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+But for millions of others, the sights and sounds of 1919 were glorious. The waging of the war had released a galvanic energy from Americans, who attacked the problem of victory with stunning efficiency. That included tremendous contributions from immigrants, women and African-Americans, who were raucously celebrated in victory parades upon return. One parade in New York feted the famous Harlem Hellfighters regiment, marching behind a spirited band playing a kind of music most Americans had never heard, soon to be known as jazz.
+One of the hottest songs of 1919 was a novelty hit, “How Ya Gonna Keep ’Em Down on the Farm (After They’ve Seen Paree)?” It was a fair question for a country that was not going to return easily to prewar attitudes about race and citizenship. The return of the doughboys brought an exuberant close to the war effort, but also exacerbated tensions over who was entitled to democracy and self-determination, those pesky phrases that Woodrow Wilson kept repeating.
+Throughout 1919, that was another way in which Americans seemed to hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. Large numbers of African-Americans chose their own form of self-determination by moving out of the South, toward Northern cities, the Midwest and the West Coast, a demographic change that altered America forever. But even after the move, many found democracy a daily challenge.
+That year in the South, two children born near each other, on either side of the Alabama-Georgia line, revealed how quickly the country was changing. Jackie Robinson grew up in a new kind of America, thanks to his mother, who moved with him to California. George Wallace spent most of life trying to hold back the tide of change that Robinson’s generation helped unleash.
+Throughout a long year, these tensions simmered just below America’s gleaming surfaces. An ugly race riot in Chicago took the lives of 38 people in late July. Other anxieties targeted immigrants, who found Americans less welcoming than the statue that greeted them in New York Harbor. To defenders of the old order, America had done her part, and there was no need to open the floodgates. But to many others, seeking a broader form of democracy, Wilson’s rhetoric seemed to describe a country that existed more vividly in his imagination than reality.
+Torn in these two directions, the world’s wealthiest country seemed headed to its own form of a crack-up. Throughout 1919, waves of fear paralyzed Americans, as they reeled from a deadly influenza epidemic at the start of the year, then a campaign of letter bombs sent by anarchists in the spring. A vigorous government response led to the creation of the F.B.I. and a series of raids conducted by an overzealous attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer. These “Palmer Raids” awakened fears of a police state and once again revealed how difficult democracy could be. A retaliatory bomb, directed at Palmer, exploded outside his house in Washington, nearly killing his neighbor, Franklin Roosevelt. When Roosevelt gave the speech that named the New Deal, 13 years later, he remembered Wilson who, for all of his failings, had ushered Americans into a new era.
+A long century has elapsed, but the contradictions of 1919 still bear scrutiny. The old fault lines seem closer to the surface than they did in Roosevelt’s day, when Americans were largely united behind the great efforts to end poverty and crush fascism.Now flip that around: If you gave up your device for a year, you would have time to make love about 16,000 times (assuming you’re like most Americans and your lovemaking sessions last an average of 5.4 minutes, not counting foreplay).
+If all that sex doesn’t bring you and your partner closer, you could pay for about four hours of couples therapy. Not enough time? The renowned couples therapist Esther Perel has managed to fix some couples’ problems in three.
+Motivate
+Currently the American political system undercounts the votes of the majority of Americans, either through gerrymandering or the unfair distribution of Senate seats and electoral votes. But this system can be changed particularly if we push for a program for voter reform at a grassroots level. As David Gold, an attorney with the organization Democratism, noted, “Quitting devices would give citizens enough time and money to visit their local and state representatives three times a week for a year and cover the cost of the trip in gas or mass transit to lobby for reform.”Warren Wells, a former wide receiver who became one of the most feared deep threats of the vaunted Oakland Raiders of the late 1960s, but whose career ended after he served a season-long prison sentence, died on Thursday at a hospital in Beaumont, Tex. He was 76.
+His death, after a heart attack, was confirmed by his son, Gary Stewart.
+Wells joined the Raiders in 1967, during the waning years of the American Football League, when the team was a perennial playoff contender. Under Coach John Rauch and later John Madden, and with Daryle Lamonica and occasionally George Blanda at quarterback, the team was known for its long-bomb offense.
+Wells, who stood 6 feet 1 inch and weighed a little under 200 pounds, was a cornerstone of that offense, with soft hands, slick moves and breakaway speed. His presence on the field also helped free up other talented receivers, like the Hall of Famer Fred Biletnikoff.
+“It was fantastic to watch him play,” Biletnikoff was quoted as saying in a memorial to Wells on the Raiders’ website. “He has speed, he could run routes, he was so smooth, he could get on top of defensive backs so quick.”In Willa Cather’s novel “My Antonia,” there are two kind Russian farmers named Peter and Pavel who have settled on the Nebraska prairie. On his death bed, Pavel tells the story of how they came to emigrate there.
+Many years before, back in Russia, the two young men had been the groomsmen at a friends’ wedding. The party went on well after midnight and eventually a caravan of seven sledges carried the families through the snow, back to where they were staying. As they rode, faint streaks of shadow — hundreds of them — could be seen dashing through the trees along the trail. Suddenly, the howling of wolves erupted from all directions.
+The horses took off and the wolves attacked. The rear sledge hit a clump and overturned. The shrieks were horrific as the wolves pounced on their human prey. Another sledge tipped and then another, and the swarms of wolves descended on the families.
+Pavel and Peter were in the lead sledge, carrying the bride and groom. They were careening at top speed, but one of their horses was now near death with exhaustion. Pavel turned to the groom. They would have to lighten their load. He pointed to the bride. The groom refused to let her be tossed over. Pavel fought with him and tried to rip her away. In the scuffle he threw them both out and to the wolves.The identification of the 45th president with an ancient Middle Eastern potentate isn’t a fringe thing. “The Trump Prophecy” was produced with the help of professors and students at Liberty University, whose president, Jerry Falwell Jr., has been instrumental in rallying evangelical support for Mr. Trump. Jeanine Pirro of Fox News has picked up on the meme, as has Ron Dermer, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, among many others.
+As the Trump presidency falls under siege on multiple fronts, it has become increasingly clear that the so-called values voters will be among the last to leave the citadel. A lot of attention has been paid to the supposed paradox of evangelicals backing such an imperfect man, but the real problem is that our idea of Christian nationalism hasn’t caught up with the reality. We still buy the line that the hard core of the Christian right i s just an interest group working to protect its values. But what we don’t get is that Mr. Trump’s supposedly anti-Christian attributes and anti-democratic attributes are a vital part of his attraction.
+Today’s Christian nationalists talk a good game about respecting the Constitution and America’s founders, but at bottom they sound as if they prefer autocrats to democrats. In fact, what they really want is a king. “It is God that raises up a king,” according to Paula White, a prosperity gospel preacher who has advised Mr. Trump.
+Ralph Drollinger, who has led weekly Bible study groups in the White House attended by Vice President Mike Pence and many other cabinet members, likes the word “king” so much that he frequently turns it into a verb. “Get ready to king in our future lives,” he tells his followers. “Christian believers will — soon, I hope — become the consummate, perfect governing authorities!”
+The great thing about kings like Cyrus, as far as today’s Christian nationalists are concerned, is that they don’t have to follow rules. They are the law. This makes them ideal leaders in paranoid times.Asked what qualities he would look for in a new coach, Johnson began his response by mentioning that experience working with a quarterback would jump out to him.
+“Somebody who has created a great quarterback would be a big plus,” he said.
+Darnold, despite missing three games with a foot strain, tied for second in the league with 15 interceptions. But his final three games after returning from the injury were some of his best of the season.
+“I thought in the beginning of the year, I took a while to get comfortable,” Darnold said. “Then once I got comfortable in the offense, I felt very confident when I was out there. Just going to keep growing and keep trying to make those strides and watch the tape, see how I can get better and move forward from there.”
+The organizational structure will not change, with the new coach reporting directly to Johnson, rather than to Maccagnan, who has two years remaining on his contract.
+“The buck stops with me,” Johnson said. “I think I let the fans down here, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure we get to and win a Super Bowl.”
+After a third-straight season with at least 11 losses — the first time the franchise had accomplished that since 1977 — talk of championships rings somewhat hollow. But the Jets have more than $100 million in salary-cap space this off-season and Johnson said the plan is to be aggressive in spending it.The unified command responsible for the United States’ nuclear strike capabilities drew attention on Monday when it tweeted a message and video that threatened the possibility of dropping a bomb.
+In the tweet, which was posted as Americans prepared to celebrate New Year’s Eve and was deleted about three hours later, the United States Strategic Command said the nation was “ready to drop something.” A video that was part of the tweet showed a B-2 stealth bomber soaring across the sky before releasing two GPS-guided bombs that exploded into a giant ball of fire after hitting the ground below.
+In the video, which was viewed more than 120,000 times, pulsing music beats in the background as the words “STEALTH,” “READY” and “LETHAL” flash across the screen in white block letters.In October, another African-American coach, Hue Jackson, was fired after his teams were 3-36-1 in roughly two and a half seasons.
+The two black head coaches still in the N.F.L. are Anthony Lynn of the Los Angeles Chargers (12-4), who are headed to a wild-card playoff game Sunday against the Baltimore Ravens, and Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers (9-6-1).
+Carolina Panthers Coach Ron Rivera, who is Latino, is the only other minority head coach.
+With eight coaching vacancies, it is possible that some of the recently dismissed coaches will be leading candidates for those openings; their experience and certain attributes may be a better fit with other teams. Jackson, for example, was on Lewis’s coaching staff in Cincinnati. And there are other minority candidates, like the Kansas City offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy and Stanford Coach David Shaw, whose names have popped up in coaching discussions.
+But the next several weeks will unquestionably heighten the scrutiny on the N.F.L.’s hiring practices and how reliably, or willingly, the Rooney Rule will be employed.
+Gulliver would not admit something that many onlookers and people around the N.F.L. have long suspected: that teams have been doing only the bare minimum to comply with, or sidestepping, the Rooney Rule. After all, if the rule was working as intended, and the percentage of minority coaches and executives was growing steadily, why would the rule need to be strengthened?
+Under the new regulations enacted a few weeks ago, when teams are looking to fill positions, they must interview at least one minority candidate from a list kept by the league’s Career Development Advisory Panel, or a minority candidate not currently working with a team. Teams also must keep detailed records of who they interview, which is perhaps a response to criticism from minority candidates who say they are routinely called, but not formally interviewed, by teams trying to do the least possible to fulfill their obligations.
+After it was first established, the Rooney Rule appeared to be having an impact. By 2011, eight N.F.L. teams had coaches of color, the most to that point, or since.“It’s a shame when you sink so low that your comeback plan is to make fun of school shooting survivors for speaking out.”
+RYAN DEITSCH, a survivor of the mass shooting at a school in Parkland, Fla., posting on Twitter about a comedy routine by Louis C.K. that mocked the survivors’ activism.A Turkish television network broadcast video on Monday showing men with suitcases supposedly containing the remains of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissident writer killed by Saudi agents in October.
+After weeks of shifting stories about Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance, Saudi Arabia said that its agents had killed him in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul during a botched mission to take him back to the kingdom.
+The Saudi account of the killing has continued to change since then, without providing clues about an enduring mystery of the murder: What happened to Mr. Khashoggi’s remains?
+Turkish officials have said that Saudi agents disassembled Mr. Khashoggi’s body with a bone saw, and probably carried the remains out of the consulate in suitcases.The president offered an unsparing, if broad, assessment of the protest movement, saying that some “take as a pretext that they are speaking in the name of the people” when “in fact they are merely speaking for a hateful mob that takes after elected officials, the police, journalists, Jews, foreigners, homosexuals.”
+“This is quite simply the negation of France,” Mr. Macron said.
+He was referring to some extremist rhetoric that has emerged most recently on the fringes of the Yellow Vest movement, which began as a citizen revolt over a rise in gasoline taxes, then spread quickly all over France as it encompassed general anger over economic inequality and a heavy fiscal burden.
+In its latest stages, the protests have veered on the fringes into hate-filled rhetoric.
+Mr. Macron’s tone on Monday was true to form — he has been accused of being didactic — and it was uncertain if his words would be enough to calm a country that is seeing some of the greatest expressions of popular anger in 50 years.
+Mr. Macron said the anger “had come from far back,” suggesting that it had started well before the beginning of his presidency in 2017. Yet while a big tax burden has been a feature of French life for several decades, Mr. Macron himself has become a symbol of economic inequality for many of the protesters.
+Early in his presidency, he enacted measures (mostly symbolic) to lighten the tax load on the wealthy and employers, while ratcheting up the burden (again symbolically) on the less well-to-do, including retirees on state pensions.SPORTS
+An article on Monday about the Jets’ firing of coach Todd Bowles gave an incorrect date for the resignation of Bill Parcells as Jets coach. He stepped down in January 2000, after the 1999 season, not in 1999.
+•
+An article on Sunday about Liverpool’s undefeated record in the Premier League misstated the timing of the most recent Merseyside derby. It was in December, not November.
+•
+An article on Friday about Jessica Springsteen’s career in professional show jumping referred incorrectly to her Olympic experience. She aspires to compete in future Olympic Games; she was not an alternate for the United States team for the London Games in 2012.
+WEEKEND ARTS
+A review on Dec. 14 about the film “Bird Box” misstated a character’s role in the movie. The character Douglas is a neighbor, not the owner of the home in which some of the characters hide.TOKYO — Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, said Tuesday that he was willing to have a second summit meeting with President Trump, but he paired the offer with a threat that if international sanctions against his country were not lifted, the North would “have no choice” but to return to nuclear confrontation.
+“I am willing to meet the United States president at any time for the betterment of our international community,” Mr. Kim said in his New Year’s Day speech, broadcast on North Korea’s state-run television. “However, if the United States does not keep its promise in our international community and misinterprets our patience and intention and continues with the sanctions, then we have no choice for the sake of our national interest and peace of the Korean Peninsula but to come up with new initiatives and new measures.”
+Wearing a suit and tie and sitting in an overstuffed leather armchair in a book-lined room, Mr. Kim offered a largely motivational speech about the need to strengthen the North Korean economy. But he took the opportunity to reiterate a demand that South Korea cease all military drills with “other foreign sources.”
+“Those should be completely stopped,” Mr. Kim said. “That is our stance.”
+There were sparse direct references in the speech to denuclearization. But Mr. Kim said the country would not be willing to take further steps toward removing its nuclear weapons unless the United States reciprocated.December 28
+An interstellar comet will make its closest approach to Earth
+The object now known as 2I/Borisov is a comet that originated from another star system before arriving in ours. It already made its closest approach to the sun, and on this day it will be about as close to Earth as it’s going to get. Read more about this visitor from outside our solar system here.LAUREL, Md. — Thirty-three minutes into the new year, scientists, engineers and well-wishers here at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory celebrated the moment that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule.
+Almost 10 hours later, the New Horizons team finally received confirmation that the spacecraft had executed its planned observations flawlessly . In the days and months to come, the mission’s scientists expect to receive pictures of Ultima Thule and scientific data that could lead to discoveries about the origins of the sun and the planets.
+[See the latest pictures of Ultima Thule here when they’re released.]
+That is the latest triumph in a journey that started in 2006, when the spacecraft launched on a mission to explore Pluto. Thirteen years and more than four billion miles later, New Horizons has provided humanity’s first glimpse of a distant fragment that could be unchanged from the solar system’s earliest days.
+Ultima Thule, the name that the mission team selected for the object from more than 34,000 suggestions from the public, means “beyond the borders of the known world.” (Thule is pronounced “TOO-lee.”)TUESDAY PUZZLE — UPDATE: The following is a message from Will Shortz about the entry at 2D.
+I’m very sorry for the distraction about BEANER (2D) in today’s fine puzzle by Gary Cee. Neither Joel nor I had ever heard the slur before — and I don’t know anyone who would use it. Maybe we live in rarefied circles. In researching this puzzle, we discovered the other meaning of the word as a slur. Later, Jeff Chen over at XwordInfo brought it to our attention as well. My feeling, rightly or wrongly, is that any benign meaning of a word is fair game for a crossword. This is an issue that comes up occasionally with entries like GO O.K. (which we clued last April as “Proceed all right,” but which as a solid word is a slur), CHINK (benign in the sense as a chink in one’s armor), etc. These are legitimate words. Perhaps I need to rethink this opinion, if enough solvers are bothered. I want your focus to be on the puzzle rather than being distracted by side issues. But I assure you this viewpoint is expressed with a pure heart. Meanwhile, for any solver who was offended by 2-Down in today’s puzzle, I apologize.
+Welcome back to Wordplay, and a whole new year of solving. Let’s dive right in with a puzzle by Gary Cee.
+Your mileage may vary, of course, but I found this to be a relatively easy puzzle whose theme did not pop out at me until I had stared at it for a while after solving. Sometimes those themes can be the most satisfying. The gratification is delayed, but when it hits you, it really smacks you.
+Tricky Clues
+1A: When the clue says “First victim of sibling rivalry,” it means the very first. In this case, the answer is the biblical victim, ABEL, who was not kept by his brother Cain.
+20A: I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone (Don’t laugh; we’ve actually gotten mail about this), so avert your eyes if you haven’t seen the Star Wars movies. Eyes averted? Good. Anakin Skywalker, nicknamed ANI, grew up to be Darth Vader.Dale Pollekoff, 71, moved to Los Angeles after a long career in graphic design in Washington D.C. As a single woman with no children, she felt drawn to the city’s weather and the less conservative ideas of varied lifestyles. “I feel more like I can be me here,” she said.
+But soon after her move in 2000, she ran into the challenge of meeting people to explore her new home with. “When you’re middle-aged, you make friends in your job,” Ms. Pollekoff said. “After that, it’s very, very hard.”
+Los Angeles also doesn’t make relationships easy. The city is vast, and the traffic is unforgiving and constant. People often talk about the perils of dating and meeting people in major cities as young adults, but it can be just as hard for an older demographic, who according to many of the women in the group, feel largely ignored.
+In 2015, after failed attempts to find a group focused on female friendships, Ms. Pollekoff decided to start her own group, called Finding Female Friends Past Fifty on Meetup, a site where people can make online groups to meet up in real life. After just a couple of weeks, the group amassed around 200 members. And it just kept growing. Today, the group has more than 800 members.Good Tuesday morning and Happy New Year. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Senator Elizabeth Warren, a sharp critic of big banks and unregulated capitalism, is running for president in 2020. Ms. Warren said she was forming a presidential exploratory committee, which allows her to raise money and hire staff before a formal kickoff.
+• Ms. Warren’s announcement marks the beginning of a new year and new campaign that will feature an unusually large number of Democrats seeking the presidency. The question is: Who, if anyone, matches the political moment?
+• With the next presidential election almost two years away, Ms. Warren and other candidates may seem to be starting their campaigns early. But they’re actually right on schedule.MEDFORD, Mass. — The comedian Pete Davidson returned to the stage Monday night, two weeks after an Instagram post raised concerns that he was having suicidal thoughts, and showed that his preferred coping mechanism was still intact: laughter.
+Delivering a rough and raucous stand-up set, Mr. Davidson, 25, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, also sought to move past his ill-fated engagement to the pop star Ariana Grande.
+He staged two sold-out shows, one in Boston and one in the neighboring suburb of Medford, in what were his first public performances since the Instagram post two weeks ago in which he stated that he really didn’t “want to be on this earth anymore.”
+The post prompted the New York Police Department to dispatch an officer to the Manhattan studios of “S.N.L.” for a wellness check, and Mr. Davidson did not appear in any sketches on that week’s show, the last of the year. (Mr. Davidson is expected to return to “S.N.L.” in January, according to a person familiar with the show’s plans who declined to be identified because the person was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.)COLLEGE FOOTBALL on ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC. New Year’s Day promises hours of college football, with 10 teams competing in bowl games. You can catch the Outback Bowl in Tampa, Fla., at 12 p.m. on ESPN2, and the Citrus Bowl from Orlando, Fla., at 1 p.m. on ABC. On ESPN, LSU teams up against the University of Central Florida in the Fiesta Bowl at 1 p.m., Washington plays Ohio State in the Rose Bowl at 5 p.m., and No. 15 Texas takes on the No. 5-ranked Georgia Bulldogs at 8:45 p.m. in the Sugar Bowl.
+AKC NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP DOG SHOW
+6 p.m. on Animal Planet. See canines of all kinds strut their stuff in one of the largest televised dog shows. This four-hour broadcast features breeds from around the world vie not just for best in show but in obedience and agility events, like dock diving and rally. Celebrity dog owners will also get in on the action, with the TV host Mario Lopez and the Olympian Shawn Johnson acting as representatives for their pets’ respective groups.And yet, offered the chance recently to recast a tarnished legacy, Dr. Watson has chosen to reaffirm it, this time on camera. In a new documentary, “American Masters: Decoding Watson," to be broadcast on PBS on Wednesday night, he is asked whether his views about the relationship between race and intelligence have changed.
+“No,’’ Dr. Watson said. “Not at all. I would like for them to have changed, that there be new knowledge that says that your nurture is much more important than nature. But I haven’t seen any knowledge. And there’s a difference on the average between blacks and whites on I.Q. tests. I would say the difference is, it’s genetic.’’
+Dr. Watson adds that he takes no pleasure in “the difference between blacks and whites” and wishes it didn’t exist. “It’s awful, just like it’s awful for schizophrenics,” he says. (His son Rufus was diagnosed in his teens with schizophrenia.) Dr. Watson continues: “If the difference exists, we have to ask ourselves, how can we try and make it better?”
+Dr. Watson’s remarks may well ignite another firestorm of criticism. At the very least, they will pose a challenge for historians when they take the measure of the man: How should such fundamentally unsound views be weighed against his extraordinary scientific contributions?
+In response to questions from The Times, Dr. Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, said that most experts on intelligence “consider any black-white differences in I.Q. testing to arise primarily from environmental, not genetic, differences.”
+Dr. Collins said he was unaware of any credible research on which Dr. Watson’s “profoundly unfortunate" statement would be based.South Africa is a country of ranches, farms, reserves and national parks, many surrounded by miles of electric fencing. The fencing keeps out unwanted animal and human intruders, and protects livestock and desirable wildlife.
+But the fencing also has a deadly, unintended side effect: It frequently kills smaller animals, particularly birds and reptiles that scientists are eager to conserve. Trip wires are often to blame. Positioned about half a foot off the ground, the wires are meant to send a deterring zap to hungry lions and crop-raiding bush pigs.
+But not all creatures respond by turning tail. Tortoises that hit a tripwire withdraw into their shells rather than retreat, while pangolins curl over the wire into a defensive ball. The animals stay put, shocked until their hearts give out.
+“Farmers will walk along fences and find six to eight dead tortoises in the space of 100 meters,” said Luke Arnot, a veterinary surgeon and lecturer at the University of Pretoria. “With tortoises, we tend to think of poaching and bush fires, but electric fences are as big, if not a bigger problem.”Salaries for the Pac-12’s head football and men’s basketball coaches lag those of their peers, according to USA Today’s databases. In football, Washington’s Chris Petersen, the best-paid coach in the conference, is 19th over all; four conference head coaches make less than Louisiana State’s defensive coordinator does. In basketball, where salaries generally are smaller, league head coaches are paid more competitively, although big names in the A.C.C., the Big Ten and the Big 12 tend to make more than their counterparts in the Pac-12.
+Kevin Blue, the athletic director at California-Davis, who was previously a senior associate athletic director at Stanford, said the SEC and the Big Ten “are setting the market” for coaching salaries.
+Several of the conference’s former athletic directors have publicly accused Scott of being more concerned with pleasing his bosses — university presidents and chancellors — than supporting the directors themselves, who are ostensibly more in touch with the business end of college athletics.
+One of the Pac-12’s biggest challenges is geography. College sports are a fundamentally easier sell in the vast spaces of the Midwest and the South than they are in the sun- and snow-kissed cities and landscapes of the West.
+“There are other parts of the country where it doesn’t matter who your team is playing against, you’re going to fill a 90,000-seat stadium,” Scott said. “I don’t have one school like that.”
+Similarly, several of Scott’s critics complain that the league’s media deal requires frequent Friday night and late Saturday football games, which can be tougher for fans to attend. League coaches, including Petersen, have raised this issue. But changing that is likely impossible, given that the conference’s universities are in the Mountain and Pacific time zones, and roughly seven in 10 television viewers in the United States live in the Central or Eastern time zones.
+“If you want to get revenues at the same level, then you’ve got to have kickoffs in East Coast prime time,” said Lee Berke, a sports media consultant. “And unless your schools are located there, they will never be in that position.”The year is set to start with a moon landing by China’s Chang’e-4 mission. The spacecraft launched in December and reached lunar orbit four and a half days later. If its lander and rover succeed, Chang’e-4 will be the first spacecraft to make a soft, or intact, landing on the moon’s far side — the side that always faces away from Earth.
+The Chinese spacecraft may be the first of a series of lunar landings.
+An Israeli company, SpaceIL, is scheduled to send a lander to the moon in February. Originally, SpaceIL was one of four finalists in Google’s Lunar X Prize. But the prize went unclaimed when none of the companies were able to meet a launch deadline of March 31, 2018. If the Israeli mission succeeds, it would make that country only the fourth to complete a soft landing on the moon, after the United States, the Soviet Union and China .
+But Israel could get beaten to that distinction by India, which may launch Chandrayaan-2, the nation’s first moon lander and rover, as soon as late January. (Chandrayaan-1, an orbiter, launched in 2008.) The mission was expected to launch last year, but met with delays.
+[How to follow the Chandrayaan-2 moon landing.]
+This lunar activity may serve as a setup for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, when humans first walked on the moon. And China has the opportunity to bookend 2019 with a second moon mission, Chang’e-5, which could land on the moon late in the year, collect samples and later return them to Earth for study.HONG KONG — The photographer Li Zhensheng is on a mission to make his fellow Chinese remember one of the most turbulent chapters in modern Chinese history that the ruling Communist Party is increasingly determined to whitewash.
+“The whole world knows what happened during the Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Li said. “Only China doesn’t know. So many people have no idea.”
+Clad in a dark blue photographer’s vest, Mr. Li, 78, spoke in a recent interview in Hong Kong, where the first Chinese-language edition of his book “Red-Color News Soldier” was published in July by the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong.
+Blending history and memoir, the photo book compiles images taken by Mr. Li in the 1960s when he was working at a local newspaper in northeastern China. Since 2003, the photos have been exhibited in more than 60 countries, bearing witness around the world to the Cultural Revolution — the decade-long turmoil that unfolded from 1966 and turned students against teachers, sons against fathers, and friends against friends.The catch is, that set has to be draining. Read more>>>
+By Ari Isaacman Bevacqua
+Want a tighter core, solid arms and sculpted legs? Not only can yoga make you more flexible and reduce stress, it can also make your body strong. By starting with poses like dolphin push-ups and half handstand, you can build and tone muscles throughout the body, and your mind will get a workout too. Now roll out your yoga mat and get ready to sweat! You’ll be amazed by what you can do. Read more>>>
+By Gretchen Reynolds
+Lifting weights might also lift moods, according to an important new review of dozens of studies about strength training and depression. It finds that resistance exercise often substantially reduces people’s gloom, no matter how melancholy they feel at first, or how often — or seldom — they actually get to the gym and lift.
+There already is considerable evidence that exercise, in general, can help to both stave off and treat depression. A large-scale 2016 review that involved more than a million people, for instance, concluded that being physically fit substantially reduces the risk that someone will develop clinical depression. Other studies and reviews have found that exercise also can reduce symptoms of depression in people who have been given diagnoses of the condition. Read more>>>
+By Anahad O’Connor
+Everyone knows that exercise is one of the best things you can do for your health. But most people ignore one crucial component of it: resistance training. According to federal researchers, only 6 percent of adults do the recommended minimum amount of at least two muscle-strengthening workouts each week.
+Neglecting resistance training — any type of workout that builds strength and muscle — is a big mistake. It increases your metabolism, lowers your body fat and protects you from some of the leading causes of early death and disability. You don’t have to lift like a bodybuilder (or look like one) to benefit from resistance training. And it’s never too late to get started.When I worked as a book publicist, my boss told me that the blessing and curse of our industry is that “everyone thinks they can do what we do, even though no one has a clue what we do.” This comment was prompted by a marketing meeting during which we were lauded for glowing review coverage that no reasonable person could attribute to our efforts, while simultaneously being asked whether we had “tried the ‘Today’ show.” Because pitching the “Today” show is just the kind of thing that would never occur to a book publicist.
+I often revisit my boss’s assessment of our world — not as an author myself but as a person who watches an obscene number of shows and movies. Hollywood’s love affair with book publishing has been long and varied, touching every cinematic genre. And yet it is a love that dare not spell its name correctly. Despite decades of sending emissaries back and forth from coast to coast, swapping mediums, one side looking for money, the other for legitimacy, we remain strangers to our cousins in storytelling.
+To be fair, any story set in an industry other than filmmaking is bound to incur infelicities when being handled by people who think filmmaking is the noblest cause. However, because book publishing is a comparatively niche business, the inaccuracies prick the ears. Films about publishing put too fine a point on our role as narrative mulch. In the romantic comedy “The Proposal,” Sandra Bullock plays a big-shot book editor. Early in the film, they (one imagines a producer consensus being reached) have her refer to Don DeLillo as Don “De-lee-lo.” The actor playing the head of the publishing house echoes the pronunciation back to her. De-lee-lo. Light of my airborne toxic event, fire of my nuclear war. “The Proposal” was released in 2009 but was apparently filmed in a bunker with no internet access. If this sounds nitpicky, I might remind you that I was not the one who decided Don DeLillo was famous enough to plop into a major studio script.New this week:
+A VELOCITY OF BEING Edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Zoe Bedrick. (Enchanted Lion, $34.95.) This collection of letters from famous writers addressing their love of books (along with illustrations by the likes of Maira Kalman, Chris Ware, Roz Chast and many, many others) is an embarrassment of riches. HOW TO DATE MEN WHEN YOU HATE MEN By Blythe Roberson. (Flatiron, $19.99.) How do you reconcile your anger with the patriarchy when you’re also attracted to men? With biting wit, Roberson explores the dynamics of heterosexual dating in the age of #MeToo. ON THOMAS MERTON By Mary Gordon. (Shambala, $24.95.) Thomas Merton was one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, a writer and a monk who found a way to balance these two identities. Gordon, an acclaimed novelist, unpacks his legacy. THE BANISHED IMMORTAL By Ha Jin. (Pantheon, $28.) The National Book Award-winning author of “Waiting” turns to biography to tell the story of Li Bai, the eighth-century Chinese poet, shaped by Taoist thought, who continues to be read in China today. SERIOUSLY CURIOUS Edited by Tom Standage. (The Economist/PublicAffairs, paper, $17.99.) Standage, the deputy editor of The Economist, has culled some quirky questions from two of the magazine’s explainer blogs. If you want to know why wolves are coming back to France or how wine glasses have gotten bigger over the years, this is the place.
+& Noteworthy
+In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.
+“My constellation of life experiences isn’t all that common. I was born in India, grew up in Hong Kong and have learned to call both London and New York home. So it is difficult for me to find books in which I can share experiences and giggle with the characters. Then I found Zadie Smith’s WHITE TEETH. The book revolves around two families in London — the Iqbals, an immigrant couple from Bangladesh who have twin sons; and the Joneses, an Englishman married to a Jamaican woman, who have a daughter together. Through these characters, Smith takes a granular look at the first- and second-generation immigrant experience; the duality of wanting to both preserve one’s roots and cut them off to fit in, ‘the feeling of belonging nowhere that comes to people who belong everywhere,’ and the crushing burden of stereotypes thrust upon us. Her book, published almost two decades ago, finds renewed relevance in a world of heightened nationalism. ‘It makes an immigrant laugh to hear the fears of the nationalist,’ she writes, presciently. ‘Scared of infection, penetration, miscegenation, when this is small fry, peanuts, compared to what the immigrant fears — dissolution, disappearance.’”
+— Alisha Haridasani Gupta, morning briefing writerIt’s not uncommon for people to set unrealistic expectations when making New Year’s resolutions, which likely contributes to most of them failing. Over 90 percent of them do, according to research by the University of Scranton.
+So this year, why not focus on improving just one area: your travels, and making sure you travel well.
+“Vacation is essential to our well being,” said Penny Zenker, a business strategy and life coach. “In order to be creative, think strategically and create balance in our lives we need to disconnect from our day to day activities.”
+With this in mind, here are three ways to get the most out of your travels in 2019.
+Take more time off
+It’s important to remember that vacation days are typically part of one’s compensation but the onus is on you to take them. (The GfK-Oxford Economics study found that 52 percent of American workers had unused vacation days by the end of 2017, which equates to 705 million unused days for the year.)The film mogul Darryl F. Zanuck was among the skeptics in the years before networks started broadcasting shows seven nights a week. “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months,” he infamously predicted. “People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.”
+To make sure that television sets would become something more than ungainly appliances, entertainment executives of the late 1940s and early 1950s went in search of programming. And they found it within earshot, in radio shows like “The Lone Ranger,” “Our Miss Brooks” and “Dragnet,” which were among the first TV hits.
+With the rise of streaming, the entertainment industry is going through a similar transformation. Executives at Netflix, Amazon and Apple are spending wildly for content, which has created a sense of urgency among their rivals at broadcast networks and cable channels. And like their midcentury predecessors, they have been aggressive about buying up ready-made programming to fill their expanding slates. These days, that means podcasts.
+“Homecoming,” the Amazon series starring Julia Roberts, is based on a fictional podcast from Gimlet Media. Bravo’s “Dirty John,” with Eric Bana in the role of the con man John Meehan, is based on a true crime series from The Los Angeles Times and the podcast network Wondery.Side Stretch: Take your right arm to the right and bend your body to the right. Your right forearm may reach the ground, or perhaps your fingers or hand reach the ground as you bend. Remember that all poses are equal. Lift your left arm up over your head for a gentle side twist. You can keep your eyes closed or open throughout your practice. Take three deep breaths in the pose. On your last exhale, reach both arms forward and move to the other side of your body, this time stretching your right side as you bend to the left. Take three breaths on this side before bringing both hands forward again. Press into all 10 fingertips in your gentle forward fold before slowly rolling back up to a comfortable seated position with a straight spine.
+Shoulder Stretch: Bring your right hand to the ground to the right of you and bring your left hand to the crown of your head. Use your left hand to gently drop your head to the left, giving yourself a nice shoulder stretch on the right side. Breathe here for three breaths before releasing your left hand back down to your side. Switch sides, using your right hand to guide your head to the right and stretching through the left shoulder. Stay here for three breaths. Gently release the right hand. Return to a straight spine.
+Hands and Knees: Inhale your arms overhead and exhale them in front of you, moving onto your hands and knees in what is also known as tabletop position, with your shoulder over your wrists and your hips over your knees. If your knees are sensitive, you can put a pillow underneath them.
+Back Bending: Inhale to release your belly toward the floor, looking up and dropping your shoulders back for cow pose, and exhale to round through the back and drop the shoulders down for cat pose. Move through a few rounds of cat and cow poses. The exact poses aren’t important — what’s more valuable is the connection between your mind and body.
+Resting Pose: Inhale back into your tabletop position and exhale folding your body backward, resting your hips on your feet, with your hands outstretched in front of you. This position is also known as child’s pose. You can put a pillow underneath your head or your hips if that feels more comfortable, or you can take your knees out wide and lay your body in front of you on the ground or on a pillow underneath your chest.
+Massage: Bring your hands by your side and make them into little fists. Give yourself a massage up and down the back (avoiding the spine) and up and down the sides of your thighs.
+A Deeper Shoulder Stretch: If your hands can easily clasp each other behind your back from child’s pose, interlace them. If not, take a moment to get your scarf. Return to child’s pose, again putting a pillow under your knees if you’d like. Hold the scarf between both of your hands with the scarf lying across your lower back. Gently lift your hips up into the sky and lift your arms away from your back toward the ceiling. You may slowly roll onto the crown of the head for a deeper stretch if it feels comfortable to do so. Alternatively, you can stay in child’s pose with your head resting on your legs or you can softly turn your head and rest a cheek on the mat or pillow. This pose helps to reverse the experience of being hunched over a computer. You can straighten one wrist and then the other. Take three breaths in the pose. On your last exhale, relax your hips back down into child’s pose and let your hands softly rest by your side. Again, you can put a pillow underneath your head or hips if that feels more comfortable, or you can take your knees out wide and lay your body in front of you on the ground or on a pillow underneath your chest. Take a few breaths in your resting child’s pose before sitting up on your knees. If you have any knee tenderness or injuries, return to a comfortable cross-legged position.Hundreds of cities, large and small, have adopted or begun planning smart cities projects. But the risks are daunting. Experts say cities frequently lack the expertise to understand privacy, security and financial implications of such arrangements. Some mayors acknowledge that they have yet to master the responsibilities that go along with collecting billions of bits of data from residents.
+Concerns have intensified as Kansas City prepares to expand its technology experiment from downtown to poor neighborhoods on the city’s East Side. The expansion will bring free wireless to homes, but also dozens of surveillance cameras and a gunshot detection system, and some residents worry that in the quest to be seen as forward thinking, the city may be handing off too much control to private companies and opening up residents to consequences it doesn’t fully understand.
+“We increasingly see every problem as a technology-related problem, so the solution is more technology,” said Ben Green, a Harvard University graduate student who studies cities and technology. “And you have cities, which are caught in this devil’s bargain, where they feel they don’t have the resources to provide the services people need, and so they make these deals with tech companies that have money, but which in the long term might not be beneficial to either them or their residents.”
+In Seattle, officials this year began to dismantle a network of surveillance cameras and wireless devices that the police had deemed vital in fighting crime, but that drew complaints over the network’s ability to track cellphones.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A well-placed, orderly sandbox. Teachers who laugh often. Plenty of miniature tables and chairs.
+Those are markers of an excellent pre-K classroom. And New York City, home to the largest citywide prekindergarten initiative in the country, has these features — and many more — in the vast majority of its programs, according to new data shared with The New York Times.
+In 2018, about 94 percent of the city’s prekindergarten programs met or exceeded a threshold that predicts positive student outcomes after pre-K, according to a national evaluation system, the Early Childhood Environment Rating Scale, developed by a coalition of experts.
+This means that as Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature initiative — public pre-K for all 4-year-olds in New York City — gets bigger, it is also improving.A 7-year-old who was riding in a car with her mother and three sisters was killed in Texas over the weekend, the authorities said, when a gunman in a pickup truck suddenly pulled up alongside them and opened fire.
+The authorities, who said the shooting appeared random and unprovoked, were searching Monday for her killer.
+The 7-year-old, Jazmine Barnes, was a second grader at a Houston-area elementary school, and her death — in the family’s car, early one morning over the holidays — unnerved and perplexed her community.
+“It’s New Year’s Eve,” Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County said in an interview on Monday. “It should be a time of fellowship and celebration for many — but not for this family. They have to bury a child.”RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilians signaled a desire for a radical shift in the country’s course when they elected the far-right lawmaker Jair Bolsonaro as their next president in October.
+It didn’t take long for profound changes to start taking hold.
+In the weeks leading up to Mr. Bolsonaro’s swearing-in on Tuesday, his embrace of a conservative movement that rejects discussion of gender or sexual orientation in schools thrust classrooms to the front lines of culture wars.
+Under his direction, Brazil pulled out of hosting the 2019 United Nations summit meeting on climate change and began backtracking from its role as a global exemplar of environmentally sustainable development.
+And on the foreign policy front, Mr. Bolsonaro courted the United States and picked a fight with Cuba, which responded by rescinding a program that had sent Cuban doctors to remote corners of Brazil since 2013.Note: After publication, the price of the Etsy sage kit was reduced from $14,770 to $147.70.
+Wendy MacNaughton is a graphic journalist based in San Francisco. You can find her via website and Instagram.I heard about it years before I first made it there. A beach paradise framed by turquoise waters and hulking, golden desert rocks, a place for spring breaks and bachelorette parties, where, if the early ’00s MTV reality series “The Hills” was to be believed, tequila shots and “drama, drama, drama” ruled. Cabo. Those in the know simply referred to it as Cabo.
+But there is a different kind of Los Cabos, an artful destination for discerning travelers that can be as laid back — or “turnt up,” as they say — as one desires. Of course, this sea-flanked strip of Mexico on the southern tip of the Baja peninsula has always been about more than getting drunk and testing friendships, but recently, a variety of high-end destinations have emerged to cater to the type of crowd that appreciates modern design, farm-to-table meals, and sipping drinks as opposed to drinking shots .
+In July, Montage Hotels & Resorts opened an expansive, 122-room property on Santa Maria Cove. It’s one of the few swimmable beaches along a 20-mile strip called the Corridor. Alan Fuerstman, the founder and chief executive of the Montage, spent 14 years searching for the ideal place along the peninsula to open a resort. “You used to have to go to Hawaii for the kind of beach experience we offer,” he said.Marlon James is one of those novelists who aren’t afraid to give a performance, to change the states of language from viscous to gushing to grand, to get all the way inside the people he’s created. His previous novel, “A Brief History of Seven Killings,” from 2014, used an assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976 to turn Jamaica into someplace far more galactic than a mere island. Now James is back with “Black Leopard, Red Wolf,” out Feb. 5, which looks like another great, big tale of death, murder and mystery but more mystically fantastical. This one is set in Africa and concerns the hunt for a missing boy. But that’s my budget description! Not only does this book come with a hefty cast of characters (like “Seven Killings”), there are also shape shifters, fairies, trolls, and, apparently, a map. The map might be handy. But it might be the opposite of why you come to James — to get lost in him. WESLEY MORRIS
+‘Fleabag’ on the StageSlide 1 of 13,
+C.C. Hirsch and Vanessa Pappas bought a two-family townhouse on the edge of Park Slope, Brooklyn, and had Jane Kim, an architect, convert it into a single-family home.C.C. Hirsch and Vanessa Pappas spent three years looking for a house to buy in Brooklyn, where Park Slope meets Windsor Terrace. But it wasn’t their Trulia searches or open house visits that led them to the home they eventually bought. It was their miniature schnauzer, Ziggy Stardust.
+“We joke that Ziggy brokered this house, because he became friends with our real estate agent’s dog, Monk,” during his daily visits to Prospect Park, said Ms. Hirsch, 42, a literary agent at Creative Artists Agency.
+As it happened, Monk’s owner, Peter Turner, was planning to list a two-story, two-family townhouse built in 1910. With a handsome brick facade, about 1,800 square feet of interior space, plus a basement and proximity to the park, it was ideal — something Ms. Pappas and Ms. Hirsch decided before they even saw what it looked like inside.
+“We knew that it would likely be a gut-reno situation, because many of the houses weren’t renovated in this area, and if they were, not quite to our style,” said Ms. Pappas, 40, who was global head of audience development at YouTube before recently joining a new tech start-up. “As we were looking and looking and looking, it just felt like this neighborhood was getting pricier and pricier and pricier. Luckily, we were at a point where we could make a move.”Indeed, Afghanistan represents the triumph of the deterministic forces of geography, history, culture, and ethnic and sectarian awareness, with Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras and other groups competing for patches of ground. Tribes, warlords and mafia-style networks that control the drug trade rule huge segments of the country. To show just how perverted the situation has become, the British regional specialist Anatol Lieven, writing in The National Interest, argues that “just because the U.S. money was stolen does not mean that it was wasted,” since it has gone to paying off tribal chiefs to keep them from joining the Taliban or becoming feuding warlords.
+It did not have to be like this. Had the United States not become diverted from rebuilding the country by its invasion of Iraq in 2003 (which I mistakenly supported), or had different military and development policies been tried, these forces of division might have been overcome. According to the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, there was simply too much emphasis on the electoral process in Kabul and not nearly enough on bread-and-butter nation building — in particular, bringing basic infrastructure and agriculture up to the standards that Afghans enjoyed from the 1950s until the Soviet invasion of 1979.
+Certainly, no place is hopeless. But that is not where we are now. The heavily Pashtun Taliban, an accessory to the Sept. 11 hijackings, continues to make battlefield gains and, if there are actual peace negotiations, is poised to share power with the American-backed government of President Ashraf Ghani, if not eventually replace it. The United States’ special adviser to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, is trying to broker a diplomatic solution that allows the United States to draw down its forces without the political foundation in Kabul disintegrating immediately.
+That may be the real reason the United States keeps spending so heavily in Afghanistan. The Pentagon is terrified of a repeat of 1975, when panicked South Vietnamese fled Saigon as Americans pulled out and North Vietnamese forces advanced on the city. The United States military did not truly begin to recover from that humiliation until its victory in the Persian Gulf war of 1991. An abrupt withdrawal from Afghanistan could conceivably provide a new symbol of the decline in American hard power.
+There is also the fear that an Afghanistan in chaos could once again provide a haven for an international terrorist group determined to perpetrate another Sept. 11-scale attack. Of course, Yemen, Somalia and a number of other places could also provide the setting for that.New bridal boutiques and ateliers in Brooklyn, specifically Gowanus, Greenpoint, Boerum Hill and Bedford-Stuyvesant, sell wedding dresses and accessories by young women designers who understand the needs of a bride seeking elegant, contemporary design with handmade embellishments, and, often a one-of-a-kind dress made just for her.
+Most of the gowns and accessories are made in small workrooms in Brooklyn, rather than large factories in China and elsewhere. Some shops are so small and custom there is only one person sewing, often the designer. Service is by appointment and the boutiques take pride in the sustainability of their fabrics.
+Image The Camellia, a lace and silk dress from VeKa Bridal in Brooklyn, designed by Tomomi Okubo; $3,850.
+VeKa Bridal
+Atlantic Avenue used to be reserved for antique shops, but other retailers have moved in like VeKa Bridal, a small store in Boerum Hill owned by two women, Jana Vendeland and Ksenia Kaliaguina. It sells bridal dresses by one Brooklyn designer, Tomomi Okubo, and four others in Chicago, Belgium, Italy and Spain, all of whom have very small production companies and make every dress to measure, by hand. All alterations are done in-house at VeKa. The usual time for a garment to be made is four to five months. (Rush orders are $100 to $250 extra.) All sizes are available; dresses are $2,000 to $4,000.President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan urged China on Tuesday to seek a peaceful solution to its differences with Taiwan and stressed that the island’s people want to maintain self-rule.
+Speaking a day before China’s leader, Xi Jinping, was expected to make a major speech about Taiwan, Ms. Tsai said that China must respect the freedom and democracy of Taiwan’s 23 million people. Her remarks came amid a shift in the island’s political landscape, with Ms. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party having suffered major losses in local elections in November. Candidates who favor closer ties with China won mayoral contests in Taiwan’s four largest cities.
+“I must emphasize, the results of the past election absolutely do not represent that the will of the people at the grass-roots level seeks to give up our sovereignty,” she said in a New Year’s Day address. Beijing considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory that must be united with the mainland, by force if necessary.
+The Chinese government, Ms. Tsai said, “must handle our differences peacefully and as equals.”
+That set of differences amounts to one of Asia’s biggest potential flash points. Since Ms. Tsai came to power in 2016, China has ramped up pressure on her government. It has increased patrols by military aircraft, sent bombers to circle the island and sailed an aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Strait.The other films of 2019 deserve a chance, but so far, “Genesis 2.0” is the best movie of the year to ask the question: What does mammoth meat that has been frozen for tens of thousands of years taste like?
+This globe-trotting documentary, directed by Christian Frei (“War Photographer”), first takes viewers to the New Siberian Islands. There, north across the seas from the Russian mainland, men break through the hardened soil looking for mammoth tusks, the subject of a lucrative trade.
+From the outset, the movie tells two stories in parallel — one about the mammoth hunters, the other about scientific advances that, with some imagination, raise the prospect of bringing mammoths back. Tagging along with the tusk hunters, Maxim Arbugaev, who is credited as the co-director and cinematographer for the New Siberian Islands footage, effectively becomes part of their team as they search for intact tusks. The hunters, despite risking their lives, barely share in the down-market proceeds. They are part of an unsustainable supply chain that will itself eventually go the way of the mammoth.Watching is The New York Times’s TV and film recommendation website. Sign up for our thrice-weekly newsletter here.
+Freed from holiday obligations, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. Below are the most interesting of what we’ve found for new movies and TV series coming to the major streaming services in January, followed by a roundup of all the best new titles in all genres. (Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice.)
+‘Comedians of the World’
+Starts streaming: Jan. 1, on Netflix.
+Forty-seven stand-up comics from around the world trot out their best bits in this series of half-hour specials, which offers an excellent opportunity to sample new and diverse comedic voices. Want to get out of a sexually awkward situation? Aditi Mittal, who hails from India, has a foolproof excuse for you to try. Thinking of getting a Brazilian wax? The Canadian-American comic DeAnne Smith will slap that out of you. Didn’t think it was kosher to joke about H.I.V./AIDS? Loyiso Madinga (South Africa) thinks you should give it a try. Concerned about racial profiling? Nazeem Hussain (Australia) explains how he’s learned to use it to his advantage. It’s the funniest trip you can take without leaving your couch.
+—
+‘Pan’s Labyrinth’
+Starts streaming: Jan. 1, on Netflix.
+The director Guillermo del Toro knows nightmares — whether they be fantastical (here, the Pale Man, with eyes in the palms of his hands) or all too real (the fascism under the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco). A pensive little girl named Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) tries to navigate both kinds of horrors as her everyday world becomes tangled with a symbolic one. Watch out for the slime-spewing toads!
+—This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.
+It’s been a while since the United States has faced a year like th e one that I expect 2019 to be.
+This year appears as if it will be dominated by presidential scandals — and the question of whether President Trump can survive those scandals. If he does, 2019 could feel a lot like 1998, when President Bill Clinton did indeed survive. If the danger continues to mount for Trump, 2019 could instead end up resembling 1973 or 1974. The presidency of Richard Nixon, of course, did not survive 1974.
+Tellingly, some senior Republicans now share these expectations for 2019. The Washington Post recently quoted Steve Bannon predicting that this year would be one of “siege warfare” for Trump. The story ran under this headline: “Republican anxiety spikes as Trump faces growing legal and political perils.”
+[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]LONDON — A knife attack that wounded three people in a busy train station in Manchester, England, is being investigated as an act of terrorism, the police said on Tuesday.
+Moments after the stabbing Monday evening at Manchester Victoria station, the police arrested a 25-year-old male suspect in the station.
+“We are treating this as a terrorist investigation,” Chief Constable Ian Hopkins of the Greater Manchester Police said in a statement. Officers “were working throughout the night to piece together the details of what happened and identify the man who was arrested.”
+The authorities did not release the suspect’s name — in fact, it was not clear that they knew his name — or give a motive. Chief Hopkins said that officers searched the man’s home in the Cheetham Hill area of Manchester on Tuesday morning.FOR SALE
+$33 MILLION
+324-326 Grand Street (between Ludlow and Orchard Streets)
+Manhattan
+A mixed-use, seven-story elevator building completed in 2017, with a black-and-gold facade covered by ornate lettering created by the Los Angeles street artist Cryptik, is available on the Lower East Side. Quarters, owned by the Berlin-based co-living operator Medici Living Group, holds a master lease for the residential portion until 2027. The 27,500-square-foot building has 16 market-rate apartments — 14 three-bedrooms with two baths, a five-bedroom penthouse with two baths and a ground-floor apartment with a large backyard that is being used as a common lounge and recreational area. The Atelier, a 3,000-square-foot speakeasy bar with a lease until 2038, occupies the lower level, which has its own entrance and an elevator for handicapped access. A Japanese pop-up gallery leases an 1,800-square-foot ground-floor space, and a recently completed 2,000-square-foot space is vacant.
+Sellers: Empire Capital Holdings and Anda Realty Capital
+Brokers: James Nelson, Brandon Polakoff and Bradley Rothschild, Avison YoungSAN JOSE, Calif. — Silicon Valley ended 2018 somewhere it had never been: embattled.
+Lawmakers across the political spectrum say Big Tech, for so long the exalted embodiment of American genius, has too much power. Once seen as a force for making our lives better and our brains smarter, tech is now accused of inflaming, radicalizing, dumbing down and squeezing the masses. Tech company stocks have been pummeled from their highs. Regulation looms. Even tech executives are calling for it.
+In the face of such a sustained assault, this might be a good moment for Big Tech to lie low. It could devote some of its mountains of cash — Apple alone has $237 billion in the bank — to genuine good works, and allay widespread fears it wants to control your data and your destiny.
+That is not the path the companies are taking.
+“The tech companies are not flinching,” said Bob Staedler, a Silicon Valley consultant. “Nothing has hit them on the nose hard enough to tell them to cut back. Instead, they are expanding. They’re going around the country acquiring the best human capital so they can create the next whiz-bang thing.”
+There is so much of life that remains undisrupted. The companies are competing to own the cloud — to become, in essence, the internet’s landlord. They have designs on cities: Google made a deal in 2017 to reimagine a chunk of waterfront Toronto from the ground up. Amazon is reworking the definition of community from the inside, as warehouses in rural areas provide the urban middle class with everything they want to stay home all weekend.MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — At least 27 members of security forces in northern Afghanistan were killed by the Taliban in a series of coordinated attacks on Tuesday, officials said, and dozens of others were wounded.
+The deadliest violence took place in Sar-i-Pul Province, where the Taliban attacked Afghan security forces in three areas, killing a total of 21 people, officials said. The officials did not provide a breakdown of casualties.
+Zabihullah Amani, the spokesman for the governor of Sar-i-Pul, said the Taliban had simultaneously attacked the center of Sayad District, security outposts along the highway linking Sar-i-Pul with Jowzjan, and a village with oil wells.
+“It was a very strong attack,” Mr. Amani said. “Two security outposts were captured by the Taliban; 25 members of security forces were also wounded during the clashes.”The American man who was arrested last week in Russia on a spying charge is a Marine Corps veteran who was in Moscow to attend a wedding, his family said on Tuesday.
+Russia’s Federal Security Service, known as the F.S.B., said on Monday that the American, Paul N. Whelan, had been detained on Friday “during an act of espionage,” and that a criminal case had been opened against him. Conviction on a spying charge in Russia carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
+“We noticed that he was not in communication,” his parents and siblings said in a statement, “which was very much out of character for him even when he was traveling.”
+They said they had not learned of his arrest until it was reported by the news media on Monday. Since then, they have contacted an array of United States government offices.The new collection is impressive, but it lacks the finish of “Fever Dream.” It contains three perfect stories (“Headlights,” “Mouthful of Birds,” “Toward Happy Civilization”), three stinkers and a handful of exploratory sketches. There’s a feeling of peeking into Schweblin’s notebook, of watching her early experiments with technique (this book was originally published before the novel). She can be oblique, as in “Slowing Down,” a story about aging (I think?), then blunt, as in “Heads Against Concrete,” with its opening line: “If you pound a person’s head against concrete — even if you’re doing it only so they’ll come to their senses — you will very likely end up hurting them.”
+Image Samanta Schweblin Credit... Alejandra Lopez
+These stories spiral into their own circles of madness, but they all belong to the same universe. Odd plot points repeat: mysterious holes in the ground, violence to animals, violence to children, violence to children disguised as animals. They begin in barren landscapes, on empty plains and steppes, on interrupted journeys. There are grotesque parodies of family life (a pair of kidnappers treat their prisoners with the loving pride of parents), parodies of work (a woman’s job requires her to lie facedown on a table and have her leg hair ritually plucked away by six beauticians). The desperate desire to bear children recurs but so too does ambivalence, even revulsion. One woman decides she does not want to be pregnant and wills her belly to shrink and shrink until she finally spits out the baby — “the size of an almond” — into a jar, to wait for the future. Maybe.
+The clearest line of continuity is in the dialogue, in how the characters communicate — or don’t, rather. There are strains of Beckett and Pinter in the way Schweblin’s people use so many words to say so little. They have a fondness for digging holes in the ground, to hide in, and they use language to the same effect.
+This is to say nothing of the perverse ways people speak to themselves. In the title story, a man discovers that his teenage daughter has taken to eating live pet birds. He is repulsed when he catches her at it for the first time, when he hears the bird scream and sees her bloodstained mouth smiling in shy apology. But he quickly begins explaining it away to himself: “I thought about how, considering there are people who eat people, eating live birds wasn’t so bad. Also, from a natural point of view it was healthier than drugs, and from a social one, it was easier to hide than a pregnancy at 13.” Schweblin’s characters constantly talk themselves out of their perceptions, out of reality.The S&P 500 in 2018 3,000 Daily closes 9/20 PEAK 2,930.75 2,750 2,500 2,250 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. The S&P 500 in 2018 3,000 Daily closes 9/20 PEAK 2,930.75 2,750 2,500 2,250 J F M A M J J A S O N D The S&P 500 in 2018 3,000 Daily closes 9/20 PEAK 2,930.75 2,750 2,500 2,250 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.
+After an unexpectedly bad year for the stock market, investors are looking for clues about what 2019 will bring.
+The hope on Wall Street is that the underlying economy of the United States is sound, that the recent selling will burn itself out and that stocks will resume their record-setting climb. But the risk is that the plunge, the worst annual decline in a decade, could be the start of something more sinister.
+[Stocks dropped to start 2019. Read our coverage of the year’s first trading day here.]
+The forces that pushed the S&P 500 down 6.2 percent in 2018 are still in place. The economy is still doing well, but it does not appear to be as strong as it once was. President Trump is lashing out at the Federal Reserve and the central bank’s interest-rate increases pose a risk to corporate profits and investors’ appetite for stocks. America’s trade war with China continues, and the technology giants that dominate the stock market face heightened scrutiny about their business practices.
+As investors try to gauge the seriousness of these risks, stocks could lurch in different directions at each new event. A meeting of the Fed later this month, an earnings report in February or a trade-negotiation deadline in March could all prove to be catalysts for a big rise or fall.
+But Wall Street’s top stock pickers are still expecting gains this year, even if they’re not quite as boisterous in their predictions as they once were.
+“It could get more frightening before it gets better,” said James Paulsen, chief investment strategist at the research firm Leuthold Group. “But I think we survive for another run.”
+Last year was a reminder of how unpredictable stock markets can be. In January, with corporate tax cuts in place, the outlook for the market in the United States was great. And stocks did hit a record high in September, with Apple and Amazon becoming the first publicly traded American companies to be valued at more than $1 trillion. But 2018 was also turbulent, with markets falling sharply in February and again at the end of the year.
+The S&P 500 narrowly avoided one grim milestone: a 20 percent drop from its high, a decline that would signal the start of a bear market. The index ended 2018 down 14.5 percent from its high point, and a bear market could yet be in store should stocks experience another decline similar to what they went through in early December. If that happens, the pessimism that has hovered over the stock market could leach into the rest of the economy, as companies grow wary of taking risks, expanding or adding more workers.
+Here are the factors that will help determine whether that happens this year.
+Borrowing costs could hurt
+Interest rates in 2018 3.5 % 10-year Treasury note yield 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 Federal funds target rate (upper limit) 1.0 0.5 0 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec. Interest rates in 2018 3.5 % 10-year treasury note yield 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 Federal funds target rate (upper limit) 1.0 0.5 0 J F M A M J J A S O N D Interest rates in 2018 3.5 % 10-year Treasury note yield 3.0 2.5 2.0 1.5 Federal funds target rate (upper limit) 1.0 0.5 0 Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. May Jun. Jul. Aug. Sep. Oct. Nov. Dec.
+Rising interest rates, and expectations about where those rates are headed, may have weighed on stock prices more than anything else in 2018.
+With the United States’s economy humming, the Fed increased its target rate four times in 2018, pushing up borrowing costs across the economy. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note, which is the basis for debt like home mortgages and corporate loans, climbed to its highest level since 2011 before falling back. When borrowing costs rise too much, they can be restrictive. Companies and consumers pull back, and the economy suffers.
+In the worst case, a recession could occur.
+Stocks tumbled as investors became increasingly concerned that the Fed, under a new chairman, Jerome H. Powell, would raise interest rates too far and send a chill through the American economy.
+Only more data on the state of the economy will ease the concerns about growth. If investors see the economy growing steadily, jitters over the Fed’s intentions and the recession fears that gripped stocks could fade.
+“We’re going to see if the market was wildly hysterical about a recession,” said Ed Yardeni, chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research.
+If not, then investors could hang on the Fed’s every move, and monetary policy meeting, in 2019.
+President Trump is a factor
+Heading into 2018, in the days after Mr. Trump’s tax cuts were enacted, investors were mostly buoyant about his presidency and tolerant of his unpredictable declarations on Twitter.
+That bullishness persisted even after it became clear that Mr. Trump was serious about imposing restrictions on trading partners as a way of gaining concessions from them. But as the trade war continued, unresolved tensions with China started to become a concern, and Mr. Trump’s proclamations started to make investors jumpy.
+When Mr. Trump referred to himself on Twitter as “Tariff Man,” the message helped spur a drop of more than 3 percent in the S&P 500.
+....I am a Tariff Man. When people or countries come in to raid the great wealth of our Nation, I want them to pay for the privilege of doing so. It will always be the best way to max out our economic power. We are right now taking in $billions in Tariffs. MAKE AMERICA RICH AGAIN — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 4, 2018
+It wasn’t just the tweets about China that began to bother investors. Mr. Trump also roiled the markets with criticism of the Fed, which he blamed for the stock market turmoil.
+This is a change for the market. When the investment bank RBC Capital Markets surveyed big investors in December about what kept them up at night, Mr. Trump topped the list (interest rates and the trade war ranked second and third).
+The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market, they don’t understand necessary Trade Wars or Strong Dollars or even Democrat Shutdowns over Borders. The Fed is like a powerful golfer who can’t score because he has no touch - he can’t putt! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018
+When it comes to Mr. Trump, investors have a lot to consider. They will have to weigh whether a partial government shutdown will dampen the economy; what a House of Representatives controlled by Democrats or staff turnover at the White House could mean; and what might happen if the United States and China can’t reach a trade deal by a March 2 deadline.
+Global growth has already been slowing
+Commodity prices in 2018 PRICE OF OIL PRICE OF COPPER $ 100 a barrel $ 4.00 per pound Brent crude futures contracts Generic futures contracts $3.28 80 3.00 $66.87 60 $2.68 2.00 $54.15 40 1.00 20 0 0 J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D Commodity prices in 2018 PRICE OF OIL $ 100 a barrel 80 $66.87 60 Brent crude futures contracts $54.15 40 J F M A M J J A S O N D PRICE OF COPPER 3.50 per pound $ $3.28 3.00 $2.68 2.50 Generic futures contracts 2.00 J F M A M J J A S O N D Commodity prices in 2018 PRICE OF OIL PRICE OF COPPER $ 100 a barrel $ 4.00 per pound Brent crude futures contracts Generic futures contracts $3.28 80 3.00 $66.87 60 $2.68 2.00 $54.15 40 1.00 20 0 0 J F M A M J J A S O N D J F M A M J J A S O N D
+The trade war’s most evident impact so far has been in large overseas economies, which appear to be taking a turn for the worse.
+China, Japan and the European Union showed signs of slowing down late in 2018, and reliable indicators of global growth like the price of oil and copper are flashing warnings.
+Growth may accelerate if trade agreements are forged in 2019. But the problems could be deeper. China’s methods for pulling its economy out of a rut probably are not as effective as they once were. And the battle between Italy’s populist government and the European Union over the country’s spending plans may heat up again.
+The European economy could also be hit hard if Britain crashes out of the European Union without an agreement that keeps trade flowing freely. That could be avoided if Parliament approves a withdrawal deal Prime Minister Theresa May has struck with the union. But that is no sure thing. Mrs. May, lacking the necessary support, was forced to delay a vote originally set for last month until mid-January. She has been trying, so far unsuccessfully, to extract changes from European officials in hopes of improving the chances of passage when that vote comes.
+If Parliament ultimately rejects Mrs. May’s proposal, investors will probably remain nervous. And support may grow among lawmakers for a second referendum on whether Britain should leave the European Union. If that happens, stocks — including those in the United States — may rise on the hope that Britons vote to stay.
+Technology stocks have unique challenges
+Technology stocks versus the S&P 500 in 2018 PERCENT CHANGE FROM JAN. 1 TO PEAK (SEPT. 20) + 100 % Netflix + 75 Amazon + 50 Microsoft + 25 Apple Google S&P 500 0 Facebook – 25 PERCENT CHANGE FROM SEPT. 20 TO DEC. 31 + 25 % 0 S&P 500 – 25 – 50 Technology stocks versus the S&P 500 in 2018 PERCENT CHANGE FROM JAN. 1 TO PEAK (SEPT. 20) + 100 % Netflix + 75 Amazon + 50 Microsoft + 25 Apple Google S&P 500 0 Facebook – 25 PERCENT CHANGE FROM SEPT. 20 TO DEC. 31 + 25 % 0 S&P 500 – 25 – 50 Technology stocks versus the S&P 500 in 2018 PERCENT CHANGE FROM JAN. 1 TO PEAK (SEPT. 20) + 100 % Netflix + 75 Amazon + 50 Microsoft + 25 Apple Google S&P 500 0 Facebook – 25 PERCENT CHANGE FROM SEPT. 20 TO DEC. 31 + 25 % 0 S&P 500 – 25 – 50
+The market’s fate also depends on whether investors fall back in love with large technology companies. Last year, companies like Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Netflix helped push key stock benchmarks like the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite to records, and then dragged those indexes down when the companies went into free-fall.
+The tech giants’ shares plunged in part because they were deemed to be too expensive. Put another way, investors went from being optimistic that the companies’ future earnings would be terrific, to worried that they wouldn’t.
+Some of the large tech firms also face substantial problems in their own operations that could take time to resolve. Apple, for example, counts on China as both a market where it sells iPhones and a manufacturing hub.
+Facebook is spending large sums of money to try to protect its network from interference. Any sign that its systems have been abused with the goal of swinging an election could subject it to regulation.
+Facebook is not alone in facing this concern. Some analysts say that large tech companies are now in a position to similar to what big banks confronted after the financial crisis of 2008.
+“The tech companies are a heck of a lot better run than the financial companies were in 2007,” said Savita Subramanian, equity strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, “but their incentives may not be aligned with the best interests of employees and shareholders.”
+Quite a few things have to go right for stocks to recover in 2019
+The United States economy has to grow at a strong enough pace to deliver the corporate earnings that investors are hoping for. But if the economy grows quickly, investors may return to worrying about higher interest rates.
+If the Fed can tread a delicate middle ground, the trade war winds down and the economies of Europe and China stabilize, a recovery in stock prices could hold.While the tone may be somber at times, there is also much to celebrate. SJ Norman, an Australian artist of Wiradjuri and Wonnaruah heritage, said in an email that the opportunity to gather in New York “feels like an honoring of the continued existence of our peoples in the big city, as well as the dynamism and globalism of our peoples, which is absolutely vast.”
+Far from merely checking boxes, the Dialogues grew out of a wariness similar to Ms. Miguel’s about diversity, or a related hope: to build lasting institutional support for Indigenous performing arts worldwide. “This is about a deep cultural shift, deep cultural change,” Ms. Johnson said. “We are very adamant that this is not about just putting your name on something, not about doing the least amount of work.”
+A Native Alaskan artist of Yupik ancestry, Ms. Johnson has been working tirelessly to counter what she calls “the perceived invisibility” of Indigenous performing artists, particularly in the United States. Funding for Indigenous performance is more robust in Australia and Canada, and said Ms. Johnson said that in her home country she has often found herself wondering: “Where are the Indigenous works? How do we bring this work forward?”
+Mr. Gantner, who grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and lives in New York, has observed similar disparities. “Here it’s kind of stuck into a corner of folk or community practice, or traditional or ritualistic,” he said. “In Australia and elsewhere in the world, it’s not; it’s understood as a dynamic contemporary expression of a culture.”
+One approach to bringing the United States up to speed is an ambitious pilot program, the Global First Nations Performance Network, which will be in development during this year’s Dialogues. (Planning sessions are closed to the public.) The envisioned network will include 15 institutions from Canada, Australia and the United States — with the potential to expand to other countries — all dedicated to commissioning and presenting works by Indigenous artists.Mrs. Fernandez, who grew up with seven shirts, one for every day of the week, is often compelled to give her husband’s clothes away to Goodwill. He usually learns she has done so when he searches for a certain one.
+Despite their hardships, the family’s faith has never wavered. “The essence of the flame is the same if it is burning a forest or used to light a lamp,” Mr. Fernandez said.
+The family hopes they will soon be able to leave the shelter system and be placed in public housing. Things are imperfect, Mr. Fernandez said, but they now have some peace that eluded them in their home country.
+“When we were in India, we thought that any time, we will be attacked,” Mr. Fernandez said. “Here, we can sleep without the fear.”MOSCOW — Rescue workers pulled a 10-month-old baby boy alive from a partly collapsed apartment building in central Russia on Tuesday, calling him a “New Year miracle” after he survived in the rubble for more than 35 hours in freezing temperatures.
+An explosion believed to have been caused by a gas leak destroyed at least 25 apartments in the 10-story building in the city of Magnitogorsk early on Monday, killing at least nine people, and dozens of other residents remained missing.
+The rescue operation, which continued through the night, has been slowed by concerns that other parts of the building might come tumbling down, and the instability delayed the retrieval of one victim until Tuesday evening. The governor’s office said that the overhanging parts of a wall that threatened rescuers have been removed.
+The temperature in Magnitogorsk, an industrial city at the southern end of the Urals more than 1,000 miles east of Moscow, hovers just over 1 degree Fahrenheit (minus 17 degrees Celsius) in the daytime and minus 20 Fahrenheit or lower overnight.This brings the price of a 24-pack of beer to 382 Qatari riyals, or about $104, and a one-liter bottle of gin (roughly 33 ounces) to 304 riyals, according to news reports. The Qatar Distribution Company confirmed the price increase, but an employee declined to discuss specific prices on Tuesday.
+The new prices apply only to foreigners living in Qatar who have valid permits to buy alcohol.
+Visitors who want an alcoholic beverage have limited options. The authorities confiscate alcohol at Doha Airport, and drinking in public is banned. A few bars in international hotels do serve foreign visitors, selling beers for around 50 riyals.
+The price increases that went into effect on Tuesday are likely to be a delicate subject as Qatar prepares to host the men’s soccer World Cup in 2022, when a country of 2.6 million people will open its doors to an expected 1.5 million international visitors. Many have wondered how much Qatari society might bend to accommodate guests who view drinking as a central part of the World Cup experience.
+Qatari officials have said that alcohol consumption would be more restricted than in other World Cups. They have suggested that some drinking would be allowed in designated zones, and that the country’s courts would deal more gently with visiting fans who consume more alcohol than usual.
+The tax increase seemed to be part of a push to clamp down on “health-damaging goods,” according to a statement released last month by the Ministry of Finance that did not mention alcohol. The new tax will increase the price of sugary drinks by half, while the price of tobacco, alcohol, energy drinks and pork will double, Walid Zidani, an employee of the ministry, said by phone on Tuesday.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When New York City’s transportation commissioner returned from a recent trip to California, she seemed downright jealous. There were electric scooters in Oakland. New train lines in Los Angeles. Self-driving cars in the Bay Area. She tried them all.
+“It is an incredibly exciting time to be in urban transportation,” the commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, told a breakfast gathering of powerful New Yorkers, pointing to California’s progress.
+Her glee signaled a noteworthy and sobering shift. Wasn’t it her city that was once the envy of the nation when it came to transportation?
+Not anymore. The subways on the East Coast that allowed New York, Washington and Boston to thrive are showing their age and suffering from years of neglect, while cities on the West Coast are moving quickly to expand and improve their networks.The 2017 tax cut has received pretty bad press, and rightly so. Its proponents made big promises about soaring investment and wages, and also assured everyone that it would pay for itself; none of that has happened.
+Yet coverage actually hasn’t been negative enough. The story you mostly read runs something like this: The tax cut has caused corporations to bring some money home, but they’ve used it for stock buybacks rather than to raise wages, and the boost to growth has been modest. That doesn’t sound great, but it’s still better than the reality: No money has, in fact, been brought home, and the tax cut has probably reduced national income. Indeed, at least 90 percent of Americans will end up poorer thanks to that cut.
+Let me explain each point in turn.
+First, when people say that U.S. corporations have “brought money home” they’re referring to dividends overseas subsidiaries have paid to their parent corporations. These did indeed surge briefly in 2018, as the tax law made it advantageous to transfer some assets from the books of those subsidiaries to the home companies; these transactions also showed up as a reduction in the measured stake of the parents in the subsidiaries, i.e., as negative direct investment (Figure 1).BERLIN — Targeting foreigners, a man repeatedly drove his car at pedestrians celebrating New Year’s Eve in western Germany, injuring four people before being arrested, the police and prosecutors said Tuesday.
+The suspect made comments disparaging of foreigners when the police detained and questioned him, Herbert Reul, interior minister for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where the attacks took place, told reporters on Tuesday.
+“This is a case of a German deliberately driving into groups of people, people who for the most part were foreigners,” Mr. Reul said. “That means this man clearly intended to kill foreigners.”
+At least three adults and one child, among them a Syrian and an Afghan, were struck and severely injured, officials said.Two friends from New York City were found dead in a reservoir in Westchester County early New Year’s morning after their fishing boat overturned, the authorities said.
+Their bodies were found beside their capsized rowboat by another fisherman who came to the Muscoot Reservoir around 7 a.m., said Capt. David Atkins of the State Police.
+The men, Ngan Kong, 48, of Brooklyn, and Ma Weitao, 47, of Staten Island, had gone fishing on the reservoir, in Goldens Bridge about 30 miles north of New York City, on Monday night, Captain Atkins said.
+“They did speak to family members about 5 p.m. yesterday to say that they wanted to keep fishing later into the night,” Captain Atkins said.PERTH, Australia — After nearly two decades of appearing alongside each other on billboards and in record books, Serena Williams and Roger Federer faced off across a tennis court for the first time on Tuesday.
+The incandescent stars, now both 37, finally aligned for the first time by taking part in a mixed doubles match between the United States and Switzerland at the Hopman Cup team event.
+On the opening point, Williams pulled Federer wide to his forehand side with a sharply angled volley, then sent a smash toward the opposite corner that he could not reach in time to send back. Long exchanges between the two proved few, however, with each using their serve to effectively neutralize the other.
+It did not seem to matter to the crowd of 14,064 in Perth Arena, the highest single-session attendance in the event’s 31-year history, and Williams and Federer clearly delighted in the chance to hit the ball around with each other a couple of weeks before more serious play occurs at the Australian Open.Mr. Lighthizer — whose top deputy will meet with Chinese officials this week ahead of more high-level talks in February — has played down any differences with Mr. Trump and views his role as ultimately executing the directive of his boss. But the trade representative, who declined to be interviewed, has told friends and associates that he is intent on preventing the president from being talked into accepting “empty promises” like temporary increases in soybean or beef purchases.
+Mr. Lighthizer, 71, is pushing for substantive changes, such as forcing China to end its practice of requiring American companies to hand over valuable technology as a condition of doing business there. But after 40 years of dealing with China and watching it dangle promises that do not materialize, Mr. Lighthizer remains deeply skeptical of Beijing and has warned Mr. Trump that the United States may need to exert more pressure through additional tariffs in order to win true concessions.
+When Mr. Lighthizer senses that anyone — even Mr. Trump — might be going a little soft on China, he opens a paper-clipped manila folder he totes around and brandishes a single-page, easy-reading chart that lists decades of failed trade negotiations with Beijing, according to administration officials.
+“Bob’s attitude toward China is very simple. He wants them to surrender,” said William A. Reinsch, a former federal trade official who met him three decades ago when Mr. Lighthizer was a young aide for former Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. “His negotiating strategy is simple too. He basically gives them a list of things he wants them to do and says, ‘Fix it now.’”
+Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Lighthizer last month to lead the talks initially spooked markets, which viewed the China skeptic’s appointment as an ominous sign. It also annoyed Chinese officials, who had been talking with the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, a more moderate voice on trade and the primary point of contact for Liu He, China’s top trade negotiator. Mr. Mnuchin has urged the president to avoid a protracted trade war, even if that entails reaching an interim agreement that leaves some issues unresolved.
+Mr. Mnuchin, who attended the G-20 dinner, helped Mr. Trump craft an upbeat assessment declaring the Buenos Aires meeting “highly successful” in the presidential limousine back to the airport, according to a senior administration official.In fact, there is so much exposed and unpainted wood, in columns, beams and ceilings, it gives the condos the appearance of a construction zone. Half the condos, which range from $800,000 to $1.3 million, have sold since the building opened last spring, said Ben Kaiser, the developer.
+Mr. Kaiser faced challenges getting Carbon12 built. The permitting process took almost two years to wind through city and state agencies, largely because wood buildings in Oregon could top out at no more than six stories, he said.
+In the end, officials concluded that wooden high-rises could help revive Oregon’s stagnant timber industry, Mr. Kaiser said. In August, the state increased the height limit to 18 stories.
+Carbon12’s timber, however, did not come cheap, according to Mr. Kaiser, whose offices were also built with timber. Indeed, at $11 million, Carbon12 was about 20 percent more expensive to construct than a concrete version would have been, which in some ways dictated that it be a luxury condo.
+“It’s like anything — the first iPhone, the first flat-screen TV,” Mr. Kaiser said. “Costs are high because not enough people are doing it.”
+Nevertheless, he plans to use wood from now on. In addition to their green benefits, he said, wood buildings perform well in earthquakes because of their lighter weight and flexibility.SAN FRANCISCO — A common belief among tech industry insiders is that Silicon Valley has dominated the internet because much of the worldwide network was designed and built by Americans.
+Now a growing number of those insiders are worried that proposed export restrictions could short-circuit the pre-eminence of American companies in the next big thing to hit their industry, artificial intelligence.
+In November, the Commerce Department released a list of technologies, including artificial intelligence, that are under consideration for new export rules because of their importance to national security.
+Technology experts worry that blocking the export of A.I. to other countries, or tying it up in red tape, will help A.I. industries flourish in those nations — China, in particular — and compete with American companies.There are but two guarantees in this year’s Oscar race for best director: Bradley Cooper and Alfonso Cuarón will be nominated for “A Star Is Born” and “Roma,” respectively.
+Who else makes the final five is anybody’s guess.
+Eleven other directors — including some Oscar-nominated veterans and would-be first-timers — all have a legitimate path to those remaining spots. But who will come out ahead when the nominations are unveiled on Jan. 22? Below, in alphabetical order, your Carpetbagger weighs their odds.
+Bo Burnham, ‘Eighth Grade’
+In his favor: Burnham’s junior-high dramedy has netted several breakthrough awards from critics. Could he follow in the path of other first-time filmmakers like Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich”) and Benh Zeitlin (“Beasts of the Southern Wild”) and crash the best-director category?
+Working against him: This year’s race may be too stacked with heavyweight names for Burnham to slip through.The story drags at times. O’Brien’s father seems always to be “whiny” and “high-pitched” when on the verge of rage. Reading about a diet of puréed vegetables is almost as tiresome as living on one. But O’Brien describes her unusual childhood with loving generosity. She captures her father’s vulnerability and creative brilliance, and recognizes her mother’s pioneering, seeking spirit. After all, this was a woman who embraced Ayurveda, meditation and co-op shopping long before they became mainstream. The family’s story is one of renunciation, but not, ultimately, one of hunger.
+KITCHEN YARNS
+Notes on Life, Love, and Food
+By Ann Hood
+232 pp. Norton. $24.95.
+Image
+Hood’s essays are like hot chocolate, cozy and warm. Her collection of meditations on food and life touches the big themes: grief for a brother and a small child gone suddenly, two divorces and the end of a grand affair. Still, Hood describes them with the easy intimacy of a friend, confessing her foibles as she stirs a pot of red sauce. The recipes closing each chapter hint that every heartache can be soothed by the deft application of cheese and carbohydrates.
+Here, unlike in many food memoirs, the recipes carry the story. In some essays, Hood recalls her days as a young woman stumbling into sophistication. She models for the Jordan Marsh department store and flits around the world in a T.W.A. flight attendant uniform designed by Ralph Lauren. The brand names share their retro appeal with the meals she cooks at the time: a curried chicken salad snipped from Glamour, Chicken Salad Veronique, the spaghetti carbonara she falls for on a layover in Rome. These nostalgic foods intuitively convey the fleeting nature of youthful ideals, and how fervently they can be held.
+Other tales focus on homely simplicity. Hood slips into her Italian-American mother’s kitchen, though she never quite manages to get the knack of rolling out meatballs like Mom does. The accompanying recipe comes with a warning: “Gogo” never measures out her ingredients, and besides, “she always wants her food to be better than yours.” Later, Hood recalls the quiet joy of making weeknight dinner while her children stand on stools beside her and help. The roast potatoes her son improvises are, appropriately, “best made by a child under the age of 10.”
+The book’s steady cheer might cloy were it not punctuated by loneliness. Hood is at her meditative best while wandering around Ikea, trying to assemble a new life after divorce. The store’s winding paths remind her of the Minotaur’s labyrinth. Instead of a ball of string, however, Hood comes out with a recipe for Swedish meatballs. There is, after all, deliverance in humble things.Norman Gimbel, the wildly versatile Brooklyn-born lyricist who won a Grammy Award for a blues hit, “Killing Me Softly With His Song”; an Oscar for a folk ballad, “It Goes Like It Goes” (from “Norma Rae”); and television immortality for the bouncy series themes to “Happy Days” and “Laverne and Shirley,” died on Dec. 19 at his home in Montecito, Calif. He was 91.
+The death was confirmed by his son Tony, managing partner of his father’s music publishing company, Words West.
+Any attempt to categorize the elder Mr. Gimbel’s musical leanings would be complicated. He was famous for the English lyrics of “The Girl From Ipanema,” Antonio Carlos Jobim’s 1964 bossa nova hit originally written in Portuguese. He also wrote English lyrics for Michel Legrand’s music from Jacques Demy’s romantic 1964 French film “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” most notably “I Will Wait for You” (“Till you’re here beside me, till I’m touching you”) and for what became “I Will Follow Him,” a solid hit about teenage adoration sung by Little Peggy March (age 15) in 1963.
+Among his early hits, “Sway” (“When marimba rhythms start to play”) was clearly Latin-accented, even when Dean Martin sang it, and “Canadian Sunset,” recorded by Andy Williams, became a jazz standard. “Ready to Take a Chance Again” (from “Foul Play,” 1978), which earned an Oscar nomination, was a wistfully hopeful love song. Jim Croce’s 1973 hit “I Got a Name” (“Movin’ me down the highway, rollin’ down the highway, movin’ ahead so life won’t pass me by”) was quintessential folk rock.That said, some top staff members will undoubtedly decamp for a campaign if there is one, several advisers said. Whether all the groups could sustain operations is unclear, given that Mr. Biden could face pressure to suspend fund-raising to avoid improper influence.
+During the 2018 cycle, Mr. Biden maintained visibility with campaign visits to 24 states and at least 135 other speaking engagements, giving him a platform whenever he wanted. At a book-related talk in Missoula, Mont., in early December, he fueled coast-to-coast speculation about his plans by declaring himself “the most qualified person in the country to be president.”
+Sources of Wealth
+Mr. Biden has long been self-deprecating about his relative lack of wealth, compared with some politicians. He and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, left office with assets worth between $277,000 and $955,000 (not including their house near Wilmington, Del.), as well as a mortgage of $500,000 to $1 million and other smaller loans, according to a 2015 federal disclosure. The report gives values in ranges.
+But they have very likely earned more in the two years since leaving office than in the prior two decades, thanks largely to a three-book deal with Flatiron Books reported to be worth $8 million (a figure unconfirmed by the publisher). Two months after the contract was announced, they bought a six-bedroom vacation house in Rehoboth Beach, Del. — off the water — for $2.7 million. No mortgage was recorded.
+[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]
+Mr. Biden’s only salaried work, according to Mr. Russo, is a Penn professorship that occupies about one day a week. Dr. Biden — who is writing one of the three books — earns $99,398 as an English professor at Northern Virginia Community College, state records show. Mr. Biden, who earned $230,700 a year as vice president, receives a hefty federal pension after 44 years of public service. The couple also receive about $66,000 a year in Social Security benefits and in other pension benefits paid to Dr. Biden, according to their last public tax return, from 2015.
+Mr. Russo said Mr. Biden would be transparent about his finances if he ran. “He will make available his tax returns, financial interests and other information that used to be — and should once again become — commonplace,” he said, referring to Mr. Trump’s defiance of a four-decade tradition of voluntary disclosure by presidents and many candidates.“Rushing for a Knife Could Be Alarming”
+For Christmas, I gave him an expensive chef’s knife. It was better than mine, even though I am the more enthusiastic cook. Right after New Year’s, standing in his beige, Burbank living room, he broke up with me without explanation. As I cried and screamed, I thought about the knife in the next room and considered retrieving it. He didn’t deserve that knife. I also knew, in that moment, rushing for a knife could be alarming in a get-you-arrested kind of way. So I didn’t get it. But I still think about that damn knife every day. — Shannon LatimerAldo Parisot, a renowned cellist who toured the world as a soloist and settled into a career as an eminent teacher that included a 60-year tenure at the Yale School of Music, died on Saturday at his home in Guilford, Conn. He was 100.
+His death was announced by his son, Dean Parisot, a film director and producer in Los Angeles. The cellist had retired from Yale only last June.
+During the busiest stage of his solo career Mr. Parisot performed with the major orchestras of Berlin, London, Paris and Munich, and with conductors including Leopold Stokowski, Pierre Monteux and Leonard Bernstein, winning plaudits for his warm, focused sound; prodigious technique; and a temperament that balanced passion and elegance.
+For a 1955 New York Philharmonic appearance under the conductor Walter Hendl, he gave the premiere of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Cello Concerto No. 2, one of many works Mr. Parisot would commission during his career to expand the cello repertory.[Read more about Anita Rachvelishvili’s rocket to stardom]
+That these performances made “Adriana” seem more musically substantial than usual was also thanks to the insightful conducting of Gianandrea Noseda. Cilea emerged during a period in Italian opera, dominated by Puccini, when the public could not get enough of hot-blooded, verismo (essentially true to life) music dramas. When it comes to harmonic daring and subtle manipulations of melodic motifs, Cilea was no Puccini. But without pumping up or milking the music in any way, Mr. Noseda led a vigorous, exacting and pulsing performance, drawing out inner details and lending lightness, with a mordant touch, to the many scenes of backstage bustle and frivolity at the company where Adriana is a star.
+The opera inhabits a realm similar to the 1980s play, and later film, “Dangerous Liaisons,” which shows 18th-century courtly French life as a game of sexual adventure and humiliation. In this Met production (involving five other companies and introduced at Covent Garden in London in 2010), Mr. McVicar puts the focus on the backstage hubbub of the theater troupe as much as possible. A rotating replica of a Baroque theater (a dominant element of Charles Edwards’s set) reveals the actors and dancers readying themselves in cluttered dressing rooms, then spins around to show us the performance as viewed from the wings. The costumes (by Brigitte Reiffenstuel) are also true to the styles of the period. In these days when updated settings are commonplace, Mr. McVicar’s choice to maintain the original setting might seem safe. But by telling the story with such attention to period detail he emphasized the opera’s intertwining of political and sexual intrigue.
+The entire cast was excellent, especially the baritone Ambrogio Maestri as Michonnet, the stage manager of the company, who pines for Adriana. With his formidable voice and hulking physique, Mr. Maestri was in his element bellowing commands at his troupe, which made the moments when he is awkward with affection for Adriana almost heartbreaking. Other standouts were Maurizio Muraro as the Prince of Bouillon, who hardly cares about his wife’s infidelities and is carrying on his own affair with Adriana’s rival in the theater company, and Carlo Bosi as the wily Abbé of Chazeuil.
+The strongest scenes in the opera, involving the three principals, leapt off the stage on Monday, especially the confrontation between Adriana and the princess in Act II, when they discover that they both love Maurizio. Ms. Netrebko and Ms. Rachvelishvili sang ferociously as they hurled accusatory phrases at each other. Yet each found moments in the music to suggest the womanly longing that consumes them.
+Since the spring of 2018, Ms. Netrebko is three for three in bringing new roles to the Met and making them her own: Puccini’s Tosca, Verdi’s Aida, and now Adriana Lecouvreur. In the final scene, when Adriana sings the aria “Poveri fiori,” Ms. Netrebko was magnificent. She cradles dying violets, a token of love she had given Maurizio, which she mistakenly thinks he has returned as a sign of rejection. In fact the princess has sent them, laced with poison. The implausible elements of the situation disappeared as Ms. Netrebko made this music, and this moment, seem an inspired creation.The number of bicyclist deaths dropped last year to 10, from 24 in 2017, according to the city. The number of people who died in vehicles also fell to 37, from 58 in 2017. But the number of motorcyclist deaths increased to 39, from 33 in 2017.
+Nationally, more than 37,000 people died in traffic crashes in 2017, according to federal transportation data that is not available yet for 2018. The number of traffic fatalities in the United States fell by about 2 percent in 2017, but that followed increases in deaths in 2016 and 2015.
+In New York, safety advocates have pressed Mr. de Blasio to move faster to improve streets. Marco Conner, deputy director of Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group, said there were still too many deaths and injuries.
+“It’s an achievement, and it should be celebrated,” Mr. Conner said of the drop last year. “But I think the big question is: Why aren’t we doing more against the enormity of the epidemic? We’re only really taking baby steps.”
+The people who lost their lives represent a cross section of New Yorkers: A 5-year-old girl, Abigail Blumenstein, and a 1-year-old boy, Joshua Lew, were killed by a driver in Brooklyn while crossing the street with their mothers; an 89-year-old woman, Beatrice Kahn, was hit by a car in the Bronx; and a 9-year-old boy, Giovanni Ampuero, was struck by a driver who fled the scene in Queens.
+In August, a 23-year-old Australian woman died after she was hit by a garbage truck while riding a bicycle near Central Park. She was cut off by a livery cab that entered a bike lane. Her death led to calls for better bike infrastructure, such as protected lanes with a physical barrier.
+The city’s transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, said that her agency completed 138 street improvement projects last year and added more than 20 miles of protected bike lanes. She called the 2018 figures “encouraging results unparalleled among American cities.”Because the federal government contributes to the salaries of many members of the Navajo Nation, Mr. Begaye said the lack of pay would hurt families on the reservation, where a single salary can support a family of six, 10 or even 12 people. Mr. Begaye said loan sharks have started circling, leaving fliers on cars and doorsteps.
+“It just kind of snowballs into our people doing things that they know they shouldn’t do and further financially obligating themselves,” Mr. Begaye said. “They have to keep their heater going. They have to keep their water on.”
+On the Bois Forte Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota, tribal officials have instituted a hiring freeze and are planning to meet later this week to discuss budget cuts. Cathy Chavers, the tribe’s chairwoman, said tribal functions were continuing for now, but “it will probably come down to minimal, minimal basic services” if the shutdown lasts another month.
+Already, police officers on her reservation, who are employees of the federal government and not the tribe, were being forced to work without pay.
+“These officers are putting their lives on the line,” Ms. Chavers said, “and they don’t know if they’re going to get a paycheck or not.”
+Tribes are making plans for how much longer they can operate, while not knowing whether they will be reimbursed for shutdown-related expenses. Officials with the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin said that they had made contingency plans but that they could manage at least another month without any cuts. The Shoshone-Bannock Tribes in Idaho posted on Facebook that they had enough money to operate at full strength through Saturday, but would then have to re-evaluate.And then with Veronica [Viola Davis], you see the ritual between Harry [Liam Neeson] and her since he’s the leader of the gang. Veronica catches her husband in the shower right before, as it turned out, he’s going to leave for his last, fatal job. She has the flask and says, “Oh, don’t forget,” and pours the shot. And she holds it out to him, but instead she downs it.
+You always try to get as much efficiency as you can in your scenes, and I was fond of that scene because it establishes so much. It shows the intimacy between the two and the fondness and a ritual. You realize they’ve been together for a long time. You understand that he’s been doing these jobs forever, that it makes her nervous and he understands that, that they have a teasing nature and a sweetness between them. And then later on the flask becomes a plot point.
+Steve and I liked the interweaving — going back and forth between those domestic moments and this complete violence with the heist going bad — to make it as stark and strange and bizarre as possible, so that you are caught off-guard in trying to figure out what’s happening. Steve called it a kiss and a slap and a kiss and a slap, which is a perfect way to put it. (As told to Kathryn Shattuck)
+[Read our review of “Widows.”]Netflix has blocked an episode of its show “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj” from streaming in Saudi Arabia after the Saudi government complained that the episode — which is critical of the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman — violated its cybercrime laws.
+In the episode, first shown in October, Mr. Minhaj critiques the United States’ longstanding relationship with Saudi Arabia after the murder of the dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
+“Now would be a good time to reassess our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Mr. Minhaj said, “and I mean that as a Muslim and an American.”
+After receiving a takedown request last month from the Saudi government’s Communications and Information Technology Commission, Netflix removed the episode from viewing in Saudi Arabia last week. The news was first reported by The Financial Times.Also in December, the Federal District Court in Atlanta rejected an effort by Jun Ying, the former chief information officer at Equifax, to dismiss insider trading charges. Mr. Ying exercised all of his vested stock options and sold nearly $1 million in shares a little more than a week before the company disclosed the hack of its database in September 2017, according to the S.E.C. He argued that the government had not shown that he had “used” confidential information about the hack when he sold the shares.
+The question of how the government can show a defendant used inside information, even if it can prove the person knew it, can be difficult. In this case, prosecutors are relying on internet searches Mr. Ying conducted into the effect of hacks on other credit reporting companies, like Experian, and the timing of the trades to show that he must have based the trading decision on the inside information he gathered about the hacking at Equifax and not a more benign reason. By selling the shares when he did, the defendant gained $480,000. That’s something a jury is likely to view suspiciously. The stock dropped over 15 percent after news of the data breach was made public.
+The government often portrays insider trading as motivated by greed, and the opportunity to make money can prove irresistible when the only real victim of the violation is the faceless securities market.
+The lure of easy profits is apparent in civil charges filed by the S.E.C. against Rajeshwar R. Gannamaneni and his wife and father for trading ahead of 40 deals over four years. Mr. Gannamaneni was an information technology contractor for an investment bank in Singapore, and the three defendants are accused of making almost $600,000 from their trading.
+Hiding insider trading can be difficult if a person makes outsize profits, which will quickly draw the attention of the stock and options exchanges. But if one can keep the trading profits small, there is a chance that it might fly under the radar, at least for a time. The problem with this approach is that making a little bit of money is not nearly as satisfying as making a lot, so greed starts to take over.
+The charges against Mr. Gannamaneni and the other two defendants show that they started small, usually making a profit of less than $10,000, and once only $78. But by 2015 and 2016, their profit on trades was as high as $55,000. That is sure to draw the interest of the S.E.C.’s market surveillance office, which looks for patterns of successful trading.
+The lesson from Mr. Gannamaneni’s case is that confidential information exerts a powerful pull to make more and more easy money, which means that one is much more likely to get caught. So if you think the government will not notice your well-timed trades, increasing your profit means there is a much higher chance that you will be discovered.Every month, Netflix Australia adds a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for January, broken down by release date.
+[Not the month you’re looking for? Find the newest Netflix Australia guide here.]
+TV Series New to Netflix
+‘Comedians of the World’
+Starts streaming: January 1
+Netflix’s programmers have been uncommonly ambitious when it comes to the service’s slate of stand-up specials, and Netflix’s line-up of international television over the past couple of years has been been impressive too. These initiatives dovetail in “Comedians of the World,” a new series shot at over a half-dozen comedy festivals, featuring 47 different comics of widely varying backgrounds. These sets — from the United States, Canada, Mexico, India, Germany, the Middle East, and elsewhere — are presented in their original languages, with subtitles. This ought to be a fascinating experiment, testing whether jokes translate as easily as drama and action.
+—
+‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’ Season 3
+Starts streaming: January 1
+The last four books of Lemony Snicket’s best-selling, blackly comic young adult fantasy series “A Series of Unfortunate Events” form the spine of the final seven episodes of Netflix’s TV adaptation, which brings the small-screen adventures of the orphaned Baudelaire siblings and the nefarious Count Olaf to a close. In addition to a heavily made-up Neil Patrick Harris as Olaf, past seasons have featured guest appearances by the likes of Alfre Woodard, Don Johnson, Catherine O’Hara, and Tony Hale. This year, Richard E. Grant and Max Greenfield join this freaky party, helping to wrap up one of the weirder sagas in contemporary children’s entertainment.
+—In it, she argued that parents play less of a role than they think they do in shaping their children. Many of the questions that frazzle new parents and guilt-trip mothers, such as whether the child will be damaged if sent to day care while the mother works outside the home, are essentially meaningless, Ms. Harris suggested, because being in day care or having the mother at home is less important than the child’s genes and social group.
+Her central insight, which she said came to her while reading a psychology paper in 1994, was that adolescents are not trying to be like adults, they are trying to be like other adolescents.
+“If teenagers wanted to be like adults they wouldn’t be shoplifting nail polish from drugstores or hanging off overpasses to spray I LOVE YOU LIƨA on the arch,” she wrote. “If they really aspired to ‘mature status’ they would be doing boring adult things like sorting the laundry and figuring out their income taxes. Teenagers aren’t trying to be like adults: they are trying to distinguish themselves from adults!”
+It was her work as a textbook writer that gave her the broad perspective across disciplines to develop her thesis. Because she was not affiliated with a university, she was in no position to undertake large studies herself. But she was deeply familiar with the literature.
+“And she was so damn smart,” Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist and author who has championed Ms. Harris’s work, said in a phone interview. “Her gift was she could understand the technical aspects of behavioral genetics and at the same time was a psychologist and a very sharp observer of human behavior.”Nearly two years into his presidency and more than six months after his historic summit meeting with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, President Trump finds himself essentially back where he was at the beginning in achieving the ambitious goal of getting Mr. Kim to relinquish his nuclear arsenal.
+That was the essential message of Mr. Kim’s annual New Year’s televised speech, where he reiterated that international sanctions must be lifted before North Korea will give up a single weapon, dismantle a single missile site or stop producing nuclear material.
+The list of recent North Korean demands was a clear indicator of how the summit meeting in Singapore last June altered the optics of the relationship more than the reality. Those demands were very familiar from past confrontations: that all joint military training between the United States and South Korea be stopped, that American nuclear and military capability within easy reach of the North be withdrawn, and that a peace treaty ending the Korean War be completed.
+“It’s fair to say that not much has changed, although we now have more clarity regarding North Korea’s bottom line,’’ Evans J.R. Revere, a veteran American diplomat and former president of the Korea Society, wrote in an email.American border officers sent tear gas into Mexico early Tuesday to drive away about 150 migrants trying to cross the border into the United States, the authorities said.
+In a statement, the Customs and Border Protection agency said that the migrants tried to climb over and crawl under the border fence near San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico — the same area where American officers fired tear gas across the border late last year and where Mexico is struggling to handle thousands of migrants who have fled violence and poverty in Central America.
+Early Tuesday, as migrants gathered at the border fence there, several teenagers with heavy jackets, blankets and rubber mats tried to cross or cover concertina wire at the barrier. Others began throwing rocks over the fence at the American officers, according to the statement.RIO DE JANEIRO — Just over four months ago, Jair Bolsonaro was fighting for his life after being stabbed in the gut during a presidential campaign rally. On Tuesday, after a quick recovery and an unlikely victory, he was sworn in as Brazil’s president, steering Latin America’s largest nation far to the right in a political shift that was evident even during his inauguration.
+As he addressed a crowd from the presidential palace amid unusually tight security that underscored his worry about a new assassination attempt, Mr. Bolsonaro waved a Brazilian flag and proclaimed that on that day, Brazilians were “being freed from socialism.”
+The country’s flag “would never be red again,” he said, alluding to the rival Workers’ Party as he stood next to his wife and Vice President Hamilton Mourão, “even if it takes our blood to keep it green and yellow.”
+The Workers’ Party, which had won the last four presidential elections, was crushed in the October vote after the country slipped into recession, violence soared and corruption scandals tarred much of the elite. It boycotted the swearing-in ceremony, reflecting the lingering bitterness of a presidential race that polarized Brazilians like none other in recent history.The president “has given Democrats a great opportunity to show how we will govern responsibly & quickly pass our plan to end the irresponsible #TrumpShutdown,” she said, “just the first sign of things to come.”
+Democrats also intend to use their first months in the majority to push for a bipartisan infrastructure bill and legislation to lower prescription drug costs, issues that they believe will have bipartisan appeal.
+The Democrats plan to pass two bills on Thursday. The first includes six bipartisan spending measures that would fully fund agencies like the Interior Department and the Internal Revenue Service through the end of the fiscal year in September. The second would fund the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 8, with $1.3 billion for fencing but no money for a wall on the Mexican border.
+With the plan facing a shaky future in the Senate and an intransigent president, some rank-and-file lawmakers in both parties are suggesting that a deal to revamp the nation’s immigration laws, pairing border security and protections for some undocumented immigrants, may be the way out of the stalemate.
+“How about comprehensive immigration reform?” Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, said on CNN on Tuesday, when asked how Democrats intend to compromise with Mr. Trump.
+One of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has revived his long-stalled immigration proposal to marry $5 billion for the wall with immigration law changes that might appeal to Democrats, including three-year renewable work permits for young undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children, known as Dreamers.
+Mr. Trump has raised the prospects of broader talks on Twitter. “We will be forced to close the Southern Border entirely if the Obstructionist Democrats do not give us the money to finish the Wall & also change the ridiculous immigration laws that our Country is saddled with,” he said last week. “Hard to believe there was a Congress & President who would approve!”“I’m working for my family, and I’m working for Jesus. So if I have $5, two for us and three for others.”
+ANTONY FERNANDEZ, an asylum seeker who fled India after a religiously motivated attack, on his salary as a dishwasher and his family’s approach to charity. The family received a laptop from Catholic Charities, an organization that receives support from The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — As the mother of two nearly grown human beings, I had a vested interest in making sure that, when they went out into the world to break bread with other human beings, no words like “rude” or even “completely feral” would be bandied about. We’re not exactly a multiple fork household even under the fanciest of circumstances, but I’m proud to say that no one in my immediate family has ever been asked to leave a restaurant. It’s the little victories that count.
+So I was happy to see that these lessons are still being taught to younger generations, at least as far as I could see in the clues of Jacob Stulberg’s puzzle.
+Or so I thought. A theme can zig when you think it’s going to zag. Sometimes you can even come to a fork in the road, like this one.
+Image A literal fork in the road. Credit... Deb Amlen
+This really happened. I was crossing Eighth Avenue on my way to the office, and stepped over this utensil in the street. It was tempting to just keep going, but then I thought, what kind of reporter of wordplay would I be if I didn’t capture this living idiom and bring it to the column to show you? So I walked back out into the middle of a busy New York City avenue, with absolutely no regard for my own safety, and snapped a cellphone shot of it. This is the kind of thing I do for my job. Because I care.PASADENA, Calif. — A colleague once advised Urban Meyer to find a moment amid each game to savor. At Ohio State, the regimented coach customarily would remove his headset between the third and fourth quarters to soak in the university marching band blasting the vintage rock tune “Hang On Sloopy.”
+The better the Buckeyes were playing, the longer he would listen.
+On Tuesday, as Meyer’s dominant squad built what appeared to be an irreversible lead over Washington in the 105th Rose Bowl, the coach was able to take in every last note.
+“This has been on the bucket list,” Meyer said of winning his first Rose Bowl. “I love all the other bowls, but being a Big Ten guy from Ohio and watching the Rose Bowl in the ’70s with Archie Griffin, it’s everything everybody says it was.”
+In what Meyer maintains was a football coaching farewell that came as a result of his own health concerns, the No. 6 Buckeyes withstood a late rally by No. 9 Washington to prevail, 28-23, and make a mild case that omitting them from the College Football Playoff in lieu of Oklahoma (slow out of the starting blocks against Alabama) and Notre Dame (glued to the blocks against Clemson) was an oversight.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York on Tuesday cast himself and the state that he leads as progressive beacons and a bulwark against President Trump, taking the oath of office while standing on Ellis Island.
+In his third inaugural address, Mr. Cuomo pledged to pursue a “new justice agenda” that would confront a “cancer” of hatred and division that he said threatened the nation.
+Mr. Cuomo conspicuously avoided invoking the president by name, even as he sharply rebuked a federal government that he said “has sought to demonize our differences and make our diversity our greatest weakness rather than our greatest strength.”
+“America’s only threat is from within: It is the growing division amongst us,” Mr. Cuomo said. New York, he vowed, would be “the light to lead the way through the darkness.”Mitt Romney, the incoming senator from Utah and former Republican presidential nominee, revived his rivalry with President Trump on Tuesday with an op-ed essay in The Washington Post in which he said Mr. Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office.”
+Days before joining a Republican-controlled Senate, and as the 2020 presidential race begins to take form, Mr. Romney issued a pointed critique of the president’s character.
+“With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable,” he wrote ahead of his swearing-in on Thursday. “And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.”
+[After the essay, Mitt Romney faced counterattacks from the president’s allies. Read more here.]
+The timing and tone of the piece set off widespread speculation online, with some suggesting that Mr. Romney aimed to position himself as “the new Jeff Flake,” the departing Republican senator from Arizona who publicly tangled with Mr. Trump.Mr. Xi’s offer of dialogue appeared unlikely to win over Taiwanese wary of the idea that they could retain autonomy under China’s principle of “one country, two systems,” Yun Sun, a researcher on Chinese policy at the Stimson Center in Washington, said by email after the speech.
+“Xi is correct in that differences in political systems are the root of the problem,” Ms. Sun said. “But ‘one country, two systems’ is unlikely to be the answer the Taiwanese people embrace.”
+Mr. Xi’s speech was a sharp reminder that, even amid many other external disputes, Chinese leaders remain preoccupied with Taiwan, especially their concern that the island could defy their demands and embrace formal independence.
+China is Taiwan’s biggest trade partner, taking over 30 percent of its exports. Many Taiwanese, though, bridle at Beijing using its growing influence to isolate them from international participation, and to press them toward eventually accepting Chinese sovereignty over the island.
+Since coming to power in late 2012, Mr. Xi has warned Taiwan against any shift toward independence and repeatedly met with Taiwanese politicians from the Kuomintang, the party that ruled China before the Communist Party and that now favors closer ties with Beijing. But Mr. Xi’s address was his first major speech as president devoted to Taiwan, said Bonnie S. Glaser, an expert on Chinese foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
+“My initial impression is that the speech is a reaffirmation of current policy,” Ms. Glaser said. She also noted that despite Mr. Xi’s renewed call for unification, he did not set a deadline. “It is notable that there is no mention of a timetable or deadline for reunification — it is just a goal,” she said.
+Mr. Xi indicated that China’s multipronged pressure on Taiwan is likely to persist after Ms. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, which is wary of moving closer to China, suffered stinging setbacks in local Taiwanese elections in November. The opposition Kuomintang won mayoralties in Taiwan’s three most populous cities, prompting Ms. Tsai to resign as leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, though she remains Taiwan’s president.No corrections appeared in print on Wednesday, January 2, 2019.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).
+Comments on editorials may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com or faxed to (212) 556-3622.
+For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.The second season of “grown-ish” debuts on Freeform. And the acclaimed sophomore season of “Atlanta” is now available to stream on Hulu.
+What’s on TV
+GROWN-ISH 8 p.m. on Freeform. When this spinoff of Kenya Barris’s “black-ish” debuted at the beginning of last year, James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times that the series — which follows Yara Shahidi’s character, Zoey, as she goes off to college — “just needs a semester or two away from home.” The spinoff, like its lead character, was still finding its own voice, a coarser one than its parent program thanks to being on cable and about college students. Zoey returns to school for her sophomore year in the show’s second season, which debuts with two new episodes Wednesday night. In the new season, Zoey moves into an off-campus apartment, rekindles a romance and navigates a social sphere defined by hashtags and status updates.
+MYTHBUSTERS JR. 9 p.m. on Science Channel. Adam Savage’s rise to fame was marked by explosions. As the bubblier half of the hosting team behind “Mythbusters,” Savage has been seen testing such questions as whether a bullet fired through a plane window can cause explosive decompression and whether using a cellphone at a gas station can cause a caller to go up in flames. He returns in this spinoff series, which features Savage alongside a panel of children working to test the veracity of yet more myths.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+agog \ə-ˈgäg\ adjective
+1. highly excited 2. having or showing keen interest or intense desire or impatient expectancy
+_________
+The word agog has appeared in 10 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Aug. 30 in “Summer Movie Scorecard: Some Crazy Rich Hits and Shocking Misses” by Kyle Buchanan:
+Box-office watchers were agog when “Crazy Rich Asians” (made for $30 million) put up second-weekend numbers that were virtually the same as its $26 million opening weekend. That sort of hold is unicorn-rare in Hollywood, and taken in concert with the record-breaking business posted by “Black Panther” earlier this year, it ought to serve as ample proof that there is a financial upside to reflecting the world as it actually looks.Before reading the article:
+What have you heard or read about NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft? What do you know about Ultima Thule?
+Read the timeline about New Horizons and its explorations. You might also watch the music video created by Brian May, best known as the lead guitarist of the rock band Queen but also an astrophysicist working with the mission’s science team.
+Why do you think the flyby of Ultima Thule is newsworthy?
+Now, read the article, “NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Is Triumphant in Encounter With the Most Distant Object Ever Visited,” and answer the following questions:
+1. When did NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft fly near Ultima Thule? How long did it take for the message about the flyby being complete to reach Earth?
+2. What does the New Horizons team hope to learn about Ultima Thule and the solar system?
+3. When did scientists discover Ultima Thule?These photographs provided much-needed detail and context for a community all too often defined by stereotypes: the exotic tourist mecca replete with golden dragons and inexpensive restaurants; the booming business district, crowded with shopkeepers hawking ethnic foods, gaudy trinkets and mysterious potions; or the lurid, opium-fueled world of “Chinatown Nights,” a 1929 gangster film directed by William A. Wellman about a white socialite caught up in San Francisco’s Chinese underworld.
+Beginning in the late-19th century, a series of federal laws — built on stereotypes, anxieties about white racial purity, and the fear of lost jobs — greatly restricted Chinese immigration to the United States. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, for example, was the first to bar a group on the basis of nationality or race. It placed draconian restrictions on prospective immigrants, including the exclusion of the wives and children of Chinese laborers already living in the country.
+But the easing of immigration laws and quotas in the 1950s and 1960s precipitated an upsurge in Chinese settlement in the United States, dynamically altering Chinatown’s demographics, physical character and geography. Shops and small business were established, shuttered and reborn. Old buildings were demolished and replaced. The neighborhood’s boundaries expanded beyond its historical core streets. And Chinese communities arose and flourished in other parts of the city.
+“All communities change,” wrote Mr. Glick. “However, looking at it now, the incredibly rapid growth and change distinguishes Chinatown from many other communities. What felt big at the time now seems small. Chinatown has expanded tremendously. It seems qualitatively different now. Today’s Chinatown is a dynamic community created by a new generation of immigrants.”Ah yes, “Green Book.” It’s sort of mind-boggling that Peter Farrelly’s compendium of tone-deaf racial clichés arrived on screens in the same year as “Sorry to Bother You,” “BlacKkKlansman” and “If Beale Street Could Talk.” It seems to come not only from a bygone era but from a whole different cinema planet, one governed by feel-good pieties that were dubious here on earth even back in the 1960s. The voting membership of the Academy circa 1987 would have given all the prizes to “Green Book,” but in 2019 its prospects are decidedly cloudier.
+Not that Boots Riley, Spike Lee and Barry Jenkins represent a unified perspective on black life and American racism, or that they are in perfect political and imaginative harmony with one another. Hardly, and thank goodness. But all of them are interested in offering something other than comforting fables of finger-lickin’ harmony. And even though “Beale Street” and “BlacKkKlansman” are set in the ‘70s, while “Sorry” unfolds in a speculative near-future, each one explicitly addresses the unfinished business of the present.
+Which is what I want: movies that, rather than arriving at pat or reassuring conclusions, embrace the complications of reality and invite the audience to really think about it. Mostly this year I found that in documentaries and in other movies made at some distance from the American commercial mainstream.
+DARGIS At this point it feels as if the remaining big studios have nothing to offer other than recycled ideas and brands, with some exceptions. I like some of the box office behemoths — mostly, I like “Black Panther” — but too many of them were numbingly familiar in every way, narratively, tonally, whatever. This isn’t new or news, but it’s bleak that “Avengers: Infinity War” receives attention simply because it is from Marvel. Each of its movies is just a delivery system for that brand, though this one did encourage me with the promise that its characters and this franchise are finally goners.
+Disney has been the dominant player for a while and, as its power has grown, each of its new movies feels like a product launch: The release of the new Marvel, Star Wars or Pixar movie is greeted like the release of the latest iPhone, including the rabid-dog media attention it generates. There are modifications, some nifty new features, but it’s mostly the same, just pricier. This seems like how things worked in classic Hollywood cinema, which depended on both standardization (through product quality control and storytelling norms, for instance) and differentiation (in the diversity of films and stars and so on).I’m Ryan Coogler, co-writer and director of “Black Panther”. This scene is an extension of an action set piece that happens inside of a casino in Busan, South Korea. Now, T’Challa is in pursuit of Ulysses Klaue, who’s escaped the casino. He’s eliciting the help of his younger sister, Shuri, here, who’s back home in Wakanda. And she’s remote driving this Lexus sports car. And she’s driving from Wakanda. She’s actually in Wakanda. T’Challa’s in his panther suit on top of the car in pursuit. These are two of T’Challa’s comrades here. It’s Nakia who’s a spy, driving, and Okoye who’s a leader of the Dora Milaje in the passenger’s seat in pursuit of Klaue. The whole idea for this scene is we wanted to have our car chase that was unlike any car chase that we had seen before in combining the technology of Wakanda and juxtaposing that with the tradition of this African warrior culture. And in our film we kind of broke down characters between traditionalists and innovators. We always thought it would be fun to contrast these pairings of an innovator with a traditionalist. T’Challa, we kind of see in this film, is a traditionalist when you first meet him. His younger sister, Shuri, who runs Wakanda’s tech, is an innovator. So we paired them together. In the other car we have Nakia and Okoye, who’s also a traditionalist-innovator pairing. Nakia is a spy who we learn is kind of unconventional. And Okoye, who’s a staunch traditionalist, probably one of our most traditional characters in the film, you know, she doesn’t really like being in clothes that aren’t Wakandan. And this scene is kind of about her really bringing the Wakandan out. One of the images that almost haunted me was this image of this African woman with this red dress just blowing behind her, you know, spear out. And so a big thing was, like, you know, for me was getting the mount right so that the dress would flow the right way. It wouldn’t be impeded by the bracing system she was sitting on. So that took a lot of time. We had to play with the fabric and the amount of the dress to get it right.They weren’t looking for a diagnosis, the middle-aged woman explained. Her husband had a diagnosis. They just wanted help figuring out why, even with all the treatments he was getting, he wasn’t getting better.
+Until a year and a half earlier, her 54-year-old husband had been perfectly healthy. Never missed a day of work, never took so much as an aspirin. Then he got what he thought was the flu. But even after the fever and congestion went away, the terrible body aches remained. He coughed constantly and felt so tired that just walking to the mailbox would leave him panting for air and shaking with fatigue.
+Still, he went back to work. He enjoyed his job driving a locomotive for a manufacturing plant in rural Connecticut. Besides, his wife told me, he was a guy who needed to be busy. And he stayed busy until, one morning a couple of weeks after starting back at the job, he was driving to work and suddenly found himself rumbling over the shoulder, drifting toward the strip of grass and the woods beyond. All he remembered was that one minute he was on the road, and the next he wasn’t. For the first time since he initially got sick, he was worried.
+Draining Liters of Fluids
+He went to an urgent-care center. A chest X-ray showed fluid surrounding his lungs. And his EKG was abnormal. The nurse who saw the man was concerned. She ordered an antibiotic to treat a possible pneumonia and referred him to a cardiologist.You were recently elected chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, the fifth-ranking position in the party leadership. At 48, you’re basically a teenager in Democrat world, because some of the top House Democrats are close to 80. Will you be giving them advice on young-people stuff? Well, Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn are extremely hip in their own right, so I don’t believe they need any advice from me.
+In 2012, The Washington Post asked if you were Brooklyn’s Barack Obama. It’s a comparison you’ve heard a lot by now. How similar are you guys really? My mother has done a tremendous job of circulating talking points throughout the country. There is and will only ever be one Barack Obama, who was a phenomenal president. The only thing that I can definitively say we have in common is that we were both born on Aug. 4.
+Many people are already speculating that you’ll be a future speaker of the House. Is that kind of talk distracting? It’s not something that I really pay close attention to. During my time in public service, it’s become clear that you have to do the job that you currently have, do that job well and not get distracted. The rest tends to take care of itself.For those of us who have resolved to stand more and sit less in the coming year, a new study might temper some of our expectations of the benefits.
+It finds that people burn more calories when they stand than when sitting or lying down, but the increase is smaller than many of us might hope. For those of us who overindulged and slacked off on our exercise regimens over the holidays, it also means that being upright is unlikely to help us lose weight.
+But it does not mean we should take this news lying or sitting down, the study’s authors caution, because frequent standing is likely to have other, substantial health impacts.
+By now, almost everyone has heard about, dabbled with or rolled their eyes at the phenomenon of standing desks. Many of us also wear fitness trackers that nag us every hour or so to get up and move.The Trump era and Reid’s illness have occasioned an inevitable reconsideration of Reid’s legacy and all its contradictions. The Affordable Care Act, which Reid managed to navigate past the oppositional tactics of his persistent nemesis, the Republican Senate leader (and now majority leader), Mitch McConnell, has so far withstood McConnell and Trump’s efforts to dismantle the legislation. Reid was also prescient in urging the Obama administration and congressional Republicans to go public about the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election; the letter that Republican leaders agreed to co-sign weeks after they were briefed on the investigation did not identify Russia by name. “They did nothing — or nothing that I’m aware of,” Reid said.
+But McConnell’s and Trump’s own most substantial accomplishment to date, the appointment to the federal bench of an unprecedented number of conservative judges, including two Supreme Court justices who might well end up hearing a challenge to the Affordable Care Act, was made vastly easier by Reid’s decision, in 2013, to get rid of the filibuster for judicial appointments. Reid remains unrepentant about this. “They can say what they want,” he told me. “We had over 100 judges that we couldn’t get approved, so I had no choice. Either Obama’s presidency would be a joke or Obama’s presidency would be one of fruition.”
+Still, a certain nostalgia for the Senate leader has set in among Democrats, even those who had their disagreements with him. McCaskill was critical of Reid during their tenure together and did not back him for caucus leader in 2014. There are two major components of a Senate leader’s job, she said. “One is to make the trains run on time and getting things done that his caucus believes in,” McCaskill told me. “But the trains need to be bright and shiny while they’re running,” she added, referring to the communication and messaging part of the job that she said Reid was less well suited to.
+McCaskill told Reid at the time that she did not plan to vote for him and explained her reasons to him. He replied that she was the only one of his nonsupporters who had the nerve to tell him directly. “Oh, no, why would I?” Reid told me when I asked him if he felt betrayed. “And I won, didn’t I?”
+Reid’s successor is Chuck Schumer, his former caucus deputy who engineered much of the Senate Democrats’ communications and campaign strategy during Reid’s tenure. They had been close during Reid’s 12 years as Democratic leader, Reid serving as the arid desert yin to Schumer’s bombastic Brooklyn yang. When we spoke, Reid told me he did not wish to be seen as second-guessing Schumer. “My personal feeling should have nothing to do with it,” he said. But clearly Reid has more than a few of those personal feelings. He has told confidants that he felt Schumer was too eager to assume his job before Reid was ready to leave. Reid has also criticized, privately, Schumer’s instinct for accommodation with both McConnell and Trump.
+In our conversation, Reid seemed incapable of not constantly reminding me that he did not wish to talk about Schumer, as if this itself was something he wanted me to emphasize. “I do not call Schumer,” he told me. Then: “I call him once in a while — not weekly. Let’s say monthly I may call him.” This sounded straightforward enough until he added: “I talk to Nancy often. I love Nancy Pelosi. We did so many good things, and we still talk about that.” And just the day before, he said, he called Richard Durbin, the Illinois Democrat who, along with Schumer, was Reid’s top lieutenant in the Senate and is now Schumer’s Democratic whip. “We came to the House together in 1982,” Reid said of Durbin. “We had wonderful conversations.” (Schumer declined to be interviewed; his spokesman said in a statement that Schumer and Reid “have different styles but they complemented each other well. They are still good friends and talk regularly.”)Welcome to 2019. Does the fresh slate of a new year have you motivated to make changes great or small in your life?
+Have you made any New Year’s resolutions? If so, what are they?
+In “New Year, New You? How to Set Resolutions That You Can Actually Achieve,” Nushrat Rahman writes:
+It’s the most wonderful time of the year, or something. The holidays are coming to a close and we’re confronted with that question that turns up around this time: What do I want to change in the next year? Setting New Year’s resolutions can be a pretty daunting task, and even more so when statistics say that a vast majority of us fail in our attempts. But choosing the right goals and creating a solid plan can keep you on track.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Have you set New Year’s resolutions in past years? If so, what were they and why did you choose them? Did you stick to those resolutions?
+— Have you made any New Year’s resolutions for 2019?
+— What do you think is the best piece of advice in the article? Why?
+— To what extent do you agree that there is societal pressure to make New Year’s resolutions? Explain.
+— In the article, Tim Herrera talks about setting what he calls SMART goals. What are your thoughts on the elements that make up a SMART goal? Is there anything he overlooks?Nancy Pelosi is returning as speaker of the House of Representatives amid a partisan standoff that has made it virtually impossible to move forward on major legislation requiring the support of both Democrats and Republicans.
+Now, she has a chance to fix at least part of the problem.
+Prodded by some House Democrats, in late November she agreed to establish a more open process for working on legislation and to allow more votes on amendments supported by both parties. The changes in rules, expected to come to a vote after the House reconvenes Thursday, will help set the parameters for Ms. Pelosi’s second stint as speaker.
+Historically, amendment votes have been critical to legislation, allowing in a variety of ideas. They are one way for lawmakers to change a bill’s contents after it goes through committee, or when it skips that step entirely. They are often used on spending bills to get lawmakers on record on important issues and to build consensus solutions.
+But since the House began using electronic voting in 1973, minority party members have increasingly adopted the floor amendment — one of the few legislative tools available to them — as a way to force their opponents to cast politically difficult or symbolic votes. In response, House majority party leaders have clamped down on amendments to shield their members from those electorally risky votes.I am a divorced mother of two grown children. I’ve had no contact with my ex for many years. My children, now in their 20s, decided several years ago to cut off contact with their father. Their reasons rest on the causes of our divorce, which they learned of when they came of age, and because of a major broken promise on his part not long after. They considered my reasons as to why they might in the future regret cutting off contact (change of heart, medical information, no way to discuss issues around the divorce). My role was to talk everything through with them and help them make a decision based on their needs and adult status, with eyes wide open and accepting responsibility for it, which they did thoughtfully and carefully.
+When they reached their full majority, they respectfully and clearly told him they wanted no further contact. A few years later, he got in touch only to say he hopes they are well and happy. They did not respond. There are no inheritance issues at stake.
+My quandary is that I am certain he feels a lot of pain, regret and sadness, and although I no longer love him, I feel a bond of parenthood with him, and in the best world I would want him to know how they are. I have honored my children’s wishes, and will continue to do so, as my relationship is now only with them, but I also feel his desire to know how his children are doing — they’re doing very well — is right, justified and sincere, so I feel utterly conflicted.
+I know the children will not change their minds and that they would feel betrayed if I contact him with news. But almost every day I think about my responsibility or duty to him, as my partner in creating these exceptional children, and it plagues me more with each year, due to creeping up in age and because I try to be guided by kindness and doing the least harm. If I decide it’s best not ever to contact him, I want to find peace about not doing so, but I don’t see how. I am on a razor’s edge and don’t know what to do. Name Withheld
+Here we’ve got a very different story of intergenerational disaffection. Your children have made a decision that is, in your view, unfair to their father. You should tell them so and ask them to reconsider. If, as you say, there’s no chance of their changing their minds, you’ll at least have set your own at ease. But they don’t have the right to stop you from maintaining ties with him, any more than you have the right to stop them from severing ties with him. So let them know that you plan to pass on news about them from time to time. And if they ask you not to, you can say that just as you’ve agreed to respect their decision, they should respect yours.
+A friend of mine recently did an online crowdsourcing effort to attract money to fund her new small-business venture. She obtained her goal of many thousands of dollars. The problem I have is that I stopped by her home recently and discovered that she and her husband purchased a new (used) Jeep that I’m guessing cost more than the amount she asked for. They also own newer, nice vehicles, an S.U.V. and a large pickup truck, as well as an expensive motorcycle, a camper and a boat. Now, if I needed extra cash, I would consider selling something and most certainly not buy another set of wheels. Should I mention this to her? There was not a hint of guilt when I was admiring the new Jeep. I feel stupid for contributing money toward her campaign. Should I mention any of this to others? Name Withheld, Cape Cod, Mass.
+If the money she raised was from investors — as with sites like Wefunder and Crowdfunder — there isn’t necessarily any problem here. They gave her money for the business, and she owes them interest or stock or dividends or whatever else she offered on the terms that were agreed. (Let’s assume there hasn’t been any commingling of business and personal funds.) But there is a problem if this was “free” money given by generous people wanting to support someone in difficulty with no expectation of an economic return. She plainly didn’t need all the money she raised to start the business; she had funds of her own. One trouble with those sorts of crowdsourcing websites — such as GoFundMe — is that it’s very easy to mislead people. Caveat donor is a good motto here.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+More than 50 years ago, one of the main transit links between New York City and New Jersey was struggling to stay in business. It was saved by a political compromise between the governors of the two states.
+Today, that rail network, known as the PATH, is as critical as ever to the region’s transportation network. It also loses more money than it ever did, piling up huge deficits that have made it one of the country’s most financially dependent public transit systems.
+With more of New York’s workers settling across the Hudson River, the PATH is struggling to avoid being overwhelmed by rising demand. For the second consecutive year, it is on pace to carry a peak ridership of more than 82 million passengers on its compact network that connects Manhattan to cities in northern New Jersey. That’s up almost 10 million riders from five years ago.
+Building has boomed around the PATH’s stations in New Jersey as developers have capitalized on access to a relatively inexpensive transit link. But the PATH’s popularity has not yielded any windfall for the system’s operator, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.Over the past 15 years, the association of “moral clarity” with a bellicose approach to overseas affairs has faded only slightly. “Rarely does international politics present a moment of such moral clarity,” Charles Krauthammer wrote in The Washington Post in 2014 — defending what others perceived, no less clearly, as an Israeli war of collective punishment that killed more than 2,000 Palestinians in Gaza, mostly civilians. (“Moral clarity” has been a euphemism in constant use through this conflict, as in Alan Dershowitz’s book “The Case for Moral Clarity: Israel, Hamas and Gaza.”) After the death of John McCain, a fierce advocate for any and all wars, the senator was praised for his “voice of moral clarity” by Jennifer Rubin, another conservative columnist at The Post. Rubin contrasted McCain’s enthusiasm for doing the right thing overseas with the Trump administration’s indifference to human rights, but President Trump himself was no stranger to the discourse of clarity regarding Muslims. “Anyone who cannot name our enemy is not fit to lead this country,” he said during a 2016 campaign speech, adding that “anyone who cannot condemn the hatred, oppression and violence of radical Islam lacks the moral clarity to serve as our president.”
+There seemed to be an opening, after Barack Obama’s election, for “moral clarity” to become a liberal watchword. Perhaps the philosopher Susan Neiman, whose 2008 book “Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists” argued for a liberal re-embrace of such language, could have served as its Bennett. Yet by 2011, it had become clear that, regarding foreign policy and economics, the Obama White House would lean instead toward pragmatism and accommodation, not the stubborn force of moral commitment. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional bid was preceded by a decade in which many youthful nonreactionaries despaired of democratic institutions’ ability to deliver any kind of systemic change — and chafed at the obtuse contempt with which older, more established liberals frequently reacted to demands for bolder action. It’s only natural that, having been chosen to replace one such established Democrat, Ocasio-Cortez would argue that “moral clarity” was not the province of radicals or dreamy idealists, but exactly the kind of principled action her constituents had voted for.
+The weapon of clarity works differently depending on who’s wielding it: It tends to be a blessing for insurgent underdogs and a curse for domineering overlords. For those already in power, clarity can be as tragically easy to obtain as the vanity it often resembles — a combination of narcissism and hubris that’s liable to produce calamitous outcomes. In politics, as in all things, it should be possible to match decisive action with intelligent consideration. Clarity achieves only the first of those two; left to its own devices, taken as a virtue in itself, it tends to generate more problems than it solves. Strategic vision requires something more than narrow intensity. It develops by admitting its limits and working to understand the enemy at a high resolution — the kind that only humble relativity can access.
+Near the end of “Moby-Dick,” Ahab furiously addresses the “clear spirit of clear fire, whom on these seas I as Persian once did worship.” If any character in literature is an avatar of moral clarity, it’s Melville’s maniacal captain, who defies all omens of disaster and single-mindedly pursues revenge upon the being he has named his evil enemy. Such clarity gets him, and all but one of his crew members, killed. With such lessons in mind, it’s hard to read the recent Foreign Affairs essay by the latest secretary of state, Mike Pompeo — in which he presses for regime change in Iran and worshipfully references “the power of moral clarity” — without suppressing a certain shiver.“Successful fund-raising is one of the messages that you want to have available to you as a candidate in Iowa, because it’s an indicator of the ability to sustain a campaign as long as is necessary,” said Jerry Crawford, who has led several Democrats’ Iowa operations.
+[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]
+The exact timing of Ms. Warren’s announcement — Dec. 31 — is significant. It means that in a few weeks, she will have to report her fund-raising totals for the fourth quarter of 2018, which will reveal how much she received on Day 1 in small-donor contributions — a key benchmark for popularity for Democrats in the nominating race.
+Like Ms. Warren, candidates often announce their campaigns at the end or the beginning of a quarter, and the choice is strategic: If you announce at the end of a quarter and raise a lot of money very quickly, you can report an impressive total right away and help cement yourself as a serious candidate. If you announce near the beginning of a quarter, you give yourself almost three months to build a respectable total before you have to disclose it.
+Message, test, message again
+Another benefit of a full calendar year of campaigning is that it provides candidates with ample opportunity to test, refine or popularize new messages. Some Democrats already have signature taglines: Ms. Warren’s “Nevertheless, we persist,” or the Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown’s “the dignity of work.” Other candidates will be less decided and may try different messages to see what works.
+Laura Belin, a close Iowa caucus observer and author on the Bleeding Heartland blog, said it was important for candidates to make residents feel as if they are being courted and their concerns are being heard. This could mean tailoring a national message for a local audience, or being responsive to a particular moment that resonates with audiences.THE WAR BEFORE THE WAR
+Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America’s Soul From the Revolution to the Civil War
+By Andrew Delbanco
+Illustrated. 453 pp. Penguin Press. $30.
+The Civil War began over one basic issue: Was slavery, the ownership of human beings, a legitimate national institution, fixed in national law by the United States Constitution? One half of the country said it was, the other said it was not. The ensuing conflict was the chief instigator of Southern secession, as the secessionists themselves proclaimed. It was thus the chief source of the war that led to slavery’s abolition in the United States.
+The struggle over property in slaves focused largely on the fate of the Western territories, but it also inflamed conflicts over the status of fugitive slaves. Pro-slavery Southerners insisted that the federal government was obliged to capture slaves who had escaped to free states and return them to their masters, and thus vindicate the masters’ absolute property rights in humans. Antislavery Northerners, denying that obligation and those supposed rights, saw the fugitives as heroic refugees from bondage, and resisted federal interference fiercely and sometimes violently. Even more than the fights over the territories, Andrew Delbanco asserts in “The War Before the War,” the “dispute over fugitive slaves … launched the final acceleration of sectional estrangement.”
+Delbanco, an eminent and prolific scholar of American literature, is well suited to recounting this history, and not just because fugitive slaves have been a subject of American fiction from Harriet Beecher Stowe to Toni Morrison and beyond. A traditional critic in the historicist mode, Delbanco has always thoughtfully rendered the contexts in which his writers wrote. He has offered fresh interpretations not only of how national politics shaped the writing of, say, “Moby-Dick,” but also of what Melville’s tragic awareness and moral ambiguities tell us about the temper of a nation hurtling toward civil war. Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau and Hawthorne, as well as Melville, Stowe and numerous lesser artists and thinkers of the time, all had pertinent if sometimes cursory and not always pleasing things to say about fugitive slaves. Delbanco’s incisive analyses of their observations — and, just as important, of their failure to observe — form one of his book’s running themes.“You want to do a gap year?” the general said. “Come do your gap year in the Army.” (Figuratively speaking, of course: Enlistees commit to serve for two to six years.)
+For decades, Army recruiting has relied disproportionately on a crescent-shaped swath of the country stretching from Virginia through the South to Texas, where many military bases are found and many families have traditions of service. Young people there enlist at two to three times the rate of other regions.
+By contrast, in the big metropolitan areas of the Northeast, Midwest and West Coast, young people are less likely to have a parent, teacher or coach who served in the military, which can be a major factor in deciding to enlist. And in those regions, many high schools openly discourage recruiters from interacting with students.
+When the Seattle recruiters visit schools, they are sometimes met by antiwar “counter-recruiting action teams” who call attention to civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan and the high rate of sexual assault in the military.
+“Legally, the high schools have to let us in, but a lot of times, they’ll just ignore our calls,” Sergeant Vargas said. “A lot of schools don’t want us to talk to their kids. They want them to go to college, and see the military as a last resort.”
+Parents can be just as leery. “They say ‘Thank you for your service, but stay away from my kid,’” said Capt. Carlos Semidey, the Seattle recruiters’ company commander.There is a timeless quality to Silva. He turns 33 next week, but still seems the player he was when he first arrived in Manchester almost nine years ago. He is no less sharp, no less lively, no less fluent: “always in motion,” as his one time Spain teammate, Javi Martinez, once said. He still wears his brilliance lightly. He still sees no need to indulge in ornament or ostentation. His is a genius for simple things, done to perfection.
+To his coach, Pep Guardiola, Silva is a “joy” to work with; to his teammates, as Kyle Walker put it, he is an “example.” He has been a central figure at City ever since he arrived in 2010, but if anything he is even more integral now, charged with knitting together all of the complex passing patterns Guardiola has drummed into his players.
+It is no surprise that it was in his absence — as well as that of Fernandinho, another of City’s old stagers — because of a leg injury that City lost to Crystal Palace and Leicester City, offering Liverpool daylight at the summit of the Premier League, and turning the two teams’ meeting at the Etihad Stadium on Thursday into a game Silva and his teammates must win. “If we drop points, it’s over, almost impossible,” Guardiola said this week.
+Even City, with all its resources, lacks something in Silva’s absence. “He is one of the most incredible players in the world at playing in the pockets,” Guardiola said of his playmaker earlier this season. “He is maybe the strongest in the world in those spaces. We try to attack those spaces: he is a master of it. Few players can do it.”Slide 1 of 15,
+A monument to Old Bet, the elephant that sparked the country’s traveling menagerie industry, stands outside the Elephant Hotel, now home to Somers’s town offices. The building, erected in 1825, was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2005.The high school, a 2018 National Blue Ribbon School, offers the International Baccalaureate Diploma Program. (In 2020, the middle school is slated to introduce the International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program.) Mean SAT scores for the 2018 graduating class were 613 in English and 610 in math; statewide equivalents were 563 and 574.
+The Commute
+Commuters to nearby cities like White Plains, N.Y., and Danbury, Conn., have easy access to Interstate 684. Commuters to Manhattan, about 45 miles southwest, can drive a few miles east to catch Metro-North Railroad’s Harlem line at Katonah, Goldens Bridge, Purdys or Croton Falls. Rush-hour trains to and from Grand Central Terminal take between 58 and 84 minutes. Monthly fare from Goldens Bridge and Katonah is $369; from Croton Falls and Purdys it is $422.
+The History
+Early in the 1800s, Hachaliah Bailey, a Somers farmer and drover, purchased an elephant, purportedly to help in his fields. But he quickly realized he had acquired a more lucrative attraction: a fantastical creature people would pay money to see. He called her Old Bet.
+Old Bet’s arrival marked the start of the traveling menagerie business, as Mr. Bailey and his neighbors toured the region with monkeys, giraffes and other exotic animals. Somers became the epicenter of an emerging national industry, a precursor to circus animal acts. (James Anthony Bailey, who was adopted into the family years later, would launch the Barnum & Bailey Circus, with P.T. Barnum, in 1881.)
+In 1816, Old Bet was killed by a disgruntled farmer in Maine. Nine years later, Mr. Bailey built the Elephant Hotel in her honor. There, in 1835, a group of menagerie owners formed the Zoological Institute to consolidate their interests. Today, the brick building houses Somers’s town hall; it was named a National Historic Landmark in 2005. Outside, a sculpture of Old Bet perches atop an obelisk, a replica of the monument Mr. Bailey erected for her.
+For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.The new year began with another round of choppy trading on Wall Street, as stocks opened sharply lower but recouped their losses after a rise in oil prices lifted shares of energy producers.
+Volatility has been a defining characteristic of the stock market lately. Investors are trying to gauge the odds of an economic slowdown in the United States, and how such an event might be affected by rising interest rates, uncertainty in American politics and a trade war with China.
+[Wall Street’s stock pickers are still hopeful about the year ahead, but here are four things they’re worried about.]
+The tone on Wednesday was initially set by fresh evidence that the Chinese economy, the world’s second largest, is slowing. Factory activity in the country fell last month, according to government and private data released this week, an indication that the trade war is beginning to weigh on Chinese manufacturing.Here’s what else is happening
+Slower withdrawal from Syria: President Trump will give the military about four months to pull 2,000 U.S. troops from Syria, after facing criticism for saying the departure would happen within 30 days.
+Chinese leader’s warning to Taiwan: Armed force could be used to stop Taiwan from asserting independence, Xi Jinping said in his first major speech about the island.
+At the edge of the solar system: After a journey of more than four billion miles, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reached a small, icy world nicknamed Ultima Thule (pronounced “TOO-lee”). It’s the most distant object visited by humankind and may provide clues about the origin of the sun and planets.
+Cuomo’s new tone: Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York was sworn in for his third term on Tuesday, in a ceremony on Ellis Island. He criticized the federal government, saying it had “sought to demonize our differences and make our diversity our greatest weakness rather than our greatest strength.”
+New leader in Brazil: Jair Bolsonaro officially became president on Tuesday, steering Latin America’s largest country to the far right. Brazilians were “being freed from socialism,” he said.While things are going so well, here are the big, thoughtful stories shaping New York that we’ll monitor, before we get distracted with Mandarin ducks and alien light shows.
+Transportation
+1. L train shutdown: No L trains between Brooklyn and Manhattan for 15 months starting in April, to fix damage from Superstorm Sandy. New bus, ferry and bike services will help fill the gap.
+2. Scooters and e-bikes: The City Council wants to legalize more of them but Mayor de Blasio is resisting, citing safety concerns.
+Criminal Justice
+3. Recreational marijuana: The governor wants to fast-track legalization. He and the mayor say it will reduce discriminatory policing. Supporters tout the tax revenue, but critics say health concerns remain.
+Schools
+4. Integration: Mayor de Blasio wants to increase racial diversity at public schools. This has led to a debate over admission criteria for the city’s most competitive schools. The mayor is, in a way, leading from behind.The target of this mass persecution is China’s Muslim minorities — especially the Uighurs, a Turkic-speaking people based in Xinjiang. They follow a mainstream, moderate interpretation of Sunni Islam. But that is enough of a “mental illness” for Chinese Communists, whose ideology considers all religions, including Christianity, to be backward superstitions that must be diluted and nationalized. That is why they go as far as forbidding people from having beards or fasting during Ramadan, and forcing them to consume pork and alcohol, both of which are forbidden in Islam.
+Chinese authorities say they are alarmed about extremists among the Uighurs — and, in fact, a handful of terrorists have carried out attacks against government targets over the years. But those extremists arose partly in response to a decades-old policy of subjugation, along with ethnic colonialization, that Beijing has pursued against the Uighurs. That history suggests that Beijing’s current “counterterrorism” campaign will be only counterproductive — deepening a vicious cycle that authoritarian minds are often unable to understand, let alone break.
+And here is the strangest aspect of this story: China’s “re-education” policy is a major attack on Muslim people and their faith, Islam, yet the Muslim world has remained largely silent . While the policy has been condemned by human rights groups and the liberal news media in the West, along with Uighur organizations themselves, only a few Muslim leaders, like the Malaysian politician Anwar Ibrahim and Pakistan’s minister of religion, Noorul Haq Qadri, have raised some public concerns. Not until last month did the Organization of Islamic Cooperation finally express concern about “the disturbing reports on the treatment of Muslims” by China.
+That is all very meek given how grim the situation is — and how it compares to what we would have seen if the same persecution had been carried out by some other country, such as, say, Israel.
+Why is that? Why are Muslim leaders, especially those who love to be the champions of oppressed Muslims, so lenient toward China?What Will Democrats Do With Their New Power? This week, the party assumes control of the House — and with it, the authority to subpoena the Trump administration.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Lynsea Garrison and Annie Brown, and edited by Lisa TobinGood Wednesday morning. Welcome to the first working day of the new year. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Hope springs eternal on Wall Street. But should it?
+Last year was an unexpectedly bad year for the stock market. But Wall Street’s top stock pickers are expecting gains in 2019. Still, there is plenty that could go wrong and upend those forecasts, the NYT’s Peter Eavis and Guilbert Gates write.
+Here’s a look:
+Borrowing costs: The Fed increased its target rate four times in 2018, and fears that the central bank would raise interest rates too much and send a chill through the American economy weighed heavily on stocks in 2018. If investors don’t see signs that the economy is growing steadily, they could hang on the Fed’s every move, and monetary policy meeting, this year.
+President Trump: Investors were mostly tolerant in early 2108 of Mr. Trump’s unpredictable declarations on Twitter. But as the trade war with China escalated, his proclamations began to make investors jumpy. And it wasn’t just the tweets about China: The president also roiled the markets with criticism of the Fed. Mr. Trump is now the top concern that keeps investors up at night.COPENHAGEN — At least six people were killed in an accident involving two trains in Denmark on Wednesday morning, shutting down the primary artery linking the country’s two main islands for several hours.
+The accident occurred shortly after 7:30 a.m., as a freight train and a Copenhagen-bound passenger train passed each other amid high winds on the Storebaelt bridge. But it was unclear just what happened, or how people died.
+The deputy manager of Denmark’s Accident Investigation Board, Bo Haaning, told reporters at the scene that a cargo container carried by the freight train had somehow struck the passenger train. He said the trailer, which was apparently empty, had overturned or had been blown off the freight train.During nearly 20 years writing about health, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of top medical experts about how to live well. What I’ve learned from all of them can be summed up in four simple words.
+Move. Nourish. Refresh. Connect.
+The science is clear. If you move your body a little each day, you will be far better off than if you are sedentary. If you nourish your body with real food (the kind that doesn’t come in packages loaded with sugar or via a drive-through window) you will be healthier than if you eat junk food. If you allow your mind to take a break and refresh from time to time, you will feel better. And if you regularly connect with loved ones and friends, old and new, you will be both happier and healthier.
+These four words — move, nourish, refresh, connect — are the guiding principles behind the 30-Day Well Challenge, a first-of-its-kind program from The New York Times to help you build healthy habits for your body, mind and spirit, one daily challenge at a time. Each task is based on science, and over time, each new habit can add up to meaningful changes in your life.
+Each challenge takes just minutes to complete. We’ve created new six-minute move workout videos to show you that you really do have time to exercise. We’ve included refresh challenges to give your mind the rest it needs. You’ll find delicious nourish challenges to nourish your body with more food, not less. And because the health of your relationships affects the health of your body, we’ve included connect challenges to help you get closer to those you love. Here are a few examples of what to expect:
+[Ready to get started now? Sign up for the 30-Day Well Challenge.]
+A Mindful Chocolate Challenge: Nourish both your body and your mind with this task. Pick a piece of quality, delicious chocolate (yes, I said chocolate!). If you don’t like chocolate pick a piece of fruit or a bite-size savory treat. Then do this mindful meditation from Dr. Michelle May, founder of AmIHungry, which teaches mindful eating. Sit down where you won’t be distracted.
+“As you unwrap the chocolate, listen to the sounds and notice the aroma. Take a small bite, then pause. Become aware of the textures and flavors on your tongue. As you begin to chew, notice how the flavors, textures and aromas change. Notice pleasure. When you have fully experienced your bite, swallow, then pause to notice how long the flavor lingers. Slowly repeat until your treat is finished.”
+Why are you doing this? Because studies show that mindfulness encourages more healthful eating.BEIJING — President Xi Jinping declared on Wednesday that he wants progress on China’s decades-long quest to win control of Taiwan. But his proposal appeared unlikely to win over residents of the self-ruled island, who have seen Hong Kong’s freedoms in rapid retreat under a similar deal.
+Mr. Xi stressed how vital unification with Taiwan is to his vision of Chinese national rejuvenation in his first major speech about the disputed island. The Chinese Communist Party regards Taiwan, a lively democracy, as a historical mistake — a piece of territory that should never have gained autonomy from China. And as an ardent patriot, Mr. Xi finds Taiwan’s separate status especially galling.
+Mr. Xi did not lay down a timetable for absorbing Taiwan, which is something more hawkish voices in Beijing have urged. But as he nears his seventh year as president, he indicated that his patience had limits and that he wanted to bring Taiwan into ever-closer political, economic and cultural orbit around China.
+“That the two sides of the strait are still not fully unified is a wound to the Chinese nation left by history,” Mr. Xi said in his direction-setting speech in the Great Hall of the People. The political divisions between China and Taiwan, he added “cannot be passed on from generation to generation.”NEW DELHI — Two women, accompanied by plainclothes police officers under the cover of darkness early on Wednesday morning, entered a centuries-old Hindu shrine in southern India that has long barred women of childbearing age. Their effort was part of a continuing push for women’s equality in the country.
+In response, protests broke out around Kerala, the state where the shrine, the Sabarimala Temple, is located. According to local news reports, the police moved relatives of one of the women who entered the temple into a safe house.
+When news broke that the women had made it inside the temple, a Hindu priest shut down the complex for “purification rituals,” which typically occur when blood is spilled or children accidentally urinate.This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.
+Partisanship is a helluva drug (to steal a line from the political scientist Brendan Nyhan).
+Well into 1973 — after Watergate had already become a major scandal — a large majority of Republicans continued to support President Richard Nixon. Party elites, like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, supported him as well.
+Democrats, of course, have their own version of partisan loyalty in the face of scandal, even if the details are quite different. President Bill Clinton had an exploitative affair with a young White House intern and lied about it under oath, yet most Democratic voters and party officials stood strongly behind him.
+[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]What do you think this illustration is saying? How does it relate to and comment on the new year? Can you connect to its message personally in any way?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this image is all about.Good morning.
+(Want to get California Today by email? Here’s the sign-up.)
+Happy 2019.
+Last year was a big one in tech, as the Silicon Valley behemoths that drive large swaths of California’s economy faced mounting scrutiny over the way they handle our personal information and do business with one another.
+But it felt almost overwhelming trying to get a handle on everything that came to light. So I asked Pui-Wing Tam, our Tech editor, to put the revelations into some context.
+Jill Cowan: What was the most surprising thing your team uncovered this year and why?
+Pui-Wing Tam: So much happened in tech in 2018 that it’s hard to know where to begin. But the story line that emerged that I found the most surprising was the increasing activism of tech workers.
+Silicon Valley tech employees have historically seemed a docile lot, lured to the corporate campuses in Mountain View, Calif., San Jose and farther north in San Francisco by promises of fat compensation and a comfortable life.Slide 1 of 24,
+An 1887 Victorian in Minneapolis, down the street from the “Mary Tyler Moore house,” is on the market for $1.075 million.Minneapolis | $1.075 million
+An 1887 Queen Anne-style house with four bedrooms, two full bathrooms, one three-quarter bathroom and one half-bathroom
+One of the relatively rare Victorians in Minneapolis (the type is more common in neighboring St. Paul), the property was designed by Harry Wild Jones, a prolific local architect whose clients included the founders of the Cream of Wheat and Hormel companies. It is in the Kenwood neighborhood, a couple of blocks from Cedar Lake to the west and Lake of the Isles to the east. The “Mary Tyler Moore house,” the building at 2104 Kenwood Parkway, whose exterior represented the home of Mary Richards in the 1970s sitcom, is a block away.
+Size: 4,236 square feet
+Price per square foot: $254
+Indoors: The home’s previous owners did a thorough renovation; its current owners, who have lived there for 12 years, updated the kitchen, finished the basement and improved the landscaping.
+One enters through a curved screened porch and double sets of doors. The foyer’s millwork, diamond-paned windows, a light fixture with dangling crystal pendants and staircase with bead-like balusters set the period tone. Solid wood pocket doors open to a front parlor with original woodwork and more recent stained glass. This room connects to a rear parlor with a tiled (nonworking) corner fireplace topped by an ornately carved ceiling-high mantel. A sunroom is through a set of glass pocket doors.
+The formal dining room has arched windows and a ceiling covered in nine different Bradbury & Bradbury wallpapers. A swinging door leads to a windowed butler’s pantry with a wall of built-in cabinets, followed by a bright eat-in kitchen with white enameled wood cabinetry and a marble-tile backsplash.Slide 1 of 13,
+An outdoor lounge with shuttered walls overlooks the center lawn and pool of a 2015 contemporary ranch house in Umhlanga, a seaside resort town on South Africa’s eastern coast. The house is on the market for $3.4 million.Eco-Friendly Luxury on the Coast of South Africa
+$3.4 MILLION (48.5 MILLION RAND)
+This five-bedroom, five-bath contemporary ranch is in Umhlanga Rocks, a development in the seaside resort town of Umhlanga, about 10 miles north of the port city of Durban, on South Africa’s eastern coast.
+The 13,454-square-foot house, completed in 2015 on a half-acre lot inside the eco-friendly, 157-acre Hawaan Forest Estate community, faces the Hawaan Forest, a protected remnant of a coastal dune forest dating back more than 18,000 years. To protect the forest’s birds and wildlife, no pets are allowed in the community, said Anni Eisele, a licensed agent with Seeff Properties, which has the listing. Gardening is strictly indigenous; homeowners choose from 600 approved plants for landscaping.
+A path from a brick-paved circular driveway leads to the U-shaped house, with the entry hall at one corner. Through sliding glass walls and Mediterranean stack-back shutters, the layout embraces a center lawn, wood decks, a swimming pool and a hot tub. An eight-car garage and a generator are on the lower level.
+To one side of the entry hall, a dining room, family room and kitchen are artfully divided by partial walls resembling a series of oversized picture frames. The ceiling is vaulted with exposed wood beams and louvered transom windows. Flooring is an oyster-hued tile.Li Chengzhi had a lot to learn when he first got a job as a professional censor.
+Like many young people in China, the 24-year-old recent college graduate knew little about the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had never heard of China’s most famous dissident, Liu Xiaobo, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who died in custody two years ago.
+Now, after training, he knows what to look for — and what to block. He spends his hours scanning online content on behalf of Chinese media companies looking for anything that will provoke the government’s wrath. He knows how to spot code words that obliquely refer to Chinese leaders and scandals, or the memes that touch on subjects the Chinese government doesn’t want people to read about.
+Mr. Li, who still has traces of youthful acne on his face, takes his job seriously. “It helps cleanse the online environment,” he said.
+For Chinese companies, staying on the safe side of government censors is a matter of life and death. Adding to the burden, the authorities demand that companies censor themselves, spurring them to hire thousands of people to police content.Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
+When most scientists were trying to make people use code to talk to computers, Karen Sparck Jones taught computers to understand human language instead.
+In so doing, her technology established the basis of search engines like Google.
+A self-taught programmer with a focus on natural language processing, and an advocate for women in the field, Sparck Jones also foreshadowed by decades Silicon Valley’s current reckoning, warning about the risks of technology being led by computer scientists who were not attuned to its social implications.
+“A lot of the stuff she was working on until five or 10 years ago seemed like mad nonsense, and now we take it for granted,” said John Tait, a longtime friend who works with the British Computer Society.Elliott Stein, an American journalist living in Paris, reported in the British film magazine Sight and Sound that “Le Monde ran a day-to-day feature, ‘L’Affaire de La Religieuse,’ to which one opened as if to a daily horoscope or weather report.” His article gave examples of the heated discourse Rivette’s movie inspired. A writer for the right-wing weekly Carrefour declared: “If, in the name of freedom, we let this film be shown, we might just as well throw open the doors of France to all the dirty hairy beatniks of the earth.”
+Beatniks prevailed when, after a year of acrimony, the Minister of Culture André Malraux allowed “La Religieuse” to be shown at Cannes. It was met with acclaim mixed with befuddlement. The New York Times correspondent, Bosley Crowther, found the film’s prohibition a “riddle.” Still, it was as a free-speech martyr that “La Religieuse” made its American debut at the 1968 New York Film Festival.
+The festival that year included two masterpieces by Jean-Luc Godard (“Weekend” and “Two or Three Things I Know About Her”), Robert Bresson’s “Mouchette” and John Cassavetes’s “Faces,” along with first features by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet; Werner Herzog; and new movies from Bernardo Bertolucci, Milos Forman, Miklos Jancso, Norman Mailer and Orson Welles. Even in this crowd, “La Religieuse” stood out, less for its notoriety than its brilliant filmmaking and impassioned restraint.
+“La Religieuse” is founded on contradictions. The movie is as sumptuous in its color photography as it is austere in its mise-en-scène. Suzanne is victimized equally by repression and license. Her situation simultaneously evokes pre-Revolutionary France and 20th-century Europe. Rivette’s direction is both theatrical and cinematic. Unable to get funding for a film, he first presented “La Religieuse” as a stage play, partially underwritten by Godard as a vehicle for Karina, who was then his wife.
+Anticipating many of Rivette’s later films, “La Religieuse” has a ritualistic quality accentuated by a sound design of tolling bells and clapped wooden blocks. The movie consists largely of interiors; that many were shot in a sixth-century abbey gives it a documentary feel. So too, the long takes and continuous observation of Suzanne’s ordeal. (Some have seen the film as a forerunner of Lars von Trier’s “Dogville.”)Carats, as you might already know, are used to measure the weight of diamonds. Like diamonds, grudges can be on the lighter or weightier side (and, of course, they can and should sparkle, both in our grudge cabinets and in our minds!), so I’ve decided to use a carat-based grading system.
+Read all about how to hold healthy grudges.
+Here’s how to grade a grudge. Call your grudge to mind and answer the following questions about it:Have you ever held a grudge for years? (Unrelated but are you a Scorpio by any chance?) Grudges can be good, actually, and we should hold onto some of them, like petty Tamagotchis in our emotional pocket. We don’t often associate the holding of grudges with virtuous people, but 2019 is a new year, new you.
+Sophie Hannah, who wrote “How to Hold a Grudge,” published Jan. 1, loves them. So much so that she holds each of her grudges in a special place, in her “grudge cabinet,” where she visits them and tends to them.
+A prolific crime novelist, Ms. Hannah, who is not a psychologist, used her personal experience — and lots of therapy over the years in which she discussed her grudges in detail — to write this book.
+Here is her system of enlightened grudge keeping to process your pettiness.
+ↂ
+Redefine the word “grudge”
+as an experience to learn from.
+Ms. Hannah isn’t generally in the habit of redefining words that are in the dictionary. “But there’s no dictionary definition I can find that doesn’t describe a grudge as a negative feeling, or a collection of negative feelings,” she said.MOSCOW — The number of people killed in an apartment building in central Russia that partly collapsed after an explosion rose to 38 on Thursday, as hope dwindled that the few people who remain missing would be found.
+Rescue work at the site was interrupted for long periods because of fears that more walls would crumble, long after the explosion at 6 a.m. on Monday in the city of Magnitogorsk caught many residents asleep in their beds.
+Three people remain unaccounted for, and only one ambulance was standing by on Wednesday, according to local news reports, signaling the diminished chances of pulling more residents from the pancaked rubble of some 25 apartments in the freezing cold.
+The apartment complex was home to around 1,300 people before the explosion, which left a gaping hole in the extensive facade. But the Emergencies Ministry declared that most of the building remained fit for habitation.WASHINGTON — President Trump and Democratic congressional leaders dug in Wednesday for a lengthy partial shutdown in a newly divided government after a White House meeting — the first in 22 days — could not break an impasse over Mr. Trump’s demands for billions of dollars for a border wall.
+During the contentious meeting in the Situation Room, Mr. Trump made his case for a wall on the southwestern border and rejected Democrats’ proposals for reopening the government while the two sides ironed out their differences.
+“I would look foolish if I did that,” Mr. Trump responded after Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, posed the question to him directly, according to three officials familiar with the meeting who described it on the condition of anonymity. He said that the wall was why he was elected, one of the officials said.
+Democrats were equally adamant, according to another official who was present for the discussion. Pressed by Vice President Mike Pence and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the incoming minority leader, they refused to budge from their offer to devote $1.3 billion to border security. The official also insisted on anonymity to describe the private conversation.Good morning. I’ve been away from the desk, out in Utah messing around in the snow with friends, and not cooking with recipes at all. Well. Thanks to my editor, Krysten Chambrot, I was able to memorize Michael Solomonov’s game-changer recipe for five-minute hummus a while back, so when it wasn’t morning yogurt parfaits or free-form French toast made out of a beautiful panettone from Sant Ambroeus, I was able to deploy the tehina to devastating effect.
+There’s a lot to be done with a hummus as good as Solomonov’s. You can use it as a bed for seared ground beef fragrant with za’atar, with pine nuts as garnish. You can top it with fava beans, for a kind of foul. Me, I cooked today’s no-recipe recipe: a freestyle sabich, the Israeli pita sandwich common in Tel Aviv.
+So: warmed pitas spread thickly with the hummus, along with slices of eggplant I fried off in a big pan, eggs I cooked for 5 and a half minutes and would again closer to sea level (up high in the mountains, I think they would have preferred 6 minutes) and a chopped salad of tomatoes, cucumbers, parsley and Peppadew peppers over the top, everything adorned with hot sauce and some yogurt I thinned out with lemon juice and good olive oil. It was great. I’m going to make food like that all year.
+Back in New York, to anchor the Food section of The Times we sent out to all our subscribers and newsstand customers today, we asked Alison Roman to tell us how she thinks we ought to cook to in 2019. Her message: Spend less time in the kitchen, and more at the table.If Mr. Trump would take the time to check in with what’s happening in the real world, he might read about the divorced Army veteran who’d worked “three jobs to survive” before getting hired as a paralegal at the Federal Trade Commission — and who now has no idea if he’ll make the rent. He could hear from the single mother who says that she’ll have enough for rent — but not for food. He might be moved by the wife of a corrections officer wondering how her family will handle their “mortgage, day care and car payments” while her husband is working without pay. Or by the disabled Air Force vet who, having waited more than a year for “service-connected surgery,” cannot get final approval for her procedure until the shutdown ends.
+An estimated 800,000 federal workers have had their lives upended by this latest presidential temper tantrum. Some 420,000 of those, deemed “essential personnel,” are working without pay. This includes upward of 41,000 law enforcement officials, 54,000 Border Patrol agents and 53,000 Transportation Security Administration workers. ( If you flew this holiday season, it was only thanks to these unpaid women and men.) Another 380,000 workers have been furloughed, including 28,800 employees of the Forest Service, 16,000 in the National Park Service and 16,700 at NASA.
+The longer the stoppage continues, the more people will feel the squeeze. Already, the Small Business A dministration has been shut down, delaying the processing of loans. A growing number of national parks, museums and historic sites will need to close, disrupting tourism for the sites and for surrounding businesses. At some of the parks kept open during the holidays, even as many rangers and other support staff members were furloughed, there were reports of trash piling up, toilets overflowing with human waste and episodes of vandalism. Routine screenings by the Food and Drug Administration are being put on hold, and the Federal Communications Commission is set to halt most of its operations on Thursday. The situation on Indian lands is about to get dire. The list goes on and on.
+For the workers directly affected, among those facing the greatest economic uncertainty are contractors, who make up more than 40 percent of the government work force. This includes not only white-collar positions, but also thousands of blue-collar jobs, such as janitors and security guards. Unlike regular government employees, many contractors may not be compensated for lost time. They could simply lose the income.
+Even for regular, non-contract employees, who have eventually been granted back pay after past shutdowns and can reasonably expect the same this time, the grinding anxiety and financial costs of scraping by in the meantime mount with each passing day. Many of these workers live paycheck to paycheck, with little wiggle room. Some of their creditors are more understanding than others, and even one missed payment can carry heavy consequences.He had, however, made it clear in recent months both to Zorc and Hans-Joachim Watzke, Dortmund’s chief executive, that he did not intend to extend his contract — due to expire in 2020 — at Signal Iduna Park. Instead, he had set his heart on moving to England, something related to his “American background,” according to Zorc. “Against that background, we have decided to accept an extremely lucrative bid from Chelsea,” Zorc said.
+The fee — more than three times the amount Wolfsburg paid Hertha Berlin for John Brooks, the German-born U.S. international, in 2017 — makes Pulisic the third most expensive player in Chelsea’s history, and the third most expensive player ever purchased from a Bundesliga team.
+It represents something of a success for Dortmund given that Pulisic has started just five of the team’s Bundesliga fixtures this season, having recovered from injury to find the likes of Jadon Sancho and Jacob Bruun Larsen blocking his path. He has started more regularly in the Champions League, featuring in all but one of Dortmund’s group games as the German team qualified with ease for the competition’s last 16.
+For Chelsea, though, Pulisic’s appeal had not faded. Aside from the likely marketing benefits of employing the most high-profile American player of his generation, Marina Granovskaia, the director who oversees the Premier League team’s transfer activity, described the signing as something of a coup for Pulisic’s on-field qualities.
+“Christian has shown his quality during a fantastic spell in Germany and at just 20, we believe he has the potential to become an important Chelsea player for many years to come,” Granovskaia said. “We look forward to welcoming him to Stamford Bridge in the summer and wish him and Dortmund every success for the remainder of the season.”The movie had a dead cat problem.
+As the director Marielle Heller prepared to shoot “Can You Ever Forgive Me?,” a biopic about the literary forger Lee Israel, she knew that she would need a highly realistic prop to pull off the pivotal scene where Israel finds her beloved pet cat, Jersey, dead. Heller wanted a dead cat with heft. She wanted an inanimate object that her star, Melissa McCarthy, could act against. “I was really intense about it,” Heller said over the phone recently. “We discussed strategy a number of times.”
+So important was the dead cat that Heller sought to secure it even before casting the film’s real live Jersey. She’d just find a feline that looked like her wonderful prop. How much difference could the real one make, anyway? On her first film, “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” she had saved money by tossing her own cat, Willie, in front of the camera. So when the movie’s animal trainer promised to bring in what she called her highest-performing cat, Heller wasn’t sure what that could mean. That it wasn’t going to pee everywhere?
+The cat’s name was Towne. He was a lanky black and white guy with green eyes and a petal pink nose, and to everyone’s surprise, he was amazing . Yes, he followed directions — hitting his marks with the help of a trainer equipped with a clicker and a laser pointer — but he also seemed to do something more. “Towne had a very expressive face,” Heller said.
+There is a moment in the film where he gazes toward McCarthy “sort of sympathetically, and also judgmentally, and you feel all of that,” she added. Heller ended up commissioning a prop modeled after Towne that cost thousands of dollars — the most expensive one for the production.Tesla shares ended trading nearly 7 percent lower.
+The sales figures were a report card on a year in which its chief executive, Elon Musk, said, “We’ve gone from production hell to delivery logistics hell.” For the first six months of 2018, Tesla struggled to work the kinks out of its Model 3 production lines, and at times was unable to make more than a handful per day.
+Mr. Musk acknowledged the production system relied too much on automated machinery that was ill suited to certain precision tasks and had to be removed and replaced by human workers. The company also set up a third assembly line in a giant tent outside its factory in Fremont, Calif. Finally, in the second half of 2018, its average weekly production rose to more than 4,000 cars a week, although that was still below its target of 5,000.
+Tesla ran into trouble delivering the thousands of cars that were rolling off its assembly lines, leaving hundreds of new Model 3s parked in inventory lots in California and other states as the company scrambled to match cars with customers and ship them across the country. Mr. Musk said at one point that Tesla was beginning to make its own auto-hauling trailers to speed deliveries, and later asserted that the company had acquired three trucking companies, although Tesla has not released their names or any details of the transactions.
+Despite the difficulties, deliveries soared in the third quarter, and the company reported a profit of $312 million, easing concerns about its finances. And even with the decline in Tesla’s shares Wednesday, investors still give the company a higher market value than any of Detroit’s established automakers.
+In the fourth quarter, Tesla rushed to ship as many cars as possible to ensure that customers could take advantage of the $7,500 federal tax credit for electric cars that was available to Tesla buyers. Under the rules of the program, the credit begins to phase out two quarters after a manufacturer’s cumulative sales reach 200,000 electric vehicles. Since Tesla crossed that threshold in July, the tax credit available to Tesla buyers fell to $3,750 on Jan. 1. It falls again on July 1, to $1,875, and ends on Jan. 1, 2020.He was getting over a cold and had a four-month-old at home — he and Ms. Kazan, with whom he co-wrote “Wildlife,” welcomed Alma in August. But he was warm and genial, brightening as he began to report on his fledgling days of fatherhood.
+“I didn’t think I would like it so much; I mean, I thought I would like it, but it’s really quite astonishing,” he said. In a crisp, black-and-blue flannel, a nest of light-brown hair and olive librarian glasses he could have passed as an adjunct at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. “There’s just a sort of … I don’t know, a hope or something. Seeing something so innocent and pure and unsullied by the world.”
+Mr. Dano, who has self-diagnosed “dorky impulses” and relishes researching a role, spent that last movie-less year, in 2003, as a New School freshman studying English and Russian literature. To portray the Beach Boys frontman Brian Wilson in 2015’s “Love & Mercy” he learned to play piano. But now he’s found the ultimate research project.
+“There’s something about being there for the first moments, the fragility, which really begins at conception,” he continued. “And the heart has this chemical reaction on the first breath — the chambers change, because you’ve switched from breathing amniotic fluid to oxygen. And then that breath just keeps going, and going, and it doesn’t stop until we … It’s just mind-blowing stuff.”
+He was born in Manhattan to a father who was a financial adviser and a mother who raised him and his younger sister (a half brother is 16 years older). Mr. Dano was acting in school plays and community theater as far back as he can remember, “a summer activity that ended up gathering steam,” and by the time he was 12 he was performing on Broadway, with George C. Scott, in the 1996 production of “Inherit the Wind.”
+At 16, he starred in his first feature film (and won an Independent Spirit Award) as a reckless, libidinous teenager coping with his mother’s death in the Long Island-based indie “L.I.E.”From the viewpoint of the Texas High School Coaches Association, any program that might reduce the number of head injuries in football, and the apprehension that they create, is worth looking at. Even if the program is inspired by a sport, rugby, that is much more prominent in other parts of the world than it is in the United States.
+After all, while participation in high school football in Texas has remained relatively steady over the past decade, the game is not growing here as fast as it once was. In part, that is because of specialization, which has locked some children into other sports. But another factor is the concern by a growing number of parents that football is simply too dangerous.
+That concern was clearly a part of the narrative at the seminar. Over and over, coaches who were present said the game was “under attack,” even in Texas, where football is nearly a religion. And to a man, they insisted that the benefits of the game — which they maintain teaches grittiness and teamwork — far outweighed its risks.
+“The most important part of it is getting moms to realize that the game is safer than it probably ever has been because of coaches’ awareness of concussions and all the things we’re trying to teach them, and because of the tackling training that’s coming on board,” said D. W. Rutledge, who retired recently as the executive director of the Texas High School Coaches Association.
+Rutledge and the coaches association have tried to reassure skittish parents by adopting rules that govern when players can return to action after a concussion and also limit the number of full-contact practices. Now they have turned to the rugby-style tackling program in their latest, and perhaps most elaborate, attempt to convince skeptics that football can be made safer to play.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A former police commander was acquitted of federal corruption charges on Wednesday after a seven-week trial in which prosecutors contended he had done favors for two businessmen in return for lavish gifts, including a junket to Las Vegas with a prostitute.
+The jury in Federal District Court in Manhattan found James Grant, who was a deputy inspector in the New York Police Department, not guilty on all charges. Still, jurors decided to convict one of the businessmen, Jeremy Reichberg, on several bribery and conspiracy charges involving other police officials.
+The jury found Mr. Reichberg not guilty on one count — that he had paid bribes to Mr. Grant. After the verdict, Mr. Grant turned to Mr. Reichberg and quietly said: “You’re going to be O.K.”
+The case had cast a shadow over the Police Department and had even tarnished the image of the mayor, Bill de Blasio, though he was not accused of wrongdoing.Right now, the site of the future Kentucky Owl Park is, literally, a hole in the ground; it takes some imagination to picture it as a nirvana of whiskey. But the plan also fits neatly within the overall trajectory of the Kentucky bourbon industry — a half-dozen distilleries lie within a few minutes’ drive, and all of them are building amenities like restaurants, visitors centers, parks and hotels to cater to a new class of whiskey tourist.
+The typical distillery was once a utilitarian industrial plant; now it’s a boozy theme park. The recently opened Castle and Key Distillery outside Frankfort, Ky., which took over a defunct distillery site modeled after a medieval castle, sports a botanical trail and a manicured garden. The centerpiece of the new Bardstown Bourbon Company distillery is Bottle & Bond, a minimalist-chic restaurant run by the former chef at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. Upping the ante, SPI Group hired Shigeru Ban, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect, to design the main buildings at Kentucky Owl Park.
+For local business leaders, such changes promise to turn the region into something like a Napa Valley of whiskey, a place that combines high-end retailing, resort hotels, fine dining and, flowing through it all, an unending river of tourist dollars.
+“We don’t want it to be just an industry; we want it to be a destination,” said Kim Huston, the president of the Bardstown Industrial Development Corporation. Ms. Huston takes the Napa comparison seriously: She travels frequently to Northern California to study how its most famous wine region went from a sleepy agricultural community in the 1980s to being a synonym for high-end living.
+“We’re probably where they were 20 years ago,” she said. “Our goal is for Bardstown to play on the world stage of luxury tourism.”
+Not everyone in the region is on board with these plans. Kentucky is significantly more traditional and rural than a place like Napa, and even deep-pocketed companies like Beam Suntory can’t easily push around social conservatives who bristle at the thought of turning their towns over to tourists, no matter how much money the visitors bring in.
+But the skeptics might not be able to hold out for long. Bourbon fans are already streaming into the state — 1.2 million people visited its distilleries in 2017, a 20 percent jump from 2016 and almost double the number in 2014, according to the Kentucky Distillers Association.Image
+The holiday season may confer an unwanted gift: higher cholesterol.
+Danish researchers studied 25,764 people in Copenhagen whose average age was 59. All had blood drawn regularly to test lipid levels. None were on cholesterol-lowering medicines.
+Average total cholesterol in the group over the whole year was 205, just over the recommended guideline of 200. Average LDL, or “bad” cholesterol, was 116, just above the 100 level considered healthy.
+But over three successive years in the first week of January, the average cholesterol was 240 and the average LDL was 143, both well into the unhealthy range. In June, the average cholesterol was 197 and the average LDL was 108. Nearly twice as many people had unhealthy lipid levels in January as in June.
+The study, in the journal Atherosclerosis, controlled for sex, age, body mass index, diabetes, smoking, alcohol consumption and other factors.Voting rights and partisan gerrymandering, traditionally the preoccupation of wonky party strategists and good-government groups, have become major flash points in the debate about the integrity of American elections, signaling high stakes battles over voter suppression and politically engineered districts ahead of the 2020 presidential race.
+When Democrats take the majority in the House on Thursday, the first bill they plan to introduce will be broad legislation focusing on these issues. Early drafts of their proposals include automatic voter registration, public elections financing and ending gerrymandering by using independent commissions to draw voting districts.
+But action and anger go far beyond Congress. With voters increasingly aware of the powerful impact of gerrymandering and doubtful about the fairness of elections, voting issues have become central to politics in key states including Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
+Questions about the health of American democracy are being raised in areas once thought to be wholly nonpartisan, as reflected in a court battle over whether the Trump administration is trying to use a question about citizenship on the 2020 census to undercount Democratic constituencies and limit their political clout.Instead, they adapted the facade of a house across the street for the exterior scenes on Tepeji Street. They adapted a second location for the rooftop shots. And for the patio and interior views, they took another house, which was slated for demolition, and essentially remodeled it to replicate Cuarón’s family home, with attention paid to the smallest details: They hired an artisan to make reproductions of the original tiles, using techniques from the early 20th century.
+I asked Cuarón why he had been so obsessive in recreating every last detail of even his house, when very few people would have known the difference. He replied flatly: “I would know.”
+Mexico City, he said, is a place in constant tension between what it is and what it was.
+“For me, it’s a place filled with past,” he said wistfully.
+A cleaning woman was sweeping the street and sidewalk in front of the house next to his childhood home, the bristles of her broom scraping the concrete. “That’s another sound,” Cuarón said excitedly. “We have it in the film.”
+Then the woman took a pail of water and started splashing the sidewalk and the facade of the house.
+“That sound!” he exclaimed, his eyes lighting up. The film opens with Cleo scrubbing the family’s driveway using water and a broom, and Cuarón seemed pleased — perhaps even reassured — by this intersection of life imitating art imitating life.
+For all that had changed, there were at least some things that remained as he remembered them.People who buy shoes for comfort are cops.
+There is really no other explanation. A sparkling, sublime footwear choice is the most expedient way to demonstrate taste. It achieves more per square inch than any shirt could. Whatever you may have to trade in exchange for a shoe with real personality is almost certainly worth it.
+I promise, and I have the sore ankles to prove it. The last couple of days, my right outer calf has been throbbing. I am certain this is because of my footwear choices. But though life has crossed me untold times in recent years, I have not yet given up on chasing this particular kind of beauty. Catch me hobbling — and styling — all the way to retirement in Boca.
+Determined to prove the viability of this opinion, I skeptically embarked upon a reasonable-footwear doubleheader: Allbirds and Birkenstock, which recently opened a few blocks away from each other on Spring Street.
+I went on the day of a dreary rainstorm. Deliberately, I wore my least comfortable rain boots and thin, supportless socks. By the time I hit Spring Street, my feet needed succor.Inevitably, fouls occur in this game.
+In what U.S.A. Ultimate refers to as the "spirit of the game," the contests are self-officiated. If a player feels he or she is fouled, the action stops and the players meet to discuss. There are no officials, but "observers" help settle disputes and reach a consensus so play can resume.Why did you go to law school?
+I decided that I wanted to be a lawyer in eighth grade. I had no lawyers in my family, obviously. When I was a senior in college, one of my professors said to me, “Julie, have you ever met a lawyer?” I said, “No.” He said, “Before you sign the papers to incur a lot of debt, I’d at least like to know that you’ve met a lawyer.” So he set me up with an informational interview. And then I went to Columbia Law School, and then straight from Columbia to Cravath , Swaine & Moore.
+“Clients constantly are saying to me, ‘The most important thing you can do is to tell me what I need to hear, not what I want to hear.’” — Julie Sweet of Accenture
+Cravath is a famously old-school firm. How did you find the culture?
+When I came back from the interview at Cravath, all the women said, “What are you doing?” Cravath at the time had two women partners, and its history goes back to 1841. Ultimately, I was the ninth woman partner, the third in the corporate department. But for me it was, “O.K., fine. There’s no women there, but it’s the best firm, and I’m going to go.”
+In 1999, I was two weeks away from the meeting where I was elected partner, and we had our first unconscious-bias training. I was one of only a couple of women in the room and the most senior one. The facilitator, a woman, was going through all these different scenarios, and she turned to me and she said, “Julie, you’re a senior woman here. Have you had any of these experiences?” To this day, I remember I went to speak, and I started sobbing. I could not speak. I couldn’t compose myself, and I left. I went back to my office.
+Were you concerned about crying in front of your colleagues?
+No. I was going to be a partner. It was one of those things that you wouldn’t choose to have done in front of your colleagues. And there wasn’t some big scandal. But it made me think about all the things that I’d gone through, that you just dealt with. Once I became a partner at Cravath, I helped start the first women’s program at the firm. Now Cravath has 25 percent women partners, which is just extraordinary.
+Many lawyers never leave Cravath, but you moved on after 17 years. Why?
+I was sitting at my desk and I picked up the phone because my assistant had stepped away, and it was a recruiter I knew through social circles. She said, “I know you don’t want to leave Cravath. I know no one ever leaves there. But I have this great opportunity.”Entropy, that unpleasant byproduct of consumerism, has been a subject of reality TV almost since that genre’s genesis. From “Clean House” to “Hoarding: Buried Alive,” we’ve seen how pathological our relationship to stuff can be, and how powerless so many of us are to dig out from under it all. The home purge show is now as rigorously structured as the hero’s journey or a Petrarchan sonnet. In it we see the act of decluttering as a quest, and the tidied home as a proxy for our reborn selves.
+It’s a form wonderfully suited to the animistic methods of Marie Kondo, the Japanese tidying guru who taught the world to kiss its socks goodbye with a novel organizing principle: If your belongings don’t spark joy, thank them for their service and show them the door.
+Her first book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying up,” published in the U.S. in 2014, made her a superstar — maybe the world’s first decluttering celebrity — and a publishing behemoth; it is still a best-seller, with over 8.5 million copies sold in over 40 languages. Her third and latest book, “Joy at Work: The Career-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” written with Scott Sonenshein, a professor of management at Rice University School of Business, out in spring 2020, was bought at a competitive auction for seven figures by Little, Brown, said her American agent, Neil Gudovitz. (The executives at that publishing house seem to have been inspired enough by her tenets to name an imprint for them, though it was created before this last acquisition: Little, Brown Spark will print “Joy at Work,” and other health and lifestyle titles.)
+No word on what lucky Netflix paid for “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo,” in which Ms. Kondo visits the clutter-addled homes of a cross-section of Southern Californians over eight episodes that have been streaming since New Year’s Day.Soto-Innes moved to New York in 2014, but her grandmother’s wellness routine is still a big part of her life. As a chef, a profession that demands long work days with few breaks, Soto-Innes relies on a few healthful drinks to maintain balance. “Every day when I wake up, I think, ‘What do I need for today? How do I feel?’” she says. First thing in the morning, she will often drink a tangy mixture of dried hibiscus flowers steeped in hot water with a splash of apple cider vinegar. She has loved the taste of hibiscus since childhood and adds apple cider vinegar because it “cleanses your intestinos, and the intensity of the vinegar really wakes you up,” she says. If she doesn’t finish the drink, she’ll mix the rest with olive oil once it cools and use it as a salad dressing.
+When she’s feeling particularly lethargic, or before going on a run, she’ll also drink green coffee (the color comes from the unroasted beans) mixed with coconut oil, which provides “pure energy without anxiety,” she says, and keeps her full. Also, the green coffee beans don’t cause teeth stains. The rest of the day is split between Atla — a casual, light-filled all-day cafe on the corner of Lafayette Street and Great Jones Street where she’ll usually have a morning snack of guacamole, fruit and fish — and Cosme, a slightly more polished space in the Flatiron district that serves dishes including duck carnitas and corn husk meringue. Currently, she is planning the opening of her and her partner Enrique Olvera’s first restaurant in Los Angeles. For the inevitable late nights out — Soto-Innes loves dancing — a light, floral drink of lemon verbena and coconut water is her all-purpose hangover cure. “Lemon verbena is what relaxes you, and the coconut helps my face start de-puffing,” she says. “It feels good and you hydrate yourself at the same time.” Here, she shares the recipes for her purifying tonics.I feel like each day is a little like being caught in a batter’s box without knowing when or where the balls are coming from, and that can be both exhilarating and exhausting. Technology certainly helps.
+My phone is pretty much everything. It’s kind of its own command center, and I can do almost everything on it except edit. For stories, I still need my laptop. Most of the reporters know that if they get a call from me at an odd hour, it usually means they’re on their way to something awful, but the reason we can do what we do is that they are total pros. Nobody ever just hangs up and goes back to sleep.
+In these cases, our job is to help them produce the best journalism possible in difficult situations and make sure they stay safe, too. I’m in awe of the reporters on National who are relentless and often put themselves in danger while covering tough stories with compassion. Unfortunately, we’ve done enough of them now that we kind of know what to do.
+Recently, we had a ton of breaking news out of California, where the majority of my reporters are based. The combination of the shooting in Thousand Oaks and the wildfires was a good example of having to be really nimble. One of our California reporters, Jenny Medina, called me in what was the middle of her night to say she and a bunch of F.B.I. agents who were in Thousand Oaks after the shooting had been forced to evacuate their hotel because of the fires. You can never predict what’s next, so you just have to be ready to switch gears and work with what you have.
+In breaking news, I rely on Twitter and Dataminr , which monitors Twitter for newsworthy patterns, to keep track of developments. We’re also paying attention to police scanners, local television and all forms of social media and trying to break and confirm our own scoops, too. The trick is being careful and fast at the same time. A lot of bad information gets out in the immediate aftermath, and you never want to get it wrong.“Girl” sounds like a film that transgender moviegoers might rally around. It depicts a teenage trans girl, Lara, raised by a single father who supports not only her dreams of becoming a ballerina but also her gender confirmation surgery. It’s set in Belgium, so much of Lara’s health care is paid for and her doctor and therapist are encouraging caregivers. And it’s a prize winner that is up for a best foreign-language Golden Globe on Sunday.
+Yet “Girl,” which has been picked up by Netflix, faces a firestorm, one that pits the director, Lukas Dhont; the trans woman who inspired it, the dancer Nora Monsecour; and the film’s supporters against trans activists and others who consider its scrutiny of a trans character’s body so dangerous that they urge no one to see it. Stuck somewhere in the heated debate are those who say that shunning “Girl” risks turning off cisgender viewers who might benefit from seeing a young trans character who’s as likable as she is complicated. (Cisgender is a term describing someone whose gender identity matches the sex they were assigned at birth.)
+Not long ago, when trans people showed up in movies, if at all, they were victims or predators. As advocates demanded increased visibility, shows like “Pose” made waves with more truthful depictions written and portrayed by trans performers. Problems persist, for sure. But the days seem to be gone when a movie like “Dressed to Kill” assumed trans women were psychos in skirts.
+“Girl” asks a provocative question: Have we gotten to a place where a film can explore dark aspects of an individual trans character without feeling regressive? No one should have the burden of representing a class of people in a film; real people are complicated. But what happens when a movie is both art and a trigger?WASHINGTON — After more than six years of less-than-heartfelt endorsements, a bitter parting of ways and a momentary rapprochement, the relationship between Mitt Romney and President Trump returned Wednesday to where it began: awkward, transactional and lingering uneasily between friend and foe.
+One day after publishing a biting critique in The Washington Post that Mr. Trump “has not risen to the mantle of the office,” Mr. Romney declined to endorse the president’s re-election, saying he wanted to consider “alternatives” in 2020.
+But Mr. Romney also made clear that, while he is willing to confront the president like few other Republican lawmakers, he had little appetite to spend his first months as Utah’s junior senator acting the part of Mr. Trump’s critic in chief.
+“I don’t intend to be a daily commentator,” he said in an interview on CNN, repeatedly declining to escalate his attacks on the president and explaining that he would speak out against Mr. Trump only on issues of “great significance.”Gene Okerlund, who as a ringside interviewer and commentator served for decades as a straight man to the outsize personalities who suffuse the world of professional wrestling, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Sarasota, Fla. He was 76.
+His son Todd said he died about a month after a fall.
+Mr. Okerlund, who was nicknamed Mean Gene by the wrestler (and future governor of Minnesota) Jesse Ventura, was a mild-mannered figure, especially by pro-wrestling standards. He often appeared on the air in elegant attire to conduct interviews with intensely muscled, scantily clad wrestlers like Macho Man Randy Savage, the Ultimate Warrior, Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan. Mr. Hogan helped popularize Mr. Okerlund’s nickname by repeating it at the beginning of many interviews.Italian prosecutors and the Carabinieri, the national military police force, which has a division that investigates art theft, have opened investigations into the painting’s movements since it was taken from Italy. They have asked German judicial authorities to cooperate.
+They are also evaluating whether the family’s request for money could be construed as extortion.
+“What belongs to the Italian state has to be returned to the Italian state,” said General Fabrizio Parrulli, the commander of the Carabinieri’s art theft unit. He said his men were working with Florentine prosecutors on the case, but declined to give details, “because the investigation is ongoing.”
+In such cases, German officials have said the 30-year statute of limitations means that when property is in private hands, there is simply no legal way to force its return, and no basis for government intervention.
+For many years, Israel and Jewish groups have lobbied Germany to carve out an exception for items looted in the Nazi era. After the discovery in 2012 of more than 1,000 artworks in a Munich apartment, including some that were taken by the Nazis, the government considered such a change, but it never became law.
+Mr. Schmidt said that generating publicity about “Vase of Flowers” should make it harder for the Germans who hold the painting to try to sell it.
+“Thanks to the photo in the Room of the Putti, people will never forget that this work was stolen,” Mr. Schmidt said in a telephone interview. And thanks to the accompanying resonance on social media, “no one would ever be able to say that ‘I purchased this work in good faith,’ ” he said.
+But some experts say that Italy should examine its own record on stolen art.
+Italy was recently called out at an international conference on the restitution of art looted during World War II as one of five countries that have been slow to address the issue.To the Editor:
+Re “They Help the Pregnant. No One Helped Them” (front page, Dec. 21), about accusations that Planned Parenthood mistreats pregnant employees:
+Your investigation reminds us that all workplaces, including those in the progressive movement, must engage in critical self-examination to ensure that we challenge ourselves to meet the highest standards of equity and fairness.
+The shocking truth is that in America there is no national program that ensures paid family leave to all working people — regardless of the size or financial resources of their employer. Our country also lacks a national legal standard that requires all employers to make reasonable accommodations when pregnant workers need them.
+The Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act and the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would change that. In holding institutions accountable, we must also demand that Congress deliver fairness for pregnant and parenting workers.
+Employers, however, cannot wait for Congress to get it together. This moment calls for urgent actions by all institutions to ensure that equity, inclusion and safety are core values fully integrated into organizational practices. In the era of #MeToo, more workplaces are learning that it is not just a matter of fairness, but essential to achieving their very mission.To the Editor:
+Re “Louis C.K. Ridicules Survivors of Parkland” (news article, Jan. 1):
+In the Trump era of American politics, Louis C.K.’s use of survivors of Parkland’s tragic shootings as a gag line is not unpredictable. Applause at Trump rallies often comes after personal attacks and disparaging remarks directed at a group or individual, including the disabled, political rivals, the “fake news” media, disgruntled past supporters, foreign leaders who dare to oppose the president, immigrants, Muslims and so on.
+It is truly shameful that the political atmosphere in America today makes someone like Louis C.K. think that his remarks are perfectly acceptable. Tragedies like Parkland can never be funny, and anyone who thinks so should never be given a microphone again.
+Doris Fenig
+Boca Raton, Fla.To the Editor:
+In “Caught in Act, Evaders of Fare ‘Don’t Feel Bad’” (front page, Dec. 25), we are introduced to several subway fare evaders who were made to feel “ unhappy ” or whose mood was ruined when issued summonses.
+There is an utter disconnect between their actions and responsibilities. The cavalierly offered rationales mean nothing and don’t change anything. Yes, there are many of us who experience problems while commuting and wish that the system functioned well, but breaking the law is not an answer; it only worsens the existing problems.
+Many of those who refuse to pay fares simply do so because it is too easy to do, period. Transit systems in other countries use methods of thwarting fare evasion that are effective, yet respectful. One major problem is that subway turnstiles, while nice-looking, are poorly designed for controlling access. Our current situation is, to no small degree, a product of design flaw.
+Burt Bloom
+Brooklyn
+To the Editor:
+When someone vaults over a subway turnstile, or boards a bus through a rear door, it’s generally not a maiden voyage. And when the police redirect their attention away from fare evasion, it sends a clear message that this form of crime (theft) is inconsequential. So no one should look the least bit shocked when fare evasion rockets from 1.8 percent to 3.2 percent of all riders. What to do?LAUREL, Md. — Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.
+At a news conference on Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by on Tuesday, New Year’s Day.
+Planetary scientists have never before seen a close-up of a body like Ultima Thule. It is likely a fragment that coalesced more than 4.5 billion years ago and which has remained in the deep freeze of the solar system’s Kuiper belt ever since.
+If it is indeed a pristine planetesimal, a building block of the planets, studying it will offer clues to how Earth and its neighbors formed.
+On Tuesday, scientists released a blurry picture of this small world, also known by its official designation 2014 MU69, taken before the flyby from a distance of half a million miles. It sort of looked like a fuzzy bowling pin then.To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Imperils the Planet” (editorial, Dec. 28):
+This editorial is correct about the destructiveness of President Trump’s actions on climate change. It accurately and poignantly portrays the status of the climate change movement. It is buttressed with historical and scientific fact. It impassionedly appeals to our hearts, minds and souls.
+Unfortunately, however, it misses what would be most effective — namely, removing the corrupt power of oil companies and other wealthy interests over government. This power is exerted through the legal bribery of public officials with lobbying and other money by the rich heads of private industries. And that problem could be fixed by rewriting campaign finance law.
+No matter how persuasive the pro-climate argument, no matter how great a majority of the public can be convinced to support climate change action, that action will not happen so long as government officials depend for their political livelihood on the fossil fuel industry.
+Art Saluk
+Pembroke Pines, Fla.
+To the Editor:
+Thank you so much for your powerful and insightful editorial. In 20 or 30 years we can look back on climate change and see if we should have done more about it sooner.It was often male doctors who dispensed such advice — the same cohort that was so sure of its expertise that it unwittingly infected laboring mothers with puerperal fever in maternity hospitals during the 18th and 19th centuries. Doctors blamed the epidemic on sour breastmilk, tight corsets, bad air; it took a while before they grudgingly bought into the germ theory of disease and started to wash their hands between patients and after autopsies.
+Traig’s book is filled with tales of men telling women what to do, and she’s candid about how furious it makes her. She calls one eminent 19th-century doctor “A PATRONIZING CHAUVINIST” (the all caps are all hers; she later admits that her go-to disciplinary move with her own children is to yell). Old medical textbooks, from the ancient Greeks through the medieval Europeans, are filled with men’s specious assertions about feminine hygiene: “I think we can agree that anyone who feels qualified to hold forth on something he has no actual knowledge of can, rather accurately, be called a douche,” she quips.
+She isn’t wrong, but the nonstop vaudeville can get wearying. Some of her punch lines are so broad that they should be accompanied by a sad trombone. She describes the Puritans arriving to America “like a wet, smallpox-infected blanket to put a damper on all the fun” (genocide, amirite?). Lewis Carroll’s creepy overture to a young girl “starts to sound an awful lot like an invitation to a pool party at Roman Polanski’s.”
+Parenting is a subject that generates so much piety that you can’t fault Traig for having a sense of gallows humor, though the calibration is off. Part of this has to do with how skillful and fluid a writer she is otherwise — the facts seem to tumble forth, in a way that makes her jokes feel superfluous (when they aren’t awful) and strenuous (when they are). Much of the story she tells is pieced together from other books, including Ann Hulbert’s “Raising America” and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s “Mother Nature.” Still, it’s a fascinating narrative, tracing the long history of mistakes and reversals and cultural presuppositions that have structured our most intimate relationships.
+Depicting herself as both extremely lazy and extremely anxious, Traig says that what she wants the most as a parent is some reassurance that she isn’t doing it wrong: “Parenting is so hard; and like our kids, we’re all looking for permission to slack off in some areas.” Sometimes, though, Traig can’t help herself, declining to step away from the kid or the joke. “Doing nothing,” she admits, “is often the hardest thing to do.”Margaret and Lovell Lee raised their family with a few simple guidelines: Work hard for your education and your employer. Eat dinner together. And help others who need assistance.
+So when their son, Lovell Lee Jr., changed colleges to major in adolescent education, it was a sign they had successfully instilled one of their key values in their children.
+“I always wanted to be a public relations specialist or a broadcaster,” the junior Mr. Lee, 19, said, “but I found out we need a lot more men of color inside our classrooms.” He added, “There’s a low representation of minorities teaching minorities and helping them get out of systemic problems.”The Golden Globes provide the highest-profile pit stop on the way to the Academy Awards, and this year’s ceremony is perhaps the most advantageously timed edition yet: The day after NBC airs the Globes on Sunday, voting begins for the Oscar nominations. A win, then, will help contenders remain front of mind for academy members filling out their ballots on Monday, and there will be plenty of those winners to go around, since the Globes spread the wealth by splitting their biggest races into separate categories for dramas and comedy/musicals.
+Still, for as often as the Globes add their imprimatur to an already presumed Oscar front-runner, this show can still have upsets. The Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a quirky group of around 90 journalists with only one academy member in its ranks. These individuals have their own tastes, and below, your Carpetbagger tries to think like an H.F.P.A. voter to guess the outcome of the 14 film races.
+[Follow our live updates: Here’s what to expect from the Golden Globes ceremony.]
+Best Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama
+Glenn Close, “The Wife”
+Lady Gaga, “A Star Is Born”
+Nicole Kidman, “Destroyer”
+Melissa McCarthy, “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”
+Rosamund Pike, “A Private War”
+Though the eventual Oscar race for best actress will probably include Olivia Colman for “The Favourite,” the Globes have her competing in the comedy category, so this particular contest will come down to the veteran Close and the pop star Gaga. Close is a 15-time Globe nominee who’s won twice for television performances, while Gaga won the only Globe she was nominated for before, thanks to her performance in the 2015 TV show “American Horror Story: Hotel.” Globes voters know that Gaga would deliver a capital-M moment if she wins, and that will probably tip the scales in her favor.Such songs now form the hoarse, moaning soundtrack to countless movies and television episodes. When a Cohen song rises from some awkward silence it’s a good bet the director has run out of ideas. The religiose sentimentality and painful growl, like a halibut with strep throat, have patched a lot of plot holes. He’ll give an emulsified version of everything the scriptwriter left unsaid.
+Image
+“The Flame” has a little of everything for Cohen fans and nothing for anyone else. The publicity matter claims the stray work has been “carefully selected”; but if this is the best of his barrel scrapings, there’s not much barrel to scrape. With a plan laid down by the singer himself, the editors have included his own choice of some 60 poems, the lyrics from his last four albums and a long dreary selection of notebook jottings. The pages have been decorated with 70 or so rumpled self-portraits (the singer’s amour propre came streaked in self-loathing), with a dozen amateurish doodles of young women thrown in. That perhaps represents the internal proportions of Cohen’s famous vanity and his equally famous lechery — I mean, of course, his search for a muse variously named Marianne, Sahara, Vanessa, Charmaine, Anjani, Mara, Sheila, Heather, Carolina and Olivia. How awful had any of his passing fancies passed unnoticed.
+The poems are monotonous scribbles of the moody-undergraduate school, what young Werther would have sung had he been Canadian:
+O apple of the world
+we weren’t married on the surface
+we were married at the core
+I can’t take it anymore.
+The long miseries and brief graces of love are Cohen’s obsessive subject. Some famous love poems by Bernart de Ventadorn and Dante sound almost as bad when translated, but Cohen doesn’t have that excuse. The poems might seem that much better in Provençal or Tuscan.
+Cohen favors an Audenesque quatrain with none of the puckish genius Auden used to refashion the form. What we get instead is:
+And from the wall a grazing wind
+weightless and serene
+wounds Me as I part Her lips
+and wounds Us in between
+And fastened here, surrendered to
+My Lover and My Lover,
+We spread and drown as lilies do—
+forever and forever.
+Cohen loves “poetic” lines that are nearly excruciating (“And now that I kneel / At the edge of my years / Let me fall through the mirror of love”), rhymes that would cripple a musk ox (plug/enough, sword/2005, art/Marx), and passages the C.I.A. should use only during enhanced interrogation (a couple “waving at desire / as it rests in the foreground / foothill-shaped, peaceful, / devoted as a dog made of tears”).
+The lyrics follow in cornucopian abundance, as if Cohen were possessed by a Dionysian mania forever unassuaged. Genial, sloppy, full of conventional lines, they sometimes have little twists that save them from disaster. Heavy on parallels and antitheses, they’re even heavier on abstractions, the words just a syllable or two, on rare occasions three, almost never four:
+The parking lot is empty
+They killed the neon sign
+It’s dark from here to St. Jovite
+It’s dark all down the line.
+Cohen could turn this stuff out all day, and it’s not half bad; but lyrics without music, even decent lyrics, look like dried lungfish in someone’s den, mounted on varnished plaques. The difference between his lyrics and poems is tissue-paper thin except when he was writing some wretched approximation of free verse:
+His cry his perfect word pitched against
+The baffled contradictions of the heart
+Wrestling them embracing them
+Strangling them with a jealous conjugal desperation.
+Cohen was not a poet who accidentally became a lyricist; he was a lyricist who for years fooled himself into thinking he was a poet. As poems these squibs are worthless; as lyrics, even sung in that lizardy groan, they often moved millions. His voice, that broken, battered thing, could make almost any song — even “God Save the Queen,” perhaps — sound lonesome, miserable, profound. If singing badly is no bar to stardom, everyone who stands caterwauling in the shower should take hope. You might not even need a whiskey-and-battery-acid cocktail to get there.The year 2018 ended with a TV event that offered multiple resolutions. The year 2019 is beginning with the anniversary of a TV series that, famously, left us with no resolution at all.
+“Bandersnatch,” the new interactive — episode? movie? game? — of “Black Mirror” on Netflix, and “The Sopranos,” which began 20 years ago Jan. 10, are products of two different TV eras. The former lets the viewer direct the story (sort of) through a series of choices. The latter was the work of a creator who resisted catering to his audience and ended his series on a big, fat question mark.
+But as different as the two works are, they’re oddly complementary. Each is an example of the tension between two ways of seeing fiction. Is a story a puzzle to be solved or a mystery to be pondered?
+“Bandersnatch,” released Dec. 28, is full of tricks. It allows you to control Stefan (Fionn Whitehead), a video game designer in 1984 creating his own choose-your-path game. Along the way (limited spoilers ahead), you can learn codes that release mysteries from a vault. You can kill your father, or not. Somewhere, there’s a 1980s-style console game you can unlock. And after you reach an ending — most of them unhappy — you can try for another.North Korean leader issues warning to the U.S.
+Kim Jong-un said on Tuesday that he was willing to hold a second summit meeting with President Trump, but he added that if international sanctions weren’t lifted, the North would “have no choice” but to return to nuclear confrontation.
+“We will not make nuclear weapons and we will not proliferate nuclear weapons,” Mr. Kim said. But he added that it “won’t be good” if the U.S. didn’t make “corresponding measures.”
+Details: Progress between the U.S. and North Korea hinges on the definition of “denuclearization.” For the U.S., that means the North giving up its entire arsenal. For North Korea, it also includes a reciprocal pullback of America’s ability to threaten the country with nuclear weapons.
+Analysis: Mr. Kim has essentially returned to where things stood when Mr. Trump took office, indicating that their meeting in Singapore in June altered the optics of their relationship more than the reality, writes our national security correspondent.There was a time when the Yankees landing Troy Tulowitzki would have been trumpeted — an All-Star shortstop treading the same patch of Yankee Stadium dirt as his boyhood idol, Derek Jeter.
+Now, though, the union carries more pragmatism than pomp.
+The Yankees need a shortstop to replace the injured Didi Gregorius for several months, and Tulowitzki, who has missed a year and half with injuries and was released by the Toronto Blue Jays last month, needs a place to resurrect his career.
+And so the Yankees are taking a low-risk flier, signing Tulowitzki to a one-year, major-league-minimum contract, pending a physical. The agreement, first reported by ESPN late Tuesday night, was confirmed by a baseball official who was not authorized to speak publicly about the deal until it is completed.
+The agreement does not preclude the Yankees from signing the free-agent infielder Manny Machado, but it does give an indication that they have reservations about meeting an asking price that is expected to be in the 10-year, $300 million range.SAN FRANCISCO — A billion dollars of tax revenue, the taming of the black market, the convenience of retail cannabis stores throughout the state — these were some of the promises made by proponents of marijuana legalization in California.
+One year after the start of recreational sales, they are still just promises.
+California’s experiment in legalization is mired by debates over regulation and hamstrung by cities and towns that do not want cannabis businesses on their streets.
+California was the sixth state to introduce the sale of recreational marijuana — Alaska, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon and Washington paved the way — but the enormous size of the market led to predictions of soaring legal cannabis sales.
+Instead, sales fell. Around $2.5 billion of legal cannabis was sold in California in 2018, half a billion dollars less than in 2017 when only medical marijuana was legal, according to GreenEdge, a sales tracking company.New Year’s resolutions often mean doing more, like working out more or saving more for retirement. But one common thread we found was that if you want to lower your climate footprint, you can find some success in simply consuming less. And it will save you money, too.
+Hang onto your phone
+Take, for example, your cellphone. Most of us hold onto them for only two years, but as we noted in November, producing a common smartphone released the equivalent of 178 pounds of carbon dioxide, about as much running a modern refrigerator for a year. That is one of the biggest reasons that the global carbon footprint of smartphones is projected to increase by 730 percent this decade.
+While some companies are making strides in reducing the environmental impact associated with producing our favorite mobile devices, hanging onto your phone for longer than two years is one way to make a difference.
+Buy less clothing
+Another thing that’s helpful to hold onto? Your old clothes. The amount of textile waste in the United States increased by more than 800 percent from 1960 to 2015, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. (The population grew by about 78 percent during that period.)
+The process of creating all of that fabric has a significant environmental impact, including on the climate. One thing you can do is to buy less clothing; spend the new year shopping in your closet instead.
+Reduce food waste
+Also spend more time searching through your cupboard this year. January is a great time to use up the contents of your fridge and cabinets before food spoils and you have to throw it out.
+Globally, we throw out about a third of the food we buy, and if food waste were its own country it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter behind China and the United States, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.The government’s repayment policy is an extension of its approach to British tourists or other citizens who get in trouble abroad and need help returning to the United Kingdom. People 18 years or older have to reimburse the government.
+That age limit came into effect after The Guardian newspaper reported two years ago on a 17-year-old British teenager who sought help at the British embassy in Islamabad to escape a forced marriage in 2014. She had to sign a loan agreement and hand in her British passport before being allowed to return to the United Kingdom, and ultimately was billed more than $1,000, with her passport being held until she paid.
+After that, 16 and 17 year olds became exempt from the reimbursement policy.
+The Times of London reported on four British women who were each charged roughly $900 for the government’s efforts to free them from a religious institution in Somalia where they said they had been chained, whipped and told they would be held until they married. The women’s families sent them there because they thought the women were too independent.
+Ayaan, 24, who had been at the institution for two years, said she signed a loan agreement on the day she was rescued.
+“I was left to fend for myself,” she told The Times of London. “The loan has caused so much anxiety.”
+Just as the government would not charge a crime victim for investigating a crime, it should not charge women for bringing them back home, said Alison Gardner, an assistant professor of sociology who studies modern slavery at the University of Nottingham. She said a $1,000 debt could be devastating for a young woman whose family has tried to force her to marry and could disown her if she escaped.
+“It’s an example of this general policy of pushing costs onto the people who have incurred the misfortune, which drives a cycle of increased vulnerability,” she said.The surest way for that to happen is to forge a constructive relationship between our two countries. Absent that, it is imperative that we put our differences aside to tackle these two existential challenges.
+As the two largest economies, the United States and China can set the tone for a global effort against climate change by investing in clean-energy technology, adopting strict environmental rules and encouraging their trading partners to do the same. (Of course, the current administration does not accept the reality of climate change, but future administrations will hopefully recognize the urgency of action.)
+Cooperation is also needed to address the spread or possible use of nuclear weapons. North Korea’s continued development of fissile materials and missiles is an apparent contravention of its recent agreement with the United States. And North Korea isn’t the only concern. Pakistan, for example, has a weak government and uncertain controls over its nuclear arsenal.
+The arc of human history is one of frequent conflict. Unless you believe human nature is likely to change, that suggests a serious risk that nuclear arms will be used at some point by state or nonstate actors. United States-China cooperation to limit nuclear proliferation among states, the diversion of nuclear material to terrorists and other risks would make us all safer.
+The most promising prospect for tackling these challenges is to put our countries’ economic relationship back on steady footing. The tenor of the relationship gets set at the top, so it’s time for Presidents Trump and Xi Jinping to work out their current trade disputes within a framework that prioritizes cooperation.Over the past decade, more and more women have begun using long-acting, reversible birth control methods like intrauterine devices and implants. These birth control methods are highly effective at preventing pregnancy but were previously not widely accessible because of high costs and lack of knowledge among health care providers. Increasing access to these methods, for women who want them, is a sign of progress.
+However, many researchers, advocates and policymakers aren’t selling their rise solely as a victory for women’s health. They claim IUDs and implants may be a powerful new tool to fight poverty. This sort of language should set off alarm bells because the idea that limiting women’s reproduction can cure society’s ills has a long, shameful history in the United States.
+Between 1909 and 1979, about 20,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in California — one of 33 states where compulsory sterilization in the name of eugenics and social well-being was legal in the 20th century. In the 1990s, multiple states proposed laws to incentivize or even require welfare recipients to use the new contraceptive Norplant — and while none of these became law, they helped shape public discourse. Even in recent years, some judges have offered reduced sentences to defendants who agree to be sterilized or use birth control. All of the above are instances in which the state sought to limit the reproduction of the poor, people of color and other groups, because of a belief that doing so would be for the good of society.
+Today, this age-old idea that reproduction is to blame for societal problems has seen a resurgence in the current enthusiasm around long-acting, reversible contraception.“I think that we can expect more of this in the future now that the line’s been crossed,” said Peter R. Mansoor, a retired Army colonel and a former aide to Mr. Petraeus, who is now a professor at Ohio State University. “I’m not sure it’s healthy for civil-military relations.”
+The risk, Colonel Mansoor said, is that “whether the criticism is deserved or not, future presidents may be less willing to trust their senior officers, thinking they’ll turn on them once they’re out of uniform, or they may be less willing to promote officers who are very competent but perhaps independently minded.”
+While Mr. Mattis’s resignation was the first over a major national security issue by a leading cabinet member since 1980, when Cyrus Vance quit as secretary of state, his conflict with Mr. Trump was hardly the first time that there have been clashes between civilian and military officials.
+In 2006, a number of retired military officers publicly rebuked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld for his handling of the Iraq war. In 1993, President Bill Clinton was at odds with military officials over allowing gay men and lesbians in the military. And there was a hefty amount of distrust between President Barack Obama and military officials over the administration’s approach to Iraq and Afghanistan.
+During the 2016 presidential campaign, Michael T. Flynn, a retired Army lieutenant general, led chants of “Lock her up!” about Hillary Clinton at the Republican National Convention, while John R. Allen, a retired Marine general, as a speaker at the Democratic National Convention, questioned Mr. Trump’s ability to be the commander in chief.
+But Peter Feaver, a former National Security Council official under Mr. Clinton and President George W. Bush who now teaches political science at Duke University, said Mr. Trump has taken these clashes to a new level.
+“We’ve never had a president who was as insensitive to the norms and taboos” of the military, Mr. Feaver said. “People like McChrystal, people like McRaven and the others are responding to the president’s breaking of these taboos.”
+“No American president has ever dared risk the American civil-military relationship for less cause or with such childish malice,” Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College, wrote in The Atlantic after the McChrystal tweets.There are many, many reasons to take up residence in New York City, but the quality of apartment fixtures does not usually register within the top 5,000. If you are a person who decided to relocate in order to experience the city’s constellation of Michelin-starred restaurants or fabulous, award-winning tap water, the odds are high you have given up at least one of the following: proximity to your workplace; the financial ability to live alone; reliable cable television and internet; more than 10 square feet of personal space; and a bathtub that one can vaguely imagine taking a bath in.
+That is why I have only two criteria for vacation accommodations: The first is a nice bathroom with a tub, and the second is everything else. Is this Airbnb a dusty cow barn with wooden shelves for beds, but it comes with a glorious claw foot tub overlooking a grazing pasture? Great, I love it, I will be there for four nights in the spring; I will plan my whole trip around when I can bathe in that tub, and spend months imagining myself in the bathroom, looking out over the cows, soaking my body in warm eucalyptus salts. The best kinds of vacation tubs, of course, are free-standing, because they indicate a bathroom large enough to accommodate a free-standing tub. The worst kinds of tubs are the afterthoughts: No pasture to look at — just some peeling duct tape, an amenity that my grimy Brooklyn bathtub, installed in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, sometime between the settling of New Amsterdam and World War II, already provides me.
+The good news is, in New York itself, there are special, sacrosanct spaces that the city’s perverse and arcane anti-bath magic cannot penetrate: hotels. They are often expensive, but ideal for situations when you are moments away from losing your mind and are desperately seeking space from the anxiety producing effects of one’s own metropolis. We have a term for this now: It’s “staycation,” a portmanteau that suggests all of the benefits of a relaxing night away without any of the associated airfare.Call her old-fashioned.
+“I still write with a fountain pen,” said Katy Klassman, who with her mother owns and runs a fashion boutique in Washington, D.C. “I love to go to bed early with a paper book.”
+Ms. Klassman is as analog driven in her self-care routines, especially her bath.
+“Maybe I’m just born in the wrong century,” she said. She remembers her grandmother bathing with an old-fashioned sponge and fragrant soap. “It was one of the things that made her for me the most glamorous woman in the world,” she said.
+Ms. Klassman was talking about the kind of glamour that makes showering seem a dully perfunctory rite. Bathing, by contrast, is a steamy indulgence apt to conjure floods of cinematic imagery: Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra lounging in a lotus flower bath; Julia Roberts covered in suds in “Pretty Woman”; and, on the brawnier side, Sean Connery as James Bond, enjoying a loll in an oversize tub.
+But glamour is only part of the draw. Baths are now touted as gadget-free zones, retreats from the sensory overload of daily life. At the same time, the tub is as often promoted as a playground, a setting from which younger fans post snapshots of themselves adrift in swirls of many-colored suds — “the symbol of self care for stressed American women,” as Fast Company put it. Those myriad selfies are but the latest indication that, for a new generation, the bath is heating up.Slide 1 of 12,
+Jenny McCarthy hosted ABC’s “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” with Ryan Seacrest in Times Square.“ I don’t know how anything will turn out when you’ve got this much rain,” said Ryan Seacrest, as cold water sluiced through his gelled hair and off his angular chin.
+As host of “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” in Times Square, Mr. Seacrest is used to New York’s unpredictable winter weather. Last year it was just 9 degrees; Monday night was milder, but brought an inch of rain.
+“I prefer the rain versus last year’s cold,” he said, despite being drenched to the skin in black J. Brand jeans and a white shirt from his own fashion line.
+Nearby, his co-host Jenny McCarthy puffed on a Virginia Slim in a hot-pink, rhinestone-studded maxi-coat, perhaps from the Barbie x Anna Karenina collection. The former teen idols from the New Kids on the Block (Ms. McCarthy is married to its bad-boy member, Donnie Wahlberg) milled around her, waiting to take the stage.FRANKFURT — The European Central Bank took control of a troubled Italian bank Wednesday, an unprecedented step that spotlighted the risks to the eurozone’s financial system from political chaos in Rome and a sputtering economy.
+While the bank, Banca Carige, is a midsize lender, its fate has the potential to reverberate broadly. Among policymakers and economists looking for signs of the next crisis, Italy and its heavily indebted banks have been a source of concern for years. And the policies and statements of the populist government in Rome have recently added to the woes of Italy’s banks, and by extension, the whole economy.
+“It’s not a bank large enough to cause systemic crisis,” said Lorenzo Codogno, a former chief economist at Italy’s treasury who operates LC Macro Advisors, a consultancy in London. “But,” he added, “we have seen that even small banks can cause huge problems.”
+“The current government is not prepared for a full-fledged banking crisis,” Mr. Codogno said.
+The action by Europe’s central bank on Wednesday reassured investors so far that the vulnerabilities of Banca Carige, the 10th-largest lender in Italy, would not provoke a broader crisis.This edition of the Carnegie International, organized by Ingrid Schaffner, includes 32 artists and artist collectives — and very few unfamiliar names. The upside of this approach is that many of the artists here are midcareer and know, from experience, how to operate within the potentially homogenizing context of a large exhibition and create exceptional displays. Several here are outstanding, activating the Carnegie Museum of Art’s collection and making you think differently about art history.
+On the outside of the museum, El Anatsui, the Ghanaian sculptor who has become one of the most imitated artists in Africa, has draped the upper facade of the entrance with a work made from his signature found bottle caps and printing plates sourced from a Pittsburgh printing press. The work treats the museum like a kind of body to be dressed with a garment. Inside the galleries, Ulrike Müller and Sarah Crowner use bright tiles, enamel, weaving and canvases sewn together to test the line between art and craft. Nearby, a terrific presentation of portraits by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye with cryptic titles suggests painting as a portal into the everyday lives of her characters, while Dayanita Singh’s installation with lush silver gelatin images bundled in cloth in India questions how history in the form of images is archived and stored.
+The boundary between furniture and sculpture is playfully transgressed in Jessi Reaves’s fantastic full-room installation, where art and design blend. You’re encouraged to sit on the sculpture-furniture. If you make the pilgrimage out to Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s “cabin” masterpiece designed for the family of Edgar J. Kaufmann, you can see Ms. Reaves’s sculpture on the terrace, made during a residency there: a lanky homemade shelving unit with an iridescent burgundy zip-on mantle that looks like a sadomasochistic vampire’s cape.
+Back in the museum, Josiah McElheny, working with the curators John Corbett and Jim Dempsey, shows his MacArthur-award mettle with an expertly researched display. Curious musical instruments and documents relate to maverick composers like Harry Partch, Pauline Oliveros and Lucia Dlugoszewski, who created sculptural wooden instruments that are one of the standouts of the installation.In February 2016, Giulianna Di Lauro, a Latino outreach strategist for Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential operation, complained to her supervisor that she had been harassed by a campaign surrogate whom she drove to events ahead of the Democratic primary in Nevada.
+She said the surrogate told her she had “beautiful curly hair” and asked if he could touch it, Ms. Di Lauro said in an interview. Thinking he would just touch a strand, she consented. But she said that he ran his hand through her hair in a “sexual way” and continued to grab, touch and “push my boundaries” for the rest of the day.
+“I just wanted to be done with it so badly,” she said.
+When she reported the incident to Bill Velazquez, a manager on the Latino outreach team, he told her, “I bet you would have liked it if he were younger,” according to her account and another woman who witnessed the exchange. Then he laughed.
+Accounts like Ms. Di Lauro’s — describing episodes of sexual harassment and demeaning treatment as well as pay disparity in Mr. Sanders’s 2016 campaign — have circulated in recent weeks in emails, online comments and private discussions among former supporters. Now, as the Vermont senator tries to build support for a second run at the White House, his perceived failure to address this issue has damaged his progressive bona fides, delegates and nearly a dozen former state and national staff members said in interviews over the last month.ISTANBUL — For 17 years, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won elections by offering voters a vision of restoring the glories of Turkey’s Ottoman past. He extended his country’s influence with increased trade and military deployments, and he raised living standards with years of unbroken economic growth.
+But after a failed 2016 coup, Mr. Erdogan embarked on a sweeping crackdown. Last year, the economy wobbled and the lira plunged soon after he won re-election with even greater powers. As cronyism and authoritarianism seep deeper into his administration, Turks are voting differently — this time with their feet.
+They are leaving the country in droves and taking talent and capital with them in a way that indicates a broad and alarming loss of confidence in Mr. Erdogan’s vision, according to government statistics and analysts.
+In the last two to three years, not only have students and academics fled the country, but also entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and thousands of wealthy individuals who are selling everything and moving their families and their money abroad.The graphic novel “Showtime at the Apollo: The Epic Tale of Harlem’s Legendary Theater” is like a sprawling Hollywood biopic. A sea of boldface names — James Brown, the Jackson Five, Dionne Warwick and countless others — make their way through the theater.
+The work, adapted by Ted Fox from his 1983 history of the same name, and illustrated by James Otis Smith, goes beyond the singers, dancers, comedians and other entertainers who have taken the stage of the Apollo, which celebrates its 85th anniversary this month. The book also shines a light on Harlem and black culture in America.
+Fox said he reworked his Apollo history into a focused narrative told in three acts, beginning years before the first performance at the theater. An early chapter highlights the Harlem Renaissance and some nightspots, like the Cotton Club, where black performers were popular, yet where black audience members were usually barred. It also notes that the Apollo name first turns up in 1922 — when it was the name of a burlesque theater.4:31
+After the Storm, a Fight for Survival in Mozambique
+0:57
+Madrid Struggles With Heaviest Snowfall in 50 Years
+1:41
+Ugandan Police Harass Opposition Candidate
+0:50
+E.U. Secures 300 Million Additional Doses of Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine
+0:42
+‘Angry and Sad,’ Merkel Says of Capitol Mob Attack
+0:51
+‘We Believe in the Strength of American Democracy,’ Macron Says
+0:43
+Britain Scrambles to Battle the Virus
+0:46
+Merkel Extends Coronavirus Lockdown in Germany
+1:35
+It’s Back to Lockdown for Britain as Cases Soar
+1:20
+Scotland Will Go Into Lockdown After Coronavirus Variant Spread
+1:31
+The World Says Goodbye to 2020
+1:27Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House for the last 16 years. She’s been in power for the party’s highs … … and lows. “Sweeping, stunning Republican victories all across the country.” “… the president of the United States.” Now she is again Speaker of the House, and leading an impeachment battle in a big election year in 2020. “I couldn’t be more honored.” So what are the tactics that have kept her in power for so long? “Good morning.” Pelosi’s affinity for politics may be genetic. “Well, I was born into a political family in Baltimore, Md. My father was in Congress when I was born, and he was mayor my whole life from when I was in first grade to when I went away to college.” But despite being raised in political circles, Pelosi didn’t jump in right away. Instead, she moved to San Francisco with her husband in the late 1960s and raised their five children as a stay-at-home mom. But as they grew up, Pelosi decided to enter the fray. Pelosi quickly rose through the ranks of the California Democratic Party, earning a reputation as a star fund-raiser, and in 1987 she won a seat in Congress. Through the ’90s Pelosi navigated the party in Washington, becoming leader in 2003. “Thank you all very much.” Since then, she’s raised millions for the Democrats. Over the years, Pelosi has earned a reputation as a shrewd legislator, especially when it comes to corralling votes. Her tactic: rewarding loyalty with good roles and coveted assignments, and punishing those who cross her. Exhibit A: when Representative John Dingell didn’t support Pelosi for Democratic whip, she eventually backed someone else to take one of his committee seats. Pelosi has never been shy about how she feels about her leadership. “Well, I’m a master legislator. I think I’m the best person to go forward to unify. I have a strong following in the country. Thank you.” And while her confidence has likely paid off, it also provides a counter to her other public persona: Democratic bogeywoman. Pelosi’s long tenure has made her an easy target for the right. “Amy McGrath is a Nancy Pelosi liberal —” “… whose name is Conor Lamb, but in Washington he’d be one of Nancy Pelosi’s sheep.” And occasionally for the left. “I didn’t support Nancy Pelosi for any leadership position. “We need some new leadership.” But when asked, she just shrugs it off. “I think I’m worth the trouble, quite frankly.” Pelosi is no stranger to a fight or a quick retort. “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.” She’s battled President Bush and recent G.O.P. leaders. “Mr. President, ‘stay the course’ is not a strategy it’s a slogan.” “Say one nice thing about Paul Ryan —” “There’s a big difference between the president and me: He has very thin skin, and I have very thick skin.” And with a challenging year ahead, there are inevitably many more fights to come. “So, help us God.”Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House for the last 16 years. She’s been in power for the party’s highs … … and lows. “Sweeping, stunning Republican victories all across the country.” “… the president of the United States.” Now she is again Speaker of the House, and leading an impeachment battle in a big election year in 2020. “I couldn’t be more honored.” So what are the tactics that have kept her in power for so long? “Good morning.” Pelosi’s affinity for politics may be genetic. “Well, I was born into a political family in Baltimore, Md. My father was in Congress when I was born, and he was mayor my whole life from when I was in first grade to when I went away to college.” But despite being raised in political circles, Pelosi didn’t jump in right away. Instead, she moved to San Francisco with her husband in the late 1960s and raised their five children as a stay-at-home mom. But as they grew up, Pelosi decided to enter the fray. Pelosi quickly rose through the ranks of the California Democratic Party, earning a reputation as a star fund-raiser, and in 1987 she won a seat in Congress. Through the ’90s Pelosi navigated the party in Washington, becoming leader in 2003. “Thank you all very much.” Since then, she’s raised millions for the Democrats. Over the years, Pelosi has earned a reputation as a shrewd legislator, especially when it comes to corralling votes. Her tactic: rewarding loyalty with good roles and coveted assignments, and punishing those who cross her. Exhibit A: when Representative John Dingell didn’t support Pelosi for Democratic whip, she eventually backed someone else to take one of his committee seats. Pelosi has never been shy about how she feels about her leadership. “Well, I’m a master legislator. I think I’m the best person to go forward to unify. I have a strong following in the country. Thank you.” And while her confidence has likely paid off, it also provides a counter to her other public persona: Democratic bogeywoman. Pelosi’s long tenure has made her an easy target for the right. “Amy McGrath is a Nancy Pelosi liberal —” “… whose name is Conor Lamb, but in Washington he’d be one of Nancy Pelosi’s sheep.” And occasionally for the left. “I didn’t support Nancy Pelosi for any leadership position. “We need some new leadership.” But when asked, she just shrugs it off. “I think I’m worth the trouble, quite frankly.” Pelosi is no stranger to a fight or a quick retort. “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.” She’s battled President Bush and recent G.O.P. leaders. “Mr. President, ‘stay the course’ is not a strategy it’s a slogan.” “Say one nice thing about Paul Ryan —” “There’s a big difference between the president and me: He has very thin skin, and I have very thick skin.” And with a challenging year ahead, there are inevitably many more fights to come. “So, help us God.”Image
+More than 7 percent of cancer cases in the United States are attributable to excess body weight, a new study reports.
+Previous studies have established an association between body fat and at least a dozen cancers, with the highest risks for liver, uterine and esophageal cancers.
+The new report, in JAMA Oncology, found that from 2011 to 2015, among people 30 and older, 4.7 percent of cancers in men and 9.6 percent of those in women were attributable to excess weight — some 37,670 cancers in men, and 74,690 in women every year.
+The highest rates of weight-associated cancer are in the South, the Midwest, Alaska and Washington D.C.; the lowest were in the Mountain States, New England and Hawaii. More than 8 percent of cancers in Texas and Washington, D.C., are associated with body fatness, but only 6 percent in Colorado and 5.9 percent in Hawaii.“Bohemian Rhapsody” plods, explains, obscures, speculates and flattens. It does not mesmerize. I mean, I wouldn’t miss a train for this. We learn how “We Will Rock You” allegedly sprang from a fit of personal protestation. But it’s news we can’t use. The movie won’t stop telling us things — about the music business and the songs, about Mercury’s tortured sex life. And it fails to show you anything close to what that clip on the subway platforms makes you feel: sweaty.
+The musical biography has an impossibly high degree of alchemical difficulty. One performer has to become a totally different performer, and not any performer, just this one star the whole world knows, and it has to be done in a way that makes you believe you’re seeing either the impersonated star or something quintessential about them. Val Kilmer made you believe you were seeing something vitally true about Jim Morrison. Joaquin Phoenix did the same with Johnny Cash. And Jamie Foxx became Ray Charles. Angela Bassett convinced you that if you were seeing if not Tina Turner, then Turner’s indestructibility; and Marion Cotillard, the brittle incandescence of Edith Piaf.
+For my money, one of the triumphs of this type of acting is Chadwick Boseman’s James Brown in “Get On Up.” Boseman pumps Brown full of edginess and spite while having to reconstruct Brown as a stage specimen, and part of that reconstruction involves learning to lip sync to Brown. You sense that you’re watching an actor who’s done more than homework. He’s written himself a little dissertation. It’s not an impression of Brown. It’s an interpolation.People under 21 are no longer able to buy semiautomatic assault rifles in Washington as of Jan 1. It is the first of several new state measures intended to reduce gun violence. The National Rifle Association has already filed suit.
+Previously, state law barred the assault weapons’ sale to those under 18. The new rules, approved by voters in a ballot initiative in November, come alongside dozens of moves by other states to strengthen gun control regulations in the absence of federal action.
+“It is a meaningful step in the right direction,” said Christian Heyne, legislative director at the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, on Washington’s initiative. “Gun violence on the whole is such a complex problem. We need to have complex solutions, comprehensive solutions. This is a part of that conversation.”
+In addition to the age restrictions, Washington’s new rules state that gun dealers must wait 10 days before delivering semiautomatic assault rifles they sell. That is designed, in part, to prevent impulsive action. The rules also require anyone buying a semiautomatic assault rifle to have completed a gun safety training in the last five years. The measure also imposes criminal penalties for unsafe gun storage, and requires more extensive background checks for purchases of the assault weapons.Bob Einstein, whose career as a comedy writer took a quirky turn into television acting as the hapless daredevil Super Dave Osborne, and later as a friend of Larry David’s on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Wednesday at his home in Indian Wells, Calif. He was 76.
+His manager, Lee Kernis, said the cause was cancer.
+Mr. Einstein played Marty Funkhouser, Mr. David’s pal and occasional antagonist, on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the long-running fictionalized version of Mr. David’s life on HBO. Mr. Einstein’s health precluded him from working on the series’ 10th season, which is now in production.
+“Never have I seen an actor enjoy a role the way Bob did playing Marty Funkhouser on ‘Curb,’ ” Mr. David said in a statement. He added, “There was no one like him, as he told us again and again.”For the last month, Marci T. House has had the perfect plan for the first week of the year: She would spend it in Washington’s museums and galleries, with her wife beside her. The first day was to be spent in the National Museum of African-American History and Culture; the second day at the National Portrait Gallery, taking photos in front of the Obamas’ portraits; the third day was for getting on tour buses and seeing outdoor monuments.
+But that plan was ruined before it even began when Ms. House learned, after arriving in Washington on Tuesday, that the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, along with many other federally funded tourist attractions, were closing because of the government shutdown. The Smithsonian’s museums and the National Zoo initially remained open when the shutdown began on Dec. 22, but closed on Wednesday.
+“We literally flew all day from Vancouver, British Columbia, to D.C. to see the museums and galleries,” said Ms. House, an actress. “Disappointed is putting it mildly.”
+She and her wife now plan on spending their trip exploring the city’s monuments, like the National Mall, which is open, and are keeping their fingers crossed that the museums will open before the end of the week.Of course, 2014 comes with an asterisk of sorts. Alibaba went public in September that year, raising $25 billion. Subtract the value of Alibaba’s offering and Chinese firms raised just $3 billion that year.
+Last year, however, offerings from Chinese firms dominated the United States market for initial public offerings. The three largest I.P.O.s by market value were Chinese companies. And Chinese firms accounted for four of the 10 largest such offerings in 2018 ranked by amount raised on American exchanges, the most of any country, including the United States, according to Dealogic.
+Why list in America?
+American exchanges offer prestige and a broader investor base that Chinese entrepreneurs can find attractive. The United States also offers a quicker route to the public markets. While Chinese regulators have taken steps to reduce the long wait, it still takes 18 months or longer for shares to begin trading from the time a company files to go public. That compares with just 42 days to list in the United States, according to Dealogic.
+But the trade war may also have been a factor.
+A slowing Chinese economy and escalating trade tensions dragged down markets in Hong Kong and China before stocks in the United States turned seriously wobbly. At their lows in late October, the Hang Seng stock index and the benchmark stock indexes in Shenzhen and Shanghai were down 15 percent to 35 percent for the year. By comparison, the S & P 500 was still up 2.5 percent at that point, making it far more attractive for offerings.SAN FRANCISCO — Apple reduced its revenue expectations for the first time in 16 years on Wednesday because of poor iPhone sales in China, an unexpected development that underscored the slowing of China’s economy and raised fears of further turmoil in global markets.
+Apple’s surprise announcement was the clearest confirmation yet that the Chinese economy is in serious trouble. Beijing’s effort last spring to clamp down on credit, which sparked a slowdown, and an intensifying trade war with the United States have unnerved consumers and businesspeople alike.
+“Apple is a bellwether,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “The iPhone is something that everyone knows and buys, and if people aren’t buying it, then that’s a pretty good sign they’re having a hard time.”
+It is not clear whether this is a problem particular to Apple or whether China’s slowing economy will affect other American companies, especially the tech giants and Detroit automakers. Either way, investors are bound to grow nervous, especially after the stock market’s recent gyrations. Tech stocks, which drove much of the bull market of the past few years, have become a drag on it.Last year, 28 percent of the women who gave birth in Sweden had been born in another country. Research shows that immigrants from low-income countries are six times more likely to die of pregnancy-related illnesses or complications than their Sweden-born counterparts and more than twice as likely to have a serious childbirth-related problem — such as shock from hemorrhage or septicemia, heart failure or severe eclampsia.
+Sweden ranks high among countries for the quality antenatal care, but it still struggles to ensure equal pregnancy and childbirth care for all. Factors contributing to the higher mortality rate among some immigrants include pre-existing illnesses, such as tuberculosis. But differences in access to treatment in Sweden, inadequate use of interpreters and inadequate care can also contribute to higher death rates, said Annika Esscher, an obstetrician.
+“Good communication is listed as one of the best ways to improve outcomes,” Dr. Esscher said.
+Midwives at a nonprofit clinic in Gothenburg were the first in the country to start training doula culture interpreters 10 years ago. Since then, almost 200 women have been certified. Their services are offered in a few counties and cities to pregnant women who do not speak Swedish.
+Studies show that the support of a trained doula can reduce the risk of complications and interventions during childbirth. Doulas also help women and their partners navigate an unfamiliar medical system and birth routines, and communicate with medical personnel, said Jennie Dalsmark, who started training doula culture interpreters in Halmstad in 2017.Ray Sawyer, who cut a distinctive figure as a member of the band Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show thanks to his flamboyant style and attention-drawing eye patch, and who sang lead on one of the group’s best-known songs, “The Cover of Rolling Stone,” died on Monday in Daytona, Fla. He was 81.
+His wife, Linda Lombardi Sawyer, announced his death on Facebook. She did not give a cause but said in a post a week earlier that he had been hospitalized.
+Mr. Sawyer and the band rose to prominence in the early 1970s with a country-rock sound that later became more lush and occasionally even displayed a disco influence. Dennis Locorriere usually sang lead, but Mr. Sawyer was the most recognizable band member. His eye patch gave the group its name, a sort of skewing of the Captain Hook character from “Peter Pan.”
+“I’ve had the eye patch since I was 27,” Mr. Sawyer told The St. Petersburg Times in 2010. “I was in a car accident. Some people still ask if it is a gimmick, something to draw attention, but it’s real.”This story was updated to reflect 2021’s perihelion.
+Early on Saturday (8:50 a.m. Eastern time, to be exact), Earth made its closest approach to the sun and reached a point in its orbit known as perihelion. Chilly as winter may feel in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re more than three million miles closer to our fiery star than we were in the dead of summer.
+The change in distance occurs because our planet’s orbit is stretched into an ellipse — so Earth snuggles up to the Sun every January and dips farther out into the outer solar system every July, at a point known as aphelion.
+Although three million miles sounds vast, it’s not much on the scale of our solar system. In fact, despite the planet’s elliptical path through the heavens, most astronomers say that Earth’s orbit is basically circular. On a scale of 0 to 100 percent, where 0 is a perfect circle and nearly 100 is a very thin oval, Earth only scores a 1.7.
+It’s a defining trait that keeps our planet at roughly the same distance from our sun, and keeps the climate relatively stable. This has led many astronomers to wonder whether a circular orbit just might be a crucial ingredient in the cocktail of life — and a key factor to consider as they search for signs of alien life around the thousands of exoplanets known to be circling other stars within the galaxy.Boss Lady
+More women than ever are climbing the corporate ladder and smashing straight through the glass ceiling. How to join their ranks? Start by brushing up on your negotiating skills (“The Assertiveness Guide for Women” can help) and investing in a suit that makes you feel as if you’re worth a million bucks. You are.
+Zara wool-blend jacket with contrast ribbon trim, $149, and miniskirt with frayed hem, $49.90, at zara.com; Miu Miu embellished satin pumps, $890 at mytheresa.com; Prada textured leather tote, $2,390 at mytheresa.com. Clé de Peau lipstick, $65 at net-a-porter.com.There are, however, a couple things you’ll need to discuss during the meeting. First, agree on a story about why you left. “Sometimes you can negotiate with your employer, and they will agree to say you weren’t fired,” said Ms. Green. In some cases, they may agree to just confirm your dates of employment when called for a reference. “The time to do that is in the meeting, when the firing is happening, because they have an incentive to wrap this up as pleasantly as possible.” You might even be able to negotiate for more severance.
+Finally, try to turn that meeting into a learning opportunity. “If you’re not too devastated by having gotten fired, this is a great opportunity for you to get the feedback that you didn’t get earlier,” Ms. Scott said. Ask what you can do better, so you don’t find yourself in the same situation next time. “Then I would ask my boss, ‘Where do you see me working? What kind of opportunity do you think I would thrive in?’ If the boss is a total jerk, you’re probably not going to get any useful information, but usually people have an idea of where you would really do well.”
+Hit the ground running at your next job
+Don’t wait until you’ve been fired to start searching for your next job. “As soon as you start being worried, start the job search,” Ms. Green said. “Reconnect with your network, and start looking around at what’s out there.” Make a list of everyone you know who might be able to offer you work — or might know someone who could. If you’re in a field where freelancing is common, see if you can line up some potential freelance work during the gap. “The sooner that you can start, the better,” said Ms. Green. “You don’t want to go home from that meeting and be at square one.”
+Hopefully, that will help you line up interviews quickly. Just make sure you’re prepared to answer the question of why you left your last job. You don’t have to say “I was fired,” necessarily, but don’t lie outright, since the interviewer will likely talk to your former boss. Instead, come up with a brief, nondefensive explanation of why it didn’t work out. Ms. Scott offered a simple script: “You could say something like ‘I realized that I’m really not well-suited for XYZ kind of opportunities. But that’s why this job is really appealing to me, because I’ll be playing to my strengths.’” If you can show that you’re a person who takes feedback and learns from your experiences, good employers will take notice.
+Finally, remember that no amount of preparation can inoculate you against the blow to your ego. Give yourself a few days to recover, but try to shift your focus to the future. “The road to insanity in these situations is obsessing about injustice,” said Ms. Scott. “Sometimes there really is injustice, and you may want to take action. But usually, it’s a better return on investment of your time to get a new great job.” After all, the best revenge is a life well lived.RIO DE JANEIRO — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who has compared indigenous communities living in protected lands to animals in zoos, took a major step toward undermining the rights of indigenous people just hours after taking office on Tuesday.
+In one of a handful of measures that stand to hurt historically marginalized communities, the incoming government on Tuesday transferred responsibility for certifying indigenous territories as protected lands to the ministry of agriculture. The ministry has traditionally championed the interests of industries that want greater access to protected lands.
+The certification was previously overseen by the National Indian Foundation, a government agency tasked with safeguarding the rights and welfare of indigenous communities.
+Mr. Bolsonaro, a far-right former lawmaker and Army captain, presented himself to voters as the polar opposite of the leftist Workers’ Party, which championed the advancement of poor and disenfranchised communities. The party lost the presidency during impeachment proceedings in 2016 as Brazil was beset by a recession, rising violence and a corruption scandal.If you’re going to meme at home, Netflix would like you to be careful.
+You might have heard about the horror movie the streaming service released last month called “Bird Box,” an adaptation of a Josh Malerman novel. The film, which stars Sandra Bullock, centers on an unknown entity that compels anyone who sets eyes on it to commit suicide, so survivors must blindfold themselves when venturing outdoors.
+Critics were mixed on the film, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a cultural sensation, and thus a vehicle for viral mememaking.
+The #BirdBoxChallenge has exploded over the last week, featuring people uploading videos of themselves doing everyday tasks blindfolded. While there have been no reports of serious injuries, Netflix felt the meme was spreading widely enough that it issued a cautionary plea on Twitter on Wednesday.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+JOHNSON COUNTY, Ind. — The children fell ill, one by one, with cancers that few families in this suburban Indianapolis community had ever heard of. An avid swimmer struck down by glioblastoma, which grew a tumor in her brain. Four children with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Fifteen children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, including three cases diagnosed in the past year.
+At first, families put the illnesses down to misfortune. But as cases mounted, parents started to ask: Could it be something in the air or water?
+Their questions led them to an old industrial site in Franklin, the Johnson County seat, that the federal government had ordered cleaned up decades ago. Recent tests have identified a carcinogenic plume spreading underground, releasing vapors into homes.In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan signed a law in April that bars pet store operators from selling dogs and cats but allows them to host adoptions. Stores may benefit financially from the adoptions because they can lure potential customers, Mr. O’Neill said.
+The law in Maryland, which takes effect in 2020, has not put a damper on business at Charm City Puppies in Columbia, which has sold about 95 dogs in the past month, said Ashley Lawson, an assistant manager. She said on Wednesday that the store sold only animals from federally licensed breeders across the United States.
+“Today we are actually low on puppies because of the holiday season,” she said, although the store was selling a Cavalier King Charles spaniel for $2,499 and a Yorkshire terrier for $1,999.
+“We are still looking forward to fighting it or overturning it,” she said, referring to the law. “It is all in the beginning stages.”
+Some customers do not have the option to adopt, particularly if they are looking for a certain type of dog, she said. “That is why we believe they should be given a choice.”
+In California, the law that took effect on Tuesday was written by two State Assembly members, Patrick O’Donnell and Matt Dababneh, both Democrats. The legislation’s fact sheet said the bill was meant to address “extremely minimal” federal standards, such as a requirement that says a cage may be only six inches larger than the animal it houses and may be cleaned just once a week.
+There were also financial considerations, with approximately $250 million a year in taxpayer money used to house animals in local shelters, the fact sheet said.When her sixth-grade daughter was sent home from school with a “flour-sack baby” to look after for a week, Hope Edelman was initially skeptical (“Weren’t sixth graders a little young for this kind of thing?” she wondered). But soon she saw the assignment as an opportunity to equip her daughter with the parenting skills her own mother never got the chance to teach her. She might have taken the exercise a little too far.
+On this week’s Modern Love podcast, the actor Gillian Anderson reads Ms. Edelman’s moving and frequently funny essay “Maternal Wisdom (5 Pounds’ Worth).”
+Ms. Edelman is the author of six nonfiction books, including “Motherless Daughters, Motherless Mothers” and “The Possibility of Everything.” She teaches writing at Antioch University Los Angeles and lives in Topanga Canyon, Calif., with her husband and two daughters.
+Ms. Anderson is known for her role as F.B.I. Special Agent Dana Scully in “The X-Files.” She will appear as sex therapist Jean Thompson in the Netflix series “Sex Education,” which premieres Jan. 11. Stay tuned after the reading to hear from her, Ms. Edelman and the Modern Love editor Daniel Jones.
+To read past Modern Love columns, click here. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.Saudi Arabia denied Wednesday that it had issued American-made weapons to Sudanese soldiers in Yemen, disputing statements made by five of the soldiers and reported last week in The New York Times.
+In an article about Sudanese soldiers fighting for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, five Sudanese fighters who had returned from the conflict said that at training camps in Saudi Arabia they had been issued “modern” weapons that were unfamiliar to them and that they believed to be American-made.
+In a statement on Wednesday, Saudi Arabia said an examination determined that American-made weapons had “never been distributed to personnel participating from Sudan as part of the coalition’s operations.”
+The kingdom has not disclosed what weapons it distributed to the Sudanese fighters or where those weapons originated.I have been married to a man for almost 40 years. He’s a good man, but he’s not my soul mate. I have wanted to leave him several times. I never did, for the usual reasons: kids, economics, laziness, fear of the unknown. We went on, the kids grew up, and we just settled in. About six years ago, he was diagnosed with dementia. In October 2018, he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. I thought I knew everything about this man but he has surprised me and, moreover, given me a lesson in love. He used to be full of anxieties and anger. Now he has distilled himself down to pure love. It’s who he is and how his days go. He tells us how much he loves us, he tells people he’s supposed to know but has forgotten how much he loves them. It’s not just words, it’s action; in his eyes, his face, his gestures. He lights up at your presence; he kisses your hand; he tells you how wonderful you look. He dispenses love from a bottomless well. There is no filter, no bargaining for affection. And I stand here, in awe. — Mary Carroll, Copake, N.Y.
+A flicker of hope after a bright light goes out
+We lost our 6-year old daughter, Nina, to cancer last year. She was funny, bright, and the kindest soul I have ever known. My own life has seemed to stretch out endlessly and pointlessly in front of me while my radiant child lies buried in the ground. To give our 12-year old son a buddy, my husband and I agreed to bring home a puppy in the new year, a ridiculously fluffy, boisterous little Havanese. And suddenly we find that we are all breathing a little easier, smiling at the thought of this energetic new life entering ours. The tiniest flicker of hope is here again. — Usha Rao, Philadelphia
+A return to midwifery
+I had been serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Uganda through a program that was attached to the Corps. Funding for the program was cut when the Trump administration took over. I am 73 and I know that for three years I made a profound difference. I want to return to my students there in the midwifery program. The work has just begun. — Cherie Clark, Broomfield, Colo.
+Fair and affordable health care
+My hope for 2019 is that all U.S. citizens will have fair and affordable access to health care services. I worked as an R.N. case manager for years, both on the insurance side and hospital side. Maybe people don’t realize the burdens of pre-existing conditions, health care services caps or young people not being able to get insurance. I hope for legislators who see the need to take care of their citizens, and that this country will have the stamina, concern and willpower to provide health care to all. — Georgia Stapleton, Shawano, Wis.
+Moderate weather
+My hope for 2019 is a return to the bad weather of the good old days, when California was wetter, Texas was dryer and hurricanes were just destructive, not biblical. My hope is that “sky rivers” revert to rainstorms that simply ruined graduations and picnics, and that snowstorms become a reason to drink hot chocolate under warm blankets again. Bad weather used to be an inconvenience that gave us welcome pauses from routine and bloated schedules. Nature is now a raging, unrelenting, unpredictable force, unsettling and sometimes downright scary. We are at its mercy and there is no help coming. — John White, Newport News, Va.Joshua Tree National Park, for example, remained open after the shutdown, but then suffered temporary or partial closings as officials struggled to keep up with the toll visitors had taken. At some parks, volunteers have stepped in to help with cleanup.
+[Read more on how parks and museums are affected by the shutdown.]
+Limited staffing has also raised questions about visitor safety. At least three people have died on National Park Service land since the shutdown began, and while it is unclear if the shutdown had any effect on the authorities’ immediate responses to the accidents, the announcement of at least one of the deaths was reportedly delayed because of the lack of resources.
+Museums have been affected, too. The National Gallery of Art, all 19 Smithsonian museums, and the National Zoo were closed last week because of the shutdown. (“Essential personnel” remain on hand at the zoo to care for the animals.)
+[Though the museum is closed, you may still be able to see the art within. Some paintings have a double life online.]
+____
+Science, research and public health
+The scientific community has been affected, too. Some government labs are empty, with scientists having been sent home. Research, some of it time sensitive, has been disrupted. And the flow of grant money may be interrupted, too.
+Some agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, are largely or entirely unaffected. But others, such as the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which includes the National Weather Service, have sent many workers home.
+[Read more about the shutdown’s toll on science and research.]
+Inspections of chemical factories, power plants, oil refineries, water treatment plants, and thousands of other industrial sites have also ground to a halt because the Environmental Protection Agency had to furlough most of its employees in charge of inspecting pollution and monitoring compliance.2. Native Americans are among those hit hardest by the partial government shutdown, with tribes across the U.S. scrambling to make up for lost federal funding.
+Among the services curtailed: a food program that fed 90,000 people last year.
+Generations ago, tribes negotiated treaties with the U.S. government that guaranteed money for services like health care and education in exchange for huge swaths of territory. Above, at a New Year’s powwow in Sault Ste. Marie, Mich.
+“The federal government owes us this,” said the chairman of one tribe. “We prepaid with millions of acres of land.”Records are falling like dominoes on Broadway.
+“Hamilton” last week grossed more than $4 million — the first Broadway show ever to make that much money in a single week.
+And, in an encouraging sign for those worried about Broadway’s balance, this year’s unusually healthy crop of plays is performing well financially: Five of them grossed more than $1 million last week, a milestone crossed mostly by musicals.
+“I often say Broadway is a wonderful escape from what’s going on in the world, and lots of people were escaping last week,” Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
+The period between Christmas and New Year’s always brings boffo business to Broadway, but even so, the week ending Dec. 30 was the best-attended (378,910 seats filled) and highest-grossing ($57.8 million) in Broadway history.“I think he was better able to showcase what he could do once we solidified the offensive line,” Shurmur said. “I think that’s a fair assessment.”
+As for how he planned to assess Manning’s performance amid the swings in fortune throughout the season, Gettleman was less effusive. He said he would watch film “until my eyes bleed.”
+Manning has a full no-trade clause, and cutting him would incur a sizable hit to the Giants’ salary cap. Nevertheless, Gettleman said, “everything is on the table for us.”
+Gettleman executed an extensive roster overhaul this season, his first as the team’s general manager. But the Giants still finished last in the N.F.C. East, leaving them with the No. 6 overall pick in the coming draft.
+This year’s class is not expected to contain the same caliber of quarterback prospects as last year, when the quarterbacks Baker Mayfield, Sam Darnold, Josh Rosen and Josh Allen all went in the first 10 slots of the draft. Still, Gettleman defended his decision to draft Barkley, a running back, with the second overall pick in 2018. Barkley ran for 1,307 yards, a Giants rookie record, and added 721 yards receiving.
+“If I was in that situation 100 times, I’d draft him 100 times,” Gettleman said of Barkley.
+His assessment of the 2019 draft options remained the same as a year ago, he said, but he did not rule out selecting a quarterback. The Giants did select a quarterback in the fourth round last summer, Kyle Lauletta, who struggled in his lone appearance of the season, going 0 for 5 with one interception during the second half against Washington on Dec. 9.
+“You’re going to take the best player available,” Gettleman said. “You start reaching, you’re going to get in trouble.”In the days after Jazmine Barnes, 7, was fatally shot inside a moving car near a Walmart outside Houston on Sunday morning, the police have released just one concrete clue about her killer: an image of a red pickup truck recorded by a surveillance camera near the scene of the shooting.
+The authorities believe that the gunman, described as a man in his 30s or 40s with a beard and wearing a hooded sweatshirt, was driving the truck. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office believes the gunman fired at random into the car in which Jazmine was riding with her mother and three sisters, a 6-year-old and two teenagers. A bullet struck Jazmine in the head, her mother said.
+The police said Wednesday that they still had not identified the gunman. But the case has drawn the attention of national civil rights activists and fueled speculation that the shooting was racially motivated. The gunman is white, the police said, and Jazmine was black.
+At a news conference on Wednesday afternoon, Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said officers were pursuing a number of tips they had received, and taking a fresh look at a similar — and still unsolved — shooting that took place nearby in 2017. The department was also increasing patrols amid concerns that the gunman could strike again.Daryl Dragon, the “Captain” half of the pop duo the Captain and Tennille, whose string of soft-rock hits in the 1970s included “Love Will Keep Us Together” and “Muskrat Love,” died on Wednesday in Prescott, Ariz. He was 76.
+His former wife and singing partner, Toni Tennille, announced his death through a publicist, who said the cause was renal failure.
+The Captain and Tennille, whose specialty was romantic ballads featuring Ms. Tennille’s silky voice, reached the Top 10 seven times from 1975 to 1979.
+“He was a brilliant musician with many friends who loved him greatly,” Ms. Tennille said in a statement. “I was at my most creative in my life when I was with him.”TOURS, France — A dozen of us sit expectantly in the orthopedic surgeon’s waiting room. We’re here for follow-ups. Some, like me, have had bunions removed. Others have had hips or knees replaced. Most are older women.
+The copies of Paris Match and Le Monde on the table are at least six months old. The only artwork is a framed print of Claude Monet’s “Poppy Fields Near Argenteuil.” Since I’m only two weeks out from surgery and can’t drive, I came by taxi. The fare was underwritten by the French social security system, known familiarly as la Sécu, which also provides health insurance for all residents.
+The woman seated opposite me tells me she’s on her second bunion surgery. Her doctor, a top orthopedic surgeon, charges more than the normal Sécu compensation, as do many specialists. Most French people purchase a supplementary insurance plan to cover costs not picked up by la Sécu. As a French resident and taxpayer, I have one too.
+Another woman is recovering from a hip replacement. Medical chat is common in French waiting rooms. If the wait is long, everyone comes to know everything about one another’s complaints.A 14-year-old Texas boy who was said to have been throwing eggs at cars was charged with murder after he crashed into a pickup truck and killed a woman while being chased by another driver, the authorities said on Wednesday.
+Around 2:20 p.m. Tuesday, the boy was driving a tan GMC Acadia westbound with two juvenile passengers “at a high rate of speed,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. They were being chased by a man driving a tan Lincoln after the teenagers were reportedly seen throwing eggs at other cars, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said. The driver of the Lincoln displayed a semiautomatic handgun while giving chase, the statement said.
+When the teenagers in the Acadia reached the intersection of Aldine Mail Route and Aldine Westfield Road in Houston, the 14-year-old driver, whose name was not released, ran the red light and struck a Ford F-150 as the Ford was traveling southbound through the intersection, the authorities said. In video of the crash obtained by The Houston Chronicle, two vehicles come spinning into the frame; one becomes momentarily airborne before both come to rest in a crumpled, smoky heap.ATHENS — When wildfire winds devoured the Greek countryside last summer, flames cut off escape routes for dozens of people in a small coastal town until only one option remained: the sea.
+Three fishermen raced to help from their boats, pulling people from the waves, where they had been struggling to breathe between the surf and a choking blanket of smoke. Months later, the men — three migrants to Greece — received their reward.
+The Greek government awarded the men citizenship on Wednesday for their actions on July 23, when the fast-moving wildfire engulfed the seaside village of Mati, near Athens, and forced desperate residents and tourists into the water. The men’s actions bolstered the rescue efforts of dozens of Greek fishermen and the Coast Guard.
+The wildfires were the deadliest disaster in recent Greek history, killing 100 people, some of whom drowned or died of toxic fumes or serious burns. The authorities later said that arsonists probably started the fire.BEIJING — China reached a milestone in space exploration on Thursday, landing a vehicle on the far side of the moon for the first time in history, the country’s space agency announced.
+The landing of the probe, called Chang’e-4 after the moon goddess in Chinese mythology, is one in a coming series of missions that underscore the country’s ambitions to join — and even lead — the space race.
+China landed another rover on the moon in 2013, joining the United States and the Soviet Union as the only nations to have carried out a “soft landing” there, but the Chang’e-4 is the first to touch down on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from the Earth.
+The mission “has opened a new chapter in humanity’s exploration of the moon,” the China National Space Administration said in an announcement on its website. The agency said the spacecraft landed at 10:26 a.m. Beijing time at its target on the far side of the moon.“My office is next to the big training room. I often hear the surprised sounds of ‘Ah, ah, ah.’ ”
+YANG XIAO, an executive at Beyondsoft, which offers censorship services, largely provided by recent college graduates, to help companies stay on the right side of Chinese law.President Trump seems to think that his hard-line immigration stance is a political winner, s aying he’s willing to keep much of the government shut down in order to get funding for his border wall. Polls suggest voters don’t see this Mr. Trump’s way, and blame him, not the Democrats, for the impasse. With Democrats taking control of the House of Representatives on Thursday, he now has the excuse he needs to make a deal.
+But if he doesn’t compromise, if he instead continues to try to transform his once proudly pro-growth party into the anti-immigration party, he will threaten Republican prospects for a generation.
+November’s midterm elections provided a clear indication that Mr. Trump’s strident positions on immigration were not widely popular. Ignoring the pleas of top Republicans, the president made the elections a referendum on the issue, vowing to end birthright citizenship, sending the military to deal with a caravan of asylum seekers and championing fringe legislation to cut legal immigration in half.WASHINGTON — It has become a favorite parlor trick of President Trump’s, and on Wednesday, he was at it again, brandishing his latest letter from the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.
+“Those few people that I’ve shown this letter to,” Mr. Trump told reporters during a cabinet meeting, his voice trailing off as he waved three typewritten sheets in front of the cameras. “They’ve never written letters like that. This is a great letter. We’ve made a lot of progress with North Korea and Kim Jong-un.”
+If history is any guide, he will end up showing Mr. Kim’s letter to more than a few people. Mr. Trump delights in sharing with visitors the correspondence he has received from North Korea’s leader since they began writing to each other last year.
+Typically, according to people who have witnessed such displays, Mr. Trump calls to an assistant sitting just outside the Oval Office to bring him “the letters,” which he then fans out across the Resolute Desk so the people facing him can get a glimpse. They are translated into English and filled with flowery references to Mr. Trump as “Your Excellency.”Ms. Ayala, 48, died on June 17 of an embolism after the police say Ms. Castillo pumped silicone into her buttocks and thighs. Ms. Ayala had traveled from her home in Philadelphia to Ms. Castillo’s apartment on Seward Avenue for the illegal procedure.
+Ms. Castillo could not be reached for comment on Wednesday because she was being held in jail pending an arraignment. Her lawyer, Robert Osuna, said he had not yet read the criminal complaint and could not comment on it. “We’ll have to see what the charges allege,” he said.
+Buttock enhancement surgery, known as a “Brazilian butt lift,” has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years, driven in part by the allure of famously curvy pop-culture figures like Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian and Nicki Minaj, plastic surgeons say.
+Cardi B, the former exotic dancer turned hip-hop superstar, told GQ Magazine last year that she received silicone injections in her buttocks and thighs for $800 from an underground medical clinic in Queens. The injections, she said, were performed without painkillers and leaked for almost a week.
+In New York City, the authorities have seen a surge in illegal clinics catering to women who want to change their shapes but might not be able to afford a licensed plastic surgeon. The procedures can be fatal, as silicone injected directly into tissues in the legs can be carried by veins to the heart and lungs.“I’d love him to be a team player, possibly he won’t be,” Mr. Trump said. The president noted that he had endorsed Mr. Romney for the Senate, and Mr. Romney, in turn, had praised him “profusely.” Then Mr. Trump added that Mr. Romney’s words might not play well in Utah, where the president said he is extremely popular. (Mr. Trump is probably less popular in Utah than almost any largely Republican state.)
+He went on to criticize Mr. Romney’s race against Mr. Obama in 2012, and said that if Mr. Romney had fought Mr. Obama as hard as he has fought him, Mr. Romney might have won. And when asked if he were concerned about a primary challenge from Mr. Romney in 2020, Mr. Trump replied, “They say I am the most popular president in the history of the Republican Party.” (Actually, Mr. Trump’s approval rating among Republicans was 88 percent at 701 days into his term, according to Gallup, the same as President George W. Bush at the same point. Over all, Mr. Trump’s approval ratings among his own party have largely hovered below Mr. Bush’s.)
+Cabinet members know the value of praise.
+One by one, the president called on select cabinet members for their contributions to border security. One by one, they responded by praising their boss.
+Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, applauded his leadership on border security. She was followed by the acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, who saluted the president for giving up his Christmas and New Year’s holidays “while some members of Congress went on vacation.” Rick Perry, the energy secretary and a former governor of Texas, also praised the president, saying he had been rebuffed on border security from the Obama administration. “You’re standing up and saying don’t come,” Mr. Perry said.
+Not to be outdone, Vice President Mike Pence noted that he, too, stayed in Washington over the holidays. Then he, too, piled on the compliments: “I want to thank you for the strong stand you have taken on border security.”
+Syria and ISIS are on Mr. Trump’s mind.
+Mr. Trump was still stinging from criticism over his decision to withdraw American troops from Syria, lamenting that he was the only person who would get “bad publicity” for it. One rebuke in particular, from Mr. Mattis, seemed to prompt the president to issue some criticism of his own.
+“How has he done in Afghanistan? Not good. I’m not happy,” Mr. Trump said, before adding, “I wish him well. President Obama fired him and, essentially, so did I.” (Mr. Mattis resigned in protest, and Mr. Trump initially characterized the retired Marine general’s departure as a retirement.)“Obviously this is not our usual business.”
+With that, Coach Mike Tomlin of the Pittsburgh Steelers opened a season-ending news conference on Wednesday in which he addressed his team’s late-season collapse and the drama surrounding the superstar receiver Antonio Brown, all the while struggling to mask his discomfort.
+“Extremely disappointed,” Tomlin said in summation of the season. “I think that’s a succinct assessment of it. The fact that we’re actually standing in this room says it all.”
+The Steelers’ roller coaster of a season began with a 1-2-1 stretch, followed by a six-game winning streak that seemed to quell the early-season consternation, and then a collapse that dragged the team out of the playoff picture.
+But things hit a new low early this week when it became clear that Brown had missed Sunday’s win over Cincinnati not because of a knee injury, as the team had said, but rather for disciplinary reasons.The American arrested in Russia on suspicion of spying met with the United States ambassador on Wednesday, and the secretary of state said he would demand the man’s return if the detention was “not appropriate.”
+Russia’s domestic security agency said on Monday that it had detained the American, Paul N. Whelan, three days earlier “during an act of espionage,” a crime that in Russia can carry a term of up to 20 years in prison. The agency, the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., said it had opened a criminal case against Mr. Whelan but provided no other details.
+On Tuesday, the State Department said it was still waiting for Russian authorities to provide consular access to Mr. Whelan, a Marine Corps veteran whose family said he was in Moscow to attend a wedding.
+That access was granted on Wednesday, a State Department spokesperson said, when Ambassador Jon M. Huntsman Jr. visited Mr. Whelan at the Lefortovo Detention Facility in Moscow. Mr. Huntsman offered the American Embassy’s assistance, and later spoke with Mr. Whelan’s family by phone.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Tuesday about a looming schism between the Orthodox Christian churches in Ukraine and Russia misstated the title of the senior Moscow Patriarchate priest in Rivne, Ukraine. He is Bishop Pimen, not Archbishop Pimen.
+NEW YORK
+An article on Wednesday about Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s inaugural address referred incorrectly to the Cuomo family’s time in power. For those born in 1980, a Cuomo — either Mario or Andrew Cuomo — served as governor of New York for a majority of their life; this is not true of everyone born since 1980.
+•
+An article on Tuesday about new laws going into effect in 2019 misstated the legal age for buying cigarettes in New York City. It is 21, not 18.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Wednesday about Netflix’s decision to pull an episode of “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj” from its platform in Saudi Arabia misstated the name of an organization that has documented a crackdown on Saudi journalists. It is the Committee to Protect Journalists, not the Committee to Project Journalists.A man was charged with murder on Wednesday after he fatally shot a California police officer who pulled him over under the suspicion of drunken driving, the authorities said.
+The man, identified by the authorities as Gustavo Perez Arriaga, was arrested Friday after a manhunt that fueled tensions over illegal immigration when President Trump tweeted about it. The police say Mr. Perez Arriaga entered the United States illegally.
+On Wednesday, Mr. Perez Arriaga’s lawyer argued that he was mentally incompetent and unable to stand trial, delaying the criminal proceedings, said John Goold, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County district attorney.
+Mr. Perez Arriaga, who is in his 30s, is accused of shooting and killing Ronil Singh, a 33-year-old officer with the Newman Police Department, early on Dec. 26. The police said the shooting occurred after Officer Singh pulled Mr. Perez Arriaga’s vehicle over because he suspected that he was driving under the influence.45A: Note the spelling in this clue. “Boardom?” is not ennui in this clue. It’s the domicile of a boar, and the answer is PEN.
+4D: Clever wordplay in the clue “One who may help you keep your balance?” It is not someone spotting you in the gym, it’s a BANK TELLER.
+38D: There is no such thing as a “Lightweight boxer?” that is fully grown, but it might be lighter in weight if it is a PUP.
+55D: The “hits” in the clue “Subject of many ’60s hits?” are not music hits, but hits of LSD.
+Today’s Theme
+Yes, it’s a wall. That vertical line of black squares that divides the grid is a wall, and that wall, oddly enough, is meant to connect the theme entries at 19- and 20A, 35- and 37A and 50- and 52A.
+I figured out the theme at 50A as I was wandering around the grid wondering why some of my answers didn’t fit. It turns out that the wall dividing the grid is meant to be part of each theme answer. For example, at 50A, the answer — as written — to the clue “With 52-Across, commander at the First Battle of Bull Run” is STONE JACKSON. It’s actually meant to be read as STONE (WALL) JACKSON.That system evolved with the introduction of radio communications. Early transmissions were often of poor quality, so, to avoid misunderstandings, spelling alphabets were developed. Also called phonetic alphabets, they replaced letters with words that started with the corresponding letter.
+By World War II, the U.S. and British militaries had settled on a standard: Able for A, Baker for B … and Roger for R. (Previously, the British had used Robert.)
+In the 1950s, a new alphabet — commonly referred to as the NATO phonetic alphabet — was adopted, and is now the most widely used. It replaced Roger with Romeo. (I’m planning to stick with Roger.)
+Chris Stanford, on the briefings team, wrote today’s Back Story.
+Your Morning Briefing is published weekday mornings.
+Check out this page to find a Morning Briefing for your region. (In addition to our European edition, we have Australian, Asian and U.S. editions.)
+Sign up here to receive an Evening Briefing on U.S. weeknights, and here’s our full range of free newsletters.
+What would you like to see here? Contact us at europebriefing@nytimes.com.In a spaceflight first, China’s Chang’e-4 has landed where no spacecraft has touched down in one piece before: the far side of the moon.
+“This is a historic step in international scientific exploration of the moon, opening up the ‘Luna Incognita’ of the lunar far side to surface exploration for the first time,” said James Head, a planetary scientist at Brown University.
+If successful, the mission could answer fundamental questions about Earth’s only natural satellite. There are still mysteries, for example, about the moon’s formation and early evolution, which, in turn, hold clues to the history of the entire solar system.
+Additionally, the mission will conduct the first radio astronomy experiments from the moon’s far side and the first investigations to see whether plants can grow on the moon — a crucial step toward long-term human missions beyond Earth.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Good news, New Yorkers: You may no longer need $1 million to buy a middle-of-the-road Manhattan apartment.
+But just barely.
+Lest the financially average among us get too excited, the median price only fell to $999,000, dipping below $1 million in the last quarter of 2018, according to a report from Douglas Elliman.
+It was the first time the median price fell below seven figures since crossing the million-dollar listing threshold in 2015. A report from another firm, Brown Harris Stevens, noted a similar decline, but found the median apartment sale price to be $1,050,000.
+Still, taken together, the end-of-the-year data in both reports suggested that New York City’s real estate market continued the gradual slowdown that had characterized it for most of the year.MUD (2013) on Amazon, Google Play, Hulu, iTunes and Vudu. In small-town Arkansas, two boys, Ellis (Tye Sheridan) and Neckbone (Jacob Lofland), explore an island on the Mississippi River and make two discoveries: a boat wedged in a tree and a sun-kissed runaway who’s been living in it. That man, Mud (Matthew McConaughey), comes to rely on the boys as they supply him with food. He in turn supplies them with colorful stories in this coming-of-age drama from the director Jeff Nichols. In his review for The Times, A. O. Scott wrote: “Mr. Nichols’s screenplay is perhaps a little too heavily plotted, especially toward the end, when everything comes together neatly and noisily, but he more than compensates with graceful rhythm, an unfussy eye for natural beauty and a sure sense of character and place.”
+What’s on TV
+BEN-HUR (1959) 8 p.m. on TCM. Watch one of Hollywood’s biggest films on the small screen when TCM shows this epic, which turns 60 this year.It’s 2019. Time to look into your crystal ball and make some predictions.
+What do you think will happen this year? What do you think will happen globally, nationally or locally? What do you think will happen in your own personal life? Why?
+In “5G Is Coming This Year. Here’s What You Need to Know.” Don Clark writes about big changes in technology in the new year:
+In 2019, a big technology shift will finally begin. It’s a once-in-a-decade upgrade to our wireless systems that will start reaching mobile phone users in a matter of months. But this is not just about faster smartphones. The transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks — known as 5G for short — will also affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones and cars that send traffic data to one another. This new era will leap ahead of current wireless technology, known as 4G, by offering mobile internet speeds that will let people download entire movies within seconds and most likely bring big changes to video games, sports and shopping.
+More sobering, in “Nearly 132 Million People Will Need Aid, U.N. Says in 2019 Appeal,” Nick Cumming-Bruce writes:
+Nearly 132 million people will need aid and protection in 2019, the United Nations said on Tuesday, opening an appeal for about $25 billion as more and more people are displaced by conflicts and protracted conflicts absorb most of the assistance. Mark Lowcock, the United Nations aid coordinator, said that one out of every 70 people on Earth will need assistance next year in seeking an increase in donations of about 10 percent, even though relief agencies are becoming more efficient. “We need to make it a bigger priority in 2019 to address the underlying causes of crises — insecurity, conflict, poverty, development failures, inadequate adaptation and resilience to climate change,” he said.
+And in “A Peek at Your New Plate: How You’ll Be Eating in 2019,” Kim Severson writes:
+More vegetables. Improved gut bacteria. Cocktails with less alcohol. Many of the predictions about what we’ll eat and drink in 2019 point to a quiet, restorative and potentially grim time ahead. Then again, these forecasts always arrive carrying the clean, healthy pine scent of New Year’s resolutions. The good news: There will be cheese tea. And salad robots, according to the prognosticators.
+In the Opinion pages, “2019: The Year of the Wolves,” David Brooks writes:
+It will be a year of divided government and unprecedented partisan conflict. It will be a year in which Donald Trump is isolated and unrestrained as never before. And it will be in this atmosphere that indictments will fall, provoking not just a political crisis but a constitutional one. There are now over a dozen investigations into Trump’s various scandals. If we lived in a healthy society, the ensuing indictments would be handled in a serious way — somber congressional hearings, dispassionate court proceedings. Everybody would step back and be sobered by the fact that our very system of law is at stake.
+But you might also want to read articles that make predictions about the year ahead in economics (will the economy continue to grow?); sports (what team will win the Super Bowl?); culture (what will be the standout movies, music, television?) or other topics.
+Students, read some of these pieces, then tell us:
+— What predictions do you have about our world in 2019 in general?
+— What do you think will happen in global or U.S. politics? What economic predictions can you make?
+— What do you think could happen in the realms of culture, the arts, fashion and style? Be as specific as you can, especially about the aspects of culture that interest you most.
+— When it comes to your life and lives of your loved ones, what do you hope or believe will happen?
+— Which of your predictions worry you most? Which are most comforting? Why?
+— Do you have any milestones coming up this year, such as a significant birthday or a rite of passage such as a graduation? In general, what do you most look forward to in 2019?
+— Did you make any predictions last year? Did any come true in 2018?“Old rocker who can not sell enough tickets to their last gig need publicity,” Mr. Palmer wrote in a text message to Australia’s ABC News on Wednesday.
+He, too, threatened to sue.
+“I wrote the words personally that appear on our promotion and hold the copyright for those words,” The Sydney Morning Herald quoted Mr. Palmer as saying.
+If members of the band “attempt to use my lyrics in any of their songs, I’ll not hesitate to take legal proceedings against them,” he said. “As foreigners, they should stay out of Australian domestic politics and stay where they are. Aussies are not going to cop it at all!”
+This is not the first time Twisted Sister has clashed with politicians about the song, which, when it was released in 1984, struck a chord with its themes of rebellion and freedom of choice.
+Paul D. Ryan, the outgoing speaker of the United States House of Representatives, used it during his vice-presidential run with former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts in 2012. Mr. Snider’s statement at the time denouncing Mr. Ryan’s use of the song included the comment: “There is almost nothing on which I agree with Paul Ryan, except perhaps the use of the P90X,” referring to Mr. Ryan’s workout program.
+Mr. Snider did, however, allow Donald Trump to use the song in his presidential campaign. Mr. Snider told Newsweek that Mr. Trump was a friend and had asked him for permission, which he gave because Mr. Trump’s “rebelling” was in the song’s spirit. (Mr. Snider has since said that he was “not a fan of Trump’s style,” though he said the president was “not being given a chance.”)Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+bluff \ˈbləf\ noun, adjective and verb
+noun: a high steep bank (usually formed by river erosion) noun: the act of bluffing in poker; deception by a false show of confidence in the strength of your cards noun: pretense that your position is stronger than it really is adjective: very steep; having a prominent and almost vertical front adjective: bluntly direct and outspoken but good-natured verb: deceive an opponent by a bold bet on an inferior hand with the result that the opponent withdraws a winning hand verb: frighten someone by pretending to be stronger than one really is
+_________
+The word bluff has appeared in 183 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Dec. 10 in “Stephen Curry Doubts Moon Landings. NASA Offers to Show Him the Rocks” by Benjamin Hoffman:
+Curry is far from being alone in expressing skepticism that the moon landing actually occurred, but NASA has worked hard to show through scientific evidence that it accomplished a feat that no other country could. And it is that competitive spirit among countries that the agency says should help confirm that it could not have faked the endeavor. “There are answers to all the questions raised by the nonbelievers,” the agency says on its website, “but one of the strongest arguments is that all the Apollo missions were independently tracked by England and Russia (our allies and enemies), both of whom sent letters of congratulations after the moon landings. In the midst of a heated space race, the Russians would have called our bluff if the landings had not actually happened.”
+_________Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• During a contentious White House meeting, President Trump rejected Democratic leaders’ proposals for reopening the government while the two sides iron out their spending differences, saying he would look “foolish” if he compromised. The shutdown, which affects 800,000 government workers, has entered its 13th day.
+• As Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont prepares for a 2020 presidential run, complaints of sexual harassment and pay disparity by staff members on his 2016 campaign have started to circulate. His failure to address these issues could hinder a second run at the White House.
+• Representative Nancy Pelosi is about to become House speaker again. She will be the first lawmaker to hold the office twice in more than half a century.LONDON — Tragedy is the order of the day on the London stage right now, and by the end of the uninterrupted 100 minutes of Mark Ravenhill’s “The Cane,” an intimate, tightly contained drama has acquired a seismic force.
+The three-character play, and the director Vicky Featherstone’s pitch-perfect production, are on the main stage of the Royal Court Theater through Jan. 26. And yet a continued life seems all but guaranteed for this latest offering from the writer of “Shopping and … ,” the provocative play with the unprintable title that began at the Court in 1996 before moving to the West End and Off Broadway.
+A domestic drama, a societal indictment and a report from the battered front line of education, “The Cane” charts a trajectory from celebration to vilification. Edward (Alun Armstrong, bruised and bruising) is preparing for his retirement party at the state school where he has worked for nearly a half-century. No teacher, Edward’s fretful wife, Maureen (Maggie Steed), informs us early on, has been so loved.
+If Maureen’s comment is to be believed, how then to explain the gathering hordes (unseen) of student protesters who have arrived at the couple’s home in such numbers that neither spouse feels able to go outside? Edward’s crime, it seems, is to have administered caning back in the day when that time-honored British custom was still the norm. (The practice was outlawed in state schools in 1986 and in private institutions more than a decade later.)Have you ever been rejected or failed at something you worked hard on? How did you handle the situation?
+How do you feel about the experience, looking back on it now? Did you learn anything? Did it help you grow as a person in any way? If so, how?
+What advice would you give to your future self for the next time you face rejection?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out how this comedian handled getting rejected 101 times in 2018.Geoffrey D. Langlands, a British officer who stayed in Pakistan after his military service ended and became one of the country’s most celebrated educators, died on Wednesday at a hospital in Lahore. He was 101.
+His death was confirmed by Aitchison College, Pakistan’s most prestigious boarding school, in Lahore. Mr. Langlands spent 25 years there as a teacher and later a headmaster.
+In more than six decades of teaching mathematics and English, sometimes in regions rife with violence, Mr. Langlands, commonly known as “the Major,” guided the children of Pakistan’s elite to top careers. His students included Zafarullah Khan Jamali, a former prime minister, and Imran Khan, the current prime minister.
+“He stood out,” Mr. Khan said of Mr. Langlands, the subject of a Saturday Profile in The New York Times in 2012. “He had this mixture of being firm yet compassionate.”Before reading the article:
+It is a new year and a new Congress — with a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives — begins this week. But many issues and challenges remain from 2018.
+One major one is the partial shutdown of the U.S. federal government, which began on Dec. 22.
+What do you know about the shutdown?
+(Read a short explanation in “The Wall and the Shutdown, Explained” and click here to see which government agencies and services are affected.)
+Now, watch this short video: “What Happens When the Government Shuts Down?”
+Next, read the article, “In Newly Divided Government, Who Will Control the Political Agenda?” and answer the following questions:
+1. The authors write, “America will get its first taste of divided government under President Trump this week when a Democratic House tries to wrest control of the political agenda from Mr. Trump, who appears determined to keep the focus on border security, immigration and his ‘big, beautiful’ wall.” How is the U.S. government divided? How will America “taste” this division?Ken Van Sickle will never forget the day in 1955 when he became a photographer. He was in Paris, where he’d moved shortly after finishing his military service in Korea, to study painting. One day in the Luxembourg Gardens, while sketching with a friend, he had an epiphany.
+“My friend said, ‘Your painting isn’t that good, but your photography really is,’” Mr. Van Sickle, 87, recalled. “I almost immediately understood he was right.”
+Mr. Van Sickle soon gave up painting and began seriously pursuing photography instead. Over the next year, he shot about 60 rolls of film in bars and cafes, at parties and clubs and in streets and parks. As he developed his photographic sensibility, he formed a portrait of the kind of artistic, carefree life that has long drawn expats to the City of Light.New York has gone to the dogs, but the rabbits and rhinos aren’t far behind in their assault.
+With little fanfare, Gillie and Marc Schattner, married Australian artists, have marshaled their brash bronze menagerie up and down Avenue of the Americas from Greenwich Village to Rockefeller Center, along Astor Place and over to Downtown Brooklyn. Their anthropomorphic statues — genteel Weimaraners, ladylike hares and gymnastic wildlife — are leaving behind indelible pawprints in the duo’s covert conquest of New York sidewalks. And in the process, the Schattners have become the most prolific creators of public art in the city’s history, to the dismay of leading art historians.
+“Nothing we’ve done has ever really been planned,” Mr. Schattner, 57, said during a December Skype call from their studio in Sydney. Improvisation is a running theme for the couple, who first met on a shoot in Hong Kong (Gillie was the model and Marc the creative director) before eloping to the foothills of Mount Everest for a Hindu marriage just seven days later, jilting their respective fiancés.
+[Tell us how you feel about public art in your city]
+Still, it’s a modest explanation for a pair who have received eight art commissions on the streets since 2016, half of them on public land. It’s an unprecedented pace for a city whose cultural programs come wrapped in streams of bureaucratic red tape. (It took Christo and Jeanne-Claude, by comparison, 30 years of efforts to win approval for “The Gates” in Central Park.) And in August, Gillie and Marc, as they are known, plan to unveil their most ambitious project yet, at Rockefeller Plaza: 10 “Statues for Equality” will depict powerful women, including Beyoncé and Angelina Jolie. The Schattners said that their project intends to highlight the gender gap in the city’s public statues, of which only 3 percent are of women.Maybe the markets were not overreacting.
+With the United States economy posting solid numbers last year, the alarming signals coming out of stock and bond markets seemed out of whack with the real world. President Trump’s bellicose trade actions were a concern, but hiring was strong and corporate earnings were surging.
+But this week, companies have issued warnings about the health of their businesses that suggest investors were right to be worried about growth. On Wednesday, Apple reduced its revenue expectations for the first time in 16 years, citing weak iPhone sales in China. On Thursday, Delta Air Lines said its fare revenue, while growing, would fall short of the company’s earlier forecast. And the American manufacturing sector slowed sharply last month, according to a closely watched index released Thursday.
+In the coming weeks, scores of companies will report their fourth-quarter results. A senior White House economics official acknowledged that there could be a torrent of bad news from corporate America.
+“It’s not going to be just Apple,” Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told CNN on Thursday. “There are a heck of a lot of U.S. companies that have a lot of sales in China that are basically going to be watching their earnings be downgraded next year until we get a deal with China.”‘EVE ATE THE APP LES AND SAW THE LIE’
+— From the poem “STO RIS,” in Nasser Hussain’s “SKY WRI TEI NGS” (Coach House Books, 2018, Page 19). Hussain, a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University, is also the author of “Boldface.”
+Airport codes — the three-letter, all-caps abbreviations we know from our boarding passes — are awkward little knuckles of language. They look like acronyms but are not. Although they are technically abbreviations, sometimes they hardly even hint at the word they are abbreviating. (OKC makes sense for Oklahoma City, but why on earth is Newark EWR?) They are at once bureaucratic and expressive — dry little formulas that conjure whole real places. Alphabetically speaking, ANC to BAH takes us almost no distance at all. In the real world, however, it is a journey from the ice of Alaska to the sand of Bahrain.
+While most of us use airport codes only functionally, Nasser Hussain uses them poetically. Out of the raw material of these unpromising nuggets, he has assembled, ingeniously, an entire book of poems.
+Hussain recreates everything from humdrum airline language (“WEL CUM ABO ARD/ KNO SMO KIN”) to Bible stories. The sacrifice of Isaac becomes “ABE MAY AXE/ ISA ACS ARM/ BUT JAH LET ABE OFF.” A tour de force account of Noah’s ark features a long roll call of animals: “GET DOS . . . COW AND CUB/ BEE AND BOA/ YAK AND LEO/ DOE AND DOG.” It is powerful to see these foundational myths reconstituted out of bureaucratic mundanity — like a model of the human genome built out of Legos.It is doubtless upsetting to hit a bird or animal, and many people swerve to avoid them. Others don’t, either because the circumstances would make swerving dangerous or because — whether through indifference or rationality — they don’t accept that responsibility for the situation lies in their hands. The driving situation, in other words, does not legislate for the behavior of animals, and so it is not the individual driver’s job to avoid them. The car itself, of course, is designed to protect the people inside it, not the objects that cross its path. The airbag that cushions the driver in the event of a collision does not have its exterior equivalent to cushion the thing being collided with. Yet in its weight and hardness, its velocity and power, the car is a more or less invincible aggressor. Nothing soft and living stands a chance against it. When cars were first invented, the number of people and animals they hit was proportionately extremely high: The car was not yet a reality that could be anticipated and avoided, to such an extent that early cars had to have a person walking in front of them waving a red flag. An analogy might be that if rocks suddenly began falling from the sky, many people would be hit by rocks before they developed systems and strategies to protect themselves. Yet around here at least, these systems are rudimentary compared with the cars’ own advancements in speed and comfort and passenger safety.
+It is often regretted that children can no longer play or move freely outside because of the dangers of traffic; inevitably, many of the people who voice these regrets are also the drivers of cars, as those same restricted children will come to be in their time. What is being mourned, it seems, is not so much the decline of an old world of freedom as the existence of comforts and conveniences the individual feels powerless to resist, and which in any case he or she could not truthfully say they wished would be abolished. There is a feeling, nonetheless, of loss, and it may be that the increasing luxury of the world inside the car is a kind of consolation for the degradation of the world outside it.
+Because of family circumstances, during the past couple of years I have had to drive frequently to the city and back. Emerging from the countryside, I am often startled by the ceaseless flow of heavy traffic. It seems incredible to me that so many people could be pursuing their private aims in this public way. But are cars people?
+The spectacle of mass movement can look like something unstoppable, yet it is the easiest thing in the world to impede the flow of traffic or to bring it to a halt. On my route, there are long stretches of motorway, and the traffic is always thickening or lengthening as it meets and then absorbs an obstruction. It doesn’t take much for this thickening to become an actual blockage. The sense of embroilment usually comes without any knowledge of what has caused it: Often the first sign of it is an increase in awareness of the individual identity of other drivers. The forward-flying host begins to be differentiated; cars that seemed anonymous and distant become closer and more familiar; a web of recognition begins to form itself. The phase of community that follows — lacking any redeeming narrative or central event — is more or less indistinguishable from mutual entrapment. In this context, the difference between a car and a person is not entirely clear. Moments earlier, the car was the disguise for, and the enlargement of, the driver’s will. Shortly, when the traffic stops, it will become his burden and his prison. But during the phase of transition, their mutual relationship seems more biological, a kind of linked separateness.
+All sorts of things can cause the traffic to stop: an accident, a scene at the side of the road. It’s often surprising how minor these dramas are, compared to the size and extent of their consequences. Their power is cumulative; it arises from the number of people exposed to the incident, however trivial. I once talked to a man who specialized in patterns of traffic flow, and he showed me a set of diagrams illustrating how the merest distraction in one place, something so small that it would cause passers-by to briefly glance at it and therefore unconsciously decrease their speed, could over time result in the whole motorway coming to a standstill in another place miles away.
+The drama of the road, once you have been observing and participating in it for a number of years, can be seen to change and develop. New themes arise or die out; new narratives emerge and either progress or fade away again; certain behaviors grow widespread and occasionally take hold. In Britain, for instance, the fast lane of the motorway is increasingly full of people driving slowly, while the other two lanes are often more or less empty. On a motorway, it might be said that you ought to know your place: Here, increasingly, it is clear that a majority of people — wrongly or otherwise — believe that place to be the fast lane. This belief, and the behavior that attends it, has numerous consequences, one of which is that it is now almost impossible to get quickly where you want to go. Rather than representing an opportunity for passing, the fast lane is dominated by the person going most slowly, who dictates the speed at which everything behind him is traveling.It’s no mere coincidence that Jeffrey R. Brown, the dean of the Gies College of Business, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is also a scholar of risk management. At his first faculty meeting four years ago, Brown fretted that his school had become, like many American universities, overly dependent on a single source of money — roughly a fifth of tuition revenue came from Chinese students. “I saw our reliance on China as a risk,” says Brown, noting that 800 or so of the university’s nearly 5,800 Chinese students attend the business school. “At the time, I was concerned that China could pull the plug on students coming to America. But then the U.S. political landscape shifted, and we were vulnerable to changing visa and immigration policies here, too. Both were threats we could not control.”
+Brown approached the problem as a risk manager, which meant doing what no school has been known to do before: buying insurance to protect against a sudden drop in Chinese enrollment. The three-year policy requires the university to pay $424,000 annually for up to $60 million in coverage. The insurer, Lloyd’s of London, will pay out a claim if a specific incident — a visa ban because of a government action, for example — causes the number of Chinese students in the colleges of business and engineering to decline by 18.5 percent over a 12-month period. The political risks have only grown since the policy went into effect. The trade war with China, visa restrictions and the anti-immigrant rhetoric coming from the White House are making it more complicated for international students to come to America. “It’s a tough environment right now,” Brown says. But the insurance gives him peace of mind. The school continues to invest in China, he says, but now “with the confidence that we are not doubling down on risk.”
+Over the past decade, the explosion in the number of international students has turned education, almost by stealth, into one of the most vital American exports. The idea that a student taking classes in Iowa City or Ann Arbor can be counted as an export might seem strange. In economic terms, however, the student’s situation is not so different from, say, a Japanese company buying American soybeans: Foreign money flows into the United States from abroad — except that in this case, the product doesn’t leave the country.
+Nearly 1.1 million international students attended American colleges and universities in 2017. They generated $42.4 billion in export revenue, more than double the amount eight years ago, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. (Because far fewer Americans study abroad, the United States ran a $34.2 billion surplus in education in 2017.) Nafsa, a nonprofit group that supports international education, estimates that students from abroad created or sustained more than 455,000 jobs in the United States, almost nine times the number of American coal miners. The value of education is almost double the revenue from America’s top agricultural export in 2017, soybeans ($21.6 billion). When other student spending is factored in — food, cars, clothes — education’s total export value rivals that of pharmaceuticals ($51 billion) and automobiles ($53 billion). “In the public at large, there’s little awareness that higher education is one of America’s biggest exports,” says Rajika Bhandari, senior adviser for research and strategy at the Institute of International Education. “Or that this export drives American competitiveness.”“Talk to kids about how other people feel,” says Markus Paulus, a professor of developmental psychology at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. To foster empathic behavior like sharing, helping and comforting others in a child, guide them into the inner world of feelings — their own and those of others. Paulus thinks one study beautifully illustrates this process: Researchers watched parents reading picture books to their toddlers and found that the children who were asked more often to label and reflect on emotions in the pictures tended to share more quickly and more often.
+Paulus recently conducted a set of studies in which 3-to-6-year-olds were presented with various sharing situations involving colored balloons and stickers. Asking them to imagine what it feels like for another child to be shared with, or not shared with, prompted them to be more generous. He found that preschoolers actually expected to feel happiness after sharing; the more happiness they anticipated, the more likely they were to share.
+For better or worse, children are watching you for cues on how to behave among human groups. Let them see you be bighearted. Find ways to embody generosity. Donating money is great, but with very young children, it doesn’t really count as teachable, imitable behavior unless you’re collecting it in a jar and carrying it with your child down to the homeless shelter. “You’re a better role model if you really show concrete behaviors rather than just doing your charity remotely online by pressing a button to transfer money,” Paulus says.
+Before they even start school, children begin building their moral identities. A 4-year-old shown pictorial representations of inequality will distribute more resources to the person pictured with less and fewer to the person with more. Cultivate that nascent drive to make the world a more equitable place. Find small, daily ways to practice sharing. “Encourage helping behavior,” Paulus says. Researchers have found that 11-to-25-month-olds who were motivated by caregivers to assist in tasks at home were more likely to be helpful as they got older. “To become an aspect of your identity,” Paulus says, “something needs to be a part of your routine.”The guy with the alligator in his pants never made it to Instagram and neither did the man with Ziploc bags of vodka taped to his thighs. But the supermarket-grade meat slicer someone tried to pack in a carry-on did make a social media appearance (and quickly garnered over 4,100 likes). Though it may not always seem so to followers of the Transportation Security Administration’s wildly popular (and currently unmanaged ) Instagram feed, standards apply to what it can post.
+The T.S.A. is, after all, a federal agency, one with a multibillion dollar budget and over 57,000 employees and the daunting task of safeguarding the skies. Screeners at airports are considered “essential” employees and are working without pay in the government shutdown — although, according to CNN, “hundreds” are now calling in sick, many for practical reasons (child care, work that pays their bills).
+And challenges for those workers ramp up this time of year when, over a two-week period that starts before Christmas and ends just after New Year’s Day, an estimated 41 million harried travelers shed belts and shoes, grudgingly remove both laptops and liquids from their luggage — and also, not infrequently, fail to recall that they have tucked a loaded pistol, say, or a pet tarantula or some throwing stars in their carry-ons.It was a dream job, visiting the globe’s most alluring destinations on assignment. Here’s what our 2018 Traveler learned in a year of almost nonstop travel.
+The man on the train platform who spoke only Hindi looked at my ticket and chuckled. This had been one of those days when mistakes piled up faster than I could track them.
+I had tarried too long in Chandigarh, India, and the four-hour taxi ride back to New Delhi now promised to be a six-hour slog in traffic. No problem, I could take a train instead, I thought, only to run out of money on my cellphone SIM card just as I was booking a last-minute ticket. I hopped in a tuk tuk and raced to the station, and got there five minutes after the last fast train had left for the night.
+When I started this harebrained experiment in January, to visit and report on the Times’s entire 52 Places to Go in 2018 list, I thought that by stop 48, for sure, I’d be the Wonder Woman of travel: blocking mishaps with a flick of my wrist. Instead I was staring down a 2 a.m. arrival in New Delhi before having to force myself awake for a morning plane to Bhutan.
+But there was the man on the platform — a waiter for the railway, whose job it is to pass out dinners — flashing a gesture that seemed to mean, “Don’t worry, I’ve got you.” I had bought an “unreserved” ticket, which I thought was for people who’d had trouble purchasing online, but which really meant I’d likely have to stand for five hours.
+But when the train pulled in, the man talked to the conductor and ushered me into a sleeper car. English-speakers all around jumped in to interpret. Seven dollars in fines and upgrade fees later, I was sitting in a cluster of bunks with four boisterous 20-something women from New Delhi.
+The words “dream job” come up whenever I tell people about the 52 Places project. Like the thousands of others who answered that fateful job listing — travel the world for The New York Times! — I had a vision of winning a journalism lottery, of getting to leave behind my routine to swim in waterfalls in Australia, paraglide off mountaintops in Switzerland and eat at Michelin-starred restaurants in France. And I got to do all of those things, for which I am incredibly grateful.
+I’ve also had to face reality: that constant travel — alone — on an illogical route no sane human would plan, might take a toll on my physical and mental well-being. That The Times, quite reasonably, expected me to do work and file stories, which meant spending a lot of time in beautiful destinations in front of a computer. That I’d make gaffes along the way and have to weather the sting of valid criticism. That I’d meet new friends only to have to say goodbye a few days later. And that I’d be mostly celibate, miss the births of four close friends’ babies, forget to call my parents. That I’d reach the end, and all I’d want is to do it over again.
+I started out, arms laden with recommendations and highlights, determined to do every one of them: Eat all the food in New Orleans, hike to the sea cave everyone goes to in Tasmania, visit every mountain temple in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Yet what I remember most are the small wins and human connections. The kind people and delicious salchipapas (deconstructed hot dogs with French fries) at a Peruvian food truck on the highway outside Disney Springs, Fla. The man in Lucerne, Switzerland, who returned my laptop when I left it on a bridge in the rain. That army of concerned citizens in Chandigarh.
+Trust has been the through-line that has emerged from it all. Trust in myself, trust in the fundamental goodness of people, trust that as a solo female traveler, I could watch my back without walling myself off from experiences.
+You see, it was a dream job. It’s just that my idea of what made this dream job dreamy has changed so much.
+Total Distance Traveled Approximately 74,900 miles
+or one third of the way to the moon
+Lesson No. 1: A year is short
+I was going on 40, feeling sad about being single, and contemplating a sabbatical from New York Magazine, where I’d worked for 17 years, when I clicked on The New York Times home page and saw something curious: A job listing in the most-read articles list. Did I want to travel around the world and document it? it asked. Sure I did! So did pretty much everyone. By the time I saw the listing, 3,500 people had already applied. The final number, they tell me, was 13,000.
+The odds were so impossible and the selection process so mysterious that I couldn’t allow myself to get too excited. And then I got the incredible phone call telling me I had three weeks to pack up my apartment, say goodbye to everyone I knew, quit a workplace that felt like family and set out for a year on the road.
+All through my 20s and 30s, I had watched friends move to London or West Africa, or quit their jobs and travel, and wondered how they possibly had the confidence to do it. I had made the huge, scary leap from New Mexico to New York City after college because it was the one big city I knew, and I had family there. And then I stayed at the same workplace, building a career I loved while living in a series of closet-size walk-ups and earning barely enough money to go home for the holidays.
+“Why do you think they picked you?” interviewers often asked me, and I didn’t know the answer. I suspected it was because I hadn’t done anything like this before. I’d never been brave enough. And maybe I could be a representative for those who didn’t think they were brave enough, either.
+Getting on that first plane to New Orleans, I felt as though I were stepping into an unknowable void from which there was no return. The first few months were tough. Five stops in, and behind on my writing, I wound up in Bogotá, Colombia, still needing to file my articles on Montgomery, Ala. (stop No. 3) and Disney Springs, Fla. (stop No. 4). I spent three straight days in my Bogotá hotel, losing precious time to report on and photograph the city. The one day I got outside, I took a taxi 30 minutes to the museum I wanted to see and realized I’d left my wallet back at the hotel.
+And I just lost it.
+I called a dear friend of mine who works for The Wall Street Journal and has made many a global move, and sobbed.
+“I know this feels daunting right now,” she said, “but you have to remember that a year is short.”
+I argued that this was the longest year of my life, and it was only February, and she didn’t know what she was talking about. But the saying stuck in my head and acquired new meaning whenever I’d hear myself complain about this wondrous opportunity.
+Freezing down to your bones and sleeping in a by-the-hour motel where you shower while sitting on the toilet? Suck it up! You’re about to see the rainbow hills of Zhangye, China! A year is short.
+Freezing again and dinner is bar nuts because you waited past 8 p.m., when all the restaurants close? You just rode a horse in Iceland! A year is short.
+Car got towed in Auckland, New Zealand, while on your third trip to the Chinese consulate trying to get a visa? But you’re in New Zealand! And you’re going to China! A year is short.
+A year is short and a year is not enough.
+A year is short, and I was strong, and the risk had always been worth it.
+Clockwise from top right: The Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia; the Bürgenstock Hotel at Bürgenstock Resort, in Lucerne, Switzerland; the Coral Coast of Fiji; and a chinchorro, or small informal bar, in Santurce, Puerto Rico. Jada Yuan/The New York Times
+Lesson No. 2: Know thy logistical self
+My 27-hour travel day from Kanazawa, Japan, to India, was one of the trickiest of the year and I had gamed it out to the minute: A 4 a.m. taxi to the Kanazawa station, where I’d pick up luggage I’d left in a locker; a six-hour train ride with two transfers, arriving at the Osaka airport with a generous two and a half hours to check in for my flight. I’d filled out the longest form in the world to get my India eVisa and paid to get it expedited. And I had a ticket for onward travel to Bhutan, having anticipating that India would require me to show I’d booked travel to exit the country before I could get on the plane in Japan.
+Then the AirAsia ticket counter woman asked if I had a paper copy of my eVisa. I hadn’t thought to print it out. Nowhere else in the world, in 47 stops, had I needed to show anything but my phone at a check-in counter.
+She couldn’t let me on the flight without it, she said. Check-in was closing in 20 minutes. After a mad scramble, I ended up in line at a Family Mart convenience store behind a woman printing out what looked like a 40-page dissertation, watching as the clock ticked down. The complicated printer setup required downloading an app to my phone, and by the time I had printed it out, I’d missed the deadline by 15 minutes.
+I raced up two flights of escalators and down several long corridors, carrying the bags I hadn’t been allowed to check, prepared to beg the ticket agent for leniency. By some miracle the line was still open. I handed everything over, smiling with relief, and then looked up to see my plane was on a 2-hour delay.
+So like any reasonable person, I went back to the Family Mart and bought a basket full of sushi snacks and tea-flavored Kit Kats, plus a beer to take the edge off.
+I’d estimate that at least 60 percent of this job was dealing with logistics. And I even had a helper back in New York, who would research hotels and flights for me.
+Every country is different, with different currencies and different languages, a different pace and different cultural customs. An unreserved train ticket means one thing in India and another in Spain. Had I done cursory research on the dual-island African nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, I would have known to show up with a wad of euros, because the society is completely cash-based and there are no ATMs foreigners can use.
+At first, I tried following travel conventions that had worked for me on one-off trips: booking planes and hotels in advance, picking the absolute cheapest fares, guarding against delays by taking 6 a.m. flights, which are the least likely to be canceled. Then four 6 a.m. flights in a row, with the necessary 3 a.m. wake-up calls, turned me into a zombie.
+I started listening to my rhythms. I am a night owl, for one, happy to wake up for sunrises but usually not for planes. Inflexible travel plans give me anxiety, particularly when they were coupled with work deadlines.
+The trip had been planned to go from west to east, minimizing jet lag, but some time zone changes knocked me out. The 24-hour travel day from Zambia to Darwin, Australia, knocked me out for days.
+I’ve become far calmer from having to deal with mishap after mishap, and realizing that nothing dire usually happens. There would be another plane, and more trains if I missed that one, too. Maybe I’d lose a day, but when you’re on the road this long, time becomes malleable, too.
+Longest Journey 6,881 miles
+Zambia to Top End, Australia
+Lesson No. 3: Develop your superpower
+“So what countries are you going to?” asked Tina Phillips, a nurse at Passport Health in Orlando, Fla., which issues vaccinations and prescriptions for travelers who might encounter infectious diseases like malaria, rabies or Japanese encephalitis.
+I started listing off my 52 Places destinations. Ms. Phillips typed the country names into the computer, her eyes widening as she laughed at the absurdity. She sent me home with several needle sticks in my arm, $1,100 in preventive medicine, a video message telling my mother not to worry, and a spiral-bound printout of all my health vulnerabilities.
+One of my biggest fears going into this project was getting sick, or injured, and having to come home early — or worse, having something happen while I was in a remote location without access to adequate medical care. Getting sick is painful, and often gross, but what worried me more was the potential time suck on a trip so tightly scheduled that it would go off the rails if I spent days groaning on a hotel bathroom floor.
+My waistline has expanded and diminished throughout this trip, but the medical kits I built so meticulously before I left the U.S. have remained largely untouched in my suitcase. It’s a stash so extensive that a customs officer at the ferry entrance to Tangier, Morocco, spent an hour threatening, in Arabic, to confiscate it and accusing me of being a drug dealer.
+Instead, I discovered I have a superpower, which may be the sole reason I’ve stayed relatively healthy: the ability to sleep anywhere, under any conditions. Give me a window seat on an airplane and I’ll be lights out before takeoff, no earplugs, eye mask or neck pillow.
+I’d fall asleep in hotels on noisy streets as dogs barked all night, and in 20-minute chunks, regulated by an alarm, between writing paragraphs of articles on an all-nighter. In Tangier, two friends who joined me started looking like death because of hourlong prayer calls outside our windows every morning at 4 a.m. I didn’t even notice them.
+But the only times I’ve gotten really sick were the colds I caught in Seville, Spain, and Chandigarh after extensive sleep deprivation. I warded them off with a lot of naps.
+Longest Stay 12 days
+Route of Parks, Chile
+Lesson No. 4: Try it
+The rain in Chilean Patagonia never really seemed to stop. Every article of clothing I owned was soaked. Soppy socks, soppy shoes. The weather matched my mood. Earlier that week, I’d called my friend crying yet again, and told her I wanted to quit — I was so far behind in writing it felt like I was drowning in obligations I couldn’t meet.
+What do people do when it rains like this? I asked the hotel manager in the national park, Parque Pumalín. “We do what we always do,” he said. “If we stopped for rain, nothing would ever get done.”
+So, in a small break in the rain, I went out to do what I always do: take pictures, talk to people, get to know the place.
+I was in the tiny town of Chaitén, which had been leveled by a volcanic eruption 10 years earlier. Residents had come back, but the buildings closest to the slope were still abandoned. I went to examine the ghost town. A few friendly construction workers were rebuilding a house, a school. I wandered further, to an industrial building that had been overtaken by jungle growth straight out of “Jurassic Park.”
+The rain started up again while I was inside, exploring the concrete corridors and coming to the realization that I was inside an abandoned prison.
+And now I was trapped by torrential rain.
+For two hours I watched the rain flood the dirt streets before me, and the inside of this prison. I tweeted out my location, just in case. Then my phone’s battery died, and it was just me and the torrent, alone in the wilds of Patagonia, with the sun going down.
+I had to make a decision, and the decision was to run, through the rain. And in that rain, soaked and running, I looked around, at the blue-tinged mountains around me, and the jungle shrubs on all sides, and the kind people laughing at this silly foreigner who’d gotten caught in an abandoned prison in the rain, and realized that all the rest was superfluous. This was why I was here.
+Something crystallized for me in that moment, of how singular this trip was. I started trying things: I jumped off a 30-foot cliff into freezing river water while “canyoning” in Megève, France; scuba dived and surfed for the first time in Fiji; and maybe scariest of all, tried a taco with a crispy-fried ant at Gustu in La Paz, Bolivia.
+Two days ago, my friend Ben saw a dish on the menu of a barbecue joint in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, he thought I should try to commemorate making it to my 52nd place.
+“Come on,” he said. “After this you can tell everyone you tried Fried Spicy Cow Penis.”
+The whole table agreed to join me. We ordered it and the kitchen brought out Fried Spicy Beef instead. “We changed it for you!” they said, cheerily.
+“Awesome,” said Ben. “We also want this one.”
+The dish came out. It looked exactly as you would imagine. Ben ate a piece. Then it was my turn. We have video evidence. I know I said, “try it,” but you don’t need to try that one. I did it for you. You’re welcome.
+Lowest Point About 30 feet below sea level
+Scuba diving in Fiji
+Lesson No. 5: Learn what safe means to you
+Eurydice Dixon, 22, Melbourne, Australia; June 13.
+Mollie Tibbetts, 20, Brooklyn, Iowa; July 18.
+Wendy Karina Martinez, 35, Washington, D.C.; Sept. 18.
+Carla Stefaniak, 36, San Jose, Costa Rica; Nov. 28.
+Grace Millane, 22, Auckland, New Zealand; Dec 1.
+Maren Ueland, 28, and Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, Imlil, Morocco; Dec. 21.
+Those are the names, ages, places and dates of death of seven women who were violently murdered while walking home, jogging, hiking or taking a birthday trip this year.
+Of all the news that has filtered across my phone screen while I’ve been bouncing around the world, none had the potential to throw me into a paralytic spiral more than reading about a woman killed simply because she was alone.
+“Was there ever a time you felt unsafe?” a friend asked me recently. The answer was no, not like I have been in the past, when I escaped attackers in my Williamsburg, Brooklyn, neighborhood or on a trip to France; and also, “Always.”
+Caution as a solo female traveler is healthy; blind fear is not. I find that for me the best system is to always remember that I am a tourist. It’s good to know what people who live in a place have to say about safety, but also realize that the rules that apply to them, who know where they are going, and can blend in, don’t apply to me.
+I’ve had to sacrifice areas of coverage I might otherwise enjoy, like night life, because I didn’t feel safe going out alone. For the one destination that was all about going out, in Belgrade, Serbia, I hired a translator-guide to keep me company, who became a fast friend. In Bogotá, I met a young female professor through Instagram who took me out with her friends for a night.
+There’s a literal extra cost to being a woman traveling on your own. In cities where safety seemed like it might be an issue, I took cabs and Ubers rather than cheaper public transport. Climbing up certain mountains or going around certain cities, I opted for a guide, and often paid extra because most private tours have a two-person minimum.
+At one point, I got delayed arriving at an Airbnb I’d booked in Glasgow, and had to retrieve the key, after midnight, from a lockbox attached to a fence on a dark side street. A man, clearly on something, swayed back and forth about 20 feet away, as I fumbled with the combination while also trying to keep an eye on my bags. When I got inside, the apartment was lovely, but the building looked like it had been through a bombing and never recovered. Certain landings, including mine, had no lights, and glass covered the floor from broken windows. I was hanging out with a local travel writer who usually walked me home at night, but if he hadn’t been there, no one would have known my whereabouts.
+After that I vowed to stay only in hotels with 24-hour front desks rather than rental apartments.
+The idea of dating in a strange land quickly went out the window — I didn’t have time and it didn’t seem safe. But I didn’t swear off romantic leanings entirely. All told I had four make-out sessions all year, all in public or under what felt like very safe circumstances. Those seem like little miracles.
+Highest Point 13,600 feet above sea level
+La Paz, Bolivia
+Lesson No. 6: Still, talk to strangers
+Oh, the stories of strangers that I could tell.
+In Montgomery, there was Marcus, an Uber driver who’d grown up in what he described as “abject poverty,” who gave me an inspired lecture on his city’s complicated racial history. We picked up his neighbor, a nurse, from work, as he does every night, and finished with a feast at Applebee’s.
+In Puerto Rico, there was Blandine, a travel agent who’d greeted me dancing and singing by the baggage carousel, a few months after Hurricane Maria, when much of the island was without power. A farmer, Elmer Sánchez, mentioned a party to me and my friend, and we showed up to find at least 400 people dancing to the best musicians in the country playing by the light of a generator.
+In Ypres, Belgium, there were the countless people attending the Last Post Ceremony, to honor the missing fallen Commonwealth soldiers of World War I, who told me the stories of their valiant, dead relatives, and ripped my heart in two.
+In Matera, Italy, there were Cosimo, Angelica, Mariangela, Alessandro and Marcello, who introduced me to possibly the world’s most delicious food, panzerotto (fried dough with cheese and tomato sauce), and made me feel like I was family, even with my rusty Italian.
+In Kigali, Rwanda, there was M.A., now a surrogate sister, and her entire family, who hosted me at a birthday gathering two days after I met them, while also sharing their stories of surviving genocide.
+What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned? is a question I often get. I always answer, “That people are fundamentally good around the world.”
+Clockwise from top right: Farming in Bhutan; the coast between Hornopirén and Puerto Montt on Chile's Carretera Austral; the Basilicata region of Italy; and Top End, Australia Jada Yuan/The New York Times
+Lesson No. 7: Alone does not mean lonely
+Solo travel is an experience I’d urge every human, and particularly every woman, to try at least once. You’ll find that while you might physically be without people you know, you’re rarely alone. I had a device in my pocket that allowed me to call home, and to post a picture on an app that opened up conversations with strangers who just seemed to want to wish me well.
+While in Patagonia, I spent four hours climbing a volcano in the rain by myself, to reach a desolate summit with nothing but burned trees and ashen pebbles. Out of the freezing cold mist came a hooded figure. “Hablas esapañol o ingles?” I asked. English, he told me. He was a vegan punk-rock drummer from Berlin who liked to laugh a lot and pet stray dogs, and we ended up traveling together for the next five days.
+My parents were my rocks through the ups and the downs. Weekly phone calls with my therapist were among the best work I did. Certain friends became lifelines. There was Heidi Vogt, with her endless logistical know-how; Jean Lee, an expert on Korea and also on how to pack for any eventuality; Chiwan Choi, a poet friend who kept me clearheaded on writing; Marie Ternes, who talked me through story ideas even two days before having her first child.
+For the past week, I’ve stayed put in my 52nd place, the small town of Kep on the Cambodian Coast. The plan was to spend the holidays alone in this tranquil, piece of heaven on the beach, banging out my final articles.
+Then I got an Instagram DM from an acquaintance from Los Angeles. She had seen a photo I’d posted from Kep, and it was a strange coincidence, but she and a girlfriend would be there the next day. Then I got another message from Ben, who lives in Bangkok. He and his girlfriend, Zoe, were trying to figure out one last vacation to take before they moved to New York. Would I recommend Kep? Within 10 minutes he sent me his hotel booking and flight information.
+The next morning, I befriended a British family at my hotel and we got along so well we went on a sunset cruise together.
+The posse grew with each new arrival. We’d feast on crabs and then head to a bar to play cards until the owner kicked us out. It was a magical holiday, and in it I could see glimpses of the future, of being surrounded by found family, content in each other’s company, of traveling solo but never being, or desiring to be, truly alone.
+What’s next? I don’t know. I might be physically going back to the apartment I left behind in Brooklyn 12 months ago, but the center of my life isn’t there for me anymore. It’s with me and it’s mobile.
+Jada Yuan in Peru, the seventh stop on her 52 Places journey. Kerri MacDonald/The New York Times
+Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.The room my brother and I shared when we first moved to the United States was small and dark, with an off-putting smell that emanated from a noisy air-conditioner. It wasn’t ideal, but we’d lived in small spaces before. Atlanta was something else — hot and humid, coursing with wide highways that neither one of us was old enough to drive along. That summer, bored and unsupervised, we’d sit on the curb in the parking lot for as long as we could take the heat, wanting school to start, and dreading it. Making fun of the whingy American accents, and wanting our own.
+My parents were busy. Outings were luxuries. One Saturday, while my mother browsed the sales racks at the mall, my brother and I stared at sneakers we couldn’t buy and listened to snippets of new albums we couldn’t buy and rode the escalator up, following the scent of sugar and yeast. I’d never been to a mall food court — a wonderland where free slivers of chicken on toothpicks were held out to us like offerings, each bite seasoned to its outermost limit, fried and tender and salty and glistening with sweet, cornstarch-bound sauces. I saw cookies — the biggest cookies I’d ever seen in my life — cookies the size of pizzas. Pizzas the size of tables. Tables the size of cars, all of them full of people with sweaty paper cups the size of planters.
+I was already drunk on a sense of abundance by the time we sat down for lunch with my mother at the California Pizza Kitchen, choosing it because it seemed fancy and my father was leaving work in the middle of the day to meet us. We studied the menu giddily, and when we were encouraged to each order our own pizza, we all had our own reasons to go for it. That’s when I felt the first pull of something like love for America, not the one I’d seen on TV, not the one I’d come to expect from the dubbed episodes of “Fresh Prince” and “90210” that we watched in rural France, but the one that stretched out before me now, greasy and messy and garnished with fresh cilantro.I’ve heard a number of conflicting things on this topic; is removing or waxing all pubic hair entirely from the vagina healthy, unhealthy, or something in between?
+— Marie
+Short take
+Removing pubic hair is a cosmetic choice that may have health consequences for some women.
+Tell me more
+Before we get started we need to get one fact straight — pubic hair is on your vulva (the outside, where your clothes touch your skin) not your vagina, which is internal or at the vaginal opening (think of the places you touch when reaching inside for a rogue tampon).
+Pubic hair serves several biological purposes. It is a physical barrier protecting the skin; it traps discharge, dirt and debris; it also traps moisture, helping the vulvar skin maintain a higher moisture content relative to skin elsewhere on your body. As each pubic hair is attached to a nerve, tugging during sex may also increase sexual stimulation. Pubic hair may also have a role in dispersal of normal odors.
+Pubic hair removal is common — approximately 80 percent of women ages 18 to 65 report they remove some or all of their pubic hair.Mr. Newsom, in interviews, has pledged to increase spending on early childhood education and a few other programs, but nonetheless said he would continue the fiscal practices followed by the departing governor.
+This is not a moment of transition only for Mr. Brown; it is one for California, as well. The Brown family has been an integral part of political life here since Pat Brown, Mr. Brown’s father, was elected governor in 1958. Jerry Brown has served as governor twice, as mayor of Oakland, as state Democratic Party chairman and as attorney general. His sister Kathleen served as state treasurer.
+But Mr. Brown, 80, who married for the first time in 2005, never had children. There is no one left to carry the family legacy. He is stepping down because of term limits; he said in an interview he probably would not have run again even if there was no term limit statute, if only because history has not looked kindly on governors of big states who seek third terms.
+Not that he wasn’t tempted.
+“What will I not miss?” Mr. Brown said, parrying a question with a question as he spoke at a luncheon. “I like it all. I like fund-raising. I like sparring with the press. I like attacking my opponents. I like being attacked. I like the whole thing. People in this business like attention and you get a lot of attention as governor.”
+A few days later at the ranch, Mr. Brown said he did not know whether he would attend Mr. Newsom’s inauguration. “These are vulgar details,” he said. “I have a whole staff in charge of details. I’m more about the large, larger questions that are affecting our times.” (Short answer from one of those staff members: Of course he is.)
+Mr. Brown declined in an interview to offer Mr. Newsom advice — that, he said, would be unseemly — though he arched his eyebrows when asked if Mr. Newsom had sought his counsel during this two-month transition.All year long as Earth revolves around the sun, it passes through streams of cosmic debris. The resulting meteor showers can light up night skies from dusk to dawn, and if you’re lucky you might be able to catch a glimpse.
+The next shower you might be able to see is known as the Quadrantids. Active between Dec. 27 and Jan. 12, the show peaks around Thursday night into Friday morning, or Jan. 3-4.
+Compared with most other meteor showers, the Quadrantids are unusual because they are thought to have originated from an asteroid. They tend to be fainter with fewer streaks in the sky than others you might be able to see this year.
+[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
+Where meteor showers come from
+If you spot a meteor shower, what you’re usually seeing is an icy comet’s leftovers that crash into Earth’s atmosphere. Comets are sort of like dirty snowballs: As they travel through the solar system, they leave behind a dusty trail of rocks and ice that lingers in space long after they leave. When Earth passes through these cascades of comet waste, the bits of debris — which can be as small as grains of sand — pierce the sky at such speeds that they burst, creating a celestial fireworks display.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The drug conspiracy trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican crime lord known as El Chapo, has been something like a marathon of sprints: Four days a week, for nearly two months, a Shakespearean cast of witnesses has appeared in court and told the epic tale of how Mr. Guzmán rose from living in poverty in the mountains of Sinaloa, Mexico, to become one of the richest — and most ruthless — drug dealers in the world.
+The trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, paused just before Christmas and resumes on Thursday morning. It is expected to last for another month or two and is likely to proceed at the same grueling pace.
+Here, in advance of the trial’s second half, is a brief recap of the testimony so far:
+· During Mr. Guzmán’s early days as a young, ambitious trafficker, witnesses testified, the nascent kingpin struck up a partnership with Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía, his first supplier of Colombian cocaine.
+· In describing the inner workings of Mr. Guzmán’s organization, the Sinaloa drug cartel, one of the crime lord’s operations chiefs, Jesús Zambada García, presented a kind of master class on the cartel, detailing its transportation methods, financing techniques and major players.Ian Schrager knows a thing or two about creating spaces that people clamor to get into, starting with Studio 54, which was the of-the-moment New York hot spot in the 1970s (and the subject of a recent documentary). But in the 1980s, after a conviction on felony tax evasion charges, for which he was later pardoned, Mr. Schrager left the nightclub world behind and struck out into the hotel business with the creation of Morgans Hotel Group. Mr. Schrager has since sold the hotel group, renovated and sold the Gramercy Park Hotel, and begun even more hospitality ventures, including the Public hotels and a collaboration with Marriott International on the Edition line of hotels.
+In November, Edition opened new properties in Shanghai and Abu Dhabi; Times Square and West Hollywood are on deck for 2019. Understandably, Mr. Schrager, who is based in Manhattan, is often on the road. Here is a look at where he goes, what he takes with him and what he thinks travelers want in a hotel.
+How often do you travel?
+For pleasure, I’ll travel about a dozen times a year. I have a family; I love to get away with them as much I can. For work, it depends on what I’m working on. We’re currently working on about 40 new Edition hotels and there are also new Public hotels as well. So yes, I do travel a lot, but I’m lucky I still love my work.
+Favorite trips?
+I just recently went to Shanghai for the opening of the Edition there. I was completely blown away. I’ve been there before — about a year or two ago — but China moves at light speed. I was so impressed by the anything is possible energy and what they have accomplished and the architecture. I was amazed at how advanced everything was and how the people were so fashion-forward.The Eugene, on West 31st Street, was closer to his office but farther from hers. They weren’t keen on the interior finishes or the location next to Dyer Avenue, the Lincoln Tunnel entrance and exit ramp, where impatient traffic seemed hazardous.
+Image The Eugene, on West 31st Street, was close to their respective jobs, but they weren’t keen on the interior finishes or the location next to Dyer Avenue, the Lincoln Tunnel entrance and exit ramp. Credit... Regan Wood for The New York Times
+Then there was Oskar, on 11th Avenue near 43d Street, with just 164 apartments. The Peppers found the small size more appealing than a massive building with hundreds of units. It felt to them like a boutique hotel.
+When they visited, it wasn’t quite finished. “It seems like the apartment is being built for you,” Mr. Pepper said.
+They saw several iterations of one-bedrooms, some with balconies and many with interesting hallways and curves. The building also offers access to most of the amenities at Sky, across the street, the largest rental building in New York, with nearly 1,200 units. (Both were developed by the Moinian Group.)
+The Peppers were able to sign the lease nearly two months in advance. They chose a one-bedroom with no balcony but with an extra half bathroom for $6,200 a month, and received three free months on a 27-month lease, with the monthly rent netting out to $5,511. They also received six free months at Life Time Athletic at Sky, a gym and spa that normally costs $199 per person per month. The one-time pet fee for Andiamo was $750.
+The Peppers, who arrived in late summer, faced some construction-related issues, like a sporadic lack of hot water and workers coming and going from their apartment.Imagine a future where you are never truly alone. Even when your spouse is on a business trip or your children are away at summer camp, you will always have someone (or something) to talk to. In the morning, you could ask the microwave to heat up a bowl of oatmeal. In your car, you could tell your stereo to put on some ’90s music. And when you walk into the office, you could ask your smartphone, “What’s on my calendar today?”
+This is increasingly the world the tech industry is building with a bloating portfolio of devices that can react to voice commands — and that the companies will be pitching to you even more in 2019.
+The future will be on display next week at CES, a consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas that serves as a window into the year’s hottest tech trends. Artificially intelligent virtual assistants will take center stage as the most important tech topic, with companies big and small expected to showcase voice-controlled devices like robot vacuums, alarm clocks, refrigerators and car accessories. Most of these products will be powered by Amazon’s Alexa or Google’s Assistant, the two most popular artificially intelligent assistants, industry insiders said.
+“A.I. will pervade the show,” said Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, which owns CES.Meet the Hosts
+Ross Douthat
+Image
+I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist since 2009, and I write about politics, religion, pop culture, sociology and the places where they all intersect. I’m a Catholic and a conservative, in that order, which means that I’m against abortion and critical of the sexual revolution, but I tend to agree with liberals that the Republican Party is too friendly to the rich. I was against Donald Trump in 2016 for reasons specific to Donald Trump, but in general I think the populist movements in Europe and America have legitimate grievances and I often prefer the populists to the “reasonable” elites. I’ve written books about Harvard, the G.O.P., American Christianity and Pope Francis; I’m working on one about decadence. Benedict XVI was my favorite pope. I review movies for National Review and have strong opinions about many prestige television shows. I have three small children, two girls and a boy, and I live in New Haven with my wife.
+Michelle Goldberg
+Image
+I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 2017, writing mainly about politics, ideology and gender. These days people on the right and the left both use “liberal” as an epithet, but that’s basically what I am, though the nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency has radicalized me and pushed me leftward. I’ve written three books, including one, in 2006, about the danger of right-wing populism in its religious fundamentalist guise. (My other two were about the global battle over reproductive rights and, in a brief detour from politics, about an adventurous Russian émigré who helped bring yoga to the West.) I love to travel; a long time ago, after my husband and I eloped, we spent a year backpacking through Asia. Now we live in Brooklyn with our son and daughter.It really depends. While working on “An Orchestra of Minorities,” I read a few books on Igbo cosmology simply to augment my knowledge of the cosmology and better recreate it in my fiction. But I sometimes find myself rereading works by great writers whose prose I envy. A slim census would include Vladimir Nabokov, Toni Morrison, Alan Paton, Arundhati Roy and Elizabeth Bowen, among others.
+What I don’t read while working on a book is any book that remotely resembles what I’m working on. I had to read George Saunders’s “Lincoln in the Bardo,” for instance, for a class I was teaching, and halfway through I wished I hadn’t included it in the list because the transient state of spirits and the liminality of some of the characters marginally resembles my new book.
+What’s the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?
+There are many, but the one I remember quite often is that revenge is not justice. This wisdom is from “Cry, the Beloved Country,” by Alan Paton. It is basic human instinct to want to unsheathe the sword once things have swung in our favor, now that the world can hear us, see us and pay attention to us. It is instinctive that we mount the hill and attempt to stomp on those who have oppressed us. It is common for us to say: For so long you made us feel this way, now we must make you taste what it’s like. This is what Paton’s character Msimangu — foreseeing an eventual end to the heinous crime against humanity, apartheid — means when he says: “I have one great fear in my heart, that one day when they are turned to loving, they will find we are turned to hating.”
+What moves you most in a work of literature?
+Language. When a sentence jumps all of the rhetorical hurdles that life and our saturated minds place along the way to reach sublimity, I become moved to near tears. Consider this paragraph from Arundhati Roy’s novel “The God of Small Things”: “Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them — as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.” I call this audacious prose, and celebrate it enthusiastically.
+Which genres do you especially enjoy reading? And which do you avoid?
+My people say that a poor maid does not reject the embrace of a wealthy prince because of bad breath. I’m hardly turned off by considerations of genre or type. So I have found even manuals — of how to hunt wild birds in West Africa — fascinating. That said, if one returns to a well again and again and finds only bad-tasting water, it is difficult to keep returning there. This is why I tend to avoid works of fiction in which plot isn’t a function of character but the reverse, in which a set of events is orchestrated and characters are thrown in as fillers. I have this sense of the Dan Brown books especially. So I tend to avoid “upmarket crime thrillers.” Although, a few pages in, I’m liking “My Sister, the Serial Killer,” by Oyinkan Braithwaite.ASUNCIÓN, Paraguay — Before being allowed inside the Paraguay jail cell of a notorious drug kingpin, I braced for an intrusive pat down. But the skinny guard standing just outside the bars barely touched me as he briskly ran his hands down my arms and back.
+I was at the prison to interview Marcelo Pinheiro Veiga, who had resorted to an audacious gambit to resist being extradited to his native Brazil: He had confessed to a litany of crimes committed in Paraguay.
+After the perfunctory search, I entered the small cell and sat about a foot away from Mr. Veiga, close enough to notice his breath smelled fresh.
+“Paraguay is the land of impunity,” Mr. Veiga told me after describing a long criminal career that led him to become one of the major smugglers of arms and drugs from Paraguay to Brazil.MR. DIAGNE She is someone who stands her ground, and that is the case for Felwine also. I spoke to them often as they were writing the report. They consulted widely. They traveled back and forth to Senegal, Mali, Cameroon. And they spoke with people in the president’s office, who gave them legal advice.
+The biggest surprise, even shock, of the Savoy-Sarr report is that it explicitly says that only full restitution of works of art will be acceptable. Curators have dodged this debate before by pointing to France’s centuries-old “inalienability” law; national institutions do not have the right to deaccession anything in a public collection. Savoy and Sarr say: no, the law has to change, it is the only morally responsible thing to do.
+MS. FROMONT That’s why the report is potentially so impactful. It demands that the logic of France’s relationship to Africa be renegotiated. It’s not simply about the objects, and where they are. By insisting on full restitution, the idea of “long-term loans” to African countries becomes as absurd as it sounds.
+MS. OJIH ODUTOLA There has to be a principle that both African and European institutions agree with.
+MR. DIAGNE When I had my first conversations with Felwine, he was telling me that many of his interlocutors — civil servants, functionaries, or museum people — would tell him, “You see, it is so complicated legally. We should really agree on the principle that these objects need to circulate.” The concept of circulation was being sold to him. And he said, yes, circulation makes sense. Somehow Africa has to share its art with the rest of the world. But Macron said “restitution,” and restitution has a meaning.
+So the authors said, we will be sticking to that word. If there is going to be circulation, it should be Africa lending the objects, not the other way around.
+MS. FROMONT Maybe in the future African countries will make long-term loans to Quai Branly!The researchers also measured participants’ general well-being in relation to how clutter might be affecting their lives, asking them to answer questions such as “the clutter in my home upsets me” and “I have to move things in order to accomplish tasks in my home.”
+The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction.
+The findings add to a growing body of evidence that clutter can negatively impact mental well-being, particularly among women. Clutter can also induce a physiological response, including increased levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.
+A 2010 study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology looked at dual-income married couples living in the Los Angeles area who had at least one school-aged child at home. The wives in the study who perceived themselves as having a cluttered home or a home that needed work tended to have increased levels of cortisol throughout the day. Those who weren’t feeling cluttered, which included most of the men in the study, had cortisol levels that tended to drop during the day.
+Darby Saxbe, an assistant psychology professor at University of Southern California and the study’s lead author, said that the women in the study who described their home as being cluttered or needing work began their day stressed and remained stressed. Some of the added stress, she suspects, was tied to women’s tendency to take on housework and extra chores after the workday. In terms of cortisol levels, men who did more housework in the evening were as likely to have raised cortisol levels at the end of the day as women. It’s just that not as many men spent as much time on housework as their wives, she said.Mr. Trump was adamant in his demands for $5.6 billion in funding for a border wall, and he rejected Democrats’ proposals to fund the government while the two sides negotiated further. The Democrats refused to increase their offer of $1.3 billion for border security.
+Mr. Trump asked congressional leaders to return to the White House on Friday to resume talks, an official said.
+Go deeper: Nancy Pelosi is poised to reclaim the title of speaker of the House today. How she deals with Mr. Trump will define her tenure.
+The Daily: In today’s episode, Senator Chuck Schumer discusses the shutdown and the era of divided government.Where did they live after marrying?
+After she graduated from law school in 2006, she moved to Chicago where he had one more year of law school. They made a plan to move to Texas after his graduation.
+How were the early years?
+For both, the first years were great. They traveled, worked hard, but discussions about where they would live and how many children they would have sowed seeds for future challenges. He didn’t want to leave Chicago for Texas, and when his mom became ill in 2007, it gave him a good reason to stay.
+Were they happy?
+Yes, — he said, though he thought he had the better deal of the two of them. “Vanessa made lots of concessions, she agreed not to do things because of my fears and I think I held her back,” he said.
+“I sacrificed to leave my family, and made concessions in my career in Chicago because in the back of my mind I thought we were going back to Texas,” she said.
+First signs of trouble?
+His mother died of cancer in May 2009 and after his father came to live with the couple. After the birth of their son in 2010, his father helped with their newborn. “It was a lot to handle all at once,” he said. “A child and the death of my mother.”
+Early on they fought about the Texas move, but by 2013, when their son was nearly 3, she felt something was amiss. He was snappish, acting strangely and drinking too much. She discovered he had had an affair. It was a reaction to a “perfect storm” of circumstances, he said: his mother’s death, the pressure of his job and their son whom he at first, felt replaced by. “It was just one of many symptoms of a marriage in trouble,” he explained.The House Republicans’ experiment with continuously nationalized politics didn’t work out. Politics operates as two interlocking systems, sort of like your left and right brain hemispheres: One system is local, parochial, individualized, pragmatic, while the other involves big national choices and ideas. Successful politicians and parties operate at both levels. Politics of local interests alone can lead to the kind of logrolling bargains — you support my farm subsidy and I’ll support your oil-drilling tax break — that create a functioning Congress but risk losing sight of big national obligations such as addressing climate change. But nationalized politics alone strips away the many little points of common ground that cut across polarizing lines of ideology and help make bargains and compromise possible. When the two systems are both healthy, when politicians are engaged both with big ideas and with their own constituents and their concerns, it brings a kind of fluidity to politics that we’ve seen in more productive periods, such as the 1980s.
+If the new members of Congress are able to govern as they campaigned, tirelessly, unafraid of hostile audiences, deeply connected to their districts, focused on improving individual lives, they might eventually pull politics out of the box in which either one party pushes through an entire unpopular agenda or Congress is paralyzed. A newfound focus on the local will also allow new members to bring forward innovations in local government and civic engagement.
+But today’s politicians face an obstacle that the class of ’74 could mostly ignore: the enormous cost of campaigns. Republican members fell out of touch with their districts in part because they were increasingly dependent on a few large national donors, operating through super PACs and political nonprofits such as the Congressional Leadership Fund, which get the bulk of their donations from billionaires in Las Vegas, New York, Texas and Florida. Democrats, too, relied on these outside groups and their own billionaires, but 2018 brought an enormous wave of small donors. And while much of that came from fired-up progressives in solid Democratic districts, even in the highest-profile races, a surprising share came from the candidates’ own constituents — for example, more than 54 percent of Beto O’Rourke’s contributions came from Texans. A majority of Democratic challengers also refused corporate PAC money, which often runs through Washington lobbyists.
+In 2020 and 2022, these new members will no longer be exciting insurgent challengers but incumbents, probably forced to compromise in ways that some supporters might find disappointing. If the volunteer energy and small-donor support that lifted them to victory in 2018 is missing, their campaigns will look very different. They’ll have to turn to corporate PACs again and, much like their predecessors elected in 2006 and 2008, focus their attention on donors rather than their districts, compromising their promises.
+The Democratic caucus has announced plans to make a package of political reforms, including the provisions to encourage small donors long championed by John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland, their top priority, bearing the symbolic bill number H.R. 1. In addition to highlighting corruption and the corrosive consequences of the post-Citizens United era, such reforms, if they were ever to pass, could give elected officials a way to stay in better touch with their districts, spending more time with voters and that way keeping the vital, diverse local dimension of politics alive even in a time of deep national polarization.
+Mark Schmitt (@mschmitt9) is the director of the political reform program at the research organization New America.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Nor is the Second Amendment absolutism that Justice Thomas is calling for reflected in the way the Supreme Court interprets most other constitutional guarantees. Judge Bruce Selya of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit made this point in a majority opinion in November rejecting a challenge to a provision of the Massachusetts gun licensing statute. “Even though the Second Amendment right is fundamental,” Judge Selya, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his opinion for a unanimous panel, “the plaintiffs have offered us no valid reason to treat it more deferentially than other important constitutional rights.” That decision, Gould v. Morgan, will shortly be appealed to the Supreme Court .
+My second point is to underscore the role Justice Thomas plays in creating this rhetorical tidal wave. He is a Federalist Society icon and a hero to many young conservative lawyers, including the 10 former Thomas law clerks whom President Trump has already appointed to federal judgeships. (A dozen other former Thomas clerks hold important nonjudicial positions in the administration.) They and their colleagues among the new Trump judges, many of whom clerked for other conservative justices, are the ones who are making the “second-class right” mantra a standard feature of any Second Amendment dissent — in other words, not only that a particular majority opinion is incorrect, but that it is part of a dangerous trend that the Supreme Court, by implication if not explicitly, needs to address right now.
+For example, the full 15-member Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently refused to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel to uphold the longstanding federal ban on interstate sales of handguns. Dissenting from that refusal, Judge James C. Ho, a former Thomas clerk who joined the Fifth Circuit last year, cited Justice Thomas’s opinions in observing, “Yet the Second Amendment continues to be treated as a ‘second-class’ right.”
+His dissent included a subtle dig at Chief Justice John Roberts, who notably has not joined Justice Thomas’s Second Amendment choir. The government rationale for the ban on interstate handgun sales is that while federally licensed firearm dealers can be expected to know the laws of their own state, they may not be familiar with laws of other states and so may not know whether an out-of-state purchaser is legally entitled to own a gun.
+That is not sufficient justification for the ban, Judge Ho wrote; if dealers could learn their own state’s laws, they could learn other states’ laws as well. “Put simply, the way to require compliance with state handgun laws is to require compliance with state handgun laws,” he wrote in a riff on the chief justice’s much-discussed line in a 2007 school integration case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
+Judge Ho’s Fifth Circuit colleague Don R. Willett, another new member of the court, observed in his own dissenting opinion in the same case, “The Second Amendment is neither second class, nor second rate, nor second tier.” An appeal in that case , Mance v. Whitaker, is now pending at the Supreme Court, and the justices will decide this month or next whether to accept it.
+Another new judge, Stephanos Bibas, dissented last month from a decision by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that upheld a New Jersey law limiting a firearm magazine to 10 rounds of ammunition. He said the state had failed to provide sufficient evidence that “specifically links large magazines to mass-shooting deaths.” Acknowledging that five other federal circuit courts have also upheld limits on magazine sizes, Judge Bibas observed that while judges were understandably concerned about gun violence, “they err in subjecting the Second Amendment to different, watered-down rules and demanding little if any proof.”Chuck Schumer on the Wall, the Shutdown and the Era of Divided Government
+On the eve of a new Congress, the Senate minority leader sat down with “The Daily” to discuss his hopes — and his strategy for getting things done — before the next election rolls around.Flexner’s case for such untrammeled freedom isn’t that it’s a good unto itself. Freedom also produces a lot of garbage. His case is that freedom is the license the roving mind requires to go down any path it chooses and go as far as the paths may lead. This is how fundamental discoveries — a.k.a., “useless knowledge” — are usually made: not so much by hunting for something specific, but by wandering with an interested eye amid the unknown. It’s also how countries attract and cultivate genius — by protecting a space of unlimited intellectual permission, regardless of outcome.
+All of this, of course, has its ultimate uses — hence the “usefulness” of Flexner’s title. Newton’s third law of motion begets, after 250 years, the age of the rocket; the discovery of the double helix delivers, several decades later, Crispr. It’s also how nations gain or lose greatness. The “reorganized” universities of fascist Italy and Germany had no place for Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi or Albert Einstein. They became the Allies’ ultimate weapon in World War II.
+Which brings us back to New Horizons, Osiris-Rex, InSight and every other piece of gear flying through the heavens at taxpayer expense and piling up data atop our already vast stores of useless knowledge. What are they doing to reduce poverty? Nothing. Environmental degradation? Zippo. The opioid crisis? Still less.
+And yet, in being the kind of society that does this kind of thing — that is, the kind that sends probes to the edge of the solar system; underwrites the scientific establishment that knows how to design and deploy these probes; believes in the value of knowledge for its own sake; cultivates habits of truthfulness, openness, collaboration and risk-taking; enlists the public in the experience, and shares the findings with the rest of the world — we also discover the highest use for useless knowledge: Not that it may someday have some life-saving application on earth, though it might, but that it has a soul-saving application in the here and now, reminding us that the human race is not a slave to questions of utility alone.
+There are plenty of reasons to worry about the state of the American mind today, as well as the state of the university. Speech is not as free; gadflies are not as welcome; inquiry is dictated as much by the availability of funding as it is by the instincts of curiosity, and funding itself is often short. But let’s start 2019 on a happier note. Even in the midst of the shutdown, the New Horizons mission was still considered an “essential” activity of government. If Flexner were alive to witness it, he might say, “most essential.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.This is part of a broader pattern caused by global warming. The Northeast is getting wetter; the Pacific Northwest is getting drier; and the South is getting hotter.
+Out of the 149 years of weather data collected at Central Park, the 10 wettest have all happened since 1972.
+To put it another way: New York City’s wettest years all occurred since “The Godfather” hit movie theaters.
+Weren’t around for that movie? Try this: five of New York City’s 10 wettest years have taken place since 2003 — when the first “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie was on the big screen.
+Not that excess wetness is a consistent phenomenon — the three years before 2018 were all unusually dry. But the overall trend is real.Good Thursday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Apple cuts its forecast, blaming a slowdown in China
+Evidence continues to mount that China’s economy is slowing faster than expected.
+The latest data point comes courtesy of Apple. A significant slowdown in iPhone sales in China forced the company to reduce revenue expectations for its most recent quarter. The company said yesterday that it expected revenue of about $84 billion in the quarter that ended Dec. 29, down from a previous estimate of $89 billion to $93 billion.
+It was the first time Apple had lowered its quarterly forecast in 16 years. The NYT’s Jack Nicas and Keith Bradsher write:
+“Apple’s surprise announcement added to concerns about the ability of American tech giants to navigate an increasingly uncertain economy and a continuing trade war between the United States and China. China has become Apple’s third-largest market in recent years, driven mostly by iPhone sales.”
+Apple’s announcement is the latest warning from corporate America about the impact of the trade war, which may be harder to defend now that the collateral damage includes one of the country’s most recognizable brands. Companies like FedEx and Starbucks are already struggling in China. And other American businesses, especially tech players and Detroit automakers, could suffer as well.
+More: The optimistic narrative about Apple’s iPhone business is falling apart, writes Bloomberg Opinion’s Shira Ovide.TOKYO — North Korea’s acting ambassador to Italy disappeared from the embassy in Rome in November, apparently in a defection attempt, according to a South Korean lawmaker briefed by intelligence officials.
+The potentially embarrassing news for Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, came just two days after he extolled his country’s economic and diplomatic progress and delivered an implied threat that if international sanctions against the North continued, he would “have no choice” but to return to nuclear confrontation.
+Little is known about what happened to Cho Seong-gil, who had been North Korea’s acting ambassador to Italy since October 2017. If his defection is confirmed, he would be the highest-ranking defector since Kim Jong-un became leader in 2011. In 2016, the No. 2 diplomat in Britain, Thae Yong-ho, defected to South Korea, expressing disillusionment with Mr. Kim’s government.
+According to Kim Min-ki, a lawmaker in the party of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, Mr. Cho and his wife fled the North Korean Embassy and residence in Rome and have been in hiding since early November, about a month before his term there was due to end.MANILA — The Philippine police said on Thursday that a mayor had ordered the killing of a congressman who was gunned down shortly before Christmas, and that one of the men he hired to carry out the assassination had been arrested.
+The police said they would seek to arrest Carlwyn Baldo, mayor of the city of Daraga, whom they accused of arranging the Dec. 22 killing of Rodel Batocabe, a member of the Philippine House of Representatives and an ally of President Rodrigo Duterte.
+Mr. Batocabe was leaving Congress and had announced his intention to run against Mr. Baldo in Daraga’s mayoral election in May. Orlando Diaz, a police officer who was guarding Mr. Batocabe, was shot and killed along with the congressman at a gift-giving ceremony for senior citizens in Daraga, a city of about 125,000 in Albay Province, southeast of Manila.
+“From all indications, as revealed by suspects and witnesses and physical evidence that was gathered by the police, the group that killed Batocabe and Diaz is a private armed group employed by the mayor that is involved in contract killing as a gun-for-hire syndicate,” said the national police chief, Oscar Albayalde.“Many a keeper’s lost their mind to quicksilver,” warns James (Gerard Butler) as Donald (Connor Swindells), his trainee lighthouse keeper, dabbles a gloved hand in a puddle of mercury. It’s 1938, and the men, accompanied by a veteran keeper named Thomas (Peter Mullan), have arrived for a 6-week shift on a barren lump of rock off the coast of Scotland. The mercury leak is only the first sign of the many troubles to come.
+As it turns out, it will be gold, not silver, that turns their heads in “The Vanishing,” a middling good-guys-gone-bad thriller (and no relation to George Sluizer’s ingenious 1991 shocker). Inspired by the Flannan Isles mystery of 1900, when three keepers disappeared without trace, Joe Bone and Celyn Jones’s script takes pains to differentiate the three leads. Thomas is tired and reclusive, haunted by personal tragedy. James, by contrast, is a loving husband and father and a natural mentor to the volatile, inexperienced Donald.When horror movies head for the woods, their titles may vary — “I Spit on Your Grave,” “Wolf Creek” — but their central dynamic is too often the same: At some point, an attractively trembling woman will be forced to run like the dickens from a yokel who butchers his own meat.
+What sets “Rust Creek” apart from most of its genre predecessors, though, is that its director, screenwriter and cinematographer are all women. Sadly (or happily, depending on your viewpoint), this hasn’t made an appreciable difference to the broadly familiar beats of Julie Lipson’s screenplay, even if Jen McGowan’s direction is as attentive to stasis as action. Midway through the movie, when the lead character, a Kentucky college student named Sawyer (Hermione Corfield), finds herself trapped in a trailer with Lowell (Jay Paulson), a hinky meth cook, her slow transition from suspicion to trust is accomplished with near-subliminal sensitivity.Wirathu, now 50, became aligned with Myanmar’s nationalist 969 movement in 2001 and has founded, since that movement was banned, a similarly anti-Muslim organization. His brief is that Myanmar’s Muslim population (which he refuses to refer to as Rohingya, which is how the stateless people refer to themselves) represents a mechanics of evil. To Schroeder’s camera and in public preaching, he pursues this theme with relentless insistence while denying he condones violence. But the words he preaches to his followers go well beyond implication. And the violence he inspires, shown in this film in footage culled from phone videos and other immediate media sources, is horrific.
+[Our chief film critics choose the films that moved them in 2018.]
+The monk is perhaps the least showy of the subjects of Schroeder’s trilogy. He speaks quietly, although his mouth often twists into an expression of petulant smugness. But in a sense, this is the most terrifying of Schroder’s portraits. Amin, as heinous as he was, was one person, as was Vergès. Wirathu represents an awful idea, one that cannot be banished, and one he propagates with chilling skill. He speaks of “seeing through the intentions of Muslims,” which sounds ridiculous. But then he talks of ISIS beheadings, and how in footage of these atrocities the perpetrators, after completing their work, raise a finger, to signify that there is only one God. He takes factual examples, distorts them, uses them to slander a whole faith and a whole people, and concludes that the Muslim “cannot be lived with.” And people believe, then follow him. Schroeder’s approach is calm, almost detached, in keeping with his other work (although the choice of de Medeiros to speak for Buddhism, and with a nonspecific Asian-seeming accent at that, struck me as an avoidable misstep); this makes the bleakness of what he recounts (which is buttressed by an insinuatingly menacing score by Jorge Arriagada) that much more resonant.Far from a fantasy, but not quite a nightmare, “State Like Sleep” is a thriller without thrills, where every setting that was once familiar has become loaded with a sense of dread. It pauses before turning any corner, anticipating horrors that never satisfyingly arrive.
+The movie follows Katherine (Katherine Waterston), the wife of Stefan Delvoe (Michiel Huisman), a rising Belgian film star who died in an apparent suicide. Their marriage was a rocky one, shaken by revelations about Stefan’s drug use and the possibility that he was unfaithful. It was Katherine who found Stefan’s body with a bullet lodged in his temple.
+One year after Stefan’s death, Katherine returns to their home in Brussels. Her mother (Mary Kay Place) has suffered a minor stroke and is in need of medical care. In between her visits to the hospital, Katherine unpacks the mess Stefan left behind. She finds matchboxes with the name of his favorite club written on them — the first bread crumb in a trail that leads Katherine to suspect her husband’s death was a conspiracy.
+Katherine retraces Stefan’s final days and finds herself submerged in a world of nightclubs and narcotics. In this shadowy landscape, Katherine’s numbed grief is indistinguishable from a high.LAKE FOREST, Ill. — During practice last Thursday afternoon, Tarik Cohen caught a punt. Still clutching the ball, he proceeded to catch another. And another. And another. And another. And another.
+And another.
+By the end of this wacky experiment, Cohen was cradling seven balls — one, roughly, for every role he has with the Chicago Bears.
+Cohen is — O.K., deep breath — the Bears’ handoff-taking, punt-returning, ball-catching, pass-throwing, mismatch-creating, gasp-inducing, highlight-monopolizing cyborg. A year after becoming the first rookie since Gale Sayers, a former Bear, in 1965, to contribute touchdowns by running, receiving, passing and punt return, Cohen has further obliterated concerns that a 5-foot-6 running back from the humble Football Championship Subdivision would struggle transitioning to the N.F.L.’s rugged N.F.C. North.
+[Wild-Card Weekend: Our Predictions for the N.F.L. Playoffs]
+If the quarterback-wrecking edge rusher Khalil Mack embodies a defense that has fueled the Bears’ worst-to-first ascent — as the N.F.C.’s third seed, they’ll face the No. 6-seeded Eagles in the wild-card round on Sunday, their first playoff appearance since 2010 — Cohen personifies the offense installed by the team’s first-year coach, Matt Nagy: creative, unpredictable and, at times, downright fun. Nagy has maximized Cohen’s speed, suddenness and receiving skills by aligning him around the formation, from the backfield to the inside to the outside, turning him into, in effect, Chicago’s offensive version of Mack: the player opponents must stalk wherever he is on the field. He led the team in catches (71), yards from scrimmage (1,169) and all-purpose yardage (1,599), and was voted onto the All-Pro team as punt returner.Women in Hollywood might have stepped to the fore in 2018, advocating for their rights and pressing for equal treatment and better representation, but new research finds that they are making little headway securing key positions in top films.
+Women made up just 8 percent of directors on the top 250 films at the domestic box office last year, down from 11 percent the year before, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University. The 2018 figure also represents a dip from 1998, when women made up 9 percent of directors on that year’s top films.
+Small gains were made in other key behind-the-scenes positions, the study found. Women accounted for a greater percentage of producers, executive producers, writers and editors, compared with that number in 2017. The biggest increases were seen in the number of editors (21 percent were women, compared with 16 percent the previous year) and writers (16 percent, up from 11 percent in 2017). Still, the 2018 figures represented just single-digit gains from 1998.
+A mere one percent of 2018’s top films featured 10 or more women in the crucial behind-the-scenes roles. Those rare projects included “Colette,” starring Keira Knightley, which was directed by Wash Westmoreland but involved women as writers, producers and more. The study found that a quarter of the top films had either no women in key production jobs, or just one.Bristol-Myers Squibb said on Thursday that it would buy Celgene, a maker of cancer-fighting drugs, in a cash-and-stock deal valued at $74 billion, the first major pharmaceutical deal of 2019.
+Between them, the two companies produce nine drugs with annual sales of more than $1 billion apiece, Bristol-Myers said in a statement.
+Bristol-Myers shareholders will own 69 percent of the combined entity; Celgene shareholders will own the rest. Celgene shareholders will get one Bristol-Myers share and $50 in cash for each Celgene share. The deal values Celgene shares at $102.43 apiece, a 53.7 percent premium on the stock’s closing price on Wednesday.
+The deal, which both companies’ boards have approved, will help the drugmakers advance their work in oncology, cardiovascular disease, immunology and inflammation, Bristol-Myers said in its statement. Celgene is known for its blockbuster Thalomid and Revlimid cancer medicines.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+While you’re still getting situated in the new year, we wanted to take another opportunity to look back at the past 12 months in California. The year was packed with huge news — much of which will affect where the Golden State is headed next.
+And I’m not just talking about tech. Deadly fires, a mass shooting and a continuing #MeToo reckoning in Hollywood all roiled the state in their own ways.
+But there were other stories, too. Some were hopeful, some highlighted communities that don’t often get their due, some were just plain unexpected. My editor, Julie, and I asked a few of our correspondents in California to pick a favorite story from the past year and explain why it was important. Here’s what they said:
+Adam Nagourney
+This story, “An Urgent Debate for California Republicans: How to Get Back in the Game,” signaled what was one of the big California stories of the year: The Republican Party here in crisis. It was already fading; Donald Trump pushed it to the edge of the map in November.
+Thomas Fuller
+There were terrifying stories about fires and shootings, warnings about earthquakes, and laments about the plight of the most vulnerable. When it feels like the world is falling apart everyone needs a good walk in the woods. I loved this piece on the reopening of the Mariposa Grove of giant sequoias in Yosemite National Park after a three-year restoration project.On the Market in New York City
+This week’s properties are on the Upper East Side, in Hell’s Kitchen and Jackson Heights, Queens.On the Market
+Homes for Sale in Manhattan and Queens
+This week’s properties are on the Upper East Side, in Hell’s Kitchen and Jackson Heights, Queens.Slide 1 of 16,
+Princeton Three-Bedroom Contemporary • $2,499,000 • NEW JERSEY • 1141 Stuart Road
+A three-bedroom, two-full-and-two-half-bath house built in 1992 that has an open floor plan with a large galley kitchen, a formal dining room, a sunken great room, a gas fireplace, a wine cellar, an attached two-car garage, and a finished basement, on 2.02 acres of wooded and landscaped property. Betsy Sayen, Callaway Henderson Sotheby’s International Realty, 609-902-7735; callawayhenderson.comThis article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.
+In the spirit of a new year, I give you a double dose of optimism this morning. First, some political optimism, via a few of the wiser writers about democracy:
+“I just want to remind everyone saying good riddance to 2018 that it was a heck of a lot better than 2017,” Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare tweeted on New Year’s Eve. “We are making progress. 2019 will also be better — which is not to say it won’t be hard. Keep the faith, people.”
+Similarly, Yascha Mounk of Johns Hopkins University wrote: “2019 will bring plenty of terrible news. But with populist governments on the ropes in India, Poland, and America, it may also mark the year in which citizens around the world remember the importance of freedom and self-determination. Happy New Year, everyone! Let’s fight.”
+And Anne Applebaum of The Washington Post was the most succinct: “Happy New Year to all. Spring is coming.”There’s a good chance the monthly rent checks you write this year will be larger than they were last year, because — no surprise — rents are up.
+Nationally, the average monthly rent reached $1,419, about a 3 percent increase over the previous year, according to the 2018 Year-End Rent Report published by RentCafe.
+The report looked only at rental apartments in buildings with 50 or more units, in the 252 largest American cities with at least 2,900 rental units. Manhattan (which was considered separately) was found to have the highest rents of all, $4,200 on average, roughly a 4 percent increase over the previous year. It was followed by San Francisco, at $3,609 (a 5 percent hike), and Boston, at $3,292 (up about 1 percent).
+But where did rents increase by the greatest percentage? For the most part, in small cities like Odessa, Tex., and neighboring Midland — both of which saw rents rise by about 21 percent.There were 15 of them. Most arrived in the dead of night, laid their trap and waited for the target to arrive. That target was Jamal Khashoggi, a prominent Saudi critic of his country’s government and its young crown prince. Since his killing in Istanbul, Turkish media has released a steady drip feed of evidence implicating Saudi officials. Weeks of investigation by The Times builds on that evidence and reconstructs what unfolded, hour-by-hour. Our timeline shows the ruthless efficiency of a hit team of experts that seemed specially chosen from Saudi government ministries. Some had links to the crown prince himself. After a series of shifting explanations, Saudi Arabia now denies that this brazen hit job was premeditated. But this reconstruction of the killing, and the botched cover-up, calls their story into serious question. It’s Friday morning, Sept. 28. Khashoggi and his fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, are at the local marriage office in Istanbul. In order to marry, he’s told that he needs Saudi paperwork and goes straight to the consulate to arrange it. They tell him to return in a week. It all seems routine, but it’s not. Inside there’s a Saudi spy, Ahmed al-Muzaini, who’s working under diplomatic cover. That very day, he flies off to Riyadh and helps concoct a plan to intercept Khashoggi when he returns to the consulate. Fast-forward to Monday night into Tuesday morning. Saudi agents converge in Istanbul aboard separate flights. Muzaini, the spy, flies back from Riyadh. A commercial flight carries a three-man team that we believe flew from Cairo. Two of the men are security officers and they’ve previously traveled with the crown prince. A private jet flying from Riyadh lands around 3:30 a.m. That plane is often used by the Saudi government, and it’s carrying nine Saudi officials, some who played key roles in Khashoggi’s death. We’ll get to Team 3 later on, and for now focus on these men from Team 2. This is Salah al-Tubaigy, a high-ranking forensics and autopsy expert in the Saudi interior ministry. Turkish officials will later say his role was to dismember Khashoggi’s body. Another is Mustafa al-Madani, a 57-year-old engineer. As we’ll see, it’s no accident that he looks like Khashoggi. And this is Maher Mutreb, the leader of the operation. Our investigation into his past reveals a direct link between Mutreb and the Saudi crown prince. When bin Salman toured a Houston neighborhood earlier this year, we discovered that Mutreb was with him, a glowering figure in the background. We found him again in Boston, at a U.N. meeting in New York, in Madrid and Paris, too. This global tour was all part of a charm offensive by the prince to paint himself as a moderate reformer. Back then, Mutreb was in the royal guard. Now, he would orchestrate Khashoggi’s killing. And his close ties to the crown prince beg the question, just how high up the Saudi chain of command did the plot to kill go? Early Tuesday morning, Khashoggi flies back from a weekend trip to London. He and the Saudis nearly cross paths at the airport. The Saudi teams check into two hotels, which give quick access to the consulate. Khashoggi heads home with his fiancée. He’d just bought an apartment for their new life together. By mid-morning, the Saudis are on the move. Mutreb leaves his hotel three hours before Khashoggi is due at the consulate. The rest of the team isn’t far behind. The building is only a few minutes away on foot, and soon, they’re spotted at this entrance. Mutreb arrives first. Next, we see al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert. And now al-Madani, the lookalike. The stage is almost set. A diplomatic car pulls out of the consulate driveway and switches places with a van, which backs in. Turkish officials say this van would eventually carry away Khashoggi’s remains. From above, we can see the driveway is covered, hiding any activity around the van from public view. Meanwhile, Khashoggi and his fiancée set out for the consulate, walking hand-in-hand. In their final hour together, they chat about dinner plans and new furniture for their home. At 1:13 p.m., they arrive at the consulate. Khashoggi gives her his cellphones before he enters. He walks into the consulate. It’s the last time we see him. Inside, Khashoggi is brought to the consul general’s office on the second floor. The hit team is waiting in a nearby room. Sources briefed on the evidence, told us Khashoggi quickly comes under attack. He’s dragged to another room and is killed within minutes. Then al-Tubaigy, the autopsy expert, dismembers his body while listening to music. Maher Mutreb makes a phone call to a superior. He says, “Tell your boss,” and “The deed was done.” Outside, the van reportedly carrying Khashoggi’s body pulls out of the side entrance and drives away. At the same time, the Saudis begin trying to cover their tracks. While Khashoggi’s fiancée waits here where she left him, two figures leave from the opposite side. One of them is wearing his clothes. Later, the Saudis would claim that this was Khashoggi. But it’s al-Madani, the engineer, now a body double pretending that the missing journalist left the consulate alive. Yet there’s one glaring flaw: The clothes are the same, but he’s wearing his own sneakers, the ones he walked in with. Meanwhile, the van that’s allegedly carrying Khashoggi’s body makes the two-minute drive from the consulate to the Saudi consul’s residence. There’s several minutes of deliberations but the van eventually pulls into the building’s driveway. Again, it’s hidden from public view. It’s now three hours since Khashoggi was last seen. The body double hails this taxi and continues weaving a false trail through the city. He heads to a popular tourist area and then changes back into his own clothes. Later, we see him joking around in surveillance footage. Over at the airport, more Saudi officials arrive on another flight from Riyadh. They spend just five hours in Istanbul, but we’re not sure where they go. Now we pick up Maher Mutreb again, exiting from the consul’s house. It’s time for them to go. Mutreb and others check out of their hotel and move through airport security. Al-Muzaini, the spy, heads to the airport too. But as they’re leaving Istanbul, Khashoggi’s fiancée is still outside the consulate, pacing in circles. She’ll soon raise the alarm that Khashoggi is missing and she’ll wait for him until midnight. The alarm spreads around the world. Nine days later, the Saudis send another team to Istanbul. They say it’s to investigate what happened. But among them are a toxicologist and a chemist, who also has ties to the hit team. He and Tubaigy attended a forensics graduation days before Khashoggi was killed. Turkish officials later say that this team’s mission was not to investigate, but to cover up the killing. Now the Saudi story has changed, and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for several suspects in Khashoggi’s killing. But that doesn’t include Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who many Western government officials are convinced authorized the killing. Khashoggi’s remains still haven’t been found.The first of three photographs sent by Chang’e-4 appeared a little over an hour after the spacecraft touched down as planned at 10:26 a.m., Beijing time, in the middle of a crater not far from the moon’s south pole. It showed a barren, undulating vista pocked by a smaller crater, as did another picture sent 12 hours later as the rover began its journey.
+Contrary to the enduring but mistaken notion that the moon has a “dark side” — you can blame Pink Floyd for that, at least in part — the photographs showed the landscape bathed in an orange hue, casting the sharp shadows from the lander and the rover. The other two, in black and white, showed the lander descending.
+The spacecraft was the first to land intact on the side of the moon that perpetually faces away from Earth. A Soviet satellite took the first photographs of the far side in 1959, and the Apollo missions circled above it between 1968 and 1972, but the difficulty of communicating with earthbound scientists had always made the idea of landing there more complex, if not necessarily prohibitive.In 1987, the directors Patrice Caurier and Moshe Leiser had their debut at the genre-hopping Spoleto Festival USA with a restaging of Richard Strauss’s operatic Oscar Wilde adaptation, “Salome,” set in 1930s Germany. This year, the pair — now festival regulars — will return with another reimagining of “Salome,” set in the present day, one of more than 140 opera, theater, dance and music performances that will take place at the 43rd iteration of the festival this spring.
+The festival, in Charleston, S.C., is known for bringing together artists from many mediums. This year, it runs from May 24 through June 9. Some other highlights this year include a performance of the composer Joby Talbot’s vocal work “Path of Miracles” staged by the director John La Bouchardière, a performance by the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and productions of the Shakespeare plays “Twelfth Night,” “The Comedy of Errors” and “Pericles” from Shakespeare’s Globe. During some of the Globe’s performances, there will be a surprise element — audience members will get to collectively choose which of the three plays they would like to see performed.
+A testament to the festival’s diversity of genre is the fact that those shows will not be the only place in the festival that Shakespeare’s ideas can be heard. The conductor Evan Rogister will lead a program of selections from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet” orchestra suites.
+“We want to make people think of these as human stories rather than as a piece of dance or a piece of theater or a piece of music,” Nigel Redden, the festival’s director, said in a phone interview.A quick survey of Mr. Whelan’s Russian social media contacts, about 70 in all, indicated that most seemed to be men with some sort of connection to academies run by the Russian Navy, the Defense Ministry or the Civil Aviation Authority. Most of those he reached out to said that Mr. Whelan seemed like a friendly, open American interested in learning the Russian language and culture and traveling around the country. Although he studied Russian, some of his social media contacts said he communicated through Google Translate.
+One Russian whom Mr. Whelan started following on Instagram six years ago was Sergei Artyomenko, 26, a Moscow hair stylist who was then serving in the military. The two men never met in person, although they had a running joke about his getting a haircut, Mr. Artyomenko said. “I am not sure how he found me, but he would initiate small talk every six months or so,” Mr. Artyomenko said, adding that they had mostly discussed interesting places to travel.
+Mr. Whelan’s family said that he was in Russia on his most recent trip, in December, to attend the wedding of a friend from the Marine Corps who was marrying a Russian woman at the storied Metropol Hotel in Moscow. That is where Russian authorities apprehended Mr. Whelan last Friday during a meeting with a Russian citizen in his hotel room.
+Rosbalt, a Russian news agency close to the security services, quoted an unidentified intelligence source on Wednesday who said that Mr. Whelan was accused of trying to recruit the Russian to obtain classified information about staff members at various Russian agencies.
+Mr. Whelan was arrested five minutes after receiving a U.S.B. stick containing a list of all of the employees at a classified security agency, Rosbalt said.
+Despite the accusations, C.I.A. officers expressed skepticism that Mr. Whelan was a spy.
+First, they said, the court-martial was the kind of black mark on his record that would most likely have prevented him from being hired by the C.I.A., or would at least complicate his tenure there. Most C.I.A. officers work in foreign countries while posing as diplomats, and if caught by a hostile government in an act of espionage, their diplomatic passports ensure they cannot be long detained, and at worst face expulsion.
+Former C.I.A. officials who have operated in Moscow said the agency almost never sends officers into Russia without diplomatic protections. The United States, said John Sipher, a former C.I.A. officer who served in Moscow and ran the agency’s Russia operations, would “never leave a real intelligence officer vulnerable to arrest.”BERLIN — The director Steven Spielberg cited a “renewed cycle of hate” in society behind his decision to bring “Schindler’s List” back to movie theaters around the world, hoping it would provoke discussion.
+An independent movie theater in western Germany embraced that very idea when it offered free tickets to members of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, to its screening of the classic film on Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day.
+But some members of the AfD, whose leaders have dismissed the Nazi era as a “speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history” and have referred to the country’s main Holocaust Memorial as “a monument of shame,” saw the offer from the Cinexx theater more as a provocation than an invitation.
+They have called it a “tasteless instrumentalization” and a “senseless provocation.”
+Members of left-leaning political parties and others in Germany have praised the offer, however. As justification, they point to the AfD’s penchant for reciting slogans like “Germany for the Germans,” for questioning the country’s post-World War II culture of atonement and for being willing to march alongside neo-Nazis during protests in the eastern city of Chemnitz.Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House for the last 16 years. She’s been in power for the party’s highs … … and lows. “Sweeping, stunning Republican victories all across the country.” “… the president of the United States.” Now she is again Speaker of the House, and leading an impeachment battle in a big election year in 2020. “I couldn’t be more honored.” So what are the tactics that have kept her in power for so long? “Good morning.” Pelosi’s affinity for politics may be genetic. “Well, I was born into a political family in Baltimore, Md. My father was in Congress when I was born, and he was mayor my whole life from when I was in first grade to when I went away to college.” But despite being raised in political circles, Pelosi didn’t jump in right away. Instead, she moved to San Francisco with her husband in the late 1960s and raised their five children as a stay-at-home mom. But as they grew up, Pelosi decided to enter the fray. Pelosi quickly rose through the ranks of the California Democratic Party, earning a reputation as a star fund-raiser, and in 1987 she won a seat in Congress. Through the ’90s Pelosi navigated the party in Washington, becoming leader in 2003. “Thank you all very much.” Since then, she’s raised millions for the Democrats. Over the years, Pelosi has earned a reputation as a shrewd legislator, especially when it comes to corralling votes. Her tactic: rewarding loyalty with good roles and coveted assignments, and punishing those who cross her. Exhibit A: when Representative John Dingell didn’t support Pelosi for Democratic whip, she eventually backed someone else to take one of his committee seats. Pelosi has never been shy about how she feels about her leadership. “Well, I’m a master legislator. I think I’m the best person to go forward to unify. I have a strong following in the country. Thank you.” And while her confidence has likely paid off, it also provides a counter to her other public persona: Democratic bogeywoman. Pelosi’s long tenure has made her an easy target for the right. “Amy McGrath is a Nancy Pelosi liberal —” “… whose name is Conor Lamb, but in Washington he’d be one of Nancy Pelosi’s sheep.” And occasionally for the left. “I didn’t support Nancy Pelosi for any leadership position. “We need some new leadership.” But when asked, she just shrugs it off. “I think I’m worth the trouble, quite frankly.” Pelosi is no stranger to a fight or a quick retort. “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.” She’s battled President Bush and recent G.O.P. leaders. “Mr. President, ‘stay the course’ is not a strategy it’s a slogan.” “Say one nice thing about Paul Ryan —” “There’s a big difference between the president and me: He has very thin skin, and I have very thick skin.” And with a challenging year ahead, there are inevitably many more fights to come. “So, help us God.”Jacob Tugendrajch, a spokesman for Mr. Johnson, called the law a “vital protection against illegal hotels” and said the Council would continue “the fight for this common sense, data-driven law.”
+Mr. de Blasio has contrasted home-sharing services with the hotel industry, which is subject to inspections and regulations that allow the city to hold owners accountable. He has argued that Airbnb should also be required to turn over information that helps the city protect the public interest.
+An influential union for hotel workers, the Hotel Trades Council, strongly backed the law.
+In a 52-page ruling, Judge Engelmayer did not rule on the merits of Airbnb and HomeAway’s claims, but said the injunction would block the law from taking effect pending resolution of the litigation, which he said would proceed expeditiously.
+The law would require online rental services to disclose the addresses of its listings and the identities of its hosts to the city’s Office of Special Enforcement on a monthly basis. Hosts would also be required to list whether the dwelling is their primary residence and whether the entire unit or a portion is available for short-term rentals. Companies that failed to share the data would be subject to fines of $1,500 for each listing they did not disclose.
+New York City is Airbnb’s largest domestic market, with more than 50,000 apartment rental listings. But under state law, it is illegal in most buildings for an apartment to be rented out for less than 30 days unless the permanent tenant is residing in the apartment at the same time.
+City officials hoped the new disclosure requirements would make it much easier for the city to enforce the state law and would lead to thousands of units rented through Airbnb in the city coming off the market.
+Airbnb and other home-rental services have been battling regulation nationally and abroad, as cities including Seattle, San Francisco and London have required such companies to share some data through a registration system for listings.In Princeton, N.J., a three-bedroom, two-full-and-two-half-bath house built in 1992 that has an open floor plan with a large galley kitchen, a formal dining room, a sunken great room, a gas fireplace, a wine cellar, an attached two-car garage, and a finished basement, on 2.02 acres of wooded and landscaped property.When Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer came to the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn in December, every sight, structure and storefront seemed to remind them of the formative days of “Broad City.” There was the waterfront where, more than a decade ago, they would sit and imagine what the future held for them. There were the former offices of Lifebooker, the defunct beauty-and-lifestyle bargain website, where they worked intermittently while they wrote the earliest episodes of the “Broad City” online series over Gchat.
+Those days of striving and subsisting are long gone for them. Jacobson, 34, and Glazer, 31, are not just the creators and stars of “Broad City,” the Comedy Central series that puts an antic, absurdist spin on their coming-of-age adventures; they’re members of the entertainment establishment. They present at prestigious awards shows, appear in tributes to their comedy foremothers; and have no shortage of solo projects. Jacobson writes books (like her recent memoir, “I Might Regret This”) and stars on Netflix’s “Disenchantment,” and Glazer performs stand-up comedy and appears in films like “Rough Night.”
+They can’t pretend to be who they aren’t anymore, and so, the coming season of “Broad City,” which makes its debut on Jan. 24, will be its last. On a break from editing some of the final episodes, Jacobson and Glazer explained their decision to end the series on their own terms, talked about the making of the final season and looked forward to life — as collaborators and friends — without the show.
+These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
+As we speak, you’re not quite done with your work on “Broad City,” but how does it feel to be very nearly done with the show?We let our daughter go to the college of her choice. She got into many state and private schools, some with scholarships. But no breaks at all from the expensive private college she selected. She loves it, and we can afford it, but it means constant sacrifice. She knows this, but it doesn’t stop her from regaling us with her friends’ pricey bling and fancy travel. I finally lost it when she ignored the care package I sent during exams, telling me about a friend’s new Cartier necklace instead. She texted: “I wasn’t asking for one.” I replied: “Please stop telling me about your rich friends’ luxuries! I don’t want to hear about them.” What do we do?
+MOM
+One of the first lessons they teach at advice school is: Never tell an aggravated person to relax. (It just inflames the aggravation!) But it seems pretty natural to me that a young person encountering great wealth for the first time would be a little transfixed by it. I’m sorry your daughter was so breathless about her pal’s fancy necklace that she forgot to thank you for your care package. But this phase will probably pass.
+You may be creating an unfair connection between your financial sacrifice and your daughter’s behavior. She’s probably drawn to all kinds of unfamiliar people and things in her new environment (some of them 18 karat), and would be even if she were on full scholarship. You gave her free rein to choose a school. You shouldn’t resent her for the price tag now, or let it color your expectations of her behavior.Even if you turned out to be right about a continuing tumble in 2019, the great risk would be that whenever the rebound began, you would be caught out of position, unable to take advantage.
+Suppose you were clever enough to recognize at the start of December 2007 that a major recession was about to take place, and you moved your money out of stocks.
+Yes, you would have saved yourself from steep losses in 2008 and early 2009. But you have to ask yourself: Would I have also had the courage to put money back in while the economy was still in horrendous shape in 2009, with double-digit unemployment and a banking system in tatters?
+If not then, when would you have moved money back in? People who simply left their savings fully invested in the stock market in December 2007 have now made a 134 percent return on that money. Would you have done better than that, or would you have missed out on a big chunk of those gains out of the same caution that led you to pull money out of stocks to begin with?
+People who did not panic in the fall of 2008 — the most panic-worthy time in most of our lifetimes — and kept putting their retirement funds into stocks did indeed incur steep losses over the ensuing months. But their newly invested funds were being put into stocks at the most favorable valuations in a generation, and thus enjoyed the full benefit of the rebound when it eventually came.
+A truism of economic and financial cycles is that by the time it feels like the coast is clear and putting money into riskier investments is completely safe, the real money has already been made. People who looked at the economic chaos of early 2009 and stuck to their guns have ended up far better off than those who, convinced that a double-dip downturn was imminent, waited for years to get in.
+This equation changes, of course, if we’re talking about money needed imminently as opposed to longer-term savings, such as for retirement. The economy looks stable now, but that could change — it’s still possible that markets and C.E.O.s know something about the future that isn’t clear in the data yet.How better to enter the new year than with a look back? History runs through many of this week’s recommended titles, from the fall of Rome to the birth of Islam to Michelangelo in 16th-century Constantinople. If Paris in the 1960s is your bag, Patrick Modiano has you covered. If you’re interested in the Harlem Renaissance but have never read Jean Toomer’s seminal 1923 novel “Cane,” which helped catalyze that movement, you might add it to your list of resolutions. If you’re curious about the Philippine-American War and its lasting impact — inescapable in the Philippines, mostly ignored in America — then Gina Apostol’s novel “Insurrecto” offers an improbably fun, and funny, guide. (When you’re done with that, maybe pick up another satire out of Asia. Yan Lianke’s “The Day the Sun Died” or Gengoroh Tagame’s “My Brother’s Husband: Volume 2” both fit the bill.)
+We round things out with a debut novel about London and two books by notable critics: a memoir of love and reading late in life by the literary critic Susan Gubar, and a collection of film writing by the movie critic A. S. Hamrah.
+Happy 2019, everyone.
+Gregory Cowles
+Senior Editor, Books
+CANE, by Jean Toomer. (Penguin Classics, $15.) In 1923, Toomer published “Cane,” the single, slender novel upon which his reputation rests. In bursts of poetry and prose, it tells of black life in the lethal rural South and in the loveless cities of the North. “Cane” sold modestly but exerted a powerful influence over the Harlem Renaissance. “It is oracular, delirious and American,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes, “rich with the intensities of Melville, the expansiveness of Whitman and Toomer’s own bedeviling preoccupation with color.”
+THE EARTH DIES STREAMING: Film Writing, 2002-2018, by A. S. Hamrah. (n+1, $20.) As the resident movie critic of the literary and political journal n+1, Hamrah writes about his idiosyncratic favorites with a political awareness that never succumbs to leaden moralizing. Hamrah is “committed to his ambivalence,” our critic Jennifer Szalai says, “conveying it with a mixture of precision and conviction that will remind you how much more there is to be gleaned from a review than whether a movie is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (even if it’s a movie you happen to deem very good or very bad indeed).”Abiy Ahmed, the 42-year-old prime minister of Ethiopia, has dazzled Africa with a volley of political reforms since his appointment in April. Mr. Abiy ended the 20-year border war with Eritrea, released political prisoners, removed bans on dissident groups and allowed their members to return from exile, declared press freedom and granted diverse political groups the freedom to mobilize and organize.
+Mr. Abiy has been celebrated as a reformer, but his transformative politics has come up against ethnic federalism enshrined in Ethiopia’s Constitution. The resulting clash threatens to exacerbate competitive ethnic politics further and push the country toward an interethnic conflict.
+The 1994 Constitution, introduced by Prime Minister Meles Zenawi and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front governing coalition, recast the country from a centrally unified republic to a federation of nine regional ethnic states and two federally administered city-states. It bases key rights — to land, government jobs, representation in local and federal bodies — not on Ethiopian citizenship but on being considered ethnically indigenous in constituent ethnic states.
+The system of ethnic federalism was troubled with internal inconsistencies because ethnic groups do not live only in a discrete “homeland” territory but are also dispersed across the country. Nonnative ethnic minorities live within every ethnic homeland.Suddenly, Trey Mourning, a 6-foot-9 forward, had a more difficult decision to make regarding a potential transfer. Though Patrick Jr.’s assistant coaching position would be eliminated because of an anti-nepotism policy, the young Mourning could not dismiss the chance to play under the senior Ewing, who is actually listed in Trey’s smartphone as Uncle Patrick.
+They had a private sit-down, during which Ewing told him, “Put in the work, you’ll play.”
+No problem, Trey thought. If there was one thing ingrained in him by his father, it was an ethic that across 15 N.B.A. seasons of low-post warfare was best exemplified by Alonzo Mourning’s refusal to pack it in after a kidney transplant in 2003.
+Trey wound up sitting out his senior year at Georgetown with a hip injury, but he had been starting as a graduate student this season. He averaged 23.5 minutes, 7.7 points and 5.4 rebounds a game in the team’s first 11 games, but was idled recently by a concussion — his status is “day-to-day.” (Georgetown is 11-3 over all as it enters an early but important Big East matchup with St. John’s, which is 13-1 over all, on Saturday afternoon in Washington.) In a game against Campbell on Nov. 24, Mourning had career highs of 27 points and 12 rebounds.
+Watching was his father, who works in Miami for the Heat and sat in the stands at Washington’s Capital One Arena for the only time this season, along with Trey’s brother, Alijah.
+“Sweetest night so far,” Trey said.
+Trey Mourning’s game is less bullish than his father’s, reflecting the sport’s dramatic shift since those Heat-Knicks conflagrations, which often ended with neither team within squinting view of 90 points, much less 100. Compelling as the games were, unequaled at the time in raw intensity, they contributed mightily to N.B.A. rule changes in 2004 and the contemporary mix of unimpeded driving and long-distance shooting.On good days, it’s a concert hall, a news source or a way to entertain the kids. On bad ones, it’s a cranked-to-11 therapy session to the loudest tracks on your Spotify playlist.
+Factory audio systems in cars were once, at best, an AM-FM radio with a cassette player and a couple of speakers crammed into leftover dashboard space. A turning point came in 1982, when Bose tuned a system to the acoustics inside a 1983 Cadillac Seville. This audio revolution heard around the world featured four speakers. Four.
+Today, solid midpriced systems pack a dozen. The best are so immersive, your next automobile decision might come down to how well the car stereo rocks your favorite Alabama Shakes song.
+Chances are a team larger than the Count Basie Orchestra designed the stereo in your car. “It’s definitely a challenge to put a good sound system into a vehicle,” said Chris Ludwig, vice president of Harman Lifestyle Automotive, whose audio and infotainment systems are in tens of millions of cars.Edgar Hilsenrath, a German Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution who unsentimentally stoked the embers of the Holocaust with brutally satirical autobiographical novels, died on Sunday in Wittlich, Germany. He was 92.
+His death was announced by his French publisher, Le Tripode.
+Mr. Hilsenrath finished his first novel, “Night,” after emigrating to New York in 1951 as a refugee from war-torn Europe. (He lived in New York until 1975.) Published in English in 1964, the novel was inspired by his dehumanizing captivity in a Jewish ghetto.
+He also wrote a celebrated farce, “The Nazi and the Barber” (1971), which tells the story of an SS officer and mass murderer who kills his Jewish best friend from childhood, assumes his identity, flees to Palestine and is transformed into an ardent Zionist.
+“To write grotesque things is my way of laughing at death,” Mr. Hilsenrath told the French newspaper Le Figaro in 2012.LONDON — For travel bargain hunters, the first day of 2019 was a spectacular one.
+On routes between Asia and North America, Cathay Pacific, the Hong Kong-based airline, offered seats in its exclusive business and first classes for less than the economy fare. A round-trip flight in business class from Vietnam to New York cost as little as $674.63, a small fraction of the usual price, according to One Mile at a Time, a travel blog that documented the fares.
+“Cathay Pacific does actually do some quite aggressive fare sales from Asia,” said Rob Burgess, the editor of a frequent flier website, headforpoints.com. Business class seats from Asia to the United States can be found for around $5,000.
+But not this aggressive.
+The low prices, offered by mistake for several hours on Monday in North America, caught Cathay Pacific itself by surprise.
+On Wednesday, the airline acknowledged the error but said it would honor the fares. On Thursday, the trip that had briefly cost less than $700 appeared on the Cathay Pacific website for about $16,000 for a fully flexible fare.PARIS — The French police have arrested a prominent leader of the Yellow Vest movement for a second time, in a clear sign that the government is following through on a pledge to crack down on the protests that have shaken France for much of the past six weeks.
+Éric Drouet, a 33-year-old truck driver from the Paris exurbs who was one of the original organizers of the movement, was arrested Wednesday night in Paris for what the authorities said was “organizing an undeclared demonstration.” On Thursday, he was released pending a trial.
+“We’ve got to shock public opinion,” Mr. Drouet said in a video on Facebook before going to the Place de le Concorde on Wednesday and placing candles for the movement’s wounded. He called for “action” on the Champs-Élysées, where several dozen Yellow Vests were waiting for him that evening outside a McDonald’s restaurant.
+Instead, shortly after 9 p.m., Mr. Drouet was hustled into a police van by riot police officers.
+French law requires the organizers of street demonstrations to inform the local authorities about their plans. Violations can bring six months in jail and a fine of 7,500 euros, about $8,500.#SpeakingInDance is a weekly visual exploration of dance on Instagram. Watch the video from our most recent post below, and follow us at @nytimes.I tend to esteem motion pictures more for their aesthetic value than for their use value but sometimes there are exceptions. Through scrupulous and heightened simulations of terrifying reality, last year’s “First Man” reminded me why I never even entertained the notion of becoming an astronaut.
+Taking the opposite tack with an irrational but not altogether implausible conceit, “Escape Room” reminds me why I’ll never engage in the newfangled form of entertainment in which you allow yourself to be “trapped” in a room and puzzle-solve your way out of it.
+The conceit is that this movie’s game masters absolutely intend to kill the six invitees who at first find themselves in a waiting area that turns into a people-cooking oven. The players, mostly adult but still “Breakfast Club”-ish, include a female war veteran, an overachieving but friendless collegian, a dirtbag grocery stock boy and a too-pragmatic finance guy.Whatever mission she’s on never comes into focus; the suspense, encouraged by the pulsing drone of Askar Brickman’s soundtrack, is reduced to anticipating the next fall. The video becomes a parody of masculinity or action films or movie-star heroes — all suggestions aided by Ms. Liden’s androgynous presence and impeccable posture (think of Matt Damon in “The Bourne Identity”) and also undermined by her unwavering dignity.
+At the gallery, “Grounding” is projected onto a large wall of cheap plywood, angled at about 45 degrees. (The grain is sometimes visible through the image.) This architectural intervention also evokes the way the ground seems to rise to meet you when you fall.
+Another video, this one on a small, flat-screen monitor, awaits on the other side of a trapdoor- like opening in the plywood wall. Even briefer than “Grounding,” it is titled “GTG TTYL” and shows Ms. Liden performing three simple acts of disappearance within the gallery itself. She hides, or takes cover, by climbing behind the gallery’s sofa, then a false wall and, finally, a large video screen. These short actions are each segmented into split-second moments that are isolated by the monitor’s going dark — interruptions like the falls in “Grounding.” The result is unexpectedly mysterious: choreographed stealth extended, through video, into oddly graceful, deconstructed dance.
+Through Jan. 13 at 165 East Broadway, Manhattan; 212-477-5006, reenaspaulings.com.After Shamorie Ponds of the St. John’s Red Storm fed Mustapha Heron for a rim-rattling dunk before a capacity crowd at Carnesecca Arena in Queens on Tuesday night, Marvin Clark II walked to the center of the court and stood in the middle of the team’s red logo.
+He faced a crowd of more than 5,000 people, including the tennis legend John McEnroe, and waved his arms to stoke the cheers.
+Like many of the St. John’s men’s basketball players this season, the 6-foot-7 Clark had seen this sort of thing done before — in other places. He played in a Final Four for Michigan State and Coach Tom Izzo in 2015, notching 10 minutes as a freshman when the Spartans lost to Duke. After his sophomore year, he transferred to St. John’s, where he believed he could play a larger role.
+Mission accomplished. On Tuesday night, Clark scored 22 points and grabbed 7 rebounds in an 89-69 win over No. 16 Marquette, the most impressive victory this season for Coach Chris Mullin’s resurgent team, which is 13-1 over all entering an early Big East matchup with Georgetown (11-3) on Saturday in Washington.Helen Mirra
+Through Jan. 5. Peter Freeman, 140 Grand Street, Manhattan; 212-966-5154, peterfreemaninc.com.
+Helen Mirra’s marvelous SoHo show of small, vibrant weavings, evocatively titled “Bones Are Spaces,” rebalances the visual and intellectual elements of her work. For over two decades, this American artist has assiduously imbued her modest, low-lying sculptures and wall pieces — handmade from assorted found materials, dissected objects and, occasionally, borrowed texts — with complex reverberations of literature, history and philosophy. At times, these complexities have remained obscure unless clarified by the gallery’s news release, making the work feel hermetic and precious.
+The 24 weavings here were made on a hand loom over the last three years, using linen and wool and sometimes silk. They progress from pieces rarely more than 12 inches on a side, which are dominated by various shapes against contrasting backgrounds, to somewhat larger works in more muted yet sumptuous monochromes. In these, especially, the complexities are right on the surface: in subtle shifts in texture, tonality and the tightness of the weave; hints of shapes and grids; and other variations. All is in flux, depending on your distance from the works or where you place your attention. Everything about them conveys and invites considerable thought and concentration. The title’s reference to the intricate interiors of bones — which combine hollow and solid, hard and soft — seems apt.
+Ms. Mirra has often linked her work to her devotion to walking in nature, and the connection seems especially close here. Weaving is a linear activity with a cumulative effect. Ms. Mirra’s weavings can also be seen as reliefs, paintings and texts, especially those that teem with surface incident, including several from 2018 named for the months in which they were made.
+Perhaps most telling is the news release that has been, it says, “intentionally left blank.” To Ms. Mirra’s credit, we are on our own. ROBERTA SMITHManagers at the golf club and at Trump International did not respond to requests for comment on Ms. Torres’s account. A Secret Service spokeswoman, Cathy L. Milhoan, said she could not discuss what measures the agency took to vet employees at the golf club. “The U.S. Secret Service does not comment on our protective operations to include the administration of our name check program,” she said in a statement.
+Ms. Torres said she believes the undocumented workers she identified to management also had their names removed from the list given to the Secret Service, but all of them, she said, remained on staff at the resort.
+At least one other undocumented employee at the resort, Victorina Morales, a native of Guatemala who had been illegally in the United States since 1999, said she was given a Secret Service pin to wear when the president was in residence at the club. Secret Service officials said the pin did not signify that she had passed any security clearance.
+Ms. Torres, 43, said she was hired to work at the resort in early 2015 using a falsified Social Security number and permanent resident card. She had informed a manager during her job interview that both were phony, she said, and the documents were photocopied for club files when she started working there.
+After a few months working as a housekeeper, Ms. Torres said she complained to management about what she felt was abusive treatment by the housekeeping supervisor and was moved to the kitchen, where she started as a dishwasher. She said she worked her way up to assistant to the chef, earning $14.50 an hour.
+Among other tasks, Ms. Torres noted that she made sandwiches for Secret Service agents when they began visiting the property. She also prepared food for Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Trump had praised her work and tipped her when she was in housekeeping, Ms. Torres recalled. But she and other former employees who have spoken with The Times said they grew increasingly uncomfortable with Mr. Trump’s derogatory comments about immigrants during his campaign. “When he won the election, fear took over me,” Ms. Torres said. “I felt I was in the lion’s den. I had to leave.”Are you in touch with her?
+We are in touch with her. But recently it has been very difficult because of all the things that have been going on. But she knows that I have been a little bit outspoken about the fact that I’ve been so disappointed. It’s tragic.
+It must be very strange for you, having played her. Do you think she should lose her Nobel?
+I think we should really take a step back and try and understand. What they are condemning her for is for not speaking out. For not turning around and saying, “You are wrong, you shouldn’t have.” Yes, maybe she can do that and be thrown out of the country again. I feel that she’s trying to keep the door open so that there’s still dialogue within her country and she still can have some kind of say. What I fear is without the support of the international people, it’s easy for the military to just disregard her. So I think she’s in a really, really rough place.
+Let me ask you about another controversial thing.
+Why stop now while we’re at it? Don’t get me into trouble.
+It’s been over a year since news about Harvey Weinstein broke. You have said you never had any trouble with sexual harassment, and if you had, you would have deployed your martial arts skills. What do you think about men hoping to come back?
+It was an adjustment. Something that we needed to clean up. We needed skeletons to come out from the closet. The most important thing is that the person has changed and understands that all that is bad.
+With “Crazy Rich Asians,” were there reactions to the film that surprised you?
+Asians are quite reserved, but after the movie they’ve come up to me on the streets to say “Can I give you a hug? I just want to say thank you.” The first opening weekend, I was on my knees, because God forbid, if it didn’t work, it could’ve set us back 20 years.HONG KONG — For years, no matter what was happening elsewhere, global companies bet billions upon billions of dollars that China’s consumers would keep spending money.
+Now, just when the world economy could use their financial firepower, they are holding back, worried about the country’s slowing growth, a trade war with the United States and rising amounts of personal debt.
+Zhao Zheng, 26, is among the cost-conscious consumers.
+On Thursday, Mr. Zhao, a real estate agent, was browsing smartphones made by Xiaomi, a Chinese rival to Apple that prices its handsets at a fraction of what the American tech giant charges for iPhones. He said the success in China of Xiaomi and Miniso, a chain of low-cost variety stores, suggested that Chinese consumers were looking to get more for their money.
+“The economy,” Mr. Zhao said, “is definitely very bad.”
+A significant pullback could have a big impact on a world looking for engines of growth, on companies that counted on China’s continuing expansion and on global investors who have long viewed Chinese consumers as a steady source of profits.WASHINGTON — As political props go, the one in the middle of the conference table during President Trump’s cabinet meeting on Wednesday was as hard to miss as it was baffling.
+It was a movie-style poster of the president in a bestride-the-colossus pose, hair lacquered in place, gaze serious and purposeful, with the words “SANCTIONS ARE COMING NOVEMBER 4” emblazoned across the middle.
+Mr. Trump did not talk about the poster. Nor did any of his cabinet members seated around him, or even Vice President Mike Pence, who was sitting directly in front of it. And he made no connection to the date on the poster — two days before Election Day.
+But in November he had tweeted a picture of the poster, with the date of Nov. 5, to announce that sanctions against Iran, which had been repealed when President Barack Obama signed a nuclear agreement with the country in 2015, were going to be reimposed. And as he took questions from reporters on Wednesday, Mr. Trump mentioned that Iran was now a much different country, apparently because of the sanctions that the United States had imposed.For the Japanese filmmaker Isao Takahata, who died last year at the age of 82, the animated film was more than a vehicle for the whimsical and phantasmagoric, it was a platform for personal expression. While the same is certainly true for his friend and colleague Hayao Miyazaki, with whom Takahata co-founded the production house Studio Ghibli, Takahata pushed harder at accepted boundaries.
+“Grave of the Fireflies,” the 1988 film that was Takahata’s first for Studio Ghibli, is a still-stunning example. While suffused with near-fantastic elements, “Fireflies,” based on a late-days-of-World-War-II story by Akiyuki Nosaka, mostly uses animation to heighten a harrowing realism.
+The movie begins on a blunt note that resonates more of its awful tragedy as it continues: with the death by starvation of one of its lead characters, Seita, who then is reunited with his dead younger sister, Setsuko, the two of them now wandering as spirits. The movie flashes back to events of earlier months when the duo were still alive. Separated from their mother after an American bombing raid on Kobe, the pair spend their last days fending for themselves in a wasteland where no adult help is forthcoming. As much as they struggle, they remain beautifully and sometimes humorously childlike.
+Although intermittently available on home video in the United States, “Fireflies” is only now getting an official theatrical release here. The movie remains one of the most startling and moving animated films ever. It is also, with the likes of “The 400 Blows,” “Kes,” and “Vagabond,” one of the finest films about being young in an indifferent world.“I assure you, it was a precise tie,” Frank Johnson, of the accounting firm Price Waterhouse, said. “We always do at least one recount, but you can imagine all the recounts we did on that one.”
+The 1969 tie proved controversial because the academy had broken with the tradition of inviting only actors who had at least two credits to join; it admitted Streisand as a member, even though she had acted in only one film. (The practice of not offering admission after only one credit still holds.) If she hadn’t been able to vote for herself — which she presumably did — she wouldn’t have tied with Hepburn.
+Gregory Peck, then the academy’s president, justified the membership decision by citing Streisand’s Tony-nominated Broadway turn in “Funny Girl”: “When an actress has played a great role on the stage and is coming into films for what will obviously be an important career, it is ridiculous to make her wait two or three years for membership.”
+Streisand also raised eyebrows with her Oscar night attire: an Arnold Scaasi sheer pantsuit with bell bottoms (which she tripped over on her way to the podium) and strategically placed fabric patches to maintain a modicum of modesty. “I had no idea when I wore it to receive the Academy Award that the outfit would become see-through under the lights,” Streisand said when Scaasi died in 2015. “I was embarrassed, but it sure was original at the time.”
+She could have gone with a safer look. “I was choosing between two different outfits — one was lovely but very conservative, then there was the pantsuit with plastic sequins,” Streisand told W in 2016. “I thought to myself, I’m going to win two Oscars in my lifetime, and I’ll be more conservative next time.”
+Her prophecy came true. Streisand shared the award for best original song with Paul Williams for “Evergreen,” the love theme for her 1976 version of, yes, “A Star is Born.” She wore her own design, a red gown with a capelet, which stirred no controversy.On Wednesday, Mr. de Blasio told reporters that he would announce the details “in a few days” and that New Yorkers would understand if it “takes a few extra days.” Mr. de Blasio said the city was considering how it could include pay-per-ride MetroCards, which are often favored by New Yorkers who are living paycheck to paycheck.
+The city agreed to pay $106 million for the first six months of the program. Under the agreement, it would apply to New Yorkers below the federal poverty line — a household income of about $25,000 for a family of four.
+[Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo canceled the full shutdown of the L train between Brooklyn and Manhattan.]
+For transit advocates who aggressively pushed Mr. de Blasio to support the idea, his failure to start the program on time or to publicize it has been frustrating.
+“To see people not taking this as incredibly seriously as they should be, it is disappointing to say the least,” said David R. Jones, president of the Community Service Society of New York, an antipoverty nonprofit. “This is not just any ordinary mayor, this is a mayor who guaranteed he’d make this the most equitable city in the nation.”
+Mr. de Blasio has struggled at times to prove he is skilled at managing a sprawling city government. And he has recently received criticism for spending less time at City Hall and for his hands-off management style.
+Mr. Johnson, who has been an enthusiastic supporter of Fair Fares, has not yet joined in the chorus of criticism over the start of the program. His office said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. Johnson was “working to make sure that Fair Fares is a success.”
+“The Council has always believed that this program is for all New Yorkers living at or below the federal poverty line, and is committed to making sure that vision becomes a reality,” said Breeana Mulligan, a Council spokeswoman.Of course, the announcement was also celebrated by New Yorkers who rely on the line. Jocelyn Crespo, 35, who lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, described herself as “very relieved.”
+“It gives us more options to get into work and opportunities to get to our friends,” she said.
+But Mr. Cuomo’s announcement also raised a host of questions: Would the new technology work? Has it been effective elsewhere? Why did the governor wait until the last minute to do this? Transit advocates wondered how much the construction would cost and raised questions over whether Mr. Cuomo, who controls the subway, had made the decision unilaterally.
+Mr. Cuomo appeared pleased to have stepped in to save the day. The decision, he said, would be a “phenomenal benefit to the people of New York City.”
+Mayor Bill de Blasio’s office, however, sounded a note of caution, saying the whiplash move by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway, “was certainly no way to run a railroad.”
+“So long as this new strategy proves to be real, the mayor thinks this is great news for L-train riders,” Eric Phillips, a spokesman for the mayor, said in a statement. “But like everyone else, the mayor thinks the M.T.A. has some real explaining to do about how it has handled this for the last few years.”It was a race to the finish for teams like the Colts, the Ravens and the Eagles, but there is no time to celebrate as they all now have to back up their N.F.L. playoff positions by trying to beat fierce competition. The weekend’s wild-card matchups will be spread over two days, with a trip to the divisional round on the line.
+[Read: Tarik Cohen Makes Football Fun Again in Chicago]
+Here are our predictions for how the games will sort out, both in terms of who will win and who will win against the spread.
+Last week’s record against the spread: 11-5
+Final regular-season record: 139-111-5Last week, after a marathon closing dash of 77.5 miles during 32 sleepless hours, the American Colin O’Brady stormed to the finish line at the foot of the Leverett Glacier to claim the first solo, unsupported traverse of Antarctica — a challenge Mr. O’Brady had called The Impossible First. Two days later, culminating a rivalry that commentators likened to the race between Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen to reach the South Pole in 1911-12, Louis Rudd of Britain finished the same arduous journey of more than 920 miles across the frozen continent, surviving brutal winds, whiteouts, crevasse scares and temperatures below minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Rudd’s expedition was conceived in part as a tribute to his friend and mentor, Henry Worsley, who died of peritonitis after sledding more than 800 miles attempting the same feat three years earlier.
+All but lost in the celebration of Mr. O’Brady’s and Mr. Rudd’s splendid achievements was the deed of another polar explorer, the Norwegian Borge Ousland, completed more than two decades before. Or, if Mr. Ousland’s own traverse was glancingly and anonymously invoked, it was tagged with an asterisk, as this year’s trekkers were hailed for attempting the crossing without the aid of dogs or sails.
+It’s not surprising that in 2018, the effort to claim the purported first solo, unsupported traverse of Antarctica became an all-out race between two contenders. For sponsored professional adventurers who feel the need to connect in real time to a social media audience, true exploration becomes secondary to the need to set “records,” to claim “firsts,” no matter how arbitrarily defined.On a late November morning, the laid-back version of Sharon Van Etten serving coffee from a thermos at a quiet kitchen table was both a miracle and an illusion.
+Toys piled in a corner and a rocking chair from her own childhood revealed the momentary absence of a toddler, but little else betrayed the mix of chaos and ambition swirling just below the surface of Van Etten’s picturesque Brooklyn life.
+In a few hours, she would fly to Los Angeles to film a quick scene for the second season of “The OA,” the Netflix show that became her first professional acting job in 2016. On the way, she would use the quiet hours away from her young son to study for the final exams that loomed as she continued to pursue an undergraduate degree in psychology. There was also a new script that needed reading and an experimental film score in the works, but those were just the side gigs.
+At the same time, Van Etten, 37, was in the midst of returning to her day job as a singer-songwriter, plotting a music video shoot, getting ready for a tour set to begin in February and awaiting the imminent delivery of the finished vinyl for her fifth studio LP, out Jan. 18 via Jagjaguwar. Though typically understated, the album’s title, “Remind Me Tomorrow,” nods at Van Etten’s current juggling act — a tongue-in-cheek mantra for a multitasking mother who also happens to run the small business that is an independent band.Washington Redskins linebacker Reuben Foster, who was at the center of criticism over domestic violence in the N.F.L., has escaped prosecution.
+The state attorney’s office in Hillsborough County, Fla., dropped misdemeanor domestic violence charges against Foster. He was arrested Nov. 24 after an episode involving his ex-girlfriend in the hotel where the San Francisco 49ers, his former team, were staying.
+The 49ers did not wait for the case to play out and released Foster, a second-year player who had had other brushes with the law during his short N.F.L. tenure. Three days after his arrest, the Redskins claimed Foster, 24, off waivers, reigniting a debate over whether N.F.L. teams were taking the issue of domestic violence seriously enough.
+Foster is on the commissioner’s exempt list, which means he cannot play in games but can be paid while the league decides whether to suspend him. Foster was supposed to appear at an arraignment in Tampa on Thursday, but the hearing was canceled after prosecutors dropped the case. TMZ first reported that the case had been dropped.Slide 1 of 10,
+The Millbrook Winery property, in Jarrahdale, Western Australia, is almost entirely surrounded by the trails and forest of Serpentine National Park. The drive in is lovely, as is the walk from your car across a bridge and through the manicured grounds.JARRAHDALE, Western Australia — The narrative is irresistible: a chef who grows almost every ingredient on your plate, who saves seeds from year to year, and coaxes beautiful meals from the same verdant land you gaze upon as you eat.
+This is the story of Millbrook Winery and its chef, Guy Jeffreys. Millbrook is on a 300-acre winery of the same name in Jarrahdale, Western Australia, about a 50-minute drive from Perth. Mr. Jeffreys took over the kitchen at Millbrook nine years ago, and has attracted much attention for his food and the fact that he buys no produce for his restaurant. Almost all of it — fruit, grains, vegetables and herbs — is grown on the grounds by the chef and his kitchen staff. Oil is made from the fruit of olive trees on the property. Meat and fish, bought whole and butchered at Millbrook, come from nearby farms and fisheries.
+In an age where words like local and sustainable are thrown around with abandon, this type of operation is a rarity, the far end of a very broad spectrum.
+The Millbrook land has been farmed since the 1860s, and has been a vineyard since the 1990s, when it was bought by the Fogarty family — the first of four wineries owned by the Fogartys, who say they produce roughly 17 percent of the wine in Western Australia. The founder, Peter Fogarty, said he spoke to about 20 chefs before he found Mr. Jeffreys, who had both the culinary skill and the passion for gardening required to run the restaurant and gardens.America’s new Congress comes to order
+Representative Nancy Pelosi was elected as speaker of the House, the only woman to hold the post.
+Hours before the vote, Ms. Pelosi suggested in an interview that a sitting president could be indicted and left open the option of impeachment, kicking off what could shape up to be a memorable term. Follow the day’s developments live here.
+What else is on the agenda in Washington: The House Democrats will vote on two bills to reopen the federal government, which has been partly shut down since late December. But their fates in the Republican-controlled Senate are uncertain.
+Meet the new freshmen: The class is best described in superlatives — it is the most racially diverse group ever elected to the House, and it includes a historic number of women.WASHINGTON — Ebullient Democrats assumed control of the House on Thursday and elected Representative Nancy Pelosi of California speaker, returning her to a historic distinction as the first woman to hold the post. They then moved to defy President Trump and passed bills that would open government agencies shuttered by an impasse over his insistence on funding for a border wall. Both measures are almost certain to die in the Senate.
+On the first day of divided government in a reordered Washington, Ms. Pelosi, now second in line to the presidency, and Mr. Trump clashed from their respective ends of Pennsylvania Avenue almost from dawn until dusk.
+The California Democrat began her day by suggesting that a sitting president could be indicted. Late in the day, Mr. Trump made an attention-getting appearance in the White House briefing room with a belligerent demand for a wall on the border with Mexico, drawing a rebuke from the newly installed House speaker, who said she would give no more than a dollar to fund what she branded “an immorality.”
+In between, as the start of the new House showcased a younger and more diverse majority in the staid corridors of the Capitol, Ms. Pelosi pledged to run a “unifying” Congress that would bridge partisan divides and heal rifts in a polarized country.LAUREL, Md. — A couple of days before the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of a small, icy world far beyond Pluto, scientists working on the mission finally got a picture of the body, nicknamed Ultima Thule, that was more than a single dot. It looked a bit elongated, but that was really all that could be detected from the image.
+“I’ve never seen so many people so excited about two pixels,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the mission, during a news conference on Monday.
+Two days later, the scientists unveiled images from the flyby with some 28,000 pixels. They could finally make out some meaningful details, which could eventually advance scientific understanding of the solar system’s earliest days.
+The New Horizons team will have to wait 20 months for all of the spacecraft’s data and images to return to Earth, but here is what they’ve learned so far.I’m black and I grew up in Georgia, where I started kindergarten in 1992. I remember we sat in groups of four and I was one of a few black children in the class.
+One day, a classmate’s father came to pick her up. To our surprise, he was black. We had all assumed that this particular student was white. I remember the puzzled looks on all of our faces.
+Sometime later, we were working on an art project and in my group of four I asked to use a classmate’s crayons from their 64-piece set. I had the 8- or 16-piece set at best. They said “no.”
+I asked why not since we were learning about sharing at that time. I remember the answer being “because you’re black.”
+That made no sense to me. I didn’t think of it as racist; it was just a bad reason in my five-year-old mind. Something like “because you’re a stinky face” would have been more acceptable.The statisticians found that social connectivity declines with distance. On average, 55% of all Facebook friendships are with individuals living within 50 miles. Check several counties and examine their “Share of friends who live within …” statistics given below the map. How could this affect people’s happiness, financial well-being and futures? Which counties have the most, and which the least, social connectivity? Do you think social connectivity is increasing or decreasing? Thinking of our own friendship links, how does your social connectivity affect you?
+Here are some of the student headlines that really capture the meaning of this map: “Facebook Friend-zy Around the Country” by Greg of Hopkinton, N.H., “The Map of Far Away Friends” by Ivette of Calif., and the quintuple alliteration “Possible Popular People Places Probability” by an anonymous student.
+You may want to think critically about these additional questions:
+■ True or false? Give support from the map and its statistics for your answers.
+— Americans from counties with similar incomes, education levels or voting patterns are more likely to be connected.
+— Americans are more likely to be friends with people who they share beliefs than people who live near them.
+■ The article discusses how there are several powerful boundaries to social connectedness. For each of these, find an example and explain how the boundary affects the friendship connectivity.
+— State lines
+— History, such as the Dust Bowl and the Great Migration
+— Natural boundaries, such as rivers and mountain ranges
+— Destinations, such as military facilities, universities and retirement communities
+■ Some say that this country is divided by politics, by urban vs. rural, and by the coasts vs. the heartland. But maybe distance is the major divider with people being friends with those who they live nearby. Running the cursor over the map, find a county whose residents have friends relatively close in distance and another county whose residents have friends who are very dispersed. What do you think caused this difference?
+■ Input the county you live in and note the percentages of friendships that are within 50, 100 and 500 miles. How does this compare to the national percentages of 55%, 63% and 70%, respectively? Why do you think your community is more or less connected than the nation as a whole? How do you think this difference affects you and your community?
+Below in the Stat Nuggets, we define and explain mathematical terms that apply to this map. Look into the archives to see past Stat Nuggets.AT THE END OF THE CENTURY
+The Stories of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
+439 pp. Counterpoint. $26.
+Perhaps no author has made more art of dispossession than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. The author of a dozen novels and twice as many screenplays — she’s the only person to have won both the Booker Prize (for her eighth and best-known novel, “Heat and Dust”) and an Academy Award (twice, for best adapted screenplay) — Jhabvala was 12 when she fled Nazi Germany with her family in 1939. After the war, when her father learned the fate of the relatives left behind, he killed himself.
+But even before her “disinheritance,” as she would later call these fundamental losses, Jhabvala was writing stories — first in German, and after they had settled in London, in English. She was studying English literature when she met Cyrus Jhabvala, an architect, and in 1951, they married and moved to Delhi. India was her home and subject until 1975, when she moved to New York’s Upper East Side, buying an apartment near her friends and creative partners, Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, as her career as a screenwriter flourished. There, as if closing a circle, she wrote fiction inspired by the European émigrés she met, people who understood what it meant to be homesick for a way of life that no longer existed. In a 1979 lecture, Jhabvala described herself as “blown about from country to country, culture to culture,” a “cuckoo forever insinuating itself into other’s nests.”
+In this country, she’s best known as the screenwriting talent behind so many Merchant-Ivory films, among them the sumptuous, Oscar-winning adaptations of E. M. Forster’s “A Room With a View” and “Howards End” (a film of her own novel “The Householder” was their first collaboration). Her name brings to mind Edwardian corset dresses and Julian Sands in a meltingly lit field of poppies — though her asperity and sense of moral stakes, so in tune with Forster’s, were the crisp counterpoint to all that romance. These weren’t merely costume dramas or comedies of manners, but struggles for the souls of women. Forster’s great subject, the pull of individual passions against stifling social conformity, the old order against the new — “the unlovely chaos that lies between obedience and freedom,” as he once put it — is also the through-line in Jhabvala’s wryly tender early stories and novels. Raising three daughters in Delhi, she was well situated to observe Indian society post-independence, with its Westernizing, marriage-minded middle class — and, at the same time, to apply her well-developed irony to the many European seekers of the 1960s she encountered, people for whom India was a semi-mythical destination, a warm, sensuous alternative to their own lumpen postwar continent, as it was for Jhabvala herself for a time. Her work anticipates a world of displaced people, where, as the half-British, half-Indian narrator of one of her stories puts it, everyone is “moving more freely” as “refugees or emigrants or just out of restless curiosity” and where there are “at least two generations of people in whom several kinds of heritage are combined.”LONDON — The Theater Royal in Drury Lane — one of London’s most historic venues, tracing its origins back to 1663 — is closing this weekend for a $56 million refurbishment, in part to meet a very immediate need: for more women’s toilets (18, in this case).
+The nearby Old Vic will start a $4.1 million project this month that includes adding 12 stalls, while the Queen’s, home of “Les Misérables,” will shutter for a renovation this summer that will include 18 more places for women to use the bathroom.
+Last year, a host of Broadway theaters started excavating, annexing, converting and renovating their buildings to remedy the problem of long, slow lines to the bathroom, for men and women. Now many in London are doing or considering the same. They include the Novello, home of “Mamma Mia!,” and the Noël Coward, showing “The Inheritance.”
+A British theater publication this week put numbers to anecdotal evidence that going to the bathroom had become a major hassle at the theater.To the Editor:
+The main reason for what is happening in Hungary (“Hungary’s Autocracy Beneath a Patina of Democracy,” news article, Dec. 26 ) is the alienation and anger Hungarians feel toward Western Europe and the European Union.
+The cause of this anger is Europe’s failure to do anything to correct the terrible injustice that occurred at the end of World War I through the Treaty of Trianon, when this kingdom, over a thousand years old, was dismembered. This occurred not because Hungary was on the wrong side in the war but because Central Europe was getting too strong and could no longer be dominated by the French and the British.
+President Woodrow Wilson rightly opposed the Trianon Treaty; he felt that strangers should not be allowed to redraw the borders in Central Europe and overnight turn millions of Hungarians into foreigners in the towns that were built by their fathers.
+It is the responsibility of the European Union to require at least local autonomy for these millions of Hungarians. And it is also important for the general public to understand the reasons for the underlying alienation and anger that are exploited by demagogues. Most people in the West don’t even know that this national minority — one of Europe’s largest — exists.To the Editor:
+Re “Here Is What Parents of Addicted Children Can Do” (news article, Dec. 19):
+To anyone of any age who desires to stop smoking, listen up. I have sage advice for you.
+I started smoking at 20 because I thought it was “smart,” but at 33 my doctor said to me: “You’ve had bronchitis five times this year. If you can’t stop, would you please try to cut down?” Cut down; I could not do that, so I knew that I would have to go cold turkey.
+Yes, it took willpower, but I was armed with the knowledge that 12 hours after one has had a last cigarette, the little hairs in one’s lungs start to grow back.
+After a few days or weeks the physiological addiction is gone; the war is over. Psychological addiction is another matter.
+As smoking is an oral fixation, there is a simple antidote, one that helped me: In most grocery stores one can buy a small package of celery and carrot sticks. Buy one or more of these and keep it on your desk or wherever you’re working. And when you start to crave a cigarette, simply chomp on one of these. It not only helps break the habit, but you’re also taking in something nutritious.To the Editor:
+Re “Untreated Hearing Loss Is Linked to Costly Ills,” by Jane E. Brody (Personal Health, Jan. 1)
+Most things are too loud: Fire trucks at 2 a.m. run sirens you can hear from miles away (and there is little or no traffic at that hour).
+Movie theaters ... awful! Not only are the pre-show ads and coming attractions at top volume, but so is the main attraction.
+Folks with listening devices turned way up are hurting themselves. And the greater their hearing loss, the higher they must turn up the sound.
+Many people take over conversations to hide their hearing problems.
+Ms. Brody is so right. It’s about time we have national discussions about hearing.Spotted from orbit
+NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter turned to photograph Chang’e-4, a bright dot on the floor of Von Kármán Crater.
+NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/Arizona State University
+The lander is a small dot between the two arrows in this detail:
+Panorama
+Days after touching down inside Von Kármán Crater, Chang’e-4 took a 360-degree panorama of its landing site. (Scroll sideways for the full image.)
+On the surface
+Chang’e-4 photographed the lunar rover Yutu-2 (or Jade Rabbit 2) and its dark tracks across the moon’s surface ...
+… and the rover looked back to photograph the lander.
+Descent into Von Kármán
+Chang’e-4 returned a video of its descent into Von Kármán Crater, which is about 100 miles wide.
+Landing
+The Chinese spacecraft Chang’e-4 successfully touched down on the far side of the moon.
+About 12 hours later, the Yutu-2 rover separated from the lander and rolled onto the lunar surface.
+Von Kármán Crater
+The spacecraft landed in Von Kármán Crater, which is on the far side of the moon and not visible from Earth.
+Previous landers have touched down on the near side of the moon to preserve line-of-sight communications, but Chang’e-4 uses a satellite to relay signals back to Earth.
+Lander and rover
+Chang’e-4 is China’s second spacecraft to land on the moon. The first, named Chang’e-3, touched down in 2013 in the Sea of Showers on the moon’s near side.
+The Chang’e-4 lander is roughly the size of a car.
+Artist’s impression
+The smaller Yutu-2 rover is about 3 feet wide and 5 feet long.
+Artist’s impression
+Launch
+The spacecraft launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China’s Sichuan Province.
+Earthrise
+Chang’e-4 landed 50 years and 10 days after the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to reach the moon and see its far side:To the Editor:
+Re “Stances Harden in Talks to Solve Shutdown Crisis” (front page, Jan. 3):
+How like this president to refuse an offer from the Democrats to reopen the government while the two sides iron out their differences because “I would look foolish if I did that .” As usual, it’s all about him.
+Not about the federal employees going without a paycheck (he has said he believes that they are mostly Democrats anyway, so their hardship presumably doesn’t count), not about the country looking foolish or about government services paid for by taxpayers not being provided.
+Too late, Mr. President, but it’s your insistence on a wall that’s already making you look foolish.
+Daniel R. Martin
+Hartsdale, N.Y.To the Editor:
+Re “The Inevitability of Impeachment,” by Elizabeth Drew (Op-Ed, Dec. 29):
+I have always admired Ms. Drew for her political acumen in writing about Washington. However, in suggesting that congressional Republicans might act to help remove President Trump from office, Ms. Drew is allowing hope to overcome reality.
+Aside from occasional rebukes to the president, congressional Republicans have resolutely refused to criticize him for his lying, for his denigration of anyone who disagrees with him, and for his policies, which have isolated this country from its allies.
+So to expect these Republicans to suddenly help usher President Trump out of office is to expect them to demonstrate some spine and concern for the well-being of the country — something they have thus far refused to do.
+Dorian Bowman
+Cambridge, Mass.
+To the Editor:
+Thank you, Elizabeth Drew, for a glimmer of hope regarding impeachment. For the first time I feel there is hope that enough Republicans will finally do their job and put the country ahead of party. Their power is now diminished, President Trump’s behavior continues to be erratic and his lack of leadership before the world will finally force them to seek self-preservation.The winter television season — will that combination of words ever stop sounding strange? — is upon us in all its abundance. And it’s more abundant than ever. Here are 21 new and returning shows to keep an eye out for over the next few months. Of course that’s more than anyone can watch. In most cases it’s too early to tell which shows will pan out, but if you nailed me to a tree, I’d tell you to definitely make time for “High Maintenance,” “Shrill,” parts of “Documentary Now!” (especially the episodes titled “Original Cast Album: Co-op” and “Waiting for the Artist”) and, if you have children, a co-view of “Carmen Sandiego.”
+[Read about the best TV shows of 2018.]
+‘When Heroes Fly’
+Israeli TV series usually stick close to home, but this action thriller from Omri Givon (“Hostages”) ventures into the Colombian jungle, where four veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces conduct a rescue mission a decade after their service. It stars Tomer Kapon, who played a rebellious young counterterrorism agent in the first season of “Fauda.” (Jan. 10, Netflix)
+‘Sex Education’
+An awkward guy (Asa Butterfield) and an outcast girl (Emma Mackey) form an alliance in this teen-sex comedy set at a British secondary school. The boy’s anxieties are aggravated by the fact that his mother is a free-loving sex therapist; the show is most notable for the fact that the mother is played by Gillian Anderson. (Jan. 11, Netflix)Rhode Island may be the smallest state, but its culinary scene is anything but small. From Cambodia to Cape Verde, Providence, R.I., restaurants span the globe in a big way.
+Big King is the latest restaurant in that city from James Mark , the chef-owner best known for North, a critically acclaimed Asian-fusion restaurant. Before that, Mr. Mark, a graduate of Johnson & Wales University, worked for David Chang at the Momofuku restaurant group.
+He opened the Japanese-inspired Big King in June in the West Side of Providence. The neighborhood is home to a mix of residences, youth arts organizations and some of the city’s best brunch spots. North previously occupied the space that Big King now does, but moved to larger accommodations at the Dean Hotel, a hip establishment located in downtown Providence.
+In contrast to North’s bustle and long wait times, Mr. Mark makes a move toward simplicity with Big King (a tribute to his grandmother, Big King Lee). For the new concept, he introduced reservations and orchestrated a physical redesign, extending the bar, but reducing the numbers of seats to an intimate 21.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is considering Jim Webb, a former Democratic senator and Reagan-era secretary of the Navy, to be the next defense secretary, according to three officials, potentially bypassing more hawkish Republicans whose names have been floated to replace Jim Mattis.
+Mr. Webb, an outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, is being considered as President Trump seeks to carry out campaign promises to withdraw American troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
+Those two decisions prompted Mr. Mattis to resign late last month, putting the deputy defense secretary, Patrick M. Shanahan, a former Boeing executive, in the top role in an acting capacity.
+Representatives for Vice President Mike Pence and Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, have reached out to Mr. Webb, one of the three officials said. Separately, a senior Defense Department official confirmed that Mr. Webb’s name had been circulating at the White House. Those two and the third official all spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal discussions.Executives would have to hold the stock shares they receive as compensation for at least five years. And corporations would have to get approval from 75 percent of their shareholders and 75 percent of their directors to make political campaign donations.
+Corporations are legal entities with distinct privileges, like limited liability, so it would be perfectly reasonable for the government to require corporate boards to include labor representatives. This would encourage corporations to maximize profits by investing in their workers rather than by cutting labor costs.
+Beyond corporations, a broader pre-distribution agenda would include labor regulation, financial regulation and antitrust. For example, the government should revise labor regulations to strengthen employees’ bargaining power, which would give them a fairer share of corporate returns. The government should crack down on noncompete clauses, which undermine workers’ ability to sell their labor to the highest bidder. And it should restrict mandatory arbitration clauses in employment contracts, which require workers to give up their right to take their employers to court; such clauses were endorsed by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in May.
+This pre-distribution approach to labor would likely appeal to swing voters — in particular, ones who voted for both Barack Obama and Mr. Trump — more than the job guarantees proposed by Senator Sanders because pre-distribution means fair pay rather than government largess.
+Likewise, financial regulation is not just about preventing financial institutions from taking excessive risks or protecting small investors from their own folly. It is also about something more fundamental: who gets the returns from financial activity.
+In recent years, the relaxing of regulations has allowed financial firms to enjoy greater profits and bank executives to win higher compensation without delivering more value to ordinary investors. So the government should reinforce the Dodd-Frank rules that constrain financial institutions from padding profits via risky trading — not further ease them, as the Trump administration proposes. It should bolster consumer protection, not gut the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. And it should enhance the fiduciary rule, which requires investment advisers to put their clients’ interests first, not refuse to enforce it.
+On antitrust, the government should be warier about corporate mergers, and more aggressive in stopping dominant firms from squashing their competitors. Over the past few decades, weak antitrust enforcement has meant higher profits for companies that dominate their markets, fewer opportunities for challengers, larger salaries for managers, higher prices for consumers and lower wages for workers.Apple’s stock fell 10 percent on Thursday, its worst one-day slide in six years. But the warning also rippled across its many suppliers.
+The chip makers Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices fell 5 percent and 9 percent. Qorvo, a maker of radio frequency chips, and Cirrus Logic, which supplies audio chips for the iPhone, dropped 9 percent.
+Lumentum, which supplies optical components for the iPhone, slid 8 percent. AMS, a maker of light sensors for smartphones, tumbled more than 20 percent.
+Since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, the market for mobile phones has become saturated. Even before Apple’s warning — its first in 16 years — investors had started to grow worried about the company’s ability to sell more phones.
+That’s partly because Qorvo, Cirrus Logic, Lumentum and AMS had all already cut their revenue forecasts for the most recent quarter late last year. Though none of the companies mentioned Apple, the tech giant is the largest customer for each.Indeed. The last big innovation explosion — the proliferation of the smartphone — is clearly ending. There is no question that Apple was the center of that, with its app-centric, photo-forward and feature-laden phone that gave everyone the first platform for what was to create so many products and so much wealth. It was the debut of the iPhone in 2007 that spurred what some in tech call a “Cambrian explosion,” a reference to the era when the first complex animals appeared. There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android version), no Tinder, no Spotify.
+Now all of tech is seeking the next major platform and area of growth. Will it be virtual and augmented reality, or perhaps self-driving cars? Artificial intelligence, robotics, cryptocurrency or digital health? We are stumbling in the dark.
+Apple has dabbled in a lot of these areas, but it still makes its money by selling mobile phones and the accessories around them. And while I love my AirPods and lose them weekly, my forking over $159 to Apple for my sloppiness is not going to help compared with buying a cool new phone.
+That business has surely leveled off, as no one upgrades quite as quickly as they did before, because of everything from the price tag and being worried about a recession to the simple fact that the new phones don’t offer that much more than the old ones. There is no question that Mr. Cook and his team have done a tremendous job taking advantage and managing this last cycle of innovation, but it’s apparent that it’s now winding down.
+This is a big issue not only for Apple but also for all of tech. There is not a major trend that you can grab onto right now that will carry everyone forward. The last cool set of companies — Uber, Airbnb, Pinterest and, yes, Tinder — were created many years ago, and I cannot think of another group that is even close to as promising.
+Well, rental scooters. O.K., they’re cool, but they are a derivative of the car rental business and are not going to make the big jumps in innovation that need to occur now. How innovation happens is a much more delicate thing than people imagine, a dance involving money, opportunity, timing, execution and, most important, one great idea behind it all.
+Where is that next spark that will light us all up?
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.When you had that silent cut, did you ever think, “This could practically be a complete film on its own?”
+One hundred percent, and that sounds super pretentious, but it’s true. Even on silent, there was so much communication happening. I didn’t think our movie would be so commercially accepted because the only other time I’ve seen someone do a movie with no spoken dialogue is Paul Thomas Anderson at the beginning of “There Will Be Blood.” That first 12 to 14 minutes where Daniel Day-Lewis doesn’t speak was a huge touchstone for me.
+Paul Thomas Anderson hosted an award-season screening for your film. That’s got to be gratifying.
+I think I’ve only told my wife this, so why not say it in an interview: That was the moment that was the most surreal of all this. He emailed me and said, “You need to call me,” and we talked on the phone and he was so specific and so honest about the movie. He’s been so kind to me through my career, but we were talking like we were on an even playing field and that tripped my wires. What I love most about Paul is that he loves movies.
+I’ll tell you a big life lesson. Paul was over at my house, I think it was my 30th birthday party, and I had just seen a movie I didn’t love. I said to him over a drink, “It’s not a good movie,” and he so sweetly took me aside and said very quietly, “Don’t say that. Don’t say that it’s not a good movie. If it wasn’t for you, that’s fine, but in our business, we’ve all got to support each other.” The movie was very artsy, and he said, “You’ve got to support the big swing. If you put it out there that the movie’s not good, they won’t let us make more movies like that.”
+Dude, Paul Thomas Anderson is out there on the wall for us! He’s defending the value of the artistic experience. He’s so good that maybe you project onto him that he’s allowed to be snarky, but he’s the exact opposite: He wants to love everything because that’s why he got into moviemaking. And ever since then, I’ve never said that I hate a movie.
+[John Krasinski explains how he went about writing “A Quiet Place.”]
+You’re writing a sequel to “A Quiet Place.” Does it worry you that the first film was such a big hit that Paramount may treat this like the “Purge” franchise, cranking out new installments on a yearly basis?After all these years, I have to ask myself why did I need to keep Iris Murdoch’s novels to myself? Was it simply because the books were “dirty”? They weren’t really, at least not in the way of dirty books, which I would find my way to later on. They were frank about the omnipresence of sex, of longing, the wish to be taken seriously, of grown-ups with sudden childish passions that seemed, at least to me, to be true. Her people voiced prejudice, held misguided notions, and Murdoch took them down, but with understanding and affection. Marriages ended, things were said, there was way too much drinking and even some fighting, and life went on. Yes, in Murdoch’s world, characters behaved badly and were not always punished for it. And even if they were, they found their way to reasonable fates.
+In my “Read this” and “I have a book for you” family, no one had ever mentioned Murdoch. Her novels weren’t part of our approved canon. And yet I adored her and her belief that love could come from any direction and in any guise, that there were different kinds and each of them was good. Men were sometimes superior to women, and sometimes women were in charge. Children were wise and adults idiotic, and everyone was attempting some humanly self-interested version of their best. Dame Iris Murdoch had been a philosophy don at Oxford before she became a novelist, and as far as I was concerned, her philosophy of life was spot on, as someone in a British novel might say.
+I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional worlds of one’s own. That first Murdoch novel seemed like a belief system transformed into story, given to me to make of it what I wanted, on my own. Her novels were, that summer, an introduction to the acceptability of strangeness, to the beauty found outside shared experience, and most of all, an introduction to the glorious privacy of reading.
+Image Credit... Evening Standard/Getty Images
+Beyond ‘A Severed Head’: An Iris Murdoch Starter Kit
+Go for the books Murdoch is best known for, particularly the Booker Prize-winning, ‘THE SEA, THE SEA,’ about a retired theater director who learns that his adolescent love, Hartley, has retired with her husband to the same coastal town and decides that they should, decades later, renew their relationship. Stay tuned for kidnapping, attempted murder, a roundelay of appearances from past lovers and their lovers, plus wonderful descriptive passages about the sea in all phases of weather.
+‘THE UNICORN,’ in which a young governess comes to live with a wealthy woman who is being held prisoner in a remote seaside house by the employees of her absent husband.
+‘A FAIRLY HONORABLE DEFEAT.’ One of its strands a terrific fictional portrait of enduring gay love, here tested when the devilish Julius King bets another friend that he can break up the long partnership of Axel and Simon.Note to teachers: Please preview the entire film before sharing it with students to make sure it is appropriate for your class.
+“Diamenteurs” is a 10-minute film that touches on themes of cultivating individuality and resisting conformity. It tells a folk tale of the history of the diamond, using the standardization of the precious stone throughout history as a metaphor for how humans force ourselves into ever-narrower standards of perfection. In the process, both diamonds and humans lose the things that make them special.
+Students
+1. Watch the short film above. While you watch, you might take notes using our Film Club Double-Entry Journal (PDF) to help you remember specific moments.
+2. After watching, think about these questions:
+• What moments in this film stood out for you? Why?
+• Were there any surprises? Anything that challenged what you know — or thought you knew?In the U.S., Young Hockey Goalies Are Coming In From the Cold
+For years, there was wasn’t much instruction available for youngsters who wanted to guard the net. Gradually, that has changed.
+Athlete to Activist: How a Public Coming Out Shaped a Young Football Player’s Life
+In a very public speech last year, Jake Bain, now a college athlete, became an accidental activist determined to change the national conversation about gay teenagers.
+‘Destroying Our Children for Sport’: Thailand May Limit Underage Boxing
+A 13-year-old’s death in the ring has spurred moves to limit the hallowed sport of muay Thai among children, and fierce calls in its defense.
+Mom Sells Tomatoes as Her Son Seeks Tennis Titles
+Chun Hsin Tseng is the No. 1 player in the junior boys rankings. Now that he’s turning pro, his family can close their Taipei food stand.
+For Mo’ne Davis, a Social Awakening and a Commitment to Hampton
+Davis, the first girl to pitch a shutout at the Little League World Series, said she would play softball next year at Hampton, partly influenced by her appreciation for black history.
+Everyone Loves to Watch Zion Williamson Play. Maybe as Much as He Loves Playing
+The Duke freshman is earning comparisons to Charles Barkley, Shawn Kemp and, yes, even LeBron James and has everyone in basketball’s attention.
+A British Hockey Player Lands in Canada
+Liam Kirk, 18, is from England and is playing in a junior league to pursue his N.H.L. dream. But he is already a commercial phenom in a sport that is growing back home.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau chief. Sign up to get it by email.
+___
+Extreme heat often sends me to art museums — thus my recent afternoon with the photographs of David Goldblatt at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
+He was a master of capturing the cold fury of South Africa as the country moved through apartheid to its end and aftermath, but the exhibition goes far beyond that, spanning 70 years and featuring around 360 prints, plus archival materials and documentary interviews.
+It’s an almost overwhelming meditation not just on race, but also on the way power gets written into the landscape of a nation, from mines to churches, cemeteries and suburbs.4. Fanciful Pearl Earrings
+A piece of pearl jewelry always adds a romantic and elegant note to a look. These three pearl earrings each put a whimsical spin on a classic style.
+From left, all sold as pairs: Chloé earring, $495, (646) 350-1770. Simone Rocha earring, $440, (646) 810-4785. Nadine Aysoy earring, $7,900, nadineaysoy.com.LIVE ARTERY at New York Live Arts (Jan. 4-7). As arts presenters from around the country and the world flock to New York to discover artists and fill their performance spaces, audiences also get to revisit favorite works from the past year or catch critically lauded shows they might have missed. Over several days, and at uncommon times, like 2 p.m. on Monday, New York Live Arts will present a nearly nonstop parade of performances by artists like Joanna Kotze, Sean Dorsey, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Kyle Marshall and Roseanne Spradlin, among many others.
+212-924-0077, newyorklivearts.org
+NOCHE FLAMENCA at Joe’s Pub (Jan. 6, 3 and 7 p.m.; Jan. 8, 7 p.m.; Jan. 9, 9:30 p.m., Jan. 10, 8 and 10 p.m.; through Jan. 11). To watch a flamenco show at Joe’s Pub is to harken back a century or so to the Café Cantantes in Seville, where song, dance, music and libations were enjoyed in intimate, immersive environs. Here, the New York-based Noche Flamenca presents “Rondan Los Deseos” (Circle of Desire), which was created by the troupe’s co-founders Martin Santangelo and Soledad Barrio, who are also its star performers. After a previous engagement at the Pub and an appearance on the Joyce stage last year, the work returns with new duets and trios.
+212-967-7555, joespub.com
+JOSHUA PETHER at Performance Space New York (Jan. 5, 7 p.m.; Jan. 6, 3 p.m.). “Jupiter Orbiting,” the latest work from Pether, exists in a dystopian sci-fi milieu populated by many colorful toys that he examines as if artifacts from a strange, happier world. Pether, who is of Kalkadoon heritage (a people indigenous to present-day Australia), performs as part of both the American Realness festival and First Nations Dialog: KIN, a series of conversations, workshops and performances at Performance Space New York from Saturday to Thursday that is led by indigenous artists and explores indigenous experiences.
+performancespacenewyork.org
+CALEB TEICHER AND CONRAD TAO at the Guggenheim Museum (Jan. 6, 3 and 7:30 p.m.; Jan. 7, 7:30 p.m.). Teicher is a disruptor of dance, particularly tap, and Tao is an inventive pianist and composer. Together they have collaborated on a new evening-length work called “More Forever,” premiering as part of the Guggenheim’s Works & Process performance series. Against Tao’s score for piano and electronics — at times calm, at times frenetic — Teicher and his team of dancers traverse a stage covered in a thin layer of sand, using dance styles like Lindy Hop and tap to create thrillingly textured sound.
+212-423-3575, worksandprocess.org
+REGGIE WILSON/FIST & HEEL at St. Marks Church (Jan. 7-8 and 10-12, 8 p.m.). Dance and devotion have met frequently in Wilson’s works over the decades, from the ring shouts practiced by enslaved Africans to the dancing of Spiritual Baptists in Trinidad and Tabago. Recently, he’s been researching Black Shakers — members of the insular and diminishing Christian sect known for ecstatic trembling and sleek, minimalist furniture. In “… They Stood Shaking While Others Began to Shout,” which was first seen last spring in New York and returns courtesy of Danspace Project, Gibney and American Realness, eight dancers and two singers enact a modern folk dance of faith that is in conversation with the past.
+866-811-4111, danspaceproject.orgMAYERS CONSULTING ALL-AGES MUSIC SHOWCASE at Drom (Jan. 6, noon-4 p.m.). New York is always a world-class center for entertainment, and it’s especially so this weekend, when the Association of Performing Arts Professionals holds its annual conference. That means that those who present theater, music and other acts onstage will be attending artist showcases, and while they’re deciding on their favorite performers at this East Village club on Sunday, your kids can, too. Of the nine eclectic acts scheduled — all clients of Mayers Consulting, an artist-management company — three have earned nominations for the 2019 Grammy Award for best children’s album: Lucy Kalantari & the Jazz Cats, who are inspired by the Roaring Twenties; the Pop Ups, known for mixing science, puppetry and rock; and Falu’s Bazaar, which introduces young listeners to South Asian beats.
+tinyurl.com/mcshowcase19
+NYC WINTER LANTERN FESTIVAL at Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden (Jan. 3 and 6, 5-10 p.m.; Jan. 4-5, 5-11 p.m.). Staten Island now has its own 150-foot-long dragon. “Game of Thrones” isn’t filming there, but this creature does qualify as a special effect of sorts: Ablaze with LED lights, it is part of an inaugural Chinese-style lantern festival on the Cultural Center’s South Lawn. The dazzling installations, which also comprise 25 pandas, a tunnel of light, a holiday zone and a giant shark mouth that visitors can walk inside, are accompanied by evening performances of traditional Chinese arts. Now entering its final weekend, the attraction is easy to reach from other boroughs: Shuttle service on Staten Island runs every 15 minutes between the festival and the St. George Ferry Terminal, as well as between the festival and the New York Wheel Garage.
+nycwinterlanternfestival.comPIER PAOLO PASOLINI: A FUTURE LIFE, PART 1 at Metrograph (Jan. 4-10). The first weekend of this planned multipart retrospective on the Italian director, poet, author and theorist (1922-1975) centers a trilogy of literary adaptations (“The Decameron,” “The Canterbury Tales” and “Arabian Nights”) that he ultimately repudiated. It also includes the film that followed: “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom” (on Friday and Saturday), which adapts a Marquis de Sade novel in the context of Fascist Italy. Notorious for its depictions of rape, torture and human feces repurposed as haute cuisine, the movie is a harrowing portrait of bodies in total service to a state. It’s also must-see Pasolini — or at least the most difficult Pasolini to un-see.
+212-660-0312, metrograph.com
+THE SOPRANOS FILM FESTIVAL at SVA Theater and IFC Center (Jan. 9-14). To celebrate the 20th anniversary of “The Sopranos,” this festival will host discussions with the series’ creators as well as screenings of movies that influenced the landmark HBO show — from the obvious (“Goodfellas,” showing on Jan. 12) to the perhaps less well known (“Trees Lounge,” directed by Steve Buscemi, playing on Jan. 13).
+212-924-7771, ifccenter.com
+TO SAVE AND PROJECT: THE 16TH MOMA INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF FILM PRESERVATION at the Museum of Modern Art (Jan. 4-31). Technically, MoMA’s annual bonanza of newly preserved films opens this Friday, but it seems more proper to think of the first week’s offerings as an aperitif, because they focus almost entirely on one filmmaker, Barbet Schroeder (“Single White Female”) — and specifically on his documentaries. These include up-close looks at the Uganda dictator Idi Amin (“General Idi Amin Dada: A Self Portrait,” on Saturday and Tuesday) and at Jacques Vergès (“Terror’s Advocate,” on Saturday and Wednesday), a French lawyer famous for defending clients like the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and the terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. On a lighter note, in “Koko: A Talking Gorilla” (showing in the program on Friday and Tuesday), the director captures the interactions of the celebrated western lowland gorilla Koko, who had an apparent facility for sign language (and who died in June).
+212-708-9400, moma.org‘SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION’ at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third-floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike — Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century-spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago)
+212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org
+‘SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER’ at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day’s not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki-torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African-Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history-that-won’t-go-away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter)
+718-638-8000, brooklynmuseum.org
+‘ANDY WARHOL — FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31). Although this is the artist’s first full American retrospective in 31 years, he’s been so much with us — in museums, galleries, auctions — as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half-noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show’s monumentalizing size, it’s a human-scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist-entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market-addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter)
+212-570-3600, whitney.org
+Last Chance
+‘ARMENIA!’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (through Jan. 13). The first major museum exhibition devoted to the art of Armenia — officially its “medieval” era, but in fact spanning nearly 1,500 years — bulges with weighty stone crosses, intricate altar frontals and flamboyantly illuminated Bibles and Gospel books unlike any manuscripts you’ve seen from that time. Armenia, in the Caucasus Mountains, was the first country to convert to Christianity, in the fourth century, and the richly painted religious texts here, lettered in the unique Armenian alphabet, are a testament to the centrality of the church in a nation that would soon be plunged into the world of Islam. By the end of the Middle Ages, Armenian artists were working as far afield as Rome, where an Armenian bishop painted this show’s most astounding manuscript: a tale of Alexander the Great that features the Macedonian king’s ship swallowed by an enormous brown crab, hooking the sails with its pincers as its mouth gapes. (Farago)
+212-535-7710, metmuseum.org
+‘CHAGALL, LISSITZKY, MALEVICH: THE RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE IN VITEBSK, 1918-1922’ at the Jewish Museum (through Jan. 6). This crisp and enlightening exhibition, slimmed but not diminished from its initial outing at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, restages the instruction, debates and utopian dreaming at the most progressive art school in revolutionary Russia. Marc Chagall encouraged stylistic diversity at the short-lived People’s Art School in his native Vitebsk (today in the republic of Belarus), and while his dreamlike paintings of smiling workers and flying goats had their defenders, the students came to favor the abstract dynamism of two other professors: Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky, whose black and red squares offered a radical new vision for a new society. Both the romantics and the iconoclasts would eventually fall out of favor in the Soviet Union, and the People’s Art School would close in just a few years — but this exhibition captures the glorious conviction, too rare today, that art must serve the people. (Farago)
+212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.orgOur guide to the city’s best classical music and opera happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+‘4.48 PSYCHOSIS’ at the Baruch Performing Arts Center (Jan. 5-6, 8-9, 11-12, 8 p.m.) It’s a mark of the Prototype Festival’s stature as a natural home for contemporary opera and music-theater that, from its scrappy origins only a few years ago, it is now hosting a production that had its premiere at Covent Garden in London. Philip Venables’s adaptation of Sarah Kane’s last play is directed by Ted Huffman and features William Cole conducting the ensemble Contemporaneous.
+212-647-0251, prototypefestival.orgOur guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.
+Previews and Openings
+‘ABOUT ALICE’ at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (previews start on Jan. 8; opens on Jan. 20). Based on what the Sunday Book Review called a “slim but walloping book,” this Theater for a New Audience play by Calvin Trillin relates his long, fine romance with his wife, Alice, who died in 2001. Under Leonard Foglia’s direction, Jeffrey Bean and Carrie Paff play Calvin and Alice.
+866-811-4111, tfana.org
+‘BEHIND THE SHEET’ at Ensemble Studio Theater (previews start on Jan. 9; opens on Jan. 17). The history of medical discovery is pitted with ethics violations, as Charly Evon Simpson’s play shows. In 1846, a doctor makes remarkable breakthroughs, including a surgical repair for fistula. But he conducts his research, unanaesthetized, on enslaved African-American women. Colette Robert directs a cast including Naomi Lorrain and Joel Ripka.
+ensemblestudiotheatre.orgSINBAD at Carolines on Broadway (Jan. 4-5, 7:30 and 10 p.m.) This stand-up broke through in the 1980s via the televised “Star Search” competition and hasn’t stopped making audiences laugh since. Sinbad famously takes the stage without preparing his hour, preferring to work the crowd and find the funny wherever it may be.
+212-757-4100, carolines.com
+BASSEM YOUSSEF at Joe’s Pub (Jan. 4 and Jan. 8, 9:30 p.m.). This thoracic surgeon, inspired by the Arab Spring at home and by “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on television, launched his own humorous news program in Egypt in 2011. Time magazine named him one of the “100 most influential people in the world” two years later. Now living in the Bay Area, Youssef is working on a one-man show about the subtle satirical differences between dictatorship and democracy.
+212-967-7555 , publictheater.orgCRAIG HARRIS at Nublu 151 (Jan. 6, 7 p.m.). Harris, a trombonist, is celebrating the release of “Brown Butterfly,” an ambitious album paying homage to the legacy of Muhammad Ali. The suite laces gnarled horn arrangements and spoken tributes to Ali over protean rhythms, drawing on influences as varied as Count Basie’s big band and the drum-and-bass of 1990s London; the music emulates the rugged grace and mercurial power of Ali in the ring. Harris’s band includes Kahlil Kwame Bell on percussion, Calvin Jones on bass, Adam Klipple on piano, Tony Lewis on drums and Jay Rodriguez on saxophone.
+nublu.net
+CHRISTIAN SANDS at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola (Jan. 5-6, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). A 29-year-old pianist and bandleader of increasing renown, Sands is aligned with jazz’s straight-ahead mainstream, but he’s got an unbounded inquisitive instinct. He sounds like he listens to Oscar Peterson, Jason Moran and Eddie Palmieri in about equal doses. He performs this Saturday with a quartet including the guitarist Caio Afiune, the bassist Yasushi Nakamura and the drummer David Rosenthal; that group will likely draw heavily from Sands’s most recent album, “Facing Dragons.” On Sunday, he returns with a trio featuring the bassist Luques Curtis and the drummer Terreon Gully. The latter show is a tribute to Erroll Garner; Sands serves as the creative ambassador for the Erroll Garner Jazz Project, a group dedicated to furthering the canonical pianist’s legacy.
+212-258-9595, jazz.org/dizzys
+JEN SHYU AND JADE TONGUE at the Jazz Gallery (Jan. 9, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). A vocalist, poet and movement artist, Shyu is equally devoted to open-ended abstraction and absorptive storytelling. Here she presents “In Healing/Zero Grasses,” a new project with her longstanding group, Jade Tongue, that features a characteristically radical admixture of song, spoken poetry and outré improvisation, all aimed at healing humanity’s relationship with the natural environment. Jade Tongue includes Ambrose Akinmusire on trumpet, Mat Maneri on viola, Thomas Morgan on bass and Dan Weiss on drums.
+646-494-3625, jazzgallery.nyc
+BEN WENDEL HIGH HEART AND KENDRICK SCOTT ORACLE at ShapeShifter Lab (Jan. 6, 7 p.m.). Wendel and Scott are two of the most admired composer-bandleaders among today’s young music students and devotees of jazz’s modern mainstream. Here Wendel, a saxophonist, will present the debut of High Heart, a new acoustic-electric ensemble with the vocalist Michael Mayo, the keyboardists Shai Maestro and Gerald Clayton, the bassist Joe Sanders and the drummer Nate Wood. Scott, a drummer, will perform with Oracle, a vessel for his shimmering, gently propulsive compositions; in its current iteration, the group includes Sanders on bass, John Ellis on saxophone, Taylor Eigsti on piano and Mike Moreno on guitar.
+shapeshifterlab.com
+WINTER JAZZFEST (Jan. 4-12). Now in its 15th year, the Winter Jazzfest has never had a more bountiful lineup of contemporary jazz talent. Its beloved weekend marathon — featuring simultaneous shows at venues across Lower Manhattan — will now stretch across two weekends: a “Half Marathon” will set the pace this Saturday, with a fuller, two-night marathon taking place a week later, on Jan. 11-12. In the week between, one-off concerts will be held nearly every night at a variety of venues. Highlights include Sunday’s New York debut of the pianist Arturo O’Farrill’s “Fandango at the Wall,” a suite he first performed at the United States-Mexican border this past spring, with a multinational federation of musicians; and a concert on Thursday with the saxophone luminaries Pharoah Sanders and Gary Bartz performing together. Both of those shows, and many others at the festival, will take place at Le Poisson Rouge.
+winterjazzfest.com
+GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLONDON — The diplomatic standoff between Qatar and its Arab neighbors spilled into the sports world once again Thursday as a Qatari vice president of Asia’s soccer confederation was barred from traveling to the United Arab Emirates ahead of the region’s top tournament.
+Saoud al-Mohannadi, vice president of the Asian Football Confederation, was denied permission to travel from Oman to the U.A.E. after airport officials said he wouldn’t be let into the country. The U.A.E., with Saudi Arabia and a handful of other Mideast countries, broke diplomatic relations and severed all ties with Qatar in 2017.
+Mohannadi is the chairman of the A.F.C.’s competitions committee, a group with overall responsibility for the Asian Cup. Prohibiting him from traveling to the U.A.E. is the first sign that long-simmering political tensions in the Gulf are likely to have ramifications for continent’s biggest tournament.
+Mohannadi immediately wrote a letter of complaint to Sheikh Salman bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa, the Bahraini royal who is the A.F.C.’s current president. The organization said in a statement that it was aware of reports that Mohannadi was being denied the right to travel and that it would investigate. The A.F.C. said it had been “assured of visas and entry permits” for tournament organizing committee members and executives.Mexico has asked the United States for an investigation into American border officers’ actions along the nations’ shared border, two days after agents near San Diego used tear gas, smoke and pepper spray to repel a group of migrants trying to cross into the United States.
+On Thursday, Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said it sent a diplomatic note to the United States Embassy about two episodes, on Jan. 1 and Nov. 25, in which American agents sent tear gas into Mexico near San Diego and Tijuana, Mexico.
+The note requested “a thorough investigation” and “deplores the occurrence of any sort of violent act on the border with Mexico,” the ministry said in a statement.
+Mexican officials also repeated their “commitment to safeguard the human rights and safety of all migrants,” and said they would hold a meeting with the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Border Violence Prevention Council, a joint American-Mexican body meant to prevent violence at the border.3. The heart is the only organ that can move itself. What else is unique about it?
+4. Jauhar takes us through many heart studies and experiments that help us understand how the organ works and how to fix it. Which of these surprised you?
+5. “Heart” tells us that you can actually die of a broken heart. How does this happen?
+6. Why do you think the heart became such a powerful metaphor for romantic love, and for the soul?
+7. The book includes many diagrams, photos and works of visual art depicting the heart. Which did you find most useful or illuminating?
+8. How do you feel about all of the animal testing done so humans can learn about the heart and how it can fail?
+9. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women. Why?
+10. How does understanding the human heart help us better understand ourselves as a species?Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday that the L train tunnel would not fully shut down in April as planned. Here’s what the Metropolitan Transportation Authority now plans to do on the subway line.
+Original Plan No L train service between Eighth Avenue in Manhattan and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn
+Shutdown scheduled to take 15 months New Plan Full L train service during weekdays
+Work to occur in one of the tunnel’s two tubes on nights and weekends
+Work estimated to take 15 to 20 months
+The authority had said that the shutdown, which was scheduled to begin April 27, was necessary to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy in 2012.
+What the M.T.A. Originally Planned Workers planned to remove and replace hundreds of thousands of feet of electrical cables housed inside the concrete bench wall that runs along the side of the tunnel. Bench wall Bench wall Replace damaged concrete and cables Bench wall Bench wall Replace damaged concrete and cables Bench wall Bench wall Replace damaged concrete and cables
+What Changes in the New Plan Under the new plan, workers will seal and mount new cables to the side of the tunnel wall, eliminating the need to remove portions of the bench wall and leaving the old cables in place. Reinforcing wrap applied to bench wall New cables mounted here Install bench wall sensors New cables mounted here Install bench wall sensors Reinforcing wrap applied to bench wall New cables mounted here Bench wall Reinforcing wrap applied to bench wall Install bench wall sensors
+The new plan still recommends removing unstable portions of the bench wall, but it proposes that workers reinforce weakened sections of the wall with a fiber wrap. Workers will also install a new sensor system to monitor for cracks or deformations in the bench wall.
+Mr. Cuomo said that the design of the system, which he announced in Midtown with a group of engineering faculty members from local universities, had never been tried in the United States.WASHINGTON — The 116th Congress opened on Thursday with Democrats taking control of the House. Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, was elected speaker.
+To win back the gavel, Ms. Pelosi defused a rebellion in her caucus. She ultimately consented to a series of agreements to secure enough support, including limiting herself to four years as speaker.
+But on Thursday, there were still some dissenters within her Democratic ranks who did not vote for Ms. Pelosi. They included:
+Freshmen: Anthony Brindisi of New York, Jason Crow of Colorado, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina, Ben McAdams of Utah, Max Rose of New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey and Jared Golden of Maine.
+Relative newbie: Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania. (Mr. Lamb won a special election last year; this will be his first full House term.)It’s embarrassing to err so publicly, and having to correct any of our journalism is regrettable. But some of the corrections we ran in 2018 not only set the record straight. They also did so while affording our readers the pleasure of schadenfreude at our expense.
+Now that we have closed out 2018, here’s a look back at seven of our most surprising — and comical — corrections of the year.
+This one rendered one Times editor and lots of readers nearly speechless on Twitter.Though the abuse crisis is a global phenomenon, recent investigations in the United States have underscored the gravity of the scandal. A grand jury report in Pennsylvania last year found that 301 priests had sexually abused minors for some seven decades. Attorneys general in at least 16 other states have initiated investigations.
+“The hurt caused by these sins and crimes has also deeply affected the communion of bishops, and generated not the sort of healthy and necessary disagreements and tensions found in any living body, but rather division and dispersion,” the pope wrote.
+Only about 200 bishops are attending a retreat that the pope himself had insisted on, out of more than 450 active and retired bishops, according to a spokeswoman for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. A list of attendees has not been made public.
+The pope said there was an urgent need “for a renewed and decisive approach to resolving conflicts.”
+But the letter also suggested that the pope might not see eye-to-eye with the American bishops on policies they proposed last year, including a new code of conduct for bishops and a hotline run by a third party to report problems about bishops’ conduct.
+“Loss of credibility calls for a specific approach, since it cannot be regained by issuing stern decrees or by simply creating new committees or improving flow charts, as if we were in charge of a department of human resources,” the pope wrote.
+Francis met with United States bishops in September and suggested that they hold a meeting for spiritual reflection as a necessary step in responding to the “crisis of credibility.” He also asked the leaders of the American church to cancel their previously scheduled November meeting in Baltimore, and hold a spiritual retreat instead. But the bishops, aware of the anger in the pews, insisted on going through with the meeting so they could vote on a set of measures they had come up with to hold bishops accountable.If all had gone as he hoped, Mark Harris would have been sworn in to the House of Representatives Thursday as the new member from North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District.
+Instead, as the new House was installed, Mr. Harris, a Southern Baptist preacher and staunch conservative, was far from Washington and his seat still up for grabs. There are increasing worries it could remain vacant for months.
+Mr. Harris, whose election is now in limbo because of fraud allegations against one of his campaign contractors, instead spent much of the day at another government office. He was being interviewed by elections investigators in Raleigh looking into the unusual handling of absentee ballots by the contractor, L. McCrae Dowless Jr.
+Standing outside the investigators’ offices, Mr. Harris expressed his disappointment.
+“I am the one seat remaining of the 435 to be seated,” he said, in remarks to reporters broadcast by WSOC-TV, the ABC affiliate in Charlotte. “We kind of find ourselves in no-man’s land, if you will, and we have asked the court to step in.”No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch.
+This Weekend I Have … a Half-Hour, and I Like the Zeitgeist
+‘Atlanta: Robbin’ Season’
+When to watch: Now, on Hulu.
+Season 2 of this poetic, unpredictable show is now streaming, and while it’s easy to zip through in a sitting, you’re better off savoring it. Donald Glover stars as Earn, whose habitual, squirmy discomfort underscores the theme of the season, which is that restless ticker in the back of one’s head that says, “You know, I probably shouldn’t be here.” If, for some reason, you want to watch only one episode, watch “Teddy Perkins,” a grotesque instant classic that is a 40-minute horror comedy.
+… Three Hours, and I Like FestivitiesHow could the M.T.A. do this without a shutdown?
+The Metropolitan Transportation Authority will keep both tunnels open during weekdays for full L train service and do its work on nights and weekends, shutting down only one tube at a time.
+Trains will run in both directions, but that will result in long waits between trains — up to 15 and 20 minutes — during repair times. The authority still plans on running more G, M and 7 trains to handle passengers who are rerouted during the repairs.
+When will this start?
+If the board approves, the work would probably start at the end of April, which was when the shutdown was supposed to begin.
+How long will it take?
+Transit officials said it could take 15 to 20 months. The previously planned shutdown was supposed to take 15 months. The governor stopped short of guaranteeing that it would not go beyond 20 months.
+“It’s a silly question, ‘am I going to promise on a construction project?’” he said.
+Who will be most affected?
+L-train riders who work nights and weekends, or those who play on nights and weekends.
+A luxury ride share company that started just for the shutdown, The New L, said it would keep its wait list open, just in case the new plans didn’t work, and there was still a need for the $155-a-month service.
+Construction and congestion on side streets in the East Village could be abated, sparing neighbors fumes from supplemental buses and asbestos in the debris removed from the tunnel.As Rashida Tlaib arrived on Capitol Hill to be sworn into the House of Representatives on Thursday, she was wearing a distinctive outfit: a traditional Palestinian thobe, or dress, adorned with the elaborate, hand-stitched embroidery known as tatreez.
+[Read live updates from the opening of the 116th Congress.]
+Ms. Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan who is the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in Congress, had posted a photo of the dress on Instagram on Dec. 14, garnering 11,000 likes — but also criticisms, including racist comments.David Robertson made his first major league appearance on June 29, 2008, the earliest Yankees debut of anyone on last year’s team. He went on to pitch in 500 more regular-season games for the Yankees. Only two pitchers — Mariano Rivera and Dave Righetti — have made more appearances for the team.
+Robertson, 33, will now pitch for the Philadelphia Phillies, who signed him to a two-year, $23 million contract on Thursday. It was the second time the Yankees let Robertson go as a free agent; he signed with the Chicago White Sox in December 2014 but returned in a trade after two and a half seasons.
+“I’ve had a wonderful time playing in New York; they’re an excellent organization, first class in everything, and I was fortunate to go to the playoffs with them six times,” said Robertson, who worked without an agent in these negotiations.
+“Being that this was my second time in free agency, there are other options out there, and there are other places to go. New York will always hold a place in my heart, but I think it was just time for me to go somewhere else.”William C. Thompson, a former Brooklyn legislator and judge who was in the vanguard of the black Democrats who staked their claim to elective office beginning in the mid-1960s, died on Dec. 24 at his home in Brooklyn Heights. He was 94.
+The cause was complications of colon cancer, his son, William C. Thompson Jr., the former New York City comptroller, said.
+In 1964, Mr. Thompson became the first black state senator elected from Brooklyn, a borough where, as recently as 1960, the fanciest restaurant, Gage & Tollner, did not seat black people.
+He was on the City Council from 1969 to 1973; elected to the State Supreme Court in 1974; and named assistant administrative judge of the Supreme Court in Brooklyn and Staten Island in 1978. In 1980, he was the first black associate justice appointed to the Appellate Division of the Second Judicial Department in Brooklyn.1. Democrats took control of the House of Representatives and elected Nancy Pelosi as speaker, returning divided government to Washington.
+The power shift came amid a partial government shutdown, with President Trump’s insistence on a wall on the Mexican border running headlong into newly energized Democratic opposition. House Democrats are voting on two new bills to reopen the federal government this evening, but their prospects in the Senate seemed dim.
+Hours before her election, Ms. Pelosi, center, suggested in an interview that a sitting president could be indicted and left open the option of impeachment, kicking off what could shape up to be a memorable term.Blake W. Nordstrom, a co-president of Nordstrom, the chain of upscale clothing and shoe stores that grew out of a single establishment founded by his great-grandfather, died on Wednesday in Seattle. He was 58.
+His death was confirmed by the company, which did not disclose a cause. Mr. Nordstrom revealed last month that he had recently learned that he had lymphoma, but that his doctors had told him that it was treatable and that he would continue to work during chemotherapy.
+His brothers, Peter, 56, and Erik, 55, who served as co-presidents with him, will continue to run Nordstrom, the company said in a statement.
+With his brothers, Mr. Nordstrom had been steering the company through a difficult period in retail, as the rise of e-commerce has challenged the company’s traditional focus on building a successful national network of premium and discount clothing and shoe stores.Mrinal Sen, one of India’s leading filmmakers and a central figure in the movement known as parallel cinema, a socially conscious alternative to splashy Bollywood films, died on Dec. 30 at his home in Kolkata, India. He was 95.
+His son, Kunal, confirmed the death.
+Mr. Sen began making films in the mid-1950s, exploring societal divisions and other themes in movies like “Baishey Shravana” (“The Wedding Day,” 1960), about a dumpy middle-aged man who marries a teenager, and “Akash Kusum” (“In the Clouds,” 1965), about a lower-middle-class man who inflates his credentials to try to win over a young woman.
+In 1969 he earned wide acclaim with “Bhuvan Shome,” whose title character, a rigid railroad official, takes a life-altering hunting trip. The movie, named best feature at India’s National Film Awards, established Mr. Sen as a major director and is considered a foundational film of what is sometimes called India’s new wave cinema, whose realism and small-scale storytelling contrasted with the grandiose fantasies, singing and dancing of Bollywood.
+In the 1970s Mr. Sen’s films showed his Marxist leanings and his fascination with the teeming city then known as Calcutta, now Kolkata. The 1980s brought several of his movies recognition at Cannes and other international film festivals.Neil deGrasse Tyson’s TV show “StarTalk” was placed on hiatus late last year after sexual misconduct allegations against him were made public, National Geographic, the network that airs the program, said Thursday.
+The most recent accusation was made by Ashley Watson, who worked as Dr. Tyson’s assistant on another show, “Cosmos.” Dr. Tyson behaved inappropriately with her, making comments “infused with sexual innuendoes,” she said Thursday. She said she had quit her job as a result.
+That accusation was published on the website Patheos in November, in an article that quoted another accuser, Katelyn N. Allers, an associate professor of physics and astronomy at Bucknell University. She used the phrase “uncomfortable and creepy” to describe his behavior toward her at a party after an American Astronomical Society event in 2009. The article went on to detail a more serious allegation that had been made before by Tchiya Amet El Maat, who accused Dr. Tyson of having raped her when they were graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin.
+In a 1,600-word Facebook post last month, Dr. Tyson described the first two incidents as benign and denied the third.Basically, it’s game on.
+But, honestly, at this point, there isn’t all that much of a game. Yes, more than three dozen candidates are considering running. And yes, as my colleague Alex Burns and I covered in the paper over the weekend, they’re interviewing staff, scouting headquarters and fleshing out financial plans.
+But almost no one is actually running — at least not yet. We’re still in that period of wild speculation. And with little visibly happening, political clichés like “likability” and “electability” are bound to appear out of the ether to fill the void.
+That’s part of what Ms. Warren discovered this week.
+Within hours of her tweet, she was “battling the ghosts of Hillary Clinton” to avoid being written off as unlikable. She was a “below par candidate,” based on the size of her Senate victory in deep blue Massachusetts, who faces real “electability” problems.
+It’s hard to see how these terms apply in the traditional sense in 2020. For the first time in 15 years, Democrats have an open field with no establishment favorite, so measuring electability is pretty difficult. And besides, being in the establishment may not be the asset it once was considered. At this point in 2015, Mrs. Clinton was seen as the most electable, even if she wasn’t likable — and we all know how that story ended.
+The Democratic pollster Margie Omero says terms like “likability” aren’t quite accurate in the Trump era. And you should forget about the old political chestnut that voters want “the guy they can have a beer with.”‘This really gets down to whether you value group rights over individual rights’
+Citizen, U.S.: You argue that populations of elite schools should match the demographics of society at large. People vary for all types of reasons, and there is no reason to think that academic competence is evenly distributed across all variables. I think this really gets down to whether you value group rights over individual rights. I would prefer to live in a system where every individual, regardless of traits, is judged based on competence and not based on irrelevant inherent characteristics like race, gender or color. Otherwise who gets to choose what inherent traits we prefer? Today it’s race and gender. Tomorrow it may be height, weight, attractiveness, health status, age, intelligence. The list goes on.
+Gutting: I agree that individual rights are fundamental and that we should aim for a world where individual ability is all that counts. But individuals live in social groups, so there’s always the possibility of judging individuals by race, gender, etc. And such judgments are still a major factor in our society. My affirmative action proposal is, in fact, meant to increase the number of highly competent blacks in upper-middle-class positions to the point where we no longer see anything odd in being operated on by a black surgeon or being represented by a black attorney. As to the question of who chooses which inherent traits we prefer, the answer is that we all argue for the choices we prefer — just as you and I are arguing that individual competence is fundamental — and society eventually makes a choice.
+Why should we continue trying if the numbers still don’t add up?
+Doubting Thomas: The best reason to oppose affirmative action for college admissions is that is just does not work. Dr. Gutting says “blacks make up 15 percent of the college-age population but only 6 percent of those enrolled at the top 100 private and public schools” and that “the figures have scarcely changed since 1980.” So, in all this time with affirmative action “the figures have scarcely changed.” Wouldn’t we be insane to continue?
+Gutting: We do need to look more closely at the data on rate of black enrollment. I suspect that many schools have aimed only at a rate that will satisfy their public relations needs and have little interest in solving a serious social problem. In any case, legal restrictions on affirmative action in California and other states and the Supreme Court’s insistence on a diverse student body rather than specific affirmative action for blacks have held back enrollment percentages.
+What about the white students who lose their ‘spots’?
+NYInsider, NYC: The reasons in favor of affirmative action as stated in this editorial are persuasive, and as a middle-aged white man who considers himself a progressive I find myself agreeing with many of them in theory. In practice, however, there remain fundamental questions not addressed by Dr. Gutting: what to do with the white kid who would otherwise qualify for a spot in someplace like Harvard, but then loses that spot to a black kid who would not have made it in if he or she were white? Do we tell the white kid that this is society’s way of making up for past discrimination that they may currently benefit from but had no hand in perpetrating? Do we tell them too bad for you that you weren’t born black? And how are these white kids and their families supposed to react to what they’re told? Do we tell them to just suck it up, that there’s plenty of other good schools out there? If so, then aren’t we just shifting the platitudes from a white family to a black family while continuing the cycle of discrimination?Nearly 180,000 former students at for-profit schools run by Career Education will not have to repay $494 million they owed to the company, a group of 49 state attorneys general announced Thursday.
+The agreement to wipe out the debt held directly by Career Education, such as unpaid tuition, ended a five-year multistate investigation into complaints that the company used predatory and deceptive recruiting tactics.
+Career Education misled students about the cost of its programs and its graduates’ job prospects, said Tom Miller, the attorney general of Iowa, whose office helped lead the states’ investigation. In some cases, Career Education charged students for vocational programs that lacked the accreditation needed for them to obtain a license and work in their field, according to the settlement documents.
+Career Education, based in Schaumburg, Ill., denied any wrongdoing. Todd Nelson, the company’s chief executive, called the settlement an “important milestone” in its turnaround efforts. The company was once among the country’s largest for-profit education chains but has shrunk to about a third of its former size as state and federal regulators increased their scrutiny of the kind of vocational programs it runs.Five children on their way to Walt Disney World and two adults were killed in a fiery multivehicle crash in northern Florida on Thursday, the authorities said. At least nine others were injured.
+The crash occurred on Interstate 75 near Gainesville, Fla., at about 3:40 p.m., when a tractor-trailer and a car collided in a northbound lane, according to the authorities. The vehicles careered through a guardrail into southbound traffic, striking a van carrying the children and another tractor-trailer.
+“Once the semis struck, they both caught on fire, as well as the passenger car,” Lt. Patrick Riordan, of the Florida Highway Patrol, said on Friday morning at a news conference.
+It is unclear what caused the vehicles to collide. The crash is under investigation.
+About 50 gallons of diesel fuel spilled onto the highway, intensifying the flames and releasing plumes of black smoke. A fifth vehicle struck either some of the injured or some debris, he said.Government officials have warned that a no-deal exit could clog ports, starve factories and disrupt supplies of food and medicine. At a cabinet meeting before Christmas, Gavin Williamson, the minister of defense, agreed to put 3,500 troops on standby. The environment minister, Michael Gove, on Thursday warned farmers that British exports to the European Union could be subject to 40 percent tariffs, and that inspections could cause delays, posing a threat to small farmers.
+A government publicity campaign will begin next week, as Parliament prepares to vote on Mrs. May’s withdrawal agreement, warning Britons of what to expect if the country leaves the European Union without a deal.
+But 76 percent of Conservative party members contacted for the poll dismissed those warnings as “exaggerated or invented,” and 64 percent maintained that a no-deal exit would have a positive rather than a negative effect.
+“In some ways, what we see is a kind of repeat of what we saw under David Cameron, which is a leadership unable to convince its own members to back the party line,” said Mr. Bale, referring to the former prime minister.
+The risks of a no-deal exit, he added, had been played down by right-wing news outlets like the Telegraph and Express tabloids, and by “the celebrity politicians so many of them admire.” The government itself has walked a fine line on projecting the fallout, trying to simultaneously warn the public of danger and reassure it that the state is prepared.
+And there are diverging views within the party about what a no-deal exit would look like, with some lawmakers speaking of a “managed no-deal” that includes a two-year transition period, or a “mitigated no-deal” in which smaller deals are in place to cover key trade areas.
+The same survey found equally strong but opposing views among members of the Labour Party. In a poll of 1,035 members, 72 percent said they want the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, to support a second referendum on European Union membership. Mr. Corbyn himself is a longstanding critic of the European Union, and has seemed reluctant to take that step.
+Among Labour members, 89 percent said they believed a no-deal Brexit would have a negative impact on the economy in the medium-to-long term. And 82 percent said that warnings of severe short-term disruptions, such as food shortages and price increases, were realistic, as opposed to 35 percent of the electorate as a whole.The other great thing about meaning is that everybody gets to define meaning in his or her own way. You don’t have to read a lot of thick books or have hard experiences to feel meaning. Just do things that give you good feelings!
+So now you are probably wondering what you can do to get the tingly meaningful feeling inside. Well, this is a four-stage process.
+First, you want to feel indignant all the time. Back in the old days morality was about loving and serving others. But now it’s about displaying indignation about things that other people are doing wrong.
+When you are indignant, or woke, you are showing that you have a superior moral awareness. You don’t have to actually do anything. Your indignation is itself a sign of your own goodness, and if you can be indignant quicker than the people around you, that just shows how much more good you are!
+Second, you want to make yourself heard. You want to put up a lawn sign that says, “Hate is not welcome here” or wear a T-shirt that says, “Stop the Violence.” By putting up a lawn sign that everybody else in your neighborhood already has, or wearing that T-shirt that all of your friends already wear, you are taking a stand and displaying who you are. You’re showing the people who are trying to silence you that you are not going to stay silent! You are going to wear your fashion item whether they like it or not!
+The third thing you want to do is tell your story. It wasn’t easy to come up with feelings as good as your feelings. You had to go through a lot. You want to inspire others by sharing about yourself. Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is talk about yourself a lot. Sometimes you have to keep talking about yourself even though other people, selfishly, keep interrupting and trying to talk about themselves.
+The fourth thing you need to do is condemn bad people. If somebody says something new or bad, you need to get on your phone right away. You need to tap the parts of the screen that will make it obvious that you are the sort of person who will not stand for bad people saying bad things. This isn’t easy because sometimes your phone is low on battery power, but you still need to show up! You need to protect people from hearing ideas they may not already have!In a meeting with cabinet officials on Wednesday, President Trump spoke about walls, wheels and foreign affairs, including a recollection of world history that startled an ally in the United States’ longest war.
+The Soviet Union, Mr. Trump said, invaded Afghanistan in 1979 “because terrorists were going to Russia.”
+“They were right to be there,” he added. “The problem is it was a tough fight.”
+On Thursday, Afghan officials contested Mr. Trump’s account — which was also at odds with the State Department’s Office of the Historian and historians, generally.
+The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, after it fell into civil war, and occupied it until 1989, propping up “a friendly and socialist government on its border,” according to the Office of the Historian. The United States and its allies condemned the brutal, long-running war, and Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan supplied aid to Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet Army.No sooner had the news of an impasse come out of a meeting room in Washington than thousands of miles away, on an island in the Pacific, Tomas Kaselionis had to start making decisions.
+“For me, it’s do I consider a car payment or do I pay the gas bill or the phone bill?” said Mr. Kaselionis, who is working on typhoon recovery for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, unpaid and far from home in the United States commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. “Those are conversations within the next week that I have to have with my wife.”
+By Saturday, the federal government will have been shut down for two weeks, a full pay cycle for federal workers. If the shutdown lasts through Monday, it will surpass the one of 2013, and if it lasts beyond the following Saturday, it will be the longest shutdown in United States history. Politicians have said they were hopeful that the standoff could be over in a matter of “days and weeks,” a reassurance that rang hollow to hundreds of thousands of federal workers who were not getting paid.
+[Read more: What is and is not affected by the federal government shutdown.]
+“They have to realize that this affects everyday people,” said Ray Coleman Jr., a corrections officer who teaches G.E.D. classes at a federal prison in Florida and is president of his local union. “It affects the boots on the ground. To me, it’s like a political chess game that they’re playing, and we seem to be pawns.”On Thursday, the best House speaker of modern times reclaimed her gavel, replacing one of the worst. It has taken the news media a very long time to appreciate the greatness of Nancy Pelosi, who saved Social Security from privatization, then was instrumental in gaining health insurance for 20 million Americans. And the media are still having a hard time facing up to the phoniness of their darling Paul Ryan, who, by the way, left office with a 12 percent favorable rating. But I think the narrative is finally, grudgingly, catching up with reality.
+There’s every reason to expect that Pelosi will once again be highly effective. But some progressive Democrats object to one of her initial moves — and on the economics, and probably the politics, the critics are right.
+The issue in question is “paygo,” a rule requiring that increases in spending be matched by offsetting tax increases or cuts elsewhere.
+You can argue that as a practical matter, the rule won’t matter much if at all. On one side, paygo is the law, whether Democrats put it in their internal rules or not. On the other side, the law can fairly easily be waived, as happened after the G.O.P.’s huge 2017 tax cut was enacted.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+regicide \ˈre-jə-ˌsīd\ noun
+1. the act of killing a king 2. someone who commits regicide; the killer of a king
+_________
+The word regicide has appeared in four articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on June 1 in the book review “Royal Ladies, Royal Intrigue” by Miranda Seymour:
+Nancy Goldstone specializes in royal ladies. (Her previous books include “The Rival Queens,” “Four Queens” and “The Lady Queen.”) Now, prudently avoiding the often-told tale of two regal and inimical cousins — Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, and Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots — Goldstone weaves her way through a turbulent century of civil war, regicide and revolution to show us, in the search for a Protestant successor to the eventually childless Queen Anne, how Scottish Mary’s feisty great-granddaughter Sophia almost became Queen of England.
+_________This image was at the top of the NYTimes.com home page on Jan. 3. Why? What does it show, and why is it so newsworthy? What do you know about any of the people pictured or their roles?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more.Before reading the article:
+On New Year’s Day, an estimated 5.5 million people demonstrated for women’s equality in India. For comparison, the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C., drew between 500,000 and one million people.
+Standing shoulder to shoulder, the “human chain” of demonstrators stretched for 300 miles.
+To understand the magnitude of that chain, take where you live as the starting point. Now look at a map of the United States and determine which city a human chain of 5.5 million from your home would reach. (This distance calculator might help.)
+Next, watch the above video, Protests Break Out After 2 Women Enter Hindu Temple in India.
+Now, read the article, “2 Indian Women Enter Sabarimala Temple, Setting Off Protests Near Hindu Shrine,” and answer the following questions:
+1. Why did two women enter the Sabarimala Temple this week? What happened as a result?
+2. In October, India’s Supreme Court ruled that the temple ban on women of childbearing age was unconstitutional. Why had previous attempts by women to enter the Sabarimala Temple failed?There’s a party you’re dying to go to. You’ve wanted a dog for years. There’s a new smartphone on sale. But your parents say no. What do you do to convince them?
+Flattery? Tears? Hard sell? Soft sell? Bribery? Deception? How about honesty?
+Have you ever tried PowerPoint?
+In “PowerPoint Is the Most Efficient Way for Kids to Manage Their Parents,” Katherine Rosman writes:
+Makennah Gatica, who is in eighth grade in Lubbock, Tex., knows exactly what she wants for Christmas: record albums, Puma sneakers, posters and slippers, all relating to her love of BTS, the South Korean boy band. To convince her mother to buy some of these items, Makennah, who is 13, created an 85-slide PowerPoint presentation. The slide show begins with a visual explainer of the K-pop music genre: images of the musicians making silly faces and an embedded video of them that Makennah has labeled “iCoNiC.” The demonstration next zeros in on coveted items of “BTS murch” (meaning, obviously, merchandise). Slide 17 reveals a publicity photo of the seven male band members, with an overlaid caption Makennah wrote that says, “I’m going to give you a list of things I would have an enormous amount of gratitude for :)” Rather than just emailing the document, she delivered its contents in person, standing before her mother to make the full audiovisual pitch. “I like to add music and do my own intros and stuff,” Makennah said. For children growing up in a world where personal relationships are often maintained and managed through digital products, sometimes convincing parents to do stuff is most easily achieved with the help of a PowerPoint presentation. School projects routinely call for students to create and display slide shows, so they’re comfortable with the technology. And maybe parents are amused, and more open to saying yes, when seeing their children doing the ho-hum, middle-aged task of calling a meeting to show off a deck, as working stiffs like to say.
+The article also describes the efforts of Cade Collins, 14, to get a puppy:
+On the occasion of his brother Luke’s birthday last year, Cade sat his parents in their living room, turned down the lights, streamed some soft jazz, lit a candles and dressed in a T-shirt with a picture of a puppy on it. Then he unleashed upon his parents a PowerPoint pressure-tation entitled, “Reasons Why We Need to get a Wing Pup.” The family already had a dog, Cooper, age 10, whom the family had nicknamed “the Wing.” But Luke wanted a duck-hunting dog and relatives were offering a black Labrador from a new litter. The boys’ parents, Vallie and Steve Collins, didn’t want a puppy to distract the boys from their responsibility of walking and picking up after Cooper. Plus, they were trying to sell their house and they didn’t think it was smart to take on a needy, messy new pet. In a slide that he headlined “I Know What Your Thinking,” Cade wrote, “I’ve heard it from you mom, ‘We would but there is just too much stress with moving houses.’ Well, boy do I have an answer for you. Studies have shown that when petting a dog your body releases a number of ‘feel good’ hormones, such as serotonin, prolactin and oxytocin. There for releasing stress.” (He meant “you’re” and “they’re” but that’s not the point here.) “Coopers years are numbered and he is slowing down, but a younger energetic presence wouldn’t hurt and may improve his lifestyle,” he added. (See slide four, “Lets Face It.”) What did Mr. and Ms. Collins say? What do you think? But before Willie joined the family (they named the new dog after Willie Nelson!), the boys had to sign a contract promising that they would clean up accidents, monitor the pup’s furniture-chewing and keep him fed and groomed. “We replied to the PowerPoint with our own official documents,” said Ms. Collins.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— How do you get what you want from your parents? What strategies have worked and which have not? How often are you successful?
+— Tell us about a time when you really wanted something and had to work very hard to convince your parents to give their approval. What happened?
+— Do you think you might use PowerPoint (or other audio/visual aides) the next time you need to ask your parents for something big?He credited his mother as his primary influence. She would engage him in long conversations about life when he was a child. “She was very ethical,” he was quoted as saying in “The Art of Business: In the Footsteps of Giants,” a 2004 book about leadership by Raymond T. Yeh.
+“She had a very democratic view of life,” he continued. “She had enormously wide interests in politics and business, so it was very educational in that respect, just talking with her. We’d sit up and talk to two, three, and four o’clock in the morning when I was quite young, about how you should behave, the goals that you should have, the ethics you should follow, how business worked, how politics can join with business.”
+After attending Wesleyan University in Connecticut and later New York University Law School, Mr. Kelleher began his career as a lawyer. He married Joan Negley in 1955, and the couple had four children while living in New Jersey. But a desire to start his own firm prompted him to move the family to San Antonio.
+His wife, three of their children and many grandchildren survive, Southwest said.
+In 1967, one of Mr. Kelleher’s clients, Rollin W. King, approached him with what seemed an outlandish idea: starting an airline that could fly passengers cheaply within Texas. Mr. King, who died in 2014, believed that Mr. Kelleher was just crazy enough to sign on. By their telling, they sketched out their ideas on a cocktail napkin.
+They soon ran into a wave of hostility from the industry. Competitors like Texas International, Braniff and Continental waged four years of litigation before Southwest Airlines could make its first flight. When the airline began service in 1971, it had four Boeing 737s in its fleet.
+Southwest was able to reduce fares by flying only within Texas, avoiding prices that would have otherwise been mandated by the Civil Aeronautics Board.The Weather Channel app deceptively collected, shared and profited from the location information of millions of American consumers, the city attorney of Los Angeles said in a lawsuit filed on Thursday.
+One of the most popular online weather services in the United States, the Weather Channel app has been downloaded more than 100 million times and has 45 million active users monthly.
+The government said the Weather Company, the business behind the app, unfairly manipulated users into turning on location tracking by implying that the information would be used only to localize weather reports. Yet the company, which is owned by IBM, also used the data for unrelated commercial purposes, like targeted marketing and analysis for hedge funds, according to the lawsuit.
+Image The lawsuit accuses the Weather Channel of manipulating users by implying that tracking data would be used only to localize weather reports. Credit...
+The city’s lawsuit cited an article last month in The New York Times that detailed a sprawling industry of companies that profit from continuously snooping on users’ precise whereabouts. The companies collect location data from smartphone apps to cater to advertisers, stores and investors seeking insights into consumer behavior.Archaeologists in Mexico say they have found the first temple dedicated to a deity called the Flayed Lord, an important god in the Aztec Empire whose worshipers were said to wear the skin of sacrificial victims.
+Artifacts related to the god were found in the central state of Puebla, at a site built by the Popoloca people, Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History said in a statement on Wednesday. The Popolocas built in the area over several centuries, beginning around A.D. 900, and were assimilated into the sprawling Aztec kingdom.
+At the temple, which the institute said was probably built between A.D. 1000 and 1260, the archaeologists found artifacts related to the god, Xipe Tótec, including two stone skulls and a stone torso that had an extra hand hanging off its left arm. Scientists said the extra hand suggested the god was wearing the remains of a sacrificial victim.
+Noemí Castillo Tejero, the archaeologist who led the project, was not available for an interview, but the institute said that the excavation at the complex, called Ndachjian-Tehuacan, had also uncovered two altars nearby, in a layout that appeared to match Aztec accounts of rituals associated with the cult of Xipe Tótec.MANCHESTER, England — The first ball floated backward, spinning and arcing toward the net. For a second, it hung in the air, a foot or so above the white goal line. Manchester City, Liverpool, the Etihad Stadium crowd all held their breath.
+And then John Stones reached it, and sent it as far away from himself, from danger, as he could. Anthony Taylor, the referee, checked his watch for the goal-line technology reading that would determine if the entire ball had crossed the line before Stones reached it. He waited. Everyone waited.
+He shook his head. The slightest sliver of orange and purple leather had remained above the line — less than an inch. City could breathe again.WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned Iran on Thursday against launching three spacecraft in the coming months, describing them as a cover for testing technology that is necessary to lob a warhead at the United States and other nations.
+His statement seemed intended to build a legal case for diplomatic, military or covert action against the Iranian missile program. It was surprising only because Iran has been launching modest space missions, mostly to deploy satellites, since 2005.
+Around the time that Mr. Pompeo issued the statement, a 12-year-old Iranian satellite that was launched by Russia was circling the globe, including in a path that took it close to New York. And Mr. Pompeo made no mention of the other country that, over the years, has aided Iran’s ballistic missile and space rocket program: North Korea, whose leader was praised by President Trump as recently as Wednesday for writing him a “beautiful letter.”
+The stark warning on Thursday was immediately rejected by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran, who shot back in a tweet that Tehran’s launch of space vehicles — and of missiles — is “NOT in violation of Res 2231.” He was referring to the United Nations resolutions approved in 2015, shortly after the completion of the Iran nuclear deal.[Read our latest story on Vicente Zambada Niebla’s testimony in the El Chapo trial.]
+Aside from the chiefs who ran the organization, probably no one knows more about the Sinaloa drug cartel than Vicente Zambada Niebla.
+A son of Ismael Zambada García, one of the cartel’s leaders, Mr. Zambada, from an early age, was groomed to take control of the group.
+But on Thursday, in a spectacular reversal, the cartel prince betrayed his father — and his birthright — testifying for more than five hours about nearly every aspect of the drug-trafficking empire: smuggling routes, money-laundering schemes, bloody wars, personal vendettas and multimillion dollars in bribes. When it came to the enterprise he seemed poised to lead one day, Mr. Zambada proved he knew almost everyone and everything.
+His bravura turn on the witness stand came at the midway point in the drug trial of his father’s former partner, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous crime lord known as El Chapo. Since the trial began in November, seven other witnesses who worked with Mr. Guzmán have testified against him. But none were more conversant with the structure and details of the kingpin’s business than Mr. Zambada.By some estimates, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch consists of more than 80,000 tons of waste and debris, tossed together by the currents into a sort of island of lost toys, minus the island. As it grows, scientists say, so does the danger it poses to the health of the ocean.
+The 2,000-foot-long boom, which arrived at the garbage patch after a voyage of about 1,400 miles, was designed to trap the trash so that it could be returned to shore. The Ocean Cleanup’s goals were ambitious: 150,000 pounds of plastic in Year 1, with more booms to follow. Within five years, the group hoped, half the debris would be collected.
+But on Monday, the organization said that in a routine inspection over the weekend, it found that an end-section of the boom almost 60 feet long — 18 meters — had detached. The boom will be taken back to shore as soon as weather allows, the group said.
+The Ocean Cleanup said it appeared that material fatigue and “local stress concentration” might have caused the fracture in the multimillion-dollar structure.
+Skeptics had raised doubts about whether the boom, known as Wilson, would do much good and whether it could hold up to the forces of nature.Bill Samuel, the director of government affairs for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said the political breakdown of his 12.5 million members is bipartisan and mirrors that of any large cross-section of America. “He seems to see them as well-paid professionals working in downtown Washington, D.C.,” Mr. Samuel said. “But on average, politically, we’re like the rest of the country.” About 79 percent of federal employees work outside the Washington area, with Texas, Virginia, California and Maryland having the largest number of government workers.
+But Mr. Trump has little sense of the life of a typical government employee, and views them negatively overall, according to former White House officials. One former official said Mr. Trump saw government workers as part of the bureaucracy, and some as part of the deep state.
+A second former official said the idea of federal workers toiling without pay left Mr. Trump unmoved.
+Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, disputed that notion.
+“The president cares about the future of all American workers in the public and private sector that have been forgotten by phony politicians for decades, and he wants to ensure their safety and security, which is why he continues to fight for border security,” Mr. Gidley said.
+Marc Short, the former White House director of legislative affairs, pointed out the vocal support Mr. Trump had received from some federal employees. “I think it’s fair to say he’s cherished the support he’s gotten from federal unions and the National Border Patrol Council,” he said. “And I never heard him harbor any ill will toward government workers.”
+On Thursday afternoon, in a surprise appearance in the White House briefing room, Mr. Trump appeared with a group of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, government workers who enthusiastically endorsed his fight for a wall.
+But the impression Mr. Trump has left on union members who do not work directly on national security issues appears to be much different.As they recorded another year of strong United States sales, automakers said Thursday that they saw little cause for concern in the months ahead. But a closer look shows signs of strain emerging on several fronts.
+Annual sales reached 17.3 million new cars and light trucks last year, a rise of 0.6 percent from 2017. It was the fourth year in a row that the figure exceeded 17 million, the longest such streak the industry has ever recorded.
+But last year’s increase was driven by higher sales to rental, government and corporate fleets. Sales to individual consumers — considered a more accurate measure of demand — were flat, according to Edmunds, an auto-retail data provider.
+At the same time, the enticing loan deals that many car buyers rely on have started to disappear. Interest-free loans, for example, accounted for just 5.5 percent of all finance plans offered by dealers in December. That was the lowest level for December since 2005, according to Edmunds.Mr. McConnell, 76, is the longest-serving Senate Republican leader in history and is a wily tactician. While he is not generally considered vulnerable, his popularity is lagging at home. A poll by Western Kentucky University last spring found that only 30 percent of Kentuckians approve of his job performance. Sticking with Mr. Trump, whose approval ratings top 50 percent in Kentucky, is in his own political interest.
+But if he wants to hang onto his job as majority leader, Mr. McConnell must also be mindful of the political fortunes of Republicans seeking re-election in states won by Mrs. Clinton in 2016 or by Democrats in November. A prolonged government shutdown is the last thing those lawmakers need. And even some Republicans up for re-election in states won by Mr. Trump, like Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, sound uneasy.
+“A shutdown, in my view, is a no-win proposition,” Ms. Capito said, adding that she heard complaints from Transportation Security Administration workers as she was returning to Washington for the start of the new Congress this week. Ms. Capito is the chairwoman of the appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over the Department of Homeland Security; the panel has already passed a bill funding the department, including $1.6 billion for border security including fencing — but with no money for Mr. Trump’s wall.
+“It is just a lot of unneeded stress on a lot of people,” she said of the shutdown.
+“I would like to see it resolved soon,” said Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, who also faces re-election in 2020. She repeated herself for emphasis: “I would like to see it resolved soon.”
+For Mr. McConnell, the shutdown fight presents a dynamic that is likely to become familiar over the next two years, as House Democrats rush to pass long-sought liberal policies and, in many cases, try to use the chamber to highlight Republicans’ opposition to legislative changes they believe are overwhelmingly popular. Mr. McConnell has already been burned once, having negotiated and passed through the Senate a plan to avoid the shutdown in the first place only to have Mr. Trump pull his support at the last minute.
+“He faces that reality now on every issue: What’s the White House going to do with this?” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and Mr. Schumer’s No. 2. He predicted that Mr. McConnell’s approach — to simply stand in the way so that Mr. Trump is not forced to use his veto pen — would only change if Republican senators up for re-election begin to fear political costs of carrying the president’s water.
+Senator John Cornyn of Texas, Mr. McConnell’s former No. 2, compared Mr. McConnell’s task to “threading a needle.” Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff, Josh Holmes, said it was considerably more simple than that.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Thursday about the exodus of Turkey’s academics and business elite misidentified the university in the Netherlands where Ilker Birbil took up a position after leaving Turkey. It is Erasmus University Rotterdam, not Utrecht University.
+NATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about how Native Americans have been affected by the government shutdown referred incorrectly to the impact of the shutdown on a Department of Agriculture food program. The program will be funded through January, but will be curtailed if the shutdown continues beyond that date.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).“To the speaker of the House, Ms. Pelosi, I extend to you the gavel.”
+REPRESENTATIVE KEVIN McCARTHY, the new leader of the House Republicans, formally handing over power to a fellow Californian, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, as Democrats assumed control of the House of Representatives.The United States renewed a travel advisory for China on Thursday that warned American citizens could face arbitrary detention there, a move that came amid tense relations between the countries dominated by trade disputes and the recent American-requested arrest of a high-profile Chinese executive in Canada.
+The rights of foreign citizens in China have received renewed focus because of public concern over the fate of an American family barred from leaving the country, Sandra Han and her two adult children, Victor and Cynthia Liu. The arrest in Vancouver last month of Meng Wanzhou, an executive of the Chinese tech giant Huawei, has also raised the specter of potential retaliatory arrests of Americans or Canadians in China.
+The travel advisory issued by the State Department on Thursday was a routine renewal of a similar warning issued in January 2018. It urged Americans to “exercise increased caution in China” because of so-called exit bans, a legal tool the authorities there use to bar a person from leaving the country.
+People subjected to a ban typically learn of its existence only when they try to leave China, and no method exists for them to determine when the ban has been lifted, the State Department said.I have loved crosswords from a young age, when I would sit down with my grandma and we would work through the daily puzzles. That social element has always been important to me: There’s nothing quite like solving a puzzle (or playing a board game) with friends or family!
+As an amateur constructor, I tend to carry notepads with me to jot down theme ideas, interesting phrases, corners of puzzles and such, and many, many pages ended up being devoted to this puzzle.
+The ‘seed’ entry was WARM FUZZIES. After about eight months of pencil-scribbling, the first version was rejected in August 2017, in part because of the entry “TCH;” evidently a puzzle-killer by itself! (Maybe it’s a regional thing, but I say “Tch!” all the time.)
+Changing that single, small entry had a strong domino effect, such that I ended up having to rework almost the whole puzzle. Because of the generally positive feedback, though, I managed to power out a new version in a few months. The second version was accepted in February 2018. And that in itself was lucky; it sounds like this puzzle just passed muster. Phew!
+For those interested in the process, chances are your clues are going to look totally different by the end. Very few of my clues seemed to make it, including some of my favorites (5D: “They bring lots to the table;” 32A: “‘ … can I go now?’”, and 51D: “A musician might jump to it”). I also tried to make a case for cluing TPK as a Total Party Kill, familiar to RPGers [RPGs are role-playing video games. — D.A.], but it looks like today is not that day.
+Anyway, I hope you enjoy the solve — especially if you solve with loved ones! And IF NOT … TCH!Kevin Tway shot a 7-under-par 66 on Thursday to secure a one-shot lead after the first round of the Tournament of Champions in Maui, Hawaii.
+Tway, who won the season-opening Safeway Open in October for his first PGA Tour victory and a berth in the winners-only Tournament of Champions, carded five birdies in making the turn in 31 shots. He then rolled in two more birdies on the back nine to complete a bogey-free card in windy conditions on the par-73 Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort.
+The defending champion Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas and Gary Woodland were one shot back after shooting 67s on Thursday. Johnson was 4-under on the course’s par-5s, with the only blemish on his scorecard a bogey on No. 6 that came after he had driven the ball into the thick grass and had to chop the ball out.
+Marc Leishman was alone in fifth place at 5-under. Another shot back was a group of players that included Jason Day, Rory McIlroy — who is playing the event for the first time — Bryson DeChambeau, Andrew Landry, Patton Kizzire and Andrew Putnam.The Blackhawks took the lead just 3:05 into the first, when Kahun swooped just outside the crease and backhanded home a rebound of a shot by Brandon Saad.
+Barzal didn’t need long to tie the game with the first of his two goals. Johnny Boychuk’s shot from the blue line was deflected by Delia and bounced off the stick of the Islanders’ Anthony Beauvillier to Barzal, who swung at the puck while it was a few inches off the ice. The puck sailed past Blackhawks defenseman Erik Gustafsson and over the stick arm of Delia at the 6:47 mark.
+The Islanders briefly appeared to take the lead with 6:20 left in the second, when Cal Clutterbuck batted home a rebound in the crease. But upon replay, the goal was waved off because Clutterbuck’s stick was above the crossbar.
+Barzal put the Islanders ahead in similar fashion with 1:04 left in the second, when he was stationed next to Delia as Nick Leddy’s shot was initially turned back by the Blackhawks goalie. Barzal then tucked the puck into the corner of the net past a sprawling Delia.
+Kane tied the game in unusual fashion 5:01 into the third, when his stick broke as he fired a shot from the face-off circle. However, Kane put enough on the shot that it fluttered into the crease and skipped past Lehner.American accused of spying in Russia
+An American citizen has been charged with spying in Russia, his lawyer said.
+The Russian authorities have brought espionage charges against Paul Whelan, a former Marine who is the head of global security for an auto parts maker. If convicted, Mr. Whelan faces up to 20 years in prison.
+Why Russia: Mr. Whelan’s family said he was in Russia to attend the wedding of a friend. A Russian news agency reported that he was accused of trying to recruit a Russian citizen to obtain classified information.
+Possible exchange: There has been widespread speculation that Russia seized Mr. Whelan to exchange him for Maria Butina, a Russian who pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court to conspiring to act as a foreign agent and influence N.R.A. officials and prominent Republicans.A judge in New York City has dismissed a lawsuit that alleged that Knight Landesman, the former publisher of Artforum magazine, sexually harassed a former employee and at least eight other women.
+The lawsuit, filed in October 2017, included accusations that Mr. Landesman — a power broker in the art world — had groped, attempted to kiss and sent vulgar messages to the women, and, on occasion, retaliated against them when they spurned his advances. Mr. Landesman resigned hours after the lawsuit was filed.
+The former employee, Amanda Schmitt — the plaintiff in the case — did not sue for workplace sexual misconduct because the statute of limitations had run out; instead, she brought a retaliation claim against Mr. Landesman that alleged he had cornered her at a restaurant in May 2017 and assailed her in front of others for having accused him of harassment.
+But in his order filed last month, the judge, Justice Frank P. Nervo of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, wrote that five years had passed between the time Ms. Schmitt had worked for Artforum and when the restaurant episode took place — enough time “to eliminate any nexus between her employment and the alleged acts.” He found that Mr. Landesman had spoken in a “purely social setting,” that he was entitled to defend himself and that his statements were not defamatory.I’m not sure what possessed me to Google our address a few weeks ago while on a writing residency in Tucson, far from my home in Ohio, but I did, and there it was: my house on Google Maps, my husband still inside. And still, I think, in love with me. The photo is dated January 2016.
+No, it is daylight in the photo, so my husband is at work. The blue recycling bins are at the curb, full, so I know it’s a Monday morning. There is light snow on the ground, and my neighbor’s magnolia trees are bare. They bloom in the spring and are impossibly beautiful for a few days, and then the blossoms drop and make a mess of both our yards.
+I love them anyway.
+Even though it’s winter, my son’s tricycle is on the front porch. This is what passes as bike storage when you don’t have a garage. The snow shovel is probably propped nearby, too. I can’t zoom in enough to see the yellow bag of sidewalk salt by the front door, but I know it’s there. I know the orange plastic tumbler is nestled inside it, a makeshift scoop.
+I am probably inside, alone; my husband will be home in the evening. I am likely working on my laptop, clacking away with my index fingers because I never learned how to type, not properly. Maybe I’m reheating the cup of coffee I always let go cold.
+In the afternoon, once the recycling has been picked up, I’ll retrieve the cracked bins from the driveway and haul them back to the side of the house. I’ll walk to pick up my daughter from the elementary school. She and I will drive together to fetch my son from day care.Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Ebullient Democrats assumed control of the House and elected Nancy Pelosi as speaker. The only woman to hold the post, she reclaimed the gavel she lost in 2011. To win it back, the California representative had to put down a rebellion in her caucus — but there were still dissenters in her ranks.
+• The new Democratic majority passed two bills to reopen the government, without funding for President Trumps’s border wall. They are likely to go nowhere for now but will raise pressure on Republicans to negotiate.
+• President Trump has talked about the need for “protection” along the southern border. But what he hasn’t talked about publicly during the partial government shutdown are the 800,000 federal workers who are not being paid. Those workers are coming up on a full pay cycle off the job, and many are trying to decide which bills to pay.With no deal, trade relations between Britain and the European Union would revert to the very basic rules of the World Trade Organization. These entail that neither side is allowed to treat the other more favorably than it treats other trade partners around the globe. If Britain steps out of the union without any bilateral trade deals, a customs regime would have to be installed between Britain and its European neighbors. In the interim, thousands of businesses on both sides, and millions of customers, will be thrown into a costly confusion. At least my insurer has a plan; many other companies are still struggling to find one.
+The old, once-amusing British headline “Fog in the Channel — Continent Cut Off” could finally come to bear some truth, particularly for Germany‘s key industry: automakers. Within Europe, Britain is by far their biggest market. Last year auto manufacturers based in Germany exported three times more cars to Britain than they did to China, according to their trade association’s data. The auditing firm Deloitte believes that the number of German cars sold to Britain could drop from 800,000 to 550,000 annually, endangering 18,000 German jobs.
+The auto industry is a great example of just how complicated and messy a “hard” Brexit will be. It’s not just that fewer British customers will buy German cars. It’s also that well-established, just-in-time supply chains could be destroyed. As The Guardian reported, the crankshaft of a BMW Mini crosses the Channel three times before it becomes part of the finished car: The cast is made in France, then goes to a BMW plant in Warwickshire, where it is drilled, then travels to Munich, where it is set into the engine. The engine finally is shipped back to the Mini plant in Oxford, to be mounted into the car. With a customs regime in place, all those cross-Channel trips will become much more expensive.
+Brexiteers claimed that Britain could shake off the union’s principle of free movement of people yet somehow maintain the usual level of free trade with the continent. Those were pipe dreams. So were expectations that as the hour of Brexit approached, the European Union would bow to Britain’s demands.
+Despite the damage Brexit will cause in the remaining 27 countries of the union, they are unflinching in their message to London: This will be painful for both of us, but we can’t let you change the rules. Germany, which sells far more cars to the rest of the union than to Britain, has insisted on this hard line throughout the talks. Germany doesn’t want to lose British buyers, but it can’t afford to undermine the common-market structure that undergirds its sales to the rest of Europe.Timothée Chalamet and Steve Carell star in “Beautiful Boy.” And Ron Funches discusses Dwayne Johnson and more in a new comedy special.
+What’s Streaming
+BEAUTIFUL BOY (2018) on Amazon Prime. Based on paired memoirs by David and Nic Sheff, Felix Van Groeningen’s latest film casts Timothée Chalamet as a young man in the throes of drug addiction. The movie focuses on the effect it has on the boy and his family, most prominently his father, David, played by Steve Carell. “There is a lot of good music — John Lennon, Sigur Ros, Perry Como — and California vistas so gorgeous that you might wonder if the state’s tourist board had a role in the production,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “But the picturesqueness and the flowing, music-video rhythms of the editing give the film a slick, evasive feel, as if it were too cautious or too cool to confront the worst of what it’s about.”
+I’M MOVING TO MARS on Topic. In the coming decades, the Dutch nonprofit venture Mars One intends to start a colony on Mars, and has gathered 100 volunteers to begin getting ready for a one-way journey. While many in both the aerospace industry and academia are skeptical of the organization (it doesn’t manufacture hardware, for one), those who have volunteered themselves are serious about their intentions — as is evidenced in this four-part series of short documentaries profiling some of the potential space colonists. “We’re going to die here anyway,” Yari Golden-Castaño, one of these aspiring travelers, says. “We’re going to Mars to live.”Sewanee could not pass the football, as per the rules of the day, and it would be no match for Alabama or Clemson. The team was also entirely white. The first African-American student to graduate from Sewanee, Nathaniel Owens, entered in 1966 and graduated in 1970. He was an outstanding football player.
+Nonetheless, Norman Jetmundsen Jr., a Birmingham lawyer who is putting together a documentary on the Sewanee team, is certain today’s elite teams would be impressed with the Tigers.
+“They played 35 consecutive minutes a half on both sides of the ball with no substitution, and they played with serious injuries,” Jetmundsen said. “They played five games in six days on that train trip and won them all by shutout. Who wouldn’t be impressed by that?”
+In a chapter of a book on the history of Sewanee, Register wrote that the 1899 team “formed part of the university’s heritage.” The professor said that Benjamin Lawton Wiggins, the university’s vice chancellor at the time, in particular, rallied students around the notion that football should be a part of the Southern male’s identity.
+At the time, the South was desperate for cheer, and Sewanee’s success was seen as a response to the aristocratic Northerners of the day, who thought they owned the game. Football was something Southerners could excel at, especially in the aftermath of defeat in the Civil War and economic depression, said George Rable, an American historian.
+“The 1890s were a rough time for the nation economically, but especially for the South,” Rable said. “Football provided some comfort and sense of achievement.”1 of 11
+The 116th Congress features the most diverse group of representatives ever elected to the House, whose history spans more than 200 years.
+What is not one of the distinctions of the new House?Mr. Gutierrez, 47, started thinking about these issues when he was a student and discovered two formative books: “This Bridge Called My Back” helped him find a voice for his own rage and passion when he was part of the group Queer Nation; and Sally Banes’s “Terpsichore in Sneakers,” which chronicled artists from the 1960s collective Judson Dance Theater, got him pondering the perceived division in dance between identity and personal exploration on the one hand and abstraction and formalism on the other.
+Using predominantly white casts in Europe changed everything. “We were playing with a lot of the same formal ideas,” he said, “but something else was coming up for me. It wasn’t that it didn’t work. It was just that I realized it felt like any investigation around abstraction or improvisation or form would probably just be read as that.”
+He wanted to go deeper, and that’s when it hit him: “What it would be like to work with a group that was all Latin American?”
+In the opening section, which is improvisation based, the dancers work with materials, including a ladder, stools and clamps, as well as pieces of fabric, which they drape over their bodies and carry throughout the space. At times, it really does feel like a bridge is being built and torn down over and over again. All the while, the dancers show their skin, their flesh, their sweat.
+To Mr. Gutierrez, the pieces of fabric conjure different images, like color block painting and Brazilian Tropicália. “Sometimes they become boundaries,” he said. “Sometimes they become a shape of a discarded thing. There’s not a lot of reverence. It’s not like, ‘Oh this beautiful canvas.’ There’s even a tent city illusion.”
+Within this painterly setting — Tuçe Yasak’s lighting manages to change the temperature from hot to cool — the performers generate and manipulate the sound. They move speakers. They stop it suddenly by closing a laptop. “Is it building, is it growing?” Mr. Gutierrez said. “Sometimes yes, sometimes no.”Q. Can I ever recover from acute diverticulitis?
+A. The answer depends on the severity of your diverticulitis.
+The mildest end of the spectrum of diverticular disease is diverticulosis. Diverticulosis is simply a collection of outpouchings, or diverticula, in the wall of the colon. Aside from being an occasional source of blood in the stool, diverticulosis usually does not cause symptoms.
+Diverticulitis — the suffix “itis” indicates inflammation — typically occurs when a diverticulum becomes blocked by a piece of hard stool, called a fecalith. This localized blockage leads to bacterial overgrowth, followed by inflammation, infection and abscess formation. At the most severe end of the spectrum, the abscess can rupture and stool may enter the abdominal cavity, which may result in sepsis, a dangerous blood infection.
+But severe disease is not the norm. Most people with diverticulosis do not progress to diverticulitis. Only 10 percent to 20 percent go on to have pain or bleeding.To call Edward Gorey eccentric is an understatement. The illustrator, whose work amassed an almost cultlike following in his lifetime and beyond, was a mystery. In this week’s issue of the Book Review, Robert Gottlieb reviews “Born to be Posthumous,” a new biography by Mark Dery that explores Gorey’s peculiar life and “genius” art. His illustrations — particularly for children’s books — were widely celebrated, though often misunderstood. Below we revisit some of Gorey’s work that placed him on The New York Times Book Review’s Best Illustrated Children’s Books list.
+1966
+An illustration from “The Monster Den, or Look What Happened at My House — and to It,” by John Ciardi, which the Book Review chose as one of the best illustrated children’s books in 1966. Our original review called Gorey’s illustrations “elegant and droll.”As we made our way through the terrible milestones of leukemia — hair loss, infections, feeding tubes and transfusions, one endless, brutal procedure after another — I felt lightheaded every time I stepped outside the hospital, blinking in the sunlight, at the ordinariness of people walking on sidewalks, picking up their children from school, drinking coffee in cafes. They looked so strange to me, as though I viewed them through a thick pane of glass. They seemed untouched while we were weighed down by sadness. It felt as though our family had been flung into some strange parallel universe populated only by those who had met with great misfortune.
+Who knows if it was some sort of premonition, but several months before Daniel fell ill I’d begun steeping myself in the writings of medieval mystics and philosophers. I had been especially drawn to the notion of memento mori, or “remember that you will die.”
+Immediately after Daniel’s diagnosis I shied away from anything having to do with death. Experienced friends told me to stay positive and upbeat and strong. We faced new medical crises every day. To even acknowledge dark possibilities felt like inviting defeat. But soon I returned to my beloved thinkers and found they offered new comfort in a disorienting world. I wanted to understand how to live in a world where death is so ever-present that it animates life.
+The idea that death exists alongside life, that it is the constant shadow that illuminates life and gives it meaning, far predated medieval times, of course. For Plato, philosophy was a meditation on death, an idea echoed by Seneca (“let us prepare our minds as if we’d come to the very end of life”) and taken up much later by Montaigne, who overcame a fear of death through his own near-death experience. Buddhist and Daoist thinkers taught that constant awareness of death enriches our lives. Awareness of our beautiful, ephemeral existence lies behind Japanese cherry-blossom viewing or the Tibetan sand mandala.
+Unlike the medieval monks who constructed entire chapels of bones or Victorian families who would ritualistically photograph their dead, in our culture and time it is not fashionable for us to linger on death. Extreme measures are taken to extend life. Tropes and platitudes abound: “Think positive.” See cancer as a “gift.” But I had made peace with my own mortality. Now I found that learning to live alongside even the mortality of a child I loved gave me a kind of strength that denialism could not, because it was a relief to acknowledge something that felt more true. When you realize your time on earth is finite, that we are all “being towards death,” as Heidegger wrote, then time expands.
+Hospital time is set apart from ordinary time. Each moment in the hospital feels eternal. For me, having a child in the hospital feels as though time has even slipped backward. Spending all these hours with him has given me a chance to reparent my son: to talk, to hold his hand, to care for him in the way few parents can care for their teenagers who are busy, busy, busy with the business of growing up.
+And we are the luckiest of the unlucky. Daniel will recover and come home; I feel guilt when I think of the families whose children will not. But follow-ups and vigilance about a possible relapse or secondary cancer will be our close companions in the years ahead. There can really be no return to the life that once was, just a stark awareness of life’s fragility. Death is a condition of being human.Most Old English poetry, which is where kennings are found, is nothing like the Medieval Times version of the Middle Ages, with knights and ladies and jousting. Instead, Old English poems like “The Wanderer,” “The Seafarer” or “Beowulf” are terribly sad. It always seems cold. Snow (snaw) falls on a story about a lonely person (perhaps an anstapa, a lone-stepper), while social discord ripples beneath the poem’s surface. “Beowulf” is probably the most famous surviving Old English poem we have (there’s no knowing how much has been lost). The sole manuscript sits in the British Library, where anybody can go and look at it housed in bulletproof glass. In it, the anonymous poet describes war and death with kennings like “battle-sweat” for blood (heaþuswate), “mind-worth” for honor (weorðmyndum), “bonehouse” for body (banhus). In the scene describing Beowulf’s funeral, the poet refers to his body as a bonehouse that has broken open (ða banhus gebrocen hæfde). The smoke rises from his funeral pyre, interweaving with the sound of weeping (wudurec astah . . . wope bewunden). I love the winding together of smoke and sound: bewunden.
+By describing Beowulf’s body as a bonehouse, cracked open by flames and surrounded by weeping, the poet communicates the body’s brittleness (how easily it breaks!) and the way that Beowulf had come to represent a whole institution in his society in a single word. When his body goes on the pyre, it’s like a house burning to the ground. None of that is explained, exactly — it’s just there in the kenning. Banhus is made of two disparate nouns, left to reconcile with each another in your head. A kenning is like a Rothko painting. It doesn’t make sense at first, but then it unfurls a beauty born of texture and contrast.
+I’ve got no interest in establishing any personal connection between their culture and mine. That’s for the historians and the fantasists. I’m just interested in the words. There are ways of expressing feeling in the Old English kennings that do not exist in the formal English of today. Even if I were to dream up some delicious new portmanteau here — some melding of “history,” “poignant” and “solitude,” say — I still would not be creating a true kenning. That’s because, in our tongue, words get their meaning from the order we put them in: “Poignant” would end up modifying “solitude,” instead of the words just hovering next to each other in figurative space. We who speak contemporary English are so reliant on word order that we are no longer as able as our forebears to create lyrical, associative, figurative meaning in poetry. We just can’t do the same things with our vocabulary. Old English speakers can treat metaphor as an occasion to innovate; Modern English simply tries to describe. Their poetry can turn skeletons into exploding nation-states; we have to focus on keeping our adjectives in the right places. But to our immense good fortune, Old English poetry has survived, and we know how to read it. The kennings are out there waiting for you — so beautiful, so different and so very, very old.Alice Walker
+To the Editor:
+We were deeply disturbed to learn that among the books on Alice Walker’s nightstand is a profoundly and unambiguously anti-Semitic work by the notorious conspiracy theorist and fearmonger David Icke (By the Book, Dec. 16). “And the Truth Shall Set You Free” is hardly the inspirational “curious person’s dream” Walker makes it out to be. In fact, the book is replete with raw anti-Semitism and nods to Holocaust denial. Icke calls Judaism an “incredibly racist” religion that preaches “racial superiority.” He claims that a “Jewish clique” fomented World War I and World War II as well as the Russian Revolution. He draws heavily on the notorious 19th-century Russian fabrication “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” for inspiration. He even goes so far as to cast doubt on the Holocaust, claiming that the history of the Nazi period has been “tampered with,” condemning the Nuremberg trials and promoting the dissemination of “alternative information to the official line of the Second World War.”
+Walker has a right to read what she will, but the Book Review has a responsibility to fact-check its material and forewarn readers if the book being recommended to readers is a conspiratorial polemic by a writer with a long history of scapegoating groups of Jews and blaming them for many of the ills of the modern world.
+JONATHAN A. GREENBLATT
+NEW YORK
+The writer is C.E.O. and national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
+♦
+To the Editor:
+I write to register my disappointment with seeing Alice Walker’s nod to David Ickes in the Book Review. It was so sad to see that name, unremarked upon by your interviewer, legitimized in the paper of record. I wonder how many people will be turned on to Icke’s ideas or think they now have a green light to publicly voice anti-Semitism based on them.Entering the new year invariably invites introspection, even when shuttling cattle to market. Jenny George’s exquisitely spare meditation never allows us to stray from the harsh realities of rural subsistence; the livestock’s wintry snorts may recall the warm breath of just-baked bread, but cold muck still tugs underfoot. Depending on your position in the hierarchy of survival, the cycle of life could shift significantly. For the cattle herd, there is no turning around; for “good girls” of the human persuasion, however, there are ways to look back while pushing ahead — if we remember that beginnings, like endings, can happen any time. Selected by Rita Dove
+Image Credit... Illustration by R. O. BlechmanNever has an administration been so unprepared to lead and so willing to make money from power. Never has a party been so willing to ignore corruption as the Republicans of 2016 to 2018.
+I trust Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and Elijah Cummings to choose wisely. Godspeed, gentlemen. Deirdre, New Jersey
+The new House Democrats should go as far as they have to go in order to investigate the activities of this administration and a president who by and large continues to hold himself both unaccountable and above the law. And the main reason he has been able to get away with everything he has done so far is that the checks-and-balances system that normally regulates the overreach of any individual’s power has been drastically compromised by the one party now in control of all three branches of government. This is not about a “witch hunt,” nor should it be. This is about justice. And it’s about time. N. Smith, New York
+Re: Denaturalized
+Seth Freed Wessler wrote about the push to strip naturalized immigrants of their citizenship.4 of 7
+Potassium bromate is one of several food additives banned in Europe because it has been tied to cancer but allowed in the United States. Potassium bromate is commonly added to:Trouble comes calling on the Louisiana bayou parish where James Lee Burke sets his idiosyncratic regional novels. In THE NEW IBERIA BLUES (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), a condemned murderer named Hugo Tillinger has pulled off a daring escape from a Texas prison and is now hiding somewhere in his old neighborhood. Another recent arrival, the Hollywood director Desmond Cormier, has returned to his humble native roots to make a movie, installing himself and his entourage in a swell house with a spectacular view of the bay. From that vantage, Dave Robicheaux, the broody sheriff’s deputy who has stamped his forceful personality on this series, lays eyes on yet another visitor — a woman nailed to a large wooden cross that washes up from the bay.
+The dead woman, the daughter of a local minister, volunteered for the Innocence Project and was working to free Tillinger from prison. But while there seems to have been a real connection between the minister’s daughter and the escaped prisoner, Burke must exert himself to fit those Hollywood types into his brutal byzantine plot. (I stopped counting after the 10th violent death.)
+But does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We’re hanging on for Robicheaux’s pensées, like his meditation on the living spirits of the dead: “I don’t believe that time is sequential. I believe the world belongs to the dead as well as the unborn.” We’re keeping an eye out for vivid characters like Bella Delahoussaye, a blues singer with intimate knowledge of Big Mama Thornton’s mournful “Ball and Chain.” Maybe most of all, we’re waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip: “I don’t think you get it,” he tells one of the movie people. “Louisiana is America’s answer to Guatemala. Our legal system is a joke. Our legislature is a mental asylum. How’d you like to spend a few days in our parish prison?” Only if there’s a new James Lee Burke novel in the cell.
+♦
+“There was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar,” Thomas Perry advises us in THE BURGLAR (Mysterious Press, $26). It takes considerable expertise to select the right house, break in without waking the dog and recognize what’s worth stealing. Elle Stowell has been at this profession since she was 15, but this petite, lithe young pro isn’t prepared to find three people — all naked and shot between the eyes — piled in a heap on the king-size bed in the master suite of the house in Bel-Air she’s broken into.NORTH OF DAWN
+By Nuruddin Farah
+373 pp. Riverhead Books. $27.
+The comedian Hasan Minhaj has spoken about “the audacity of equality” — the belief many immigrants foster of belonging to their adopted country, and how rudely, and often, they are reprimanded for their aspirations. Mugdi and Gacalo, the Somali couple at the heart of Nuruddin Farah’s new novel, “North of Dawn,” have settled into middle age and middle-class Norway with just such audacity. In their roomy house, Mugdi putters around translating an obscure Norwegian novel, while his wife, Gacalo, works; they are solvent, secular, well-adapted members of the global Somali diaspora. The challenge to their contentment comes not from Norway’s right wing, but from their own family. Their Norwegian-raised son, Dhaqaneh, joined a terrorist cell in Oslo before fleeing to Somalia, where he killed himself in an Al Shabaab-sponsored suicide attack near Mogadishu. Mugdi, whom a friend describes as “culturally a Muslim,” is disgusted and affronted, wanting nothing to do with his son’s memory. But Gacalo insists that she keep her word to Dhaqaneh and care for his wife and stepchildren, currently living in a refugee camp in Kenya.
+Enter the widow, Waliya; her son, Naciim, 12; and daughter, Saafi, 14. Gacalo dispatches Mugdi to the airport to collect them. They have taken a circuitous smuggler’s route to Europe, but Mugdi and Gacalo’s sponsorship allows their entry into Norway and its generous immigrant settlement system. From this first encounter, Waliya resists both her in-laws and the wiles of their Western nation. Dressed in a “body tent” and reciting Quoranic verses in the back of Mugdi’s car, Waliya refuses to fasten her seatbelt, stating that her death is the will of Allah. Mugdi responds that he may have to pay a heavy fine to the police if she doesn’t. Her compliance is not acquiescence. The battle lines are drawn.
+The war between these two is, of course, a proxy for the global clash between fundamentalism and secularism. In the hands of a younger, brasher novelist, we might expect high drama, but here, instead, is a nuanced, quietly devastating family soap opera; we can almost hear the clatter of an Olivetti typewriter. The Somali-born Farah has been writing books for nearly half a century, his name aligned with Nadine Gordimer and Chinua Achebe. Like them, he uses the intimate as allegory for the national. If we cannot understand why a family falls apart, then neither can we understand why a nation does — a truth those of us weary from holiday-dinner-table political arguments may appreciate.
+Image
+There is indeed a weary tone to this book, relayed mainly through Mugdi: the exhausted, chronic grief of one who has witnessed his country implode like a dark star. “Imagine a single house collapsing and causing a handful of deaths,” Mugdi urges. “Then think of the damage that would be caused if an entire country collapsed in on itself, the way Somalia did in 1991.” Mugdi, who began his career as a diplomat for his country when it was still a country, notes: “The world could not decipher the signposts. A people with the same singular culture, the same religion and the same language tearing into one another.”At times, the politically progressive leaders of some of the organizations — many from the Vietnam era — take positions that appear out of step with more socially conservative members from previous wars. This has irritated Robert L. Wilkie, the Veterans Affairs secretary, who views these as unwelcome partisan positions, said several agency and veterans’ group officials.
+Last April, Mr. Wilkie hosted a breakfast for veterans’ service organizations that included representatives not just of the traditional Big Six, but also the Independence Fund and Concerned Veterans for America, which is financed by Charles G. and David H. Koch, who have backed conservative causes.
+The Koch-supported group was instrumental in ousting the last head of the department. It has also been pushing for more health care to take place outside the V.A. system, with the first step beginning soon under a sweeping new law. Their voices were welcomed by House Republicans as they passed the measure this year.
+At a hearing last month on Capitol Hill, some Democrats suggested that Mr. Wilkie was ignoring the opinions of traditional organizations on this law. “A lot of V.S.O.s have talked to me about the communication within the V.A.,” said Senator Jon Tester of Montana, the ranking Democrat on the Senate veteran committee. “It’s not where it needs to be.”
+Mr. Wilkie made his position clear. “Half of our veterans are now under the age of 65,” he said, “which means they have different cares, they have different interests. What I have done in my short time is actually open the aperture to the table at the Department of Veterans Affairs to bring in veterans who are not traditionally part of the system.”
+The shifts, while perhaps inevitable, leave some worrying that the hard work of pressing for the complicated and expensive health care needs, and other issues, will lack a generation of new leaders.THE FUTURE OF CAPITALISM
+Facing the New Anxieties
+By Paul Collier
+248 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.
+You might expect that Paul Collier, a noted development economist at Oxford who has devoted most of his professional life to the uplift of the global poor, would see himself as a “citizen of the world.” But that’s not quite right. Collier grew up in Sheffield, a once-flourishing English steel town that provided working-class families like his own with a modicum of prosperity and stability, and that has since struggled in the face of import competition and the loss of many of its most ambitious citizens to London and other dynamic cities. He attributes his prodigious accomplishments in no small part to the cooperative character of the community, and the nation, in which he was raised.
+National loyalty, far from being inimical to a more just and decent world in which all, including the world’s poorest, can flourish, is seen by Collier as a firmer foundation for global cooperation than abstract cosmopolitanism, which all too often serves as a mask for unenlightened self-interest. The question animating his small but wide-ranging book “The Future of Capitalism” is whether the sense of rootedness that so defined the Britain of his youth can be restored.
+Image
+Postwar Britain was, in Collier’s affectionate account, a society undergirded by a dense web of reciprocal obligations, which in turn gave rise to a strong sense of shared identity. A widespread belief that the fates of the cities and the provinces were tied together, and that the affluent and established had a stake in cultivating the talents of young strivers like himself, justified large increases in public investment. It also infused the sensibilities of many corporate executives, who tempered the pursuit of short-term profit with a concern for the long-term prosperity of the communities they served.Their premise is that what they call “fault lines” have always existed but until recently were held in check by a “robust federal government, a thriving middle-class economy and a powerful union movement.” They hammer home their “fault line” metaphor with Stakhanovite repetition. Almost every chapter is organized according to the rules familiar to any public speaker: “In the first part I tell ’em what I am going to tell ’em; in the second part I tell ’em; and in the third part I tell ’em what I’ve told ’em.”
+Image
+Kruse and Zelizer, who have based their book on a course they created at Princeton, begin with the story of the unraveling of the “somewhat forced ‘consensus’ of the postwar era” in the 1960s and ’70s, quickly moving through capsule histories of the series of “crisis” events and issues that reordered the outlook of Americans — Watergate, stagflation, racial equality, feminism, gay rights and more. Stepping in to exploit these unleashed fault lines, according to the authors, is “an aggressive new conservative movement … amplified by a fragmented partisan media.”
+But are Americans really divided by fault lines? Interestingly, there is a great deal of research that shows it is the political parties that are polarized but not the American people. Political scientists describe this situation as “party sorting.” That is, the Democratic and Republican Parties have devolved into two separate groups that offer ideological and policy conformity with almost no overlap. Remember liberal Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller of New York or conservative Democrats like Zell Miller of Georgia? They almost don’t exist anymore (Joe Manchin of West Virginia excepted) because neither party in its current iteration would have them. The actual fault lines, it might be said, are between the parties, not between two groups of the public.
+For the past 25 years, according to Gallup, over a third of Americans have identified as moderate, and the number of independents reached an all-time high in 2013. Even the famous 2014 Pew Survey on polarization noted that the majority of Americans “do not have uniformly conservative or liberal views.” Where fault-line-like division is most pronounced is among the most politically engaged Americans. Examples of these folks abound in “Fault Lines.”
+So if the real story is that the political parties have sorted ideologically and are appealing to the most ideologically engaged voters, who happen to be the most outraged, what is to be done? Kruse and Zelizer argue for Americans to build bridges “that can bring us closer together,” although they are also refreshingly frank about the cant of postelection remarks on coming together — noting the ritualistic aspect whose constant repetition is, in fact, an acknowledgment of division.Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
+ELASTIC: UNLOCKING YOUR BRAIN’S ABILITY TO EMBRACE CHANGE, by Leonard Mlodinow. (Vintage, $16.) Our capacity to stretch beyond the bounds of our preconceptions and other deeply held beliefs, what Mlodinow calls “elastic thinking,” is essential to innovation, creativity and independent thought. He offers an engaging guide to the brain’s power to solve new problems, weaving together scientific research, politics and literature.
+BRASS, by Xhenet Aliu. (Random House, $17.) Elsie and Lulu, the mother and daughter whose potent relationship forms the core of this debut novel, are desperate to leave behind their hardscrabble lives. As our reviewer, Julie Buntin, put it, the book “offers a reminder that assumptions — whether about a place, or a person as close to you as your mother — never tell the full story.”
+THE WINE LOVER’S DAUGHTER: A MEMOIR, by Anne Fadiman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) In her study of her father, the literary critic Clifton Fadiman, the author uses his infatuation with wine to explore the motivations that guide connoisseurship and hedonism. Though Fadiman does not share her father’s ardent love of the drink, her wine-focused vignettes sketch a portrait of their complicated relationship.
+MACBETH, by Jo Nesbo. Translated by Don Bartlett. (Hogarth Shakespeare, $16.) In his reimagining of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the Norwegian crime writer draws out the play’s noir elements, transposing its moral choices and plot to 1970s Glasgow as the city strained under corruption, violence and addiction. Our reviewer, James Shapiro, praised the adaptation, calling the book “a dark but ultimately hopeful ‘Macbeth,’ one suited to our own troubled times, in which ‘the slowness of democracy’ is no match for power-hungry strongmen.”Sketchbook | Graphic Review
+Molly Crabapple’s Illustrated Reflection on Sabahattin Ali’s Novel ‘Madonna in a Fur Coat’
+The 1943 Turkish classic follows a hopeless love story against the backdrop of a crumbling Weimar Berlin.I have two toddlers at home. And the littler, at 18 months, is finally eager to sit through a book, or seven, if they engage her. She climbs up next to me on the couch while I drink my morning coffee, pointing and shouting, “Book, book, book!” Or, if I’m already holding one and haven’t started quickly enough, she’ll shout: “Read! Read!” My 3-year-old is captivated by surprising or funny-sounding words, and already appreciates some of my favorite books from childhood (I have, naturally, read him nearly all of William Steig, to me the undisputed master of children’s literature), as well as many newer picture books with good stories.
+But when both kids are on my lap, the chunkier board books, with fewer words and a smaller format, are best. I’ve learned to perform, as the added theatricality both pleases my son’s desire for wordplay and sonic delight and helps keep my daughter’s attention. These new board books find ways to break down the barriers between little listeners and the books themselves, helping parents like me put on a successful story time show.
+“You can read this book in the bath,” begins HUG THIS BOOK! (Phaidon, 30 pp., $9.95; ages 0 to 4), written by Barney Saltzberg and illustrated by Fred Benaglia. This one started out as a bigger picture book, but the new board book version is a clear winner, inviting touch and placing the youngest readers right in the middle of the action, in a familiar location. Later, they are told, “If you read this book being tickled, I dare you not to laugh.” Stimulated from awareness to empathic interest, my kids were enraptured, aware the book was talking about itself, directly to them. “You can kiss and hug and smell this book” elicited tiny smooching sounds from my daughter, while my son leaned in close and sniffed it. The sketchy, energetic illustrations in a limited but bright palette charmed us all. As if more proof was needed that the kids and this book were on the same wavelength, my son asked me to read it again even before we got to the last page: “Even though this book is over, it isn’t really the end. You can start at the beginning and read it to a friend.”A year ago, in the wake of President Trump’s tax cut, euphoric investors pushed the Dow Jones industrial average past 25,000, a record. The Dow had just gained 25 percent in 2017, and the Nasdaq had leapt 28 percent. Volatility was so low that there wasn’t a single day in 2017 when the S&P 500 fluctuated more than 2 percent.
+Not everyone was celebrating.
+“If there are any certainties, one will be that this party will eventually come to an end,” James Stack, president of InvesTech Research, told me a year ago. “And when it ends, it will end badly, and with high volatility.”
+Mr. Stack turned out to be right. He lowered his recommended asset allocation for United States stocks from 82 percent last January to 72 percent in September, when stocks hit new all-time highs. He urged investors to raise cash in October, and at the end of November he recommended an even more defensive posture — including putting money in a fund whose value would rise when stock prices dropped. That brought his recommended net exposure to stocks to just 55 percent, the lowest since the depths of the last bear market in early 2009.
+Stocks plunged in December, posting their worst monthly loss since the financial crisis and the worst December since 1931 and the Great Depression.Economists offered raves that could appear on a movie poster or a book jacket — “Extraordinary!” “Blowout,” “Wow!” The figures, they said, offer a resounding response to the question of whether a recession is imminent: “Never mind!” said David Berson, chief economist of Nationwide. “The fears of the economy tipping into a recession now have clearly been overstated.”
+Mr. Trump welcomed the stellar showing in televised remarks delivered in the White House Rose Garden. “312,000 jobs was a tremendous number and obviously having a big impact on the stock market today,” he said, adding that the pickup in wage growth was “beautiful to watch.”
+But the latest report comes in the context of flashing yellow lights elsewhere, which Mr. Powell acknowledged on Friday. There is an unresolved trade war with China, a nation already contending with an economic downturn that could dampen global demand. In the United States, there is a slump in the housing sector, with hints that the auto industry could be next.
+This week, Apple cut its revenue forecast for the first time in 16 years, citing flagging iPhone sales in China. Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said on CNN that Apple would not be the only victim of tensions with Beijing.
+“There are a heck of a lot of U.S. companies that have a lot of sales in China that are basically going to be watching their earnings be downgraded next year until we get a deal with China,” Mr. Hassett said.
+And on Thursday, the Institute for Supply Management released a survey showing the biggest drop in manufacturing activity since 2008. Many manufacturers blamed rising costs related to tariffs. (The index reading of 54.1 still showed an economy in expansion.) Measures of consumer confidence have also weakened recently.
+The stock market has been in the midst of its worst decline since the financial crisis.
+“We’re listening sensitively to the messages markets are sending,” Mr. Powell said Friday. But investors, he said, “are way ahead of the data.”She was a sprightly girl of 18 when she ascended to the throne of the British Empire in 1837, and a revered global presence — a grandmotherly figure to her millions of subjects — when she died in 1901 at 81. In 2019, the Victorian Era will be again celebrated throughout Britain as the country marks the 200th anniversary of the queen’s birth.
+For those wanting to cross the Atlantic and join the celebrations, here is a roundup of the festivities that will be taking place, from museum exhibits to travel packages and tours.
+Where it all began
+Start at London’s Kensington Palace, Victoria’s birthplace, where a new exhibit opens on May 24, the date the future queen was born in 1819. The preserved suite of rooms that Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, once occupied, will be filled with new interactive displays and objects never before seen by the public, such as a scrapbook kept by the queen. The exhibit also includes writings and drawings from her childhood. Don’t miss the Pigott Gallery, where another new exhibit re-examines her life and legacy as a wife, mother, monarch and grandmother (she had nine children and 42 grandchildren), as well as wardrobe items that show the queen’s fashionable side, in contrast to the black gowns she donned during her long widowhood. “We are celebrating an exceptional woman who was powerful, yet feminine, royal, and yet appealed to ordinary people.,” said Polly Putnam, the curator of the exhibit at the royal palace. “They broke the mold when they made her.”The back flap of Thomas Page McBee’s most recent memoir, “Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man a Man,” notes that he was the first transgender man to ever box in Madison Square Garden. But Mr. McBee, 37, is known less for his skills in the ring than for his determination to unravel the mysteries of manhood. “Amateur” is a follow-up to his 2014 memoir, “Man Alive.” Both books take an unflinching look at gender and masculinity. Mr. McBee lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with his wife, Jessica Bloom, 33, the director of development at a nonprofit. They live with two rescue dogs, Bruno and Henry, and a cat named Olive.
+FOCUS The dogs wake us up around 7:30. Jess walks the dogs while I make the coffee. It’s the only time of the entire day I’m in the house by myself, so I try to do something meditative. Like I’ll pull a tarot card to give me my thing to think about for the day. Or I’ll use the notes app on my phone to write down things I’m thinking about. Usually I start the day thinking, What am I struggling with? What’s a barrier I need to get around?There are self-described activists like Tony Herbert and Nomiki Konst.
+There are people with affiliations to the former President Barack Obama (Dawn Smalls, Benjamin Yee); lawyers (Jared Rich); and former candidates (David Eisenbach, a Columbia professor who ran against Ms. James in the 2017 primary for public advocate, and Helal A. Sheikh, a one-time City Council candidate).
+With such a crowded field, someone could win with a relatively small number of votes, increasing the chance that a long-shot candidate could eke out a victory. There is no minimum percentage of the vote needed to win.
+What does the public advocate do, anyway?
+That’s a question that even some candidates seem to flub.
+Betsy Gotbaum, the second person elected to the public advocate’s job, was at a candidate forum held by Citizens Union, where she serves as executive director. Ms. Gotbaum said she was floored when some candidates started speaking about eliminating student debt, while others mentioned that the office should have subpoena power. The public advocate has the power to deal with neither issue.
+“I wish some of the candidates would look at the City Charter and see the duties,” said Ms. Gotbaum. “Many did not know and do not know the role.”
+The City Charter describes the public advocate as responsible for receiving and investigating multiborough, citywide and individual “complaints concerning city services and other administrative actions of city agencies.” The 1989 City Charter commission recommended that the City Council president position become the "public advocate" to "monitor delivery of services to the public" and recommend legislation to fix systematic problems. The job title of Council president was officially renamed public advocate in 1993 by the City Council.
+The public advocate can refer complaints to the agency in question or conduct an investigation and make recommendations about how to resolve the complaint. The public advocate also presides over City Council meetings and can introduce legislation, but does not have a vote. And, if something were to happen to the mayor, the public advocate is next in the line of succession.
+This is New York City, so a Democrat will win, right?
+Technically speaking, no.
+February’s election is nonpartisan (although most candidates are Democrats), so candidates can form their own individual party label, leading to some interesting and revealing choices.Hundreds flocked to an October community meeting to vent their frustration with the district’s plan, and over 6,000 people have signed an online petition, started by Mr. Braley, against it. “Low-income housing doesn’t belong in Almaden,” one resident commented on the petition. “This would devalue home prices in the area significantly,” wrote another.
+The school district, with 30,000 students, is losing one out of every seven teachers each spring. Some high-need students, like those with disabilities, are being taught by long-term substitutes or contractors. Like many other districts across the country with teacher shortages, it has begun recruiting educators from the developing world.
+Starting salaries for teachers here range between $55,000 and $79,000. That kind of money does not go far in an area where the median home price is over $1 million, and the district cannot easily raise compensation to account for housing costs. Despite being one of the nation’s richest states, California’s education spending, about $11,000 per student, was slightly below the national average in 2016. Land is the most valuable asset the district has.
+District-owned housing would have interested Jesse Escobar, 33, an academic counselor at a middle school in San Jose. He and his girlfriend, Shana Riehart, a high school teacher, were priced out of town and moved 25 miles away to Hayward, Calif. Ms. Riehart quit her job to take a position closer to their new home. Traffic means Mr. Escobar’s commute sometimes takes an hour and 45 minutes each way. He said it had been hurtful to hear parents oppose the housing plan for educators.
+“Instead of saying teachers, if you had said engineers from Google or doctors from Kaiser, would the tone have been different?” Mr. Escobar asked. “Families trust us with their kids from 8 to 3 every day. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be the case that they would trust us in their communities.”PASADENA, Calif. — Last month, the Big Ten’s influential commissioner, Jim Delany, endorsed discussions to expand the College Football Playoff, just five seasons into the format’s 12-year contract.
+Expanding the four-team playoff to six or eight teams is likely to be a hot topic at the meetings many conferences will hold Monday, before that evening’s national championship game between Alabama and Clemson in Santa Clara, Calif.
+“It’s probably a good idea, given all the discussions and noise around the issue, to have conversations with our colleagues,” Delany told The Athletic.
+Delany might have ulterior motives — the Big Ten has now gone two seasons without getting a team into the playoff. But John Swofford, the Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner, echoed Delany last week in Arlington, Tex., before Clemson played in its fourth straight national semifinal.WASHINGTON — This article is a collaboration between ProPublica and The New York Times.
+A year and a half after receiving a detailed complaint from tribal leaders, the Education Department plans to investigate their accusations that the Wolf Point School District in Montana discriminates against Native American students.
+In a Dec. 28 letter, sent hours after The New York Times and ProPublica published an investigation into racial inequities in the district, the department’s Office for Civil Rights notified the lawyer representing the tribal executive board of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in eastern Montana that it would look into the complaint. The board includes members of the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. Native American and mixed-race students make up more than three-quarters of Wolf Point’s enrollment.
+According to the letter, the investigation will focus on whether Wolf Point schools discipline Native students more harshly than white students, shunt them into remedial programs without appropriate cause, and deny them special education evaluations and services.
+The department said it would also examine whether the district failed to respond to a parent’s accusations that a Native student was racially harassed. The student was not identified in the tribal complaint or in the letter.Mr. McConnell was moving very cautiously. Before the holiday break, he had pushed through the Senate with no objection a resolution to extend funding for all federal agencies into February, only to see it quickly torpedoed by Mr. Trump and House conservatives. It was an embarrassing outcome for the Senate leader, and Mr. McConnell was in no rush to make that mistake again, preferring instead to wait for a White House plan to end the shutdown.
+On the other side of the aisle, Democrats would typically be furiously trying to find a way to get the government back online. Early last year, Senate Democrats relented just a few days into a shutdown and capitulated on an immigration issue to reopen the government. This time, Democrats believe Mr. Trump has boxed himself in with his demand for money for a wall that they consider ill advised and publicly unpopular. They are not about to help him out of his predicament.
+“President Trump is holding the government hostage over his wall, using the well-being of millions of Americans as hostage in a futile attempt to get what he wants: a concrete border wall,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.
+Democrats, looking at a much more favorable Senate map in 2020 compared with a difficult 2018, do not see much political risk in standing firm against Mr. Trump. In fact, at this point, they see picking a fight with the president as politically advantageous.
+They view the shutdown as damaging to Republican senators who could face difficult re-election challenges in 2020, including Cory Gardner of Colorado, who has broken with his colleagues and called for reopening the government without border wall funding.
+Mr. Trump and his allies, on the other hand, see the fight as critical to his political standing. Facing an emboldened and empowered Democratic House, the president intends to keep his conservative base firmly in his corner, and standing up for his long-promised wall is one way to do so. Early signs last month that he would relent on the wall money drew a quick rebuke from the right.
+It is a recipe for a prolonged impasse.
+Other factors are also at work in keeping the government shut down. The first two and a half weeks of the interruption have occurred during the holidays, when many workers are off and the demand for government help is not as great.When Ms. Moses returned to the nursing home, life intervened again. This time, the rabbi got sick.
+She and Mr. Zeimer have not given up hopes to get hitched, as Mr. Zeimer puts it. In the meantime, he moved to a room closer to hers, and still watches television with her at night, though he leaves earlier than previously because they get tired.
+As in past years, Ms. Moses talked often about her own mother and how much she missed her. Her mother had taught her so many things, but not how to be 94: how to manage a daughter who liked to take charge and a boyfriend who made her feel needed again, all set against the daily wear of aging. In this act she was on her own.
+Summing up, Ms. Moses said, “If it wasn’t for the hospital I had a good year.”
+Two hours south, in Voorhees, N.J., Ms. Wong asked after my mother, who turned 90 this year, and broke her hip. Did she have activities where she lived? Ms. Wong asked.
+“Here you have three meals, a bedroom and then a lot of activities,” she said, describing her days in the nursing home, where she moved in 2016 to be near her daughter. “You can pass time, enjoy yourself. Usually this kind of activity is good for the elderly, but your mom is too far from this place, otherwise it’s better to come here to enjoy herself.”
+Four years ago, at the start of the series, Ms. Wong had lived in a subsidized apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, where she spent her days playing mah-jongg with three women from the building. The onset of dementia and consequent move to the nursing home had been very difficult for her, and this year her spirits were up and down. Though she has made new friends, she also had recurring bouts of anxiety, including one that landed her in the hospital.
+“She kept telling the people they put hot water on her and burned her skin,” Ms. Wong’s daughter, Elaine Gin, said. “Delusions. Finally they sent her to the hospital. I was there at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning. I entered the emergency-room door and I can hear her talking. She’s nice, she says, ‘Thank you very much,’ ‘You’re so nice.’ They do all the tests. She’s fine, but she’s talking and talking and talking. At 11:40 my friend came so I could go to work, and she’s still talking. They moved her to a room, and she couldn’t stay by herself. I got off early, at 4 o’clock, and she’s still talking. At 6:30 she finally calmed down. She wanted to stand up, she wanted to walk around.”
+In late November she was back in the hospital, this time for dehydration and kidney malfunction. When I asked what was wrong, she said: “I think I fell down, because I am very weak. Now I can’t take very big steps.”5 Places
+Five Places to Visit in Beverly Hills
+Beverly Hills is an expensive place with a village-like charm, but it pays to know where to go. Cash Black, a bartender at one of its hot spots, shares his favorites.
+Image The head bartender Cash Black at £10 in Beverly Hills. Credit... Beth Coller for The New York Times
+Beverly Hills is more approachable than you might expect for a ZIP code typically associated with Lamborghinis and reality stars. It has a surprising number of sidewalk cafes and swaths of greenery. That village-like charm, coupled with residents’ famously refined palates, is what attracted Cash Black to the area seven years ago. “Jewelry. Cars. Wine. Beverly Hills has the best of the best. You don’t get to be here unless you really know what you’re doing,” said Mr. Black, a Las Vegas native, who began as a valet and worked his way up to head bartender at £10, a high-end Scotch bar tucked in the back of the Montage Beverly Hills hotel. He presides over the five-table bar as if it’s his own living room, occasionally bringing in his guitar to jam with clients. At ease with his customers’ seemingly unrestrained wealth (the Lalique crystal tumblers go for $650 apiece), Mr. Black, 31, has a startling command of whisky. (He’s also a cowboy in his spare time, corralling cattle on weekends.) Here, five of Mr. Black’s favorite places in Beverly Hills.
+1. Wally’s
+Mr. Black’s standards for drinking venues is understandably high, but the bar scene at this visually striking bistro just three blocks from his hotel bar, strikes the right chord. “The bar scene is really nice, the drinks are well made, and the bartenders are attentive,” he said. At the bar, white marble c ounter-height tables are framed on both sides by mounted wine racks stretching up to the ceiling; and the image of all those bottles (9,000, give or take) is impressive. “There’s a lot of energy in there,” Mr. Black said.
+447 North Canon Drive; wallywine.comPlattekill is also remote. “You have to drive by Belleayre to get to us if you’re coming from downstate,” said Ms. Vajtay. “That’s a huge hurdle for us.” Driving along Route 28 in the Catskills, once you pass Belleayre, with its prominent signage, you have to continue along for several more miles before switching to a small, slow, winding road that leads to a dumpy, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it turnoff. It’s hard to imagine anything at the end of the road, let alone a ski resort.
+But 25 years later, the scrappy, indie mountain is thriving.
+“These small ski areas survive by knowing who they are and creating niches for themselves,” Mr. Brandi said. With around 50 ski mountains operating in New York State, many differentiate themselves by offering a certain expertise. Mount Peter, for example, a humble mountain in Warwick, N.Y., has branded itself as a perfect place for families, offering free lessons for beginners . “It knows who it is and caters to its strengths,” he said.
+Plattekill, in turn, has branded itself as an intimate, old-fashioned resort for expert skiers and families alike. Most important, however, it has been able to guarantee income on the slower weekdays, by becoming a private mountain of sorts. Four days a week, it puts itself up for rent . Any group can have exclusive access to it for just a few thousand dollars a day.More than 20,000 new apartments in New York, both for sale and for rent, will open their doors this year — and likely just a fraction will find residents by year end.
+The affordable ones, of course, will attract thousands of applicants, but the bulk of the new units — in gleaming towers, many of them conceived at the height of the last housing boom — will enter a saturated market, where buyers and renters have ample choice and little incentive to rush.
+At the current rate of sales, it will take more than six years to sell all of the new development in Manhattan alone, which totals almost 8,000 units, said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel Real Estate Appraisers and Consultants.
+The pace of sales has already slowed coming into the new year, with homes seeking $4 million or more taking an average of 447 days to go into contract in 2018, according to Olshan Realty. In the halcyon days of 2013, similar homes spent only 172 days on the market.HONG KONG — Ringo Lam, a Hong Kong film director best known for gritty crime thrillers like the 1987 classic “City on Fire,” died on Dec. 29 at his home in Hong Kong. He was 63.
+The police confirmed Mr. Lam’s death. The cause was unknown, the police said, but they found no reason to suspect foul play. Local news media said Mr. Lam had recently come down with a cold and that his wife had found him unresponsive in his bed.
+After the unexpected success of his fourth feature film, the action-comedy “Aces Go Places IV” (1986), Mr. Lam was offered a rare opportunity: to write and shoot any film he wanted to make so long as the budget was under 4 million Hong Kong dollars, the equivalent of about $1.1 million today.
+“I was puzzled, and at first I didn’t know what to film,” Mr. Lam said in a 2015 interview. “Eventually I decided that I enjoyed the realistic aspects of ‘The French Connection’ ” — the 1971 American movie directed by William Friedkin — “and that I wanted to create a film containing similar grit.”There is an inviolate ritual attached to the pistol.
+The actor about to get shot was taken backstage before the scene, as he is every time, and shown the gun and the ammunition — a handful of blanks. He was also shown that the gun had been altered so it could not use real bullets — information that enabled him to go on without fearing that he might be the unwitting victim of a sudden Agatha Christie-style theatrical murder.
+There was a second gun backstage, ready to be fired if for some reason the gun onstage failed to go off (so far, that hasn’t happened). And after the climactic scene and then the curtain, Mr. Zajac was, as always, waiting in the wings, stage left.
+“After the first bow, I receive the gun from Paddy,” he said, referring to Paddy Considine, the actor who plays the key role of Quinn Carney. “And then I unload it, put it in its case, and put it back into the gun safe.”
+And then cleanup begins.Vicente Zambada Niebla was groomed from an early age to take control of the Sinaloa drug cartel. But his lawyers said that he secretly worked for years as a spy for the Drug Enforcement Administration, providing information about his rivals in exchange for running his business freely.
+On Thursday, he described in detail to a New York courtroom the workings of the drug-trafficking empire of his father’s former partner, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Travel advisory for China: The State Department warned U.S. citizens on Thursday that they could face arbitrary detention if they travel to China. The advisory comes after the recent arrest of a Chinese executive in Canada at the request of the U.S.
+Subway reprieve: Plans for a 15-month shutdown of the L train tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn were abruptly halted on Thursday by Gov. Andrew Cuomo. The new project would keep full train service during weekdays and close just one of the tunnel’s two tubes on nights and weekends.
+Hotel hacking: Marriott International said this morning that the number of people affected by a recent security breach was 383 million, not 500 million as previously thought. But for the first time it conceded that its Starwood hotel unit didn’t encrypt the passport numbers of roughly five million guests.MANILA — A former mayor in the southern Philippines who had been accused of drug trafficking by President Rodrigo Duterte was killed on Friday in a pre-dawn police raid, the authorities said.
+Talib Abo, formerly the mayor of the town of Parang in Maguindanao Province, was killed in a shootout with police officers who were raiding his home, the regional head of the Philippine Drug Enforcement Agency, Juvinal Azurin, said on a local radio station.
+Mr. Azurin said the police also killed Mr. Abo’s brother, Bobby Abo. Mr. Azurin said Bobby Abo, who was killed in a separate raid, had also fired at the police.
+Both brothers were on a list of about 150 Philippine officials, police officers and other public servants that Mr. Duterte read aloud on live television in 2016, accusing them of being involved in the drug trade, though he offered no evidence against them. Since then, several people on the list have been killed, including the Abo brothers.Stocks surged on Friday after the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said the central bank’s approach to monetary policy would remain flexible in the face of market turbulence and signs that the global economy is slowing.
+The S&P 500 rose 3.4 percent, while the Nasdaq composite ended up 4.3 percent. Stocks were already higher before Mr. Powell’s comments, rising off Labor Department figures that showed robust gains in hiring, but the rally picked up speed after he spoke Friday morning.
+The Fed’s plans for future interest rate increases have become a concern for investors as stocks have stumbled in recent months. Markets slumped last month after the central bank raised rates and policymakers suggested it would continue on a course of tightening its monetary policy. Mr. Powell, acknowledging the market’s concerns that rising interest rates would dampen the economy, said the central bank could adjust its plans if conditions warrant.
+[Read more about Mr. Powell’s comments.]
+Stock investors have been looking for fresh evidence about the state of the economy, and on Friday they got a sign that it remains in good health. Employers in the United States added 312,000 jobs last month, well above Wall Street’s expectations and the biggest monthly gain since February.TOKYO — Carlos Ghosn will finally get a day in court.
+Mr. Ghosn, the embattled former chairman of Nissan Motor, is set to appear in a Tokyo court on Tuesday in what would be his first public appearance since his arrest in November. He has been held since then in a Tokyo jail and faces charges that he underreported his compensation to the Japanese authorities.
+His appearance is likely to further stoke interest in a legal and corporate clash that has shaken a global auto empire. The brash Mr. Ghosn won fame for turning around Nissan more than a decade ago and leading a car-making alliance that also includes Renault of France and Mitsubishi Motors of Japan. He has since been ousted as Nissan’s chairman, straining ties with Renault and leaving open the question of who will run a business that combined sells more than 10 million cars annually.
+Citing his lawyer, the Japanese public broadcaster, NHK, said Mr. Ghosn planned to appear. He will be allowed to speak at the hearing, though it was not clear what he might say. Mr. Ghosn’s lawyer in Japan could not be reached for comment, and the lawyer’s office was closed on Friday.
+Under Japanese law, Mr. Ghosn has the right to request that the court that allowed his detention explain its justification. In Japan, prosecutors can ask a court to keep suspects in custody for up to 22 days after their arrest.“When he drove me home, we sat outside my house in his car and just talked for hours — neither one of us wanted to part ways,” she said.
+They became closer over the next several months. There were phone calls, dates and introductions to one another’s families. In September, Ms. Parham helped Mr. Kovach celebrate his 24th birthday.
+“I took him and my cousin to Red Lobster, his favorite place, and bought him some video games — we’re both fanatics — and some sweaters. He was so touched, he teared up, and that really touched me,” she said. “I really felt appreciated. It was our first major thing together that we celebrated. I always found myself in past relationships where you give and it’s not respected or appreciated. This is someone who recognized me and what I was giving.”
+When Mr. Kovach used the restroom, Ms. Parham told her cousin she was going to marry him.
+Two years later she did.
+“It’s like we’re the same person,” the bride said. “I’ve never had anything come together so organically with another person.”
+The marriage was somewhat spur of the moment. Mr. Kovach proposed spontaneously in Atlantic City on the boardwalk over the summer.
+“We would have gotten married next June, but I’m pregnant and that’s when I’m due,” said the bride, who now uses the surname Parham-Kovach. “We wanted to be married once the baby got here. I wish I had a traditional wedding. My grandmother and sister aren’t here. But the experience is still special. I never saw myself getting married. I never planned a wedding in my mind. This is the next best thing.”We the people, our power embodied by members of the new House of Representatives who swore to uphold the Constitution on Thursday, need to dig deep and investigate. We need to expose the crooks, incompetents and traitors selling out their country in a White House of grifters.
+We need to call out the moral crimes: the adults financed by taxpayers who let children die in their care. The secretary of state who gives a pass to a kingdom that cuts up a journalist with a bone saw. The press office that covers for a president who can rarely go a single hour without telling a lie.
+We need to restrain a toddler in chief who forces 800,000 federal workers to go without paychecks, many of them now missing house payments. We need to remind people that a temper tantrum from President Trump means garbage is overflowing and poop is backing up at our national parks — a fitting image of what this cipher of a man has done to the land.
+But also, we need to laugh.
+There has never been a more darkly comic person to occupy the White House. Who tells a 7-year-old on Christmas Eve that this whole Santa Claus thing may be bogus? Who rings in the new year with a siren tweet in all CAPITAL LETTERS urging people to calm down? What kind of president puts a poster of himself on a table during a cabinet meeting?WASHINGTON — House Democrats unveiled on Friday the details of ambitious legislation devised to lower barriers to the ballot box, tighten ethics and lobbying restrictions and, in a swipe at President Trump, require presidents and candidates for the nation’s highest offices to release their tax returns.
+Singling out Mr. Trump and his administration, Democrats said that they were making good on promises to voters across the country who vaulted them into the majority with demands to clean up corruption and influence-peddling in Republican-controlled Washington.
+“Over the last two years, President Trump set the tone from the top of this administration that behaving ethically and complying with the law is optional,” said Representative Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee. “Ladies and gentlemen, I have stopped by here to simply say we are better than that.”
+Little if any of the bill, named H.R. 1 to underscore its primacy, is likely to become law; in its sprawl and ambition, the measure is less a legislative vehicle than a political platform for the Democrats heading into the 2020 presidential cycle.“I’m particularly proud to be the woman speaker of the House, of this Congress — which marks the 100th year of women having the right to vote. [applause] We all have the ability and the privilege to serve with over 100 women members of Congress, the largest number in history. When our new members take the oath, our Congress will be refreshed and our democracy will be strengthened by their optimism, idealism and patriotism of this transformative freshman class. I’d like to call my grandchildren up to be here when I take the oath, and any other children who want to join them. Come on, kids.” “All children —” “Do you solemnly swear that you will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies — foreign and domestic — that you will bear true faith and allegiance to the same, that you take this obligation freely without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that you’ll well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which you’re about to enter, so help you God?” “I do.” “Congratulations, Madam Speaker.”A few years ago, when I was self-employed and had recently had my second child, my husband went combing through my credit card statements, looking for tax deductions that I’d missed. I’m financially disorganized at the best of times, and with a baby and a toddler, I was barely even trying to keep track of my business expenses. So it’s not surprising that I hadn’t noticed the hundreds of dollars of weird recurring bank charges that my husband discovered.
+It turned out I’d been signed up for a dubious program that purported to protect users’ credit in certain emergency situations. My bank had been accused of fraudulent practices in connection with it and fined $700 million by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government agency that was Senator Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild. I tried, maddeningly, to seek redress from the bank — cycling through phone trees, screaming at automated operators. No one could tell me how I’d been enrolled in the program, or for how long.
+Eventually, I turned to the C.F.P.B. itself, filling out a simple form on its website. A few weeks later, I was notified that the bank had been deducting money from my account for years, and I was being refunded more than $11,000. Having financed my own maternity leave, I badly needed the money.
+[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]In May, the musician Matt Marks died suddenly, of heart failure, after a performance with the ensemble Alarm Will Sound.
+It was a blow to the tight-knit world of contemporary music, in which the 38-year-old Mr. Marks was a prominent presence as a composer, vocalist and French horn player. Along with his prolific compositional output, he helped found Alarm Will Sound, as well as the New Music Gathering conference, and was a provocatively humorous mainstay on social media.
+[Read the New York Times obituary for Mr. Marks.]
+This community rallied to memorialize him. Alarm Will Sound started the Matt Marks Impact Fund to develop new works. Several of his close friends completed his score for a theatrical piece, “Words on the Street,” which had its debut in October. And on Tuesday at Roulette in Brooklyn, the Prototype: Opera/Theater/Now festival — which presented Mr. Marks’s opera “Mata Hari” in 2017 and runs from Jan. 5 through 13 this year — will revive his breakthrough 2010 work “The Little Death: Vol. 1.”Answers will come, eventually. But not on Thursday.
+Mr. Cuomo prioritized speed and construction, not parliamentary rules of procedure. He has long argued that government was more about building than talking and debating.
+Besides, Mr. Cuomo has said, he does not control the M.T.A., which operates the subways. But there he was, controlling it, while denying that was what he was doing.
+Obvious contradictions, zigging while your administration is zagging, all with a showman’s timing. Did that sound familiar?
+Mr. Cuomo, who says he has no interest in running for president, delivered the train news on Thursday afternoon, around the time members of Congress were being sworn in.
+Local news carried Mr. Cuomo’s news conference live.
+Coincidence? On New Year’s Day, he was inaugurated on Ellis Island, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. On Wednesday, he was greeted with a Daily News front page describing him as “presidential-sounding.”
+One critic of the new L train plan said Mr. Cuomo did, in a way, seem presidential. The governor, @2AvSagas wrote on Twitter, “sounds like Trump now.”
+More on the L train plan
+• What this abrupt U-turn means for Brooklynites, East Villagers and the rest of the city.
+• How engineers hope to use new technology to replace cables and fix the L train tunnel.Good Friday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Were investors right to be worried?
+Last year, the U.S. economy seemed solid. Skittishness in the stock and bond markets appeared at odds with signs of stability on the ground. But this week’s flow of distressing news, showing ever more evidence of slowing growth, suggests that the markets had cause for concern:
+• Apple reduced its revenue expectations for the first time in 16 years, citing weak iPhone sales in China.
+• Delta Air Lines said its fare revenue, although growing, would fall short of the company’s earlier forecast.
+• The American manufacturing sector slowed sharply last month, according to a closely watched index released yesterday.
+And things could get worse, especially amid trade tensions with China, as companies line up to report fourth-quarter results in the next few weeks. Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told CNN on yesterday:
+“There are a heck of a lot of U.S. companies that have a lot of sales in China that are basically going to be watching their earnings be downgraded next year until we get a deal with China.”
+More on markets: Forty-six percent of American companies issuing estimates for the fourth-quarter have revised their outlook lower, the most since President Trump’s inauguration. Traders are placing bets on whether the Fed will be forced to change course by a slowing economy and swooning stock market. Investors have piled into money market funds as a shelter from market turmoil. China will keep trying to attract bond investors, and a fresh campaign to promote its currency is expected. If all this news makes you want to flee, that’s understandable. It’s also a bad idea.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Perhaps at no other time of the year is it clearer that elective self-denial is just another privilege of affluence. If you indulged in December without abatement, then you are likely to approach January with the intent to say no — to cheese, to craft beer, to Shake Shack, to cake doughnuts, to the braised short ribs you have perfected in an Instant Pot. You will stay home and make salads and eat undressed grains, and presumably the money you save will be spent on virtuous things.
+During these exercises in asceticism you may often feel hungry, but in most cases you will not think about hunger in any broader or meaningful sense. This is not (necessarily) because you are cold and indifferent to the misfortunes of others.
+Hunger as a defining symptom of poverty in the United States is rarely discussed, either at the level of engaged civilian conversation or as a political talking point. To do so would be to admit to a failure of democracy for which too many are to blame.
+According to government statistics, one in eight households in the United States is food insecure, meaning those households are unable to afford a consistent supply of nourishment throughout the year. In New York City, the number of people living with food insecurity has decreased during the past six years, but the figure is still higher — by 22 percent — than it was before the recession. In the Bronx, more than one-third of all children go hungry regularly.SAN ANTONIO — High above the floor at the AT&T Center hang the retired numbers of eight former San Antonio Spurs. Kawhi Leonard seemingly has a very strong case to see his old No. 2 hoisted among them someday.
+“I would think so,” Danny Green said Thursday night, when he and Leonard made their shared return to San Antonio as members of the Toronto Raptors.
+“He’s a finals MVP, led this team to a championship, won a couple defensive player of the years,” Green added. “Not everybody who’s come through here has done that.”
+Yet it’s likewise true that no Spur over these past two decades of rampant San Antonio success left town the way Leonard did. No prominent Spur before Leonard, in the Gregg Popovich era, ever forced his way out in such contentious circumstances.The following reports compile all significant security incidents confirmed by New York Times reporters throughout Afghanistan. It is necessarily incomplete as many local officials refuse to confirm casualty information. The toll here does not generally include claims of insurgents killed by the government, because of the difficulty of verifying such claims. Similarly, the reports do not include attacks on the government claimed by the Taliban. Both sides routinely inflate casualties of their opponents.
+At least 75 members of pro-government forces and 14 civilians were killed this week. Pro-government forces casualties increased this week compared to last week, but civilian casualties were down. The deadliest violence took place in Sar-i-Pul Province, where the Taliban attacked security forces in three areas, killing a total of 21 people and wounding 25 others. At least 10 civilians suffered casualties in two operations by pro-government forces in Paktia and Faryab provinces. Casualties in both provinces were caused by American air power.
+[Read the Afghan War Casualty Report from previous weeks.]
+Jan. 3 Baghlan Province: 14 police officers killed
+The Taliban attacked two police outposts in the Dasht-i-Khwaja Alwan area of Pul-i-Kumri City, the provincial capital, killing nine police officers in one outpost and five in another. The outposts were located along the highway connecting Baghlan with Samangan. The Taliban lit fire to a Humvee and a police truck. They also seized one Humvee and a large weapons cache, then they left the area. Taliban fighters blocking the highway prevented reinforcements from reaching the area.HONG KONG — With the Chinese economy beginning the new year on a decidedly downbeat note, Beijing’s leaders are injecting more than $200 billion into its financial system to ease lending.
+The People’s Bank of China on Friday said it would cut the amount of cash that banks must hold as reserves by one percentage point. The move will essentially free up 1.5 trillion Chinese renminbi, or about $218 billion, for an economy experiencing weaker factory output and consumer confidence while it weathers a trade war with the United States.
+The cut is not unusual for China’s central bank, but it comes amid uncertainty about how Beijing will manage slower growth. China’s slowdown has contributed to shaky global financial markets. On Wednesday, underscoring the broad impact, Apple unexpectedly cut its sales forecast for its latest quarter, citing disappointing iPhone sales in China, once one of its most vibrant markets.
+Chinese officials pledged last month to step up support of the economy, and they are facing new urgency, said Mark Williams, chief Asia economist for Capital Economics, a research firm. Retail and auto sales are down, and China’s latest manufacturing data showed factory activity shrank in December. While monthly data released on Friday showed improvement in China’s services sector, the overall picture has become more concerning.BERLIN — After hackers, later determined to be working for Russia, broke into Parliament’s main computer network three years ago, the government vowed to fortify its cybersecurity. The authorities schooled lawmakers about changing passwords, using two-step identification and other measures to protect online data.
+But on Friday, nearly 1,000 lawmakers and other prominent Germans, including rappers, journalists and internet personalities, awoke to find links to their street and email addresses, private chats from social media, bank account details and pictures of their children published on Twitter, in another major breach aimed at the country’s political establishment.
+All those attacked had a history of criticizing the far right, whose politicians appeared to be spared, raising suspicion that the hacker or hackers were sympathetic to their agenda, though the authorities said they had no indication yet who was behind the attack.
+The breach spread a fresh round of alarm in Germany, a country where citizens especially covet their privacy, and once again raised the disconcerting question of whether even the most vigilant and sophisticated individuals and governments can safeguard their computers and the valuable personal, financial and other sensitive information that resides there.Created with the pianist and composer Conrad Tao, “More Forever” now returns to the Guggenheim for its official premiere. With his free-spirited warmth and impeccable rhythm, Teicher first garnered attention as a dancer with the celebrated tap artist Michelle Dorrance. In works for his own ensemble, Caleb Teicher & Co., he shares her knack for percussive invention and moving bodies through space in eye-catching ways. To Tao’s score for piano and electronics, “More Forever” experiments with sources of sound, exploring American dance traditions like tap, jazz and Lindy Hop on a sand-covered stage. SIOBHAN BURKE
+Classical: Experimental Opera at the Prototype Festival
+Jan. 6-12; prototypefestival.org.
+The Prototype Festival, held each January, is a proving ground for audacious new opera and music theater. Overseen by Beth Morrison Projects and the theater collective Here, the 12 works put on by Prototype this week unfold across New York and explore themes as varied as clinical depression, family ties, capital punishment and the legacy of Pancho Villa.
+Among such intense offerings, one highlight is “prism,” composed by Ellen Reid, with a libretto by Roxie Perkins and direction by James Darrah. Staged at La MaMa in Manhattan, “prism” is Reid’s first opera, but her well-wrought music has been engaging with smart dramatic ideas for some time: She wrote a few of the most compelling scenes in “Hopscotch,” the car-based experimental opera that sprawled across Los Angeles in 2015. When “prism,” a harrowing examination of the aftermath of sexual assault, debuted last November, The Los Angeles Times declared that “Reid, in a word, has arrived.” WILLIAM ROBINCyberconflict right now, at this very moment, is like this airplane. It was the first military airplane that was ever built — back in 1909. But in just a few decades, planes would be capable of destroying entire cities. Right, so when we talk about cyberweapons, we’re still basically in 1909. “That’s why you have to have some humility about what’s going to happen in the world of cyberconflict.” David, here, is a national security correspondent for The Times, and he’s written a book about cyberconflict. It seems like we’re hearing more and more — “One of the worst cyberattacks ever.” — about state-sponsored cyberattacks. “Occasionally, there are going to be breaches like this.” “And this weapon will not be put back into the box.” “We have more to lose than any other nation on earth.” So, we really wanted to find out just how bad things are. And how bad they could get. Should we be afraid? “Yes, you should be afraid, but not for the reason you think — not because somebody is going to come in and turn off all the power between Boston and Washington. You should be worried about the far more subtle uses of cyber.” For example, not an overt attack on U.S. troops, but instead, maybe hacking into military health records and switching around people’s blood types. It still causes havoc. “Think terrorism —” “About a third of the building has been blown away.” “— instead of full-scale war.” “Why do you call it the perfect weapon?” “Because it’s deniable. If you can’t figure out right away where the attack’s coming from, you can’t really retaliate.” Plus, you can fine-tune the strength of cyberattacks. You can make them just strong enough to do real damage, but not so strong that they trigger a military response. “It’s cheap compared to, say, nuclear weapons. You just need some twenty-somethings who are good at programming, a little bit of stolen code and maybe some Red Bull just to keep them awake during the night.” That’s why cyberweapons have only just begun to spread. “And cyber is the perfect weapon for a country that’s broke.” “And we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” Take that time North Korea hacked into Sony — “Because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco.” What if they didn’t have cyberweapons? “Maybe they would have landed some commandos at Long Beach, called an Uber, stuck some dynamite underneath the Sony computer center and run like hell.” So really, North Korea’s only option was to use cyberweapons. But it wouldn’t be so easy for the U.S. to hit North Korea’s cybernetworks. “They have fewer IP addresses — Internet Protocol addresses — in North Korea, than you have on any given block of New York City.” Still, we wanted to know who’s the best at cyberconflict. “Russia, China, Iran, they use it regularly to advance their political agendas. The Russians to disrupt, the Chinese frequently to steal information, the Iranians to show that they can reach the United States.” “How good or bad is the U.S. at this stuff?” “Among the very best at cyberoffense. The problem is that while we’re good at offense, we’re the most vulnerable in the defensive world because we’ve got so many networks that form such a big target. The United States has 6,200 cybersoldiers.” “Are these people sitting in military fatigues behind a computer?” “They are sitting in military fatigues behind a computer. But the Russian hackers, or the Chinese hackers, may not be in uniform. They may be in blue jeans. They are probably sitting at the beach somewhere — someplace that’s got a really good internet connection.” All this cyberconflict really kicked off in 2008. Right, that’s when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. “It was the most sophisticated use of cyber by one state against another, and it opened up the Pandora’s box.” And remember — it’s still only the beginning. “We haven’t seen a full-blown war, and we don’t know what one looks like.” “What’s the most challenging part about covering this beat?” “The hardest part about covering the state use of cyber, is the enormous secrecy that the U.S. government wraps around it. But we’ve hit the point where the secrecy has actually begun to impede our ability to deter attacks. Because others don’t understand what we can do to them, and what we’re willing to do to them. In other words, we’re not setting any red lines out there.”Cyberconflict right now, at this very moment, is like this airplane. It was the first military airplane that was ever built — back in 1909. But in just a few decades, planes would be capable of destroying entire cities. Right, so when we talk about cyberweapons, we’re still basically in 1909. “That’s why you have to have some humility about what’s going to happen in the world of cyberconflict.” David, here, is a national security correspondent for The Times, and he’s written a book about cyberconflict. It seems like we’re hearing more and more — “One of the worst cyberattacks ever.” — about state-sponsored cyberattacks. “Occasionally, there are going to be breaches like this.” “And this weapon will not be put back into the box.” “We have more to lose than any other nation on earth.” So, we really wanted to find out just how bad things are. And how bad they could get. Should we be afraid? “Yes, you should be afraid, but not for the reason you think — not because somebody is going to come in and turn off all the power between Boston and Washington. You should be worried about the far more subtle uses of cyber.” For example, not an overt attack on U.S. troops, but instead, maybe hacking into military health records and switching around people’s blood types. It still causes havoc. “Think terrorism —” “About a third of the building has been blown away.” “— instead of full-scale war.” “Why do you call it the perfect weapon?” “Because it’s deniable. If you can’t figure out right away where the attack’s coming from, you can’t really retaliate.” Plus, you can fine-tune the strength of cyberattacks. You can make them just strong enough to do real damage, but not so strong that they trigger a military response. “It’s cheap compared to, say, nuclear weapons. You just need some twenty-somethings who are good at programming, a little bit of stolen code and maybe some Red Bull just to keep them awake during the night.” That’s why cyberweapons have only just begun to spread. “And cyber is the perfect weapon for a country that’s broke.” “And we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” Take that time North Korea hacked into Sony — “Because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco.” What if they didn’t have cyberweapons? “Maybe they would have landed some commandos at Long Beach, called an Uber, stuck some dynamite underneath the Sony computer center and run like hell.” So really, North Korea’s only option was to use cyberweapons. But it wouldn’t be so easy for the U.S. to hit North Korea’s cybernetworks. “They have fewer IP addresses — Internet Protocol addresses — in North Korea, than you have on any given block of New York City.” Still, we wanted to know who’s the best at cyberconflict. “Russia, China, Iran, they use it regularly to advance their political agendas. The Russians to disrupt, the Chinese frequently to steal information, the Iranians to show that they can reach the United States.” “How good or bad is the U.S. at this stuff?” “Among the very best at cyberoffense. The problem is that while we’re good at offense, we’re the most vulnerable in the defensive world because we’ve got so many networks that form such a big target. The United States has 6,200 cybersoldiers.” “Are these people sitting in military fatigues behind a computer?” “They are sitting in military fatigues behind a computer. But the Russian hackers, or the Chinese hackers, may not be in uniform. They may be in blue jeans. They are probably sitting at the beach somewhere — someplace that’s got a really good internet connection.” All this cyberconflict really kicked off in 2008. Right, that’s when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. “It was the most sophisticated use of cyber by one state against another, and it opened up the Pandora’s box.” And remember — it’s still only the beginning. “We haven’t seen a full-blown war, and we don’t know what one looks like.” “What’s the most challenging part about covering this beat?” “The hardest part about covering the state use of cyber, is the enormous secrecy that the U.S. government wraps around it. But we’ve hit the point where the secrecy has actually begun to impede our ability to deter attacks. Because others don’t understand what we can do to them, and what we’re willing to do to them. In other words, we’re not setting any red lines out there.”Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+You’ve probably seen at least a few “exit interviews” with outgoing Gov. Jerry Brown over the past several months. And if you’re like me, there’s really never enough. The man is endlessly fascinating and a veritable quote machine (even if you need a translator).
+Our Los Angeles bureau chief, Adam Nagourney, recently visited the governor on the tail end of a non-farewell tour before the Gov.-elect Gavin Newsom takes over on Monday. Here, Adam tells us about what it’s like to interview Mr. Brown:
+After nearly 50 years in California public life, including 16 years as governor, it’s difficult to think of a question that Jerry Brown has not heard before. And Mr. Brown can be an ornery interview, particularly when asked questions that strike him as obvious or familiar, as we were reminded during the visit to his ranch.
+Like, for example, when Mr. Brown was asked if he had any regrets about problems not tackled. Probably not the best question to ask.
+“Wouldn’t you say that is a condition of life — that if you do one thing, you don’t do something else?” Mr. Brown said. “I have a saying that fits that. Commitment is the enemy of opportunity. To do one thing is not to do something else.”I set to thinking about this after watching my Mets spend much of November and December in a modestly lunatic attempt to trade Noah Syndergaard, one of the National League’s best starting pitchers. They appear to have failed at this self-mutilation. Now that they have retained two true aces — Syndergaard and Jacob deGrom, the Cy Young Award winner — why not stretch them out and push them to go deeper into games? What is the point in allowing an ace to pitch six innings before turning the ball over to a committee of anonymous relievers?
+Game 4 of the 2018 World Series presented something of a nadir when Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Dave Roberts, a bright fellow no doubt, pulled his starting pitcher after he had yielded a single hit through six and a third innings and was ahead, 4-0. The Dodgers ended up marching six relievers into that game, lost, 9-6, and exited the World Series the next day.
+Mazzone pulled out a few of his remaining hairs.
+“The greatest teacher for a pitcher is starts,” he says. “Pitch and pitch and pitch. Let a pitcher find himself.
+“The problem is that so many pitching coaches and managers are yes-men and don’t want to challenge their front offices.”
+There’s a sizable mound of statistical evidence to back such assertions. At risk of giving the quadratic dudes a seizure, I turned to Baseball Reference and selected 40 pitchers from the past half-century, men who ran the gamut from solid to superb. These are the sort of pitchers you’d expect to see in the postseason, and my list included Bobby Ojeda, Mike Torrez, Steve Avery, Tom Browning, Tom Seaver, Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins and Mazzone’s troika of Hall of Famers. I examined their performances across games, from beginning to end.
+For most good pitchers, their worst inning was the first. Once they found a rhythm and once pitches began to crackle, they became progressively more difficult to hit. Tom Seaver’s career earned run average in the first inning was 3.75. His E.R.A. for the last three innings of a game, that dreaded third and fourth time through the batting order, stood at 2.75.Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.
+Hi, I’m David Streitfeld, reporting from a very quiet week in Silicon Valley. The venture capitalists were at their vacation homes or exotic resorts, dreaming of riches to come. Entrepreneurs also must have taken time off, because I made it to San Jose in less than two hours, a personal record. There wasn’t even a new data privacy scandal to occupy the pundits.
+Amazon, however, never lets up. Chances are, something under your family Christmas tree or at your Hanukkah or Kwanzaa celebration was from the retailer. Perhaps everything was. Amazon’s 210th and final press release of the year summarized the company’s holiday season: best ever. If history is any guide, more than half those sales were made by third parties — shops big and small that are in essence renting a stall in the Amazon bazaar.
+With millions of marketplace sellers battling for a piece of the lucrative Amazon action, competition is fierce. Exactly how tough I didn’t realize until I read a piece called “Prime and Punishment: Dirty Dealing in the $175 Billion Amazon Marketplace,” by Josh Dzieza on the tech site the Verge. Almost as an aside, the article mentions that some unscrupulous sellers were taking an established competitor’s product, setting it on fire and then posting photos saying it exploded. Amazon would go nuts and pull the product as a safety hazard, leaving a clear field for the shady new arrival.Even cosmetic projects don’t come cheap. HomeAdvisor estimates that the average cost of a new kitchen is around $23,000, with a high-end one costing $55,000. It’s no wonder that Americans handled roughly 43 million home improvement projects on their own from 2015 to 2017, according to United States census data. Do-it-yourself projects accounted for 38 percent of all home improvements, but just 18 percent of home improvement costs, according to a NerdWallet analysis of census data.
+But unlike other home improvement TV stars, the Scott brothers are not fans of D.I.Y., even though they began their careers buying and renovating properties while they were still in college.
+Some projects, like installing a backsplash, are manageable after watching enough YouTube videos, they say. But plans can quickly go awry. “Don’t even take it on unless you know you’re willing to finish it,” Jonathan Scott warned.
+A contractor will likely get the job done faster and better. “Most people, they don’t value their own time,” said Drew Scott, a real estate broker and the brother who’s usually in a dapper suit walking buyers through the offer process. A failed D.I.Y. project can make a homeowner resent the house “because it’s not turning out the way that they wanted,” he said.
+He recommended starting small, with a project that can be done in a day and that isn’t too disruptive. “Maybe there’s an old side table or chair you can refinish,” he said.
+Well, sure, but that hardly feels like an accomplishment, unless you think of the fuchsia end table as a conversation piece. “If friends come into your space and they say, ‘I absolutely love that side table, it’s so unique, where did you get it?’” Jonathan Scott said, you can respond with something like: “Oh funny story, I didn’t just buy it at the store.” And then, take it from there.
+For bigger projects, the Scott brothers wholeheartedly endorse hiring professionals.
+Americans certainly invest heavily in their homes, spending $300 billion a year on home improvements and repairs, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. How are they paying for all this work? Sixty percent of people who responded to a Chase survey said they planned to take out loans to finance it.Thanks to Judd Legum of Popular Information, who recently asked me to offer advice to Democratic voters trying to sort through the potential candidates. He also asked Dan Pfeiffer of Pod Save America, Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action and several others. You can read all their answers here.
+Related: The political scientist Steven Vogel writes in The Times about Warren’s plan to tackle inequality through “pre-distribution” — a subject that also interests me. And Michelle Goldberg explains an upside of a crowded Democratic field: “a chance to hash out big, forward-looking ideas.”
+Programming note. To repeat what I told you earlier this week: Starting Monday, the name of this newsletter will change. Instead of being called “Opinion Today,” the newsletter will bear my name.
+The back story: When I began writing it in September 2016, this newsletter was one of only a few produced by the Opinion section — and I was planning to write it only temporarily. Thus the name “Opinion Today.” But 28 months later, I’m still writing it and enjoying it, thanks in no small part to the interactions with all of you.
+And the Opinion section now has several newsletters: There is a weekly roundup of standout work, called Sunday Best, as well as the weekly Op-Docs newsletter. My colleague Frank Bruni has started a weekly newsletter. And Nick Kristof continues to write a twice-weekly newsletter.
+The name change of this newsletter doesn’t require any changes by you. It will continue to arrive in your inbox five days a week, with my thoughts on the news and reading suggestions from around the web — as well as links to all Times Opinion pieces published that day.
+In addition to a different name, the newsletter will also have a slightly different design — one I like because it’s a little bit better organized than the current design. As always, I welcome your feedback, at leonhardt@nytimes.com.
+You can join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook. I am also writing a daily email newsletter and invite you to subscribe.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTOpinion).“BANDERSNATCH” IS FASCINATING, original, staggering in scope — and I still found the whole process stressful and unpleasant, and occasionally just straight-up upsetting. It’s an achievement I admire, but not one I’m all that interested in.
+Call me old-fashioned, but I like a good story, and none of the versions of “Bandersnatch” I watched — made? enabled? chose? — had quite enough. I don’t know if this is a failure of my own imagination and decision-making, and if I am therefore panning my own existence in The New York Times. Maybe I am! Maybe this is all part of the big “Black Mirror” plan to make everyone as nihilistic as possible; to remind us that being British is very sad but it’s better than the alternatives; to illuminate the fact that we are just cogs in a machine that produces more machine; that my futile role such that it is will soon be obviated by that exact machine. And have I ever noticed that things that are supposed to bring us closer together actually keep us further apart in some ways, hm?
+Anyway, I wanted — thought I wanted? — a story. So on my first pass, I followed the advice of every improv teacher I’ve ever had and sought to make the most emotional choice available. But it often didn’t matter; my choices sometimes just looped back toward a main path, or they didn’t materialize how I’d envisioned. Sure, I told Stefan to “yell at Dad,” but if I were really controlling him, I would also have told him what to yell. I wanted either more control or less. I didn’t want just to declare the outcomes, I wanted to influence the motivations. Otherwise the outcomes have no grounding, no purpose. Unlike a physical “Choose Your Own Adventure” book, I could never tell how far I was from the end, and thus how far I was from the beginning, and so I could never cogently construct a narrative arc that made sense for pacing or structure.
+Even when I replayed — rewatched? reselected? — “Bandersnatch” for a few other passes, I was torn between competing goals: one, to create the most interesting “episode,” and two, to find the deepest, most secret pathways to see if I could trick the show or myself. This tension between meaningful narrative and tricksterism resulted in the worst, least joyous aspects of both. Perhaps this is how the writers of “Westworld” feel.
+I don’t think “Bandersnatch” is an episode or a movie, and I’ve seen it described elsewhere as a video game, but it’s more of an ecosystem, and not all of “Bandersnatch” is “Bandersnatch” itself: It also relies heavily on the internet response machine (which this article is also part of). I suppose there are people who will play through the story, reach the end credits option, and then just go on with their lives, not deigning to do even a cursory search online, but I can’t really picture it.
+I knew as soon as I finished that I could find a Talmud’s worth of dissections of every possible selection, perhaps an oral history of how the project came together, a full walk-through of how to get to however many endings there were, maybe a personality quiz to tell me what kind of person I am based on whether I ever poured tea on the computer. (I could never.)Pet policies typically don’t cover pre-existing conditions, Mr. Blyskal said, so premiums are generally lower when your pet is young and healthy. Even if you start early, though, you may end up paying more over time, he said, because some policies raise premiums as pets get older. This can increase costs substantially, he said, and cause owners to drop their policies as the animals get older — just when they are more likely to need the coverage. Industrywide, the average pet policy is maintained for three years or less, according to an insurer regulatory filing in 2016 in Washington State.
+The expenses tied to pet health coverage usually include not only a regular premium but also other out-of-pocket costs, like a deductible — an amount that you must pay before insurance begins paying. Insurance may cover less than 100 percent of costs after the deductible, so you’ll still have to pay for part of the treatment. Some policies may cap payments, so ask if there’s a limit.
+Rob Jackson, chief executive of Healthy Paws Pet Insurance, said insurance could protect against budget-busting events costing thousands of dollars. (Healthy Paws said a pet’s age affects premiums at initial enrollment, and also as the pet ages.) The Healthy Paws website cites examples like Fridgey the Bengal cat, who had a $4,600 hip replacement, and Lupa the German shepherd, who needed $52,000 in treatment for tetanus exposure.
+One way to pay lower premiums, and possibly get broader coverage, is to buy pet insurance through your employer. Eleven percent of employers in the United States offer pet health insurance benefits, according to a 2018 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management, up from 6 percent in 2014. Typically, companies offer pet insurance as a “voluntary” benefit. It’s uncommon for employers to contribute to the cost of premiums, as they do with human health insurance. But insurers may give employees a break on premiums, or offer better coverage, because their marketing costs are lower.
+Employees at Ollie, a specialty dog food company, receive a 15 percent discount on premiums from the insurer Healthy Paws, said Gabby Slome, a co-founder of Ollie. (Ollie also offers workers benefits like “pawternity” leave when they take a new dog home.)
+“We had a strong belief that pets are a part of one’s family,” she said.
+Scott Liles, president and chief pet insurance officer with Nationwide, said half of Fortune 500 companies offer their employees pet insurance from his company. Nationwide’s employer-based plans now underwrite by species — canines vs. felines — but not by age or breed, Mr. Liles said. That means, he said, you won’t pay a higher premium if your pet is older, or if its breed is prone to certain illnesses, unlike policies sold in the open market.
+Here are some questions and answers about pet health insurance:
+Do some animals cost more to insure than others?
+Cats are generally less expensive to insure than dogs. The average accident and illness premium in 2017 was about $45 a month for dogs and $28 a month for cats, according to the pet health insurance association. Because some purebred animals are prone to certain health problems, some insurers may charge higher premiums for them.At War is a newsletter about the experiences and costs of war with stories from Times reporters and outside voices.
+In 2019, one of the oldest and most archaic punishments in the United States military — three days’ confinement on bread and water — will be no more. On Christmas Day, my colleague Dave Philipps reported that the Navy’s bread-and-water punishment for the most junior enlisted sailors has been eliminated in a new revision to the Uniform Code of Military Justice that went into effect on Jan. 1.
+It’s a change long in the making in the United States even though the punishment has been outlawed elsewhere for decades. For what are essentially misdemeanor offenses, service members can be punished by their commanding officers if the commander thinks that a preponderance of the evidence points to their guilt. The punishment is considered less severe than what would be doled out in a military trial, but the burden of proof for establishing guilt in these administrative hearings is also far lower.
+Three days’ confinement on bread and water is considered the most severe administrative punishment possible in the Navy, and it may only be awarded to enlisted sailors in the three lowest pay grades. Once a sailor is promoted to the E-4 paygrade, that of a third-class petty officer, he or she cannot receive the draconian punishment.Since so few books are published in December, the best-seller lists don’t change much this time of year. John Grisham’s “The Reckoning” remains atop the fiction list, and Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” still holds the No. 1 nonfiction spot.
+But it is something of a surprise to see Obama’s memoir, which has been translated into 23 languages, selling so well the world over. In Finland, for example, the former first lady’s book has been at No. 1 on the bookseller Akateeminen Kirjakauppa’s nonfiction list for weeks, followed closely by “Paranoid Optimist,” a memoir from the Nokia chairman Risto Siilasmaa (clearly that title works better in Finnish than it does translated into English). Next door in Sweden at Svensk Bokhandel, “Becoming” is at No. 2, edged out by Hans Rosling’s “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World — and Why Things Are Better Than You Think,” which was one of Barack Obama’s favorite books last year. Sweden is a Scandinavian outlier, though; “Becoming” is No. 1 in both Norway and Denmark. It tops the lists in other European countries, too, including Germany, Portugal and England.
+[ In this essay, Isabel Wilkerson brings all her narrative firepower to Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.” ]
+“Becoming” is No. 3 on Ireland’s combined list, where it follows “Normal People,” a novel by the hugely popular Irish writer Sally Rooney, and “At All Costs,” a memoir from the hurling manager and player Davy Fitzgerald. It is No. 4 in both France and Spain; in Italy, where most of the books on the combined top 10 list are by Italian authors (Elena Ferrante commands the four top spots), “Becoming” is No. 9. It’s No. 14 in Poland and No. 20 in the Czech Republic, and it seems to be selling briskly at bookstores in Albania.In 2006, the San Diego Chargers had a conundrum. Their starting quarterback from the previous season was a 27-year-old free agent who was coming back from a severe shoulder injury. While they had gone 21-11 over the previous two seasons, they had not won a playoff game since 1994, and they had a first-round pick from the 2004 draft on the bench, ready to step in as a starter.
+The player they chose to let go, Drew Brees, went on to become the most productive passer in N.F.L. history. Yet 12 seasons later it’s fairly easy, after considering the salary and risk involved in the situation, to make the argument that the Chargers made the right call in letting him leave.
+That’s the strange reality of Philip Rivers, who replaced Brees, established himself as a franchise quarterback, and yet has been largely overlooked ever since in the discussions of the game’s best quarterbacks despite a regular-season résumé that stands out even amid today’s bloated passing numbers. And whether it is fair to him or not, his lack of a Super Bowl victory is no small factor in that disregard.
+So as he heads into the playoffs for the sixth time — his Chargers (now in Los Angeles) will play at the Baltimore Ravens in the wild-card round on Sunday — Rivers is once again having his worth debated.Thousands upon thousands more recipes you might cook this weekend are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Here’s how to take out a subscription to the site if you haven’t done that already.) You can also seek culinary inspiration on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter accounts. And regardless of your subscription status, you can write to us at cookingcare@nytimes.com for help with your cooking or our technology. (You can send me darts or hearts at foodeditor@nytimes.com.)
+Now, it doesn’t have a thing to do with pretzels or candied ginger, but it’s been more than six months since Ben Taub wrote his New Yorker profile of Patrick Skinner, a former C.I.A. officer who became a beat cop in Savannah, Ga. I started following Skinner on Twitter not long after. Now I suggest you do the same. He’s @skinnerpm, and his feed is a window into a world we should all be aware is spinning and important. He’s on the street working for his neighbors. What he learns is a lesson for all of us.
+I like that Granta has a short essay on the best book of 1919. It’s Rudyard Kipling’s “The Years Between.” See if you can’t track down a copy at the library.
+Finally, I know I’m mad for these Australian crime novels lately. But Garry Disher’s “Chain of Evidence” is very good. I’ll see you on Sunday.By some accounts, women occupy a mere 0.5 percent of about 3,500 years of recorded history. That’s 17.5 years. Women’s acknowledged history isn’t even old enough to vote!
+As the author and historian Bettany Hughes put i t : “We need to actively look for women’s stories, and put them back into the historical narrative.”
+So, readers, as we enter the new year, I plan to do exactly that. Starting now, Gender Letter will become In Her Words, a twice-weekly newsletter in which I’ll break down news events, offer behind-the-scenes insights from Times journalists, share reader experiences and more.
+Many of these stories will be framed through the words of women, because it’s those words that too often have been scarce or shouted down. Here, women rule the headlines.
+Now, some quick logistics: If you get Gender Letter in your inbox already, no need to do anything. In Her Words will replace it and show up Tuesdays too.WASHINGTON — President Trump threatened on Friday to keep the federal government partly closed for “months or even years” if he did not get $5.6 billion for his wall at the southern border, and he warned that he was considering declaring a national emergency to build it without congressional approval.
+Mr. Trump and Democratic leaders emerged from a two-hour meeting in the White House Situation Room without a deal to reopen government agencies that have already been shuttered for two weeks, and the two sides offered sharply contrasting views of where they stood. By day’s end, the two sides appeared to be still locked in a stalemate.
+Democrats called the meeting “contentious” while the president and Republican leaders in the House called it “productive.” And while Mr. Trump announced that he had assigned Vice President Mike Pence to lead a “working group” to negotiate with Democrats over the weekend, Democrats said the phrase “working group” was never discussed.
+“We told the president we needed the government open,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters outside the White House. “He resisted. In fact, he said he’d keep the government closed for a very long period of time, months or even years.”Asked if he would resign if Mr. Trump asked him to do so, Mr. Powell replied directly: “No.”
+Mr. Powell was joined onstage at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association by his immediate predecessors at the Fed, Janet L. Yellen and Ben S. Bernanke. Both of them criticized Mr. Trump’s attacks as potentially damaging to the central bank, and therefore to the economy.
+Strong economic growth fueled the Fed’s decision to raise its benchmark rate four times in 2018, into a range from 2.25 percent to 2.5 percent. The rate, which had hovered near zero in the wake of the financial crisis a decade earlier, now sits at the lower end of the range that Fed officials consider a reasonable estimate of “neutrality,” meaning that the central bank is neither encouraging nor discouraging economic growth.
+Fed officials say the continued strength of the economy validates their management of monetary policy. “I think we’re actually in a good spot,” Loretta Mester, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, told CNBC on Friday, noting that job growth is strong and inflation is under control.
+But critics, including Mr. Trump, have said the economy still needs the Fed’s help. Inflation remains below the 2 percent annual pace the Fed regards as optimal, suggesting that the economy has room to grow, and workers are only beginning to reap the benefits of an expansion now in its 10th year.
+Clouds also are gathering on the economic horizon. The Trump administration increased economic growth last year through large tax cuts and increased federal spending, but those benefits are waning. And Mr. Trump’s trade war with China is beginning to be felt by American companies, like Apple and FedEx, which have warned that the tit-for-tat tariffs are pinching profits.
+The Fed’s decision to raise the benchmark rate at its most recent meeting, in mid-December, drove down stock prices and bond yields in a show of concern about the prospects for continued economic growth. Asset prices imply an expectation that the Fed will not raise interest rates at all during 2019.
+Mr. Powell began his remarks by reiterating his view that the markets’ concerns are overstated. He said that 2018 had been “a good year for the United States economy” and that the latest economic data suggested “ongoing momentum heading into 2019.” Wall Street’s pessimism, he said, is “well ahead of the data.”Well, I’m writing a movie, and so I’m pretty consumed with that. I want to write a comedy that’s funny because I feel like comedy movies haven’t been that funny for a long time. For me, “Bridesmaids” was probably the last remarkable comedy.
+I’ve been watching “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” and “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” — Steve Martin movies. I feel like what I see in these older movies is people really allowing comedic performances to sing, and I think now there’s much more of a sense of pace it up, have a big set piece, make the stakes through the roof. And also, since I began in comedy, I’ve been in this crazed desire for women to be something other than a disappointed girlfriend or a hot girl that’s unattainable. I love comedies in which women are more than just kind of standing there next to brilliantly funny men.
+Last year you tweeted that you disliked roundup lists of good female comedians.
+I have always wanted to be seen as a great comedian, and when you throw “woman” in front of it, it just makes me see that you see me as some kind of freakish subset. You don’t say, “This is the funniest male comedian.” But it’s this weird thing that subtly indicates, “I don’t see you as really in the running on a comedy level.”
+One time I was asked to do a show where I had to wear high heels and a dress, and my whole career I have tried to pass on things like that. It’s just I always want to be seen as a funny human being. When I started, people were basically like: “If you’re a woman on stage, you should desex yourself. Don’t wear sexy clothes. Don’t talk about sex.” And now when I see Amy Schumer’s popularity, or Ali Wong — and these are women that are wearing dresses and they are talking about their sex lives — I go, “Oh, maybe I was kind of internalizing too extreme of an erasure of my gender.” So I’ve been quietly trying to make sense of what it all means for me.
+You’re married to another funny human being. Can I start a family feud and ask you to spoil Jordan’s new movie, “Us,” for us?
+Yeah, right. Very cute. No, you have to analyze the poster like everyone else. I’m purely doing this out of duty to my marriage, but I will say it’s very scary, it’s very good and I’ve been thinking about some of the deeper themes ever since.Image
+Many more Americans say they have a food allergy than actually have one.
+Researchers surveyed 40,000 adults about food allergies, carefully eliciting details about which foods produced the allergies and what specific symptoms they had.
+To be considered a true allergy, the person had to report at least one of the known symptoms of an immune system reaction to an allergen: hives, lip or tongue swelling, difficulty swallowing, throat tightening, chest tightening, trouble breathing, wheezing, vomiting, chest pain, rapid heartbeat, fainting or low blood pressure. An upset stomach, diarrhea or a report that “it makes my mouth itch,” for example, was considered evidence of a food sensitivity of some kind, but not the immune response produced by an allergy.
+Using these criteria, the researchers estimated that 10.8 percent of American adults — or more than 26 million people — have an allergy to one or more foods. Another 21 million think they have a food allergy but do not. The report is in JAMA Network Open.
+“With one in five adults having a negative reaction to a food, it is essential to see an allergist for a diagnosis,” said the lead author, Dr. Ruchi S. Gupta, a professor of pediatrics at Northwestern. “Food allergies can be life-threatening, but other food-related conditions may be treatable.”Most of the grain bowls that happen in my house are serendipitous.
+Leftovers (last night’s sautéed greens, Thursday’s brown rice, a hunk of poached salmon) scooped into a bowl and garnished with various salty condiments (pickles, kimchi, fermented red chiles) and a sliced vegetable (radishes, carrots or cucumber) make a dish that is easier than takeout and a whole lot better for you. And then there’s the satisfaction of using up all those small containers of food your partner was about to throw out.
+There are other times, though, when a grain bowl craving hits and the refrigerator is bare. That’s when you need a recipe like this. Vegetable-forward yet cozy, it has a variety of textures and a lemony kick to keep things interesting bite after bite. It’s a little more labor-intensive than raiding your leftovers, but still faster and more healthful than anything you can order in.[Sign up here for In Her Words, our newsletter about women, gender and society.]
+Since Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a self-described Puerto Rican “girl from the Bronx,” was elected in New York in November, she has been a target of conservatives and far-right groups. She won political notice after jolting the Democratic establishment by defeating an incumbent congressman to win the primary for New York’s 14th Congressional District in a virtual landslide in June.
+But her origin story, which saw her go from being a bartender to a lawmaker, has been dismissed by some on the right. Her clothes have come in for particular scrutiny, with a conservative journalist criticizing a fitted coat and jacket she wore as “too nice for a girl who struggles.”
+The hosts of “Fox and Friends” have mocked her for saying she could not afford an apartment in Washington until she received her salary, disputing the menial savings she cited. She has been something of a lightning rod in her own party as well. Claire McCaskill, the departing Democratic senator from Missouri, called her a “thing” and “a bright shiny new object” in a recent CNN interview.Last year at this time, Republicans feared the “blue wave,” a surge of voter enthusiasm for Democrats in the midterm elections.
+With the election over, and the fears of Republicans partly realized, the party’s worry has shifted to the “green wave:” $39.67 here, $39.67 there.
+That’s the average donation to ActBlue, the online fund-raising hub used by more than 90 percent of Democrats. Buoyed by ActBlue, more than 100 Democratic candidates outraised their Republican counterparts in hotly contested congressional races.
+That kind of uniformity and heft in small-dollar donations — typically defined as $200 or less — was missing on the Republican side, a costly shortcoming that the party is now confronting after losing 40 seats, and control of the House, to Democrats.For most Americans, the word “pie” brings up images of apples (or some other fruit) encased in pastry and baked, cut into wedges and served for dessert, sometimes with a scoop of ice cream or a bit of whipped cream.
+But in Britain and throughout the Commonwealth, dessert pies are more often called tarts, and it’s meat pies that are legion. There are pork pies baked in pastry and served cold, and pies made with beef in gravy, served warm. There are individual hand pies, like Cornish pasties and diminutive football pies, sold at sporting events. Chicken pies and potpies and game pies, the list is long and varied.The two-state solution is increasingly feeling like a cruel joke. American Jews’ rabbis and lay leaders counsel them to be vigilant against any other solution, such as granting Palestinians full rights in a greater Israel, because those solutions would dilute or destroy Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. Be patient, American Jews are told. Peace talks are coming. The Palestinians will have their state.
+In the meantime, the movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel grows stronger on American campuses, and new voices are emerging in the Democratic Party, such as Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who are willing to speak openly about Palestinian rights and autonomy where other lawmakers have declined to do so.
+Of course, American Jews, like Israeli Jews, are not a monolith. Within the American Jewish population, there is a significant generational split on Israel that goes beyond ideology. Older American Jews, more viscerally aware of the Holocaust and connected to the living history of the Jewish state, are generally willing to look past Israeli government actions that challenge their values. Or they embrace those actions. Younger American Jews do not typically remember Israel as the David against regional Goliaths. They see a bully, armed and indifferent, 45 years past the Yom Kippur War, the last conflict that threatened Israel’s existence.
+American Jewry has been going its own way for 150 years, a drift that has created something of a new religion, or at least a new branch of one of the world’s most ancient faiths.
+In a historical stroke with resonance today, American Jewish leaders gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce what is known as the Pittsburgh Platform, a new theology for an American Judaism, less focused on a Messianic return to the land of Israel and more on fixing a broken world, the concept of Tikkun Olam. Jews, the rabbi behind the platform urged, must achieve God’s purpose by “living and working in and with the world.”
+For a faith that for thousands of years was insular and self-contained, its people often in mandated ghettos, praying for the Messiah to return them to the Promised Land, this was a radical notion. But for most American Jews, it is now accepted as a tenet of their religion: building a better, more equal, more tolerant world now, where they live.
+Last summer, when a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was hauled in for questioning by the Israeli police after he officiated at a non-Orthodox wedding, it was too much for Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella organization of the Conservative movement in North America.Gaby Savransky was walking his new puppy in Coffey Park, in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. She was a silvery gray shade that dog breeders call “blue fawn.” Mr. Savransky announced to the onlookers cooing over his pet that her name was Esme, she was 11 weeks old, and the breed? Pit bull.
+Was he aware that there was a rebranding effort with the sometimes maligned dog type to get them to be called “pibbles”?
+“Pibble?” asked Mr. Savransky, 49, who is a musician. “Is that like renaming Hell’s Kitchen?”
+In a word: yes. “‘Pibble’ sounds like ‘pit bull’ but also sounds like ‘nibble,’” said Katy Brink, who is the executive editor of The Dodo, a website about animals, as well as the owner of a 7-year-old pit bull named Sasha and a foster parent to a 1-year-old pit bull named Lily. “You also see them called ‘pittie,’ ‘pittopotamous,’ ‘hippo,’ or ‘potato.’ It’s part of a bigger effort to show them as silly and sweet and gentle. They just want to give you kisses and lounge around. It shows you there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
+The Dodo has a series called “Pittie Nation” that has more than one billion views on Facebook Watch, with episodes with titles like “Pablo, who was scared of men, falls in love with his new dad” (73 million views) or “Shortcake with the world’s best smile” (66 million views).She added: “The academy is saying, ‘What can we do to make this happen?’”
+It’s unclear whom DeGeneres spoke to. The academy did not respond to a request for comment and has not announced a replacement host for Hart.
+Hart told DeGeneres that he took responsibility for his past comments, which include a now deleted tweet from 2011 in which he said, “Yo if my son comes home & try’s 2 play with my daughters doll house I’m going 2 break it over his head & say n my voice ‘stop that’s gay,’” and a 2009 post on Twitter in which he used a homophobic slur. There was also Hart’s 2010 comedy special, “Seriously Funny”: As part of an extended riff, he said, “Me, as a heterosexual male, if I can prevent my son from being gay, I will.”
+But Hart, who was also promoting his new movie “The Upside,” also said the campaign to have him ousted as Oscars host was meant to “destroy” him.
+“On my side, openly, I say I’m wrong for my past words,” Hart told DeGeneres. “I say it. I said it.”
+“I understand that,” he continued. “I know that. My kids know when their dad messes up, I’m in front of it because I want to be an example so they know what to do. In this case, it’s tough for me because it was an attack. This wasn’t an accident. This wasn’t a coincidence. It wasn’t a coincidence that the day after I received the job that tweets just somehow manifested from 2008.”WASHINGTON — The American man being held on espionage charges in Moscow also has British, Canadian and Irish citizenship, officials said on Friday, a status that could complicate the situation for Russia if it finds itself confronted by coordinated pressure from the West.
+The man, Paul N. Whelan, could benefit from stepped-up efforts by multiple governments to secure his release, especially if the four countries coordinate their actions to secure his release or work to develop a collective punishment, like restricting visas for Russian business leaders.
+New details also emerged on Friday about Mr. Whelan’s court-martial and bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. While deployed to Iraq in 2006, then-Staff Sgt. Whelan was found guilty of attempting to steal $10,410.59 and pass bad checks in an attempt to pay off debt.
+Some former American officials said that by detaining a citizen of multiple countries, Russia may have miscalculated by picking not just a fight with the United States, but with a larger part of the international community — inviting the kind of multinational pressure that Moscow is most susceptible to.LONDON — It’s late night in a British home. In the darkness, the flashing colors of a video game light a teenager’s face, his gaze fixed on the screen.
+“Can’t get him off that thing,” his father says. “Up all night, he is.”
+Then the image suddenly flips to soldiers in the field at night as a voice-over says: “Stamina. Don’t underestimate it.”
+This is one of several new recruitment ads the British Army rolled out on Thursday, portraying the derogatory labels applied to young people as strengths. In a statement, the army said it saw “compassion in ‘snowflakes,’ self-belief in ‘me me me millennials’ and drive in ‘binge gamers.’ ”
+Tapping into the anxieties of people growing up in a digital world — and their parents — the campaign says that what society often sees as a weakness or character flaw can be considered a strength in the army.When I reached out to them again, they were more than willing to talk. They had avoided reporters after Las Vegas but were frustrated that the Thousand Oaks shootings had fallen out of the spotlight so quickly, subsumed by the news of wildfires there — and the ever-quickening news cycle after mass shootings.
+Our article focused on 22-year-old Brendan Kelly, who is just days away from shipping off to Afghanistan for his first tour of duty as a Marine. But I also spent time with David Anderson, then 23, and Dylan McNey, 22.
+In listening to the stories of these three friends, I was struck by their different reactions to two of the most violent incidents in the last 12 months. They reminded me that we each experience fear and trauma in distinct ways, processing it on our own timeline and terms. All three have tried to move on, to launch into their adult lives, but they have inevitably been thrust in new directions, ones that are not always predictable and not always bad.
+Mr. Kelly is almost defiant, embracing another set of risks as a Marine.
+As mass shootings have become more common, so have the stories in their aftermath — and their similarities can lead the public to tune out. Mr. Kelly’s defiance made him uniquely compelling, in this uniquely American moment: surviving a massacre here to go fight on a battlefield where the country has been engaged nearly his entire life.
+But after the story was published, I began reflecting on the two young men I’d left out of it.
+It is often the quieter characters I meet in the course of my reporting who stay with me and keep me thinking late into the night. So much of life is in the gray areas, in how we go on with mundane daily tasks after a life-altering event. That’s why I found Mr. Kelly’s two friends so compelling.Steph Richards composes in ways that standard notation could never document. To make “Brooklyn Machine,” she yanked out one of her trumpet’s valves — some air escapes where it ought to be, making the muffled, sometimes warping sound you hear in your right speaker. The tinnier tone coming from the left emerges when Richards covers the valve and air passes through the horn’s bell, like usual. The bell, in turn, is covered with a mute, helping her create the fuzzy mumble at the beginning of the track. “Brooklyn Machine” appears on “Take the Neon Lights,” her forthcoming album, but the performance in the video above — featuring abstracted urban scenes animated by Andrea Yasco — is a separate take, just under a minute and a half of haunting trumpet surgery and jostling play with her piano-bass-drums quartet. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
+Paul McCartney, ‘Get Enough’Slide 1 of 14,
+The 64th International Debutante Ball took place on Dec. 19 at the Pierre Hotel. Catherine Fields Coselli of Texas was among the 23 “women of distinction” who made their debut.Happy New Year! We are swan-diving into home-cooking season, one of the best times of year to just stay in. Somehow January has come to mean culinary austerity — it’s about what you can’t eat, rather than what you can — and I sort of hate that. There’s nothing really happening, and you also want me to go on a diet?
+That said, I am finding myself wanting to bail on butter, steak and creamy cheese. It’s just not what I crave right now. What I do crave are stewy dishes with beans, salads, citrus, pastas, fish. I always tell you what I actually want to cook and eat at this moment, so that’s what you’ll find below.
+One last thing before we get to recipes: Keep the weeknight cookbook suggestions coming! My inbox is flooded with mentions of our own Alison Roman’s book, “Dining In,” and Pierre Franey’s “60-Minute Gourmet” cookbooks (classic New York Times vibes!). I also received rapturous notes about the British authors Diana Henry (a brilliant recipe writer, beloved by many of us here in the Food department), Nigel Slater, Yotam Ottolenghi (another NYT Cooking contributor) and Felicity Cloake. Send your favorites, or just write me a note, at dearemily@nytimes.com.The final Popcast looking back at the music of 2018 is about the year in jazz: There was a tremendous amount of excellent music created, as well as intriguing alchemical choices made by the youngest generation of rising stars.
+But jazz’s increasing role as a commodity of intellectual cool brings its own set of questions. What is the effect of pop culture’s embrace of figures like Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding and an entire generation of British jazz upstarts?
+That’s one theme of this episode, which also addresses the living legacy of Wayne Shorter, the renewed growth of big-band orchestras, and how jazz institutions, particularly in the academy, are shaping the genre’s future while selecting which parts of its past to prioritize.
+On this week’s Popcast:Slide 1 of 9,
+At Thai Farm Kitchen in Kensington, Brooklyn, nua toon, a soup of long-simmered beef shank, has a broth that is crystalline and thin but rich, each spoonful a renewal.William Mullan’s Delicious ‘Odd Apples’
+The photographer turns his obsession with the fruit into a feast for the eyes in his new photography book.Wun maprao onn — or Coconut Delight, as the Bangkok-born Jess Calvo of Thai Farm Kitchen in Kensington, Brooklyn, calls it — is “the most difficult dessert to make,” he said. “First, you have to find the right young coconut.”
+This was a slightly easier task when he lived with ready access to coconut trees, in Nonthaburi Province just outside Bangkok. There he and his wife, Elizabeth Kanyawee Calvo, ran a hydroponic farm and three celebrated restaurants. Then they sold everything, moved to Brooklyn and opened Thai Farm Kitchen in Kensington in October.
+Here, once a suitable young coconut has been procured — heavy and silent when shaken, because it’s so full of water, there’s no space for slosh — it’s boiled whole, to concentrate the sweetness and loosen the flesh inside. Then the top is lopped off, and the water is drained, cooked with agar-agar until near syrup and returned to the shell to set overnight.The photographer William Mullan estimates that his obsession with apples began when he was a high schooler in Esher, a small town outside of London. An Egremont apple caught his eye at the local Waitrose, a British chain of upscale grocery stores. “I was really curious as to why such a highly selective supermarket would carry an apple that most people would agree looks like a potato and not at all what we demand an apple look like as consumers,” he recalls. But when he tried it, the apple was, in his words, mind-blowing. “It’s a really delicious, complex apple that has all these wonderfully nutty and cidery notes — like chestnuts and hot apple cider,” he says. “It tastes like the Instagram filter you’d pick for a photo of autumn leaves.” From then on, he was hooked, spending hours, and eventually years, researching apple varieties and the history of the fruit.
+After suffering through a veritable dearth of apples while attending college in California, Mullan moved to New York City in 2014, where they abounded at farmers’ markets from late August to mid-November. It was while eating the rosy-fleshed Pink Pearl in 2017 that he had another apple-induced epiphany. “I would eat it and see like, the font from Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ and lots of pink and some Gang of Four music,” Mullan says.
+The experience of tasting the Pink Pearl was such a visual one, “I was pretty much compelled to shoot it,” he says. “I just had to have this photo exist in the real world so I could look at it forever.” As the brand manager for the Brooklyn-based chocolatier Raaka, Mullan was already in the habit of shooting products against pastel-colored backdrops, and he applied the same treatment to his rare and beloved apples over the next year or so. The project eventually caught the eye of the designer Andrea A. Trabucco-Campos, who had worked with Mullan on branding for Raaka — and who loved his work. So together, they created “Odd Apples,” a large-format book of Mullan’s photographs including each apple’s cultivar name, the location where it was first farmed and tasting notes. The self-published book was printed as a limited edition of 200, released last month.
+Mullan meticulously researched and sought out all 29 apples featured in the book. His favorite is the Niedzwetzkyana, a rare varietal originally from Kyrgyzstan in central Asia that, as he puts it, is “the mother of most apples that have a pigmented flesh.” He had read about the “Niedz,” but didn’t see it in person until he visited the Union Square Greenmarket during cider week last year, where the heirloom orchardist and cider maker Gidon Coll had one on display. “I kind of went nuts, but didn’t want to make a fool of myself, so I just took his card and didn’t talk to him about the photo project for a good nine or so months,” Mullan says. He finally worked up the courage to reach out to Coll, who graciously invited Mullan to his test orchard in Ancram, N.Y., to sample the Niedzwetzkyana apple. At first bite, Mullan says, “I immediately understood why, despite its really cool look, it wasn’t such a popular apple — it’s very, very dry and tannic. I don’t see the Honey Crisp crowd going crazy for it. That said, I liked it. But there are few apples I don’t like.”So much of what we think we know about old age comes from people who have never been old. But what does it look like to the people living it? In 2015, John Leland started following six people over age 85, and discovered how little he knew — at least 17 articles’ worth.
+They’re gay and straight; black, white and Asian; from different boroughs and diverse backgrounds. All had challenges, but none defined themselves by them. Only others did that.
+Helen Moses declares the wedding is on. Then off. Jonas Mekas gathers his photos of the Velvet Underground. And Fred Jones loses parts of two toes, but not his love of dirty jokes.You can call it a Triassic titan. Or a pre-Jurassic juggernaut. Just don’t call it a dinosaur. Despite its appearance, this burly behemoth was a completely different prehistoric beast: a dicynodont.
+Early relatives to present-day mammals, dicynodonts dominated Earth more than 200 million years ago, living first before, and then alongside, dinosaurs. Unlike dinosaurs, these herbivorous animals had short necks and large skulls. They were stocky like rhinos, toothless and had tusks and turtle-like beaks. Many ranged in sizes from pigs to hippos, though some were small enough to burrow into the ground.
+Now, scientists have uncovered a new species of dicynodont that towered over the rest, comparable in size to an elephant.
+The newly discovered species, known as Lisowicia bojani, was 8.5 feet tall and about 15 feet long, and weighed 9 tons. It is both the largest and youngest dicynodont found so far and its discovery provides further evidence that these proto-mammals survived into the late Triassic Period, past the point when many scientists had previously thought they went extinct.“Everything’s different this time,” college student Tree Gelbman (Jessica Rothe) says in the trailer for this sequel to “Happy Death Day,” the 2017 sleeper. “Now the killer’s coming after all of us.” Instead of Tree dying over and over again, now she has to keep killing herself to protect her friends from the psycho in the creepy baby mask. Sorry, but this was more fun the first time — when it was called “Groundhog Day.”At a recent Interpretations concert, the composer and pianist Anthony Davis, author of grand operas like “X — The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and “Amistad,” announced he would perform some material from his next opera, “The Central Park Five,” set to premiere at Long Beach Opera in June. Mr. Davis’s operatic writing was once performed at Lincoln Center by New York City Opera; now, if you want to hear this work in the city, you’ll likely end up at Roulette.
+Even if you can’t make it in person, you can tune in online; clips of select recent shows run on Roulette TV, while vintage audio recordings have been popping up on the venue’s SoundCloud page. Excerpts from performances by María Grand, Jennifer Choi and Amirtha Kidambi are particularly good on Roulette TV, and the SoundCloud page offers work by the likes of Leroy Jenkins and Pauline Oliveros. A launch party for an even more in-depth archive is scheduled for Feb. 12.
+The organization also supports up-and-coming artists with residencies and commissions. In the months before the pianist and composer Kelly Moran made her debut on the Warp label, with the album “Ultraviolet,” you could hear her working out the balance of live pianism and electronics at Roulette, thanks to one of its emerging artist grants.
+Describing the award as “way more monetary support than I’m used to,” Ms. Moran said in an interview that she was “shellshocked” to receive it: “It was kind of a surreal moment, because I had all these ideas for projects I wanted to do related to my record, and now I had the means to do them.”
+Roulette is generous to audiences, too. To my mind, its balcony remains far and away the city’s loveliest, most relaxing location from which to take in music. I knew Mr. Threadgill liked it, too, based simply on the number of times I have spotted him there. “It’s just so comfortable,” he said during our interview. “I got addicted to sitting upstairs.”
+Strangers tend to talk to each other during intermission, more than at other spaces devoted to experimental music. Artists often circulate before and after performances. And that beer you bought in the lobby? You can bring it into the hall.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The first phase of what was to be a sweeping plan to provide half-priced subway and bus rides to the poorest New Yorkers arrived on Friday, a few days late and many people short.
+If the plan had been presented last year as a major change in the lives of those struggling to make ends meet in New York City, the reality, announced by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Corey Johnson, the City Council speaker, is far less than anticipated: Only 30,000 New Yorkers — those who already receive cash assistance from the city and are employed — will be eligible for the cards starting this month.
+The pool of eligible New Yorkers would expand in April to about 130,000 people who receive federal food stamps and are working, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Johnson said — still a far cry from the 800,000 New Yorkers estimated by advocates to live below the federal poverty line of $25,000 a year for a family of four.
+The city has no mechanism for people to apply for the discounts; only those who receive cash benefits or food stamps can get the half-priced MetroCards.Maj. Sjaak van Elten, a spokesman for the Dutch Defense Ministry, said that 100 troops had been sent to the island of Schiermonnikoog on Friday and that they would continue cleaning up debris this weekend. He noted that Schiermonnikoog was one of the country’s “most scarcely populated islands, with the least capacity for volunteering, and it’s there that most of the rubbish is washing ashore.”
+“It’s not mopping up with the tap open anymore,” Major van Elten said, using a Dutch expression referring to an impossible, pointless task. “But after every high tide, new stuff arrives on the beaches, so the cleaning work continues day after day.”
+The Mediterranean Shipping Company said in a statement on Friday that it was using fast boats to tow drifting containers and sonar-tracing vessels for underwater recovery. It also deployed drones to try to prioritize what to recover.BEIJING — On a sleepless night last summer, her siamese cat Star at her feet, Zhou Xiaoxuan, a 25-year-old screenwriter in Beijing, took out her cellphone and began writing furiously about the day that had haunted her for years.
+In 2014, as a fresh-faced intern at China Central Television, the state-run broadcaster, she was asked to bring fruit to the dressing room of Zhu Jun, a famous anchor. It was there, she said, that Mr. Zhu began forcibly kissing and groping her. (Mr. Zhu has denied the accusations.)
+Ms. Zhou’s essay about the experience, which she posted online in July, was an impassioned plea for women’s rights in China — and a daring rebuke of the status quo.
+“It’s important for every girl to speak up and say what she has suffered,” she wrote in the essay, which totaled more than 3,000 Chinese characters. “We need to make sure society knows that these massacres exist.”A 61-year-old man from the Dominican Republic has been waiting for his day in federal immigration court since the 1980s, unable to visit his dying mother back home or, in recent years, legally hold a job. His trial was finally to come next week.
+But because of the federal government shutdown, he stands to lose his precious court date.
+In the backlogged immigration courts, that is likely to mean not just a few more weeks of waiting, but a few more years. Migrants like this man — who asked to be identified only by his first name, Jose, for fear of repercussions in court — are being sent to the back of the line, with their new court dates coming as late as 2022.
+From furloughs at the Justice Department to confusion in the courts, to prison officers working without a paycheck, the shutdown has challenged the nation’s courts and criminal justice system and those whose livelihoods depend on them, slowing some cases while throwing others into disarray.
+[Read more: On Friday, President Trump threatened to keep the government shut down for “months or even years."]Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, a historian who helped bring to light the long-suppressed role of black women in the women’s suffrage movement, died on Dec. 25 at her home in Columbia, Md. She was 77.
+Her daughter, Jeanna Penn, confirmed the death. The cause had not yet been determined, she said.
+Dr. Terborg-Penn, a professor of history at Morgan State University in Baltimore for more than three decades, was the author of seven books, most notably, “African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920” (1998).
+It was one of the first book-length examinations of black women in the suffrage movement, and it challenged the existing narrative that was dominated, and framed, by white activists like Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
+Dr. Terborg-Penn’s book was a counterweight to “History of Women’s Suffrage,” a six-volume work, begun in 1881, that was edited by Anthony, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage. That opus more or less erased from the picture the many black women who Dr. Terborg-Penn said had attended suffrage meetings, organized suffrage clubs and promoted the cause. Stanton, moreover, had expressed racist views, especially when arguing that women should have the vote before black men.Probing the sexual and professional misadventures of a struggling filmmaker after a breakup, the writer and director Adam Christian Clark (“Caroline and Jackie”) has cast himself in the lead of his unflinching semi-autobiographical “Newly Single.” Clark’s alter ego, Astor Williams Stevenson, comes across as a Todd Solondz character trapped in a Woody Allen film: Amid the familiar personality quirks, airy loft setting, glowing cinematography and orchestral score, the toxicity of Astor’s narcissism and frustration leaps out. He even flagellates himself with a paddle.
+In one montage, Astor prowls the Los Angeles dating scene, attempting to break the ice with every woman at the bar by flashing a $50 bill. Curiously, it is set to a melancholy Ronald Stein tune from the 1960 film “The Threat,” as if to elicit sympathy for Astor’s obnoxiousness. Scenes in which he repeatedly harasses his ex Valerie (Molly C. Quinn) leave no doubt, however, that Astor is a tool. He appears agreeable only in meetings and conference calls pertaining to his film, even if his colleagues find one of his artistic choices exploitative.In the story, based on a book series by George R.R. Martin, the ice wall was built thousands of years ago, with magical assistance, to keep out the White Walkers (the “Others” in the novels), a race of frigid beings dedicated to snuffing out all life. (I’ll let you Google the details.)
+[Plan ahead for the season to come with our culture calendar.]
+But as the Walkers lay dormant for centuries, people in Westeros started to forget. This nightmare enemy of all mankind, they decided, was a fairy tale. Instead, they came to believe, the wall was there to protect the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros from the “wildlings” — their term for the poor suckers who happened to live on the desolate northern side of the wall when it went up.
+Over generations, the Night’s Watch — the force created to patrol the Wall — changed its self-image too, thinking of itself as a kind of border patrol, an icebound I.C.E., there to defend Westeros from what it saw as savages who wanted to pour over the border and steal the riches of honest, hardworking Westerosi.
+If you’ve watched “Game of Thrones,” you know where it goes from there. The Walkers rise again, and the Night’s Watch leader Jon Snow (Kit Harington) wants to make common cause with the wildlings. “They were born on the wrong side of the wall,” he says. “That doesn’t make them monsters.”
+His comrades, declaring this fake news, stab him to death. (Only temporarily!) But by the most recent season, with the zombie army encroaching, a resurrected Jon has convinced the squabbling armies of Westeros to pause their war for the Iron Throne — sort of — to fight the undead.
+In “Game of Thrones,” in other words, nationalism and tribalism are not essential forces for preserving society but an existential threat to survival. The Wall is a mighty symbol of protection but ultimately an ineffective one; the only salvation, if there is one, is people deciding they have more to gain by working together. And the worst leaders (if sometimes the most successful) are those like Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey), who see disaster as an opportunity to decimate and divide rivals.The police in Phoenix have opened an investigation into allegations that a woman in a vegetative state at a private nursing facility was sexually assaulted and gave birth to a child last month, the authorities said Friday.
+Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a spokesman at the Phoenix Police Department, said that detectives were looking into the case at the facility, which provides long-term care for people with intellectual disabilities. Sergeant Thompson declined to elaborate on how long the investigation had been open or other specifics about the case, which was reported Thursday by KPHO-TV, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix. The woman has not been publicly identified.
+A spokeswoman at the Arizona Department of Health Services said that the agency was aware of the allegations and had sent inspectors to check on patients at the institution, which is about seven miles south of downtown Phoenix. The facility is part of Hacienda HealthCare, which its website describes as an organization for some Phoenix-based health care programs and services.
+“During this time, the agency has required heightened safety measures be implemented at the facility, including increased staff presence during patient interactions; increased monitoring of the patient care areas; and increased security measures with respect to visitors at the facility,” the spokeswoman, Melissa Blasius-Nuanez, said on Friday.PRINCETON, N.J. — For as long as I can remember, I have loved the silences of the concert hall almost as much as the sounds. The expectant hush that falls on an auditorium when the oboe’s A pierces through the hum of voices and the lights dim. The way a spellbound audience can wrap a protective silence around a pianissimo ending.
+But on a recent afternoon in Richardson Auditorium at Princeton University here, silence became an equal partner to the music. I was in the hall for a series called Live Music Meditation. (The next event, on March 28, features the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja.) For the first 20 minutes, while listeners quietly filed in, I sat motionless with my eyes closed, noting the sounds of footsteps and the rustle of coats.
+Gradually, the calm deepened, broken now and then by a male voice inviting us to focus on our breath, relax our shoulders, and clear our minds. From inside this stillness, the sound of a gong rang out like a bright explosion, followed by waves of amber overtones that seemed to dance with each other in space. Then more silence, long minutes of nothing to hear but the breathing of strangers. When the first notes of a clarinet threaded their way into my consciousness, they seemed to come from inside me.To the Editor:
+Re “2019: The Year of the Wolves” (column, Jan. 1):
+David Brooks’s forecast for 2019 — President Trump’s desperate attempt to defy all institutions of government to get whatever he wants — is totally plausible. Mr. Brooks’s remedy — a rebirth of congressional bipartisanship — is not. Only one party, the Democrats, is open to bipartisanship. Unfortunately, bipartisanship requires two.
+For two years, the majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has listened only to Mr. Trump, and Mr. Trump listens only to the most radical voices in his base, like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Representative Mark Meadows. And when Mr. McConnell tried bipartisanship and passed a stopgap budget bill with the support of Mr. Trump, the president heard those voices and changed his mind .
+The United States is now governed by a small minority of Americans, the most radical of Republicans, who are indifferent or hostile to the rest of us. And they have an advantage, because the president doesn’t care what happens to anyone else . He issues ultimatums and requires capitulation, so he can “win.”
+The ball is in the Republicans’ court. The stakes could not be higher.
+Caroline Poplin
+Bethesda, Md.To the Editor:
+We have had two years of a Trump presidency. Two years ago, I was very fired up. I promised myself that I would be vigilant. I promised that I would do everything in my power to hold President Trump accountable. And I did: I wrote, I called, I marched, I canvassed, I worked to get out the vote. And I voted.
+But it is getting hard to keep my righteous indignation at a level that will continue to fuel such a high level of action. It is not just that Mr. Trump’s outrageousness has become almost boringly status quo; it is that he has gotten away with so much despite all the protests. To his Republican base and their news sources he lies with impunity. He seems indeed to be made of Teflon.
+Yes, I have hope in the new diverse House. I have hope that Republicans like Mitt Romney might be a centering and rallying voice for an out-of-control, extremely conservative Republican Party that still overwhelmingly approves of Mr. Trump.
+But I cannot become complacent just because one part of Congress might push back, finally, against an unruly, careless president. Never. There is still too much at stake. So to all of you who have marched and written, called and voted, roar on. Our job is far from done.To the Editor:
+According to the statistic cited in Paul Greenberg’s “In Search of Lost Screen Time” (Op-Ed, Jan. 1), I am among the under 25 percent of Americans who don’t own or use a smartphone. According to friends and colleagues who can’t understand how I’ve made it into the 21st century without one, that fact qualifies me for a place in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
+When I started my business in 1996 and announced to my new clients that they would never be able to reach me by cellphone, many of them were horrified and wondered how I could ever possibly conduct business. Or what would happen, say, if a friend was delayed for our lunch date and absolutely had to get in touch to let me know that she’d be seven minutes late. I am glad to report that it has all worked out.
+I have found being smartphone-less delightfully freeing and not remotely a hardship (although I admit that it must be nice to have access to Uber on a rainy night). Otherwise, I can happily say — as suggested in Mr. Greenberg’s article — that I have the time to exercise and read books every day and I save lots of money.
+And while my honey and I don’t make love 16,000 times a year (per Mr. Greenberg’s calculation), I suppose that I would have to blame his smartphone for pulling down our stats.Suzanne Vega sat backstage at the Cornelia Street Café on New Year’s Day, remembering when she had first stepped into it almost four decades ago. She was 20, an undiscovered talent, and it was a Monday night. She had come to try out material on the young troubadours and folk-revival survivors who attended the weekly Songwriters Exchange there.
+The cafe had sprung up in 1977 on a little side street in Greenwich Village, where foot traffic overtakes the asphalt in summer, and the arched doorways give the block a European feel. The club quickly became an heir apparent to the Village’s old coffeehouses, which were peopled by poets and folk songsters in the 1950s and ’60s. But Vega didn’t remember it as a nostalgic place.
+“We felt ourselves to be modern and of the moment,” she said. If you wanted to perform at the Songwriters Exchange, it had to be your own music. “It had to be current stuff,” she added. These have been constants at the club over nearly 42 years: an aura of inheritance and an ethic of freewheeling invention.Earlier in the day, Mr. Trump had asked on Twitter, “How do you impeach a president who has won perhaps the greatest election of all time?” He continued the theme at his news conference by asserting that “you can’t impeach somebody who is doing a great job.”
+Ms. Pelosi and senior Democrats said they were determined not to take the bait for now and risk generating a backlash from Mr. Trump’s supporters, who would most likely see impeachment as the overreaction of out-of-control Democrats. But the words of Ms. Tlaib, who stood by her comments on Friday, made evident the pressure already mounting from the left, where public opinion polls suggest a majority of liberals want the president removed from office.
+“People love you and you win,” Ms. Tlaib told the crowd Thursday night. “And when your son looks at you and says: ‘Momma, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.’ And I said, ‘Baby, they don’t.’ Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”
+She made no apologies for the remark on Friday, proclaiming that “I will always speak truth to power” and fashioning her own hashtag, #unapologeticallyme. She told a Detroit television station that “it’s probably exactly how my grandmother, if she was alive, would say it.”
+Her outburst ran counter to all Democratic talking points. Ms. Pelosi and her deputies have repeatedly made the case that it is too early to consider impeachment. Even as Mr. Trump’s legal perils have deepened — and federal prosecutors in New York appear to have gathered evidence implicating him in a campaign finance crime — Democrats have said they want to wait to see the findings of an investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, of the president, his campaign and Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 election.
+“I don’t really like that kind of language,” Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — where any impeachment inquiry must begin — said on CNN. “But more to the point, I disagree with what she said. It is too early to talk about that intelligently. We have to follow the facts.”
+Ms. Pelosi defended Ms. Tlaib on Friday at a town hall hosted by MSNBC at the speaker’s alma mater in Washington, Trinity University. “I’m not in the censorship business,” Ms. Pelosi said.The deputies, from the Horry County Sheriff’s Office, had been told to safely transport the patients to a mental health center in September, as Hurricane Florence drenched the Carolinas. They were not being evacuated from the floodwaters, but being moved from hospitals for further treatment.
+One of the patients, Nicolette Green, 43, had schizophrenia and had been committed on the recommendation of her counselor. The other, Wendy Newton, 45, had asked to be taken to a hospital because she thought she was about to have a “spell.” Both women sought out treatment, hoping to feel better, their families said.
+Law enforcement officers were assigned to drive them to the mental health center, as is routine under state law. As water levels rose and roads shut down, Mr. Flood and Mr. Bishop “were provided a travel route that was believed to be safe,” a probable cause affidavit said.
+But the deputies did not take the path recommended by their supervisors, according to the affidavit. Instead, the authorities said, they took an alternate route, passing through a barricade and driving into floodwaters on Highway 76 in Marion County in northeastern South Carolina.[The L train shutdown was canceled. What exactly does that mean?]
+The new repair plan relies on an unproven technology that has never been used in the United States, raising questions about whether it can work without causing major disruptions. And the plan, for all of the governor’s promotion, was criticized as a simple patch job instead of a permanent solution.
+Mr. Cuomo’s 11th-hour dramatics are well known. He has fashioned his political brand around a series of concrete accomplishments and an aggressive response to disasters and other headline-grabbing events, like his campaign to make sure the Second Avenue subway opened on time. He has not been shy about wading into city affairs, including the management of the New York City Housing Authority and placing state troopers on city streets.
+His L train announcement on Thursday came together hastily. An email arrived at 12:34 p.m., alerting board members that the M.T.A.’s chairman, Fernando Ferrer, had accepted the Cuomo panel’s recommendations. Mr. Cuomo’s news conference began at 12:45 p.m.
+His panel of experts had been working for weeks behind the scenes, even on Christmas and New Year’s Day. Mr. Ferrer said leaders at the transit agency welcomed the new approach.
+“We’ve actually, over the last three weeks, literally spent hundreds of hours collectively working on this project,” Mary Boyce, dean of engineering at Columbia University, said.
+When Mr. Cuomo was asked on Thursday whether the board had to approve the repair plan, Mr. Cuomo said, “I don’t believe so.” Mr. Ferrer clarified that the board would, in fact, have to approve a new contract for the work.But she and other European researchers have demonstrated that people with dementia can significantly improve their ability to do the tasks they’ve opted to tackle, their chosen priorities. Those improvements persist over months, perhaps up to a year, even as participants’ cognition declines in other ways.
+“They want to be enabled to manage their lives,” said Dr. Clare. “It gives hope that they can handle everyday challenges.”
+This approach may represent the future for the growing number of older adults around the world with dementia. Trials of drugs to prevent or treat dementia have failed over and over. Even if some future treatment demonstrated effectiveness, millions of people and their stressed family caregivers need help now.
+“We can’t wait another 20 years for some magic pill,” said Laura Gitlin, dean of the College of Nursing and Health Professions at Drexel University. She has developed something called the Tailored Activity Program (T.A.P.), somewhat similar to cognitive rehab, which also brings occupational therapists into people’s homes.
+“We’re trying to lay the scientific basis for nonpharmacological approaches,” Dr. Gitlin said. “These studies signal that they can have powerful effects on peoples’ lives.”
+In the United Kingdom, for instance, a government-supported trial involving 475 people with early-stage dementia found that after cognitive rehab, most participants attained their goals, while those in a control group did not, and they maintained improvement at three months and at nine months. (The study has not yet been published; Dr. Clare presented the results at a conference last year.)“Breathe into the pain,” the yoga teacher says, and I think of other corpses that I have seen in recent years.
+I had a musician friend once who found out that he was about to die and he started writing poetry. Did everyone say that he was good because they knew that he was dying? I knew he was always good at poetry. He used to have a book on yoga but never practiced it.
+Inhale. Hold. Exhale.
+Another friend died. He wasn’t a poet or a singer. But he was very funny. And sometimes not funny at all. I miss him more because he didn’t leave any poetry behind. He probably would have approved of my doing yoga, and then made fun of me and told me there is no such thing as free-range chicken.
+And another friend died. She was funny, fierce and tender. She made a life out of being that. She never had time for yoga. Only street cricket.
+I console myself by thinking that all of them are in an eternal savasana without any lists.
+The yoga teacher says, hug yourself. I do hug myself, but I am thinking: Here’s a grown-up telling other grown-ups to hug themselves. I hug myself and think of a friend who is still alive. He was the first person in our group to discover yoga. He had chronic asthma. He took some classes, saved money, wrangled a visa to India and studied with some famous yoga teachers. We lost touch. Recently I found out that he has become much sought after as a yoga teacher and does only private classes.
+I ran into him and we arranged to meet for lunch. He told me what yoga has done for him. He is a mountain climber now, a serious one. He has reached eight of the world’s highest peaks. He saved $50,000 by teaching yoga. That’s the amount it takes to climb Mount Everest. Some people do it for much more. He said he did it the simple way.
+We recalled that when we were young and lived on the same street and used to send out our C.V.s, employers looked at our address and threw them away. Our address was known for having constant troubles and long curfews. My friend, a lower-middle-class boy, has cured his own asthma through yoga, then gone on to climb the world’s highest peak. In the class, I cheat on my breathing exercises and wait for savasana to begin.
+Mohammed Hanif (@mohammedhanif) is the author of the novels “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti” and “Red Birds.” He is a contributing opinion writer.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.[Read all of our classical music coverage here.]
+Happy new year! The Metropolitan Opera rang in 2019 with a boffo “Adriana Lecouvreur,” featuring a love triangle of Anna Netrebko, Anita Rachvelishvili and Piotr Beczala with enough sizzle to lead some critics to warm to the not-always-respected work. More on that in a second.
+I was more than 4,000 miles away, celebrating in Vienna with a life-affirming 26-hour musical marathon: Strauss’s ‘’Die Fledermaus” at the State Opera on New Year’s Eve; more Strauss the next morning at the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert in the Musikverein; and the Vienna Symphony playing Beethoven’s Ninth that evening.
+Is there a more musical city? In the New York of my childhood, aggressive street hawkers offered drugs to passers-by. In Vienna they sound almost as furtive, but their pitch is: “Concert? Opera? Strauss? Mozart?”
+Here are some postcards. MICHAEL COOPER
+The New Year’s Concert
+I’ve often wondered: Do the star conductors the Vienna Philharmonic brings in each year for its New Year’s concerts actually conduct, given that this music is practically this orchestra’s birthright?Most New Year’s resolutions turn out to be less successful than people expect when they make them, starting with high-minded goals for fitness.
+But this is a column about people who make wholesale life changes, people with financially solid careers who risk that stability. What they share is a single-minded focus on a niche, not an overarching vision to change the world.
+Monique Greenwood is one of them. She was the editor in chief of Essence Magazine, her childhood dream job. But as she was working on a book, “Having What Matters,” she realized that what she really wanted was to concentrate on what had been a sideline and go into the bed-and-breakfast business.
+“I decided I was worth the investment,” Ms. Greenwood said.
+For Lisa Congdon, the change was less an epiphany. She was working in a senior role at an education nonprofit organization and decided to take art classes on the side “with zero intention of becoming an artist; it was to balance office work.” Some 10 years later, she left the stable job to become a commercial artist and illustrator.WASHINGTON — Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas announced Friday that he would not seek a fifth term in 2020, ending more than a half-century of service in Washington and setting off what will likely be another fractious Republican primary between the party’s warring establishment and conservative wings.
+Standing before a shock of wheat at the Kansas Department of Agriculture’s headquarters in Manhattan, Kan., Mr. Roberts trumpeted the recent passage of the farm bill, recalled a career in Congress that began when he arrived on Capitol Hill as a congressional aide in 1967 and noted that he would leave Washington as the longest-serving lawmaker in state history. And, he noted, he never lost a race.
+“I’m damn proud of that undefeated record,” said Mr. Roberts, 82, his voice choking with emotion at times.
+But Mr. Roberts was nearly felled in his own primary in 2014, when he struggled to overcome the ascent of the Tea Party right and questions about his lack of a residence in Kansas. Mr. Roberts purchased a home of his own in Topeka in 2016, but he almost certainly would have faced another hard-fought primary had he run again.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+State Senator John J. Flanagan, who until this year led the Republican majority of the state’s upper legislative chamber, will miss the beginning of this year’s session in Albany in order to complete an alcohol rehabilitation program, he announced on Friday.
+Mr. Flanagan, who assumed the leadership of the chamber in 2015, had first sought treatment for alcohol dependency in 2017. In a statement on Friday, he said that he had recently recognized he needed to seek additional help and would miss the start of session, which begins on Wednesday, as a result of a “thorough rehabilitation and recovery program.”
+“No man or woman is perfect, but it does not mean we all shouldn’t strive for continuous and daily improvement. I will attempt to do that with every fiber in my body,” Mr. Flanagan, who represents central Long Island, said in the statement. “This brief period of time away is necessary for my overall well-being, but will in no way impact my ability to serve my conference or my constituents.”
+The Republicans decisively lost their slim majority in the Senate in November’s election, and with it their last toehold of power in state government. They will now enter the session in their weakest position in a decade, and without their leader. Senator Joseph A. Griffo, who represents Lewis and Oneida Counties upstate, will oversee the Republican conference until Mr. Flanagan, 57, returns.A historically high number of top movies had black directors last year, according to a sweeping study, released on Friday, that examined diversity behind the scenes and in studio boardrooms.
+While 2018 was a banner year for black directors — with 16 working on the top 100 films — 15 of those 16 directors were men; the one woman in that group was Ava DuVernay (“A Wrinkle in Time”). The overall figure was up from six black directors working on the top 100 films in 2017 and eight in 2007.
+“While we do not see this finding mirrored among female or Asian directors, this offers proof that Hollywood can change when it wants to,” said Stacy L. Smith, who wrote the report with the University of Southern California Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, which released it.
+Indeed, the remainder of the research showed little change for other ethnicity groups or for women. Surveying the 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007-18, researchers found that just over 4 percent had female directors, which meant that they were outnumbered by their male counterparts by a ratio of 22 to 1. And Asians represented just 3.6 percent of last year’s top 100 grossing directors, a number that changed little over 12 years.In 2017, Simon & Schuster canceled a book by the professional provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos after he gave an interview in which he appeared to condone pedophilia. His contract reportedly did not include a morality clause, and he sued, though he later dropped the suit. If a morality clause did lead to a book’s cancellation, we probably wouldn’t know it, according to Devereux Chatillon, a partner in the media and intellectual property law firm Chatillon Weiss who has represented both The New Yorker and writers. “It wouldn’t be public unless somebody sued over it,” she said. And even then, the lawsuit probably wouldn’t come to light.
+Morality clauses may be relatively new to mainstream publishing, but they have a long history. The entertainment industry started drafting them in 1921, when the silent-movie star Fatty Arbuckle, who had just signed a then-astonishing $1 million contract with Paramount Pictures, was accused of the rape and manslaughter of a girl at a party. Mr. Arbuckle was acquitted after two mistrials , but by then the public had soured on him, and the studios wanted out.
+Today the clauses are widespread in sports, television and advertising. Religious publishers have used them for at least 15 years, which seems fair enough. You can’t condemn a Christian publisher that cancels publication of a book called “The Ridiculously Good Marriage” after the author is accused of having sexually assaulted an underage girl when he was a youth pastor. (He apologized for a “sexual incident.”) Children’s publishers have been including the clauses for a decade or more, and they, too, have a case. It would be challenging to sell a children’s book written by a pedophile.
+Maybe you don’t find morality clauses alarming under any circumstances. “If what you’re selling me is your reputation, if that’s what I’m paying you for, then I should not have to pay you” if your reputation tanks, said Rick Kurnit, a partner in Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz, a firm specializing in art and entertainment law.
+Maybe you’re asking: Why should anyone get away with being a racist or sexist jerk? What gives Mr. Alexie, accused of hitting on women who saw him as a mentor, and Mr. Díaz, accused of forcibly kissing someone, the right to have their books published? Or even: Why should opinion writers be allowed to gratuitously insult duly elected officials? If a loudmouth suffers from a backlash, this reasoning goes, he probably deserves it.
+The problem with letting publishers back out of contracts with noncelebrity, nonreligious, non-children’s book authors on the grounds of immorality is that immorality is a slippery concept. Publishers have little incentive to clarify what they mean by it, and the public is fickle in what it takes umbrage at.
+In 1947, the concern was Communism, and morality clauses gave studios a way to blacklist the Hollywood 10, a group of directors and screenwriters who denounced the House Un-American Activities Committee as illegitimate and refused to say whether they’d ever been Communists. All 10 went to jail, and all but one, who decided to cooperate with the committee, became unemployable until the 1960s, though some continued to write under pseudonyms.ATLANTA — It was only 16 days ago when the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and its chairman, Jerome Powell, conveyed that he was fundamentally confident about the outlook for the United States economy.
+To markets, he came across as excessively dismissive of the message that turbulent stock, bond and commodity prices were sending. His comments were interpreted as implying the Fed was dead-set on pushing interest rates higher to prevent some hypothetical future inflation, consequences be damned.
+It’s clear that a jaw-dropping series of market swings, combined with some hints that a broader economic slowdown could be on the way, have made Mr. Powell rethink things.
+Two weeks ago, the consensus of Mr. Powell’s Fed colleagues was that two more interest rate increases were likely this year. In his message Friday, in a panel I moderated at the American Economic Association, he decidedly did not reaffirm that projection. Instead, his emphasis was on flexibility, adaptability and open-mindedness.LONDON — The Catholic Church, one of the few trusted institutions in Congo, has determined that a leading opposition candidate won this week’s presidential elections, a senior Western official and a presidential adviser said on Friday, setting up a potential confrontation with the Congolese government.
+The candidate, Martin Fayulu, a United States and French-educated oil executive, had led President Joseph Kabila’s handpicked successor, Emmanuel Ramazani Shadary, by nearly 30 points in recent polls. The Western official, who had talked to church officials, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing diplomatic protocol.
+The Kabila government also confirmed that the church had identified Mr. Fayulu as the winner. Kikaya Bin Karubi, a diplomatic adviser to the president, said in an interview on Friday that the governing coalition party was “aware” that the church had “chosen to publish the winning candidate as Martin Fayulu.”
+Mr. Kikaya said the church was breaking constitutional and electoral laws and was looking to start a “popular revolt that it will end up being responsible for.”Christine McGuire, the eldest of the singing McGuire Sisters, who struck gold on the pop charts in the 1950s with “Sincerely,” “Sugartime” and other close-harmony hits that won young American hearts not quite ready for rock ′n’ roll, died on Dec. 28 at her home in Las Vegas. She was 92.
+Ms. McGuire’s family confirmed her death in a statement released on Friday. No cause was given.
+With their identical dresses and hairdos, synchronized movements and sweetly innocent voices, the McGuire Sisters — Christine, Dorothy and Phyllis — were the musical embodiment of popular culture in their day, singing for audiences who watched “Your Hit Parade” on television and listened to Perry Como, Patti Page and the lingering postwar strains of the big band era.
+After appearing on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” in 1952, the McGuire Sisters soared to national fame. They were regulars on Mr. Godfrey’s morning shows for six years and remained one of the nation’s most popular vocal groups into the 1960s, singing on television, in nightclubs and on records that sold millions, even as teenage rebellion, Elvis Presley and rock ′n’ roll transformed the music world.
+The fashion-conscious Christine chose the sisters’ matching wardrobes, Dorothy kept track of finances, and Phyllis did most of the talking for the trio. Their million-selling records included two No. 1 hits, “Sincerely” in 1955 and “Sugartime” in 1958. Like other white performers of their generation, they recorded what critics called blander (but often better-selling) covers of rhythm-and-blues hits by black artists.In August 2004, Johnny M. Allen, 43, a real estate broker, picked up Ms. Brown at a fast-food restaurant in Nashville and bought her something to eat. He then drove her to his home, after she agreed to engage in sexual activity for $150, court documents say. After they got into bed, Ms. Brown said she thought he was reaching for a gun to kill her.
+She later shot him in his sleep with a handgun from her purse, took money and two guns, and fled, documents say.
+In 2006, she was tried as an adult. A jury rejected her claim of self-defense, finding her guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. She is serving a life sentence in Tennessee Prison for Women, and will be eligible for parole when she is 67.
+Lawmakers have pointed out that the laws have changed since Ms. Brown was convicted, and that under the trafficking laws and laws governing juvenile offenders that are now in place in Tennessee, it would have been more difficult for Ms. Brown to be tried as an adult.
+“Tennessee has changed with regard to giving young people life sentences,” Ms. Dowell said. “As time goes on you will see more scrutiny of those cases to make sure we made the right decisions.”
+In May 2018, the Tennessee parole board was divided on whether to recommend clemency to the governor. Two of the six board members recommended commuting Ms. Brown’s sentence to time served, while two voted to recommend making her eligible for parole after serving 25 years. Two voted to recommend denying clemency.
+The detective who investigated the murder of Mr. Allen wrote in a letter to Governor Haslam, published by NewsChannel5 on Friday, that she should not be granted clemency.Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to Listen
+“We’re all very good at leading our daily lives, our private lives, and setting aside the things that we don’t want to know about in the broader world,” Andrew Delbanco says on this week’s podcast. “Now and again, something happens that makes it almost impossible to do that.”
+One of those things happened in 1850, when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act. In his new book, “The War Before the War,” Delbanco argues that disputes over the fates of fugitive slaves did much to accelerate the divisions that led to the Civil War.
+“The fugitive slave law was an important force in bringing the public and the personal together for more and more Americans, and thereby woke them up to the fact that this was an existential moral problem,” Delbanco says. “How could you have a democratic republic based on the principle of liberty and equality in which millions of human beings were enslaved, some of whom were courageous enough to actually escape and tell you about it? It became more difficult to keep one’s head in the sand.”
+Image
+Rob Dunn also joins us this week, to discuss his new book, “Never Home Alone,” which is about the many (many, many) microbial life-forms that live in your house, your car and your place of work. And everywhere else. “We’ve swabbed thousands and thousands of sites,” Dunn says of his team of researchers. “We’ve never swabbed a spot in a house or a hospital that isn’t full of life.”The veteran pop singer Britney Spears announced “an indefinite work hiatus” on Friday, canceling her new Las Vegas residency, “Britney: Domination,” that was set to run at the Park MGM resort beginning in February.
+“I don’t even know where to start with this, because this is so tough for me to say,” Spears, 37, wrote on social media. “I will not be performing my new show Domination.” She cited the health of her father, Jamie Spears, who she said “almost died” two months ago.
+Representatives for Spears said her father’s colon spontaneously ruptured, causing him to spend 28 days in the hospital. “We’re all so grateful that he came out of it alive, but he still has a long road ahead of him,” the singer wrote. “We have a very special relationship and I want to be with my family at this time just like they have always been there for me.”WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to take another look at whether the Constitution bars extreme partisan gerrymandering. The move followed two decisions in June in which the justices sidestepped the question in cases from Wisconsin and Maryland.
+Those earlier cases had raised the possibility that the court might decide, for the first time, that some election maps were so warped by politics that they crossed a constitutional line. Challengers had pinned their hopes on Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, who had expressed ambivalence on the subject, but he and his colleagues appeared unable to identify a workable constitutional test.
+Justice Kennedy’s replacement by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh makes a ruling limiting partisan gerrymandering less likely, election law experts said. Indeed, the court could rule that the Constitution imposes no limits on the practice.
+The court’s decision to add two new cases on the question to its docket did not signal any particular enthusiasm for the project. While the court has almost complete discretion in deciding whether to hear most kinds of cases, Congress has made an exception for some disputes concerning elections. In those cases, Supreme Court review is all but mandatory.BEIJING — To most Americans, the names are unfamiliar, maybe a little hard to pronounce: Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo.
+They are China’s biggest smartphone brands. Around the world — although not in the United States — they are making the handset business brutally competitive. This week, after Apple warned of disappointing iPhone sales in China, industry observers said that devices from the Chinese brands were a major culprit.
+As the phone market in China reaches saturation and sales shrink over all, the country’s hardware makers are pushing hard, and increasingly winning fans, in places like France, Germany, India and Southeast Asia, where consumers find that the phones can do just about everything an iPhone can do at a fraction of the cost.
+Apple sits comfortably atop the market in many countries, including China, for the highest-end handsets. But companies like Huawei have started to do elsewhere what they have done in China, competing with the iPhone on experience and value and luring customers with price comparisons that make them rethink buying Apple’s signature product.The college football national championship game on Monday night matches two undefeated teams, Alabama and Clemson, both 14-0. It may seem hard to separate two teams that have swept all before them. But there are ways, and in the end, they point to one clear favorite in the game.
+[Alabama vs. Clemson: Follow our live coverage from the national championship game]
+Whom Did They Beat?
+Alabama and Clemson turned aside quite a few solid teams. Clemson had a slight edge, meeting 10 bowl teams to Alabama’s nine. But it isn’t difficult to make a bowl game these days. Using more exclusive criteria, Alabama clearly played a tougher schedule. It faced six teams in the final College Football Playoff top 25; Clemson faced three.
+Computer evaluations of schedules agree: Jeff Sagarin’s, for example, ranks Alabama’s schedule as the 28th toughest in the country and Clemson’s 45th.
+How Badly Did They Beat Them?
+Both teams dealt out some whippings this season: Clemson won games by 61 and 60 points, Alabama by 55 and 50. Their average margins of victory were quite close, both about 31.5 points per game.Big banks have more resources and don’t have as high a percentage of customers who are facing the prospect of no federal paycheck. So why can’t they make similar loans? “That is probably a great question for you to ask them,” said Bill Thorla, chief operating officer of the State Department credit union.
+Bank of America wouldn’t comment when I asked about zero-interest loans. JPMorgan Chase does not offer personal loans. Citibank isn’t offering any in this instance. If any national banks are doing so, please raise a hand.
+For-profit financial services firms are not heartless . American Express, Chase and Discover said that if eligible federal employees contact them first and explain their circumstances, there may be ways to put off debt payment for a month and not pay interest or fees while avoiding negative credit report repercussions. Citi says it is offering fee waivers, but the home page of its personal banking site makes no mention of its efforts. Bank of America has a general assistance program where people temporarily in trouble can ask the bank to cancel certain charges and make other modifications. (It has no website, but you can call 844-219- 0690 for help.)
+Banks are rarely cuddly, but there is no close reading of the government shutdown assistance page on Wells Fargo’s site that doesn’t feel conditional, lawyered and a wee bit stingy given its recent history. The bank dangles “forbearance” — a word that generally suggests mere toleration, but is specifically dirty if you’ve learned about it the hard way: when your student loan interest kept piling up while you took a timeout from payments.
+On Thursday, I began to pry a bit more information out of the bank’s spokesman, Tom Goyda. He confirmed that there were no zero-interest loans available, so the bank can’t match the credit unions there. He was concerned, given how different each individual customer’s circumstances may be, that other promises of relief might feel misleading. But he did allow that there may be some situations where the bank could do what American Express, Chase and Discover say they are willing to do: help federal employees who might not be able to make their payments.
+As of Thursday, the site said the bank “will consider reversing overdraft/non-sufficient funds fees for individual and business banking customers whose income is disrupted as a result of the shutdown” — making it sound as if its customers must be supplicants.
+By Friday, that statement had been replaced. Instead, the site said Wells Fargo “will work with” that same group, without the word “consider.” The site no longer mentioned specific fees at all, but Mr. Goyda said the change did not mean the bank would not still try to help with those charges.The band used its new material to audition for the record producer Joe Meek, who immediately saw their potential. They recorded “Have I the Right?” in Mr. Meek’s studio.
+Featuring twanging guitars and thumping drums augmented by stomping feet, the song was released as a single by Pye Records, whose managing director suggested that Ms. Lantree go by Honey and that the group become the Honeycombs.
+The Honeycombs appeared on television and released their first album, called simply “The Honeycombs,” in 1964. Some journalists accused the group of using Ms. Lantree, who dressed stylishly and sported a beehive hairdo, as a gimmick. Some even questioned whether she had actually played the drums on “Have I the Right?”
+“We couldn’t do nothing about it,” Mr. Murray said, “just deny it, which is the truth.”
+In late 1964, Peter Pye replaced Mr. Murray, and in 1965 the Honeycombs set off on a tour of Scandinavia, Australia and parts of Asia. That same year the group reached No. 12 on the British pop charts with “That’s the Way,” in which Ms. Lantree sang with Mr. D’Ell, and released a second album, “All Systems Go!”
+But the Honeycombs’ greatest success was already behind them, and the band broke up in 1967.
+“It was very traumatic,” Ms. Lantree told an Australian newspaper in 1991. “I was still living at home with my parents, and I went back to hairdressing. People still recognized me, and it was hard to get on with a new life.”
+Anne Margot Lantree was born on Aug. 28, 1943, in Hayes, Middlesex, England, to John and Nora (Gould) Lantree. Her father owned a sign-making business, and her mother was a homemaker.But it soon might be in the cross hairs of President Trump. Apple, one of the quintessential American brands, assembles most of its products in China — and Mr. Trump has noticed. He criticized Apple on the campaign trail, saying he’d force it to start making its products closer to home. While president, he has said Apple plans “to build a lot of plants” in the United States — even though it hasn’t announced plans to do so. (Mr. Cook hasn’t publicly corrected him.)
+While Apple avoided an iPhone tax in the first rounds of tariffs, it might not be so lucky if Mr. Trump is looking for more products to target. If that happens, Apple will be in a pickle. Its supply chain is entrenched in China, and finding another country that can match China’s scale and skill in the labor market will be difficult. The iPhone is also already among the world’s most expensive phones. Increasing the price to pay for tariffs would most likely scare away even more buyers.
+Cozying up to the president to spare Apple products from tariffs also risks angering Apple’s employees in liberal Silicon Valley — even some of its customers. So far, Mr. Cook has walked a fine line, holding cordial private meetings with Mr. Trump while also publicly criticizing his policies, without drawing the ire of the president or Apple employees.
+On Friday, speaking to reporters at the White House Rose Garden, Mr. Trump reiterated that he wanted Apple to move manufacturing to the United States.
+“Don’t forget this: Apple makes their product in China,” he said. “I told Tim Cook, who is a friend of mine and who I like a lot: ‘Make your product in the United States. Build those big, beautiful plants that go on for miles, it seems. Build those plants in the United States.’”
+He went on to say China, not the United States, gets the biggest benefit from Apple. “They build their product mostly in China.”Thirteen nations announced on Friday that they would not recognize the legitimacy of the new presidential term of Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, who is set to be inaugurated next week for a second time.
+Diplomats from Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and St. Lucia issued a joint statement after meeting in the Peruvian capital, denouncing last year’s election as flawed and urging Mr. Maduro to hand power to the opposition-controlled National Assembly until another election could be held.
+“The electoral process carried out in Venezuela on May 20, 2018, lacks legitimacy due to the lack of participation of all Venezuelan political actors, without the presence of independent international observers, or the guarantees and standards necessary for a free, fair and transparent process,” the statement read.
+The signatories, part of the so-called Lima Group — a multilateral working group of Latin American countries plus Canada that organized to find a peaceful solution to the crisis in Venezuela — urged Mr. Maduro not to assume the office, saying that the only way to restore democracy was for him to step aside.“Hamilton” has become an industry-changing phenomenon since its Broadway premiere in 2015. But the show has its detractors: One manifestation of this criticism will take the stage this weekend in New York.
+It is a reading of a play by Ishmael Reed, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” which will be held at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side and will run through Jan. 7.
+The play, directed by Rome Neal, will take aim at what Mr. Reed — a prominent and prolific satirical writer who was awarded a MacArthur Grant in 1998 — believes are inaccuracies with “Hamilton.” Some academics have long said the show glosses over the role of slavery of the period and have criticized the way Alexander Hamilton is presented. Mr. Neal said in a phone interview that Mr. Reed began writing his play at the beginning of last year.
+“He was talking about this subject a lot: ‘How they could put up a play about Hamilton and call him an abolitionist when he was a slave trader?’” Mr. Neal said.Dean Ford, vocalist for the Scottish band the Marmalade, whose voice was heard around the world on the group’s biggest hit, “Reflections of My Life,” died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 72.
+His daughter, Tracey McAleese Gorman, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
+Mr. Ford had a heady decade in the 1960s and early ’70s as the Marmalade (which eventually dropped its “the”) had hits in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, then grew even bigger with “Reflections,” a somber ballad in which the singer examines the world around him with dismay but also a glimmer of something positive.
+“The world is a bad place, a bad place, a terrible place to live,” sang Mr. Ford, who wrote “Reflections” with his bandmate Junior Campbell. “Oh, but I don’t want to die.”
+The song reached Billboard’s Top 10 in May 1970 after achieving even greater success in Britain. Fame, though, proved hard to handle for Mr. Ford, who left the group in the mid-1970s and struggled with alcoholism. In 1986 he sought help from Alcoholics Anonymous.RICHMOND, N ew South Wales — I thought I would come to Australia and learn to surf. Instead, I learned to walk.
+More precisely, I lumbered, jogged, waddled and generally humiliated my way around a track as I tried — and failed — to keep up with the world’s most exceptional race walker.
+That walker, Heather Lee, is 92 years old. She holds five world records and eight Australian ones for racewalking. She is the New South Wales Senior Australian of the Year. And she has big plans for 2019 — namely, breaking her own best times — so she does not kid around when it comes to working out.
+Ms. Lee trains at least three days a week. Wednesdays are reserved for interval training with her coach, Liz de Vries. “I never know what horrors she has in store for me,” Ms. Lee said. “But I’m turning back the clock as far as speed’s concerned.”LOS ANGELES — At the midway point of the N.H.L. season, the Tampa Bay Lightning find themselves in a position that is pleasantly familiar: the top of the league.
+Tampa Bay’s 66 points are the most in the N.H.L., as its 61 points were at the same time last season. But the Lightning’s dominance this season is stark. Entering Friday’s games, they are 12 points better than the next-best teams, the Toronto Maple Leafs and the Western Conference-leading Calgary Flames.
+In a league where nine teams have a point percentage above .700 in their last 10 games, Tampa Bay (32-7-2) has managed to be the hottest club. The Lightning have earned points in 16 games in a row, with winning streaks of eight and seven games flanking an overtime loss to the Winnipeg Jets, a Western Conference power. The Lightning have not lost in regulation since Nov. 27. They outscored opponents by 81-48 during that span and have a league-leading goal differential of plus-55.
+“You add in the skill set, you add in the leadership qualities that are within this room, it’s one of the best I’ve ever played with,” said Steven Stamkos, an 11-year veteran with the Lightning. “You put all those things together, and you don’t get complacent. Especially when you’re on a stretch like this. We want to win every night. We have that belief that no matter what happens, if we’re down a goal or two early, we’re going to find a way.”• Leadership: Only Mr. Trudeau and Elizabeth May of the Green Party will be repeat performers from 2015 as party leaders. Several polls suggest that many voters still don’t know much about Andrew Scheer, the former speaker of the House of Commons who now leads the Conservatives.
+Mr. Singh, a former Ontario provincial politician, also needs to define himself for a national audience. The wild card is Maxime Bernier, the libertarian former cabinet minister who has left the Conservatives to create the People’s Party of Canada.
+• Money: Unlike in American elections, Canada’s laws make votes here comparatively low-budget affairs. But donations are still the fuel of campaigns. The last fund-raising reports from the parties show that the Conservative machine remains well oiled, pulling in 4.8 million Canadian dollars in the quarter ending in September. The Liberals raised 3.8 million dollars. Both of those results are relatively consistent with the recent past. But the New Democrats have fallen hard, with well under one million dollars over the same time period.
+• Issues: Forecasting key election issues, like results, can be fraught. But unlike in 2015, Mr. Trudeau is unlikely to wander around the country making promise after promise. Many of his earlier vows remain unfulfilled or works in progress, and a handful were abandoned, notably a promise to reform how we elect members of Parliament. But he can point to a number of achievements, including middle-income tax cuts and the legalization of medically assisted deaths and recreational marijuana. And while Mr. Trudeau’s attempts to develop a relationship with President Trump came to a bitter end, a new Nafta was nevertheless struck.Egypt tried to block the broadcast of an interview by CBS News with President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi about his covert military cooperation with Israel, the network said Friday. The network refused and will broadcast the interview on Sunday.
+The attempt to stop the broadcast was the latest indication of the growing tension between Egypt’s public hostility and its private collaboration with the Jewish state.
+Egyptian officials and the state-owned Egyptian media continue to rail against Israel as a dangerous enemy, and as recently as 2016 the Egyptian Parliament voted overwhelmingly to expel a lawmaker for the offense of hosting a dinner with the Israeli ambassador to Cairo. (A fellow member of Parliament was so outraged he threw a shoe at the culprit.)
+Outside of public view, however, Egypt’s military and intelligence agencies have worked closely with their Israeli counterparts for nearly four decades, since the Camp David treaty of 1978. That cooperation has grown far closer since the military coup that brought Mr. Sisi to power in 2013.“From the New York Times Magazine, this is Behind the Cover. I’m editor in chief, Jake Silverstein.” “And I’m design director, Gail Bichler.” “Our story this week is a heartbreaking one about a kid named Alex, a student at a suburban high school in Long Island who was suspended for doodling the school’s mascot in his notebook. School officials saw the devil horns as telltale signs that he was a member of the MS 13 gang. He was referred to immigration and ultimately deported.” “We sent photographer Natalie Keyssar to take pictures of Alex’s family in Long Island, and we also sent her to Honduras to take pictures of Alex. They were hoping to capture his sadness and also his youth.” “It’s increasingly the case that we’re writing about immigrant communities we are very careful about revealing peoples’ identity.” “We don’t put it on the cover lightly.” “Alex and his family were very brave and decided that they were O.K. with showing their faces for the story.” “Right.” “Alex is one of many students who have had their lives upended by this aggressive crackdown. You just cannot imagine a more tragic mistake than a kid who gets deported to a violent country that he was trying to escape.” [music]Alexander Stubbs of the University of California, Berkeley, and Fernando Montealegre-Z of the University of Lincoln in England studied a recording of the sounds made by diplomats and published by The Associated Press.
+“There’s plenty of debate in the medical community over what, if any, physical damage there is to these individuals,” said Mr. Stubbs in a phone interview. “All I can say fairly definitively is that the A.P.-released recording is of a cricket, and we think we know what species it is.”
+Mr. Stubbs presented the results of the analysis at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology. He and Dr. Montealegre-Z also posted an early version of their study online. They plan to submit the paper to a scientific journal in the next few days.
+When Mr. Stubbs first heard the recording, he was reminded of insects he came across while doing field work in the Caribbean. When he and Dr. Montealegre-Z downloaded the sound file, they found that its acoustic patterns — such as the rate of pulses and the strongest frequencies — were very similar to the songs of certain kinds of insects.
+Male singing insects produce regular patterns during courtship. Females are attracted to certain males based on their songs, which has led to the evolution of different songs in different species.1. The shutdown won’t end soon.
+In a contentious meeting at the White House, President Trump and congressional leaders failed to break a deadlock that has kept the government partially shut down for nearly two weeks.
+Mr. Trump threatened to keep agencies closed for “months or even years” unless Congress approved money for his proposed wall on the southern border. Above, in the Rose Garden after the meeting.
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, whose party assumed control of the House this week, said Democrats were committed to securing the border but wanted government offices reopened while they negotiated. “We can do that best when government is open,” she said.ROME — Matteo Salvini likes spreading Nutella on his morning bread. He winds down with a bowl of Barilla pasta and a glass of Barolo wine. He heeds the words of wisdom inside the wrappers of Perugina Bacio chocolates. He drinks Moretti beer.
+Italy knows these things because Mr. Salvini, the country’s hard-line interior minister, deputy prime minister and leader of the anti-migrant League party, shares them on his many social media feeds. Just about every day.
+But Mr. Salvini’s social media feeds are not really about product placement, or the musings of a proud culinary nationalist. Rather, say those who have worked closely with him, they are part of a carefully studied and remarkably successful strategy to sell his common-man brand in an anti-elite era.
+A year after Mr. Salvini stormed Italian politics from the far right, his rise as Italy’s most powerful politician — far-eclipsing the influence of a prime minister many consider a puppet — has become a parable of the modern social media age. He is the study of a politician, much like President Trump, whose methods have shattered political norms, nearly all Italian politicians agree, whether they agree with his politics or not.WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration is accusing Juul and Altria of reneging on promises they made to the government to keep e-cigarettes away from minors.
+Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner, is drafting letters to both companies that will criticize them for publicly pledging to remove nicotine flavor pods from store shelves, while secretly negotiating a financial partnership that seems to do the opposite. He plans to summon top executives of the companies to F.D.A. headquarters to explain how they will stick to their agreements given their new arrangement.
+Dr. Gottlieb was disconcerted by the commitments the companies made in the deal announced Dec. 19, under which Altria, the nation’s largest maker of traditional cigarettes, agreed to purchase a 35 percent — $13 billion — stake in Juul, the rapidly growing e-cigarette start-up whose products have become hugely popular with teenagers. Public health officials, as well as teachers and parents, fear that e-cigarettes have created a new generation of nicotine addicts.
+“Juul and Altria made very specific assertions in their letters and statements to the F.D.A. about the drivers of the youth epidemic,” Dr. Gottlieb said in an interview. “Their recent actions and statements appear to be inconsistent with those commitments.”WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will press Saudi Arabia’s leaders this month on diplomatic conclusions that the kingdom has failed to sufficiently answer for the October killing of the dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a senior American official said on Friday.
+Turkish officials have said Mr. Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist who lived in Virginia, was beaten and dismembered when he visited the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul to get documents for his wedding. After his death, Saudi Arabia removed a few senior officials from their posts, and on Thursday a Saudi court held the first session in the trial of 11 suspects charged with Mr. Khashoggi’s death.
+The American official spoke as part of a briefing organized for journalists by the State Department to preview Mr. Pompeo’s visits to eight Arab nations in the Middle East from Jan. 8 to Jan. 15. Four senior officials spoke on the call on the condition of anonymity, which the State Department demands for such briefings.
+Separately, the department announced that a senior diplomat, James F. Jeffrey, is the new special envoy coordinating efforts to fight the Islamic State. Mr. Jeffrey will also continue as a special representative on Syria. The previous envoy, Brett McGurk, resigned last month after President Trump announced he was withdrawing all 2,000 American troops from Syria. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had resigned in protest two days earlier.But this past summer, the L train shutdown seemed certain, and so “it became a mad dash” for Mr. Dulay and his wife to relocate, he said. The couple put their apartment on the market, selling it for about $24,000 less than they were asking, because they were determined to leave the neighborhood before the train stopped running.
+They were not the only people to compromise. Landlords in Williamsburg were giving concessions to renters, offering them reduced rates or a free month’s rent, according to Andrew Barrocas, the chief executive of MNS, a real estate firm.
+With the shutdown averted, Mr. Barrocas said, some of the landlords now regret it.
+“They wish they wouldn’t have given the concessions,” he said. “But my response was, you know, ‘If you buy life insurance and you don’t die, are you upset about it?’”
+Overall, parts of the rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods along the L line became somewhat more affordable for renters before the reversal on Thursday, said Grant Long, an economist at StreetEasy, the New York City real estate site.
+Rents in north Brooklyn have fallen 1.5 percent since the shutdown was first announced, Mr. Long said, while rents in the rest of the borough rose by 3.3 percent.
+In general, the supply of apartment rentals in north Brooklyn was also outpacing demand, Mr. Long said. In Bushwick, available apartment listings more than doubled from October 2017 to October 2018, according to data from StreetEasy. In Williamsburg, the supply of apartments was near record highs.
+Mr. Long predicted rents would rise sharply in the near future as landlords looked to recover some of their lost revenue.I’ve heard the Oscar season feels like a political campaign. Has that been your experience?
+Yeah, it’s a political campaign with better fashion, I would say. There’s a whole lot of shaking hands and kissing babies, for sure. And a lot of selfie taking.
+Why is it like that?
+There are a lot of different reasons. There are smaller movies that have to rely on award-season attention, if they hope to stand out. There’s so much content out there, so much pop culture, and if you’re in the Oscar conversation, it can be the difference between getting lost and having everybody know the name of your movie.
+Also, for many people in Hollywood, winning an Oscar is something that they’ve been rehearsing in a mirror since they were likely very young. So it provides them a critical canonization that maybe they’ve long desired or wanted.
+What can you learn from watching the publicity machine at work?
+There are a lot of things you can parse. The more you do it, the more you can tell how confident a studio is in their campaign by simply looking at the restaurants they book or the stars or directors they get to co-host the party.
+How do you think growing up in Southern California has impacted how you look at Hollywood?
+I grew up just outside Los Angeles, which probably helps give me the right amount of distance but kept me close enough to understand how this system works.Georges Loinger, a physical education teacher in France who saved hundreds of Jewish children from deportation to concentration camps by helping to smuggle them into Switzerland, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Paris. He was 108.
+His son, Daniel, said he died after a recent fall.
+In the years after the German invasion of France in 1940, Oeuvre Secours aux Enfants, a relief organization known as O.S.E., orchestrated many efforts with the French Resistance to rescue the sons and daughters of European Jews who had been killed or sent to death camps.
+Some children were placed with French Catholics or sent to the United States; others lived in safe houses around France, where Mr. Loinger, who was Jewish himself, ran sports competitions to maintain the children’s physical and mental well-being.
+Mr. Loinger (pronounced low-ohn-JAY) was well suited to his clandestine work. He not only spoke German fluently, but with his blond hair and blue eyes he could also pass as an Aryan while smuggling young Jews.For 70 years, women arriving at Marine Corps boot camp have learned to fire rifles, slide down ropes, and sprint through obstacle courses while separated from male counterparts. But now, for the first time, a platoon of women has been integrated into one of the all-male training groups.
+The platoon of 50 women, training at Marine Recruit Depot Parris Island in South Carolina, will still perform most exercises apart from the men, but they will join together for larger training missions.
+It’s a small step — and one that would be a step backward for other military branches — but is a notable advance in integration for the Marine Corps, which has the lowest percentage of women of any military branch and for years has resisted efforts to integrate its fighting forces.
+The rest of the military is already completely integrated when it comes to basic training. In Army infantry training, for example, women and men have been tramping through the woods in mixed squads for nearly two years. But the Marines have said that too much mixing would distract recruits, and perhaps intimidate female Marines.Transportation Security Administration workers at several major airports around the country, working without pay since the partial government shutdown began on Dec. 22, have been calling in sick in heightened numbers, according to union and airport management officials.
+More than 150 T.S.A. employees, many of them responsible for screening passengers, called in on Friday morning at Kennedy International Airport in New York to say they were ill or otherwise unable to work their shifts, according to a union official with knowledge of the situation.
+The staffing gap was covered by other officers, who are also working without pay, the person said.
+The so-called call-outs have spiked to three times their normal level at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where an average of 25 T.S.A. employees usually call in sick per shift, a local official of the agency told CNN, which first reported on the story.
+The shutdown has left 800,000 federal workers either on furlough or working without pay because their jobs are deemed essential.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced late Friday night that it would freeze a pay raise for Vice President Mike Pence, members of the cabinet and other high-ranking political appointees in light of the partial government shutdown.
+The high-level officials were positioned to receive a raise of about $10,000 a year — which was to go into effect on Saturday — as 800,000 federal employees were entering their third week without pay.
+The increases were the result of Congress’s failure to renew a longstanding freeze on raises for high-ranking officials and political appointees. An extension of the freeze was included in the spending bills funding multiple government agencies that were not acted on before the expiration on Thursday of the 115th Congress.
+But on Friday night, the Office of Personnel Management announced that “it would be prudent for agencies to continue to pay these senior political officials at the frozen rate until appropriations legislation is enacted that would clarify the status of the freeze.”For more than two decades, the R&B singer Robert Kelly, who performs as R. Kelly, has faced accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse.
+This week, a six-part documentary on Lifetime is taking an expansive look at the allegations against Mr. Kelly, a chart-topping artist whose history has invited extra scrutiny in recent years.
+The series, “Surviving R. Kelly,” includes testimony from several women who accuse the singer of abuse, as well as commentary from Mr. Kelly’s critics, including the founder of the #MeToo movement, Tarana Burke, and the singer John Legend.
+The six episodes, each an hour long, cover the long history of allegations against Mr. Kelly. They feature women who described being controlled or abused by him, often when they were teenagers, as well as associates and relatives of the singer.Misconduct in the federal prison system is widespread, tolerated and routinely covered up or ignored, including among senior officials, according to a congressional report released this week.
+The report, by the House Subcommittee on National Security, found that a permissive environment in the Bureau of Prisons had often made lower-ranking employees targets of abuse — including sexual assault and harassment — by prisoners and staff members.
+Inmates can easily exploit that culture of permissiveness, the report said. “If they know that an employee will get little support from management if harassed, that employee becomes a target.”
+The study underscores a New York Times investigation of federal prisons last year that found rampant sexual harassment, retaliation for those who spoke out and few consequences for those responsible.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In 2007, an unlikely figure vowed to leave the Sinaloa drug cartel: Vicente Zambada Niebla, a son of one of its leaders and the group’s heir apparent.
+As strange as it was that a cartel prince wanted to quit the empire that he had been groomed to run, Mr. Zambada’s plan to escape the enterprise was even more unusual: His father’s partner, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the crime lord known as El Chapo, offered to put him in touch with federal drug agents in the United States, he said.
+While many of the details of Mr. Zambada’s departure from the drug trade are still shrouded in secrecy, he talked about some of them for first time Friday on the witness stand at Mr. Guzmán’s drug trial in New York.
+At 32, Mr. Zambada told the jurors, he had grown weary of the narco life and asked his father, Ismael Zambada García, for permission to “retire.” It was then, he said, that Mr. Guzmán made an astonishing proposal: He offered to reach out to his “contacts” in the Drug Enforcement Administration and see if they would meet with the young man.LOS ANGELES — LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers has shown throughout his 16-year N.B.A. career that he is good at a lot of basketball-related activities, including scoring, passing, rebounding and winning. But perhaps one of his most remarkable assets — a feat, really — is his durability. He seldom misses games because of injury.
+But now, less than a week after turning 34, James is still on the mend from straining his left groin in a win over the Golden State Warriors on Christmas Day. The timetable for his return remains uncertain.
+The Lakers announced on Friday, before playing the visiting Knicks, that James would not make a coming trip with the team for back-to-back games against the Minnesota Timberwolves on Sunday and the Dallas Mavericks on Monday. The Lakers’ next game after that is on Wednesday against the Detroit Pistons at Staples Center.
+The team said in its statement that James was making “progress with his recovery” as he received daily treatment from the team’s medical staff and that he would be re-evaluated in one week.WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Washington has extended the term of a grand jury hearing evidence uncovered by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential race and the Trump campaign.
+The jurors, impaneled in July 2017, will continue to meet for up to six months. Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, approved the extension ahead of the scheduled expiration of the grand jury’s term this week.
+The extension underscores that Mr. Mueller’s team continues to pursue leads about Russia’s covert effort to influence the results of the 2016 election, and whether anyone in the Trump campaign conspired with Moscow to help Donald J. Trump triumph over Hillary Clinton.
+The prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller are believed to be writing a report for senior Justice Department officials summarizing their findings, but it is unclear how detailed it will be or how or whether it will be made public, including whether the White House could interfere with its release. Representative Jerrold Nadler, Democrat of New York and the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, told CNN on Friday, “We will make sure it is public.”WASHINGTON — Congress is reviewing the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions on companies owned by Oleg V. Deripaska, an influential Russian oligarch with close ties to President Vladimir V. Putin, Democrats said on Friday.
+The reviews could fuel a congressional effort to block the administration’s decision, which came after an aggressive lobbying and legal campaign against the sanctions by Mr. Deripaska’s corporate empire.
+Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, laid the groundwork to block the lifting of the sanctions on Friday, filing a congressional resolution disapproving of the move by the Treasury Department.
+In a statement accompanying the resolution, Mr. Schumer said that “critical questions” remained unanswered about the agreement to lift the sanctions between the Treasury Department and Mr. Deripaska’s companies, including the aluminum giant Rusal.WASHINGTON — The United States is accusing Peru of violating its commitment to protect the Amazon rain forest from deforestation, threatening to hold Lima in violation of the 2007 United States-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement.
+On Friday, Robert Lighthizer, President Trump’s top trade negotiator, announced that he was seeking formal consultations with Peru to resolve concerns about its recent decision to curtail the authority of the country’s forestry auditor, Organismo de Supervisión de los Recursos Forestales, which was established to comply with the treaty. The move prompted concern within the Trump administration — and complaint from congressional Democrats — that it will lead to more illegal logging in Peru.
+“By taking this unprecedented step, the Trump administration is making clear that it takes monitoring and enforcement of U.S. trade agreements seriously, including obligations to strengthen forest sector governance,” Mr. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative, said in a statement.
+The challenge is intended, in part, to send a signal to Democrats that the administration is willing to enforce environmental and labor provisions that are included in trade agreements. The forestry agreement was inserted into the 2007 trade agreement by Representative Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who was sworn in as speaker of the House on Thursday. The language is the basis for enforcement provisions of environmental and labor standards in the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement that the three countries settled on last year.If anyone thought the Yankees’ acquisition of Troy Tulowitzki, which was completed on Friday, was going to provide some clarity about the rest of their winter plans — particularly the pursuit of the infielder Manny Machado — well, good luck with that.
+General Manager Brian Cashman, in a conference call with reporters on Friday, said his scouts had been so impressed with Tulowitzki in two workouts that they plan to turn the shortstop job over to him until Didi Gregorius returns from Tommy John surgery, whether that is in June, July or August. Tulowitzki has not played since 2017.
+As for whether the signing of Tulowitzki, who agreed to a one-year, minimum-salary contract, takes the Yankees out of contention for Machado, Cashman said: “I can’t say what it would take us out of. But I will say we’re going in with a commitment level to try Troy Tulowitzki at shortstop.”
+The Yankees are not inclined to go near the type of 10-year, $300 million contract that Machado is seeking, but if his market turns out to be less than robust — he has met with only two other teams, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Chicago White Sox — he could still be in the team’s plans at third base. Cashman said he had continued to speak with Machado’s agent, Dan Lozano, but did not characterize the conversations or say when they had taken place.Reaffirming that “much progress remains to be made … in moving the nation toward a more integrated society,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2015 that it was appropriate for the Fair Housing Act of 1968 to let discrimination be measured by its “disparate impact” on minorities even if there was not proof of intentional discrimination.
+The reason, as he noted , is that discrimination doesn’t just happen overtly, that governments and private actors sometimes take actions that fall hardest — or have a disparate impact — on people of color or other groups .
+But the Trump administration, which has already rolled back Justice Department oversight of police departments and Education Department protections for transgender students, may be targeting the principle of disparate impact in its latest effort to undermine civil rights enforcement, according to a report in The Washington Post.
+Of course, some trial balloons floated out of the Trump administration vanish into the ether without becoming policy. May this be one of them. The reported changes would be a major shift in the way the executive branch has enforced civil rights laws for the past few decades.Like Nelcy and her daughters, the new arrivals from Central America are coming in much sicker, after being held far longer than ever before in bare-bones government detention facilities never intended for children. Asylum seekers bottled up in Mexico are jumping fences and throwing rocks at officers, who are firing tear gas to push them away. Hundreds of migrants have been released on city streets in recent weeks, uncertain of where to go. Two sick migrant children have died while in custody.
+A crisis of the kind President Trump has long warned of is beginning to take shape along the country’s 1,900-mile border with Mexico. A border security network built over a period of decades to handle large numbers of single men has in the past several years been inundated with women and children, and as the number of families has peaked in recent months, the system has increasingly been unable to accommodate all of them.
+Much of the growing chaos, say many of those who work along the border and in some of the government’s own security agencies, is a result of a failed gamble on the part of the Trump administration that a succession of ever-harsher border policies would deter the flood of migrants coming from Central America.
+It has not, and the failure to spend money on expanding border processing facilities, better transportation and broader networks of cooperation with private charities, they say, has led to the current problems with overcrowding, health threats and uncontrolled releases of migrants in cities along the border.Pegi Young, a late-blossoming folk-rock musician who was a founder of a school for children with severe physical and speech impairments, like her son from her marriage to the singer-songwriter Neil Young, a performer at its many star-studded benefit concerts, died on Tuesday in Mountain View, Calif. She was 66.
+Her brother Paul Morton said the cause was cancer.
+By the early 1980s, Ms. Young had grown frustrated with the special education programs available for her son, Ben, who was born with cerebral palsy in 1978. She began thinking about starting a school to better address his needs and those of other children who had largely lost the ability to speak.
+That inspiration led in 1987 to the Bridge School, an innovative institution in Hillsborough, Calif., that has since achieved global reach. Ms. Young founded it with the speech and language pathologist Marilyn Buzolich and Jim Forderer, who had adopted many special-needs children.
+At the school, about 17 miles south of San Francisco, children from ages 3 to 12 use augmentative and alternative communication techniques, including speech generators and manual communication boards, to help them articulate their thoughts and prepare to complete their educations in their local school districts.Speaker Nancy Pelosi has ruled out paying for a border wall, even at a much lower funding level, despite suggestions by Mr. Trump that the government shutdown could last “months or even years.”
+Administration officials have been scrambling to tackle the legal and logistical problems involved with steering previously allocated funding toward any project that can be described as a wall, a fence or a barrier.
+The definition of a wall has grown ever more elastic.
+The White House and homeland security officials have been pushing the Pentagon to continue to use military troops at the border — mainly to install, extend and repair a section of concertina wire used to stop immigrants from entering unmanned sections of the southwest border.
+Mr. Trump tweeted last month that “the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall” — a reference to several hundred miles of fencing along the border.
+The temporary troop deployments are just one of many recommendations that the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, and her staff have made to the Pentagon.
+One possible solution, in the absence of new congressional allocations, is figuring out a way to steer contracts already planned for Army Corps of Engineers projects toward some kind of barriers. But lawyers at the Homeland Security and Justice Departments have yet to determine if doing so could withstand court challenges, two senior administration officials said.
+Mr. Trump spent the holidays at the White House to demonstrate his determination to secure new border funding. Yet he has struggled to dramatize his cause, as stories of federal employees and other Americans suffering from the effects of the shutdown pile up.NASHVILLE — There’s a New Year’s tradition among bird-watchers: The first bird you see on New Year’s Day is your theme bird for the year. Your spirit bird, the bird that sets the tone for your encounters with the world and with others, the bird that guides your heart and your imagination in the coming year.
+It’s hardly a serious ornithological exploration, but there are plenty of birders who will wake before dawn anyway, no matter how late they stayed up on New Year’s Eve. They will drive off to some wild place teeming with avian life, all to increase the sunrise odds of seeing a truly amazing first bird. Who wouldn’t love to be matched for a year to the spirit of the snowy owl? What a gift to be guided for 12 months by the soul of a Bohemian waxwing!
+I’m not a real birder, and my first bird of the year is always some ordinary creature: a cardinal or a blue jay or a plain-vanilla American robin. I keep hoping for a dark-eyed junco — those adorable puffballs that live in Middle Tennessee only in winter — but small gray ground foragers aren’t as easy to see as the brighter, bigger birds that cling to the feeders surrounding my house. The first feeder “bird” I saw outside my window this year was a gray squirrel. By the time I got up, hours after dawn, he had already chewed a hole in the hard wire mesh of the new feeder some friends gave us for Christmas. For me, apparently, this will be the Year of the Persistent Domestic Rodent.
+Winter is not generally a season that inspires a sense of hope. Short gray days are followed by long dark nights, with no intervening sense that time is passing, that progress of any kind is being made. The other seasons are observably different from one day to the next — new flowers blooming in springtime, baby birds fledging in summer, leaves turning new shades of color all fall — but in winter the world is fast asleep. Silent. Still.WASHINGTON — At first, he vowed to “take the mantle” for closing part of the federal government. Then he blamed Democrats, saying they “now own the shutdown.” By Friday, President Trump was back to owning it again. “I’m very proud of doing what I’m doing,” he declared.
+Two weeks into the showdown over a border wall, Mr. Trump is now crafting his own narrative of the confrontation that has come to consume his presidency. Rather than a failure of negotiation, the shutdown has become a test of political virility, one in which he insists he is receiving surreptitious support from unlikely quarters.
+Not only are national security hawks cheering him on to defend a porous southern border, but so too are former presidents who he says have secretly confessed to him that they should have done what he is doing. Not only do federal employees accept being furloughed or forced to work without wages, they have assured him that they would give up paychecks so that he can stand strong.
+Never mind how implausible such assertions might seem. The details do not matter to Mr. Trump as much as dominating the debate. After an oddly quiescent holiday season in which he complained via Twitter about being left at home alone — “poor me” — he has taken the public stage this week clearly intent on framing the conflict on his own terms.Granted, it’s a strange way to run a subway.
+After three years of planning, and of anxiety for thousands of Brooklyn residents, a plan to shut the L train tunnel under the East River in April for 15 months of repairs jerked to a halt on Thursday. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that outside engineering experts, taking a fresh look at the tunnel, had come up with a way to make the repairs without immiserating commuters. Only night and weekend service would be disrupted or delayed, he said.
+The news was greeted with great relief by many, skepticism by some, and the word “duh” by still others, who, while perhaps not experts on mass transit, found themselves wondering why such a seemingly obvious idea hadn’t surfaced much earlier.
+Why, some asked, was the governor getting involved so late? Why hadn’t the Metropolitan Transportation Authority considered this innovative technique years ago? How could the M.T.A. have any credibility with its long-suffering customers after this?
+These are good questions, maybe less about the new proposal than about the system as a whole, which, apparently, requires a bolt out of the blue, or Albany, to shake things up. To respond to them in reverse order: Did the M.T.A. have much credibility to begin with? Is it any surprise that it hadn’t considered a simpler alternative given its record of delays and fiascos? And does it make any difference why Mr. Cuomo got involved so late if it turns out that he has now come up with a better solution?Napoleon is said to have remarked that if he had been killed in 1812 as he entered Moscow in triumph, he would have gone down in history as the greatest general who ever lived. Then came the retreat, the long limp back to France, and unspeakable loss.
+Good timing in death, as in any departure, is important. I have been thinking about this in relation to the passing last month of Amos Oz, the great Israeli novelist whom I counted as a friend. He was the conscience of Israel, true to the founding ideals of the nation and to Judaism itself, and he went as every idea he had stood for — peace, compromise, dignity, decency and human rights — is being trampled in the Holy Land and beyond.
+Oz, at least, will be spared the spectacle of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, fawning over an American president, Donald Trump, whose notion of peace in the Middle East seems to be a dismissal of every Palestinian claim. He will be spared the littleness of the leaders of Israel and Palestine. He will be spared their cowardice. He will be spared the farce of Jared Kushner’s ideas about peace, should they ever issue from His Languidness. History is spinning backward.
+I would meet Oz at his Tel Aviv apartment. He was an early riser. His best working hours were between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m. “You have to work very hard for your readers not to note a single false note,” he told me. “That is the business of three-quarters-of-a-million decisions.” He told me, with that twinkling smile of his, about receiving a literary prize from China and telling a crowd in Beijing how honored he was because between them the Chinese and the Jews represented close to 20 percent of humanity.“You can’t impeach somebody who is doing a great job. I have probably done more in the first two years than any president, any administration in the history of this country.”
+PRESIDENT TRUMP, after a meeting with congressional leaders in which he invoked House Democrats who want to impeach him.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Friday about Paul N. Whelan’s arrest in Russia described incorrectly his university education. Mr. Whelan attended Northern Michigan University from the fall semester of 1988 until the fall semester of 1990 but did not complete his bachelor’s degree, according to the school; he did not graduate from the University of Michigan. (The information came from Mr. Whelan’s Russian social media account, where he said he studied at the University of Michigan.)
+NATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about how Native Americans have been affected by the government shutdown, using information from an Interior Department report from January 2018, gave outdated figures for the number of employees set to be furloughed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. It is 2,295 of 4,057, not 2,662 of 4,490.
+BUSINESS
+The Wheels column on Friday about high-end sound systems for cars misidentified an Acura model in reference to sound profiles. The RLX has a sound profile different from the hybrid versions, not the RDX.
+WEEKEND ARTS
+An article on Friday about recommended winter TV series misstated the premiere date for the third season of “High Maintenance.” It will debut on Jan. 20, not Jan. 19.Meanwhile, legalization advocates have squelched discussion of the serious mental health risks of marijuana and THC, the chemical responsible for the drug’s psychoactive effects. As I have seen firsthand in writing a book about cannabis, anyone who raises those concerns may be mocked as a modern-day believer in “Reefer Madness,” the notorious 1936 movie that portrays young people descending into insanity and violence after smoking marijuana.
+A strange disconnect has resulted.
+With large studies in peer-reviewed journals showing that marijuana increases the risk of psychosis and schizophrenia, the scientific literature around the drug is far more negative than it was 20 years ago. Comparing two major reports from the National Academy of Medicine , the nonprofit group that advises the federal government on health and medicine, makes the difference clear.
+In a report in 1999, the academy (then called the Institute of Medicine) reported that “the association between marijuana and schizophrenia is not well understood.” It even suggested the drug might help some people with schizophrenia. But in its next major report on marijuana, released in 2017, the academy reached a very different conclusion: “ Cannabis use is likely to increase the risk of schizophrenia and other psychoses; the higher the use, the greater the risk.”
+Yet the change in the scientific consensus has gone unnoticed. Americans in general are far more likely to believe the drug is safe, and even medically beneficial, than they once were. As a result, support for legalization has doubled since 1999.
+Making matters worse, the ways Americans use cannabis are changing in ways that further increase its risks.“All of us, together, raising our voices — that’s what’s going to make real change,” she said. “And Iowa is going to have a big part of determining where we go next.”
+[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]
+The event not only kicked off Ms. Warren’s campaign, but marked the starting point to what figures to be a long and grueling Democratic primary season. Dozens of candidates, including governors, senators and big-city mayors — many of whom will be new to the national stage — are considering joining the race in the coming months.
+Some have characterized the 2020 Democratic nomination process as perhaps the most wide open since 1992: The party has no single leader, no obvious front-runner to challenge President Trump in 2020, and no broadly unifying ideology as it moves away from a quarter-century of dominance by the Clintons and Barack Obama.
+Ms. Warren, who will be among the top-tier candidates no matter who else runs, has staked out a position as one of the party’s most resolute voices on the left. Before she took questions from the audience, she laid out her overarching premise of America’s ills: too much corporate money in the political system, a retrenchment from government regulation in the market and even overt discrimination that has affected racial minorities.
+“It is an America right now who works for the rich and powerful. And we need to call it out for what it is: corruption pure and simple,” Ms. Warren said. “What’s happening to opportunity in this country? Why is the path so rocky for many — and why is it so much rockier for people of color?”PRODUCER 3: Tech.
+TUCKER: Well, obviously tech. Goes without saying, doesn’t it? I mean, Sean here wasn’t exactly the comp-sci genius of his high-school class, was he? But apart from financing, deregulation, and technology. …
+PRODUCER 4: Global markets for our products.
+PRODUCER 5: Capital markets for our retirement accounts.
+PRODUCER 6: Stable and predictable legal and regulatory environments.
+TUCKER: Yeah, yeah, all right. Fair enough.
+PRODUCER 7: Immigrants.
+TUCKER: Immigrants?!
+PRODUCER 7: William Lewis, the C.E.O. of Dow Jones, is English. Also Gerry Baker, the former editor of The Wall Street Journal. And Peter Rice, the 21st Century Fox president, now going to Disney. Robert Thomson, the C.E.O. of News Corp., is from Australia, along with Col Allan, the former editor of The New York Post. Rupert, too, obviously.
+TUCKER: Yeah, well, it’s not like they’re Hondurans or something. Australians aren’t a bunch of criminals.
+Embarrassed silence.
+TUCKER: Anything else they’ve done?
+PRODUCER 1: Well, there’s also Manhattan itself. It’s not like any of us would actually want to work in, you know, Dayton or Detroit or any of the neglected corners of America you speak about so touchingly, Tucker. New York’s murder rate hit yet another record low last year. And frankly, we prefer eating at Oceana than, you know, the Olive Garden.
+PRODUCER 2: And education. I mean, most of us here graduated from elite schools. You went to St. George’s and Trinity College. Laura went to Dartmouth. Let’s be honest: Except for Sean, it’s not like the people who produce the shows at Fox have that much in common, socially or economically speaking, with much of the target audience.“All of the border things that we’ll be building will be done right here in the good old USA by steel companies that were practically out of business when I came into office as president. And now, they’re thriving.” Later, he said, “the steel industry was almost dead.”
+"Dead" is an exaggeration. Steel production has been in decline, as has the number of employees in the industry. But the metals industry still employed over 360,000 workers and produced 80 million tons of raw steel in the year before Mr. Trump took office.
+At any rate, Mr. Trump continued, “we’ve already built a lot of the wall” and “renovated a tremendous amount of wall.” (The Trump administration has replaced some existing barriers with new barriers, and will begin constructing 14 miles of new wall in February. But to date, construction on his border wall has not started.)
+Shutdown ownership and impact
+In his first meeting about a shutdown with Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer in the Oval Office last month, the president forcefully said that he alone would own the shutdown. On Friday, he was selling shares in it. “You can call it the Schumer or the Pelosi or the Trump shutdown,” he said. “Doesn’t make any difference to me. It’s just words.”
+Could he reach a compromise with Democrats to end the shutdown by coupling wall funding with a pathway to citizenship for the young immigrants known as Dreamers? Mr. Trump responded that Democrats lost interest as soon as the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against his administration’s termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. (A deal on the program and to avoid an earlier government shutdown in early 2018 faltered last January, after Mr. Trump made vulgar remarks on immigration. The court ruled on the case in November.)
+That was such a bad decision from the court, Mr. Trump asserted, that even his predecessor, “when he signed the DACA, with the executive order, made a statement to the effect, this isn’t going to work.” (President Barack Obama did not sign an executive order to implement the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. He announced it as a Department of Homeland Security policy in a speech in 2012. He did not say it would not work, but called it a “temporary stopgap.”)
+For federal workers who may need a safety net or financial assistance as they go without pay, Mr. Trump said “the safety net is going to be having a strong border,” especially because government employees support his wall. (A recent poll of more than 1,400 by Government Executive suggests the opposite: most oppose the shutdown and the wall.)SATURDAY PUZZLE — There’s nothing better than feeling better, people! I seriously hope that whatever ails you allows you to have enough good days to outweigh the bad and keep you hopeful. Also, happy new year.
+Andrew Zhou’s grid today was stuffed with debuts and rarities, all of which capped out at 11 letters in length; this seemed rare in itself, since so many Saturday puzzles seem to develop around a full-span seed entry, which leads to stacks and more long words and phrases. I thought this made today’s solve a little bit different and found some of the shorter entries super sticky.
+Tricky Clues
+A few new words today were like sliced bread; how had we not seen GARLIC BREAD or SHACKED UP before? As a budding horticulturist (so sorry) and very earthbound Olympics fan, I also devoured certain specific clues that might have been real toughies for others, which is one of the things that make weekend puzzles weekend puzzles.
+I’ll be curious to know your opinion on the obscurity of XERISCAPING, a landscape style that is manifesting itself everywhere you see naturalistic plantings, like Piet Oudolf’s Highline in New York City, and in many public gardens in California. Strictly speaking, it’s selecting plants that function and thrive in dry conditions, but even in climates like New York’s (where we just had our fourth-wettest year on record), it prescribes plants and techniques that make your garden resilient and water-wise. And as far as SIMONE BILES, who could not love her defiance of gravity and origin story?With the government in shutdown, a large number of federal employees have found themselves either on unpaid leave or working without pay. This is the effect the shutdown would have if the same number of people were laid off from American industries and companies.
+The 800,000 federal employees furloughed or working without pay is more than …
+Oil and gas Coal 800,000 government workers Other mining Oil and gas Coal 800,000 government workers Other mining Oil and gas Coal 800,000 government workers Other mining
+… the 748,000 people employed by the mining and oil extraction industries in the United States. (And it’s 16 times the size of the entire coal mining industry.)
+Clothing manufacturers 800,000 government workers Fabric mills Rugs, carpets Other Clothing manufacturers 800,000 government workers Fabric mills Rugs, carpets Other Clothing manufacturers 800,000 government workers Fabric mills Rugs, carpets Other
+It’s also more than the 640,000 people employed by the entire textiles and clothing manufacturing industry.
+It’s more than double the number of people who work for Target …
+… and more than four times the number of people who work at General Motors.
+The Treasury department furloughed roughly 72,400 workers. That is nearly three times the number of people who work at Facebook.
+The Department of the Interior furloughed about 56,000 employees, which is more than the nearly 50,000 people who work at Chevron worldwide …
+… and more than 10 times the number of people who work at Netflix.
+The Department of Agriculture furloughed about 44,000 employees. That’s more than the number of people who work for Goldman Sachs …
+… and nearly double the number of people who work at Alaska Air.
+[A look at some of the government functions that have been affected by the shutdown.]Love blossoms through the cold in “Winter Castle,” and sink your teeth into “Twilight.”
+What’s on TV
+WINTER CASTLE 8 p.m. on Hallmark. When Jenny (Emilie Ullerup) gets the chance to travel to an ice hotel for her sister’s destination wedding, she finds herself enchanted not only by the winter wonderland, but by the best man, Craig (Kevin McGarry), too. It seems as if it’s a match made in heaven, until his plus one, Lana (Meghan Heffern), shows up and sloshes Jenny’s romantic dreams. But when Jenny and Craig find themselves together, they can’t help but feel a connection, and they wonder if there might just be something worth exploring.
+SAY YES TO THE DRESS 8 p.m. on TLC. The hunt for the perfect wedding dress returns to New York’s very own Kleinfeld Bridal for the show’s 17th season premiere. Randy Fenoli, whose eponymous bridal collection has debuted, stars.
+What’s StreamingFrom the government shutdown to the start of a new Congress, it’s been a busy week in American politics. Here are some of the biggest stories you might have missed (and some links if you’d like to read further).
+___________________
+The shutdown is entering its third week
+Early in the week, House Democrats agreed on a proposal to end the partial government shutdown that would extend current levels of funding for the Department of Homeland Security, but that didn’t include money for President Trump’s border wall. Mr. Trump rejected the idea in a White House meeting on Wednesday, saying he would look “foolish” if he compromised.
+After the Democrats took control of the House on Thursday, they passed two bills to reopen the government, knowing they would likely go nowhere in the Senate. The majority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, said he would not bring up any legislation Mr. Trump did not support. Few Republicans called for an end to the shutdown.
+On Friday, the president threatened to keep agencies closed for “months or even years.” Mr. Trump also said he was considering declaring a national emergency to build a border wall without congressional approval.JERUSALEM — With elections a few months away, it is political fratricide season in Israel: From left to right, candidates are sticking knives in the ribs of their natural allies in hopes of elevating their own chances of succeeding Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
+This week, the Zionist Union, a four-year-old liberal alliance, blew itself up as the Labor Party chief, Avi Gabbay, humiliated the veteran politician Tzipi Livni by abruptly breaking with her and her boutique party Hatnuah (The Movement) while television cameras rolled.
+The popular ministers Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked abandoned their right-wing party, the Jewish Home, to form a new one — the New Right — that they vowed would be less beholden to religious leaders but would still push to settle the West Bank and oppose a Palestinian state.
+And a former army chief of staff, Benny Gantz, barged into the political center with a vague-sounding new party — Israel Resilience — and a still-to-be-announced set of ideas. It instantly threatened to siphon off support from more established moderate contenders like Yair Lapid and Moshe Kahlon, as well as another former chief of staff, Moshe Ya’alon.With baggage fees and flight delays on the rise, carry-on travel has become more survival tactic than lifestyle choice. Beyond saving money, flying with only a carry-on prevents bags from getting lost in handling, and gives you more flexibility in case of cancellation, as planes are frequently grounded by weather that poses no threat to a train, bus, or car.
+Packing a whole trip’s worth into a small bag is often a challenge, but it gets easier with the right accessories. Here are a few suggestions to help.
+Image
+If you’re comfortable carrying loads, a travel backpack fits about 33 percent more stuff into the same external dimensions as a four-wheeled carry-on suitcase.Michelle Yeoh on why “Crazy Rich Asians” mattered so much to Asian moviegoers: “We don’t want to be told that we’re not good enough to be on the silver screens.”
+Credit... Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesA tentative deal reached on Monday to prevent another federal shutdown would include 55 miles of fencing along the United States border with Mexico. As of January, no new miles of barriers had been built so far under President Trump, though some construction is expected to begin this month.
+UNITED STATES NEW MEXICO NORTH TEXAS CALIF. ARIZONA U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 miles MEXICO UNITED STATES NEW MEXICO TEXAS NORTH CALIF. ARIZONA U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 miles MEXICO UNITED STATES NEW MEXICO TEXAS NORTH CALIF. ARIZONA U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 miles MEXICO UNITED STATES NORTH N.M. TEX. ARIZ. CALIF. U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 miles MEXICO 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall Note: Illustrations of wall types are diagrammatic and not to scale. 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall Note: Illustrations of wall types are diagrammatic and not to scale. 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall Note: Illustrations of wall types are diagrammatic and not to scale. 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 55 mi. Proposed barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 55 mi. Proposed barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 55 mi. Proposed barriers 1,954 mi. U.S.-Mexico border 1,000 mi. Trump’s proposed wall 0 mi. Built based on prototypes 654 mi. Existing barriers 0 mi. New barriers as of January 124 mi. Approved new or replacement 40 mi. Replacement done or started 55 mi. Proposed barriers
+Here’s a look at what has actually been constructed on the U.S.-Mexico border in the past year. The U.S.-Mexico border is 1,954 miles long... President Trump has said he wants a 1,000-mile wall made of concrete or steel. He commissioned eight prototypes. No border walls based on these prototypes have been built or funded by Congress. Before Mr. Trump, there were 654 miles of a variety of barriers. As of January, no new miles of barriers had been built under Mr. Trump. Some existing barriers have been replaced. Before this year, Congress had approved 124 miles of new and replacement barriers, using designs already in place, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Of the approved barriers, 40 miles of replacement barriers have been built or started. Officials expect to break ground on an additional 61 miles in 2019. Congressional negotiators proposed on Monday to add 55 miles of fencing as part of a broader immigration deal.
+Construction is slated to begin on 14 miles of new barriers in February, which would be the first extension of the current barriers.
+Mr. Trump has said several times that the United States has constructed new walls. In January, he said that the administration had built a “brand new wall in San Diego.” While several replacement barriers are being installed in Southern California, Customs and Border Protection had not announced any extensions of the current barriers there at the time.
+So far, the most common design for recent construction on the border is steel slats that are 18- to 30-feet tall. This is often taller than the barriers they are replacing, which are also sometimes in disrepair. Mr. Trump has varied on his vision for the wall. In December, he promoted the steel slat-style barrier, while also saying parts of the wall would be all concrete.
+A barrier in place in the El Paso sector of the U.S. border with Mexico. A replacement barrier made of steel slats being installed in Naco, Ariz. This concrete wall is one prototype commissioned by Mr. Trump. A barrier in place in the El Paso sector of the U.S. border with Mexico. This concrete wall is one prototype commissioned by Mr. Trump. A replacement barrier made of steel slats being installed in Naco, Ariz. A barrier in place in the El Paso sector of the U.S. border with Mexico. A replacement barrier made of steel slats being installed in Naco, Ariz. This concrete wall is one prototype commissioned by Mr. Trump. Photos by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Josh Haner/The New York TimesThe decline in earnings is also largely because of Amazon’s lion’s share of the self-publishing, e-book and resale market, Ms. Rasenberger said. The conglomerate charges commission and marketing fees to publishers that Ms. Rasenberger said essentially prevent their books from being buried on the site. Small and independent publishers, which have fewer resources and bargaining power, have been particularly hard hit. Book publishing companies are passing these losses along to writers in the form of lower royalties and advances, and authors also lose out on income from books resold on the platform.
+In some ways, these changes are in line with a general shift toward a gig economy or “hustling,” in which people juggle an assortment of jobs to make up for the lack of a stable income. But the writing industry as a whole has always eluded standardization in pay. In a conversation with Manjula Martin in the book “Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living,” edited by Ms. Martin, Cheryl Strayed said, “There’s no other job in the world where you get your master’s degree in that field and you’re like, ‘Well, I might make zero or I might make $5 million!’”
+In a recent call, Ms. Martin said that “the people who are able to practice the trade of authoring are people who have other sources of income,” adding that this creates barriers of entry and limits the types of stories that reach a wide audience. There is also, she added, a devaluation of writing in which it is often viewed as a hobby as opposed to a valuable vocation.
+“Everyone thinks they can write, because everybody writes,” Ms. Rasenberger said, referring to the proliferation of casual texting, emailing and tweeting. But she distinguishes these from professional writers “who have been working on their craft and art of writing for years.”
+“What a professional writer can convey in written word is far superior to what the rest of us can do,” Ms. Rasenberger said. “As a society we need that, because it’s a way to crystallize ideas, make us see things in a new way and create understanding of who we are as a people, where we are today and where we’re going.”LOS ANGELES — As California’s deadliest wildfire was consuming the town of Paradise in November, some of the state’s top power company officials and a dozen legislators were at an annual retreat at the Fairmont Kea Lani resort on Maui. In the course of four days, they discussed wildfires — and how much responsibility the utilities deserve for the devastation, if any.
+It is an issue of increasing urgency as more fires are traced to equipment owned by California’s investor-owned utilities. The largest, Pacific Gas and Electric, could ultimately have to pay homeowners and others an estimated $30 billion for causing fires over the last two years. The most devastating of those, the Camp Fire, destroyed thousands of homes in Paradise and killed at least 86 people.
+Realizing that their potential fire liability is large enough to bankrupt them, the utility companies are spending tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions. Their goal: a California law that would allow them to pass on the cost of wildfires to their customers in the form of higher electricity rates. After an earlier lobbying push, legislators have already voted to protect the companies from having to bear the cost of 2017 fires, and utilities are seeking the same for 2018.
+The utility companies acknowledge that they may bear some responsibility but say not all of it, because climate change and development in remote areas have made wildfires more destructive. In addition, they argue that electricity rates would go up regardless of whether the state protected them because investors and banks could grow wary of lending to California’s energy sector.When Apple lost more than $75 billion in market value this past week after a surprise announcement that it is expecting lower iPhone sales than originally projected, the company put most of the blame for its troubles on China, where a slowing economy and the trade war with the United States have hurt sales.
+But a bigger issue for Apple might exist much closer to home, in a small, leafy town in Ohio.
+That’s where my mom lives. She’s a relatively tech-savvy retiree and a longtime Apple fan who has used many of the company’s products over the years. I learned to type on an Apple IIGS at her office, and she was an early adopter of the original turquoise iMac. These days, she uses her iPhone to check Facebook and Instagram, talk with her friends and relatives, and play solitaire and Words With Friends.
+Her phone isn’t the latest model — it’s a three-year-old iPhone 6S — and it’s missing some of the latest features. She can’t take portrait mode photos using a dual-lens camera, a feature introduced in the iPhone 7 Plus, and she can’t unlock her phone using Face ID, which was introduced in the iPhone X in 2017. Her phone’s battery life could be better, and the device sometimes runs out of storage space.
+But she’s happy with it, and doesn’t feel the need to upgrade. She also has a first-generation Apple Watch and a several-versions-ago MacBook Air, neither of which she’s planning to replace anytime soon.Mr. Guevara returned to El Salvador about once a year to see his wife. After she became pregnant, the distance between them took on new poignancy.
+“It was a very emotional time,” Ms. Ayala, 35, recalled, through an interpreter. “I was so happy to finally become a mother, but, of course, it was difficult because you want your husband to be there to support you.”
+Image Isaac playing with his sister’s feet. Credit... Gabriella Angotti-Jones/The New York Times
+In 2013, Ms. Ayala gave birth to a son, Isaac, while Mr. Guevara, 3,000 miles away, waited for news. During their nightly chats, Ms. Ayala would put the phone to Isaac’s ear so he could hear his father’s voice. She sent photos and videos each day. When Isaac was 9 months old, Mr. Guevara traveled to El Salvador to meet his son, holding his hands as the child took his first toddling steps along the beach.
+When Mr. Guevara returned to Maryland, he began researching ways to bring his wife and child to his new home. He turned to the International Rescue Committee, one of the eight organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund.
+A caseworker told him about the Central American Minors program, begun in 2014, which allowed the children of parents with temporary protected status to apply for permanent residency as refugees. As Isaac’s mother and Mr. Guevara’s wife, Ms. Ayala was also eligible.LAHORE, Pakistan — Kiran remembers the days when she shimmied confidently across rooms adorned with plush velvet pillows and fine carpets, working alongside a troupe of trained musicians and commanding the attention of Pakistan’s wealthiest men.
+Now, she travels with a crusty boom box and a few CDs of electronic music to dance in front of groups of ogling men who want one thing: sex.
+“It used to be more about the art, the dancing and music,” said Kiran, 28, who asked that her last name not be used because of safety concerns. “Now, after one or two songs, all the men think about is the bed.”
+Kiran is part of the dying tradition of the dancing girls of Lahore, a once famed and respected profession, with dancers employed for hundreds of years by the courts of the maharajahs to perform for royal audiences.INDIANAPOLIS — The first thing one notices about Books & Brews is that it’s off the beaten path, tucked into an unassuming strip mall in a cluster of industrial-supply stores and a sprawling outpost of The Home Depot near 96th Street on the far north side of Indianapolis. The second thing you may notice upon entering the shop is how inviting it feels, with its bright, bookshelf-lined walls, clusters of sturdy wooden tables and racks of board games — and that’s before you get to the back of the store with a craft-beer taproom, small stage and even more packed bookshelves.
+“I started off here mainly because as a start-up, no one will lease to you,” said Jason Wuerfel, 38, the founder and president of Books & Brews, during a recent chat at the company’s “mother ship” location. But the lack of foot traffic hasn’t stopped his establishment from becoming a popular gathering spot.TAIPEI, Taiwan — President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan called on Saturday for domestic and international support of the island’s de facto independence, days after China’s leader, Xi Jinping, warned that unification with China was inevitable.
+“It is impossible for me or, in my view, any responsible politician in Taiwan to accept President Xi Jinping’s recent remarks without betraying the trust and the will of the people of Taiwan,” Ms. Tsai said in a briefing for foreign reporters in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital.
+“We hope the international community will pay attention and combine efforts to speak out on our behalf,” she said.
+Mr. Xi’s speech, his first major address on Taiwan, has given Ms. Tsai a chance to position herself as the young democracy’s defender, both to the outside world and to voters who will decide next year whether she stays in office. Her party was battered in local elections in November, but since Mr. Xi’s address there has been a groundswell of support for her on Taiwan social media and even, to some degree, in publications that tend to oppose her.Three people were killed and four others were injured in a shooting at a bowling alley in Torrance, Calif., late Friday night, the police said.
+The Torrance Police Department responded just before midnight to reports of shots fired at Gable House Bowl in Torrance, which is about 20 miles from downtown Los Angeles.
+Three men were pronounced dead at the scene, the police said, and four more were injured. Two were taken to the hospital, and the others sought medical attention on their own.
+A police spokesman said information about a suspect or motive was unavailable. The police did not identify the men who died.
+One of the victims was identified by his sister as Michael Radford, 20.
+The sister, Latrice Dumas, said she was at the movies when her family called and said her brother had been shot. Ms. Dumas, 28, said she heard Mr. Radford was trying to protect his girlfriend, who had been accosted at the bowling alley.
+“He always felt like he could be a protector,” Ms. Dumas said.
+She said his death was “tearing” her family apart. Mr. Radford grew up in Los Angeles, and worked in construction, she said, adding that he wanted to be an auto mechanic or a mathematician.
+She said he had a 7-month-old daughter.
+“Who did this to my brother?” she asked. “It’s just crazy.”
+Wesam Hamad, 29, was bowling with his 13-year-old niece and 32-year-old cousin near the entrance of the alley. He said a fight broke out within a group of about 10 men and women behind their lane, near the desk where bowlers check in. Mr. Hamad said there was a small arcade there, and he heard someone slam into one of the machines.
+He told his niece to leave and as they were walking, they heard a series of about 15 gunshots. He ran to the other end of the alley with his niece and his cousin, and they dove behind some couches.
+“I still had my bowling ball in my hand. I held my bowling ball behind my niece’s head just in case something ricocheted,” Mr. Hamad said. “We’re just lucky to be alive. I’m still in shock.”
+Gable House Bowl did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The bowling alley offers glow bowling and laser tag, according to its website. The police said no bowling alley employees were injured.
+The shooting set off renewed discussion about gun violence, as shootings continue to take place in public spaces, even in California, which has among the toughest gun laws in the nation. In November, a gunman set off smoke bombs and opened fire at a country-music bar, the Borderline Bar & Grill, in Thousand Oaks, Calif., killing 12 people.
+Senator Kamala Harris, a Democrat of California, said in a tweet that she was heartbroken for the victims of the bowling alley shooting and their loved ones.
+“We must do more to address gun violence,” she said. “Americans should be able to go to a bowling alley and be safe.”
+Damone Thomas said in a Facebook video that he witnessed the aftermath of the shooting. He said he was enjoying karaoke when he said people rushed into his area and shouted “gunshot, gunshot, gunshot, gunshot.”
+“To realize that the space was invaded, just by one simple thing: a gun,” he said. “How do we get over this? Where can we go? We see it happening in the church, we see it happening in the schools, now it’s happening in the karaoke. It’s happening everywhere, so what can we do? Where can we go?”“Being a woman of color in a sport that is predominantly white has always been difficult in terms of identity,” said Vashti Lonsdale, the program’s director of skating. She named the professional skaters Surya Bonaly, Tai Babilonia and Starr Andrews as possible role models. “I think seeing Surya in particular being a rebel in her own realm and proving that you don’t have to be a stock standard looking person to be a great skater, it’s quite powerful,” she said.
+Back at the rink, a little girl with pink gloves and a white hat attempted the beginning of a camel spin, a move that requires the skater to balance on one foot and extend her other leg backward. She fell onto her knees. Without pause she picked herself back up and glided into the arms of her two friends, who were waiting for her on the other side.
+To the left of these girls, in a more sparse part of the rink, another skater lost her balance and started to wobble. But before she could hit the ground, another girl held out her arms and caught her.“He did not even want to be Hector anymore,” said Jose Disla, a close friend and fellow Xtrava who Hector eventually decided was his “biological cousin.” “He wanted to be grandfather.”
+Also: He loved hearing regularly that he looked great for his age.
+To earn money, he continued to work retail jobs, scraping together spare coins for balls and lending assistance to Xtravaganzas like Manuel Torres, whom he helped transition from pornography to nursing.
+Even when money got tight and Hector moved to a smaller place in the Bronx, he exuded sunshine and optimism. A pier queen Dr. Seuss, his pearls of wisdom included “don’t treat a peep like a punk from the street” and “don’t read the child, teach the child.”
+The man could barely contain his excitement when he was asked two years ago to consult on “Pose.”
+His motto on set, said Jennie Livingston, who also worked as a consultant on “Pose,” was “‘let me help the kids,’ and ‘let me promote the scene,’ and ‘let me not get into a lot of gossip and drama that obviously attends the whole world but the ball world in some very particular ways.’”
+It was hard to completely avoid it. His disinclination toward conflict could frustrate the Xtravaganza’s current father, Mr. Gutierez, especially when Hector sat on a judges’ panel at a ball and didn’t stand up forcefully for a house kid who got “chopped.”
+In November 2018, shortly after Hector and the Xtravaganzas were profiled in New York, Hector was honored at an AIDS benefit and was incorrectly credited as the founder of the House of Xtravaganza.The internet is teeming with people determined to use science as proof of racial hierarchy. There is no existing genetic evidence to support the view that blacks are less intelligent than whites. But the argument, which rests on data from IQ-type tests that show lower average scores among blacks, persists.
+In a widely-read Times Op-Ed last spring, the prominent human geneticist David Reich, of Harvard, argued that geneticists have underplayed the degree to which human populations are likely to have genetic differences.
+But it’s the different environments — things like family wealth, access to education, nutrition, and living in a racist society — inhabited by black and white Americans that has led most scientists to believe that IQ differences arise from nongenetic causes. And, since environments impact the way genes get expressed, and there’s no way to equalize the environment — except to fix racism — there’s no way to do a controlled experiment.
+It has been interesting to observe how people have responded to my reporting on all of this. In response to my piece on Dr. Watson this week, some biologists argued that The Times, as well as PBS, should not be devoting space to him. But Nathan A. Smith, a black neuroscientist at Children’s National Health System, disagreed.
+Dr. Smith contacted me after watching the PBS documentary. He had been struck by an archival clip of a Charlie Rose interview with Dr. Watson, in which Dr. Watson said that he had not intended for his comments about race to be made public.
+“That statement made me think just how many other scientists feel this way and keep their thoughts close to the vest,” Dr. Smith wrote. “If we want to eradicate this type of misinformation, we must continue to shine a light on it.”
+Additional reading:
+Why White Supremacists Are Chugging Milk (and Why Geneticists Are Alarmed)
+‘Could Somebody Please Debunk This?’: Writing About Science When Even the Scientists Are NervousBut then, another flicker of joy: The Knicks left with a 119-112 victory that they described as cathartic, even if the Lakers were without LeBron James, Kyle Kuzma and Rajon Rondo, all sidelined with injuries.
+At this point, the Knicks care little for such technicalities. James L. Dolan, the team owner, was in town for the game and visited the locker room afterward to congratulate the team.
+“When we win, we celebrate like it’s the Super Bowl,” Fizdale said. “Why not?”
+The Knicks were right to savor the win: Who knows when the next one will come? They still need to visit the Portland Trail Blazers and the Golden State Warriors before returning to New York on Friday, and one game will neither change the trajectory of their season nor mask their daily challenges.
+But it was important in its own way.
+“We’ll try to run with the momentum,” Tim Hardaway Jr. said.
+The Knicks have an odd roster made up of veterans on expiring contracts and inexperienced players who are still learning the business of pro basketball. And that mix, which is almost a 50-50 split, has caused some problems, Fizdale said, not among players in the locker room — “They like each other,” he said — but in terms of the team’s on-court chemistry.
+Before the Knicks arrived in Los Angeles, the first half of their road trip featured a 16-point loss to the Milwaukee Bucks, a 32-point loss to the Utah Jazz and a 7-point loss to the Denver Nuggets.4. Sign up for your goal race.
+I have a hard time getting out the door if I don’t have a race on the docket. Fortunately for you, spring is a popular 5K time, so you most likely can find one on a weekend nine weeks out from when you start.
+5. Keep track of your training.
+You want to be able to look back and see how you’ve progressed. It’ll keep you moving forward. This can be in a spreadsheet, a journal, your calendar or something like Dailymile, which I use, along with a Google Sheet that I share with my coach. While running apps will keep these statistics for you, you’ll want to make sure to also record how you feel about each run. This will help you identify what other things affect your training. The log I share with my coach helped me identify that I felt fatigued at a certain point in my menstrual cycle, which is not surprising, but I couldn’t identify it until I saw the pattern written out.
+6. Brace yourself.
+Forming any new routine is difficult, especially such a physical one. It’s easier to know that this challenge is going to take some work, so that you can prepare for it (maybe that means scheduling a nap on the weekend, or finding a fellow runner to gripe with when the going gets tough).
+7. You haven’t failed if it doesn’t work.
+It just means you get a chance to learn from what didn’t go right, and adjust for the future. No one said you must start a running routine on Jan. 1. Your birthday works, or Presidents’ Day, or next Saturday. And don’t beat yourself up if it takes a few tries. Running is hard. Sticking with it until it’s a routine is harder. But I believe in you. I really do.
+If you’d like to know more about the science of sticking to a New Year’s resolution, I wrote a feature on it last year. It includes a lot of tricks and tips for setting and meeting any kind of goal. And here is a New York Times guide on How to Start Running.
+One common fear I hear from new runners is that they’re worried they’ll finish last in their first race. That’s incredibly common — I worried about it. My mom finished last in her first race ever, and she’s now entered in the New York City Marathon drawing (which I’ll write more about next week). If you too are worried about being in last place, check out this Runner’s World feature about people who finished last, and lived to tell the tale. It’s not as bad as you think.
+We’re also running a 30-Day Well Challenge. Every morning for 30 days, you’ll be emailed a daily challenge that will help you build healthy habits, one day at a time. Sign up here.An 11-year-old boy who died on New Year’s Day after visiting family members in Brooklyn may have had a fatal reaction to fish proteins released into the air while his relatives cooked.
+The sixth grader, Cameron Jean-Pierre, had asthma and was allergic to fish and peanuts, his father, Steven Jean-Pierre, said on Thursday in an interview with WABC.
+They had been visiting Cameron’s grandmother in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn, where one of his relatives was making fish, and Cameron had an asthma attack, Mr. Jean-Pierre said.
+Cameron’s father treated his son with a nebulizer, a device they had used many times in the past to deliver medicine to the boy’s lungs.Elizabeth Patricia Frei and Benjamin Franklin Duchek were married Dec. 31. The Rev. William H. Gurnee III officiated at St. Joseph’s on Capitol Hill, a Roman Catholic church in Washington, where he is the pastor.
+Mrs. Duchek, 30, is a special assistant to the assistant secretary for strategy, planning, analysis and risk at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington. She graduated from the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul.
+She is a daughter of Tracey Wold Frei and Thomas A. Frei of Fargo, N.D.
+Mr. Duchek, 40, joined the United States Army in 2008, and is now a captain in the Army Reserve, serving as a civil affairs officer at the Southern Command, in Doral, Fla. He was an artillery officer while on active duty, and did two tours in Afghanistan. He is also now developing a consultancy specializing in technology in emerging markets, and working in Washington. He graduated from the University of Maryland and received a master’s degree in public administration from N.Y.U.
+He is a son of Barbara Ruzicka Duchek and John R. Duchek of Oakville, Mo.
+The couple connected through Tinder, the dating app, in late December 2016, but didn’t meet in person until the following March. He was stationed at the time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, but his position as a major general’s aide brought him regularly to Washington, where Ms. Frei lives.Q: I am a rent-stabilized tenant living in an Upper West Side co-op building. The owners of the unit above mine are rarely home, but they loan it out to relatives, who can be so noisy that I have to sleep in my living room when they use the apartment. Over the past two months, there’s been a rotating cast of visitors, and the current set stomps around until after midnight. To what agency can I make a complaint, and what documentation do I need? I do keep a noise diary.
+A: Many co-ops permit owners to have guests for up to 30 days. Some buildings require the owner of the apartment to be present, while others do not. Your neighbor may be following the co-op’s rules about houseguests, but buildings also have policies about noise, too.
+No one, not a tenant nor a guest, is supposed to make excessive noise that interferes with another resident’s ability to enjoy their home. However, noise complaints are notoriously hard to win since the courts generally maintain that the city is noisy and tolerating the occasional stomping feet is part of the price of living here. The success of these claims comes down to the severity of the disturbance.
+You could knock on the neighbor’s door when the guests get too loud. Explain that you live downstairs and that they are keeping you up. As visitors, they might feel shamed into behaving better. But this will only provide temporary relief since the guests presumably will soon be replaced with a new bunch.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Inside a police station house in Queens about a year ago, St. Clair Steward insisted he had not been involved in a recent shooting. Mr. Steward told the police he had been resting at home.
+Investigators did not believe him. The motive behind the shooting was a mystery, but the victim had combed through pictures of people with past arrests and identified Mr. Steward, a father of eight, as the assailant.
+To the detectives involved, the shooting in January 2018 was just the latest in a long line of crimes solved by asking a victim to search through mug shots, an investigative technique used in New York City for more than 150 years. Detectives enter a description of the perpetrator into a database, which then spits out dozens or even hundreds of matching photos. The witness scrolls through, in hopes of recognizing the culprit.
+But these open-ended photo searches also increase the likelihood of ensnaring an innocent person, according to studies and experts in eyewitness identification. The method has few safeguards to protect against a false identification and can lead police to focus on the wrong person from the outset of an investigation.“What’s not to like about this building?” said Klavdia G. Kiselyova, 78, who moved in when the high-rise opened. Standing on her stoop bundled in furs and watching dump trucks cart away debris, she mused aloud. “It’s an amazing house.”
+Judging by a sign on an entryway near the collapse, it looked as if they were getting their way. “Dear Residents!” it read. “An inspection found residing in apartments in entryway 10 is allowed.” The collapse had occurred in entryway seven.
+Yet, others were more skeptical about moving back in. Yulia V. Skalvysh, an accountant at the steel mill, said she was told she would have to return to her two-room apartment a few yards away from the collapse. The authorities were apparently unconcerned about a crack in the tiled wall of her kitchen that she said was growing longer each day.
+“They say, ‘It’s safe, you can return,’ but I don’t want to,” she said. “I want to live in safety.”
+For some, the close call reinforced their belief in God. Vera D. Saravarova, 59, who lived next door to an apartment that collapsed into the void, attributed her survival to having remained in church the day before for the entire two-hour sermon, even though she had wanted to duck out.
+Russian Orthodox churches have no pews, she said, and her feet were beginning to hurt. But a friend told her, “You have to stay” until the priests wrap it up, and she did. “It was a miracle,” she said. “We were protected by God.”PERTH, Australia — When Serena Williams and Roger Federer played against each other for the first time, on Tuesday night at the Hopman Cup, it was the ultimate expression of an event that has brought the best men and best women in tennis together for more than three decades.
+But despite the power of seeing Williams and Federer on opposite sides of the net, the future of the Hopman Cup is uncertain, with a new men’s team event set to eclipse it, part of a trend of realignment and reinvention in tennis. Tennis Australia, which manages the Hopman Cup, will next year help organize the ATP Cup, a 10-day tournament that will have men’s teams from 24 countries competing across three Australian cities for ranking points and $15 million in prize money.
+With mixed doubles increasingly outstripped in prize money and prestige at Grand Slam events, the Hopman Cup — with two-person teams from eight countries competing in singles and mixed doubles — is the lone place to see top men and top women team up besides the Olympics.
+Though Federer did not participate in the Hopman Cup through the middle years of his career, he has a long attachment to the event, first coming to Perth as a hitting partner in 1999. He won the tournament with Martina Hingis in 2001 about a month before taking his first title on the ATP Tour. At the next Hopman Cup, he partnered with his future wife, Mirka Vavrinec.TIJUANA — Life in Tijuana’s largest migrant shelter has begun to take on the familiar rhythms and sounds of a Central American neighborhood: Early in the morning, adults rise and get ready to go to work. Children dress for school. Mothers gather huge bundles of dirty clothes for the day’s wash. Vendors hawk coffee.
+“We are getting used to this life,” said Norma Pérez, 40, who left Honduras in a migrant caravan bound for the United States about two months ago with her 5-year-old son.
+For weeks, they walked from Central America up to the Mexican border with the United States, fleeing poverty and violence. All along the way, President Trump described the migrants as a danger, as invaders trying to crash their way into the United States. But they didn’t stop their trek north.To the Editor:
+Re “A Woman’s Rights” (editorial series, nytimes.com, Dec. 28):
+It’s complex. Are you arguing that an infant one day after delivery is fundamentally different developmentally from a fetus one day before delivery? This is what I inferred from “fully formed person” versus a “fetus in the womb .”
+Whether, and under what circumstances, a fetus should have rights is a good question. Are you arguing that “never” is the right legal answer? I’m not so sure that I agree. When I am pregnant, I’m the custodian of another human life, just as I am when I take that baby home from the hospital.
+These personal stories invite outrage, which is exactly what we don’t need more of right now. You at least state that the situations described are rare. We, rightly in my opinion, criticize President Trump for doing this exact thing when he gets the conservative base all riled up with a story about an immigrant who committed a felony.
+The idea that abortion should be safe, legal and rare appears to be out of vogue with the very liberal, but it’s still my opinion. And I think that it is shared by many.Have you made Alison Roman’s stew (above)? The Internet has. Add a few other dishes to your to-do list: Dijon and cognac stew, Julia Moskin’s best black bean soup or any of the recipes in the collection below.For the country’s sake, there is only one acceptable outcome, just as there was after Americans realized in 1974 that a criminal was occupying the Oval Office. The president must go.
+Achieving this outcome won’t be easy. It will require honorable people who have served in the Trump administration to share, publicly, what they have seen and what they believe. (At this point, anonymous leaks are not sufficient.) It will require congressional Republicans to acknowledge that they let a con man take over their party and then defended that con man. It will require Democrats and progressive activists to understand that a rushed impeachment may actually help Trump remain in office.
+But if removing him will not be easy, it’s not as unlikely as it may sometimes seem. From the beginning, Trump has been an unusually weak president, as political scientists have pointed out. Although members of Congress have not done nearly enough to constrain him, no other recent president has faced nearly so much public criticism or private disdain from his own party.
+Since the midterm election showed the political costs that Trump inflicts on Republicans, this criticism seems to be growing. They have broken with him on foreign policy (in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Syria) and are anxious about the government shutdown. Trump is vulnerable to any erosion in his already weak approval rating, be it from an economic downturn, more Russia revelations or simply the defection of a few key allies. When support for an unpopular leader starts to crack, it can crumble.
+[Sign up for David Leonhardt’s daily newsletter — with commentary on the news and reading suggestions from around the web.]
+Before we get to the how of Trump’s removal, though, I want to spend a little more time on the why — because even talking about the ouster of an elected president should happen only under extreme circumstances. Unfortunately, the country is now so polarized that such talk instead occurs with every president. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were subjected to reckless calls for their impeachment, from members of Congress no less.
+So let’s be clear. Trump’s ideology is not an impeachable offense. However much you may disagree with Trump’s tax policy — and I disagree vehemently — it is not a reason to remove him from office. Nor are his efforts to cut government health insurance or to deport undocumented immigrants. Such issues, among others, are legitimate matters of democratic struggle, to be decided by elections, legislative debates, protests and the other normal tools of democracy. These issues are not the “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors” that the founders intended impeachment to address.“A shutdown has these cascading effects on the scientific work of the organization,” said Daniel M. Ashe, a former director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. “They’re hard to foresee or predict right now, but they’re crippling, really, and they affect the organization not for three or four weeks, but for the rest of the year because of all of this complex orchestration of field work.”
+The Fish and Wildlife Service declined to comment beyond its published contingency plan, an eight-page document covering nearly 8,400 employees.
+The effects could soon reach beyond government workers and labs, and scientists who are not on Washington’s direct payroll have been fretting over how the shutdown might interrupt the flow of grant money to researchers across the United States. The National Science Foundation, which underwrites billions of dollars in research each year, will cancel dozens of proposal review panel meetings this month if the government remains closed. Other agencies that dole out research money have also effectively put their plans for future spending on hold.
+“Having that review process literally shut down now, plus also having the budget year truncated, puts a ton of pressure in terms of getting money out to the states and these federal-state partnerships in order to do science,” said Dr. W. Russell Callender, the director of Washington Sea Grant, which receives money from NOAA and is based at the University of Washington.
+“You need the feds as a partner in order to be able to conduct the science the states need,” said Dr. Callender, a former NOAA official, “and to be able to get the money the states need.”
+The turmoil also spread elsewhere in higher education. Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, wrote on Twitter on Friday that he would not accept any new graduate students because he had proposals pending with NASA and the National Science Foundation.
+“I don’t want to accept a student and then find out I don’t have funding for them,” he wrote.
+Stopgap solutions, scientists said, will prove unworkable if the shutdown lasts for “months or even years,” as Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said President Trump threatened on Friday.LOS ANGELES — Knicks center Enes Kanter said on Friday that he would not travel with the team to play the Washington Wizards in London on Jan. 17 because he feared retaliation for his public opposition to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.
+Kanter, who is Turkish, has been an outspoken critic of the president for years.
+“Sadly, I’m not going because of that freaking lunatic, the Turkish president,” Kanter said after the Knicks’ 119-112 victory over the Lakers. “It’s pretty sad that all the stuff affects my career and basketball because I want to be out there and help my team win. But just because of the one lunatic guy, one maniac, one dictator, I can’t even go out there and do my job. It’s pretty sad.”
+Kanter said Turkish operatives could present a danger to him in London.
+“They have a lot of spies there,” he said. “I could get killed there easy.”
+An official at the Turkish Embassy in Washington, speaking Saturday on the condition of anonymity to abide by diplomatic protocol, dismissed Kanter’s comments as baseless.The year of the woman and the midterm gains that followed electrified Democrats, who have eagerly promoted themselves as the party of diversity. That success has inspired some of the most powerful women in politics to consider running for president. And it has boosted expectations that the political calculus for women has changed in the last two years, and that gender could become an asset, even in a presidential contest. Mrs. Clinton, after all, won the popular vote by almost three million.
+Yet at a time of ascendancy for women in the party, there’s a lingering doubt in some quarters about whether there is a risk involved in nominating a woman to take on President Trump, whom Democrats fervently want to unseat.
+The specter of Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in 2016 still haunts some Democratic officials, voters and activists. There is widespread recognition that women in politics are held to a different standard than men on qualities like likability and toughness, and that voters have traditionally been more reluctant to elect women as executives than as legislators.
+Some women see bias in the excitement surrounding a potential presidential run by Beto O’Rourke, the Texan who energized the left in a losing Senate bid, while Stacey Abrams is not mentioned as a possibility even though she had a much narrower loss for governor of Georgia.
+“There’s a real tension,” said Neera Tanden, the president of the Center for American Progress and a former policy adviser to Mrs. Clinton. “On one hand, women are leading the resistance and deserve representation. But on the other side, there’s a fear that if misogyny beat Clinton, it can beat other women.”BUDAPEST — Gyula Radics is not easily angered. When Prime Minister Viktor Orban rewrote the Constitution to give his party greater power, he stayed on the sidelines. When the party took over state media, he was silent. And when the government forced the internationally renowned Central European University out of Hungary, he did not join the protests.
+But after Mr. Orban pushed through legislation compelling employees to work hundreds of hours of overtime without full or immediate compensation, he had enough.
+“Orban destroys lives and families,” Mr. Radics said as he prepared to march with thousands of protesters Saturday afternoon. A 39-year-old steelworker with five children, he traveled from Veszprem, an hour outside of Budapest.
+“This is all we have left,” he said.
+By this, he meant the streets.
+Over the past eight years, Mr. Orban has steadily used the instruments of a democratic state to undermine nearly all checks on his power.ACROSTIC — It’s the very first acrostic of the year, which lends this excerpt, from a venerable novelist and essayist, a particularly auspicious quality. I guess I’m saying that some of us could be forgiven for interpreting the solved passage in a fiery way, extrapolating its meaning to apply to a wider realm, even though (strictly speaking) it refers to a fantasy world from a century past.
+The author is Alison Lurie, and the passage draws from a 2002 book called “Boys and Girls Forever: Children’s Classics From Cinderella to Harry Potter,” itself a compendium of several essays that mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books. Ms. Lurie has analyzed legions of stories for young people, and her attention here is paid to L. Frank Baum and his “Oz” series. I don’t really remember which of these books I read — the 1939 movie is what’s stuck with me over the years. The passage refers to an intriguing character who did not appear in that film, and who doesn’t ring a bell to me, but the plot reveal we see about the wizard isn’t news to anyone who saw the movie or read the original book.
+I did not struggle for too long with the clues today — letters drawn from UTAH, ROUGH DRAFT, RAINBOW, EAT ME, R-E-S-P-E-C-T and DUST BOWL gave me plenty of material to work with. I had no idea what a SAMISEN was, and although this demonstration might not be in the vein of the term’s cluing, it’s a wild and impressive display.LONDON — President Trump’s push for a border wall hints at a problem that populist leaders are facing across the Western world.
+After a year of setbacks, populist leaders and parties are trying to rejuvenate their fortunes by revitalizing the sense of crisis on which they thrive. But as with Mr. Trump’s demand for a border wall — which has brought a two-week government shutdown — this may say more about populism’s weakness than its strength.
+Immigration and terrorism crises, which aided populism’s world-shaking rise in 2016, have waned. Populists have faced disappointing election results in Germany, the United States and even Poland, shattering the image of the movement’s inevitability and its claims to represent true popular will.
+The West’s populist leaders and parties have grown defensive, retreating into ever-starker messages of us-versus-them. The approach excites their most dedicated followers. But it can be risky, forcing voters to pick sides at a moment when the populist right holds declining appeal.“The logical thing to do to maximize safety and minimize waste of public funds would not be to immediately shut down an enormous number of shelters,” Ms. Cancian said. “The best course of action would be to figure out a plan for transitioning those facilities and transitioning those personnel.”
+The Office of Refugee Resettlement, the agency that oversees migrant shelters as part of the Administration for Children and Families, declined to speculate on Southwest Key’s grants. In response to a question asking if the agency had a plan if the charity were to lose its grants, a spokeswoman said the agency was always planning for unforeseen events.
+A Southwest Key spokesman, Jeff Eller, said the charity had had no discussions about losing its grants with the Office of Refugee Resettlement or about its shelter licenses with officials from Texas, Arizona or California. He said the charity was focused on providing “the best care possible” for children.
+Last year, the government cut off the contracts of another major shelter provider, International Educational Services, over suspected financial improprieties. Juan Sanchez, who founded Southwest Key and still runs it, also helped establish I.E.S., although he has not had a role there for decades.
+The closing of I.E.S. facilities was carried out haphazardly, straining the system for months. As many as 620 children needed to be rehoused; most landed in Southwest Key facilities.
+Comprehensive Health Services, a for-profit company based in Florida that ran one of the temporary shelters, leased three former I.E.S. shelters, all in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, and then received a new government contract. Many original staff members were rehired.Making games is difficult in part because it is so hard to predict the rules and interactions that will be most satisfying. Some special part of the brain switches on when you play a game, and the particular blend of information and constraint that will light it up is hard to anticipate. As a result, the most reliable way to create good games is to create a prototype of a game idea and put it in front of some helpful play testers to see what sticks. Then iterate and repeat, cutting distracting elements and embellishing fun features.
+Running this gradual process of prototyping and iterating rule sets is the primary responsibility of a game designer, but the job is multidisciplinary in surprising ways. At times I act as a lawyer, crafting the laws of the game and ensuring they interact in a meaningful and satisfying way. At others I’m an anthropologist, studying what players value and what practices or rituals define their relationship with a game. I also think like a psychologist, trying to understand which specific rules and interactions tickle that cognitive sweet spot in the mind that leads the user to the best experience.
+So how do I bring this process to the same institution that houses the famed Times Crossword?
+First, our team brainstorms a variety of puzzle and game ideas. We discuss them as a group, drawing rough mock-ups and comparing them with existing games before voting on which ones we like best. Smaller teams develop the most popular ideas. We create a paper prototype, a quick, basic version of the game, and run around The New York Times Building asking people to play-test it. With each play test, we look to see which components of the game players struggle with and which components engage them. (Often, they are parts we don’t expect. One time users were so fascinated by a mechanic they ignored part of the tutorial.) Then we modify the game by rewording the rules, changing the layout or even changing the objective before testing it again with a different set of play testers.
+We play-test with as many people as possible to get a variety of perspectives. Employees at The Times are genuinely excited to play games and give polite but candid feedback. We factor each opinion in as we plan the next iteration, paying attention to what is not said as much as what is said. It’s an exhausting process, but a consistently rewarding one.
+Once we are satisfied with our prototype, we create a digital version and enlist an internal group of players to test it for us, following the same process of getting feedback and iterating. After about a month of testing and iterating, we test the game on nytimes.com, measuring which games get traction and which ones fall flat. Word games like Letter Boxed, where players connect letters to form chains of words, have done well. Meanwhile, our physics puzzler Gravity Golf, a game focused on guiding a golf ball using gravity and Rube Goldberg-esque obstacles, wasn’t a hit.The great disappointment for those of us who were fans of Louis C.K.’s work is how strongly his behavior cuts against our original sense of him. This was a man who seemed able to connect deeply and authentically with his own messy experiences, and in doing so he invited us to embrace our own messy realities. Was it all an act? Some might answer yes — that we now know who the real Louis C.K. is.
+But I am holding out hope for something better from him. As a psychotherapist, I often see men and women at their worst, so I know that a person who harms himself or who has harmed someone else is not defined only by that behavior. That truth is demonstrated by his presence in my office. I get to witness the drive for healing and repair alongside a patient’s suffering.
+Many of my clients are men who have hurt women. Cheating or assaultive husbands, bullies, abusive co-workers, these men often come to therapy first to make sense of the hurt they have caused other people — hurt that is often a consequence of wounds they themselves carry. Yet they often make every effort to steer the topic to anything else. Even when we discuss it, they protect themselves by minimizing (“it was just one time and I was drunk”), obscuring (“back when all of that drama happened”) and placing the blame elsewhere (“everyone is out to get me”). They’re afraid to fully face their wrongdoing — not just the repercussions, but also the deep shame they would feel in acknowledging the truth.
+I struggle with how to work with men like this. In spite of their actions, I often find them likable. Paradoxically, I would not be able to work with them if I didn’t like and care about them. It is always tempting to give in to that impulse, to absolve them of their guilt, to reassure them that they are still good men in spite of what they have done. But that would be morally unconscionable — and more important, it would not bring them healing.
+Real healing emerges only when I accompany them to whatever dark place it is that they have worked so hard to avoid. There is always a moment where this comes to the forefront, where a patient’s casual-seeming phrase becomes an opportunity to explore his avoidance of painful realities. “Do you notice,” I might say, “how you keep focusing on how angry your wife is with you? Could we take some time to sit with how you feel toward yourself?” Or: “What if instead of ‘I only lash out when I’m drunk’ you say it again, but this time as ‘I lashed out at my wife last night’?”WASHINGTON — Before it became the chief sticking point in a government shutdown drama that threatens to consume his presidency at a critical moment, President Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southwestern border was a memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.
+As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.
+“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled telling Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser. “We’re going to get him to talk about he’s going to build a wall.”
+Talk Mr. Trump did, and the line drew rapturous cheers from conservative audiences, thrilling the candidate and soon becoming a staple of campaign speeches. Chants of “Build the wall!” echoed through arenas throughout the country.To the Editor:
+I am humbly honored to have been featured in “Slandering the Unborn” (“A Woman’s Rights” editorial series, nytimes.com, Dec. 28). As one of the mothers who suffered during the 1990s crack epidemic, I want to thank The New York Times for its apology for how it demonized mothers like me and for its brilliant journalism. The apology is welcomed, and it gives me hope.
+I want to apologize as well — to society, the media, my family and my children. My child welfare case happened because of my drug use, which was due to untreated trauma in my childhood. Without my using drugs, my son would not have been born with drugs in his system, and my parental rights to both my daughter and son would not have been terminated.
+The broken entity that is child welfare system and the racism that is so embedded in this society had prominent roles in how my child welfare case played out. Nevertheless, the ultimate responsibility of not having raised my children rests with me.
+This country’s war on drugs was intended to be a system of social control. Yet the war on drugs has instead become a system of social chaos. American citizens, including drug users, have rights. My rights were violated numerous times during my child welfare case, and my family was wrongfully torn apart. When families are wrongfully torn apart, the results are devastating. When the fundamental relationship of every human being — the relationship of a child with his or her mother — is severed, the effects can be irreversible.The first tuna auction of the year at Tokyo’s new fish market set a high bar on Saturday after a restaurant chain paid a record price — more than $3 million — for a giant bluefin tuna.
+The city’s famed Tsukiji fish market was relocated to the new space, in the Toyosu neighborhood, late last year to make way for the 2020 Olympics. The market was well known for its pre-dawn tuna auctions, a tradition that is continuing at the new location.
+On Saturday, dozens of buyers walked along row after row of giant tuna, examining the fish before making their bids. The $5.3 billion enclosed, air-conditioned facility at Toyosu is a far cry from the grime and grit of Tsukiji, which served as the city’s main fish market for 83 years.Each year, when the bucking bulls arrive at Madison Square Garden, livestock trailers pull into 33rd Street and back up to ramps that lead five floors up to the arena.
+The bulls — 50 or so — come for the opening event in the Professional Bull Riders circuit, which this year runs Jan. 4-6. Cowboys on horses, letting loose an occasional whoop or holler, herd them up the ramps. The bulls soon emerge into a kind of animal-athlete locker room, with a dirt floor and strong steel bars arranged horizontally to form stalls.
+Some bulls walk calmly into the mazelike corral. Some trot. Some come in hot, trying to charge the workers, who quickly climb the steel bars to get out of the way.
+This is only the locker room, of course; the bulls don’t have to bed down at the arena. Once the event is over and the cowboys head to their hotel, the bulls are trucked back to more comfortable quarters in New Jersey for a restful night.Harold Brown, a brilliant scientist who helped develop America’s nuclear arsenal and negotiate its first strategic arms control treaty, and who was President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of defense in an era of rising Soviet challenges, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. He was 91.
+His daughter Deborah Brown said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
+As defense secretary from 1977 to 1981, Mr. Brown presided over the most formidable power in history: legions of intercontinental ballistic missiles and fleets of world-ranging bombers and nuclear submarines, with enough warheads to wipe out Soviet society many times over. But that was hardly the question.
+In an age that imperiled humanity with nuclear Armageddon, the issue was whether America could keep pace with Soviet strategic capabilities, maintaining the balance of terror — an assurance of mutual destruction, with hundreds of millions killed outright — that had dominated the nuclear arms race and strategic planning throughout the postwar era.
+In those days, “Dr. Strangelove,” Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy film about the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, shaded debates over nuclear strategy because the concept of deterrence was based on the dubious assumption that if the Russians launched a surprise nuclear attack, America could survive and retaliate, devastating Soviet cities and strategic targets, although millions would die.The homegrown groundswell began with a little-known brand called Xiaomi, which burst onto the scene in the early 2010s as one of the first brands in China to have its own operating system, and offered high-speed processing on the cheap. At first it appeared to cater to a completely different market than Apple. Selling entirely online, Xiaomi offered both a low-end model — the Redmi for as low as 699 yuan (then under $150) — and a higher-end model that was still far cheaper than the cheapest iPhone (less than 2,000 yuan, then under $350).
+But with time, the useful features on Xiaomi products, as well as those of its competitors like Huawei and OPPO, combined with the price, began to outweigh the increasingly limited glamour of the iPhone. I myself transitioned to a high-end Xiaomi from an iPhone in late 2015 after a young professional friend of mine, who worked in marketing in Shanghai, raved about the Xiaomi Mi Note, which is one of the big-screen models, or “phablets,” that have long been popular in China and East Asia, where many prefer the bigger screens — Huawei’s latest measures a whopping 7.2 inches — ideal for taking selfies and watching TV dramas. (Apple released its Plus series in late 2014 with larger handsets, which did send its sales shooting up in China — but also added $100 to an already expensive price tag.)
+Apple also long resisted the rise of another important local feature: the dual SIM card system, a component that may sound boring but for Chinese people has become essential. In China, where many young people have never owned laptops, phones have become all-in-one devices — part television, part computer, part phone. Transitioning between two SIM cards on all other cell brands is a seamless process: one card for streaming and downloading at cheaper rates, the other one for making calls. Growing international tourism has also raised demand for phones that can accommodate a second, foreign SIM — and yet for years, Apple didn’t budge. The company finally gave in to the dual SIM card in the form of special models for China and Hong Kong last fall.
+It’s telling that the main example of Apple localizing its products to China in the last few years was a special model gold-colored iPhone. First introduced in 2013, it was a clear play for the Chinese market, and was, admittedly, a huge hit on the mainland. Many joked that the gold iPhone was targeted at the tuhao, a recent term that roughly translates as “tasteless nouveau riche” and that mockingly refers to the wealthy who feel the need to show off. The color was even given the name tuhao jin, or tuhao gold.
+But the allure of gold-colored plating — a feature focused not on user experience but aesthetics — goes only so far, it seems. And it may not be enough at this point to keep even the tuhao loyal. Huawei, China’s largest smartphone maker by market share, recently overtook Apple to move to second place globally. Its popularity among the wealthy and business class at home has shot up in recent years; its prices have been steadily rising as it shifts focus toward higher-end products. Many upper-middle-class Chinese who once owned iPhones have since switched to Huawei — including my dad.At the time, I was making $28,000 a year — nothing much, especially when you live 10 minutes away from Manhattan — but credit was free flowing, and I qualified for a $250,000 “no doc” adjustable loan. It wasn’t a lot, but with some savings and some money that my mom and great-aunt promised to give me — a privilege a lot of black people don’t have — I knew I’d be able to make a 20 percent down payment.
+Almost all of my closest family members owned their home: My grandparents, my great-aunt and, most important, my mother. She bought her home several years after I was born and constantly talked about how tough that was to do in the early 1980s as a single woman. She was always clear about the importance of owning your own things. It meant having control over your life; it meant freedom.
+So back in 2005, it seemed like a good idea to buy an apartment. I looked in Englewood, where I grew up, but across town from where I was raised, in the East Hill neighborhood. My mortgage broker told me I needed to get out of my adjustable loan in two years and get a conventional mortgage. She sort of warned me it was a bad deal, and I could understand why. But she didn’t warn me against doing it at all. She was black, middle-aged and seemed to take a “by any means necessary” approach to black people owning property. I understood that, too. I marched up to my new, small, one-bedroom apartment on the Hill, satisfied. It felt as if I’d broken barriers.
+But when I got a notice in the mail about five years after I closed, I felt dizzy. It was not long after the financial crisis. The letter said that my mortgage company had been charged with giving subprime loans to black and Hispanic people around the country and asked if I wanted to join a class-action suit. I had most likely been the target of predatory lending. I had known from the start that my income could make me a target. I’d heard the words of the broker. But because of my race? It hadn’t crossed my mind. I was devastated.
+I was reminded of this moment years later, when I was talking to a young man named Bleu who lived in Florida.
+He loved playing basketball, did well at his charter school and hoped to become a forensic scientist — the version of the American dream that rewards merit and achievement, his version of saving for a mortgage. His family had no resources to get him to college, though, and he took a job at a fast-food restaurant after graduating from high school. He tried to enroll in a for-profit college, but the monthly fees got too expensive . He dropped out after he missed the third payment.
+We were talking by phone as he drove home from work one night, through Tampa. He was talking about the political climate and racism today. “Not only do you have to worry,” he said, “about not having food to eat, but as a black person, you have the added burden of just trying to make it home alive.”In the odious 2018 film “Peppermint,” Jennifer Garner acts out a Trumpian fantasy. As a suburban mom whose husband and daughter were killed by Latino drug dealers, she becomes a one-woman vigilante army, killing a series of Latino assassins and destroying a piñata warehouse that doubles as a drug lord’s secret headquarters. The New Yorker called it “a racist film that reflects the current strain of anti-immigrant politics and its paranoid focus on MS-13.”
+Like the drug dealers in “Peppermint,” the bad guys in Latino drug war films are often a mishmash of tropes and stereotypes. The cartel operatives in “SEAL Team” resemble an Islamic State army as they launch a Benghazi-style attack on the show’s heroes. The Americans take refuge in a Mexican church and summon other Navy SEALS to rescue them. The show aired not long after Mr. Trump sent troops to the Mexican border to stop a caravan of Central Americans.
+Hollywood has become addicted to the narco narrative because it offers a tried-and-true tale of good and evil on an epic scale.
+The new Netflix series “Narcos: Mexico” features an excellent, nuanced performance by Diego Luna as a smart, enterprising and deeply flawed man. But watching Mr. Luna build his “empire,” I longed to see a Latino actor play a big Hollywood role without seeing him leave the usual trail of cocaine and severed heads in his wake.
+In “The Mule,” Mr. Eastwood plays an older man filled with regrets after a lifetime of alienating his wife and daughter. The drug dealers are really just stand-ins for forces that are eating away at many American families: rampant gun violence and the cruel logic of capitalism. The bad guys in narco films are always ruthless hyper-entrepreneurs, and in “The Mule” they tell Mr. Eastwood’s character, “We own your ass.” In “The Mule,” as in countless films of lesser quality, Latino stereotypes become symbols of a white man’s powerlessness and his unchecked desires. For his role in “Ozark,” Jason Bateman earned a Golden Globe nomination as yet another ordinary gringo caught up in the machinations of a Mexican cartel.
+Meanwhile, in real life, Latinos are acting out their own human foibles, and trying to build their own private empires, in fields that don’t involve criminal activity. They manage your local Walmart, study law, get divorced, attend cosplay conventions, and do all sorts of things you rarely see them do in mainstream American television and film.
+The dominant story among the more than 57 million Latino people in the United States is not the drug war: It’s inequality, immigrant ambition and the wounds caused by the separation of extended families. These themes await a treatment as virtuosic as “There Will Be Blood,” or as smart and cutting as “Get Out.”New Yorkers mostly know it as being the home of the Alamo. Sometimes they’ll say to me, “Oh, isn’t there a river there?” To which, I usually joke that, yes, as a matter of fact, it is the Venice of Texas. (It is nothing like Venice.) Even when the Spurs racked up national N.B.A. championships, the coastal sports media dismissed them as boring. (Luckily, another local hero, Coach Gregg Popovich, is around to belittle said national media.)
+“We’re not Houston or Dallas, we don’t boast,” said Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio native and former state senator who ran for lieutenant governor of Texas in 2014. “We never give ourselves the ‘atta boys’ or ‘atta girls,’ it’s not in our nature.”
+If you spend enough time in San Antonio, it’s hard not to run into one of the Castro brothers. (“Half the time they think I’m my brother,” Julián Castro said). When we were both back home, Mr. Castro and I usually caught up over tacos, so, just before Christmas, when he was in New York, I met him at La Esquina, a taqueria in Midtown.
+“Not as good as Texas, but not bad,” Mr. Castro said, a cautious politician’s verdict on the $4.99 barbacoa tacos that we both knew would have been fluffier and cost 99 cents in San Antonio.
+We spent the first few minutes catching up on local gossip — a mutual friend; The San Antonio Express-News holding a grudge because he didn’t give it an exclusive about his plans to run. (“They put my story in the Metro section!”)
+When asked by reporters why he was running, given that he hardly registers in the national polls, Mr. Castro talked about his hometown. “I said, ‘Go to my neighborhood that I grew up in — nobody was the front-runner there,’” he recalled. Mr. Castro will base his campaign in San Antonio, starting with a kickoff rally next Saturday.
+Until recently, San Antonio was reliably red, but like much of the Southwest, it has been transformed into a battleground by its young and Latino population, bad news for Republicans fearing an increasingly purple Texas. In the midterms, every major statewide candidate, including Senator Ted Cruz and his Democratic opponent, Beto O’Rourke, poured resources into winning San Antonio.[Never be uninteresting. Read the most thought-provoking, funny, delightful and raw stories from The New York Times Opinion section.]
+All your senses are heightened at night; everything is amplified. When you hear rustling leaves, it is as if you can pick out each individual flutter. The scurrying of small mammals offers a complex, scratchboard choreography. Listen hard along an internal register, and you sometimes pick up the pounding thud of your heart, or a mysterious whooshing that swirls through your ears like a miniature mistral. The cognitive realms of insomnia frequently resemble the dippy altered states induced by psychotropic drugs. (And of course, like a bad trip, the night can be full of terror: hypnagogic hallucinations causing mysterious shadows to sway before your open eyes or inducing furniture to hulk and loom.)
+Just as artists, writers and seekers have used drugs to expand their minds, so have many sleepless souls wondered at one time or other if the insomniac mind, pushed to its lateral limits, might not yield insights as well as torments. Might there be some small comfort amid the suffering?
+After all, once in a while, an unexpectedly profound thought will suddenly coalesce out of the dying remnants of a dream — and then I chase it down, all my insomniac energy bent on its capture. Again, I am reminded of Nabokov, delighting in the way his insomnia would explode in a “sunburst,” filling his head with ideas and fancies to feed his creative soul. The challenge involved, as Walt Whitman saw it, is to “see the sparkles of starshine on the icy and pallid earth” and then “sweat the night into words,” as the poet Bernard Spencer more practically put it in his poem “Night-Time: Starting to Write.”
+Maybe insomnia itself is a portal that encourages trafficking between the conscious and unconscious minds. On the one hand, as Alice Robb argues in her new book, “Why We Dream,” you can train yourself into lucid dreaming, exerting directorial control over the night brain’s filmic productions. Think of it, perhaps, as a form of scenario planning. Flip the direction of travel, though, and you become alert to the process Freud described when he wrote that during the day we “drive shafts” into our fresh chains of thought, and these shafts make contact with “dream thoughts.” This is how night and day fertilize each other. This — I’ve come to believe — is how creativity is born.
+As ever, Freud’s grasp of the mind’s quirks proved prescient. Sleep scientists now speak of states in which the brain is neither awake nor sleeping, but both. According to Rubin Naiman at the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, parts of the brain can drift into sleep during the day, effectively making sleepwalkers of us all, or shut down entirely, producing a flash sleep that endures for milliseconds and is experienced merely as a fractional slip of attention or momentary blackout. Perhaps, after all, sleep, not wakefulness, constitutes the mind’s default mode. And if that is the case, then perhaps insomnia is consciousness’s determined revenge.
+Marina Benjamin (@marinab52) is the author, most recently, of “Insomnia.”Secrecy about income and money is defeatist. Anat Shenker-Osorio, a messaging expert, discovered that in focus groups which included middle-class people, she heard a lot of expressions of self-loathing. Between refrains about the cost of living and remarks like “I can’t get the kids to college,” participants made statements that conveyed their deeply held belief that not making it meant they were not working hard enough.
+“They have imbibed this idea that your economic well-being is traceable principally to your own efforts,” Ms. Shenker-Osorio said.
+As a result, what the electorate doesn’t need to hear are Horatio Alger stories of how candidates worked their way up from humble origins, with the implied moral that anyone can make it in America with enough hard work. These kinds of tales can insidiously lead middle-class people today to blame themselves more for not flourishing.
+Instead, the new Congress and candidates of the future should tell voters that it’s O.K. to be mad about being in debt, that this is a savage society we now live in. They could talk about their own experience of debt, be it student or medical, or the debt of someone in their family. (What makes this a bit harder is how unrelatabl e, and depressing, the wealth of our Congress still is: in 2015, it was majority millionaire.)
+To win the anxious middle-class vote, politicians must offer real solutions for the challenges in the lives of these voters, especially on health care and education. One example of this is the scholarship program that Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York put in place: 940,000 middle-class families and individuals making up to $125,000 per year will qualify to attend tuition-free at colleges in the New York State and New York City public university systems. Though not perfect, it’s a step in the right direction.
+It is important to get these voters beyond the shame of debt, perhaps by allowing student debtors to be able to declare bankruptcy related to student loans, something that is nearly impossible to do now, and obtain debt forgiveness.
+An actual “Medicare for all” proposal would get at the heart of what is a real challenge for many. Michèle Lamont, a sociologist at Harvard who specializes in culture and inequality, told me that her work found that when candidates promote a policy like Medicare for all, even if it doesn’t come to fruition they are signaling that they understand voters’ need for solidarity and give voice to their hopes and difficulties by making them visible .Such a sentiment, not to mention the idea of stepping away from power for the good of the country, seems so alien to our politics today that it might have come from a different age. In light of such service, talk of toxic brands and a new generation of leaders seems misplaced.
+Rayburn, Albert and Tip O’Neill — who negotiated a key bill with President Ronald Reagan to preserve funding for Social Security — formed the ideal of the modern speakership. They shaped policy, worked with presidents from either party, molded their successors and tried to move the wheel forward. They sought compromise but also tried to bring about what progress had to be made. Above all, they respected the institution they led, the most thoroughly democratic part of our national government.
+It was a model that worked very well — or at least it did until Newt Gingrich wrecked it, as he wrecked so much that he put his hand to. Mr. Gingrich’s rebellion was aimed at cozy, low-level corruption and complacency, which certainly existed in the old speaker system. But his brand of self-aggrandizing hyperpartisanship proved exactly wrong as a corrective. Unable to conquer or to compromise, he ended up fleeing the Capitol engulfed in investigations and hounded by allegations about his own personal conduct.
+Ms. Pelosi represents a restoration of that ideal, and she brings formidable talents and a legendary work ethic (back) to the job. In what was described as an “unbelievable marathon” to secure Obamacare, she personally took on the task of winning over 60 wavering Democrats. To win back the speakership this time, she swayed another 60 or so members of her caucus.
+“For Pelosi, the strategy in every campaign she runs is ‘owning the ground,’” writes her friend Steve Israel, a former congressman, which is “not just a matter of a campaign field operation,” but “extends to message as well.”
+Ms. Pelosi doesn’t hesitate to associate her own ambitions with the quest for women’s equality — “You know why I do it? I do it because I want women to see you do not get pushed around,” she told CNN’s Dana Bash — and some, including Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, have attributed Ms. Pelosi’s ability to whip a caucus to the mothering skills that come from having five children and eight grandchildren: “She has eyes in the back of her head.”
+At the same time, she regularly displays what have traditionally — wrongly — been considered male attributes in politics. She keeps her head when all about her are losing theirs and is adept at the deadpan gibe, usually delivered right between the ribs. When President Barack Obama and his chief of staff Rahm Emanuel seemed about to abandon the Affordable Care Act in despair, she mocked their proposed alternative as “incrementalism” and “Kiddie Care,” and told them: “We’ll never have a better majority in your presidency in numbers than we’ve got right now. We can make this work.” She proceeded to get it done, vote by vote, maneuver after maneuver.WASHINGTON — Lucky there’s no Saturday detention at the Capitol.
+Republicans — and some Democrats — would certainly make like Mr. Vernon, the “Breakfast Club” disciplinarian, and lock down the irrepressible Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She’s only been in town a moment and has already, in this city of acronyms, become famous enough to supersede the shorthand for the Architect of the Capitol.
+A.O.C. now simply signifies the congresswoman from the Bronx and Queens.
+No longer content with Nancy Pelosi, the right craves a new she-devil. Republicans have mocked Ocasio-Cortez’s hardscrabble story, howled at her proposal to soak the rich with a 70 percent tax, scrutinized her clothes and booed her at Pelosi’s swearing-in. A.O.C. saucily tweeted back, “Don’t hate me cause you ain’t me, fellas.”
+The frenzy reached new absurdity when a tweet popped up with a video of her with friends at Boston University doing a dance from “The Breakfast Club,” with this slam: “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is.” Holy Footloose.
+“It is unsurprising to me that Republicans would think having fun should be disqualifying or illegal,” she told The Hill.On the 60th anniversary of the Cuban revolution, which the ruling Communist Party celebrated on Tuesday, the island nation is stable, having overcome such existential threats as the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 and a half-century of diplomatic isolation and withering economic sanctions imposed by the United States.
+Cuba has also weathered the collapse of the Soviet Union, its main Cold War benefactor, and a slew of traumatic internal ructions including the Mariel boatlift in 1980 and the Cuban raft exodus in 1994. Last but not least, Cuba has managed its first major political transitions, following the death in 2016 of its defining leader, Fidel Castro; the presidential retirement, last year, of his younger brother, Raúl Castro; and Raúl’s succession in office by Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, a 58-year-old Communist Party loyalist.
+For the first time since 1959, in other words, Cuba is ruled by someone other than a Castro, and it has handled the transition without the drama or bloodshed that many other revolutionary states have experienced after the death of their patriarchs.But here’s where competitive markets come in. In a perfectly competitive economy, with no monopoly power or other distortions — which is the kind of economy conservatives want us to believe we have — everyone gets paid his or her marginal product. That is, if you get paid $1000 an hour, it’s because each extra hour you work adds $1000 worth to the economy’s output.
+In that case, however, why do we care how hard the rich work? If a rich man works an extra hour, adding $1000 to the economy, but gets paid $1000 for his efforts, the combined income of everyone else doesn’t change, does it? Ah, but it does — because he pays taxes on that extra $1000. So the social benefit from getting high-income individuals to work a bit harder is the tax revenue generated by that extra effort — and conversely the cost of their working less is the reduction in the taxes they pay.
+Or to put it a bit more succinctly, when taxing the rich, all we should care about is how much revenue we raise. The optimal tax rate on people with very high incomes is the rate that raises the maximum possible revenue.
+And that’s something we can estimate, given evidence on how responsive the pre-tax income of the wealthy actually is to tax rates. As I said, Diamond and Saez put the optimal rate at 73 percent, Romer at over 80 percent — which is consistent with what AOC said.
+An aside: What if we take into account the reality that markets aren’t perfectly competitive, that there’s a lot of monopoly power out there? The answer is that this almost surely makes the case for even higher tax rates, since high-income people presumably get a lot of those monopoly rents.
+So AOC, far from showing her craziness, is fully in line with serious economic research. (I hear that she’s been talking to some very good economists.) Her critics, on the other hand, do indeed have crazy policy ideas — and tax policy is at the heart of the crazy.
+You see, Republicans almost universally advocate low taxes on the wealthy, based on the claim that tax cuts at the top will have huge beneficial effects on the economy. This claim rests on research by … well, nobody. There isn’t any body of serious work supporting G.O.P. tax ideas, because the evidence is overwhelmingly against those ideas.The world is, as everyone knows, going to hell, but there’s still the nervous thrill of waiting to see precisely which dark force will take us down. Will the economy collapse first, the ice sheets melt first, or chaos and war envelop us first?
+So here’s my antidote to that gloom: Let me try to make the case that 2018 was actually the best year in human history.
+Each day on average, about another 295,000 people around the world gained access to electricity for the first time, according to Max Roser of Oxford University and his Our World in Data website. Every day, another 305,000 were able to access clean drinking water for the first time. And each day an additional 620,000 people were able to get online for the first time.
+Never before has such a large portion of humanity been literate, enjoyed a middle-class cushion, lived such long lives, had access to family planning or been confident that their children would survive. Let’s hit pause on our fears and frustrations and share a nanosecond of celebration at this backdrop of progress.PARIS — The first Yellow Vest demonstration of the new year reached a new level of violence on Saturday as a government ministry building was attacked and the minister evacuated out the back door. What started two months ago as a protest over gas taxes has turned into a more general attack on the French government.
+The minister, the chief government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux, told French television that Yellow Vest protesters and “men dressed in black” — the so-called casseurs, or “breakers,” who have latched onto the movement — commandeered a construction vehicle and broke down the door of the Left Bank building. They then entered a courtyard and broke several windows, he said.Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, says he wants to give Arabic “prestige,” as it is “a great literary language.”
+While the ministry wants to promote the study of Arabic and make classes more readily available, it has not provided many details about the plan, other than to say that Arabic teaching will be strengthened alongside that of Russian and Chinese.
+And most French schools will have to start their Arabic programs from scratch.
+Only 0.2 percent of students in public middle and high schools in France took Arabic classes in the 2017-2018 school year, putting the language far behind the widely taught English, Spanish and German.
+In addition to the pedagogical challenges of jump-starting Arabic programs in public schools, there are social and political obstacles, as well.
+Rime Abdel Nabi, who teaches Arabic at two public high schools, as well as at Sorbonne University in Paris, said public school principals were reluctant to open classes, saying, “‘No, we don’t have enough Arabs here,” or “‘No, we don’t want to attract Arabs.’”
+The ministry’s plans is causing particular alarm on the political right. Luc Ferry, a former education minister, suggested that the measure was tantamount to allowing Islamism in public schools.President Trump on Friday said that he was considering the declaration of a “national emergency” along the border with Mexico, which he apparently believes would allow him to divert funds from the military budget to pay for a wall, and to use military personnel to build it.
+While it is hard to know exactly what the president has in mind, or whether he has any conception about what it would entail, one thing is clear: Not only would such an action be illegal, but if members of the armed forces obeyed his command, they would be committing a federal crime.
+Begin with the basics. From the founding onward, the American constitutional tradition has profoundly opposed the president’s use of the military to enforce domestic law. A key provision, rooted in an 1878 statute and added to the law in 1956, declares that whoever “willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force” to execute a law domestically “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years” — except when “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”
+Another provision, grounded in a statute from 1807 and added to the law in 1981, requires the secretary of defense to “ensure that any activity (including the provision of any equipment or facility or the assignment or detail of any personnel)” must “not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.”ISTANBUL — As a writer and magazine editor, Qurban Mamut promoted the culture and history of his people, the Uighurs, and that of other Turkic minority groups who live in far western China. He did so within the strict confines of censorship imposed by the Chinese authorities, who are ever wary of ethnic separatism and Islamic extremism among the predominantly Muslim peoples of the region.
+It was a line that Mr. Mamut navigated successfully for 26 years, eventually rising to become editor in chief of the Communist Party-controlled magazine Xinjiang Civilization before retiring in 2011.
+“My father is very smart; he knows what is the red line, and if you cross it you are taken to jail,” said his son, Bahram Sintash, who now lives in Virginia. “You work very close to the red line to teach people the culture. You have to be smart and careful with your words.”
+Then last year, the red line moved. Suddenly, Mr. Mamut and more than a hundred other Uighur intellectuals who had successfully navigated the worlds of academia, art and journalism became the latest targets of a sweeping crackdown in the region of Xinjiang that has ensnared as many as one million Muslims in indoctrination camps.But slaughter by Muslim halal and Jewish kosher rules requires that an animal be in perfect health — which religious authorities say rules out stunning it first — and be killed with a single cut to the neck that severs critical blood vessels. The animal loses consciousness in seconds, and advocates say it may cause less suffering than other methods, not more.
+Most countries and the European Union allow religious exceptions to the stunning requirement, though in some places — like the Netherlands, where a new law took effect last year, and Germany — the exceptions are very narrow. Belgium is joining Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia among the nations that do not provide for any exceptions.
+Ann De Greef, director of Global Action in the Interest of Animals, a Belgian animal rights group, insisted that stunning does not conflict with kosher and halal doctrine, and “they could still consider it ritual slaughtering,” but the religious authorities refuse to accept that.
+“They want to keep living in the Middle Ages and continue to slaughter without stunning — as the technique didn’t yet exist back then — without having to answer to the law,” she said. “Well, I’m sorry, in Belgium the law is above religion and that will stay like that.”
+Belgium, with a population of about 11 million, is home to roughly 500,000 Muslims and over 30,000 Jews. Those who adhere to their religious rules will soon be forced to order their meat from abroad, which community members say will mean paying more, and could even lead to food shortages.The negotiations on Saturday focused on priorities for security rather than a dollar figure for the border wall, the vice president’s office said. While Mr. Trump has stood by his $5.7 billion demand, Senate Democrats have offered $1.3 billion for border security, including fencing, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, have repeatedly said that they will not agree to any wall funding. Ms. Pelosi has called a border wall an “immorality.”
+The vice president’s office said that Mr. Pence had reiterated the president’s position that any deal needed to include funding for the wall. The office also said that Democrats had requested additional information from the Department of Homeland Security about its needs to deal with border issues.
+Democratic staff members asked for a formal budget justification for the administration’s insistence on its $5.7 billion proposal, a Democratic official familiar with the discussion said, adding that Mr. Pence made clear that the White House would not budge from that figure. The Democrats told the vice president that there would be no movement on the dollar figure until after the government is reopened.
+It is unclear just what kind of authority Mr. Trump has granted Mr. Pence to speak for him in negotiations. Last month, when Mr. Pence made a $2.6 billion counteroffer to Democrats in an effort to avert the shutdown, Mr. Trump quickly shot down the proposal.
+During the talks on Saturday, Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, offered a briefing on what the administration has deemed a “crisis” at the border. Ms. Nielsen had tried to give a similar briefing earlier in the week to congressional leaders and White House officials gathered in the Situation Room, but she was cut off by Ms. Pelosi, who questioned Ms. Nielsen’s facts.Tricky Clues
+The fill of this puzzle wasn’t nefarious for a Sunday, although there were some super-cute and gratifying misdirects, like LEO, RDA, ROMP, ART and EDDY. I also really liked clues for ECLIPSE, BISON, NINES, BLO, CLAM and TOW, among others.
+64A: Now that “content,” which is what we call entertainment these days, comes at us at an overwhelming pace, I wasn’t sure if we even did “pilot season” anymore. Apparently it does still exist (and seems to be swinging into action around now, actually): A frenzy of acquisition where networks and all those streaming channels fight over sample shows, and reward the ones they think will succeed with the chance to follow up with EPISODE I and ultimately a whole season (which we can now binge in one slothful sitting. Progress!).
+73A: It’s probably provincial of me to think of Nobu as an esoteric reference; I didn’t realize that there are now more than 70 locations all over the world. And it’s probably provincial of me to think only of sushi; the fish we’re looking for here is BLACK COD, and in this recipe, it’s marinated in a miso mixture for four days.
+81A: I didn’t struggle much with this confection, but it was a debut and I figured I’d stand up for CUP O JOE as something I know I’ve seen and heard many times in life. The puzzle hasn’t used “cuppa joe” either, apparently, and there’s room for both in the world, I think.
+3D: This is another brand name I’m going to call out as hoity-toity, mainly because of their voluptuous expense, but I’m certainly among the admirers of MOLESKINE notebooks. This is a debut, untarnished, like the three Moleskine yearly planners that I’ve bought with starry eyes and never touched. I Marie Kondo’d them out of here a few days ago; when the 2019 version gets marked down, I’m sure I will once again succumb to temptation.Ireland this week began offering legalized abortion services, a historic shift in a country that for decades had some of the most restrictive abortion laws in Europe.
+In a referendum last year, voters repealed a clause in Ireland’s Constitution that effectively outlawed abortion, and legislation passed at the end of 2018 allowed for unrestricted terminations of pregnancies up to 12 weeks.
+The legalization was immediately met by small-scale protests, with a demonstration at a clinic in Galway gaining national attention on Thursday after a handful of anti-abortion activists gathered outside the entrance with signs that read, “Real doctors don’t terminate their patients,” and “Say no to abortion in Galway.”
+The protests set off calls for additional legislation to protect those seeking abortions and for the physicians providing them, including establishing exclusion zones that would restrict how close protesters could be to places providing abortions.But in September, workers dismantling the east span heard a loud popping sound and soon discovered that the structure was unstable. Taking that part of the bridge apart piece by piece could lead to collapse, Tappan Zee Constructors, the company responsible for the demolition, determined.
+“Through extensive engineering analysis, it has been determined that this is the safest method to proceed with lowering the span given its current state,” the company said in a statement.
+After the demolition, only a portion of the west span, nearer Rockland County, will remain; it will continue to be dismantled piece by piece, according to Tappan Zee Constructors.
+The instability of the east span was discovered a day after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo led a ceremony to open the second span of the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, the $4 billion structure named after his father. That bridge was built to replace the Tappan Zee, which opened in 1955.
+State Senator David Carlucci, a Democrat who represents Rockland County and parts of Westchester, said on Saturday that he was disappointed at the change of plans because engineers have “known since September that the structure was not sound.”HOUSTON — Relatives of Jazmine Barnes, the 7-year-old Texas girl who was fatally shot inside a moving car, grieved on Saturday at an emotionally charged rally not far from where the gunman opened fire on a family that was out on a morning coffee run.
+Nearly 1,000 people gathered to honor Jazmine and to urge law enforcement to find the man who the police said attacked on Dec. 30 without provocation.
+Jazmine, who was black, was in the car with her mother and three sisters when a white man pulled his red pickup truck beside them and began shooting, the police said. A bullet struck Jazmine in the head and she died at the scene, the police said. The gunman was described as a man in his 30s or 40s wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
+“We’re going to find him no matter what corner we have to turn,” said LaPorsha Washington, Jazmine’s mother, who was driving at the time of the attack. “We’re going to find you.”“I believe that in the age of mutual deterrence — and we are still in the age of mutual deterrence — the superpowers will behave the way hedgehogs make love. That is, carefully.”
+HAROLD BROWN, the defense secretary under President Jimmy Carter, a few months after taking office in 1977. Mr. Brown, a scientist who had helped develop America’s nuclear arsenal, served until 1981.ARTS & LEISURE
+An article on Page 1 about the artists Gillie and Marc Schattner, using information from the artists and the MetroTech BID, misidentifies the organization that secured “The Last Three” sculpture in Brooklyn’s MetroTech Commons. While MetroTech Commons is a privately operated space within the MetroTech BID, the BID did not secure the work. The error is repeated in a picture caption. The article also misstates Jennifer Lantzas’s position with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation. She is its deputy director of public art, not its public arts coordinator.
+TRAVEL
+An article on Page 1 about Jada Yuan’s experiences traveling the world for The New York Times misstates the surname of a woman who was murdered in Washington last year. She was Wendy Martinez, not Marina. The article also misidentifies a farmer in Puerto Rico who told Ms. Yuan and a friend about a party. He is Elmer Sánchez, not Rafael.
+•
+Because of an editing error, an article on Dec. 23 about the Dead Sea misstated the amount of money in dollars that the Israeli tourism ministry recently spent on improvements at the Ein Bokek resort area. It was $135 million, not $13 million.
+REAL ESTATE
+A photograph with the cover story last Sunday, about Manhattan’s housing market in 2018, was published in error. The picture showed 21 West End Avenue, not One West End Avenue, where several notable sales occurred.The Yankees retained one of their best relievers, reaching an agreement Saturday night on a contract with the left-hander Zach Britton. The deal guarantees Britton three years and $39 million.
+The agreement was confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the deal who was not authorized to comment publicly until Britton passes a physical examination. The Yankees will have an option, after the 2020 season, to extend the deal to four years and $53 million. If they do not, Britton could then exercise an out clause.
+Britton, 31, had a 2.88 earned run average in 25 games with the Yankees last season after coming to New York in late July in a trade from the Baltimore Orioles. He ruptured his Achilles’ tendon in an off-season workout in December 2017 but proved he was healthy last summer, retaining the power sinker that hitters struggle to elevate.
+Britton, who had 120 saves from 2014 through 2016, has allowed just 12 home runs in 283 games over the last five seasons.Elizabeth Moira Dean and Erin Marie Randall were married Jan. 5 at Weber’s Boutique Hotel in Ann Arbor, Mich. Stacey Swickerath, a Universal Life minister, officiated.
+Ms. Dean (left), 30, is a web administrator at the University of Michigan School of Education in Ann Arbor. She graduated from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., and received a master's degree from the University of Maryland and a micromaster’s degree from the University of Michigan School of Information.
+Ms. Dean is the daughter of Kathleen M. McGettigan Dean and Gregory F. Dean of Potomac, Md. Ms. Dean’s father is the vice president for curriculum development at America’s Health Insurance Plans in Washington. Her mother is the chief management officer at the Office of Personnel Management in Washington.
+Ms. Randall, 26, is a third-year law student at the University of Michigan. She graduated summa cum laude from American University in Washington and served as a political appointee in the Obama administration at the Department of Education in the Office for Civil Rights. This fall, she is to begin as an associate in Washington in the financial services practice at the law firm Dechert.GraceAnn Caramico and Alfonse Robert Muglia were married Jan. 5. The Rev. David C. Santos performed the ceremony at St. Bartholomew the Apostle Roman Catholic Church in Scotch Plains, N.J., where he is the associate pastor.
+The couple met while studying at Georgetown, from which each received a law degree.
+Mrs. Muglia, 27, is an associate at Kasowitz Benson Torres, a law firm in New York. She graduated magna cum laude from N.Y.U.
+She is a daughter of Joan M. Caramico and Michael J. Caramico of Scotch Plains. The bride’s father is a vice president and the tax director at Nasdaq, the stock exchange in New York.
+Mr. Muglia, 26, is an associate at Riker Danzig Scherer Hyland & Perretti, a law firm in Morristown, N.J. He graduated with honors from Cornell.Maura Carey Whang and Deegan Ross McClung were married Jan. 5 at the Marigny Opera House, an arts and events space in New Orleans. Paola J. Martinez, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated.
+Ms. Whang, 36, is a candidate for a master’s degree in historic preservation at Columbia. She graduated from Middlebury College and received a master’s degree in architecture from City College.
+She is the daughter of Eileen McCoy Whang and KyuJung Whang of Princeton, N.J. The bride’s father is the vice president for facilities at Princeton University. Her mother retired as the work-life consultant in the human resources department at Cornell.
+Mr. McClung, 42, is the executive chef at Sadelle’s, a New York restaurant.
+He is a son of Barbara Ross McClung and Daniel F. McClung of New Orleans. The groom’s father retired as the senior partner at Campaign Strategies, a Houston consultancy for Democratic candidates for national political office.Elizabeth Emery Rothman and Lee Miller Taglin were married Dec. 31 at the home of the bride’s parents in Los Angeles. Oona L. Curley, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated.
+The couple met during a musical theater workshop while at Brown, from which both graduated.
+Ms. Rothman, 29, is the director for new play development at Manhattan Theater Club, a Broadway and Off Broadway producer in Manhattan whose show “Cost of Living” was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for drama.
+She is a daughter of Jessica Harper and Thomas E. Rothman. The bride’s father is the chairman of the Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group in Los Angeles. Her mother is an actor who has had starring roles in “Suspiria,” “My Favorite Year,” “Stardust Memories,” “Pennies from Heaven” and other films. She is also a singer and songwriter and the author of “The Crabby Cook Cookbook” (Workman Publishing, 2010).
+Mr. Taglin, 30, is the manager for international strategy and production at Disney Theatrical Productions, a division of the Walt Disney Company in Manhattan.Stephanie Cristina Formas and Stephen Thomas Carter were married Dec. 31. Jenny A. Durkan, who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated at the Brake and Clutch Warehouse, an events space in Dallas.
+Ms. Formas, 32, is the chief of staff for Ms. Durkan, who is the mayor of Seattle. The bride graduated from Baylor University.
+She is the daughter of Patty Huber Formas of Waco, Tex.
+Mr. Carter, 33, is a senior communications manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash. He graduated from Whitman College, which is in Walla Walla, Wash.
+He is a son of Gail Viseltear Carter of Virginia Beach and Donald F. Carter of Seattle.
+The couple met and began dating in 2012 while working in Washington, both as regional press secretaries, for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.Jia Zhang and Eric Ross Finkelstein were married Jan. 4 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. A staff member of the New York City Clerk’s Office, officiated.
+The couple met at the Rhode Island School of Design, from which each graduated.
+Ms. Zhang, 37, is a research scholar at Columbia University's Center for Spatial Research. She received master’s degrees from Parsons School of Design and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She also received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab.
+The bride is the daughter of Hong Zheng and Xiaobin Zhang of Beijing. Jia's father is the chairman in Beijing for ELife Holdings, an investment holding company in Hong Kong, and was formerly the China senior adviser and managing director at J.P. Morgan. Her mother is the founder and principal of Dandelion School in Beijing, a nonprofit school for the children of migrant workers.
+Mr. Finkelstein, 37, is a founder and an owner of Court Street Grocers, a group of restaurants in Brooklyn and Manhattan.Martha Rose Shulman and Robert Alan Israel were married Jan. 5 at their home in Los Angeles. The bride’s sister, Melodie Bryant, who was ordained through the American Marriage Ministries, officiated.
+Ms. Shulman, 68, is the daughter of the late Carol R. Shulman and the late writer Max Shulman, who lived in Westport, Conn. The bride is a cookbook author, having written works like “Mediterranean Light,” “The Vegetarian Feast” and “The Simple Art of Vegetarian Cooking.” Ms. Shulman is also a food columnist, having been featured in The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times.
+Mr. Israel, 79, is the son of the late Lillian R. Israel and the late Dr. Barney B. Israel, who lived in Detroit. The groom is an opera and theater set and costume designer based in Los Angeles. His work has been seen at the Metropolitan Opera, the National Operas in London and Tokyo, the Paris Opera and the Vienna State Opera, among others. Israel's costume drawings are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He has designed the world premieres of four operas by Philip Glass and is the former chairman of the Theater Department at the University of California, Los Angeles.
+The couple met through a mutual friend in 2015.
+The bride’s first marriage ended in divorce and the groom was a widower.Elizabeth Frei and Benjamin Duchek connected through Tinder, the dating app, in late December 2016, but didn’t meet in person until the following March. He was stationed at the time at Fort Dix, in New Jersey, but his position as a major general’s aide brought him regularly to Washington, where Ms. Frei lives.
+In the time before they met, the two texted often and then eventually talked every night on the telephone. That gave them a lot of time to get to know each other, so that when they did finally meet, “We had a 12-hour first date,” Mr. Duchek said.
+The two had found that they had much in common, and both admire the kindness that they see in each other.
+“It’s what I love most about her: She never has a mean word to say about anyone,” he said.
+She realized she could rely on him, always. “When you really need him there, he shows up,” Ms. Frei said. “He doesn’t complain and it was so eye-opening for me to be in a relationship where I know I can count on that person.”Jessica Chastain plays an underground poker ringleader in “Molly’s Game.” And “Annihilation” hits Hulu.
+What’s on TV
+MOLLY’S GAME (2017) 6:40 p.m. on Showtime. This week’s announcement that the actor Idris Elba will be D.J.-ing at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival may not have been the news that many pine for (that would be the prospect of Elba as James Bond), but it did bring to light one of Elba’s lesser-known talents. See him here as he plays a lawyer opposite Jessica Chastain in the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin’s directorial debut, a fictionalized (and sympathetic) account of the life of the skier-turned-underground poker ringleader Molly Bloom. Dense with quick-moving dialogue, the film follows Bloom’s rapid rise from the back seat of a high-end Los Angeles poker game to her eventual F.B.I. and legal troubles. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that “Mr. Sorkin has written some sharp characters and cast them accordingly.” But she also said that the film’s endeavor to view Bloom as a victim and put a feminist spin on the story is a feeble one. “By attempting to portray Molly as any kind of female victim — and by glossing over her culpability — Mr. Sorkin only ends up denying this character her agency,” Dargis wrote.
+SISTERS (2015) 5:30 p.m. on FXM. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler play sisters with midlife troubles in this comedy, by the longtime “Saturday Night Live” writer Paula Pell. Fey is perennially unemployed, with a temper. Poehler is a nurse who is divorced. Their childhood home is being sold, so the siblings decide to throw a final party there. In his review for The Times, A.O. Scott called the film “uneven, generally enjoyable, self-consciously naughty and also, despite drug use and jokes about anal sex, more concerned with reassurance than transgression.”Rear Adm. Kevin M. Sweeney has resigned his post as chief of staff to the United States secretary of defense, the Defense Department said Saturday.
+Mr. Sweeney had become chief of staff to former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in January 2017, and his resignation comes soon after Mr. Mattis’s own pointed departure in December. The two had known each other for years.
+Mr. Mattis said then that he had resigned in protest of President Trump’s decision to withdraw American forces from Syria and in protest of the president’s rejection of international alliances.
+Mr. Mattis had originally said he would step down at the end of February, but angered by Mr. Mattis’s criticism, Mr. Trump said he was removing Mr. Mattis from his post two months early.In a room full of stars, which one is the sun?
+That’s a thing your Carpetbagger often wonders as he wanders through a dense thicket of celebrities at an award-season party. At these soirees, almost everyone is famous, but there is always one person so additionally compelling — think a Meryl or a Leo — that the center of gravity shifts when they enter.
+The Hollywood parties this weekend, all held in advance of Sunday’s Golden Globes, haven’t lacked for big names like Bradley Cooper, Nicole Kidman and Viola Davis. Still, they were reduced to mere satellites whenever Billy Porter showed up, swanning through each crowd in a new wrap dress and cackling with evident pleasure.
+“I’m black, I’m turning 50, and I’m fierce!” Porter crowed to me Friday night.
+He was at W Magazine’s party at the Chateau Marmont to celebrate his Golden Globe nomination for best actor for the FX drama “Pose,” and though most of the men in our orbit wore tasteful suits, Porter was in a black dress with peekaboo cutouts and a wide-brimmed Gucci hat that was half-cowboy, half-coven. “It reminds me a little of Diane Keaton,” said Sarah Silverman, coming over to pay respects.
+Earlier in the day, Porter had turned heads at the American Film Institute luncheon, where he posed for pictures with the likes of Mahershala Ali while wearing a goldenrod gown. No other dress in the room received quite as many compliments.Jazmine was with her mother, LaPorsha Washington, and her sisters, including a 6-year-old and two teenagers, the authorities said. Ms. Washington, who was injured in the shooting, told CNN she did not see the gunman but her teenage daughter described him as a white man with blue eyes.
+“This just went down very quickly,” Sheriff Gonzalez said. “When the gunfire erupted, we are talking about small children, they witnessed something very traumatic. And it’s very likely the last thing they did see was that red truck and the driver in that truck.”
+Research has shown that stress levels and conditions at the time of a crime can undercut the accuracy of eyewitness identification. The sheriff and the family said the sun had not yet risen when the shooting happened.
+Image Eric Black Jr., 20, has confessed to taking part in Jazmine’s killing, the authorities said. Credit... Harris County Sheriff's Office
+“Eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have,” said Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College in North Carolina, who said that people generally try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they know about the world. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we fill in the gaps.”
+After Jazmine’s killing, the public mobilized to help the family. On Saturday, the day before the arrest was announced, nearly 1,000 people gathered at a rally in Houston, clutching banners and shouting for justice for Jazmine, who was in second grade at a Houston-area school.
+DeAndre Hopkins, a wide receiver for the Houston Texans, had pledged to donate his paycheck from this weekend’s playoff game, which amounts to $29,000, to help pay for Jazmine’s funeral. And Mr. King, a prominent racial justice activist and a columnist at The Intercept, had raised a $100,000 reward for information leading to the gunman’s arrest.And in Wauwatosa, a shopping polestar in Wisconsin where chockablock malls attract families in the market for $4,000 sofas, Adidas NMDs and a Cheesecake Factory pig out, the city is fighting property tax appeals in court dating back to 2015 from Lowe’s, Nordstrom, Best Buy, Meijer and United Healthcare. It recently settled with Target, Walgreens and a KFC franchise.
+“It’s like a virus,” said Kathleen Ehley, the mayor of Wauwatosa.
+In the Lowe’s case, the company spent more than $16 million to buy the land and construct its 140,000-square-foot building less than a dozen years ago. The city assessed the spot in a bustling retail hub right off Highway 41 at $13.6 million. The company’s appraisal was $7.1 million, based on sales of empty and once empty buildings in other neighborhoods.
+Lowe’s declined to comment because the case is being litigated.
+But the city’s assessor said Lowe’s had partly based its analysis on stores that were more than 25 years old and in economically declining neighborhoods. Another store was listed as comparable in part because of its “proximity” to a shopping mall, although instead of the booming center near this Lowe’s, that mall had closed 15 years earlier.
+City officials estimate that the current string of dark-store lawsuits alone would require it to refund $4.1 million of tax payments — the equivalent of about a tenth of its total property tax revenue this year.
+“Either my property taxes are going to go up or my schools are going to suffer,” said Lisa Williams, who lives in a classic Craftsman-style bungalow a few minutes’ drive from Lowe’s in Wauwatosa, a comfortable suburb of Milwaukee. “The stores want to get all the benefits of being here without any of the costs.”
+Ms. Williams, 53, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has three children, added, “Everybody in the neighborhood shops there.”“My career never recovered and never will,” said Charlotte Brock, 39, a mother in Vienna, Va. When she had her first child eight years ago, she quit her job as a think tank analyst and moved in with her parents because she had no paid leave.
+Now an analyst at NASA, she is expecting twins, and has pieced together sick leave followed by part-time work. Her husband doesn’t get paid parental leave either. “People don’t realize the recovery for women, even physically, is a lot longer than what’s advertised in our culture,” she said. “And just in terms of the experience of bonding, the closeness, and breast-feeding is so much easier if you can do it without having to pump.”
+The share of American women who are working has stalled, researchers say, hurting families’ incomes and the country’s economic output, even as that share has continued to climb in other rich countries. As employment has improved since the last recession, men have benefited more than women. Economists have pinpointed the lack of family-friendly policies as a big reason. In Canada, by comparison, some parents can stretch out their paid leave over 18 months, and in Britain, many parents can take one year. Both nations also provide subsidized child care.
+“Because we refuse to acknowledge that people have families and care issues, we’re falling behind our economic competitors,” said Heather Boushey, the executive director of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, who advised Hillary Clinton on economic issues during her 2016 presidential campaign.
+If policies like paid parental leave and subsidized child care enabled more mothers to work, the United States could add five million prime-age workers to its labor force, according to a new economic letter from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. Spending on child care makes the biggest difference in female employment, earnings and fertility, found a recent paper.
+The California policy would be the nation’s biggest test of the idea that longer leave, by encouraging parents not to quit their jobs and by delaying the need to pay for infant care, can help economic growth.“Congresswoman Tlaib was elected to shake up Washington, not continue the status quo,” her office said in a statement standing by her remarks even as President Trump was denouncing them, and her, on national television.
+In case it wasn’t already clear, the insurgent freshmen who promised bold and uncompromising action, uninterested in and unbowed by the strictures of the status quo, are showing no signs of wavering. They appear determined to push their party to the left, even as more experienced lawmakers fear that their antics and programs could divide the party and empower Republicans.
+“I think some lessons will be learned pretty quickly around here,” Representative Dina Titus, Democrat of Nevada and a former professor of political science, said after Ms. Tlaib’s profane outburst. “You don’t want to hand the gun for the other side to shoot you with.”
+The 2019 freshmen are hardly the first incoming class to come in swinging. The “Watergate babies” of 1975 came in with a mandate to clean up government. Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolutionaries of 1995 and the Tea Party class of 2011 believed they had a mandate for conservative change; what they lacked in realism, they made up for in moxie.
+This new class has deeper ideological divisions, but its liberal wing is in the spotlight, thanks to the iPhone video-Instagram generation that powered its ascent. Its reach, as of yet, has gone only so far, though. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who took pains to welcome the freshmen and praise their victories, must also attend to the demands of more moderate lawmakers whose victories in Republican districts sealed the party’s majority — and whose re-elections are necessary to keep it.Zainab’s parents estimated that their daughter’s illness began more than 10 months ago when they noticed that her temperament changed and her appetite waned. She developed fevers and constipation, and she wasn’t urinating normally.
+Zainab was once an active, chubby child, but she lost weight and preferred to be on the bed instead of running around. Her condition seemed to worsen over the summer. The family recalled visiting relatives in Atlanta and attending a barbecue where Zainab was quiet and withdrawn.
+“Everybody wanted to play with her,” Mr. Mughal said. “So there were a lot of other kids there. But she would not play with anybody. My wife kept telling me, she said, ‘She is not O.K. She is not O.K.’”
+They brought Zainab to the pediatrician.
+“I went to the doctor and I said to her over and over, ‘She is not eating,’” Zainab’s mother, Mariam Mehmood, recalled during the interview.
+When they learned that Zainab had cancer, it was “devastating,” Mr. Mughal said. “At that time we were completely destroyed.”
+Zainab had a tumor growing in her stomach, Mr. Mughal said, and a biopsy revealed that it was cancer. Doctors have characterized Zainab’s neuroblastoma as high risk. Children in that category have a five-year survival rate of around 40 to 50 percent, according to the American Cancer Society.
+Soon after Zainab received her first blood transfusion, doctors realized that she was missing the Indian-B antigen, meaning that if her body receives blood that does have the antigen, her immune system will attack it.When the gunman in the Las Vegas mass shooting died, he left behind a hoard of guns and firearm accessories in his two Nevada homes and the hotel suite he used as a perch for his attack.
+All told, the gunman, Stephen Paddock, owned 50 guns, from pistols to high-powered long arms, and almost 40 firearm components including scopes, a red dot sight, bi-pods and rifle cases. A special administrator appointed by a state court judge to determine the value of Mr. Paddock’s estate said in a recent report that the guns and equipment were worth about $62,340.
+Now, the main lawyer involved in passing on Mr. Paddock’s nearly $1.4 million estate to the families of the 58 people he slaughtered at an outdoor country music festival is facing a quandary. Should the firearms be sold to raise as much money as possible for the bereaved, or would it be more appropriate to destroy the guns in an emblematic rejection of the kind of violence that Mr. Paddock carried out?
+“The money that would come from selling the guns is not a huge amount, but it would help to make a difference in peoples’ lives,” said Alice Denton, the lawyer for the special administrator in the estate case.Each week, our survey of recent residential sales in New York City and the surrounding region focuses on homes that sold around a certain price point, allowing you to compare single-family homes, condos and co-ops in different locales.
+The “list price” is the asking price when the property came on the market with the most recent broker. The time on the market is measured from the most recent listing to the closing date of the sale.
+Connecticut | 3 bedrooms, 2½ baths
+$1,100,000“It’s a tax that comes right off the bottom line,” said EBW’s president, Cory Steeby. “It totally incentivizes you to move out of the United States and build either in Canada or Mexico. These are active conversations right now.”
+Mr. Trump portrays his trade war as an unavoidable confrontation aimed at remedying decades of American victimization in the global marketplace. Pointing at trade deficits as indications that Americans have been ripped off — a contention dismissed by many economists — he has unleashed 25 percent tariffs on imports of steel and 10 percent on aluminum.
+He has trained special wrath on China, imposing tariffs reaching 25 percent on some $50 billion worth of Chinese imported goods, and 10 percent on an additional $200 billion worth of products. Barring a deal in the next two months or an extension of a fragile cease-fire, Mr. Trump has vowed to increase duties to 25 percent on the whole lot, while threatening to target an additional $267 billion in Chinese imports.
+The tariffs have been sold to Americans as a means of forcing multinational companies to make their products in the United States, abandoning China, Mexico and other low-cost centers of industry. But the tariffs are threatening jobs that are already here.
+Trade in components has grown in recent years, as American industrial prowess has become increasingly dependent on access to the global supply chain. Back in 2009, American factories imported some 20 percent of the electronic products and computers they folded into their operations, according to an analysis by the United States International Trade Commission. By 2016, the share had risen to 25 percent.“I used to sit down and cry sometimes,” Mr. Scott said. “I cried and prayed.”
+He was desperate to provide for his son. He had no relationship with his own father, and his mother died when Mr. Scott was 2 years old, leading to a tumultuous time in foster care.
+A doctor of Zahir’s vouched for Mr. Scott’s care to officials, and he was able to keep his son.
+The inquiry opened the door for Mr. Scott to receive help and create a more stable environment. A doctor recommended to city officials that the two be placed in housing in the Bronx, close to Zahir’s appointments at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore. Returning to the borough where Mr. Scott had spent much of his life proved to be a turning point.MARADI, Niger — He didn’t hit her. He didn’t yell. He didn’t cheat, as far as she knows. It was just that, less than two years into their marriage, Zalika Amadou’s husband had changed. He’d become far too neglectful and indifferent for a young woman who expected, well, more.
+Her mother, who had gotten married at 14 to a stranger twice her age, couldn’t understand the fuss. She’d stuck with her husband for five decades until he died, and was appalled that young women these days didn’t do the same.
+But for Ms. Amadou, who married at 16, simply having a husband was not enough. She never wanted to depend on a man in the first place. So, on a busy morning in Maradi, Niger, she sat in front of a judge at a crowded Islamic court on the sidewalk and asked for what young women across the region are seeking like never before: a divorce.
+For centuries, women have been expected to endure bad marriages in many conservative pockets of West Africa. Divorce happened, but most often the husbands were the ones casting off their partners. Tradition has bound women so tightly that spouses are sometimes chosen for babies in the womb.Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
+I was reporting in the West African nation of Niger when the Unicef workers I was traveling with suggested we make a side trip to a clinic that treats women suffering from fistula.
+Fistula occurs when the lining between the bladder and the vagina is punctured. It happens often to girls when they experience tears while delivering babies before their bodies are fully developed. The New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof has written extensively about the condition, which often leaves the girls unable to control their bladders, viewed as dirty and ejected from their families.
+There was steady demand for treatment of fistula in Niger, a poverty-stricken nation with high rates of child marriage. The fistula facility we toured was near a leprosy clinic, a sign of just how stigmatized these patients are by society. It also treated girls who had been subjected to genital cutting, a practice that has been outlawed but still occurs in some places.As president, Roosevelt was aware that the governments of Germany, France and Britain had set up programs to help their citizens stave off the financial catastrophes associated with old age, illness, injury, unemployment and loss of a breadwinner. He was embarrassed that the United States had nothing comparable. The idea of using the government’s strength to assist those unable to fend for themselves seemed to him a mark of national greatness. And there were few things he coveted more than Europe’s recognition of American greatness.
+Unable to make any legislative progress on this front, Roosevelt resorted to other tactics. He issued dozens of executive orders creating federal wildlife refuges on public land, a move that protected animals and reduced pollution. He also made liberal use of presidential commissions. The Inland Waterways Commission was established in 1907 to manage the nation’s lakes and rivers and to develop their potential as a transportation network. The ostensible goals were economic, but the plan also called for flood control, soil reclamation and pollution abatement — all boons to public health.
+Toward the end of his presidency, Roosevelt appointed a White House commission to study the problems of rural life. Among the chief topics of the group’s report was the poor state of health in the hinterlands. Farms ought to be healthy places to live, the commissioners wrote, but doctors and nurses were scarce, and most rural Americans had not been schooled in the rudiments of hygiene. While some states had public health departments, many did not. And because of widespread antipathy to federal power, officials could not intervene except to address outbreaks of disease among farm animals. Treading softly, the commission made only mild recommendations: basic education in hygiene and sanitation, and a promise of federal help in health matters if a state requested it.
+Roosevelt also invented the White House conference, giving himself yet another way to act without Congress. In 1908 he hosted a conference of governors, focused on conservation, and nearly every governor present went home and formed a state conservation commission. The experience was a victory for conservation and public health, and it offered a model for federal-state collaboration on matters affecting the well-being of all Americans.
+The most notable of Roosevelt’s White House conferences, on dependent children, took place a few weeks before he left office. The idea came from a young lawyer who had grown up in an orphanage and was pressing for governmental subsidies to widowed mothers, whose poverty often forced them to place their children in orphanages. Roosevelt issued the invitations on Dec. 25, 1908, a date surely not chosen at random.
+On Jan. 25, 1909, Jane Addams, Booker T. Washington, and some 200 child welfare advocates, juvenile court judges, directors of orphanages and leaders of social service organizations turned out for the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children. Considered a landmark in American social policy, the conference led to the establishment of the United States Children’s Bureau, spurred the growth of adoption agencies and inspired the founding the Child Welfare League of America.
+When Roosevelt left office, on March 4, his files were thick with correspondence from social activists, urban reformers, physicians and others who shared his belief that the federal government ought to play a larger role in advancing health and well-being. On a two-month tour of Europe in 1910, he made a point of meeting politicians and social reformers who had helped to put up the first government-sponsored social safety nets.1. The partial government shutdown is entering its third week.
+Negotiations between Vice President Mike Pence and congressional aides from both parties yielded little progress on Saturday. The two sides are scheduled to meet again this afternoon, but there is little reason to believe that President Trump’s demand for more than $5 billion for a wall at the southern border will be met anytime soon.
+The president’s fixation on a border wall, a favorite talking point since his campaign, has left him in a political box of his own making, our reporters write in a news analysis.
+If the partial shutdown continues a week longer, it will officially be the longest in U.S. history. Here’s a look at what is and isn’t affected by the shutdown.Want this column in your inbox? Sign up here.
+If you’re like me, you aspired to leap into January bright-eyed and ready to break all sorts of personal productivity records. But instead, here we are, scrambling as usual and digging through backlogs of emails that have sat unchecked since the Friday before Christmas.
+Allow us to lighten your load, especially after a crammed three-day workweek. Here’s a quick, painless briefing of the top stories in business and tech, plus what to look for in the week ahead. Feel like you need another vacation already? Read the 2018 recap from our 52 Places Traveler, and resolve to visit somewhere on her list this year — or at the very least, try a salchipapa or a panzerotto.
+DEC. 30-JAN . 5
+What’s Up?
+Apple Upsets the Cart
+Apple surprised investors by lowering its revenue forecast on Wednesday, the first time it has done so in 16 years. The company attributed its $5 billion shortfall to the sharp decline in iPhone sales in China. That spurred larger fears about the lagging Chinese economy — and whether it’s pulling American companies down with it. Apple’s stock fell 10 percent after its announcement, its worst one-day slide in six years, and suppliers that manufacture iPhone parts took a beating as well. This doesn’t bode well for the other businesses that sell to Chinese consumers.ARLINGTON, Tex. — With less than three minutes remaining in a tight N.F.L. playoff matchup with the Seattle Seahawks on Saturday night, Dallas quarterback Dak Prescott made the most memorable play of his three-year career. It couldn’t have come at a better time for the Cowboys.
+With his team leading by 3 points and looking to put the game out of reach, Prescott took the snap on third down at the Seattle 16-yard line, 14 yards from a first down. Settling for a field goal would give the Seahawks a chance to win. Dallas needed that first down.
+Seattle’s defense was set up for a pass, so Prescott took a few steps back, then charged forward. He found the seam and scooted past the first-down marker. He was tripped up around the 3-yard line, did a somersault and landed just short of the goal line. Two plays later, he again ran the ball, this time for a touchdown that gave his team a 10-point cushion — just enough for the Cowboys to hold on for a 24-22 victory. It was the first playoff win for Prescott and the Cowboys’ first postseason victory in four years.“The construction of a Casely-Hayford suit is a feat of engineering — from the prominent chest with special internal darting to the shaped sleeve with high underarm point and natural sloping shoulders,” said the journalist and friend of the family Mark C. O’Flaherty. “Joe’s lighter fabrics and ingenuity of cut let the wearer move in ways tailoring hadn’t allowed before, whether that was on the street or on the stage.”
+Mr. Casely-Hayford was nominated for a string of prestigious awards, and became the designer of choice for such high-profile bands as the Clash and U2. When Bono, U2’s frontman, became the first man to appear on the cover of British Vogue, in 1992, he did so wearing a Casely-Hayford design.
+In 1993, Mr. Casely-Hayford became the first designer to collaborate with the mass-market retail giant Topshop; in 1995, the Princess of Wales sat in the front row at one of his runway shows.
+As his star rose, Mr. Casely-Hayford became a role model for other young black men in British fashion and arts, including Mr. Enninful, now of British Vogue; the fashion designer Ozwald Boateng; the artist Chris Ofili; and the architect David Adjaye, the lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
+“Joe was one of the most extraordinary fashion designers, entrepreneurs and inspirational characters in London during the 1980s and 1990s, and was a source of deep admiration and impact on myself as a young man looking to find his place and understanding of self in the world,” Mr. Adjaye said.
+He added, “He had an incredible talent, and as a global African man with roots in Ghana, he helped me to understand how to negotiate the different terrains that I would need to deal with.”MAZAR-I-SHARIF, Afghanistan — More than two dozen villagers panning for gold in the northern Afghan province of Badakhshan were killed on Sunday after the makeshift tunnels where they were working collapsed following heavy snowfall, officials said.
+Muhammad Rustam Raghi, the governor of Kohistan district, said that police officers and villagers had pulled out 30 dead as well as seven wounded, and that the rescue efforts were continuing.
+Mr. Raghi said that about 10,000 people pan for gold along the river, often illegally digging tunnels as deep as 50 feet with simple machinery and then searching for gold with pans for about $7 a day.
+Afghanistan is believed to have vast mineral wealth, but continuing violence, a lack of strong state institutions and widespread corruption have meant that the sector contributes little to the country’s economy, which is still largely dependent on foreign donors.Good morning. It is the Feast of the Epiphany today, at least for those who celebrate the revelation of God incarnate as this poor little dude in a manger, visited by kings. Either way you could make Dorie Greenspan’s recipe for a galette des rois (above). The deliciousness is its own reward.
+That is a lot of work, of course, even for a Sunday. (A king cake of the sort they make in New Orleans for Mardi Gras is a good backup plan.) So keep it simple for dinner. Perhaps an omelet mousseline? I had a truly ethereal version at the restaurant Frenchette right before Christmas, the omelet lined with sea urchin roe and brushed with butter. At home you could try salmon roe in its place? Or maybe crab meat or nothing at all?
+On Monday night, I like the idea of this maple-and-miso-glossed sheet-pan salmon dinner with green beans. (Are you nervous about cooking the salmon? Here’s our guide to the practice, life lessons hard-won.)
+For Tuesday, how about chicken braised in two vinegars, to serve over polenta? Agrodolce!
+As for Wednesday night, when it’s the hassle of all hassles to cook, you might improve your life greatly with baked skillet pasta with Cheddar and spiced onions. Or, failing that, with one of these 13 delicious recipes that are ready in 20 minutes or less.ISTANBUL — The spiritual leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians worldwide recognized the independence of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in a four-hour ceremony in Istanbul on Sunday, formalizing a split with the Russian church to which it had been tied for more than four centuries.
+Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, the spiritual leader, handed a Tomos of Autocephaly containing a decree of independence to the newly appointed Metropolitan Epiphanius of Ukraine, cleaving millions of Ukrainians from the Russian Orthodox Church.
+The independence effort outraged political and religious leaders in Russia. But for President Petro O. Poroshenko of Ukraine, who stood before an elevated throne throughout the ceremony in Istanbul, the occasion was an affirmation of independence from Russian influence in his embattled country and a boost ahead of elections in March.
+“Tomos for us is actually another act of proclaiming Ukraine’s independence,” Mr. Poroshenko said in an address. “For Ukrainians, our own Church is a guarantee of our spiritual freedom. This is the key to social harmony.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The #MeToo movement has swept across television and movie studios, investment banks and factory floors, fundamentally remaking the thinking around gender and harassment.
+Has it also swept into a corner of one of the country’s biggest celebrations of Irish heritage?
+For the first time since its founding shortly after the Revolutionary War, a group that puts on a formal dinner to raise money for charity just before the St. Patrick’s Day parade in New York City will allow women to attend.
+Specifically, the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick in the City of New York is inviting “the wives, daughters, sisters, mothers, aunts, nieces and female cousins, friends and colleagues of our members” to its dinner at the New York Hilton.
+It has taken only 235 years. And it has only been 30 years since a woman led the St. Patrick’s Day parade as grand marshal for the first time.JERUSALEM — Several Jewish teenagers have been arrested in connection with the fatal stoning of a Palestinian woman in the West Bank, Israel’s internal security agency said on Sunday.
+The agency, the Shin Bet, said in a statement that the suspects, who were not identified because they are minors, were under investigation for “grave terrorism offenses, including murder.”
+The Palestinian woman, Aisha Rabi, who was in her 40s, was struck in the head by a stone as she rode in a car with her husband and two daughters near the settlement of Rehelim, in the occupied West Bank, on the night of Oct. 12. Her husband, Yaqoub Rabi, who was driving, said at the time that he believed the culprits were Jewish settlers and that he had heard them speaking Hebrew.
+The Shin Bet said Ms. Rabi was the mother of nine children.
+The five suspects are students of Pri Haaretz, a yeshiva high school for Orthodox boys in Rehelim, according to the authorities. The morning after the Friday night attack, the Shin Bet said, activists set out by car from the settlement of Yitzhar for Rehelim, where they briefed the students on how to prepare for, and deal with, Shin Bet interrogations.Mr. Garfield was rarely involved in the film adaptations of his books, deliberately extricating himself from a process he found distasteful even though it meant giving up control. (His 1975 novel “Hopscotch,” which won an Edgar Award, was an exception: He adapted it into a comedy starring Walter Matthau in 1980.)
+Image Mr. Garfield’s “Death Wish” was the best known of his more than 70 books.
+“I’m not really patient enough to put up with that, and I learned that the credit ‘associate producer’ means you’re the only person who’s willing to associate with the producer,” he said in an interview with the website PopMatters in 2008.
+“I prefer writing books, because a book belongs to its writer,” he added. “And nobody has the power to tell me how to fix it.”
+Brian Francis Wynne Garfield was born on Jan. 26, 1939, in Manhattan. His mother, Frances (O’Brien) Garfield, an artist, was a protégé of Georgia O’Keeffe, and it was O’Keeffe who introduced Ms. O’Brien to her future husband, George Garfield, an entrepreneur.
+His mother painted covers for The Saturday Review of Books and frequently had writers and artists around the house, so her son grew up comfortable in that milieu. He wrote his first book, “Range Justice,” a western, when he was 18.
+Brian had asthma, and the family moved to Arizona to ease the condition. He graduated from Southern Arizona School for Boys in Tucson before receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, both in English, from the University of Arizona.
+Mr. Garfield played the guitar and in the late 1950s toured the country with a band called “The Palisades,” which had a doo-wop hit called “I Can’t Quit.” He also served in the Army and the Army Reserves from 1957 to 1965.To the Editor:
+Re “Pedestrians Still in Danger, Despite Drop in Traffic Deaths” (news article, Jan. 2):
+Pedestrians are a danger to themselves. Jaywalkers appear out of nowhere when they dart into the street between cars and trucks . Many will cross against the light if they see no immediate approaching vehicle — or if they just happen to be in a hurry.
+Intersections with left-turn signals render many pedestrians clueless that vehicles have the right of way (hint: that’s why the “walk” icon is not lit up). The worst offenders are those who cross streets looking at their phones, including mothers pushing strollers. Just as we’re taught to drive defensively, it is equally important to walk defensively.
+And let’s not forget the bicycle couriers who move in a state of anarchy unto themselves.
+Thomas P. Roberts
+Lawrenceville, N.J.To the Editor:
+In “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan” (Op-Ed, Jan. 2), Robert D. Kaplan refers to the diplomatic expertise of Richard Holbrooke. Mr. Holbrooke famously remarked, after becoming familiar with Afghan affairs, “We may be fighting the wrong enemy in the wrong country .” He recognized that Pakistan was the true enemy.
+It was Pakistan that helped create the Taliban in the early 1990s and has supported them ever since. In order to bring peace to Afghanistan, the influence of Pakistan must be terminated. This is particularly urgent because of Pakistan’s position as a leading nuclear power . In 2009 the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, noted that enriched uranium being produced in Pakistan might be acquired by terrorists to produce their own bomb. Ten years later, that danger still exists.
+Pakistan must be confronted to prevent the Afghan-Pakistan region from becoming a haven for nuclear-armed terrorists.
+Edward A. Friedman
+Hoboken, N.J.
+The writer teaches courses on nuclear weapons and energy at Stevens Institute of Technology. He represented Stevens in an international development program in Afghanistan from 1965 to 1967 and 1970 to 1973.A 34-year-old man from Houston who is said to have sent a résumé and cover letter seeking a job with the Islamic State has been seized on a battlefield in Syria, an American-backed militia fighting the militants said Sunday.
+“Dear Director, I am looking to get a position teaching English to students in the Islamic State,” the Texan, Warren Christopher Clark, is said to have written in a letter found in an Iraqi house once occupied by the militants.
+Mr. Clark once worked as a substitute teacher in the Fort Bend Independent School District in Sugar Land, Tex., according to his father, and seemed prepared to draw on that experience.
+“I believe that a successful teacher can understand a student’s strengths and weaknesses,” he wrote, “and is able to use that understanding to help students build on their understanding of the English language.”Analysis: The idea of the border wall, which Mr. Trump’s advisers said they initially created to remind Mr. Trump to talk tough on immigration during his campaign, has boxed in the president. He’s now struggling to find a way to please both his core supporters and conservative skeptics who see the wall as ineffective.
+In Opinion: Our columnist David Leonhardt builds a detailed argument that Mr. Trump is demonstrably unfit for office and “must go,” but that a rushed impeachment could actually help him remain in office.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Week ahead: The British Parliament will resume debating Brexit terms and the U.S. Fed may release some clues on whether it will continue to raise interest rates.
+Syria: Two Americans were caught fighting for ISIS, according to the Syrian Democratic Forces. The arrests came on the same day President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, said a retreat from Syria was conditional on the defeat of the terrorist group, reversing Mr. Trump’s surprise announcement last month of withdrawing thousands of American troops from the country.
+$3 million: That’s the record-breaking price a restaurant owner who calls himself the King of Tuna paid for an endangered 612-pound bluefin tuna at an auction in Tokyo’s new fish market.WASHINGTON — An American airstrike in Yemen last week killed one of the suspected plotters of the deadly Qaeda bombing of the United States Navy destroyer Cole in 2000, President Trump and military officials confirmed on Sunday.
+On Friday, the military’s Central Command said it had conducted a strike on Tuesday in the Marib Province of Yemen that targeted the militant, Jamal al-Badawi, but added that it was still assessing whether he had been killed. By Sunday, the military was confident that Mr. Badawi was dead, Capt. Bill Urban, a spokesman for the command, said in an email.
+“Our GREAT MILITARY has delivered justice for the heroes lost and wounded in the cowardly attack on the USS Cole,” Mr. Trump tweeted on Sunday before flying to Camp David for meetings with White House staff. “We have just killed the leader of that attack, Jamal al-Badawi. Our work against al Qaeda continues. We will never stop in our fight against Radical Islamic Terrorism!”Peter D. Meldrum, who led the biotech company Myriad Genetics for 23 years, when it was at the heart of a landmark court battle involving whether two genes associated with breast cancer could be patented, died on Dec. 20 in Salt Lake City. He was 71.
+A spokesman for the company said the cause was a head injury sustained when he fell while playing touch football with his grandchildren.
+Mr. Meldrum and Mark Skolnick founded Myriad Genetics in 1991, and Mr. Meldrum became its chief executive the next year, taking it from a small start-up to a publicly traded company that by the time he retired in 2015 had annual revenues of more than $700 million. Its most visible product during that time was a test for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that could indicate a heightened risk of breast and ovarian cancer.
+The company had been granted patents on those genes, which, working with several partners, it had isolated after Mary-Claire King, then at the University of California, Berkeley, had traced it to a particular chromosome in 1990.Broadway performers and stage managers are demanding a share of the profits from hit shows they help to create, setting off a labor dispute that is threatening to disrupt the high-stakes development of new musicals and plays.
+Actors’ Equity, a national labor union, and the Broadway League, a trade association representing producers, are at odds over the issue two years after public pressure from the original cast of “Hamilton” prompted that blockbuster show’s producers to agree to a new formula for distributing its proceeds.
+Equity says the two sides are at an impasse and it is considering a limited strike in which it would bar its members from participating in any developmental work with commercial producers. The union says it is unhappy with how its members are compensated for work in developmental labs, which are generally four-week sessions in which actors and writers test out material for shows in progress. Recent productions that have used labs include “The Cher Show,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Hello, Dolly!” and “Waitress.”
+“After two years of wrangling and negotiating we are just at a standstill,” Mary McColl, the union’s executive director, said.The remarks also reflected the disarray that has surrounded the president’s decision, which took his staff and foreign allies by surprise and drew objections from the Pentagon that it was logistically impossible and strategically unwise. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis resigned within hours of the announcement, and the Pentagon chief of staff, Kevin M. Sweeney, said on Saturday evening that he was also leaving.
+While Mr. Bolton said on Sunday that he expected American forces to eventually leave northeastern Syria, where most of the 2,000 troops in the country are based for the mission against the Islamic State, he began to lay out an argument for keeping some troops at a garrison in the southeast that is used to monitor the flow of Iranian arms and soldiers. In September, three months before Mr. Trump’s announcement, Mr. Bolton had declared that the United States would remain in Syria as long as Iranians were on the ground there.
+Asked on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” if Mr. Bolton’s comments amounted to an admission that Mr. Trump had made a mistake, Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who at times has been one of the president’s staunchest supporters, said, “This is the reality setting in that you’ve got to plan this out.”
+Mr. Graham, who described the dangers of making the announcement first and then considering the longer-term implications, added, “The president is slowing down and is re-evaluating his policies in light of those three objectives: Don’t let Iran get the oil fields, don’t let the Turks slaughter the Kurds, and don’t let ISIS come back.”
+The move to reverse course on Mr. Trump’s promised swift withdrawal picked up in recent days, even as Mr. Bolton worked to avoid openly confronting the president the way Mr. Mattis did. On Friday, in a briefing for reporters about a forthcoming trip to the Middle East by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a senior State Department official said there was no fixed timetable for the American withdrawal.“Surviving R. Kelly,” the six-part documentary about the R&B singer Robert Kelly, who has faced accusations of child and sexual abuse for decades, underscores the theme of accountability — not just of Kelly or his many personal enablers, but of us all.
+Clinical psychologists, music journalists, activists and others who are interviewed in this Lifetime series echo one another in their explanations of how the musician has managed to escape severe repercussions, legally and professionally, for decades.
+Chief among them: the shielding powers of money and fame; society’s indifference toward the suffering of black and brown girls and women; a perception by some that the attacks on any black male celebrity, no matter how credible, are part of a larger racist conspiracy.
+Another key factor: Laughter. Two cultural touchstones that helped shape the public’s perception of the Kelly accusations are only mentioned in passing in “Surviving R. Kelly.” But “(I Wanna) Pee on You,” a 2003 sketch from “Chappelle’s Show,” and a 2005 episode of the animated series “The Boondocks” titled “The Trial of R. Kelly,” embody many of the points made in the documentary.There’s always a bigger fish — unless you’re “Aquaman.”
+The Warner Bros. DC Comics movie starring Jason Momoa continued to lead ticket sales this weekend, taking in an estimated $30.7 million at the end of a lazy week at the box office. The movie, now in its third week in theaters, put a triumphant cap on Hollywood’s 2018 box office comeback. And it has continued to do well overseas, where it brought in $56.2 million this weekend according to the studio. Combined with its cumulative domestic sales, that brings the movie’s total global ticket sales to about $940.7 million, meaning it could soon surpass $1 billion.
+But while the staying power of “Aquaman” at the top spot points to the film’s continued success, it also points to the fact that there simply isn’t much competition during Hollywood’s post-holiday exhale.
+The only new movie in the top 10 this week, Sony’s “Escape Room,” exceeded most analysts’ expectations and landed in the No. 2 spot with $18 million in sales. A thriller directed by Adam Robitel, the film capitalized on the phenomenon of real-life “escape room” puzzle games, where players (or corporate employees on a team-building trip) are trapped in a room and have to complete a series of challenges to get out. “Escape Room” features a deadly version. While its opening weekend sales were modest beside those of “Aquaman,” the $18 million is a win for Sony given the movie’s $9 million budget.
+There are few surprises elsewhere in the top ten. Disney’s “Mary Poppins Returns” came in third with $15.8 million this weekend, while Sony’s well-received “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” came in fourth, making $13 million according to Comscore, which compiles box office data.Mr. Letteri is one of a growing number of venture capitalists rooting for a market dip to calm the overheated start-up scene. For the past few years, Silicon Valley tech start-ups have been awash in a stream of cash that has allowed them to expand quickly and sell or go public at high valuations. Yet that drove up the costs of deal making for venture capitalists, who often prefer to invest in young companies at lower prices in the hopes of making a bigger return later.
+Now some of these investors may get their wish for a market decline. Stocks tumbled late last year, led by tech giants such as Facebook and Apple, amid fears of slowing economic growth and a trade war with China. And so far this year, the stock market has swung wildly, whipsawed by confusing signals including Apple’s disappointing iPhone sales in China and American employers adding more jobs than expected last month.
+While it takes time for choppiness in the stock market to ripple out into the start-up market, many venture investors are already preparing for a downturn. Some are setting aside money to pounce on investments and are preparing to write bigger checks with the expectation that new investors who flooded in in recent years will flee. And they are keeping closer tabs on companies that were too expensive to invest in last year.
+“We definitely want to take advantage of a market downturn,” said Sandy Miller, a venture capitalist at IVP who projects that start-up valuations will fall by 10 percent to 40 percent this year. He said his Silicon Valley venture firm has set aside “meaningful reserves” to do more deals and to put more money into companies it has already invested in, though he declined to specify an amount.LOS ANGELES — What will happen to Sony Pictures?
+That has been a question in Hollywood since Kenichiro Yoshida took over as Sony Corporation’s chief executive in April. Unlike his two predecessors, Mr. Yoshida, a number-cruncher based in Japan and known for jettisoning underperforming businesses, seemed to have little affinity for the company’s also-ran movie and television division, which is best known as the home of Spider-Man and “Seinfeld.”
+Surely this would be the moment for Sony to get rid of the midsize studio — especially since Rupert Murdoch had just decided to sell his bigger 20th Century Fox to Disney, having concluded it did not have the scale needed to compete with moviedom insurgents like Netflix, Apple and Amazon.
+Surprise. When Mr. Yoshida takes the stage on Monday at the CES trade show in Las Vegas, he plans to use the high-profile platform to showcase Sony movies, television shows and music. He plans to telegraph that not only will his Sony not exit any of these businesses, it will make them a priority as his predecessors have not. In particular, Mr. Yoshida wants to make better use of the company’s online PlayStation Network as a way to bring Sony movies, shows and music directly to consumers. PlayStation Network, introduced in 2006, now has more than 80 million monthly active users.
+“I want to convey the message that Sony is a creative entertainment company,” Mr. Yoshida said by phone from Tokyo before leaving for Nevada. That description amounts to a significant shift. Sony has long been seen as a consumer electronics superpower first and a Hollywood entity second.BALTIMORE — The Baltimore Ravens’ startling charge into the playoffs was spurred by something perhaps even more surprising: a radical, run-first style of offense led by the rookie quarterback Lamar Jackson.
+Baltimore’s unconventional style of attack in the midst of a pass-happy N.F.L. era rescued the Ravens, who won six of their final seven regular-season games. And the most impressive victory in that stretch was a 12-point romp over the Chargers in Los Angeles in Week 16.
+In the end, however, the defeat of the Chargers was the Ravens’ undoing in their rematch here Sunday in an A.F.C. wild-card playoff game.
+In the week leading up to Sunday’s contest, the Chargers dissected the videotape of the Ravens’ Dec. 22 triumph in Los Angeles until every play and, more important, the alignments before every play were committed to memory. The Chargers’ defensive coaches schooled the players on every Ravens tendency and tried a daring lineup that included seven defensive backs instead of the usual four or five.WASHINGTON — President Trump is cheerleading his way past the economic warning signs that have rattled financial markets and unnerved economists, insisting that the United States has an advantage in a crucial first round of trade negotiations beginning on Monday in Beijing.
+It helps his case that the Labor Department published a jobs report for December that soared past expectations. “China’s not doing very well now,” Mr. Trump said in a news conference at the White House, hours after the report came out on Friday. “It puts us in a very strong position. We are doing very well.”
+Mr. Trump is correct about China’s economy, which by several measures appears to be hobbled by American tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports. But the president’s confidence about the domestic economy largely ignores what others see as looming threats, including damage from a protracted federal government shutdown, the waning effects of Mr. Trump’s $1.5 trillion tax cut and contagion from China’s pain to American companies, farmers and consumers, Friday’s data notwithstanding.
+Chinese officials appear set to offer a mix of concessions, including reducing some tariffs on American goods, as they try to defuse trade tensions ahead of a March 2 deadline, when tariffs on $200 billion worth of imports will increase to 25 percent from 10 percent. An American delegation of midlevel trade officials will begin two days of talks with their counterparts on Monday in Beijing, led by Jeffrey Gerrish, the deputy United States trade representative, and David Malpass, the Treasury Department’s under secretary for international affairs.Updated: Jan. 10, 2019
+Students
+1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
+• What is going on in this picture?
+• What do you see that makes you say that?
+• What more can you find?
+2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
+3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
+Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.• “Bohemian Rhapsody” won best drama, and its star, Rami Malek, won best actor at the Golden Globes on Sunday night; “Green Book” took home three awards, including best movie, musical or comedy; and Glenn Close won best actress in a drama, an award many expected to go to Lady Gaga. Here’s the complete list of winners.
+• At last year’s Globes, many women wore black in solidarity with the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements. On this year’s red carpet, celebrities wore black-and-white bracelets and ribbons that read #TimesUpx2.
+• Here’s our take on the best and worst moments from the show.
+• Not only was Sandra Oh one of the hosts, but she also won her second Golden Globe — this time for best actress in a television drama as the star of the BBC America series “Killing Eve.”
+• The Globes, which often teeter on the edge of tipsy chaos, seemed to be coasting on a mellow, it’s-all-good buzz, our TV critic James Poniewozik wrote, adding, “It was pleasant enough, though numbing the longer it went on.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+About 300 more people came forward to report they were raped last year in New York City than the previous year, a sharp increase that officials theorize was fueled in part by the #MeToo movement.
+While other violent crimes like murder and assault decreased or remained relatively flat, the police said reported rapes increased 22.4 percent to 1,795 in 2018, up from 1,467 from 2017. A broader category of sex crimes that includes groping and forcible touching also jumped 8.4 percent to 3,873 in 2018, from 3,573 in 2017, according to police statistics.
+Reported rapes in New York City have risen for 16 consecutive months since last fall, when allegations of sexual misconduct against the movie producer Harvey Weinstein ignited a global reckoning about sexual harassment and assault, especially in the workplace. The city’s numbers reflect many, but not all of the sexual assaults reported to the police last year because of differences in how such crimes are classified under state and federal law.
+Though it is almost impossible to determine with certainty why more people are coming forward, police officials and advocates for victims said the publicity and outrage generated by the #MeToo movement has encouraged more victims to contact the police.Thailand has a history of sending refugees back to autocratic countries, including China, Pakistan and Turkey, said the deputy Asia director for Human Rights Watch, Phil Robertson.
+In November, the Thai authorities arrested a former Bahrain soccer player, Hakeem al-Araibi, who had been granted refugee status in Australia after speaking out against a powerful Bahraini soccer official.
+Mr. Araibi had come to Thailand for his honeymoon but was stopped at the same Bangkok airport as Ms. Alqunun after Bahrain sought his arrest through Interpol. He remains in custody, awaiting a decision on Bahrain’s extradition request.
+“Basically, Thailand is open for business sending refugees and asylum seekers back to their authoritarian governments,” Mr. Robertson said.
+In the interview, Ms. Alqunun described a life of unrelenting abuse at the hands of her family, who live in the city of Hail, in northern Saudi Arabia. She said she was once locked in a room for six months because she had cut her hair in a way that her family did not approve of. And she said her family used to beat her, mostly her brother.
+Saudi Arabia, Ms. Alqunun said, is “like a prison.”
+“I can’t make my own decisions,” she said. “Even about my own hair I can’t make decisions.”
+Ms. Alqunun said that when she was 16, she tried to kill herself. When her family did not seek help for her, she said, she started planning her escape.Under Article 6, Paragraph 1 of Saudi Arabia’s Anti-Cyber Crime Law, the following is punishable by up to five years in prison: “Production, preparation, transmission, or storage of material impinging on public order, religious values, public morals, and privacy, through the information network or computers.”
+Think “First Amendment.” Then invert it.
+Last week, we learned that the Kingdom had alerted Netflix that it had violated the statute with an episode of its comedy show “Patriot Act,” starring Hasan Minhaj, a comedian and American Muslim. How? Mr. Minhaj dared to question Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, both for the C.I.A.’s conclusion he ordered the murder of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi and for Saudi war atrocities in Yemen.
+Maybe the Saudi complaint wasn’t all that shocking. Like any authoritarian monarch worth his bone saw, Prince Mohammed doesn’t brook criticism, which is why he has overseen the Saudis’ increased jailing of journalists, critics and rivals.
+The shock came with Netflix’s supine compliance. After pulling the episode from its Saudi feed, the streaming service told The Financial Times it was simply responding to “a valid legal request.”Walls protect. Walls divide. Both these statements are true. Yet perhaps no issue represents the deep political chasm separating this country as a wall — a “big, beautiful wall” in the words of President Trump.
+In this lesson plan, students move past the political rhetoric to analyze the function and symbolism of a border wall. They learn about what’s in place already along the United States-Mexico border, they find out what life in the borderlands is like, they learn more about border security and they consider walls as symbols. Then, if you would like to go further, we invite your students to compare President Trump’s proposed wall to other historic walls, from China to Berlin, and we offer a related Student Opinion question about the shutdown and the wall that students can answer.
+_________
+Warm Up
+Ask students to respond to the following prompt:
+Both of the following statements are true.
+Walls protect.
+Walls divide.
+Which statement do you think is more true? Explain why.
+Then have students share their answers as a class.
+If you are feeling a little more adventurous, you can have students stand up and respond to this same prompt using a barometer activity. Tape two signs, “Walls Protect” and “Walls Divide,” on opposite ends of the classroom. Ask students to stand along a continuum between the two signs based on how strongly they feel about their answer to the prompt. Give them a minute to find their spot along the continuum, then have students share what they think and why.WASHINGTON — President Trump’s evolving definition of a border wall animated negotiations to end a partial government shutdown on Sunday, while House Democrats moved to increase pressure on the president by vowing to pass individual bills to reopen targeted departments that handle critical functions like tax refunds and food stamps.
+“I informed my folks to say that we’ll build a steel barrier,” Mr. Trump told reporters after returning to the White House from a senior staff meeting at Camp David. He added of the Democrats, “They don’t like concrete, so we’ll give them steel.”
+The president characterized the second day of talks between Vice President Mike Pence and Democratic congressional aides as “productive” after saying earlier in the day that he did not anticipate much progress. But Mr. Trump also said that, if no deal could be reached over his demand for $5.7 billion for the border wall, he was still considering using “emergency” authority to build the barrier with other government funds.
+For their part, Democrats said there was no progress as the shutdown entered its 16th day, and asked again that the government be reopened before negotiations on border security money begin.The 2019 Golden Globes marks one year since attendees signaled their commitment to fighting sexual misconduct and inequity in the workplace by donning Time’s Up pins and bringing activists — including Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, and Ai-jen Poo, the director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance — to the ceremony as their guests .
+Since last January, protests on the red carpet have mostly waned, and tonight’s red carpet was also apolitical.
+Here are some of the highlights:
+Lady Gaga arrived wearing a periwinkle couture Valentino gown and Giuseppe Zanotti platform heels, and discussed her evolution from musician to actress. (She is nominated for best actress in a motion picture, drama for her role in “A Star Is Born.”)
+“I discovered something in working on this film and it’s something called alchemy,” Lady Gaga said. “I learned a lot about going to the nectar of your being,” she added, explaining that acting, for her, was about tapping into “something I had already in me.”
+Idris Elba, whose appearance on the Coachella lineup was announced to much surprise last week, discussed his musical leanings on the red carpet. “I play house,” Mr. Elba said. “I’ve been DJing all my life. I’m going to rock Coachella. I can’t wait.”
+Isan Elba, Mr. Elba’s 17-year-old daughter, is this year’s Golden Globe ambassador, a role that goes to celebrity offspring every year (past ambassadors include Dakota Johnson, Rumer Willis, and Sylvester Stallone’s three daughters Sistine, Sophia and Scarlet, but the role was previously called Miss or Mr. Golden Globe in the past). What advice did Mr. Elba have for Isan? Keep your back straight, smile and nod politely, and “if you feel like you’re going to pass out, don’t,” he said. Thanks, dad!
+What does Charlize Theron want to say to Emily Blunt, her friend and fellow nominee in the category for best actress in a musical or comedy? “I’ll meet you in the back alley.”
+Huh? Ms. Theron explained: After the nominations were announced, Ms. Theron sent Ms. Blunt a drawing by one of her children that depicted the two women as ice queens fighting each other, and said, “This is going to be us at the Globes.” The actresses played sisters at war with each other in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War.” But off screen? Ms. Theron said: “We’re sisters. It’s for life.”
+Debra Messing said she was the sole representative from “Will & Grace” at the Globes. Ms. Messing, who has been nominated nine times, including this year, but has never won, distilled what takes place at the event into several words: “We drink. At the Golden Globes that’s what you do. You drink.”
+Rami Malek, wearing Givenchy, answered why he thinks he was cast as Freddy Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is nominated for best motion picture, drama: “I think it was a little bit of the mischief I have going on behind my eyes,” said Mr. Malek, who is also nominated for best actor in a motion picture, drama for the role.
+Carol Burnett, a 16-time Golden Globe nominee and five-time winner, will now have an award named after her. “I guess now I’ll have to keep my name,” Ms. Burnett said. On the red carpet, Ryan Seacrest asked about how it might feel to see the award given out annually. “Maybe they’ll give it to me every year,” Ms. Burnett said. “I don’t know.”I think the episode where Sideshow Bob runs for mayor is sort of the ultimate critique — obviously that one is all about the Willie Horton ad and the 1988 presidential election — and it lays bare so much hypocrisy in one episode. That’s probably my all-time favorite.
+Which member of “The Simpsons” family do you most identify with?
+Well, it’s kind of hard not to love Bart the most. I would say an honorable mention to Maggie. She’s often the voice of reason even though she can’t speak.
+So you see yourself in Bart and not in the more cerebral Lisa?
+Look, you’ve got to admire Lisa’s earnestness and that she’s kind of the sane member of the ship of fools. But I think Bart, to me sort of heart and soul-wise, the spunk and the spirit and the willingness to disrupt — I’m more emotionally moved by Bart.
+Interesting. When did you start watching the show?
+Early on. When it started. From the beginning.
+In the show, politicians are craven, corrupt and incompetent. What is it that resonates with you about the show’s vision?
+First of all, it totally parodies what’s wrong with the political system and what’s wrong with many politicians. Mayor Quimby is just an epic character because he is kind of the composite of everything wrong with traditional politics.
+He’s a Democrat, don’t you think?
+Oh, I’m certain. It’s a Kennedy rip off, obviously. But it’s brilliant.
+There’s a rejection of a lot of status quo in there that I appreciate. And, of course, there’s a beautiful humanist element to the show. They figured out how to tell a lot of truth in a way that was light enough for people to get it, but still really edgy.“In the circles that I move, I think there’s almost unanimity of support for him,” Mr. Smith said.
+But Mr. Smith acknowledged that in Mr. Biden’s absence, others were making moves in South Carolina. Mr. Smith said that after his defeat in November, he had heard from several contenders, including Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey, Kamala Harris of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — none of whom, he said, could count on scooping up Mr. Biden’s network.
+The entry of Mr. Biden would immediately upend the still-nascent primary: Ms. Warren joined the race last week and three dozen other Democrats are considering it. Mr. Biden could crowd out other establishment-aligned contenders like former Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans and former Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, given that Mr. Biden’s donor base and supporters may overlap with some of their own. And Mr. Biden’s allies are themselves mindful of another Democrat whose blue-collar credentials could pose a challenge to their own coalition: Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio.
+[With Elizabeth Warren visit, Iowans get the first taste of 2020.]
+Most of all, a Biden candidacy would also frame the primary around the question of whether Democrats prefer a familiar face and steady continuum of former President Barack Obama’s center-left politics, or a generational change and turn to a more liberal, confrontational approach to Mr. Trump and the right.
+Mr. Biden’s supporters argue that Mr. Trump’s incendiary conduct and norm-breaking presidency have so imperiled the country that only somebody with the stature and experience of a two-term vice president can bring back stability. And, they contend, Mr. Trump has diminished the importance of ideological differences within the Democratic Party.
+“Variations in policy positions don’t really matter because, to paraphrase the president, we are in a national emergency — but the national emergency is him,” said Lou Frillman, who was a major fund-raising bundler for Mr. Obama’s campaigns and is close to Mr. Biden. “The vice president has all the qualities necessary to win, and I think he has all the qualities the country is going to so desperately need to bring us back from the edge.”
+Most of all, Mr. Biden’s allies contend, he would be the Democrat most likely to reclaim the battleground state voters who abandoned the party in 2016.
+“If you look at Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, the labor folks who voted for Trump, they love him,” former Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware said of Mr. Biden. “He has a connection with these people.”MONDAY PUZZLE — O.K., fine. This one was kind of cool.
+I’m usually not a fan of this theme schtick, but I will give it a pass for two reasons. The first is that I felt it was overdone a while back, but enough time has elapsed since this type of theme came up. The second reason is that anytime a constructor — in this case, Andrew Kingsley — puts their own special spin on a theme, I feel it’s worth a closer look.
+This is the first time this particular twist on a theme has run in The New York Times, so let’s get to looking.
+Tricky Clues
+8A: My eyes stopped reading after “Maze runner,” in the clue “Maze runner in an experiment,” so I confidently plunked in THESEUS, but that obviously wasn’t right. And I couldn’t remember the name of the lead in the “Maze Runner” series of books and films, which turned out to be a good thing, because the answer was LAB RAT.
+24A: I’m not sure I’d call Garfield a PET CAT, even if he is technically owned by character Jon Arbuckle. It’s kind of an odd phrase; it would be as if my kids called me “Parent Mom.”Slide 1 of 77,
+Lady Gaga, nominated for best actress in a motion picture for “A Star Is Born.” She is wearing a periwinkle couture Valentino gown.
+“I discovered something in working on this film and it’s something called alchemy,” she said of her evolution from musician to actress. “I learned a lot about going to the nectar of your being.”In the late 1970s, the United Aut­­­­­omobile Workers union had a brazen idea. During negotiations for a new contract, members asked Chrysler to give workers representation on its board, a practice called “co-determination” that had been germinating all over Europe.
+The proposal was far outside the bounds of management-labor relations in America at the time, and Chrysler was initially immovable. But the union had helped secure a federal loan for the company, which shielded it from bankruptcy, and management eventually relented. In 1980, Chrysler’s chief executive, Lee Iacocca, nominated the U.A.W. leader Douglas Fraser to the board as a reward.
+But the presence of a single labor representative on a 17-member board did not translate into meaningful results for workers. At one point, Mr. Fraser did vote against a plush executive pay package, but he was the only nay. He stepped down in 1984, and Chrysler eliminated the union seat altogether in 1991. Only a handful of other companies tried worker representation, the unions didn’t fight for it, and the American experiment in co-determination was over before it began.
+In today’s Gilded Age — when chief executives are making well over 300 times what the typical worker brings home in pay — the idea is getting new life. Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who recently announced her bid for president, introduced a bill last year to give workers the right to vote for two-fifths of all corporate board seats, with a companion bill in the House by Representatives introduced by Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico. A similar bill by Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin would entitle workers to elect one-third of the seats.I think he is more vulnerable than many people realize.
+First, there are the political risks that his current standing creates for other Republicans. It’s true that his approval rating has been notably stable, around 40 percent. It’s also notably weak. Thus the Republican whupping in the midterms.
+Second, Trump’s political fortunes are more likely to deteriorate than improve this year. The economy isn’t likely to get a lot stronger. The various investigations aren’t going away. And Trump will surely commit more unforced errors, like the government shutdown. “It’s still difficult to predict how all this ends,” the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein wrote on Friday, about the shutdown. “But it’s hard to see it ending well for Republicans.”
+Third, Republican support for Trump may remain broad, but it’s shallow. Trump has already faced far more intra-party criticism than most presidents. Since the midterms, it seems to be growing. Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, resigned and criticized Trump while doing so. Mitt Romney entered the Senate by once again turning against Trump. Collins and Gardner have started grumbling about the shutdown.
+As Republicans begin looking nervously to 2020, their willingness to break with Trump may increase. For some of them, their political survival may depend on breaking with him. If that happens, it’s quite possible that his approval rating will begin to drift below 40 percent — and the bad news will then feed on itself.
+No, none of this is guaranteed. Democrats could overreach, by quickly impeaching Trump and thereby uniting Republicans. Or Trump could end up navigating the next few months surprisingly well. But that’s not the mostly likely scenario.
+The normal rules of politics really do apply to Trump. He won a shocking victory in 2016, and his opponents have lacked confidence ever since. They should no longer lack it.
+Donald Trump still has great power as the president of the United States. But as presidents go, he is very weak. His opponents — Democrats, independents and Republicans who understand the damage he is doing to the country — should be feeling energized.It’s not the first time we’ve seen this argument, and other companies have made similar arguments in privacy lawsuits. In addition, major industry players, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have put forward similar views. They are fighting legislation that would grant consumers the ability to sue companies for privacy violations and are lobbying for federal privacy legislation where enforcement is tied only to “concrete” harm, not necessarily to violations of the law.
+It’s easy to see why.
+Huge privacy violations have become commonplace. Without a private right of action, consumers have little practical ability to seek relief in cases where their data was mishandled or misused. This eliminates a powerful enforcement stick that can be used to dissuade companies from violating the law. A private right of action is also important because government agencies often do not have the resources to investigate and take action in every case where consumers’ privacy is violated. So, a private right of action may be the only avenue to hold a company accountable.
+In rare cases, the harm from a privacy violation may be clear, such as losing a job, money or sense of safety. But in most cases, the harm, while staggering, can be virtually impossible to measure. For example, how do you prove the collective impact of having companies profile you based on sensitive health data, affecting things like the content you see and the ads you’re served? How do you measure the national-security or societal impact of having people targeted with divisive and exploitative ads? How do you determine the collective impact of consumers’ being stripped of control over information they own and having intimate details of their life, like relationship status and political views, shared with countless entities?
+Industry players often seek to take advantage of the extreme difficulty that most people face in showing exactly how they have been hurt by a privacy violation. The bar is almost impossibly high for consumers or regulators who seek to rein in abusive data practices. Under the view that consumers must show “concrete” harm, it would not be enough to show that a company violated the law by, for example, sharing information without permission. And it would not be enough to show that millions of consumers were affected or that billions of pieces of information were improperly shared. For a fine or damages to be imposed, consumers would instead have the difficult burden of demonstrating that the unlawful collection of their own data damaged them in a tangible and measurable way, like causing physical, emotional or financial harm.
+This limit on consumer suits might be good for industry, since it may insulate companies from legitimate lawsuits stemming from their irresponsible data practices and helps them emerge virtually unscathed following large-scale privacy violations that affect millions. But it’s a bad deal for everyone else.“It was a totally different thing,” she said, saying that she had been helped enormously by her co-star and director, Bradley Cooper, whom she called “a tremendous visionary.”
+She then said many wonderful things about acting, describing her process as “going to the nectar of your being,” and later saying, “I discovered something in working on this film, and it’s something called alchemy.”
+“A Star Is Born” is also nominated for best motion picture for a drama. Bradley Cooper is nominated for best actor and best director for the drama.Outside the Golden Globes, the weather was sunny and the mood was equally light on the red carpet. I talked to the stars and filmmakers of some of the year’s most popular films (“Crazy Rich Asians”! “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse”!).
+Speaking of “Crazy Rich Asians,” representatives of the film were out in force.CHICAGO — Eleven months have elapsed since Philadelphia’s improbable Super Bowl title, and on Sunday it was ever more necessary to re-establish this interval as fact. The playoffs, again, had arrived, and there, again, was Nick Foles, reprising his role as the Eagles’ backup-turned-starter-turned-savior.
+So, to clarify for anyone squinting at their televisions and wondering how Foles managed to bend time and space: No, he did not actually depart one stadium in the Midwest after bewitching his opponent and then materialize in another to do the same — though such confusion would be understandable.
+Foles, and the Eagles, seem to inhabit a place untouched by the mayhem churning all around them. Their mojo has been so good for the last month that on Sunday they foiled the league’s most destructive defense with a go-ahead touchdown on fourth down and then watched a kick that would have doomed them clang first off the left upright and then bounce off the crossbar.
+The final score — Philadelphia 16, Chicago 15 — silenced the crowd at Soldier Field, which hosted its first playoff game in eight years, but not the occupants of the visitors’ sideline, who danced and shouted and swarmed the grass after Cody Parkey’s 43-yard attempt ricocheted to the ground, ushering the Eagles into a divisional-round matchup next Sunday afternoon at top-seeded New Orleans.No corrections appeared in print on Monday, January 7, 2019.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
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+Comments on editorials may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com or faxed to (212) 556-3622.
+For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.A gunman pulled up alongside them and opened fire. Jazmine’s mother, LaPorsha Washington, 30, was injured. Ms. Washington and her daughters met with investigators to help them create a composite sketch of the gunman, who attacked them before sunrise.
+The man was described as white, thin and in his 30s or 40s and driving a red pickup truck. On Sunday, the authorities announced they had charged a 20-year-old black man with capital murder in connection with the shooting. In a CNN interview, Ms. Washington said her teenage daughter told her that the man was white and that his hoodie was black.
+“That’s all she could see at the time because the sun hadn’t really even came out yet,” Ms. Washington said in the interview.
+For days, the search for a white man dominated news headlines. The unexpected turn — that the suspect charged was black and not white — was not intentional, Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, Tex., said at a news conference on Sunday. The person driving the pickup, who the police now believe was likely a witness to the shooting, might have been the last thing Jazmine’s family remembered “prior to the mayhem and chaos,” the sheriff said.
+Lori Brown, a criminologist at Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C., said “eyewitness testimony is the least reliable evidence you can have” because people try to understand how a traumatic event could have happened by using what they know about the world. “Unfortunately,” she said, “we fill in the gaps.”Despite claims that denuclearization talks with North Korea have progressed, Mr. Trump seems to be on a carousel of dreams.• “Bohemian Rhapsody” won the Golden Globe for best drama, beating out “A Star Is Born.”
+• “Green Book” won three awards at a ceremony full of surprises.
+• See our live updates and analysis from the ceremony.
+• Read about the best and worst moments of the Globes.
+Here are the movies and TV shows that received awards.
+Movies
+Best Motion Picture, Drama:
+“Bohemian Rhapsody”
+Best Motion Picture, Musical or Comedy:
+“Green Book”
+Best Director, Motion Picture:
+Alfonso Cuarón, “Roma”HOUSTON — It was a face that haunted many people in the nation’s fourth-largest city: The police sketch of the unshaven white man who witnesses and the authorities said had opened fire on a black family in a car the day before New Year’s Eve.
+A second grader riding in the car with her mother and three sisters — Jazmine Barnes, 7 — was shot and killed. And the man in the sketch — thinly built, in his 30s or 40s, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, driving a red pickup — became the focal point of what appeared to be a racially motivated shooting that rattled black residents, elected officials and civil-rights activists in Houston and around the country.
+“Do not be afraid to call this what it seems to be — a hate crime,” Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Houston Democrat, told hundreds of people at a rally last week near the site of the killing.
+But it has turned out far differently.
+On Sunday, the authorities charged a suspect with capital murder who is not the man in the sketch. He is a 20-year-old African-American man named Eric Black Jr. Investigators with the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Black acknowledged taking part in the shooting, and that Jazmine’s family’s vehicle may not have been the intended target.ESPN reported Sunday night that the Wolves, though, are determined to keep the coaching and personnel roles separate in the future, meaning Hoiberg — or anyone else they hire — would have to choose one or the other.
+Thibodeau’s dismissal leaves San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich as the only coach in the 30-team N.B.A. who also holds personnel power as team president. But even Popovich does not operate in that manner, delegating virtually all of his personnel power to the team president, R. C. Buford.
+The Timberwolves ended a 13-year playoff drought last season by posting a 47-35 record, with Butler and the young center Karl-Anthony Towns emerging as All-Stars.
+Butler, however, rebuffed Minnesota’s offer of a contract extension in July in the first hint of his discontent. He ultimately asked for a trade days before the start of training camp in September — despite a long association with Thibodeau dating to their days in Chicago.
+Butler maintained that he had made his desire to leave Minnesota in free agency clear to the Wolves for months. But Thibodeau and his general manager, Scott Layden, did not begin to seek trades for Butler until training camp was underway and ultimately dealt him to Philadelphia on Nov. 12 for a package headlined by Dario Saric and Robert Covington. The team was 4-9 at the time.
+“I said let’s let it go and see how things worked and I think now, we’ve gone up through halfway through the season and I don’t think we’re where we thought we would be or where we think we should be,” Taylor told The Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
+“I’m just looking at the results. The results are that I don’t think we should’ve lost against Phoenix or Detroit or New Orleans or Atlanta. Maybe one of those games. We just lost against a bunch of teams that we’re a better team.”“N.I.H. has basically been operating on the principle that everyone is well intentioned,” said Scott Kennedy, an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who briefed the N.I.H. working group. “Then they run smack dab into the challenge of China, which has millions of researchers scrambling for money and for fame and for national glory. That creates an environment where some people may feel pressure to skirt, ignore or break the rules.”
+In some cases, Dr. Collins and Mr. Wray said, Chinese graduate students or visitors have taken intellectual property from American laboratories and given it to Chinese scientists or arms of the Chinese government, which published and commercialized the findings.
+In other cases, scientists who received grants from the N.I.H. had shadow laboratories in China, which also received funds from the Chinese government. The foreign funding and affiliations were, in some cases, unknown to the National Institutes of Health and even to the American universities where the scientists worked.
+Particularly worrisome to American officials was the finding that China had somehow obtained confidential information from applications for N.I.H. research grants. Under federal law, the N.I.H. uses an elaborate process of peer review to evaluate applications, and information in the applications — providing valuable insights into some of the world’s most advanced biomedical research — is supposed to remain confidential.
+Congress has poured money into the institutes, which have a budget of $39 billion this year, up 30 percent from 2014, and lawmakers say the agency has been phenomenally productive. More than $4 out of every $5 is distributed to researchers around the country studying cancer, heart disease, diabetes and myriad other conditions.Season 4, Episode 10: ‘The Deep Heart’s Core’
+Brianna was never so compelling as when she cracked Jamie right in the face.
+Her rape story line may never escape the shadow of the show’s reliance on sexual violence. That said, her early days at Fraser’s Ridge felt more like the beginning of a process than a bandage on a wound, suggesting “Outlander” was trying to make Brianna a full character at the center of this story, however belatedly. And this episode, she unleashes on Jamie and Ian in one of the more painful family scenes since the Fraser reunion.
+It is part of a shift in Brianna’s arc. She has moved from dull horror to burning anger, confessing to Jamie that she dreams of murdering her rapist. Whatever that suggests for the long term, in the short term it’s clear that she is trying to come to terms with what happened. She declines to terminate the pregnancy on the slim chance it could be Roger’s, and yet her nightmares about Bonnet get worse.
+But this family feud is also comeuppance for Jamie. And that’s rare enough to feel important.
+Early in this episode, Jamie goes from “It’s not your fault, Brianna” to devil’s advocate on a dime, so he can goad her into attacking him. Then he pins her in a weirdly loaded sleeper hold and points out that she’s powerless to stop him from killing her. You know, to make her feel better. (The actual heart-to-heart that follows is honest and earnest, but it’s hard to forget that Jamie ran out of patience so fast that a father-daughter half-nelson seemed more expedient than a little more reassurance.)
+It seems destined to come back and bite him — his confidence the sort that implodes. But on “Outlander,” Jamie is the hero, and he doesn’t tend to face a lot of pushback from characters he respects. Murtagh is still coming over for dinner without a word about how Jamie plans to handle his pledge to the Governor. So the most remarkable thing about this episode is that after Brianna and Claire find out Jamie and Ian dealt some secret violence to Roger, they get mad at Jamie — and stay mad.Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+After the Golden Globes hosts Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg delivered a mostly safe opening, going out of their way to praise the work of Hollywood, Oh ended the first segment on an emotional note about improvements in diversity in the film and television industry.
+Several films in the spotlight this awards season feature women and people of color. Oh’s hosting gig is itself a barrier breaker: she is the first Asian woman to front a major awards show in the United States.
+Oh told the crowd, “I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change. And I’m not fooling myself. I’m not fooling myself. Next year could be different. It probably will be. But right now, this moment is real.”
+Before Oh’s remarks turned earnest, she and Samberg started off with a bit in which he “read” Oh’s lines off the teleprompter. That evolved into Samberg’s newfound understanding about “whitewashing” in Hollywood, a term that usually refers to white actors being given a part initially written for a person of color.
+SAMBERG: Now, I know we are up here joking. But on a serious note, this year, we saw incredible work like “Black Panther,” “Crazy Rich Asians,” “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Roma,” “Pose,” “BlacKkKlansman,” and many more. And they are not just here tonight because they resonated with audiences Hollywood often ignores, they are here because they told stories that resonated with everyone. And that is truly a beautiful thing. OH: Wow, Andy, can I just say that you just read all of my lines off the teleprompter? SAMBERG: What? No, those were mine. Here, let me keep going. “When I was growing up in Canada, the daughter of Korean immigrants,” O.K. You know what? You are right. That was totally your stuff. Oh, my God. I just totally whitewashed your speech. That’s how it happens. OH: That’s not how it happens. SAMBERG: What an amazing learning experience for me. OH: O.K. would you stop talking? SAMBERG: You got it. OH: But if I could take a moment here, in all honesty: I said yes to the fear of being on this stage tonight because — because I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change. And I’m not fooling myself. I’m not fooling myself. Next year could be different. It probably will be. But right now, this moment is real. Trust me, it is real. Because I see you. And I see you. All of these faces of change. And now so will everyone else.
+Here’s the full list of winners.But moments after arriving with his pregnant wife and three children at the foot of the international bridge, he and his family were stopped by Mexican officials and detained.
+A few months ago, Mr. Moreno’s lack of proper paperwork would have been ignored by the Mexican authorities, according to local officials and immigration lawyers. But Mr. Moreno was held in a cell for 20 days and his family was placed in a temporary shelter.
+The lure of the smugglers in Reynosa is not limited to Central Americans. Mexicans, too, employ their services, although the cost is lower — the prices charged seem to depend on just how bad the situation is in a migrant’s home country.
+On a recent day in a migration office in Reynosa, a group of Mexicans sat waiting to be processed after their deportations from the United States.
+“For the migration authorities, it is a job,” said Melvin Gómez, 18, who is from the Mexican state of Chiapas. “For Mexicans and Central Americans, immigration is a dream.”
+Mr. Gómez had just tried crossing for the fourth time the day before.
+“We have something to live for,” he said, “and that keeps us going.”[Sign up here for In Her Words, our newsletter about women, gender and society.]
+Ahead of the show, the actress Rachel Brosnahan, wearing a ribbon, said: “While we’re still fighting for safety and equity in the workplace, those are symptoms of a larger problem of an imbalance of power” — the message attached to the new #TimesUpx2 hashtag. She won a best actress Golden Globe for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” on Sunday night, an award she also won last year. Her husband, Jason Ralph, wore a bow tie he said he fashioned on the spot from one of the ribbons.
+Elsewhere on the carpet, Laura Dern’s daughter Jaya, 14, said: “I want my generation to not have to say #MeToo.” Dern was nominated for “The Tale.”
+In her opening comments, Oh, choking up, took a moment from the gags to say: “I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change. And I’m not fooling myself. I’m not fooling myself. Next year could be different. It probably will be. But right now, this moment is real.”
+The camera scanned to the faces of women in the audience, particularly those of women of color.
+Not long after, Regina King, accepting her Golden Globe for “If Beale Street Could Talk,” stopped the play-off music with the words “Time’s Up times two.” She then announced that she was dedicated to finding gender parity in her projects.
+“I am making a vow,” she said, “to make sure that everything that I produce, that it’s 50 percent women. And I just challenge anyone out there who is in a position of power, not just in our industry, in all industries, I challenge you to challenge yourselves and stand with us in solidarity and do the same.”Welcome to the Smarter Living newsletter! Every Monday, S.L. editor Tim Herrera emails readers with tips and advice for living a better, more fulfilling life. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
+If you have a pen and paper handy, let’s do a little experiment.
+Picture a cashew. Now pick up your pen and draw a little sketch of one, then put the drawing face down somewhere you can’t see it. We’ll come back to it later.
+Yes, this is a weird way to start your week, I know. But there is a reason, I promise!
+You’ve probably guessed by now that we’re playing a little ad hoc memory game. There is no shortage of mnemonic tricks you can use to remember things, but the three-act technique of picturing something in your mind, putting pen to paper to draw it, then looking at your drawing is a powerful memory trick that outperforms other “strong” mnemonic strategies when it comes to memory, according to a study published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
+“We more or less established first that this is something people can do to improve their memory relative to the baseline task of just writing things out,” said Jeffrey Wammes, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of psychology at Yale and co-author of the study. “Not only that, drawing improves memory more than at least a few tasks that have been touted in the past as strong mnemonic techniques.”Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+Regina King, at Sunday night’s Golden Globes, pledged in her acceptance speech after winning best supporting actress in a motion picture that women will make up 50 percent of the staff for any of her projects in the next two years. She won for her role as Sharon Rivers in the Barry Jenkins-directed “If Beale Street Could Talk.”
+In her speech, King also thanked Jenkins for “giving us a film that my son said to me when he saw it, that it was the first time he really saw himself.”
+Amy, thank you for the prayers, sweetheart, thank you so much. Oh, this is so fantastic. And Annapurna, thank you so much, everyone. I mean, this is odd, but it’s not. My publicist Mike Liotta, the Annapurna publicists, Daniella, Jesus, Seth, Marvin, who have been championing and working their asses off to get people to come see this film. Barry Jenkins. I love you with all my heart. Thank you for your empathy. Thank you for telling stories so rich and thank you for giving us a film that my son said to me when he saw it, that it was the first time he really saw himself. Thank you so much for that.
+Plan B, Jeremy, and Dede, oh, my gosh, what a journey it’s been, all the way from “Year of the Dog” to here, Jesus, man, oh, my gosh. My son, Ian, boy. Oh, thank you so much for all the love that we have been receiving for “Beale Street,” we are so proud of this film. The Baldwin family, thank you so much for trusting Sir Barry Jenkins to tell James Baldwin’s words and allowing us the opportunity.
+Thank you, God, for allowing me to be a witness. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, okay. Oh, cheers, cheers.
+Oh, my gosh, one more thing. So often everyone out there, they hear us on the red carpet and they say celebrities, we’re using the time to talk about ourselves when we are on our soap box and using a moment to talk about the systemic things that are going on in life. Time’s Up times two. The reason why we do this is because we understand that our microphones are big and we are speaking for everyone.
+And I just want to say that I’m going to use my platform right now to say in the next two years everything that I produce I am making a vow — and it’s going to be tough — to make sure that everything that I produce — that is 50% women. And I just challenge anyone out there — anyone out there who is in a position of power, not just in our industry, in all industries, I challenge you to challenge yourselves and stand with us in solidarity and do the same. God bless you. Thank you.“I don’t think anything would stop me. And certainly not a wall.”
+OSMAN NOE GUILLÉN, who traveled to Mexico’s northern border with his wife, fleeing economic hardship in Honduras. They plan to pay smugglers to take them to Texas.Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+Sandra Oh was onstage a lot on Sunday. Not only was she one of the hosts, she also won her second Golden Globe — this time for best actress in a television drama as the star of the BBC series, “Killing Eve.”
+Her first win was in 2006: best supporting actress for her role as Dr. Yang on the television series “Grey’s Anatomy.” Other stars have won Globes even as they served as host, most recently Amy Poehler for best actress for “Parks and Recreation” in 2014.
+On Sunday Oh’s acceptance speech was one of the most spirited of the night, in keeping with her approach to her hosting duties: an endearing combination of earnestness and jubilation.
+When she took the stage, the camera cut to the audience, where her father was giving her a standing ovation, to which Oh yelled, “Oh, Daddy!”Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+Carol Burnett sometimes daydreams of being young again and reliving her unparalleled career, she said at Sunday night’s Golden Globes, but then she stops short. “I realize how incredibly fortunate I was to be there at the right time, because what we did then couldn’t be done today,” she said.
+Burnett, 85, considered the “queen of comedy,” was accepting the inaugural Carol Burnett Award, an accolade that focuses on life achievement in television. And she took the moment to reflect on the opportunities that were available to her when she began a variety show called “The Carol Burnett Show” in 1967, which ran for “11 joy-filled years,” as she put it, and earned 25 Emmys.
+Burnett won five Golden Globes for the program, which drew about 30 million viewers a week.
+In her acceptance speech on Sunday, Burnett, who has been in the industry for seven decades, said she fell in love with movies as a young girl and then with television as a teenager.
+“What fascinated me was the way the stars on the screen could make people laugh or cry or sometimes both,” she said. “And I wished and I hoped that maybe, just maybe, some day, I could have the chance to do the same thing. Well, those childhood dreams came true.”The 2019 Golden Globes didn’t want any trouble.
+The previous two years, the usually bubbly event found itself responding to upheavals in politics and in the power structure of Hollywood. This year a big issue hanging over the awards ceremony was another awards ceremony: the Oscars, which is still without a host after a search that included the naming and quick unnaming of Kevin Hart, after objections to the comedian’s history of homophobic jokes.
+The hosts, Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg, kicked off their opening monologue declaring that they were “the only two people left in Hollywood who haven’t gotten in trouble for saying something offensive” and announcing that one lucky audience member “Will! Host! The Oscars!”
+[Read our analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony | Browse the list of winners]
+Their opener, amiable if a little stiff, played on the idea of aggressive niceness, “roasting” stars in the room with compliments. Even one of the zingers, a joke by Oh about Hollywood’s casting white actors as Asian characters, produced a cheerfully penitent “I’m sorry!” from Emma Stone, who played a part-Asian character in “Aloha.”Susan Zirinsky, the longtime producer of “48 Hours” on CBS, will succeed David Rhodes as the president of the network’s news division in March, the company said Sunday night.
+The surprising announcement was the latest major personnel change for CBS, which also forced out Leslie Moonves, the company’s longtime chief executive, in September after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct.
+The news division, which has struggled in the ratings, has weathered significant upheaval in the last year. Charlie Rose, the anchor of the morning show, was fired in November 2017 after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct. Jeff Fager, the longtime executive producer of “60 Minutes,” was fired by Mr. Rhodes in September after he threatened a reporter and colleague looking into allegations of sexual harassment against him. And Ryan Kadro, the executive producer of “CBS This Morning,” announced last month that he was departing.
+Mr. Rhodes’ contract was set to expire early this year but his departure was not expected within the ranks of the news division. In fact, over the last few months, he has been weighing who should replace Mr. Fager at “60 Minutes.” Ms. Zirinsky was the leading candidate for the position. Now, as the first woman to lead CBS News, she will decide who will take over the program.U.S. government shutdown enters third week
+Negotiations over the weekend appeared to offer little hope of an immediate agreement between Democrats and President Trump over his demands for a border wall. Democratic leaders have repeatedly said they would not agree to any funding for the wall. The White House is also digging in, insisting on $5.7 billion in wall funding, even as some Republicans have started to call for an end to the shutdown. Mr. Trump gave little ground. “They don’t like concrete, so we’ll give them steel,” he said.
+Analysis: The idea of the border wall, which advisers to Mr. Trump said they initially created to remind Mr. Trump to talk tough on immigration during his campaign, has boxed in the president. He’s now struggling to find a way to please both his core supporters and conservative skeptics who see the wall as ineffective.
+In Opinion: Our columnist David Leonhardt builds a detailed argument that Mr. Trump is demonstrably unfit for office and “must go,” but that a rushed impeachment could actually help him remain in office.Read our updates and analysis from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+Glenn Close won a Golden Globe on Sunday and it was one of the biggest upsets of the night. Her portrayal of Joan Castleman in “The Wife” won her a third Globe for best actress in a drama, over Lady Gaga, who was widely expected to win for her performance in “A Star is Born.”
+In a tearful speech that drew many in the crowd to their feet, Close, seemingly caught off-guard when her name was announced, implored women to “find personal fulfillment.” After acknowledging the other nominees and thanking, among others, “Meg Wolitzer for writing this incredible novel and Jane Anderson for adapting it,” the actress said it took 14 years to make the movie. “You know, it was called ‘The Wife.’ I think that’s why it took 14 years to get made.”
+She continued:
+“To play a character is so internal. And I’m thinking of my mom who really sublimated herself to my father her whole life and in her 80s she said to me, “I feel I haven’t accomplished anything.” And it was so not right and I feel what I’ve learned through this whole experience is that, you know, women, we are nurturers, that’s what’s expected of us. We have our children. We have our husbands if we are lucky enough, and our partners, whoever. But we have to find personal fulfillment. We have to follow our dreams. We have to say, “I can do that and I should be allowed to do that.” And, you know, when I was little, I felt like Muhammad Ali, who was destined to be a boxer. I felt destined to be an actress. I saw all the early Disney films and Hayley Mills, and I said, “I can do that.” And here I am today. It will have been 45 years in September that I am a working actress. And I cannot imagine a more wonderful life. Thank you Björn Runge, who is here, who directed “The Wife,” who trusted the close-up, who knew where to put the camera and how to light us. Jonathan Pryce, what a great partner. My daughter Annie who played the foundation of this character. I love you, my darling. Thank you so much.”
+Here’s the full list of winners.Good Monday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump’s national security adviser, John R. Bolton, appeared to roll back Mr. Trump’s decision to rapidly withdraw from Syria, laying out conditions for a pullout that could leave American forces there for months or even years. Read about the conditions.
+• Mr. Trump’s evolving definition of a border wall was central to negotiations over the government shutdown on Sunday, as he told reporters he was fine with a “steel barrier.” House Democrats moved to increase pressure on the president by vowing to pass individual bills to reopen certain departments that handle critical functions. Read about the discussions.
+• The Trump administration has adopted several strategies to deter migrants and persuade them to turn around — or not to come at all. Its latest effort is a policy that admits only a few asylum seekers a day at border crossings. As a result, migrants are now waiting on the Mexican side of the border for weeks and months.As the Golden Globes began on Sunday, Sandra Oh earnestly told the audience, “I said yes to the fear of being on this stage tonight because — because I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change,” referring to one of the more diverse slates of nominees in Globes history, in an industry that has traditionally been difficult to break into for people of color.
+It turned out — at least this year — the diversity wasn’t just in the nominees, but also in the winners selected by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Several performers of color won in some of the most prestigious categories, including the night’s best actor in a movie drama, the Egyptian-American star Rami Malek.
+And the diversity extended to the stories being told. Best animated movie went to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” in which a version of the superhero is an Afro-Latino teenager. (The directing team behind the movie included an African-American filmmaker, Peter Ramsey.) Best comedy went to “Green Book,” about the relationship between an African-American pianist and his Italian-American driver.
+One winner, Darren Criss, spoke onstage about the issue, noting, “This has been a marvelous year for representation in Hollywood, and I am so enormously proud to be a teeny, tiny part of that as the son of a firecracker Filipino woman from Cebu that dreamed of coming to this country and getting to be invited to cool parties like this.”The search for love is back on in “The Bachelor,” and feel that high school nostalgia during “Friday Night Lights.”
+What’s on TV
+THE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. Colton Underwood, the former NFL football player and Season 14 “Bachelorette” contestant, returns to reality TV once more to try to find love. During the 23rd-season premiere of this show, which has captivated many and caused books to be written about its scope and power, Colton meets the 30 contenders after his heart. They include Miss Alabama 2018 and one contestant who brings, and momentarily leaves behind, her 10-year-old pet Pomeranian.
+COLLEGE FOOTBALL NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP 8 p.m. on ESPN. Alabama, with a 14-0 record, takes on Clemson, also 14-0, for the national title. This is the fourth year these teams are meeting in the College Football Playoff, and the third time in those four years that the two go head-to-head for the championship.BANGKOK — An 18-year-old Saudi woman who expressed fear that she would be killed if sent back to her family was allowed to remain in Thailand on Monday evening, ending a tense 48-hour drama at Bangkok’s main international airport.
+The young woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, was on the verge of being deported earlier in the day at the request of the Saudi government. But after she and human rights advocates mounted a global social media campaign, Thai immigration officials agreed not to send her home.
+“Thailand is a land of smiles. We will not send someone back to die,” said the country’s immigration chief, Maj. Gen. Surachate Hakparn. “We will take care of her as best as we can.”
+After meeting with Ms. Alqunun and officials from the United Nations refugee agency Monday afternoon, General Surachate said that Ms. Alqunun had been allowed to leave the airport with agency representatives. They will take up to 10 days to process her request for refugee status and find a country that will accept her.Capping a Golden Globes ceremony that belonged more to audience favorites than to critical darlings, “Bohemian Rhapsody” and its star, Rami Malek, played the spoiler to “A Star Is Born” in the battle between two musicals competing in the best drama category for film. Neither, however, is currently streaming, and nor are any of the other major movie winners except for Netflix’s “Roma,” which won prizes for its director, Alfonso Cuarón, and for best foreign language movie.
+[Here’s the complete list of Golden Globe winners.]
+The good news is, plenty of quality movie nominees can be streamed now, and many of the winners arrive online later this month, including “Rhapsody” (Jan. 22), “Star” (Jan. 15) and “The Wife” (Jan. 22), a little-seen film for which Glenn Close won best actress. Meanwhile, nearly all of the TV winners are already on subscription services or available for rental.
+Here’s a guide to the those major-category nominees and winners that are already a click away, along with excerpts from their New York Times reviews.
+Movies
+‘Roma’
+Won for: Best foreign language, best director.
+Nominated for: Best screenplay.
+“Many directors use spectacle to convey larger-than-life events while reserving devices like close-ups to express a character’s inner being. Here, [Alfonso] Cuarón uses both intimacy and monumentality to express the depths of ordinary life.” (Click here to read the full Times review by Manohla Dargis.)Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+agape \ ə-ˈgāp or \ä-ˈgä-(ˌ)pā, ˈä-gə-ˌpā\ (noun) \ adjective, adverb and noun
+adjective or adverb: with the mouth wide open as in wonder or awe noun: selfless love of one person for another without sexual implications (especially love that is spiritual in nature)
+_________
+The word agape has appeared in 46 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Aug. 30 in the Travel article “36 Hours in the Dolomites” by Ingrid K. Williams:
+A travel tip for the Dolomites: You don’t want to be the driver, negotiating steep hairpin turns and bands of Italian cyclists pedaling through dangerously narrow mountain passes. You want to be the passenger, the one hanging her head out the window, mouth agape, transfixed on the mountain peaks and gloriously green valleys. This monumental mountain range in northeastern Italy is one of the world’s most beautiful playgrounds for outdoor adventurers, from winter skiers to summer hikers, bikers, mountain climbers and more. But equally fascinating is its cultural heritage.LOS ANGELES — There are 900 schools, 30,000 teachers and more than 600,000 students in the Los Angeles public school system. By the end of the week, a teacher strike could throw them all into crisis.
+After months of failed negotiations, teachers are expected to walk off the job on Thursday, in a show of frustration over what they say are untenable conditions in the second-largest school system in the country.
+Teachers and other employees in the Los Angeles Unified School District are demanding higher pay, smaller class sizes and more support staff like counselors and librarians. But district officials say that they do not have the money to meet all of the demands and that the strike would do more damage to schools than good.
+A strike in Los Angeles would offer a new stage for the national teacher protest movement, which in the last year has driven walkouts against stagnant pay and low education funding in six states. A walkout in staunchly liberal Los Angeles would also signal a major shift in a movement that has spread mostly in conservative or swing states with weaker unions.“Even if it was stupid, there’s significantly more political upset in Gabon then there has been,” said Eric Benjaminson, a former United States ambassador to the country, who left in 2013. “It’s a marker for something.”
+“Mr. Bongo needs to return to Gabon,” he said, “and do something positive for the country.”
+In a New Year’s Eve speech broadcast from Morocco, where Mr. Bongo, 59, was recuperating, the president sought to reassure the nation that he was fit.
+“It is true that I have been through a difficult period, as sometimes happens in life,” he said. “Today, as you can see, I am better and I am preparing to meet you again soon.”
+Observers noted that the president had slurred some words and did not move his right arm.
+The first indication that something was amiss in Libreville on Monday came early in the morning, when songs from the campaign of Jean Ping, Mr. Bongo’s chief opponent in the 2016 presidential election, were broadcast over national radio.
+A call to the station during the broadcast was answered by Lt. Kelly Ondo Obiang, the leader of the self-declared Patriotic Movement of the Defense and Security Forces of Gabon, who said he would announce a coup shortly. He went on the air and did just that, while station employees were held hostage during the broadcast.
+Lieutenant Obiang said that Mr. Bongo’s speech from afar had “reinforced doubts about the president’s ability to continue to carry out of the responsibilities of his office.”Still, some have expressed doubts that start-ups can change the trajectory of a state whose economic output is about the same as it was in 2005.
+“The Lamonts are talking about innovation, but if, say, we get start-up companies here and they grow at a rate of 60 percent a year, that’s too slow,” said Fred Carstensen, director of the Connecticut Center for Economic Analysis at the University of Connecticut.
+“In terms of scale, what you really want to do is get a Pratt & Whitney to put a facility with 1,500 jobs here,” Mr. Carstensen added. “What Connecticut really needs is big hits.”
+Mr. Lamont, 65, started a cable television company in the 1980s, but he is better known for his political campaigns. In 2006, he beat three-term incumbent Joe Lieberman in the Democratic primary for Senate, but lost to Mr. Lieberman, who ran as an independent, in the general election. He sought the Democratic nomination for governor in 2010, but lost to Dannel P. Malloy, the outgoing governor.
+Mr. Lamont, whose great-grandfather was a business partner of J.P. Morgan, spent $38 million of his own money on his campaigns, including $12 million to win the governor’s race in November.
+Now he inherits a state striving to reverse its financial fortunes.
+General Electric dealt the state a particularly harsh blow when it announced in 2016 that it was moving its headquarters to Boston in search of a deeper pool of high-tech workers. When Mr. Lamont learned the news, he called a Yale classmate and neighbor in Greenwich, Indra Nooyi, who was the chief executive of PepsiCo.SAN JOSE, Calif. — It was 85 degrees in Tuscaloosa, Ala., on Aug. 18, and Nick Saban was feeling the heat.
+Midway through training camp, many of Alabama’s younger players had not progressed as Saban had hoped. A talented linebacker for the Crimson Tide, the defending national champion, had recently sustained a severe knee injury, and the prior season’s starting right tackle had broken his foot.
+[Alabama vs. Clemson: Follow our live coverage from the national championship game]
+“We don’t have enough depth, especially on defense, to afford to be able to lose those kinds of players,” Saban told a group of reporters.
+Then Saban was asked whether the lack of progress among the more inexperienced players worried him.
+And that’s when Saban, this era’s most successful college coach and recruiter, snapped. His expletive-tinged remark went viral online.Along with the biomarker panels, Orreco’s algorithms also take into account game minutes, air miles traveled, sleep data and reaction times that are obtained from wearable devices used during practices.
+The rules that allow players to opt out of blood testing are in place because regulating how teams use biometrics and the data such research produces — specifically whether the data belongs to the teams, players or the league itself — remains an evolving point of concern throughout the N.B.A. As a safeguard amid the rise of wearable technology in practice sessions, league policy threatens fines of up to $250,000 per team for the misuse of biometric data.
+Yet Smith insists that the collaboration with Orreco has improved the Mavericks’ ability to track the onset of illness and keep players “more available” for games. In the 2016-17 season, according to data maintained by InStreetClothes.com, a website that tracks injuries in the N.B.A., Dallas players missed only four games due to illness — less than half the league average of 8.5.
+The Mavericks then lost a league-low zero games to illness last season, when the league average was 7.1 games per team, according to the site.
+“Does that mean we win more games?” Smith said. “Not necessarily. But it gives us a better shot.”
+Still, with the sports and fitness world littered with treatments not supported by vetted published studies, some independent experts have their doubts.
+Dr. Anthony Romeo, the chief of orthopedics at the Rothman Institute in New York and a former team physician for the Chicago White Sox who also worked with the Chicago Bulls, said he would maintain “a healthy level of skepticism” about Orreco’s work until it reveals more about the biomarkers it studies and the data being gathered.So some Democrats were discomfited by the revelation that the first of the Alabama efforts was explicitly devised to try out the tactics of the Russian operation, according to an internal report on the project obtained by The Times. Rather than Russians working in St. Petersburg posing as Americans, this time Democrats — most of them far from Alabama — pretended to be conservative state residents.
+The first of the Alabama efforts was funded by Reid Hoffman, the billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, who apologized and said he had been unaware of the project and did not approve of the underhanded methods. The second was funded by two Virginia donors who wanted to defeat Mr. Moore — a former judge accused of pursuing sexual relationships with underage girls — according to a participant who would speak about the secret project only on the condition of anonymity and who declined to name the funders.
+The two projects each received $100,000, funneled in both cases through the same organization: Investing in Us, which finances political operations in support of progressive causes. Dmitri Mehlhorn, the group’s managing partner, declined to comment on whether he approved of the tactics he had helped pay for. But after the Times report in December, he acknowledged, in a post on the online forum Medium, a “concern that our tactics might cause us to become like those we are fighting.” He declared that “some tactics are beyond the pale.”
+Another organizer of the project, according to two participants, was Evan Coren, a progressive activist who works for the National Archives unit that handles classified documents. He did not respond to requests for comment. Beth Becker, a social media trainer and consultant in Washington who handled Facebook ad spending for the Dry Alabama page and the project’s other Facebook page, called Southern Caller, said in an interview that a nondisclosure agreement prohibited her from saying much about the project.
+But, she added, “I don’t think anything this group did crossed any lines.”
+That may be true in the sense that neither law nor regulations set any clear limits on social media activity in elections. “The law has clearly not caught up with social media,” Ms. Becker said.On a Friday Night Train
+Dear Diary:
+You know the feeling you get on a Friday after work ends? I had that feeling when I got on a Metro North train headed home after a long week.
+I picked the middle seat in a three-seat row. Just before the train pulled out, a man sat down next to me and gave me a mean look.
+“You know,” he said, “you shouldn’t be sitting in the middle seat.”
+The implication was that I should have taken the window seat to allow more room for others.
+The comment made me angry, and I was about to respond to his rudeness but it was Friday. And I had to admit that he had a point. So I moved over to the window seat and offered him a handshake and an apology.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Fire department officials continued investigating the circumstances that led to the death of a rookie New York City firefighter on Sunday night after he fell from a bridge in Brooklyn while trying to rescue two people involved in a car accident.
+The firefighter, Steven H. Pollard, 30, died from injuries he suffered when he dropped more than 50 feet from the Belt Parkway’s Mill Basin Bridge onto heavy sand below, the authorities said.
+The city mourned Mr. Pollard’s death on Monday. Dozens of firefighters lined the streets as his remains, draped in a flag, were carried from the city medical examiner’s office in Manhattan to a funeral home in southern Brooklyn. A procession of Fire Department vehicles escorted his body through the streets, passing firefighters who saluted or bowed their heads. Flags across the city were flown at half-staff.
+“It’s a very sad night here in our city,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference on Monday. “This is particularly painful because we’ve lost a young man serving our city as a firefighter.”[Read more about how President Trump sees China’s recent economic weakness as an opportunity.]
+As the trade war drags on, however, investors have grown worried about its economic impact as well as the risk to corporate profits. Those worries were amplified last week when Apple warned that its sales in the most recent quarter would be worse than expected because of slowing demand for iPhones in China. And the rising cost of imports is also affecting businesses in the United States.
+[Read more about American factory owners who say the trade war is hurting them.]
+Offsetting those concerns, on Friday, the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, said the Fed would be flexible amid market turbulence and broader concerns about slowing global growth. The comments sent shares in the United States higher, as did strong job numbers for December.
+Also on Friday, the People’s Bank of China essentially injected $218 billion into the country’s financial system. The move was intended to ease lending in the Chinese economy, which has experienced weaker factory output and consumer confidence.
+Asian shares ended higher Monday, while Europe’s major indexes pared early gains to close lower.
+The Nikkei 225 index in Japan jumped 2.4 percent, and the Hang Seng in Hong Kong closed 0.8 percent higher. In China, the Shanghai composite index rose 0.7 percent, and the Shenzhen composite index rallied 1.7 percent.I had stumbled across William’s work at the Mudd Club in the early 1980s when some photos on the wall stopped me. They were portraits of musicians from the neighborhood, some of them my friends, taken in the present but with a formal tone of the past. I asked the bartender who made them, and he said the artist, William Coupon, lived just a couple of blocks away.
+I met William and saw more of his images, which were beautiful. He was an artist who wanted to capture the beauty of people in social groups, and he saw the local musicians who played at the club as a community, a contemporary tribe. That feeling also informs his photos from Cafe’tal, where echoes of the past linger. Fat Carmine Aquilino tells stories about the old neighborhood photos on the wall. So does Joe Perrotta, the cafe’s owner. Recently, he pointed to a 50-year-old photograph of men playing cards around a table in the same room we were in: “That’s my father.”
+Mr. Perrotta said that it’s not only important that the dishes on the menu evoke memories of the past, like Sunday Gravy, but that the same space continues to bring people together. Poker gave way to tales of stickball matches, shared baby photos and antipasto for the table.JERUSALEM — Moshe Arens, the Israeli politician and statesman who was one of the last of his country’s founding generation of right-wing, liberal Zionists, and who held top posts but never achieved his greatest aspirations, died on Monday at his home in Savyon, Israel. He was 93.
+A son-in-law, Dr. Itzhak Fried, said Mr. Arens had died in his sleep.
+A former member of the Irgun militia and a young leader of the revisionist Betar Youth Movement, Mr. Arens remained until his last days a beacon of Israel’s ideological right. After helping to found the Herut (Freedom) party, he reached the top echelons of its outgrowth, the Likud, and was seen by many as the natural heir of the conservative prime ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
+Mr. Arens served three times as defense minister and also as foreign minister and as Israel’s ambassador to the United States.
+Widely considered an outstanding defense minister, Mr. Arens was respected by the military and helped shape Israel’s defense doctrine. A champion of Israeli self-reliance, he fostered Israel’s aerospace program and became the godfather of one of the country’s most ambitious, though ill-fated, projects — to build a state-of-the-art fighter plane, the Lavi.Ask for advice about finding a career path and it likely won’t be long before you hear “find your passion” or “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.”
+But what if that dream career won’t pay enough for you to avoid making sacrifices about material comforts, having additional jobs or both? Does money matter if people feel strongly that they are doing what makes them happy and fulfilled?
+In “Does It Pay to Be a Writer?” Concepción de León considers these questions as they apply to professional writers:
+Writing has never been a lucrative career choice, but a recent study by the Authors Guild, a professional organization for book writers, shows that it may not even be a livable one anymore. According to the survey results, the median pay for full-time writers was $20,300 in 2017, and that number decreased to $6,080 when part-time writers were considered. The latter figure reflects a 42 percent drop since 2009, when the median was $10,500. These findings are the result of an expansive 2018 study of more than 5,000 published book authors, across genres and including both traditional and self-published writers. “In the 20th century, a good literary writer could earn a middle class living just writing,” said Mary Rasenberger, executive director of the Authors Guild, citing William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. Now, most writers need to supplement their income with speaking engagements or teaching. Strictly book-related income — which is to say royalties and advances — are also down, almost 30 percent for full-time writers since 2009.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— What information from the article, if any, surprises you? Why?
+— In light of what you just read, why do you think people still pursue careers in writing or other industries that typically do not pay much?
+— What importance, if any, do you think people should put on potential earnings when choosing a career?
+— What sort of job do you think you will seek someday? How important to you is the salary that you would earn in that job?
+— What is your response to advice like “do what you love,” when it comes to choosing a career? Explain.Acne is a disease of the pilosebaceous unit — translation: the hair shaft, follicle and associated sebaceous gland and muscle. Under the influence of adolescent hormones, the glands increase their production of an oily substance called sebum that normally lubricates the skin. Sebum is a food source for bacteria called Cutibacterium acnes (also called Propionibacterium acnes) that reside in the skin. As these bacteria proliferate, they attract white blood cells that can damage the follicle walls, forming debris and dead cells that result in pimples and sometimes pustules. Or the follicles may become plugged, forming blackheads or whiteheads.
+Contrary to common belief, acne does not result from surface dirt or infrequent skin cleansing. In fact, irritation of the skin from too frequent washing or, for example, by rubbing with hands or by a hat covering the forehead, can promote acne, Dr. Dellavalle said. He recommended gentle skin care with a product like Cetaphil rather than soap. Washing should be limited to twice a day, Dr. Zaenglein suggested.
+The influence of diet is controversial, largely theoretical and hard to test. Global studies suggest that a high-glycemic diet — one rich in refined carbohydrates and sugars — can promote acne, as well as a host of other common Western ailments. A low-glycemic diet rich in whole grains and legumes seems to improve acne in teenagers and “is good medical advice for everyone,” Dr. Dellavalle said. Acne is virtually unheard-of in populations that traditionally consume such a diet.
+Dairy products may aggravate acne in some people, so teenagers who are big milk drinkers might try cutting back to see if their acne improves. Likewise, heavy consumers of meat and poultry, rich in the amino acid leucine, may be more likely to develop acne through a complex chain reaction that stimulates the skin’s oil glands.
+But the influence on acne of other dietary items like chocolate and fried foods is more myth than fact. Dr. Steven R. Feldman, dermatologist at Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, told me that “within reason, diet doesn’t have a big effect on acne.” He suspects that most mistaken beliefs about diet stem from the fact that “when adolescent hormones kick in, teens get very hungry and coincidentally also get acne.”
+More important than restricting diet is getting the right treatment. Most mild cases respond well to over-the-counter remedies like benzoyl peroxide, which kills acne-fostering bacteria. It is often used in combination with adapalene gel, a topical retinoid now sold over-the-counter as Differin.
+But Dr. Zaenglein advised against “messing around with over-the-counter remedies if acne is extensive or severe. It’s better to treat it professionally right away to prevent scarring.”A $100 billion dollar health care package was proposed by congressional Republicans this past summer, and afterward endorsed by some Democrats. It aims to save money by encouraging you to make big life changes. But the package will probably fail to achieve its goals for a simple reason: scarcity. Chances are you don’t have the time, money or bandwidth to follow through.
+The legislation is expected to be reintroduced in the first quarter this year, and it has laudable goals. It encourages exercise by treating gym memberships as tax-deductible medical expenses. It would help cover out-of-pocket costs for high-deductible health plans by allowing people to deposit more money in tax-shielded health savings accounts. And it would permit the use of flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts to buy sports equipment.
+In other words, the spending package is intended to nudge Americans to exercise more and to get a better handle on their finances. But it would require people to restructure their lives in response to modest financial incentives. The package is an active policy: It requires opting in.
+Most of us won’t. We’re experiencing multiple, and often compounding, types of scarcity.
+“Scarcity in one walk of life means we have less attention, ‘less mind,’ in the rest of life,” wrote Eldar Shafir and Sendhil Mullainathan, Princeton and Harvard University professors who study behavioral economics. They refer to scarcity as a “cognitive tax” that makes it hard for people to live healthy lives and make health-promoting choices.I had just moved to Williamsburg in September 2013, to an apartment that was only six blocks from the club. Output was still fairly new at that point. It was dark, filled with fog, and there was only one thing there for you: the music. I had recently discovered the wonders of deep house, through the music of Sasha. I was standing front and center as he opened with a Pachanga Boys track, “Come Save Me.”
+I’ll never forget how subtle and simple that track started with just six or seven notes, repeating, quiet at first, slowly building. I lost every thought and sank down into the music. I fell even deeper in love with electronic music, with Sasha, with Output.
+Cidney Falk, 34, Park SlopeIn New York, almost every living situation involves a trade-off of some kind. As Joseph Boudin discovered during his first few years in the city, figuring out how to balance the pros and cons of various locations, rents, roommates and apartments is a difficult art to master.
+Since moving from Alabama four years ago, Mr. Boudin, 25, has lived in five apartments, each a brief attempt to find a long-term home. After a year in Manhattan, he moved to Staten Island to save on rent, although he was working in Midtown East. When he discovered the commute was miserable, he overcorrected by moving into a Hell’s Kitchen room-share where his rent, at $1,875, rivaled that of a studio apartment. And he still had to travel across town to work.
+Then he found a $1,200-a-month bedroom in an Upper East Side walk-up that turned out to be his worst calculation of all. Going in, he knew the accommodations wouldn’t be deluxe. The two-bedroom apartment was small, shabby and on the sixth floor.
+“When my best friend moved me in, she said, ‘Joseph, are you sure you want to live here?’” Mr. Boudin recalled. “There was a hole around the bathroom pipe that was the size of a dinner plate.”“On top of that, one of the issues with kids historically is there was no easy way to measure pain in kids,” Dr. Schechter said. If your 4-year-old was crying it might be “because he missed mommy and daddy, or he was anxious.” The real problem, he said, was that nobody knew how to dose pain control medications safely in children, because the research hadn’t been done.
+Today, “nobody’s getting intramuscular injections,” said Dr. Charles Berde, the founder of the division of pain medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. As pain management improved, at first, the focus was indeed on giving opioids — like morphine — but on giving them intravenously, and with older children at least, on having the patient actually control the dose, with devices called PCAs, for patient-controlled analgesia.
+But over the last 15 years, Dr. Berde said, the focus has shifted to optimizing all the nonopioid methods of pain control. That means using regional anesthesia, like nerve blocks, using nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, like ibuprofen and its relatives, and using acetaminophen (Tylenol). Dr. Berde, who wrote a 2016 review of the different modalities for pain control, said that opioids are still important for the most painful surgeries, such as large spine operations and open chest operations, although even in these situations, most children get them for less than a week. For smaller surgical procedures, he said, they should be used as “rescue” drugs when others fail, not as the predominant agents.
+“Pain medicines act on different sites in the periphery and in the central nervous system,” Dr. Berde said. “Combinations are often more effective than a single medicine.” Thus, in the first couple of days after a minor surgical procedure, a child might get round-the-clock acetaminophen and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory medication, using opioids only as backup, very short-term for a midrange procedure.
+Surgical procedures nowadays often use minimally invasive methods like laparoscopy and arthroscopy, with easier recoveries and less pain, and patients are generally encouraged to return to activity much more quickly than in the past. Procedures are often done on an ambulatory outpatient basis, which puts responsibility for pain management on the parents when they take their child home. “Ideally, you want to have your kid in a hospital where they make it a priority to have systems in place,” Dr. Berde said. Parents need clear guidance, and they should know whom they can call with questions and problems.
+“Kids benefit from a very individualized tailored approach,” Dr. Berde said, “from being honest with them about when there is discomfort and giving them ways to get through it, ways to feel like there is some mastery.” A child’s pain control should be tailored not only to the particular surgery, he said, but also to past experiences with pain, and even to the individual biology of the child. “There are clear biological differences between people in how much medicine they need and how well it works for them,” he said, and in the near future, it may be possible to predict these differences and tailor individual pain regimens.
+Parents should be vigilant that their children are in fact receiving adequate pain management. “Parents assume everything possible is already being done for their child when we know in fact many of the evidence-based solutions for acute or procedural pain many times are not used in practice,” said Christine Chambers, a professor and children’s pain researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Pain still isn’t given the priority that it deserves.”DES MOINES — Allison Kipp is all in for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign, but she was the exception.
+Ben Miller, a 21-year-old student at Iowa State University, said he wants to vote for an economic populist, and if Senator Bernie Sanders runs again it will be a “tough choice” between him and Ms. Warren. Charles Miller, Ben’s father, said he expects to vote for Ms. Warren, but is also intrigued by a Democrat who could be described as her ideological opposite: Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York.
+“As Democrats, we haven’t seen a big field like this in a long time,” said the elder Mr. Miller, a 47-year-old resident of Ankeny, Iowa. “And as long as they keep it positive, as long as there’s no personal attacks and they just share their views, it’s going to be a good thing.”
+“I’m ready to be convinced.”
+Such is the mood of Iowa Democrats, who are currently feeling somewhat spoiled after a visit by Ms. Warren this weekend — more than a year before a single vote is cast in the state’s caucuses — unofficially kicked off the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. The party’s 2016 primary was defined by rigid and bitter lanes of Hillary Clinton and Mr. Sanders, but as the 2020 nomination process begins, the state’s voters are giddy at the prospect of a crowded field that could feature more than a dozen candidates across the ideological spectrum.WASHINGTON — Like lots of Americans, Robert Frese is not shy about expressing his views on the internet. Last year, in a comment on a newspaper’s Facebook page, he said a New Hampshire police officer who had given him a traffic citation was “a dirty cop.” The police chief, Mr. Frese added, was a coward who had covered up the matter.
+The police officers might have looked the other way. They might have responded, explaining their positions and letting readers decide who was right. They might have filed a civil suit for libel, seeking money from Mr. Frese.
+Instead, they did a fourth thing, one that seems at odds with the American commitment to free expression, particularly where criticism of government officials is concerned. They arrested Mr. Frese, saying he had committed criminal libel.
+About half of states have laws making libel a crime, and prosecutions are not uncommon. About 25 people were charged with violating New Hampshire’s law from 2009 to 2017, according to a lawsuit filed last month on behalf of Mr. Frese by the American Civil Liberties Union. Nationwide, according to a preliminary count by Eugene Volokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, “it appears that they happen about 20 times per year, and often lead to convictions.”In “One Good Meal,” we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.
+The chef Nina Clemente spent much of her childhood in New York City and southern Italy, but some of her earliest memories are of Chennai, India, a bustling city on the Bay of Bengal. She and her family lived there for half a year while her father, the artist Francesco Clemente, worked in the area. “I remember an insane monsoon season,” says Clemente, who was 4 during their stay. “I woke up one night and my bed was floating in the center of the living room, and all the stray cats we had taken in were gone.”
+This journey to a different world heightened Clemente’s senses and stimulated her palate. Her mother — the artist, actress and costume designer Alba Clemente — would often experiment with local ingredients as she cooked a red lentil dal. “To this day,” Clemente says, the traditional Indian dish “is one of my comfort foods.”See the full list of winners from the Golden Globes ceremony.
+The Golden Globes on Sunday featured a number of upsets and rousing thank-yous as well as flubbed intros and snoozy speeches. Here are the highlights and lowlights as we saw them:
+Most Stirring Opening Speech
+After the Golden Globes hosts Sandra Oh and Andy Samberg delivered a largely safe opening, going out of their way to praise the work of Hollywood, Oh hit a surprisingly emotional note about representation in the film and television industry and gains in diversity onscreen and off. She was referring to several films this awards season that feature people of color, and her hosting gig was itself a barrier breaker: she was the first Asian woman to front a major American awards show. Oh told the crowd that she had signed on as host because “I wanted to be here to look out into this audience and witness this moment of change.” She acknowledged that the progress could be temporary, saying, “I’m not fooling myself. Next year could be different.” But, she concluded, “right now, this moment is real.” As if to prove her point, the Globes rewarded a notably diverse group of actors, directors and stories. — Sopan Deb
+[Read a transcript of Sandra Oh’s comments.]
+Least Riveting HourHONG KONG — Malaysia’s king resigned on Sunday, becoming the first monarch to abdicate in the country’s history.
+The royal palace offered no explanation for why the king, Sultan Muhammad V of Kelantan, stepped down after serving only two years of a five-year term. It has also declined to comment on a widespread rumor that his departure was tied to his marriage to a former beauty queen in Russia during a recent medical leave.
+But this much is clear: A king’s role in Malaysia has little parallel among the world’s monarchies.
+What explains the king’s term limit?
+The monarch’s position, officially the “yang di-pertuan agong,” rotates every five years among a group of hereditary sultans who are titular leaders of nine Malay states. (The other four states have governors instead.)
+The power-sharing arrangement was developed when Malaysia became independent from Britain in 1957 and the sultans — who had previously ruled independently, with support from the British colonial authorities — needed to nominate a figurehead to rule over a newly federalized nation.In , Senegal’s capital, men stand on street corners with small cages crammed full of birds known locally as pithis, some of which are red-billed fire finches. The birds, which are common across sub-Saharan Africa and often live close to people, are thought to be carriers of human unhappiness. Tradition holds that you can get rid of sins and anxieties by buying a pithi and setting it free.To help me focus on the most newsworthy topics, I do prebriefings, where companies tell me what they are going to introduce — so long as I pledge not to reveal anything early.
+For weeks, my inbox has exploded with requests for meetings, often with obscure start-ups. (In the eight hours before I wrote this, I received 85.) Sometimes I agree, but usually these pitches aren’t the right fit.
+The show covers about 2.7 million square feet, so I wear comfortable, sturdy boots. I carry my laptop, a bulky battery pack for my phone, trail mix, business cards and, most important, hand sanitizer. (Despite this precaution, I’ve returned with what we veterans call the CES plague about six times.)
+That reminds me: I should buy more hand sanitizer.
+That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Chris
+Thank you
+To Eleanor Stanford (welcome back) for the cultural guidance and Alan Henry for such Smart Living. A special thanks to Brian X. Chen for today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.
+P.S.
+• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Today’s episode is about President Trump’s decision to withdraw troops from Syria and the ensuing debate over the role of the U.S. military.
+• Here’s today’s mini crossword puzzle, and a clue: Flexible blackjack cards ( 4 letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
+• The editor of our technology coverage is Pui-Wing Tam, who was named a deputy business editor last month.Still, there are some very real consequences here.
+Historic sites like the African Burial Ground and Grant’s Tomb are closed. Gateway National Recreation Area, a national park with locations in Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey, is open, but with no visitor services. And if you’re itching for a piece of Hamilton history, try the “Hamilton” lottery, because his home in Upper Manhattan is closed.
+Gerald Quaye, an air traffic controller at Kennedy Airport, is not getting paid but still reports to work. If the shutdown extends past this week, Mr. Quaye said he is unsure how he will pay his mortgage. “I’ve never been late and I’ve never defaulted,” he said on Friday, “and hopefully, it doesn’t get to that point.”
+Other closed historical sites: Federal Hall, Saint Paul’s Church, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home, Franklin Roosevelt house, the Vanderbilt Mansion and Women’s Rights National Historical Park, among others.
+Closed museums: National Museum of the American Indian Heye Center and Cooper Hewitt.
+Open, but without visitor services: Appalachian Trail, Sagamore Hill, and the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River. Enjoy those restrooms.
+Open, because of state funding: Ellis Island (where Governor Cuomo had his inauguration) and the Statue of Liberty.Trump’s Plan to Withdraw Troops From Syria The president’s abrupt order may have raised important questions about the future of American wars, but it stymied others.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Alexandra Leigh Young, Paige Cowett and Clare Toeniskoetter, and edited by Lisa TobinThe first time I met Jerry Brown, he was judging the Dutch oven cook-off contest at the Colusa Western Days festival. Sixteen teams had set up outdoor ovens on the fairgrounds to compete for the best main dish, side, bread and dessert, cooked over open fires in cast iron pots. The governor of California and his wife, Anne, judged as a team, as they do almost everything.
+He had been drawn to the fair in the spring of 2015 not for the food but the community: He was spending weekends in rural Colusa County, an hour northwest of Sacramento, on an isolated ranch that had been in his family since 1878.
+Despite his aversion to selfies, the governor mingled comfortably at the cook-off, introducing children to his famous corgi, Sutter, and greeting the town’s retired doctor, who had started his practice in 1949 with a loan from Mr. Brown’s great-uncle. Then the governor headed to his nearby spread, still known as the Mountain House. The governor and Anne stayed in a small cabin, without water or electricity, off the grid.
+I had come to Colusa to see the ancestral Brown homestead and to fathom its appeal for a man who could live anywhere and chose to “reinhabitate” an area where rattlesnakes outnumbered people. In the course of a long conversation that afternoon, I began to appreciate why the land held such sway, and to think about how its history and that of the family offered a way to tell the history of California. Over time, I came to see Jerry Brown’s decision to build a future rooted in his past as key to understanding the man who ends his remarkable political career today, having served as California’s youngest governor in modern times, its oldest and its longest-tenured.Soldiers arrived Sunday afternoon at the Daily Trust office in Maiduguri, where Boko Haram was founded, and rounded up two journalists working there, Uthman Abubakar, a regional editor, and Ibrahim Sawab, a reporter who has worked in the past for The New York Times. The men were detained in a military barracks.
+Mr. Sawab was released several hours later, but Mr. Abubakar remained in custody on Monday, colleagues said.
+Later Sunday afternoon, armed soldiers in five vehicles stormed the paper’s main office in the capital, Abuja, and ordered journalists working inside to evacuate. They occupied the building for four hours, according to Mannir Dan-Ali, the paper’s editor in chief, ransacking the newsroom and carting away dozens of computers. Soldiers also entered the newspaper’s offices in Lagos and Kaduna.
+Their actions “strangulated the production of the Monday edition of the paper,” Mr. Dan-Ali said.
+President Muhammadu Buhari, who is running for re-election next month, made big gains against Boko Haram when he first took office in 2015, but some of that success has slipped away in recent months, as the group has carried out a series of successful attacks against the military. Boko Haram fighters have killed dozens of soldiers, even posting online a gruesome video of one attack, and rumors have circulated that they once again control some territory in the country’s northeast.
+Soldiers have complained about long tours of duty that have left them with no days off for months, worn-out equipment and low rations, according to local news reports. The military has disputed all such claims.Good Monday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+As U.S. negotiates with China, some firms look to Mexico
+In Michigan, which is likely to be a battleground state in 2020, EBW Electronics continued to produce lights for the auto industry even as nearby factories succumbed to competition and moved to Mexico.
+President Trump’s tariffs may change that, executives told the NYT’s Peter S. Goodman. Pat LeBlanc, EBW’s chairman, who voted for Mr. Trump, said the trade war with China could halve the company’s profit for the year. “It’s killing us,” he said. “I just feel so betrayed.”
+Chinese and American trade negotiators are meeting today in Beijing, hoping to extend a delicate truce. Tariffs as high as 25 percent on Chinese imports have left American companies such as EBW trying to pass higher costs of foreign components to their customers, struggling to keep up with competitors abroad and considering whether to move their plants and jobs outside the country.
+• Mr. Trump says the U.S. has the stronger negotiating position: China, he said, will capitulate because it’s “not doing very well now.”Before reading the article:
+Did you watch the Golden Globe Awards on Jan. 6? Have a look at the winners and the nominees. Did your favorites win? Were any of your favorite movies, television shows, actors or actresses overlooked? Did you check out the red carpet looks?
+Now, read the article, “Golden Globes 2019: ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Wins Best Drama,” and answer the following questions:
+1. Who won the top acting awards of the evening? What movies and television shows won?
+2. Why are the Golden Globes “mostly seen as a moneymaking moment,” according to the article?
+3. How many people cast votes for the Golden Globes? How does this compare with the Oscars?
+4. What visual references were there to the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements at the event?
+5. Lady Gaga, who is pictured above, was predicted to win which acting award? Though she did not take home that award, she won an award for music. What was it? With whom does she share the award?Q. Do animals play games? If so, why?
+A. Many immature mammals practice hunting and fighting skills in preparation for the real thing. Anyone who has raised a litter of kittens has observed their almost continuous cycles of pursuit and evasion, capture and attempted evisceration, and sometimes even a mock version of the killing bite. Fortunately, the rules of the game seem to stop a killer kitten short of committing real bodily harm to a littermate.
+To the human observer, it looks like fun, but there is an underlying evolutionary utility to such romps. At least one researcher has suggested that such games, if games they are, are not just physical practice, but a way of preparing animals for mental and emotional reaction to unexpected perils.
+The avian world also includes examples of what appears to be play. Absent the more detailed brain research done in mammals, this is a hard hypothesis to test conclusively. But some scientists believe that birds do things for pure pleasure, not just to practice useful skills, and that birds have the necessary brain receptors for reward and pleasure, as do mammals.
+As for other animals, there is at least anecdotal evidence that some turtles and octopuses engage in play-like activities.3. He pressured Justice Department officials to go easy on an investigation into the president himself and his campaign.
+4. He attempted to undermine the credibility of multiple checks and balances on the executive branch, including the justice system, the press, the electoral system and the Central Intelligence Agency.
+No other president, Republican or Democrat, has ever behaved as Donald Trump has. I think Americans, regardless of party, should come to see that he is unfit for the office and is damaging the country. In the Sunday Review yesterday, I made the much longer version of this case. I also argued that Democrats would be doing him a favor by impeaching him soon. The best way to push for his removal from office is not to impeach him, at least not yet. Richard Nixon, as you may recall, was never impeached but resigned under pressure after he lost the support of fellow Republicans.
+If you’ve already read the article, you may be interested in the reader comments that other Times readers suggested as the most interesting (which you can see by clicking on the “Readers’ Picks” tab). I’m grateful to my editors for encouraging me to write the piece and for giving it as much space as they did.
+I know one skeptical question that many readers ask is a version of: So what? That is, even if Trump deserves to be removed from office, people have come to believe congressional Republicans will never abandon him. I don’t think that’s quite right, and my Monday column explains why. The column starts with an analysis of the midterm elections. As the final results have come in, it’s clear they were even worse for Republicans than first understood.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+Today’s the big day for Gavin Newsom. At about noon, he’s set to be sworn in as the 40th governor of California, following Jerry Brown’s historic tenure.
+The ceremony will cap a series of inauguration festivities the likes of which haven’t been seen for a couple of decades, The Sacramento Bee reported. (As if you needed another point of contrast between the two, Mr. Brown’s 2011 inauguration featured a choir from one of the charter schools in Oakland that he started, while Mr. Newsom’s pre-inauguration benefit concert Sunday night featured Pitbull.)
+Of course, that’s all secondary to the bigger question: How will Mr. Newsom run the state? Adam Nagourney, our Los Angeles bureau chief, is back today with context.
+What should we be listening for in Mr. Newsom’s speech?
+Adam Nagourney: The governor-elect was relatively vague during the campaign, but he said a few things: He promised a major investment in early childhood education, and expanding parental leave. We can count on those being in the speech.Thus does the promise of red-carpet change that hovered over the Golden Globes only a year ago — when women took back their wardrobes for the night — get squandered.
+The co-host Sandra Oh, in an emotional moment during the opening set of the awards show on Sunday, said she could see “change” by looking around the ballroom. But during the dress parade that is the celebrity entrances, it was mostly back to business on the fashion front. And I mean that literally.
+The red carpet is a marketing machine, pairing stars and brands to optimum mutually beneficial effect. Last year, the collective decision by women to wear black in honor of the Time’s Up movement, which aims to address systemic inequality and injustice in the workplace, changed the equation if not the players. It had power because it felt personal, a quality that has been largely leeched from the contemporary red carpet, where what to wear — that most close-to-the-body decision — has generally been transformed into a business arrangement. It raised the stakes beyond advertising to advocacy, suggesting the moment could be used for more than just moneymaking. Yet 12 months later, it’s still a promise, not a reality.The Moon will be on 15th Street, and the Earth will be on 16th Street, starting on Jan. 24, in a new public installation created by the artist Oliver Jeffers in partnership with the High Line.
+The two large globes will be displayed on the Chelsea Market Passage of the High Line, separated by roughly the length of a city block, through Feb. 7. The Moon will be two feet in diameter and Earth will be about eight feet; both will be mounted at a height of 10 feet. (They are made from Hard-coated foam, steel and acrylic.) The installation, called “The Moon, the Earth and Us,” will explore the vastness of the universe, the fragility of artificial borders, and the relationship between the two celestial bodies.
+“We are excited to bring the creative world of Oliver Jeffers to New York City,” Robert Hammond, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the High Line, said in an email. “His books and illustrations are beautiful and connect with a broad range of audiences — just like the High Line. And there is no better place in the city than the High Line to view the sky. With this installation Jeffers is providing our visitors and neighbors with a unique chance to see a scaled model of the Moon and the Earth up close.”
+Mr. Jeffers is an artist, illustrator and author, and the cosmos has featured prominently in his work. He also has a show of oil paintings opening Jan. 10 at Bryce Wolkowitz gallery that deals more abstractly with the connections between Earth and the universe.WASHINGTON — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who underwent cancer surgery last month, was missing from the bench on Monday for the Supreme Court’s first arguments since the court returned from its four-week holiday break.
+Justice Ginsburg has suffered a number of health setbacks over the years but has never before missed an argument in her 25 years on the court.
+Kathleen Arberg, a court spokeswoman, said Justice Ginsburg was working from home.
+Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced his colleague’s absence at the start of Monday’s session, saying that “Justice Ginsburg is unable to be present today.” He added that she would take part in the court’s consideration of the day’s two cases based on the briefs submitted by the parties and transcripts of the arguments.
+Surgeons removed two nodules from Justice Ginsburg’s left lung on Dec. 21. According to the justice’s thoracic surgeon, Dr. Valerie W. Rusch, the nodules removed during surgery were found to be malignant, Ms. Arberg said at the time.Writing with the assurance and wry omniscience of an easygoing deity, Makumbi watches her protagonists live out invariably provisional answers. They are pagans and Christians, vagabonds and military generals, newspaper columnists and victims of H.I.V. Some are looking for families, like the orphan girl vying for her neighbors’ charity in a crowded Kampala boardinghouse. Others are in flight from relatives, like the elderly Christian missionary nostalgic for British rule. Named Kanani (or “Canaan”), he believes that faith will save him from the family curse and spends his days proselytizing at captive commuters: “The church was like a bus and brethren were passengers on their way to heaven rather than a family.”
+None quite manage to escape or fulfill their appointed roles; when “Kintu”’s carnival of clans, royal courts, Kampala apartments and church groups concludes, it is hardly clearer what form “family” might take, or how individuals should reconcile themselves to kinship. There is, nevertheless, a beauty to how Makumbi’s characters improvise alternatives to what they do not have or cannot be. In one characteristically tender and comic moment, a young man without a father looks for a surrogate to negotiate with a school’s headmaster over a scholarship. His roommate obliges, and finds himself so caught up in the charade that he sheds prideful tears at his “son”’s test results. Dressed for the meeting in a pinstripe suit that makes him resemble “a broke black gangster from an American film,” he boasts and blusters with a parent’s loving obstinacy. It may be a curse that families never “work,” but it is surely a blessing that they can always be reinvented.
+If Makumbi’s Kintus are cursed like Cain, the heroes of Wayétu Moore’s SHE WOULD BE KING (Graywolf Press, $26) are cursed like Storm, Wolverine and Professor X. The Liberian-American writer’s debut novel is a Marvelesque national epic about Liberia’s independence centered on three supernaturally gifted misfits. The leader is Gbessa, an immortal girl expelled as a witch by her indigenous Vai people, who finds shelter among the black American settlers of Monrovia. (The American Colonization Society, an antebellum organization dedicated to resettling African-Americans in West Africa, established Liberia in 1821. The country declared independence in 1847.)
+Gbessa joins forces with two other renegades: a magically invincible plantation runaway from Virginia and a Jamaican maroon with the ability to disappear. These newcomers patrol the coast like abolitionist avengers, superpowering their way through every coffle and barracoon they encounter. Meanwhile, in the ballrooms of Monrovia, Gbessa uneasily assimilates into the Americo-Liberian settler elite. The trio’s powers — immortality, for Africa’s antiquity; invisibility, for maroon cunning; invincibility for the endurance of enslaved African-Americans — allegorize the diasporic strands united by the country’s history: Who needs Wakanda when Liberia already has it all?
+The varied and frenetic action makes for a novel that, while stimulating, is often confusing and overstuffed. Some sections read like folk tales or adventure novels, while those set in Virginia serve up reheated plantation melodrama. “She Would Be King” shows greater originality when Moore dissects Monrovia’s social world. Patronized by Americo-Liberian ladies who see themselves less as fellow Africans than as a civilizing vanguard, Gbessa negotiates a double exclusion that only intensifies once she marries the settlers’ military chief. A conflict between the new arrivals and her estranged kin forces her into the role of mediator, brokering a hybrid identity for Africa’s first republic.
+Few novelists have explored the singular relationship between Liberia’s black settlers, for whom “returning” to Africa was a form of deliverance from American white supremacy, and the indigenous people who fell under their dominion. Moore’s sophisticated treatment of this encounter showcases her novelistic talents, though the tension somewhat dissipates when the “real” enemies arrive: The complex dance of nation-building gives way to a Garveyite battle royale pitting the reconciled settlers and natives against French slavers who attack Monrovia.Slide 1 of 22,
+Immediately after the Golden Globes, winners and losers fanned out across the Beverly Hilton Hotel for various after-parties. Rachel Brosnahan, who won the best actress award for “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” made her way to the party hosted by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which bestows the awards.Good morning. All I want to do this week is follow Tejal Rao’s new recipe for mall-style barbecue chicken pizza (above), a dish she wrote about movingly in The Times the other day.
+“Later, my brother and I would learn that we weren’t supposed to like mall food,” Tejal wrote in her most recent “Eat” column. “Certainly not mall pizza. But when we still had identification cards with the word ‘alien’ on them, we found that mall pizza helped us feel at home, assured us there was space for us here.”
+And, of course, the version of the dish Tejal makes now doesn’t just recreate the flavors of those California Pizza Kitchen slices she ate as a kid. It greatly improves on them. So read her words and get to it! Make the dough this evening, and you’ll be eating fine by Tuesday night.
+For dinner today, though: chicken piccata! Or maybe Provençal greens soup. I wouldn’t say no to twice-baked potatoes, either, the dough for the pizza proofing in the fridge and everyone crowded around the screen watching Clemson play Alabama for the college football national championship. (Roll Tide!)Clever cookbooks with a limited number of ingredients per recipe are not new, but this one from the chef Jamie Oliver is notable for its ease and verve. Before he gets to the cooking he names his five “pantry heroes”: red wine vinegar, sea salt, black pepper and two olive oils, everyday and finer for finishing, staples that are not part of the ingredient tally. The book starts with salads, mostly as the center of the plate, and then goes on to simple pastas like one with canned tuna, capers and tiny tomatoes. There are sections on eggs, chicken, fish, various meats (beef dishes are mostly steaks) and desserts. To keep the ingredient count to five, Mr. Oliver bakes with self-rising flour and premade puff pastry and relies on prepared Asian condiments and sauces. With coconut milk and curry paste, you’re on your way to soup. Along with plenty of inspiring shortcuts, there’s a straightforward recipe for potato gnocchi with asparagus, and a six-hour lamb shoulder baked with chickpeas from scratch, not quick at all.
+“5 Ingredients: Quick & Easy Food” by Jamie Oliver (Flatiron Books, $35).
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+From the end of the 19th century until the 1950s, Detroit was known as “the city of trees,” with more per capita than any industrialized city in the world. But by 1980, more than half a million trees had died. Of the 20,000 trees marked dead or hazardous in 2014, when Dr. Carmichael’s study began, the city had removed only 2,000 or so.
+Ms. Westbrook noted that the city hasn’t addressed several dead trees on her block. She was worried that a dead giant next door would damage her roof, leaving her to pay for repairs. Now retired, Ms. Westbrook worked for Detroit’s water department, where she saw enough tree roots growing into pipes that she didn’t want to plant a tree of her own until she replaced her old pipes with root-resistant PVC ones.
+Other cities have encountered similar resistance to their tree-planting efforts. “Some poor decisions were made around trees that were planted 50 years ago,” said Kathryn Ott Lovell, Philadelphia’s parks and recreation commissioner. The city’s TreePhilly program, which helps residents plant and care for trees, offers up to a dozen types of trees as options and explains which trees are safe to plant around pipes, sidewalks and wires.
+Dr. Carmichael has offered recommendations based on her research. Residents should be involved in at least choosing the type of tree they receive. Agencies should shift their metrics of success to include not just the number of trees planted, but also how engaged residents are in the process. Based on those suggestions, The Greening of Detroit, the nonprofit group that came to Ms. Westbrook’s neighborhood, expanded its youth employment program, which trains and gives stipends to local high school students to maintain and teach residents about trees.
+Although Ms. Westbrook turned down a tree, her block is fairly lush. Neighbors collectively maintain bushes and flower beds on the block’s corners, and they’ve taken up the task of watering trees. The trees planted in 2014 by the Greening of Detroit “are well-rooted and they are growing,” said Mellow Jean Dixon, Ms. Westbrook’s neighbor, who has one next to her house.Alonso Guzman Arellano says his Taiwanese cooking is very traditional. Still this chef, who left the Mexican state of Michoacán for New York when he was 15 (and most recently was cooking at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, after a stint at Vitae in Manhattan), puts a burrito spin on his parchment-thin scallion pancakes, rolling them around a filling of beef, jalapeños, onions and greens. The dish for which Mr. Arellano, 24, is best known at his compact market stall is braised beef noodle soup, a Taiwanese specialty. It comes in a deep bowl filled with slices of beef, bok choy, pickled cabbage and his hand-pulled noodles, an art that he has managed to perfect. The broth, which he says simmers for six hours, delivers depth and spice. He speaks Mandarin and has visited Taiwan. Dumplings and other soups with noodles are also on the menu.
+Noodle Culture, Gansevoort Market, 353 West 14th Street, 347-989-7325, noodleculture.business.site.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Silan is a Middle Eastern syrup made from steamed, pressed dates. I now keep a container of it in my refrigerator for cocktails. It’s especially suited to whiskey drinks, which benefit from a shot of the dark, musky sweetness. Use it in marinades and sauces for basting roasted meats, over granola and yogurt in the morning and in place of honey in baking. Soom’s new silan is kosher.
+Soom Silan, 12.3 ounces, $9.49, soomfoods.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Tea, especially mint, is as essential as couscous to the Moroccan table. Mina brand from Casablanca Foods, a reliable source for harissa condiments and sauces for cooking, has just introduced a line of teas. Nana is a type of Moroccan mint with toasty overtones; Atay, a traditional blend of mint with Chinese green tea that’s usually served sweetened; and Louiza, or lemon verbena. The company sells the teas in sachets, and also sells some loose, in canisters. All are organic.
+Mina Teas, $8 for 15 sachets, casablancafoods.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Computer technology and precision engineering are behind a new whiskey glass from Norlan, a company started by Brian Fichtner and Shane Bahng, who were at the SoHo design store, Moss , and an Icelandic designer, Sruli Recht. Called the Rauk Heavy Tumbler (it weighs about a pound and holds 8.5-ounces), the glass is named after an old Scottish word for rock, and it has several interesting features to enhance the drink. The crystal glass, made in the Czech Republic, is molded with a chevron pattern inside at the bottom to augment muddling. And though its base appears flat, only four points of it actually touch a surface, making it seem lighter than it is.
+Norlan Rauk Heavy Tumbler, $50, norlanglass.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Several of California’s most notable cheeses, including Vella Dry Jack and Cypress Grove Lamb Chopper will be served at the 92nd Street Y alongside powerful cabernet sauvignons and zinfandels from Napa and Sonoma Counties. The occasion is a talk by Martin Johnson, a cheese expert, and Michael Whidden, a wine distributor. They’ll explain the state’s big wines and big cheeses.
+California Dreamin,’ $45, 7 p.m., Jan. 31, 92nd Street Y, 1352 Lexington Avenue (92nd Street), 212-415-5500, 92Y.org.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.“It is a very long and expensive road here,” he said, adding that “the next several months will be critical.”
+Hitachi, without providing exact figures, wants government financing from Britain and Japan to help attract outside investors like pension funds that seek long-term income streams. Investments by the governments would also help lower Horizon’s risk rating.
+The Wylfa Newydd plant, with two giant reactors, would be just the second nuclear plant to be built in the United Kingdom since the 1990s. Once a world leader, Britain’s nuclear industry atrophied after serious accidents in Ukraine and the United States spurred broad resistance to nuclear power.
+Britain has legally committed to cutting carbon emissions. As a result, the government is reassessing its energy options amid a decline in natural gas from the North Sea oil fields and a decision to phase out the use of coal.
+Proponents of wind and solar energy say Britain should be putting its money there, but those sources have not been able to match the steady supply of power nuclear energy produces. So nuclear plants are back in vogue. One is being built at Hinkley Point in southwest England, and at least four more are planned.
+“It’s hard to conceive that nuclear does not have an important role to play,” said Steve Holliday, a former chief executive of National Grid, the British power system operator.
+Britain’s renewed interest in nuclear power stands out among Western countries, where such plants have become forbiddingly costly and complex. The challenges were evident in October when Toshiba scrapped plans to build a plant in northern England.There are tough ways to lose, and there are tougher ways to lose. And then there’s what the Bears lived through on Sunday in front of their hometown fans when Cody Parkey missed a 43-yard game winning field goal in the dying seconds of their wild card playoff game against the Eagles.
+Think you’ve suffered as a fan? Here are some reasons the Bears now have you beat.
+The kick hit the upright. And the crossbar.
+It was so nearly good. The kick was inches away from success, striking the left upright. But even then it had a chance, descending to smack the crossbar and falling ... on the wrong side of it. Eagles 16, Bears 15.
+A slight adjustment by Parkey and it might have been good. Had Treyvon Hester of the Eagles not got a little piece of the ball, the trajectory would have been different, and it might have been good. Had the Eagles not called time out before the Bears’ first snap, had Parkey not gone ahead and kicked that one (and made it) ... any little thing could be the difference when the difference is inches.The Park Avenue Armory must really want you to know who Benjamin Appl is.
+Otherwise it wouldn’t have given such significant real estate — three concerts, three Schubert masterworks — to Mr. Appl, a 36-year-old baritone who, with these performances, is making his American recital debut.
+His concerts at the Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room, which began with Schubert’s “Die Schöne Müllerin” on Sunday and continue with the composer’s “Schwanengesang” on Tuesday and “Winterreise” on Thursday, remind me of the pianist Igor Levit’s debut there in 2014. Mr. Levit made an entrance by daring to program Beethoven’s final sonatas; Mr. Appl has chosen some of the most well known, and revealing, works in the art-song repertory.
+And like Mr. Levit, who pulled off his American entree with confidence and preternatural maturity, Mr. Appl presented a masterly account of “Die Schöne Müllerin.” He had the exacting attention to text of an actor, the charisma of a seasoned storyteller and an agile voice that, while not fully formed, shows promise not only for this week’s remaining concerts, but also for what I hope to be more appearances here in the years ahead.ROME — Pope Francis defended “modern multilateral diplomacy” and international institutions against “the resurgence of nationalistic tendencies” in an address at the Vatican on Monday.
+Francis did not cite specific countries in his speech, delivered to diplomats at the Holy See, but he appeared to be lamenting the mix of jingoism and isolationism that has emerged in the United States and in European nations where populist governments have risen to power.
+Noting that the League of Nations, established after World War I, had failed to head off another war largely because countries were not willing to work together, Francis raised the specter of fresh violence.
+“The same attitudes are presently threatening the stability of the major international organizations,” he said, urging Europeans in particular to remain united in the face of “temptation to erect new curtains.”MANILA — For some inmates of the Manila City Jail, making the bed means mopping up sludgy puddles, unfolding a square of cardboard on the tile floor and lying down to sleep in a small, windowless bathroom, wedged in among six men and a toilet.
+On one recent night at the jail, in Dorm 5, the air was thick and putrid with the sweat of 518 men crowded into a space meant for 170.
+The inmates were cupped into each other, limbs draped over a neighbor’s waist or knee, feet tucked against someone else’s head, too tightly packed to toss and turn in the sweltering heat.
+Since President Rodrigo Duterte’s violent antidrug campaign began in 2016, Philippine jails have become increasingly more packed, propelling the overall prison system to the top of the World Prison Brief’s list of the most overcrowded incarceration systems in the world.Juan Cifuentes and his family never knew when the call would come.
+For nine years, he, a sister and their parents waited in Pereira, Colombia, their hometown, outside Medellin. When he was 17, just after he finished high school, the approval for their visas came through. They were going to join his grandmother in New York City.
+“It was challenging, but it was very, very exciting,” Mr. Cifuentes, 25, said of arriving in the United States in 2010. “Being an immigrant, you encounter things you never expect and feel things you don’t know about. It’s all part of the process.”I don’t think so. You couldn’t help but be surprised — beyond surprised — at the response. It was a pleasurable sensation that people were talking about it, that it made an impression on people. It made a lot of people angry. Sometimes I couldn’t believe it was that important to people.
+With the 20th anniversary coming, are you ready for another round of “Is Tony dead or not?”
+I’ve got to say I’m just bored with it. I also feel like, Jesus, there were 86 episodes and you’re fixated on that? Can’t we talk about something else?
+You did an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2015 that extensively broke down the final sequence. Was that an attempt to just put the whole thing to bed?
+Might have been. I really don’t recall my reasons. I was trying to provide a context.
+Is it frustrating that even after that, many people don’t seem to want to take you at your word?
+It’s frustrating. It makes me use bad words. But it’s not surprising, you know? And I don’t have any statistics to prove it, but I think it’s become more accepted as time has gone on.
+I think the point isn’t whether or not Tony was killed. It’s the uncertainty that’s the point, and the way the scene’s crazy tension makes us aware of the passage of time and how choices shape the brief bit of life we get. Most people can’t control when or how they die, but the choices are ours. Is that totally off base?A Michigan Uber driver accused of killing six people and wounding two others in a 2016 shooting spree pleaded guilty to murder on Monday just before his trial was set to begin.
+The driver, Jason B. Dalton, terrorized the Kalamazoo area on Feb. 20, 2016, when he drove wildly through the city and its suburbs, shooting people outside a car dealership, a Cracker Barrel restaurant and a townhouse complex. Over a period of hours, he gave Uber customers rides between the seemingly random shootings. The gunfire rattled Western Michigan and raised questions about Uber’s screening of its drivers at a time when the ride-hailing service was expanding into smaller cities.
+“It helps with community healing, some closure,” said Mayor Bobby Hopewell of Kalamazoo. “It’s a heinous incident.”
+Mr. Dalton, who was arrested the night of the shootings, initially pleaded not guilty and appeared to be headed to trial until his last-minute plea. Last year, Mr. Dalton won a case in the Michigan Court of Appeals that barred prosecutors from using incriminating statements made to police officers. Mr. Dalton had spoken to officers shortly after the shootings.In the era of music downloads, the week after Christmas used to bring a slight sales bump, as people used iTunes gift cards to buy albums and songs. But now, once those holiday playlists stop streaming, it becomes just another slow week on the charts.
+The rapper 21 Savage has the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s album chart for a second time with “I Am > I Was,” with the equivalent of about 65,000 sales in the United States, according to Nielsen. That includes 84 million streams and a little more than 3,000 copies sold as a full album. Overall, the album lost 51 percent of its momentum from its opening week.
+With no major new releases last week, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie holds at No. 2 with “Hoodie SZN,” while most of the rest of the Top 10 is also filled with recent rap hits: Meek Mill’s “Championships” is No. 3, Post Malone’s “Beerbongs & Bentleys” is No. 4, and the “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” soundtrack — featuring Post Malone, Lil Wayne, Juice WRLD and others — is No. 5.
+Michael Bublé’s “Christmas,” which had reached as high as No. 3 this season, fell to No. 148 with a 91 percent decline in streams, while Mariah Carey’s “Merry Christmas” fell 173 spots to No. 181.We’re all familiar with the concept of a mutual fund, right? A mutual fund is a box you put money into, and out the other side comes more money. Hooray!
+You know what’s even more exciting than a mutual fund? An adventure.
+An adventure is a box you put human beings into, and out the other side comes a more valuable human being. I don’t have to defend why that is a good investment, do I?
+Just think about the world we inhabit. You set the temperature in your house at 70 degrees, you go to the office and it’s 70 degrees there, too, and then you hop into a car to go home and it’s still 70 degrees.
+In a world where it often feels like everything is static, there is inherent value in reminding yourself that you can change. If it’s O.K. with you, I’d like to just call that an adventure.Sometimes a whale just wants to change its tune.
+That’s one of the things researchers have learned recently by eavesdropping on whales in several parts of the world and listening for changes in their pattern and pitch . Together, the new studies suggest that whales are not just whistling in the water, but constantly evolving a form of communication that we are only beginning to understand.
+Most whales and dolphins vocalize, but dolphins and toothed whales mostly make clicking and whistling sounds. Humpbacks, and possibly bowheads, sing complex songs with repeated patterns, said Michael Noad, an associate professor in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia.
+Birds may broadcast their social hierarchy among song-sharing populations by allowing the dominant bird to pick the playlist and patterns. But how and why whales pass song fragments across hundreds of miles, and to thousands of animals, is far more mysterious.
+The biggest question is why whales sing at all.
+“The thing that always gets me out of bed in the morning is the function of the song,” Dr. Noad said. “I find humpback song fascinating from the point of view of how it’s evolved.”But Mr. Pence said the White House was bargaining in good faith. The administration has now provided Democrats details they were seeking about how any border security money would be spent, and officials have incorporated at least one Democratic idea, to allow migrant children seeking asylum to apply in their home countries rather than make a treacherous journey to the United States border.
+“The question I have is: When are the Democrats going to start negotiating?” Mr. Pence said.
+The administration’s credibility continues to suffer, as Democrats call out Mr. Trump for falsehoods about the crisis, such as his assertion that former presidents had told him privately that they should have built the wall. On Monday, former President Jimmy Carter joined the list of presidents who said they had never discussed a border wall with Mr. Trump.
+With talks to end the shutdown at a standstill, Mr. Pence said the president had directed the Office of Management and Budget to take steps to “mitigate” its effects, including an order to the Internal Revenue Service to issue tax refunds. Under previous shutdown plans — and interpretations of federal law — the I.R.S. was prohibited from dispensing tax refunds when Congress had not approved money to fund the Treasury Department, as is the case now.
+On Capitol Hill, Democrats tried to use leverage of their own to force Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, to come to the table and pressure Mr. Trump. On Monday, Democrats said they would vote against advancing a package of bipartisan Middle East policy bills slated for consideration this week unless Republicans allowed a vote on bills to reopen shuttered federal departments already passed by the House — a decision that could scuttle its prospects if Democrats stick together.
+Senate Democrats did not indicate whether they are ready to block other bills, but their position raised the prospect that a significant portion of the chamber’s work could halt until the Senate gets to vote to reopen the parts of the government now closed.
+The House, under Ms. Pelosi, passed a package of bills on Thursday, the day Democrats took control of the chamber, to reopen the one-quarter of the government without funding Mr. Trump’s wall. But Mr. McConnell has refused to consider them, insisting that he will not bring up any legislation that does not have Mr. Trump’s explicit support.Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee granted clemency on Monday to Cyntoia Brown, commuting her life sentence for killing a man who had picked her up for sex when she was a teenage trafficking victim.
+Ms. Brown, 30, will be released to supervised parole on Aug. 7, said Mr. Haslam, who will leave office later this month. She will have served 15 years in prison.
+[Read the Times’s review of the Cyntoia Brown Netflix documentary, “Murder to Mercy.”]
+“Cyntoia Brown committed, by her own admission, a horrific crime at the age of 16,” Mr. Haslam, a Republican, said. “Yet, imposing a life sentence on a juvenile that would require her to serve at least 51 years before even being eligible for parole consideration is too harsh, especially in light of the extraordinary steps Ms. Brown has taken to rebuild her life.”
+“Transformation should be accompanied by hope,” he said.
+Ms. Brown’s story attracted widespread attention and she garnered support from celebrities, including Rihanna and Kim Kardashian West. Lawmakers and rights activists highlighted the years of abuse and forced prostitution that she endured in her youth and lobbied the governor to grant her clemency before his term was up.WASHINGTON — It was the perfect Philip Greene anecdote, equal parts military and mixology.
+“John Philip Sousa was the director of the Marine Band,” Mr. Greene began, nursing a rye manhattan in a far corner of the Round Robin Bar, a historic lounge just a stone’s throw from the White House. “His successor was a fellow named Fanciulli. Fanciulli was leading a Memorial Day parade right outside here” in 1897.
+When a superior officer ordered Francesco Fanciulli to lead the band in a particular piece, he refused. Mr. Fanciulli was arrested and court-martialed for disobeying an officer. Still, the band leader’s name lives on in liquid form. “Fanciulli has a cocktail named after him,” Mr. Greene said. “It’s basically a manhattan with a little Fernet Branca.”
+Mr. Greene understood his story coming and going. By day, he is the trademark and internet counsel for the United States Marine Corps, with an office in the Pentagon, and he is as suit-and-tie proper as that job title would indicate. In his spare time, he is a drinks historian more prone to wearing tuxedos and seersucker. His latest book, “A Drinkable Feast: A Cocktail Companion to 1920s Paris,” was published in October.
+The split focus of his life prompts some interesting reactions. “When I give a presentation to the public and I’m announced as one of the founders of the Museum of the American Cocktail, you hear a few suppressed giggles,” he said. “But then they say, ‘He’s also the trademark counsel for the Marine Corps,’ and they say, ‘Oh.’”What spell “The Age of Miracles” did manage to cast was predicated on two aspects. For one, as Irving Kristol put it, the “premonition of apocalypse springs eternal in the human breast.” Tell me a story in which the world is ending and CNN is covering it, and I will sit and listen for a while.
+Image Karen Thompson Walker Credit... Dan Hawk Photography LLC
+For another, Walker’s first novel tapped neatly into our fears about the melting of the permafrost. Global warming has a role to play in “The Dreamers,” too. There is drought in California, and the book’s fictional college sits by a lake that’s evaporating. Sunken boats and other ancient items emerge from the receding waters.
+One of the sleepers, a doomsday prepper with two young daughters, wakes from his long sleep and relates this premonition: “The oceans moved a hundred miles inland. Los Angeles was swallowed.” By fire, by water: Like Kenny in “South Park,” L.A. always takes it in the end.
+Walker needs to keep the plots of her novels spinning, like plates on sticks. When the action slows, you realize what a limited and sentimental novelist she too often is.
+“The Dreamers” introduces us to many characters, nearly all of them exceedingly nice. There’s Ben and Annie, young academics new to town, and their baby. There’s Catherine, a specialist in psychiatric disorders.
+There’s Mei, a college freshman, who is lonely until the contagion gives her life purpose: along with another student, she devotes herself to assisting others. There are Libby and Sara, the pre-teenage daughters of the doomsday prepper. To keep themselves sane, these girls take in animals that wander the streets, some still wearing leashes, while their owners slumber.
+None of these characters says or does an interesting thing. Anarchic instincts and impure thoughts are kept to the barest minimum. Minds race in neutral. Reading this book’s bland dialogue is like watching players on center court use dead tennis balls.Everyone who works at Ben & Jerry’s headquarters in Burlington, Vt., is entitled to three free pints of ice cream for each day of work. At the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, employees are treated daily to an elaborate buffet with appropriately white-shoe fare like prime rib, crab cakes and housemade beignets.
+And at the offices of the Perkins Eastman architecture firm, with locations on three continents, staff members can enjoy all manner of free snacks — just as long as they are orange, the color of the company’s logo. In New York, that means a lot of Cheetos, Goldfish and Nacho Cheese Doritos .
+Free food has been a formidable presence in the American workplace since the 1990s, when Bloomberg and tech start-ups like Google began to put out snacks in hopes of making employees happier or healthier, more productive and less likely to stray far from the task at hand.
+But today, the practice is almost obligatory, as businesses go to extraordinary lengths to provide food without charge, or at a sharp discount. The offerings have grown in size, scope and specificity — some tailored to a company’s mission, others unwittingly reflective of it and still others that seem oddly random.Grainy and circular, the sound in the dark could be that of a scratchy old record. But when the lights come up, you see that it is the tap dancer Caleb Teicher, caressing a sanded floor with his leather shoes: not a scratchy old record at all, but a young artist trying new things.
+In “More Forever,” which had its premiere in the Guggenheim Museum’s Works & Process series on Sunday, Mr. Teicher is joined by his company and at the piano by the composer Conrad Tao. Mr. Teicher and Mr. Tao are former teenage prodigies, now in their mid-20s, garnering much attention and acclaim as they mature in public. At its best, their “More Forever” is both youthful and sophisticated.
+This is a tap show without tap shoes. Mr. Teicher is reaching back before the invention of metal taps to an earlier tradition of thumping and scraping, but he applies it to his own ends. He starts quietly in a corner of the stage, and as other dancers pass through, trailing what looks like sand (it’s cornmeal) from their fists, they leave another soloist in another corner. This happens again and again, until the corners are full.
+Suddenly, a dancer center stage (the ebullient Macy Sullivan) takes the dance up tempo and onto the balls of her feet. The other dancers follow, locking into diagonals, lines and circles while the rhythms change. One by one, they depart, exiting with a funny little hop.WARSAW — It was supposed to be fun, but in the end, there was no escape.
+When a fire broke out in a squat, two-story concrete building in northwestern Poland, five 15-year-old girls died, trapped in a tiny windowless room no bigger than a closet, with no emergency exit and no key.
+They were locked in by design. The building, a private house in the city of Koszalin, had been converted into an “escape room,” a popular entertainment where groups have to follow clues and solve a series of puzzles in order to find their way out.
+But a preliminary investigation has revealed that the house failed to meet even the most basic safety precautions, officials say, raising questions about the safety of hundreds of similar sites throughout the country and thousands across the region. As of Monday, the authorities had ordered at least 26 escape rooms in Poland to shut down amid a nationwide safety review.
+In the building where the girls died on Friday, the windows had been covered with makeshift walls. There was no evacuation route. And there was apparently no system in place to deal with an emergency.A SABRA is a Jewish person who was born in Israel. The term is related to the Arabic word sabr, which means patience and perseverance.
+In Hebrew, the word SABRA also refers to the prickly fruit of a species of cactus. SABRAs compare themselves to the fruit, which “has a prickly exterior and a soft interior,” as a way of describing that perseverance.
+The term was first used in the 1930s, before the establishment of the state of Israel, to describe those who had immigrated as part of the Jewish diaspora.
+How It Might Be Clued
+SABRA has been an entry in the New York Times Crossword a total of 47 times, most recently in the Friday, Jan. 4, puzzle by Neil Padrick Wilson.To the Editor:
+Re “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Dancing Video Was Meant as a Smear, but It Backfired” (news article, nytimes.com, Jan. 4):
+For all the old, conservative, resentful white men and their enablers who have never had their power and influence seriously challenged (especially by a woman), the election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York — a young, well-educated, passionate woman of color — must be as frightening as it is profoundly disturbing.
+And as the video of her dancing reveals, it turns out that she’s also a playful, charismatic, imaginative woman with a beautiful smile who knows how to laugh and have fun.
+No wonder they feel threatened (and perhaps a bit envious).
+Deborah Lieberson
+Cambridge, Mass.SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for a four-day visit at the invitation of President Xi Jinping, Chinese and North Korean official media said.
+The visit offers Mr. Kim and Mr. Xi an opportunity to coordinate strategy face to face should Mr. Kim have a second summit meeting with President Trump.
+Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, confirmed Mr. Kim’s visit after a flurry of reports from South Korean media that a train appearing to be carrying a senior North Korean official had passed through Dandong, a Chinese city on the border with North Korea. The train entered China on Monday and pulled into Beijing on Tuesday morning, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported.
+North Korea’s state-run Central Television also confirmed the visit, reporting that Mr. Kim started the four-day visit to the country on Monday at Mr. Xi’s invitation. It said he was accompanied by his wife, Ri Sol-ju, and senior officials, including Kim Yong-chol, Mr. Kim’s right-hand man in diplomatic negotiations with the United States and South Korea.They sought her here, they sought her there. They sought Lady Gaga everywhere.
+At the half-dozen parties held at the Beverly Hilton hotel following the Golden Globes on Sunday night, it seemed as though every celebrity was looking for the singer and nominated actress, if only to touch the hem of her enormous periwinkle gown.
+“I wanted to meet Lady Gaga, I really did,” said Chuck Lorre, who won a Globe for producing Netflix’s “The Kominsky Method.” “I would have said thank you for all the great work she does.”
+But the artist was not present. After winning for best song (and losing in the best acting category) Lady Gaga somehow managed to vanish in a puff of Valentino taffeta. (Her rep noted that she stopped by one party, hosted by InStyle and Warner Bros.)
+Other stars were there to be seen but not heard. At Amazon’s after-party, held at the hotel’s Stardust Penthouse, Timothée Chalamet begged off interviews so he could dance with his mother, Nicole Flender.THE BREAKTHROUGH
+Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer
+By Charles Graeber
+Illustrated. 302 pp. Twelve. $28.
+If someone were to give cancer a human face, it would probably be that of an archvillain in a comic book series — a master of evil who can adapt at will to any attack, lurking lethally in the shadows, shifting its shape and location, resistant to almost any weaponry humans devise. At least, that has been the story until very recently; the new book by Charles Graeber, “The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer,” artfully traces the history of old and new developments that may have — finally — resulted in an actual cure for the most dreaded of all diseases. If you or a loved one has recently received a cancer diagnosis, or has been living with it as a chronic, if terrifying, condition, this book and the advances it describes offer far more than the usual glimmer of hope.
+Immunotherapy essentially involves training the body’s own immune system to fight the disease. It’s an idea that scientists have been exploring since the end of the 19th century, when a Harvard-trained surgeon named William Coley met a vivacious young woman with a painful lump on her hand, swollen to half the size of an olive. Coley found and cut out a mass, but it grew back. Eventually it was found to be a sarcoma, a form of cancer that was already racing through his young patient’s body. She died at 17.
+Disturbed by her death and determined to find another way to treat cancer, Coley began searching through his hospital’s medical records. He soon came upon the case of a sad sack German immigrant named Fred Stein. Stein had been hospitalized in 1885 with an egg-size mass bulging from his left cheek; every time he was operated on — five times in the next three years — it came back stronger until it was, in Graeber’s words, “as big as a man’s fist.” Like many patients who endured frequent hospitalizations, Stein also contracted streptococcus pyogenes, which caused high fever, chills, inflammation and, far too often, death. (Its old name, dating back to the Middle Ages, was St. Anthony’s Fire.)To the Editor:
+Re “Cry to Impeach Upsets Agenda for Democrats” (front page, Jan. 5):
+The profanity used by Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan regarding her pledge to impeach President Trump saddened me deeply. I, too, am outraged at the words and deeds of this president, and the culture of fear and intolerance he has ushered into our country, but Ms. Tlaib’s words were not the words from which positive change will grow.
+It saddened me because I had begun to hope that this new class of women and immigrants in Congress represented change for the better.
+“Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win,” said Ms. Tlaib’s son. The hard truth is that bullies sometimes do win, and bullying isn’t stopped by profane threats. Bullying is stopped by leaders who understand that it is their job to do the hard work needed to bring people together around the common good.
+I am sad, but I have not lost hope. As the days and weeks progress I am hoping that a new era will begin in which courageous leaders, on both sides of the aisle and from all ranks, will emerge to call on our best selves and usher in a better day for our country.But Democrats said they were left with the impression that the most senior officials in attendance were arguing that they were not empowered to make any agreements. Mr. Pence noted that no numbers for wall funding would be discussed because the meeting was not a principals’ meeting. And when he introduced the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as the person who knew Mr. Trump better than anyone, Mr. Kushner demurred, saying that distinction belonged to his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter, who was not in the meeting.
+A White House staffer in attendance described the weekend discussions as productive and cordial, but blamed Ms. Pelosi for being unwilling to look like she was negotiating with Mr. Trump to end the shutdown.
+While there was little common ground, some small advances were made, White House officials said. Republicans agreed that a concrete wall was a non-starter, and that any text of a bill would refer to steel and not concrete.
+And even though Mr. Pence said numbers would not be part of the weekend discussions, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, on Sunday provided Democrats with a written statement outlining why the administration needed $5.7 billion for a barrier along the southern border.
+In the meeting, Ms. Nielsen also gave the full briefing she had prepared to give Democratic leaders last week in the Situation Room, outlining what the White House has described as a crisis at the border. Several Democrats in the room, according to the White House official, said they agreed with her that a humanitarian border crisis did exist. But the Democrats who were interviewed said the two sides remained far apart about what constituted the correct response to a humanitarian crisis.
+Stephen Miller, the White House policy aide who has been the architect of the president’s immigration policies and its public face, occupied a seat along the edge of the room at Saturday’s meeting, not at the table, and spoke infrequently, according to attendees. He interjected memorably only once, to argue that the Flores agreement, which limits how long the government can detain immigrant children to 20 days, was creating a loophole for smugglers.The New York Times theater critics Ben Brantley and Jesse Green attended the opening weekend of the Public Theater’s annual Under the Radar festival. Here’s the first of their reports on the experimental work on display. The festival runs through Jan. 13 at various venues; for more information visit publictheater.org.
+‘[50/50] old school animation’
+Through Jan. 13.
+If you’re creeped out by Villanelle — the angel-faced psychopath from “Killing Eve” — you may want to steer clear of the nameless woman who opens this corrosive double bill of monologues. But if you enjoy unblinking journeys into everyday hearts of darkness (and hey, I don’t judge you), then this portrait of a blank-faced young Brooklynite may be just your ticket.
+She is embodied by a pale and attenuated Julia Mounsey, who with Peter Mills Weiss created this icy diptych about giving and receiving pain. Though only in her early 20s, Ms. Mounsey’s character has figured out her definitive purpose in life, and she’s totally cool with it: She exists to hurt other people.
+That description has nothing to do with the rituals of consensual sadomasochism. She works by stealth, and when she accomplishes her goal, these victims are unlikely to blame her for their suffering.Opera is an art form of affliction. It’s a genre that has long made a specialty of giving trauma stature and structure.
+But even by that standard, the marquee productions of this year’s Prototype, the festival of new music-theater that sprawls throughout the city and runs through Sunday, are extreme. There are scenes in “Prism,” “ThisTree” and especially “4.48 Psychosis” of almost cataclysmic suffering, the kind of pain that lingers without reason or resolution.
+“4.48” is an adaptation of the final work by Sarah Kane, the British playwright who died in 1999. A fragmented, incantatory immersion in clinical depression, filled with descriptions of psychotropic drugs, sets of numbers, angry rants and stark wordplay, the script specifies neither characters nor precise plot, nor even the number of performers.
+Seen on the page, the words scattered amid expanses of white, it can seem more like modernist poetry than theater. It is, in other words, as easily made into a score as into anything.Here’s what else is happening
+SoftBank: The Japanese telecom company will inject another $2 billion into WeWork, the co-working start-up, according to people familiar with the deal. The latest commitment brings SoftBank’s total investment in the company to about $10.5 billion and values WeWork at $47 billion.
+Silicon Valley: Some venture capitalists are rooting for a market dip this year, hoping that a downturn would calm an overheating start-up scene and make companies cheaper to invest in.
+North Korea: A train possibly carrying the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, entered China, South Korean news media reported, raising speculation that he could be meeting with President Xi Jinping before a planned second summit meeting with President Trump.
+Nigeria: Soldiers stormed the offices of one of the country’s largest newspapers, detaining two journalists, over an article that the military said divulged classified information. The raid came amid struggles to combat Boko Haram and less than two months before presidential elections.
+Asylum seekers: As the U.S. tightens its policies at the southern border, many asylum seekers are contemplating hiring smugglers in Mexico, despite the dangers and increasing costs.To the Editor:
+Re “How the Wall Has Boxed In the President” (news analysis, front page, Jan. 6):
+The current shutdown is only superficially about a wall and national security. After all, President Trump and Senate Republicans were fine with the continuing spending resolutions until right-wing pundits started objecting. What this is really about is the first battle in the war between Mr. Trump and the now Democratically controlled House for the soul of this country.
+The president is trying to compel House Democrats to vote for his wall. It is a pure and unmitigated battle for power. In this battle he has no empathy for the suffering of others. No lie is too small or cruelty too harsh.
+At stake is the future of our democracy. The biggest threat to national security is Mr. Trump himself. If Mr. Trump is not defeated in this battle, he will only be emboldened to do it again whenever he doesn’t get his way.
+Leonard Stamm
+Silver Spring, Md.
+To the Editor:
+Sorry , but your description of President Trump’s position as “boxed in” is mistaken. The president is not a politician. He is a show-off who found his niche as a television entertainer. Now he has had the good fortune to become entertainer-in-chief.A military victory against the terrorist group is a mere first step. The lesson of Iraq, where this terrorist group was born, is that premature declarations of victory and the reckless actions they tend to spur create more problems than they solve. The international community cannot afford to make the same mistake again today.
+Turkey proposes a comprehensive strategy to eliminate the root causes of radicalization. We want to ensure that citizens do not feel disconnected from government, terrorist groups do not get to prey on the grievances of local communities and ordinary people can count on a stable future.
+The first step is to create a stabilization force featuring fighters from all parts of Syrian society. Only a diverse body can serve all Syrian citizens and bring law and order to various parts of the country. In this sense, I would like to point out that we have no argument with the Syrian Kurds.
+Under wartime conditions, many young Syrians had no choice but to join the P.Y.D./Y.P.G., the Syrian branch of the P.K.K., that Turkey and the United States consider a terrorist organization. According to Human Rights Watch, the Y.P.G. militants have violated international law by recruiting children.
+Following the United States withdrawal from Syria, we will complete an intensive vetting process to reunite child soldiers with their families and include all fighters with no links to terrorist organizations in the new stabilization force.
+Ensuring adequate political representation for all communities is another priority. Under Turkey’s watch, the Syrian territories that are under the control of the Y.P.G. or the so-called Islamic State will be governed by popularly elected councils. Individuals with no links to terrorist groups will be eligible to represent their communities in local governments.
+Local councils in predominantly Kurdish parts of northern Syria will largely consist of the Kurdish community’s representatives whilst ensuring that all other groups enjoy fair political representation. Turkish officials with relevant experience will advise them on municipal affairs, education, health care and emergency services.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will direct the Internal Revenue Service to issue tax refunds during the ongoing federal government shutdown, reversing previous policy, officials said Monday.
+“Tax refunds will go out,” Russell T. Vought, acting director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, told reporters in an afternoon briefing.
+In a late-afternoon call with the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the administration will call back a significant number of I.R.S. employees from furlough, in order to issue refunds. Mr. Mnuchin also told Mr. Neal that the I.R.S. would open the tax filing season on time at the end of January, and that enough employees would return to work to allow the I.R.S. to answer 60 to 70 percent of phone calls seeking tax assistance.
+Those employees will not be paid until the shutdown ends.
+The move to issue refunds seeks to circumvent a potential political problem for the Trump administration by allowing taxpayers to claim refunds despite the protracted government shutdown, which is already dragging into Day 17.WASHINGTON — The World Bank said on Monday that its president, Jim Yong Kim, would step down from his post in February to join a private infrastructure investment firm, an unexpected departure that comes nearly three years before the end of his term.
+The abrupt resignation, which is effective Feb. 1, could prompt a clash between the Trump administration and other governments over the future of the international body. The United States traditionally selects the president of the World Bank, which is made up of more than 100 countries, but Mr. Trump has taken a skeptical view about the importance of multilateral institutions. The World Bank’s priorities — like combating climate change and engaging in foreign aid — also tend to be at odds with those of the Trump administration. Last month, the bank announced it would invest $200 billion toward fighting climate change over a five-year period.
+The Trump administration did surprise some development experts last year when it supported a $13 billion capital increase for the World Bank, the first such boost since 2010. The increase, which the White House had initially resisted, was conditional on the bank putting cost controls in place and came with the understanding that lending to China would be expected to decline. The bank lent $64 billion to developing countries last year, a figure that included China.
+“Jim Kim had deftly struck a balance between keeping the Trump administration mollified and involving the World Bank in work on areas that the administration has been openly hostile to,” said Eswar Prasad, the former head of the International Monetary Fund’s China division. “The new head of the institution will face a difficult challenge in maintaining the institution’s legitimacy and relevance while hewing to the Trump administration’s open hostility to multilateralism.”The implications of this historical debate for public policy today makes a recent book on the events that brought the Gilded Age to an end and ushered in the Progressive Era all the more timely and urgent.
+Jack Kelly’s “The Edge of Anarchy: The Railroad Barons, the Gilded Age and the Greatest Labor Uprising in America” opens in May 1893 with President Grover Cleveland surveying the half-million citizens who had filled the Chicago World’s Fair, “the most astounding metropolis ever built.” The Columbian Exposition, as it was known, was a celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World as well as “the productivity of American commerce.” Four days after the fair opened, the bottom dropped out of the United States economy, which was further crippled that summer by “an increasingly ferocious depression.”
+The resulting economic turmoil provided the backdrop for a series of mass labor actions that are the focus of the book. These began with an unlikely 40-year-old Ohio businessman named Jacob Coxey’s leading a hundred unemployed workers to Washington on foot to petition for a vast infrastructure investment project to alleviate unemployment and remedy the sorry state of the nation’s roads.
+The improbable prophet picked up many more along the way and motivated multiple independent Coxeyite groups from across the West to make their way East. Although few ultimately completed the journey, and Coxey was arrested and convicted under a law making it a crime to deliver a “harangue or oration” on Capitol property, the nation was held transfixed by the progress of the so-called Coxey Armies.
+The core of “The Edge of Anarchy” is a thrilling description of the boycott of Pullman cars and equipment by Eugene Debs’s fledgling American Railway Union. The strike caused much of the country’s commerce to grind to a halt, federal troops were called out over the objections of state officials, and many lives were lost. Mr. Kelly closely scrutinizes the roles not only of the American Railway Union and management but of state, local and federal officials, the courts, industry, the press, activists, and labor. No one comes out unscathed.The mosquito-borne virus that causes Rift Valley fever may severely injure human fetuses if contracted by mothers during pregnancy, according to new research.
+In a study published last month in the journal Science Advances, researchers used infected rats and human fetal tissue to discover how the virus targets the placenta. Results showed that the virus may be even more damaging to fetuses than the Zika virus, which set off a global crisis in 2015 and left thousands of babies in Central America and South America with severe birth defects.
+“Zika caught everybody by surprise,” said Amy Hartman, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Pittsburgh, who led the research. “If doctors had known about Zika’s birth effects, they could have done a lot more to protect pregnant women and babies. With Rift Valley fever, we’re trying to get ahead of the curve.”
+Rift Valley fever primarily occurs in livestock in sub-Saharan Africa, where outbreaks cause 90 to 100 percent of pregnant cows in a herd to miscarry or deliver stillborn calves, often a significant economic loss.“Teams like Palace and Newcastle: they’re the ones that have killed it, the teams where it is about Premier League survival,” he said. “Knocking Palace out would be an upset, but you’re expecting a reserve team.”
+Though the upsets still come, Mills is correct: those Premier League teams eliminated this year, as is now generally the case, were lacking most — if not all — of their first-choice players, many of them rested for what the club decided were more important games. Palace made it through, narrowly, in front of 6,000 traveling Grimsby fans, but it did so having made nine changes from its last Premier League game.
+Others cast the blame on the Football Association itself: for kick-starting the competition’s demise by allowing Manchester United to opt out in 2000, in favor of playing in that year’s Club World Cup in Brazil; for toying with various ideas — like abolishing replays of tied matches — to bow to the wishes of those Premier League clubs that see the Cup as an unwelcome distraction. This year, the F.A. was fiercely criticized for scheduling games at seemingly random times across the weekend to meet the demands of an international television deal, and using other matches as test runs for a video assistant referee system.
+“It’s a wonderful thing, the F.A. Cup,” Holt said. “It needs protecting.”
+Wherever the fault, the effects are obvious. At Burnley’s meeting with Barnsley, the Premier League hosts had tried to encourage more fans to come by reducing ticket prices to £10 for adults and £5 for children. Though the visiting team had brought a healthy contingent, Turf Moor, Burnley’s raucous stadium, was noticeably quieter than normal. Swaths of seats remained empty.
+Elsewhere, there were weakened teams named not only by the Premier League’s giants and those battling to avoid relegation from the top flight, but by those, like Leicester City, caught in the middle, and with nothing much else to play for. The trend is now mainstream: Championship teams often name weakened sides, too; the prize money on offer even for winning the F.A. Cup pales in comparison to the king’s ransom promotion to the Premier League would bring.
+Looked at from a distance, it is hard to see much magic left: teams of reserves contesting games they do not care about in front of half-empty stadiums, for the right to stay in a competition everyone involved sees as an afterthought.Intensive testing: There was no doubt that Mr. Stanacev had meningitis — his brain was inflamed. But why? Antibiotics did not help, and neither did steroids, which should tamp down an inflammation.
+No matter how many times he was tested, doctors found no sign of a bacterial or viral infection. Finally, late last year, Mr. Stanacev was referred to the Undiagnosed Diseases Network’s site at the N.I.H.
+He received the full gamut of testing: imaging, blood draws, genetic analysis and, importantly, a lumbar puncture to obtain cerebrospinal fluid, which bathes the brain. That fluid showed clear signs of extensive inflammation.
+At the end of the week, the Stanavecs went home, praying for a diagnosis.
+The diagnosis: The Stanavecs got a phone call in April from the clinic. Researchers had figured out what was wrong.
+Mr. Stanavec had an extremely rare mutation in a gene, NLRP3, which helps direct cells to activate a protein, interleukin 1 beta, that is part of the immune response to infections. The mutation made him produce an NLRP3 protein that was always active — even when there was no infection.
+There are just two or three reported cases of this mutation in the medical literature, said Dr. William Gahl, clinical director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the N.I.H. It’s not clear why Mr. Stanavec’s symptoms started so late in life, Dr. Gahl said. Nor is it clear why only his brain was inflamed.
+But the good news for him was that there is a drug on the market — anakinra, used to treat rheumatoid arthritis — that blocks interleukin 1.Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, as recently as late last year explored the possibility of becoming president of the University of South Carolina, four people familiar with the discussions said.
+Mr. Mulvaney, a congressman from South Carolina for six years before joining the Trump administration, initiated a discussion with a senior official at the university late last year about the position, which is going to become open this summer.
+By then, Mr. Mulvaney already had two other jobs — he led the federal Office of Management and Budget, as well as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But he was weeks away from getting a third job that he had lobbied President Trump for over several months: White House chief of staff.
+Mr. Mulvaney got the job in an “acting” capacity — a move Mr. Trump said over the weekend gave him “flexibility” with various appointments — after being replaced with a permanent director at the consumer bureau. But chief of staff is not a cabinet-level position requiring Senate confirmation, so it is unclear why the “acting” designation has remained.SoftBank is increasing its ownership stake in WeWork yet again, investing a further $2 billion in the fast-growing co-working company, according to three people familiar with the deal.
+But the deal, which is likely to be announced this week, is far smaller than an investment that was recently under consideration and could have been worth some $16 billion, the people said. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about the deal publicly.
+The latest investment — which is coming from SoftBank itself, not its nearly $100 billion Vision Fund — values WeWork at $47 billion, and brings SoftBank’s total investment in WeWork to about $10.5 billion, they said.
+SoftBank, a Japanese telecom conglomerate led by the billionaire Masayoshi Son, is reinforcing its commitment to WeWork even as the complex relationship between the two companies is under growing scrutiny.Although Goldman has pledged its cooperation, the firm has also claimed that it is innocent of the Malaysian charges and may well be girding for a fight with the Justice Department to limit its liability. Goldman also will have to deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which shares jurisdiction over the bribery law, and the Federal Reserve, Goldman’s chief banking regulator.
+Goldman has little choice but to reach a settlement. The key question is how much its entanglement with 1MDB may cost the firm. Disgorging the $600 million fee it earned for arranging the bond deals is the likely starting point for any resolution in the United States.
+How much a potential fine could be on top of that is anyone’s guess. One possibility is that it will be a multiple of Goldman’s profit on the transaction. That could push the penalty over a billion dollars, with the possibility of even more if Goldman has to reach an agreement with the Malaysian government.
+Do Cryptocurrencies Need a New Regulator?
+The precipitous fall in the value of cryptocurrencies in 2016 cries out for greater regulation to protect investors. Studies have shown that the market for cryptocurrencies is subject to widespread manipulation, which puts smaller investors at the mercy of those who are trying to profit from the price swings.
+Two bills were introduced in Congress in December to address manipulation in the cryptocurrency markets. Neither offers a concrete step toward regulating trading platforms, nor do they designate oversight to a single agency.
+As investors have suffered losses, the questions have increased about whether cryptocurrencies will survive as a viable investment class. Without greater government oversight to curb manipulation, the interest of small investors may well dry up.
+The Coming Investigations
+Control of the House means Democrats can investigate actions by the Trump administration, and perhaps the president himself. The subpoenas for documents and testimony are likely to fly up Pennsylvania Avenue in much the way they did during the Obama administration after Republicans took control of Congress.“We have absolutely reshaped how we’re teaching the game and how we’re teaching coaches how to teach the game,” Starman said. “We have really emphasized small-area games, and it goes along with age-appropriate practices.
+“If we play a lot more 3-on-3, 2-on-2, where younger kids are touching the puck more, they’re in an environment where they’re going to have more fun and be more involved,” he added. “Not only are they going to have more fun and want to come back, they’re going to get better because they’re constantly involved in the play.”
+The emphasis is the same in Finland, Starman said.
+“A lot of their parents and their organizations don’t care who wins the average game by shortening a bench so they can win a game,” he said. “Their players play, and they use their bench. They believe in player development.”
+The trends from the World Junior Championship are now showing up in the N.H.L., too. Over the last decade, the American and Finnish federations have increased the number of players they have delivered to the N.H.L.
+In 2009-10, the season that John Carlson’s overtime goal in Saskatoon gave the United States a 6-5 win over Canada in the final, 22 percent of N.H.L. players (212) hailed from the United States, while 4 percent (38) came from Finland, according to Quant Hockey.
+This season, the N.H.L. is up to 240 American players (26.8 percent) and 49 Finns (5.5 percent). With Finland’s Mikko Rantanen and the Americans Johnny Gaudreau and Patrick Kane among the league’s top scorers, it is not surprising to see that the number of points produced by players from the two nations also has increased — to 26.2 percent from 19.4 in 2009-10 for Americans and to 5.7 percent from 3.8 for Finns.The 52 Places to Go list is one of Travel’s biggest efforts of the year, for which The Times enlists writers and photographers around the globe, as well as a cadre of editors, designers and interactive specialists who work to produce it. Until the list is published early on Wednesday morning, I can’t reveal what spots made it, but I can offer some insight into how it is put together.
+I became The Times’s Travel editor at the end of October, just as the process was ramping up, and I had to leap into the deep end.
+To start, the editors on the Travel desk asked the journalists who have written for us in the past what places they find most intriguing. We asked them to pitch their favorite destinations in about 150 words or so, about the length of the final write-ups. Their suggestions were compiled into one big document, which this year ran to more than 70 pages. In some cases, multiple writers suggested the same place — often because there was some new development, or a special event taking place in 2019 — and a number of them made our final list.After a year filled with critically acclaimed movies from black directors like Spike Lee, Ryan Coogler and Barry Jenkins, the Golden Globes last night gave one of their two top film trophies to “Green Book,” a racial-issues film from the white “Dumb and Dumber” director Peter Farrelly.
+The other top Globe went to “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which pulled off a rare best-drama win without a best-director nomination, a split that happened mainly because the director of this critically dismissed film, Bryan Singer, was fired from the project midshoot.
+You can always count on the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a quirky group of around 90 foreign journalists who vote on the Golden Globes, to make some left-of-center picks. (Hey, the Globes are gonna Globe.) But now that the dust has settled from the best-comedy-or-musical win for “Green Book” and best-drama victory for “Bohemian Rhapsody,” your Carpetbagger is left wondering whether these choices are as unlikely as they might have seemed on Sunday night.
+Instead, should we treat them as emblematic of a mainstream sensibility that most moviegoers share? And, after recently seeking to reward more popular films, will the Oscars follow suit?Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue and the artistic director of Condé Nast, said in a telephone interview: “What she was accomplishing during her time working in magazines was groundbreaking. While she was shooting Ernest Hemingway and Marilyn Monroe, she was also shooting a very simple black dress or a simple suit to give them personality as much as any public figure.”
+Beatrice Crosby de Menocal was born into a family of privilege on April 9, 1913, in Beijing (known then as Peking). Her father, Daniel Ammen de Menocal, descended from an aristocratic Cuban family; her mother, Beatrice (Crosby) de Menocal, was a New York society beauty with a Washington Square address.
+Beatrice was the oldest of four — Richard, Esmee and Daniel followed — and the family moved to South America before eventually settling in Boston. They lived the kind of life indexed in The Social Register: summers in Nantucket and debutante comings-out, all documented by an affectionate press. Mr. de Menocal settled into a banker’s life, rising to become vice president of the First National Bank of Boston.
+In 1935, the young Miss de Menocal married William Simpson of Chicago, a Harvard man, in what The Boston Globe called “one of the most important weddings of the June season.” But the marriage was not to be a long one. Though the newlyweds set up house in Locust Valley, on Long Island’s North Shore — where they lived with an English butler and three maids, according to the 1940 census — after seven years of marriage they divorced and Mrs. Simpson made for New York City.
+She dabbled in low culture as well as high — she remembered celebrating the end of Prohibition with a group of boys by heading down to Boston’s tattoo parlors — but fell in with a glamorous crowd in New York, befriending the likes of the jewelry designer Fulco di Verdura and the hairdresser Kenneth. She was a regular at Café Nicholson, the Midtown Manhattan haunt of Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal that put the cafe in cafe society in the postwar years.They showed up in Mardi Gras headdresses, fedoras and tutus paired with combat boots. They drummed on darbukas, djembes and congas. And many of the performers at Sunday’s GlobalFest also brought grievances with them along with their costumes and instruments: against occupation, the erasure of indigenous voices, walls.
+GlobalFest, which took over the Copacabana nightclub near Times Square for the first time this year, is an annual showcase of music from all corners of the earth. This year 12 acts performed overlapping sets on three stages in what proved a joyful and often raucous celebration of diversity and culture’s uncanny knack for slipping through borders and stretching out roots underneath walls.
+As such, the festival is an inherent act of defiance against any attempt to cement hierarchies.
+At the same time, it complicates the notion of identity politics by demonstrating the composite nature of style. While the musicians’ art was always fueled by tradition, their distinct sounds were almost invariably shaped by the clash — or serendipitous kiss — of difference.Hotels have already turned their lobbies into spaces where guests can socialize or work. Now, some properties are going one step further to cater to business travelers and professionals in general: They’ve set up WeWork-style co-working areas.
+Traditional hotel business centers these aren’t. Yes, they offer practical amenities like office supplies, printers and, of course, coffee. But they also have a laid-back ambience and convivial feel of the shared working spaces popping up around the globe under the banner of the start-up WeWork.
+The new hotel business centers seem to have struck a chord among business travelers who find that they’re probably getting less work done in busy hotel lobbies, said Lorraine Sileo, the senior vice president of research for the travel research company Phocuswright. “Lobbies are distracting because there is so much going on, with people coming in and out and also socializing,” she said. “These new work spaces are meant for productivity.”
+They’re also especially attractive to younger business travelers, said Jessica Collison, the research director for the Global Business Travel Association. “Millennials tend be more nomadic than the older generation of travelers and spend more time outside of their room,” she said. “Hotels have picked up on this, and more of them are offering a co-working option.”WASHINGTON — Two Marines and a Navy corpsman stationed in northern Iraq are being investigated in the death of an American civilian contractor last week, two Defense Department officials said on Monday.
+The contractor was severely wounded in what officials described as a physical altercation on New Year’s Eve in Erbil, the capital of the semiautonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The contractor, who worked for Lockheed Martin, was evacuated to Landstuhl, Germany, and pronounced dead on Jan. 4.
+The two Defense Department officials confirmed the death on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the continuing investigation.
+Ed Buice, a spokesman for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, said in an email that the agency “does not discuss the details of ongoing investigations.”LONDON — The arrival of the new year has done little to quell the nerves about a London in flux. The economic and political future of Britain remains uncertain, and the battle over how the country should leave the European Union continues to rage.
+It has prompted an identity crisis that spilled over into the first of the coming round of fashion shows, which began on Friday with London Fashion Week Men’s. After all, the old narrative of London as a global metropolis was an identity deeply woven into its designs.
+So it was of little surprise that, last weekend, passionate questions around authentic presentations of self and voice, as well as explorations of artifice and mirage, were front and center on the runway. Here’s what shone through.Is there anyone like Warren on the other side of the aisle? No. Not only aren’t there any G.O.P. politicians with comparable intellectual heft, there aren’t even halfway competent intellectuals with any influence in the party. The G.O.P. doesn’t want people who think hard and look at evidence; it wants people like, say, the “economist” Stephen Moore, who slavishly reaffirm the party’s dogma, even if they can’t get basic facts straight.
+Does all of this mean that Warren should be president? Certainly not — a lot of things determine whether someone will succeed in that job, and intellectual gravitas is neither necessary nor sufficient. But Warren’s achievements as a scholar/policymaker are central to her political identity, and clearly should be front and center in any reporting about her presidential bid.
+But, of course, they aren’t. What I’m seeing are stories about whether she handled questions about her Native American heritage well, or whether she’s “likable.”
+This kind of journalism is destructively lazy, and also has a terrible track record. I’m old enough to remember the near-universal portrayal of George W. Bush as a bluff, honest guy, despite the obvious lies underlying his policy proposals; then he took us to war on false pretenses.
+Moreover, trivia-based reporting is, in practice, deeply biased — not in a conventional partisan sense, but in its implicit assumption that a politician can’t be serious unless he (and I mean he) is a conservative, or at most centrist, white male. That kind of bias, if it persists, will be a big problem for a Democratic Party that has never been more serious about policy, but has also never been more progressive and more diverse.
+This bias needs to be called out — and I’m not just talking about Warren. Consider the contrast between the unearned adulation Ryan received and how long it took conventional wisdom to recognize that Nancy Pelosi was the most effective House speaker of modern times.
+Again, I’m not arguing that Warren should necessarily become president. But she is what a serious policy intellectual looks and sounds like in 2019. And if our media can’t recognize that, we’re in big trouble.Dr. Baselga stepped down in September from his role as chief medical officer at the cancer center after The New York Times and ProPublica reported that he had failed to accurately disclose his conflicts of interest in dozens of articles in medical journals. He later resigned from the boards of the drug maker Bristol-Myers Squibb and the radiation equipment manufacturer Varian Medical Systems.
+Although Memorial Sloan Kettering has said that Dr. Baselga was not fired, hospital leaders have indicated that he was forced out. In October, Douglas A. Warner III, then the chairman of the cancer center’s board, told the staff that Dr. Baselga’s actions “left us no choice.”
+In December, the American Association for Cancer Research said that Dr. Baselga, at its request, had resigned his post as one of two editors in chief of its medical journal Cancer Discovery because he did “not adhere to the high standards” of conflict-of-interest disclosures that the group expects of its leaders. Some of his omissions involved articles that were published in Cancer Discovery while he was an editor in chief.
+A spokesman for AstraZeneca said Dr. Baselga was not available for comment, but the doctor told Reuters on Monday that he took responsibility for his disclosure lapses. He also said the cancer association had concluded his failures were “inadvertent,” and said many of his company relationships were publicly available on a federal database of physician payments by drug and device manufacturers. However, some of the relationships that Dr. Baselga failed to disclose were with small biotech start-ups that are not required to report to the federal government.
+“Dr. Baselga is one of the best scientists in the field of oncology,” said the spokesman, Gonzalo Viña. “We evaluated the series of inadvertent omissions, which have since been addressed and it is not for us to comment about the previous roles he held.”Howell Begle, a Washington lawyer who found a second career crusading on behalf of underpaid black R&B stars of the 1950s and ’60s, leading to industrywide royalty reform and the creation of the charitable Rhythm & Blues Foundation, died on Dec. 30 at a hospital in Lebanon, N.H. He was 74.
+His wife, Julie Eilber, said the cause was injuries he sustained in a skiing accident on Dec. 24.
+Mr. Begle (rhymes with eagle) was a successful corporate lawyer with a specialty in media mergers and a roster of high-profile arts clients, like the Kennedy Center, when, in 1982, a friend encouraged him to meet Ruth Brown, the singer of 1950s R&B classics like “Teardrops From My Eyes” and “(Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean.”
+A lifelong fan of Ms. Brown’s music, Mr. Begle met her after a performance and brought along some records for her to sign. When she told Mr. Begle that she had not received any royalties in decades, he said he would look into the problem.
+Ms. Brown had spent years trying to recover royalties from her former record company, Atlantic. One of the label’s earliest and biggest stars, she was so associated with Atlantic that it was sometimes called “the house that Ruth built.” But she had not been paid since leaving the label in the early 1960s. In the fallow years of her career, she had worked as a maid and a bus driver.Rosenda Monteros, a Mexican actress remembered for her turn as one of the few women in John Sturges’s classic western “The Magnificent Seven,” died on Dec. 29 at her home in Mexico.
+A spokeswoman for her family, who is also a representative for the National Theater Company of Mexico, said the cause was pelvic cancer. The spokeswoman said Ms. Monteros was 86, although according to Spanish-language news media accounts and other sources she was 83.
+Ms. Monteros, a successful actress in Mexican theater, films and television for more than five decades, played a small but important part in “The Magnificent Seven,” the 1960 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1954 film “Seven Samurai.” In the Hollywood version, seven gunslingers are hired by local farmers to defend their Mexican village from bandits.
+The movie had an all-star cast, with Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Horst Buchholz, Robert Vaughn, Brad Dexter and James Coburn as the seven gunmen and Eli Wallach as the leader of the bandits. The film featured a stirring and now instantly recognizable theme, composed by Elmer Bernstein.The new governor also said he would propose in his new budget, due out later this week, mandating that all Californians obtain health care insurance, in direct response to the Republican tax bill last year that removed the mandate from the Affordable Care Act. Such a mandate in California would require approval of the Legislature, which is far from assured.
+His office also announced that he would create a surgeon general position for the state by executive order. His aides said the governor’s first budget would seek to expand Medi-Cal coverage to undocumented youths up to age 26.
+Mr. Newsom, 51, had been the state’s lieutenant governor — largely a ceremonial position — for eight years under Mr. Brown. Before that, he served as mayor of San Francisco, where he positioned himself, for the most part, on the liberal side of the spectrum. He was an early promoter of same-sex marriage and the legalization of recreational marijuana.
+On Monday, he used his speech to laud Mr. Brown’s tenure; the mention of his predecessor’s name drew a standing ovation. But Mr. Newsom left little doubt that he had a broader view of government than the moderate Mr. Brown. The departing governor inherited a $28 billion deficit and left Mr. Newsom a $14 billion surplus; he also created an $18 billion so-called rainy day fund to help the state get through what is widely viewed as an inevitable coming recession.
+Mr. Brown’s insistence on holding onto state revenues was a source of continued friction with Democratic allies in the Legislature, who wanted to use the money to restore spending cuts that had been in place during the Great Recession.
+Mr. Newsom’s agenda is likely to be costly, and thus likely to face obstacles as the new governor prepares to offer a new budget. Mr. Brown, among others, has warned that California is heading into a recession, and there are concerns in the business community and among some moderate Democrats that the former San Francisco mayor might take a decidedly different approach to spending than Mr. Brown.
+Anthony Rendon, the Democratic speaker of the State Assembly, said in an interview Monday morning that while he supported some of Mr. Newsom’s initiatives, he had strong reservations about raising taxes to pay for them, as Mr. Newsom’s aides have suggested.All that makes it the more remarkable that these two teams keep meeting in championship games, as if they are the Warriors and Cavaliers of the N.B.A.
+The first, a 45-40 Alabama victory in January 2016, was exhilarating, the teams combining for 40 fourth-quarter points. An unexpected and successful onside kick and a 95-yard kickoff return were the big plays for Alabama’s comeback victory.
+Clemson and quarterback Deshaun Watson avenged the result a year later, with Watson throwing a 2-yard touchdown to Hunter Renfrow with 1 second left to give the Tigers a 35-31 victory.
+The teams met in the semifinal game last year, with No. 4 Alabama dominating No. 1 Clemson, 24-6. The Crimson Tide beat Georgia, in overtime, in the championship game. The hero there was Tagovailoa, then a freshman backup quarterback. He came into the game with Alabama trailing 13-0 at the beginning of the second half and threw three touchdowns, including the game-winner in overtime.
+Alabama arrived this year as a slight favorite, though few expected any sort of romp. Alabama was the first team since Yale in 1900 to beat every team by at least 20 points during the regular season, but Clemson has built itself into a deep shadow of Alabama’s program, following closely behind in college football’s spotlight.
+This might be the moment that Clemson fully emerged from it.
+The game opened as if the fast-forward button had gotten stuck. That was a twist from their previous championship meetings, which built slowly and ended with a flurry of points, like the finale of a fireworks display.
+This time, they combined for three touchdowns in the first four and a half minutes, and four touchdowns in the first 9 minutes. Barely 3 minutes into the second quarter, the teams had combined for 37 points. The entire game felt like a highlight reel.1. President Trump will deliver a prime-time address on Tuesday night about what he called the crisis at the southern border.
+He also plans to travel to the border later in the week in an effort to persuade Americans of the need for a wall — the sticking point in negotiations that caused the partial government shutdown. Above, wall prototypes on the border with Tijuana.After announcing her bid for president last week, Elizabeth Warren wasted no time in getting to Iowa, site of the first 2020 primary, to start campaigning. My colleague Astead Herndon traveled with Ms. Warren through the state over the weekend, and he sent us this dispatch:
+In her five city Iowa tour, Senator Elizabeth Warren gave a preview of what figures to be her defining message throughout the campaign season: a broad defense of government intervention, and the overarching belief that Washington corruption is the must-solve problem of our time.
+Across the state, Ms. Warren told voters that the country’s politics had been corrupted at its core, even before President Trump, and that the next president must work to undo the harm. She seemed comfortable in settings big and small, including a larger Des Moines rally where she lost her voice from a lingering cold but, to paraphrase the T-shirts at her merch table, persisted nevertheless.
+Key applause lines: when Ms. Warren calls for ethics reform in Washington and a mandate for all federal candidates to release their tax returns. The crowd also sits at ready attention when she talks about black-white wealth disparities and tells more of her personal story of humble beginnings. Unlike other politicians, who may begin with a joke to put a crowd at ease, Ms. Warren begins with the story of her family’s near foreclosure, and how that informed her political thinking.
+Attendees, some of whom did not consider themselves supporters of Ms. Warren at the outset, often told me they left feeling positively about her candidacy. Many said it was the first time they had heard about her family’s struggles with poverty.
+One worry, though: Several Iowans mentioned fears that Republicans had already branded her as too far left, and one audience member asked Ms. Warren about her decision to take a DNA test to prove her native ancestry. Ms. Warren again avoided apologizing or acknowledging the criticism from some Native American groups, who remain livid at her decision.
+Read Astead’s latest story from Iowa: With Warren Visit, Iowans Get the First Taste of 2020: ‘I’m Ready to Be Convinced’
+____________________
+2020 Watch[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Martha Moxley’s body was found under a pine tree on her family’s estate in a gated Connecticut community. She had been struck with a steel golf club with enough force to break it, and a piece of the shaft was used to stab her through the neck.
+The case grew into a sensation after Michael C. Skakel, her neighbor and a cousin of the Kennedys, was charged years later with murder, which would result in a drawn-out legal fight that posed questions about the influence of wealth and privilege in the justice system.
+Now the battle might have reached its end as the United States Supreme Court on Monday denied prosecutors’ attempts to revive Mr. Skakel’s conviction. Prosecutors could still opt to retry the case.
+In a statement on Monday, the State Division of Criminal Justice declined to comment on its plans for moving forward with the case. “We appreciate the Supreme Court’s consideration of the state’s petition,” the statement said.Sylvia Chase, an Emmy Award-winning correspondent whose professionalism and perseverance in the 1970s helped a generation of women infiltrate the boys club of television news, died on Thursday in Marin County, Calif. She was 80.
+Her death was confirmed by Shelley Ross, a former network news colleague, who said Ms. Chase had undergone surgery for brain cancer several weeks ago.
+Ms. Chase was one of a number of correspondents hired by network and local television news departments — along with Connie Chung, Cassie Mackin, Marya McLaughlin, Virginia Sherwood, Lesley Stahl and others — at a time when women were striving to be taken seriously and to defy being typecast as eye candy for male viewers.
+While they had been preceded a decade earlier by pioneers like Marlene Sanders, Ms. Chase and her contemporaries were members of a freshman class still more concerned with getting into broadcast news on the ground floor than worried about being passed over for promotion later on because of a glass ceiling.Here are some other steps retirees can take to lengthen the life of their savings when markets are less than cooperative:
+Portfolio Check. Retirees need to ask themselves a couple of key questions. Is my portfolio broadly diversified in low-cost investments, such as index funds? Is my allocation to stocks one that my stomach can handle should the market plummet 50 percent, as it did in 2008 and 2009?
+If you answer “no” to these questions, you should reassess (preferably with a pro) how reducing your stock exposure might change your ability to spend what you want in retirement.
+Mindful Spending. One of the most widely cited rules for retirement spending might be what’s known as the 4 percent rule. It suggests that retirees who withdrew 4 percent of their initial retirement portfolio balance, and then adjusted that dollar amount for inflation each year thereafter, would have created a paycheck that lasted for 30 years. (The numbers crunched by a financial planner more than two decades ago were based on a portfolio evenly split between stock and bonds.)
+But if your portfolio value takes a significant hit, your withdrawal rate may have to increase to support your spending. If that rate starts to approach 5 percent, and certainly 6 percent, there’s a greater chance you’ll outlive your portfolio, Mr. Pfau warned. So adjustments may be in order.
+The simplest way to deal with a dip would be to hold your spending steady, rather than increasing it with inflation. That approach can be enough to steady your finances even if your portfolio were to drop by 25 percent from its original value at retirement, according to Judith Ward, a senior financial planner with T. Rowe Price, based on a recent study. She suggested to keep spending steady for two to four years, depending on when the portfolio rebounds.
+“Keep in mind, steady spending over a number of years may still result in some kind of spending cuts depending on the inflation environment,” she said. “That may be the easiest and most intuitive approach for many retirees.”It was also an exploitation of his position to commandeer a prime-time audience for purely selfish political purposes, his detractors charged.
+“Simply embarrassing to see,” said Itzik Shmuli, a member of Parliament from the Labor Party, who called the prime minister’s speech “a curtain of smoke meant to get the public to forget one simple fact: He is drowning in severe accusations. He is neck deep.”
+From Mr. Netanyahu’s camp there was largely silence: Miri Regev, the culture minister, declared, “I believe in the prime minister’s innocence,” according to the newspaper Maariv, but hers was the loudest immediate expression of solidarity.
+For months as the inquiries proceeded, Mr. Netanyahu reassured his supporters with a steady and constant refrain: “There will be nothing, because there is nothing.” But his tactics belied his unperturbed pose: He attacked the press who reported the allegations, the police who investigated them, and finally the prosecutors who oversaw the cases.
+He has tried to project calm, but has also displayed an erratic side as the legal pressure mounted: After insisting in November that for national security reasons, Israel should wait to hold elections until the fall, Mr. Netanyahu reversed himself a month later. He called elections for April 9, in what appeared to be an attempt to notch a wide re-election margin before the attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, could render his decision on an indictment.
+Mr. Netanyahu then began arguing that, since he was entitled to a hearing after Mr. Mandelblit announces his decision and before an indictment is issued, and since there might not be time for that process to play out before voters go to the polls, Mr. Mandelblit owed it to the people to delay announcing his decision until after the vote.
+That one did not fly: Mr. Mandelblit instead let it be known that he was speeding up his timetable accordingly.Still, the administration might argue that Congress has effectively preapproved a wall-like barrier under other laws, including one that authorizes the military to construct border “fences” blocking drug-smuggling corridors, and another, the Secure Fence Act of 2006, that empowers the Department of Homeland Security to build “physical infrastructure enhancements” along the border.
+The government could skip the requirement to identify pre-existing authorization for a wall if it invoked a different emergency-powers law for the funds, but that route would raise other problems, Ms. Goitein said. Among them, the government would need to show that a wall meets the legal definition of military construction even though it is not clearly tied to a military facility or installation and that the southern border situation represents the kind of emergency that requires the use of the armed forces.
+Does it matter if there is no true emergency?
+Probably not.
+If Mr. Trump declares that the situation along the southern border suddenly constitutes an emergency that justifies building a wall without explicit congressional sanction, he will run up against a reality: that the facts on the ground have not drastically shifted. The number of people crossing the border unlawfully is far down from its peak of nearly two decades ago. The recent caravans from Central America primarily consist of migrants who are not trying to sneak across the border but instead are presenting themselves to border officials and requesting asylum.
+And while Mr. Trump and his aides keep claiming that terrorists are sneaking in across the border, including assertions that they are doing so by the thousands, as a matter of empirical reality, there has been no such instance in the modern era.
+Still, as a matter of legal procedure, facts may be irrelevant. Before a court could decide that Mr. Trump had cynically declared an emergency under false pretenses, the court would first have to decide that the law permits judges to substitute their own thinking for the president’s in such a matter. The Justice Department would surely argue that courts should instead defer to the president’s determination.
+“If any court would actually let itself review whether this is a national emergency, he would be in big trouble,” Ms. Goitein said. “I think it would be an abuse of power to declare an emergency where none exists. The problem is that Congress has enabled that abuse of power by putting virtually no limits on the president’s ability to declare an emergency.”
+Why did Congress give presidents such broad power?
+In part by accident. When passing many emergency-powers laws, Congress attached a procedure that would let lawmakers override any particular invocation of that authority. The National Emergencies Act, for example, permitted Congress to rescind an emergency if both the House and the Senate voted for a resolution rejecting the president’s determination that one existed.
+But in 1983, the Supreme Court struck down such legislative vetoes. The justices ruled that for a congressional act to have legal effect, it must be presented to the president for signature or veto. Because it takes two-thirds of both chambers to override a veto, the ruling significantly eroded the check and balance against abuse that lawmakers had intended to be part of their delegation of standby emergency powers to presidents.NASA’s new planet-hunting machine, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, is racking up scores of alien worlds.
+Less than a quarter of the way through a two-year search for nearby Earthlike worlds, TESS has already discovered 203 possible planets, according to George R. Ricker, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the leader of the project. Three of those candidates already have been confirmed as real planets by ground-based telescopes.
+On Monday afternoon, Dr. Ricker and his colleagues issued a progress report on humankind’s latest search for friends or at least neighbors. The mission, they said at a meeting of the American Astronomical Association in Seattle, was well on track to its official goal of finding and measuring the masses of at least 50 planets that are no larger than four times the size of Earth.
+“The torrent of data has already begun,” Dr. Ricker said.
+All of these worlds would be located within 300 light years from here, our cosmic backyard, and close enough to be inspected by future telescopes, such as NASA’s ever-upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, for signs of atmospheres, habitability and, perhaps, life. These worlds are the next frontier beyond our own solar system for answering the haunting question of whether life, in whatever form it might be recognized, has arisen elsewhere in the universe.The first items for Ms. Zirinsky to address will be finding a permanent executive producer to replace Mr. Fager at “60 Minutes” and a new executive producer for “CBS This Morning.” Both shows are critical to the network. The long-running “60 Minutes” is a highly rated show that prizes its independence from the larger news operation. “CBS This Morning,” though in last place among network morning shows, was in the midst of a turnaround before Mr. Rose’s departure helped bring that to a halt. In 2017, both properties brought in a combined $327 million in revenue for CBS, according to Kantar Media.
+Ms. Zirinsky said new producers would be installed in “short order.”
+Her ascension was widely celebrated throughout the network. She was greeted with a roaring ovation from the CBS News staff when she addressed them for the first time on Monday. Far from being isolated at “48 Hours,” Ms. Zirinsky has been a sounding board and a trusted counselor to employees across CBS News for years. There will be no listening tour required before she begins to make moves at the network.
+“I don’t charge per hour,” she said of her frequent open-door sessions with employees.
+Mr. Rhodes, 45, who joined the network as president eight years ago and took over the news division in 2015, will be free on March 1, though he said he would continue on as an adviser. During his tenure, he tried to modernize a news division long used to conducting business a certain way. He introduced a 24-hour digital news outlet, CBSN, and helped usher in several transitions, including the successful handoff of “CBS Sunday Morning” from Charles Osgood to Jane Pauley.
+Two recent transitions — at the “CBS Evening News” and “Face the Nation” — have been rockier, with ratings declines at both shows.
+Two law firms that were hired last summer to look into the news division’s culture were also critical of the treatment of women at “60 Minutes.” The lawyers wrote that there was a perception among some on the staff that Mr. Rhodes “failed to promote and retain certain qualified female employees,” according to a draft report of the investigation reviewed by The New York Times. But they also said there was not a toxic atmosphere for women within the wider news division and that they did not believe Mr. Rhodes favored men over women.
+It will now be left to Ms. Zirinsky to deal with the repercussions.
+“There was some tough stuff that happened,” she said. “The whole world is going through tough stuff. MeToo isn’t behind us. It’s part of us. We are now a different people because of it.”
+Ms. Zirinsky is certainly in touch with what’s going on in the wider world. She is an avid Twitter user, regularly live-tweeting “48 Hours” broadcasts. On Saturday night, as one viewer said that the idea of an “all American” family was a fiction and that “we all have our secrets,” Ms. Zirinsky enthusiastically replied, “YOU ARE SO RIGHT.”Second, the power structure of Washington has fundamentally changed. Pelosi is now one power center. Trump is another. You Senate Republicans are the fulcrum between the two. You are the crucial players in this drama if you decide to make yourselves that.
+Take the government shutdown fiasco, for example. On one side there is Trump, who wants a concrete or steel wall — which is an inane policy, but there it is. On the other side is Pelosi, who says walls are immoral. No money for a wall. Pelosi’s policy is equally inane. We’ve already got 654 miles of fencing on the southern border. It may be wasteful, but how is it “immoral” to go up to 800 or even 1,000 miles?
+This is where you come in. You are at the fulcrum between the absolutist inane positions. You have the power to create facts on the ground.
+You pass the obvious deal that everyone has been talking about for a year: a wall for DACA. Trump won the 2016 election offering voters a wall — so he gets $5 billion for “border security,” which he can claim is a wall. The Democrats won the 2018 midterms offering voters a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, so they get their path.
+This deal has fallen apart in the past because people got greedy. Republicans wanted to add interior enforcement measures. Democrats wanted a broader amnesty. But you’re professionals. You pass a bill that simple and skinny. A wall for a path.
+By passing an actual bill you cut through the dysfunctional negotiations at the White House. You make Trump and Pelosi come to you, to accept or reject.
+Moreover, this general approach can be applied across policy areas. It does not mean going against Trump or your base. You are giving Trump things he’s unable to get on his own. It doesn’t mean crushing the Democrats. It means governing within the reality of divided government. It means exercising leadership to create a government that actually works.The theater actors’ union said on Monday that it was barring its members from taking part in developmental work on Broadway shows while it demands a new contract that includes some profit-sharing.
+The union, Actors’ Equity, called the action a strike, and said it would take effect immediately, preventing its members from working on developmental labs, workshops and staged readings. About a quarter of all Broadway shows use developmental labs to test out material, and there are several labs scheduled in coming months that will not take place unless the dispute is settled.
+“No union wants to get to this point, but we feel strongly because our members feel strongly,” Kate Shindle, the union president, said. “Our members who do this work don’t think the terms are fair.”
+The Broadway League, representing producers, said it was still hopeful that the dispute would be resolved. “The Broadway League has been negotiating in good faith over multiple sessions and there are additional proposals to make,” the trade group said in a statement. “We look forward to continuing our respectful dialogue with the union and are confident that we will reach a fair agreement that will be beneficial to both sides.”In a rare bit of bad news for its investors, Apple last week laid the blame for lower than expected revenue on its performance in China. The news sent Apple’s stock price plunging, and investors also ditched other companies with significant exposure in China. The scale of the damage, both to Apple’s bottom line and to the broader market, underscores how critically important China — and Chinese consumers — have become for American companies.
+China accounts for about $52 billion in sales for Apple, and is its third-largest market. Apple is not the only technology company that relies on sales in China. For Qualcomm, a chip maker whose technology is used in many Apple smartphones, the figure is $15 billion, or about 65 percent of its total sales, according to an estimate by FactSet. Others with big bets on China include Intel (24 percent of sales) , Micron Technology (51 percent), and Texas Instruments (44 percent).
+These numbers make it very clear that the perception of China as the “factory of the world,” flooding global markets with cheap goods, is badly out of date. Exports and capital investments such as buildings and roads are no longer the main engines of China’s growth. Exports have dropped from 36 percent of China’s gross domestic product in 2006 to 20 percent in 2018. Going after China’s exports with tariffs, as the Trump administration is attempting, is, to a certain extent, fighting yesterday’s war.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+With Hillary Clinton to his right, female elected officials seated before him and cheering women filling the audience, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on Monday promised to protect women’s reproductive rights by expanding the state’s abortion laws within the first 30 days of the new legislative session.
+Mr. Cuomo’s vow was not exactly new. But the pageantry of the occasion seemed to reflect the circumstances that had prompted it: a Legislature newly controlled by Democrats raring to broaden reproductive rights, and a federal government increasingly looking to rein them in, all against the backdrop of a state with abortion laws that are not as liberal as many perceive them to be.
+“The Republican Senate said, ‘You don’t need a state law codifying Roe v. Wade. No administration would ever roll back Roe v. Wade,’” Mr. Cuomo said at the event at Barnard College, describing why previous efforts had languished for so long. “So help me God, this was the conversation.”
+That Republican-led State Senate is no more, ousted in November in favor of an overwhelming Democratic majority and the chamber’s first-ever female leader. The federal administration, meanwhile, is indeed seeking to roll back Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a constitutional right to abortion: President Trump has appointed two conservative judges to the Supreme Court, and women’s rights activists are warning that the decision is in peril.President Trump and his administration have always had a mixed-messaging problem. Whether it had to do with the future of NATO, relations with the European Union, a rapprochement with Russia or a trade war with China, Mr. Trump has made norm-shattering pronouncements while his top advisers worked behind the scenes to preserve the status quo.
+Most recently, his insistence that Congress pony up $5.7 billion for a wall at the southern border and his threat to keep the federal government closed for “months or even years” if he doesn’t get his way have undermined Vice President Mike Pence’s efforts to reach a compromise over the shutdown with Democratic lawmakers.
+But the president’s mercurial approach to the conflict in Syria is in a category all its own. After Mr. Trump stunned the world last month by ordering the withdrawal of all 2,000 American troops in Syria within 30 days, the administration began backtracking almost immediately.
+By the time John Bolton, the national security adviser, visited Israel over the weekend, the president’s order was effectively reversed. Mr. Bolton laid down conditions, including the complete defeat of the Islamic State and guarantees from Turkey that it won’t attack America’s Kurdish allies. In other words, American troops are there to stay for months, or years, or indefinitely.Robert Richards, 33, returned from a monthlong stint in Mississippi the day after the shutdown began. He said he was owed about $2,500 in expenses. “We’re tired of being put in the middle,” he said.
+Though Mr. Trump said on Twitter over the weekend that “most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats,” that is far from true in places like Jackson County, Fla., where Marianna is the county seat. It is a Republican bastion so deeply conservative that it was illegal to sell liquor by the drink until November 2017. The president and his plan for a wall along the border are popular here, as they are across much of the state, which might explain why Florida Republicans in Congress have done little to pressure party leaders in the Senate to put an end to the shutdown.
+“Everybody I talk to wants the wall,” James Grover, 72, a car salesman from nearby Blountstown, said over breakfast on Saturday at the Waffle Iron, a diner on Route 90 that opens six days a week even though its facade, destroyed by the hurricane, is temporarily made up of plastic sheeting and plywood.
+Few prison guards interviewed leveled any criticism at the president or his border policy, instead blaming the impasse on both Republicans and Democrats in Congress who have failed to reach any agreement.
+“You can point fingers at both sides,” said Jason Griffin, 44. “I point fingers at everyone. If they want to get something done, they can.”
+[Here’s a look at what is and what isn’t affected by the government shutdown.]
+Mr. Vinzant, the union president, said he believed a wall was necessary because he trusted fellow public employees who work for the Border Patrol. “Those guys will sit there and say, ‘We need help,’” he said. “So I have to agree with it. We don’t have a choice.”As the government shutdown over President Trump’s demand for border-wall funding moves through week three, the administration is looking to cut a deal with Democrats by emphasizing the deepening humanitarian crisis at the border — a crisis caused in large part by this administration’s inhumane policies, political grandstanding and managerial incompetence.
+In a letter Sunday to lawmakers, the White House laid out its latest proposal for addressing the border tumult. The administration called for more immigration and Border Patrol agents, more detention beds and, of course, $5.7 billion to build 234 new miles of border wall. The White House also demanded an additional $800 million for “urgent humanitarian needs,” such as medical support, transportation and temporary facilities for processing and housing detainees.
+Translation: Mr. Trump’s mass incarceration of migrant families is overwhelming an already burdened system that, without a giant injection of taxpayer dollars, will continue to collapse, leading to ever more human suffering.
+The situation is an especially rich example of the Trump Doctrine: Break something, then demand credit — and in this case a lot of money — for promising to fix it.WASHINGTON — As he makes his case for building a border wall, President Trump says that his predecessors have secretly confided in him that they should have done it themselves. The only problem: All of the living presidents say that’s not true.
+Former President Jimmy Carter said on Monday that he never had such a conversation with Mr. Trump, making him the last of the veterans of the Oval Office to dispute the assertion. “I have not discussed the border wall with President Trump and do not support him on the issue,” Mr. Carter said in a statement.
+Aides to the other living presidents — Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama — have all likewise denied Mr. Trump’s claim. Former President George Bush, who died in November, was in failing health throughout Mr. Trump’s administration and did not have any discussion with the current president about substantive issues, according to people close to him.
+This would not be the first time Mr. Trump has bragged about conversations that never happened. In 2017, he publicly claimed that the head of the Boy Scouts called him to praise a speech as the best ever given to the organization. He also asserted that the president of Mexico had called him to say that Mr. Trump’s enforcement efforts at the border were deterring Central Americans from crossing into Mexico because they knew they could no longer get into the United States.Mr. Azar “may either collect the data necessary to set payment rates based on acquisition costs, or he may raise his disagreement with Congress,” but he may not circumvent the mandate of Congress, said Judge Contreras, who was appointed by President Barack Obama. The government had acknowledged that it did not know the precise amount of the difference between what hospitals were paying for the drugs and what Medicare was reimbursing them.
+The program, created under Section 340B of the Public Health Service Act, is commonly known as the 340B program.
+Caitlin Oakley, a spokeswoman for Mr. Azar, said Monday: “We are disappointed with the court’s ruling and are evaluating next steps. As the court correctly recognized, its judgment has the potential to wreak havoc on the system.”
+Ms. Oakley said the decision could increase costs for Medicare patients, who are generally responsible for 20 percent of the Medicare-approved amount for outpatient drugs covered by the program. Most people on Medicare have supplementary insurance, like a Medigap policy or retiree health benefits, to help pay their share of the bill.
+The lawsuit challenging the Medicare cuts was filed by the American Hospital Association; by two trade groups representing teaching and public hospitals; and by three providers: Henry Ford Health System, based in Detroit; Park Ridge Hospital, in Hendersonville, N.C.; and Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, now known as Northern Light Health.
+Dr. Robert A. Chapman, a medical oncologist at Henry Ford Health System, described the administration’s action as an example of “reverse Robin Hood.” Under the policy, he said, the government took money from hospitals serving large numbers of low-income people and redistributed most of it to hospitals that did not qualify for the program.
+When Medicare cuts its payments to hospitals, Dr. Chapman said, it tends to offset the discounts that hospitals receive from drug manufacturers.“This is certainly a long-term fix,” Mr. Byford said. “If it were as some have suggested — if we were having a Band Aid offered to us — I for one would have rejected that.”
+Under the revised plan, starting in late April, repair work would happen on nights and weekends, when one of the tunnel’s two tubes would close. But closing one tube would still be significantly disruptive for New Yorkers who rely on the L train.
+“When you have only one tube in service, you may have three to four trains maximum an hour,” Dr. Horodniceanu said. “You’re going to have people who are going to wait on the platform for 20 minutes.”
+The old plan, which would have closed the entire tunnel for 15 months to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy, prompted outrage in Williamsburg and other neighborhoods in Brooklyn along the L line. Some people moved away and others began to plot intricate plans to reach Manhattan.
+Elected officials held a news conference on Sunday to complain about how the new plan was foisted on them without many details. Brad Hoylman, a state senator who represents a slice of Manhattan along the L line, compared the process to marrying someone you had never met.
+“I kind of feel like we were planning a wedding for the last three years,” said Mr. Hoylman, a Democrat. “We get to the altar and not only does the groom run off, but you look at the guy next to you, and you’ve never seen him before."
+At the same time, New Yorkers have asked why subway officials had not thought of the solution sooner. Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat in his third term, complained to reporters last week of a “transportation industrial complex,” made up of consultants and contractors, that benefit from the M.T.A. doing things the way they always have.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When Edgar Galvan got divorced in El Paso, Tex., in 2003, he did what many others in a similar position might have done: look for a good time. To do so, Mr. Galvan rented a house across the Mexican border in El Paso’s sister city, Ciudad Juárez.
+But as he began frequenting the city’s raucous night clubs, Mr. Galvan — then only 26 — made poor choices about who he spent his time with. He became “party friends,” he said, with Antonio Marrufo, a bloodthirsty killer known as Jaguar, who would soon be tasked by the Sinaloa drug cartel with “cleansing” Juárez of its rivals. Within four years of meeting Jaguar, Mr. Galvan began working for him, receiving shipments of Mexican cocaine and marijuana at safe houses in El Paso and moving guns in the opposite direction.
+On Monday, Mr. Galvan, now 41, spoke about his brief stint in the smuggling trade at the drug trial of the longtime cartel leader, Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the kingpin known as El Chapo. So far, most of the witnesses at the federal trial in Brooklyn have been Mr. Guzmán’s lieutenants, suppliers or distributors — people who emerged from his organization’s managerial class. A luckless figure with a quiet voice and an unassuming manner, Mr. Galvan was the first witness who could be described as a minor worker bee.
+Image Antonio Marrufo, nicknamed Jaguar, was an assassin for the Sinaloa drug cartel. Credit... United States Attorney's Office, Eastern District of New York
+In an afternoon on the witness stand, Mr. Galvan told the jurors that he had never even met Mr. Guzmán and had only heard his voice one time — when he was in the room as Mr. Marrufo talked to the crime lord on the phone. At best, Mr. Galvan was a guy who knew a guy who knew the guy in charge.WASHINGTON — The impact of a partial government shutdown began to ripple across the economy as it stretched into Day 17, with mortgage applications delayed, public companies unable to get approval to raise capital and thousands of Secret Service agents expected to show up for work without pay.
+President Trump and congressional Democrats have made little progress in negotiations to end a shutdown that has affected about 800,000 federal workers, many of whom will miss their first paycheck this week, and who owe a combined $249 million in monthly mortgage payments, according to the online real estate firm Zillow.
+The shutdown shows no sign of ending soon, with Mr. Trump announcing Monday that he would address the nation on Tuesday evening from the Oval Office to discuss what he called the crisis at the southern border, and the White House saying that he would travel to the border this week as part of his effort to persuade Americans of the need for a wall — the sticking point in negotiations with Democrats.
+The standoff is beginning to inflict pain on Americans, whose lives are affected, in one way or another, by the federal government. It is already the second-longest shutdown in history, behind the one that started in December 1995 and lasted 21 days.The authorities charged a man on Monday in connection with nearly a dozen shootings in and around a Southern California state park that left a father dead as he camped with his two young daughters and terrorized two affluent communities for almost two years.
+The suspect, Anthony Rauda, 42, was charged with murder in the June 2018 killing of Tristan Beaudette, 35, a scientist shot while he was inside a tent with his children at Malibu Creek State Park in the Santa Monica Mountains outside Los Angeles. His children were not hurt in the attack.
+Mr. Rauda, a felon who was on parole at the time of the attacks, was also charged with 10 counts of attempted murder in the shootings beginning in November 2016 in and around the park, which abuts the upscale communities of Calabasas and Malibu.
+He was arrested in October after sheriff’s deputies saw him on a ridge dressed in black with a rifle sticking out of his backpack, according to The Associated Press. They were searching the area for an armed burglar who stole food from nearby homes and businesses.Iran has been holding an American Navy veteran in prison on unspecified charges since late July, when he was seized while visiting an Iranian girlfriend, his mother said Monday.
+The imprisonment of the veteran, Michael R. White, 46, from Imperial Beach, Calif., could further complicate relations between the United States and Iran. Tension between the countries worsened substantially after President Trump renounced the nuclear accord with Iran last May and reimposed severe sanctions.
+At least three other American citizens, two of them of Iranian descent, have been incarcerated in Iran for years. Another American has been missing in Iran for more than a decade.
+Image Michael R. White, an American Navy veteran, in an undated photograph. Credit... via Joanne White
+Mr. White’s mother, Joanne White, said in a telephone interview that he had been set to return from Iran via Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, on July 27, but never boarded his flight.MEXICO CITY — The Guatemalan government said Monday that it would expel a United Nations-backed anticorruption panel, giving its prosecutors a day to leave the country in the most decisive effort yet by President Jimmy Morales to remove the body that has been investigating him and other top politicians.
+At a news conference in Guatemala City, Mr. Morales, accompanied by members of his cabinet and several people accused in panel investigations or their relatives, defended his expulsion order.
+“Cicig has put public security and governability at risk,” he said, using the acronym for the panel. “Cicig has repeatedly violated the human rights of Guatemalans and foreigners in Guatemala through selective and partial justice.”
+Earlier on Monday, Foreign Minister Sandra Jovel accused the panel of interfering in Guatemala’s internal affairs, and said the government was withdrawing from an agreement with the United Nations that established the panel more than a decade ago.The whole tempest was so monumentally stupid that I was tempted to ignore it, particularly since it’s starting to blow over. But it’s worth trying to figure out what the uproar was really about, since it could be a sign of the kind of media coverage this brash new group of representatives, particularly female representatives, might be in for.
+It certainly wasn’t about the profanity itself. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney delighted conservatives by effectively telling Senator Patrick Leahy, on the Senate floor, to go copulate with himself. (“It’s sort of the best thing I ever did,” Cheney later boasted to right-wing comedian Dennis Miller.) In October, Kanye West used the same term as Tlaib in the Oval Office, and few pretended to be scandalized.
+Some commentators accused Tlaib of adopting a Trumpian mode of discourse, but this misunderstands why Trump’s words are offensive. When Trump called athletes who knelt to protest police brutality “sons of bitches,” the problem was bigotry, not salty language. When he was caught boasting about sexually assaulting women, the issue wasn’t that he used a slang term for female anatomy. It’s Trump’s foul actions and ideas, not his swearing, that make him a walking obscenity.
+A few opiners insisted that the real affront lay in Tlaib’s threat of impeachment. But it’s not a secret that a lot of Democrats want to see Trump removed from office; on Thursday, Representative Brad Sherman, Democrat of California, reintroduced an impeachment resolution in the new Congress.
+So why the fainting fit over a bad word? I suspect it has something to do with the very phenomenon Tlaib was celebrating. The new Congress looks very different from any that’s come before. Forty-two of the new members are women, while 24 are people of color. Two of them, Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, are Congress’s first Muslim women. This new face of American political power makes a lot of people uncomfortable.Unlike most death row inmates, Scott Raymond Dozier wanted to die.
+Convicted of the 2002 killing and dismemberment of a Las Vegas man, Mr. Dozier waited for years while his lawyers appealed his death sentence. But he found the wait more agonizing than the prospect of execution. Two years ago he abandoned their efforts and urged a judge to set a date.
+The state of Nevada pressed to execute him, too, in a new lethal injection chamber. Still, the delays continued, the last six months ago. Mr. Dozier grew increasingly despondent, those who knew him said Monday.
+On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Dozier, 48, threaded a bedsheet through an air vent in his cell at the state prison in Ely, Nev., and hanged himself, prison officials said, ending one of the most significant and bizarre death penalty cases in recent years, one that highlighted the contradictions and shifting politics of modern capital punishment in America.
+“The prospect of eking out his existence on death row for the rest of his life was unfathomable to him,” said Edgar Barens, a filmmaker who had spent time with Mr. Dozier for a documentary that is still in progress about families affected by death penalty cases.The Mets have sat out the protracted, high-profile negotiations for Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, the 26-year-old superstars whose free agency has dominated baseball’s winter headlines. But they have stayed busy adding depth to their roster in the last few days, and they formalized a role for their former captain on Monday.
+David Wright, 36, is younger than the Mets’ new second baseman, Robinson Cano, but was forced to retire in September because of chronic injuries. He was formally released from the roster on Monday and officially joined the front office as a special adviser to Chief Operating Officer Jeff Wilpon and General Manager Brodie Van Wagenen.
+Wright assisted the Mets’ contingent at the winter meetings in Las Vegas last month, meeting with free agents and impressing Van Wagenen with his perspective. Wright, who found behind-the-scenes work to be more appealing than coaching or broadcasting, thanked the Mets’ ownership and their fans in a statement on Monday.
+“Playing in this city and for this team was a dream come true,” the statement said. “I look forward to contributing and taking on the challenges of this new role.”White House officials said Mr. Bolton came into his job determined to streamline the National Security Council, which they said had become bloated during the Obama administration, with functions that often overlapped those of the agencies. They insist his approach was welcomed: During his first breakfast with Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one official said, Mr. Mattis asked Mr. Bolton to hold fewer meetings.
+But there is a long distance between standard-issue jokes about too many meetings and eliminating them completely. Pentagon officials said Mr. Bolton did away with much of the process put in place by Mr. McMaster, a retired three-star Army general, who placed great emphasis on meetings, where everyone got a say.
+Mr. Bolton’s preference, one official said, is to have one-on-one conversations with cabinet members or other senior officials directly, rather than in a group or on a conference call. He maintains more control of the process that way, this person said.
+Patrick M. Shanahan, the acting defense secretary, has taken advantage of this channel, according to another Pentagon official. He has not hesitated to call Mr. Bolton directly, something that Mr. Mattis apparently did not do as much. He tended to relay questions through his recently departed chief of staff, Kevin Sweeney.
+The National Security Council engaged in “reverse engineering” under Mr. McMaster as well. But officials said the trend had gotten worse under Mr. Bolton, in part because he did not trust the national-security bureaucracy and saw no reason to include it in policymaking.
+Mr. Bolton is also handicapped by not having a deputy, who traditionally coordinates policy debates. He has yet to replace Mira Ricardel, an official who was forced out of the White House after she clashed with the first lady, Melania Trump.
+Unlike in the past, when the National Security Council was the president’s clearing ground for security policy, one official said that the N.S.C. under Mr. Bolton was best described as another voice at a table crowded with advisers vying for influence with Mr. Trump.TOKYO — In his first public appearance since his arrest nearly two months ago, Carlos Ghosn pushed back on Tuesday against the accusations that toppled him from the top of a global automotive empire, declaring he was innocent of all allegations.
+“I have always acted with integrity and have never been accused of any wrongdoing in my several-decade professional career,” Mr. Ghosn planned to say, according to prepared remarks distributed as a hearing began in Tokyo District Court. “I have been wrongly accused and unfairly detained based on meritless and unsubstantiated accusations.”
+Mr. Ghosn, who until recently was head of the vast car-making alliance of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, was arrested in Japan in November on allegations of financial wrongdoing and has been jailed with limited contact to the outside world ever since. On Tuesday, he was led into court handcuffed, with a rope around his waist. He wore plastic slippers and a dark suit without a tie, according to pool reports, and looked thinner than he had in photos taken before his incarceration.
+He was appearing in a packed courtroom to defend himself against allegations that he improperly transferred personal losses to Nissan’s books and withheld millions of dollars in income from Nissan’s financial filings for years as chairman and chief executive.“We get to the altar and not only does the groom run off, but you look at the guy next to you, and you’ve never seen him before.”
+BRAD HOYLMAN, whose State Senate district is affected by a late change in plans to repair the L train.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.Even when she’s sitting still — which admittedly is a rare occurrence — Alison is a gale-force presence. Portrayed by the never disappointing Marin Ireland in Abby Rosebrock’s “Blue Ridge,” the emotionally congested play that opened Monday night at the Linda Gross Theater, this disgraced high-school English teacher is one of those unsettling people who suck up all the oxygen in a room in one convulsive gulp.
+You could call her a life force or, as one of her sometime friends does, “a terrorist.” Alison, after all, has wound up in a North Carolina Christian halfway house, the setting for this Atlantic Theater Company production, because she took an ax to the car of her married lover, who was also the principal of the school where she worked.
+Cue Carrie Underwood, whose pop hit “Before He Cheats” describes a similar act of vengeance and is cited in the opening scene of “Blue Ridge,” directed by Taibi Magar. It is one of two songs Alison uses to define herself in her first mandatory group meeting.
+The second is also by Ms. Underwood, “Jesus, Take the Wheel,” which is about giving yourself over to divine guidance, or as Alison sees it, letting go and chilling out “when you’re gonna look crazy and lose all your friends.” This is not a message she seems to have taken to heart.Ms. Liang, 60, is a fellow at the Brookings Institution. She previously spent three decades on the Fed’s staff, rising to lead a department created after the financial crisis to monitor financial stability.
+Image Nellie Liang, who was nominated by President Trump to serve on the Federal Reserve Board, has withdrawn her name from consideration. Credit... Brookings Institution
+At the Fed, she helped orchestrate stricter postcrisis oversight of the financial industry, including the creation of annual “stress tests” to determine whether the nation’s banks could withstand a severe economic downturn.
+Mr. Trump’s nomination of Ms. Liang was applauded by many current and former Fed officials, who regarded her expertise as a potentially valuable addition to the Fed’s board. The Fed has significantly increased its focus on maintaining financial stability in the aftermath of the financial crisis, when bad bets by big banks helped plunge the American economy into a recession.
+But the banking industry has argued that the government overreacted to the crisis and imposed overly restrictive rules that are impeding lending and economic growth. Both the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have pledged to ease the burden of those regulations, despite hefty profits at the United States’ biggest banks. Financial firms had quietly rallied opposition to Ms. Liang’s nomination, arguing that she was not supportive of efforts to recalibrate postcrisis rules.
+Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chairman, supported Ms. Liang’s nomination and encouraged Senate Republicans to confirm her. But the Senate Banking Committee did not schedule a confirmation hearing in the fall, and Ms. Liang’s nomination expired when the 115th Congress ended this month.MELBOURNE, Australia — Swarms of bluebottle jellyfish stung thousands of beachgoers on Australia’s east coast over the weekend, forcing officials to close a number of beaches in what they described as a “relentless” influx of the creatures.
+The bluebottle usually inhabit more remote ocean waters. But strong winds have helped the jellyfish sail ashore in recent weeks.
+For beachgoers, it has been a painful introduction to Physalia utriculus. More than 3,500 stings were reported this past weekend alone, according to Surf Life Saving Queensland, the aquatic rescue authority.A meteorologist for a television station in Rochester was fired Sunday after he uttered a racial slur on air while describing a city park named after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
+Jeremy Kappell, a News10NBC meteorologist, used a derogatory term for black people as he was describing a picture of the park during a Friday broadcast about the weather, inserting the slur between “Luther” and “King.” A clip of the segment began circulating over the weekend, drawing furious reactions and calls for reprimand.
+Reached by phone on Monday evening, Mr. Kappell confirmed that he was fired Sunday. He said that he had not intended to use the word during the unscripted broadcast but had misspoken. Mr. Kappell said he had been a meteorologist for the television station since October 2017 and had two years left on his contract.
+He released a video Monday evening responding to his firing, saying that he had jumbled his words. He apologized to those who felt hurt.TUESDAY PUZZLE — “When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold, Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
+And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
+Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, ‘It's pretty, but is it Art ?’"
+— Rudyard Kipling’s “The Conundrum of the Workshops”
+And thus was born the first-ever case of Impostor Syndrome. Because how can you make art when the devil has put such doubt into your head?
+There is no doubt that Freddie Cheng’s creation is art. But what kind is it?
+Tricky Clues
+1A: Maybe the bakers out there can confirm this, but “Baker’s dozen?” is EGGS and not the number 13 today because EGGS are needed in most baking recipes, and they are sold by the dozen.
+42A: I looked at XWordInfo just to confirm this, but can you believe that the musician and producer Brian ENO has been in the New York Times Crossword only 228 times? He really needs to get out more.[music] This is Zhang Zhejun. Today, he’s making drugs. He isn’t a chemist or a dealer. He’s making medicine for his mother. She has stage 3 lung cancer. Zhejun earns $300 a month, but the medicine needed to treat his sick mother costs $2,000. Looking for options, he turned online. Today, he’s making WZ4002. It hasn’t been approved by Chinese or American regulators, and it doesn’t have a commercial name yet. But he can still order the raw ingredients for drugs like this online at a fraction of their official prices. The Communist Party of China says it provides close to universal health care coverage. Nearly 95 percent of people are insured here, including Zhejun’s mother. So why is he making drugs on the floor of his apartment when his mother has insurance? It’s a symptom of a health care system in crisis. To understand this crisis, we need to rewind a bit. Under Mao Zedong, the Communist state provided free health care for all. Decades later, China adopted a unique brand of capitalism that transformed the country from a poor farming nation into an economic superpower. Life expectancy soared. But the introduction of capitalism and the retreat of the state meant that health care was no longer free. Hospitals became profit-driven. And with limited accountability, they were widely accused of predatory behavior. A culture of mistrust and inequality now plagued the system. Here’s what that looks like today for ordinary Chinese. It’s 5 a.m., and about 100 people have gathered in a line in downtown Shanghai. This isn’t the line to the movies or a holiday sale. It’s the entrance to the Shanghai Cancer Center at Fudan University. Those who were willing to lose a night’s sleep trying to get a spot in line now have one question in their mind: “Will I be able to see a doctor today?” The scalpers are out, and they’re selling spots in line. China’s line scalpers symbolize a greater dysfunction. The chance of seeing a doctor here is directly related to how big your wallet is. Corruption is inherently part of the system. And in rural areas, it’s worse. But leaving your home in the countryside could have a profound impact on what type of care you can get in the city. Despite its rapid modernization, China still uses what is known as the Hukou system. Your Hukou is defined by your birthplace, and you’re only entitled to social services within that region. Everything from the schools your kids can go to, to what your health insurance will cover is determined the moment you are born. So if you get cancer and live in an area without an oncologist, you could be in trouble. Some here compare it to a caste system. By 7 a.m., it’s one hour before opening time. The line has tripled in size, and then the news hits. Those are not good odds. But even worse, they aren’t unusual. There are nearly 7,000 people per general practitioner in China. To put this number in perspective, the World Health Organization’s international standard is one doctor for every 1,500 to 2,000 people. General practitioners we talked to in China typically see 70 to 80 patients per day. Specialists said they see up to 200, each just for minutes at a time. The doctors we talked to in the U.S. said they see fewer than 30 patients a day. While rich Chinese will pay for individual care or leave the country altogether for it, the rest of the population, those dependent on health insurance, end up paying roughly 30 percent of their health care costs. Americans pay about 10. Numbers like these have added up to a culture of conflict. With more and more patients and underpaid doctors, violence has become commonplace in hospitals across China. And with the state insurance system not meeting the rising costs of treatments and drugs, medical disputes often play out in public on the hospital floor. Violence in hospitals has become so common in China, there’s a word for it — yi nao. Roughly translated, it’s medical disturbance. Back at the Shanghai hospital, it’s opening time. Scalpers are making a last effort to sell off doctors appointments they secured in advance. Some that wouldn’t wait, or couldn’t afford the scalpers’ tickets, try to cut in line and are thrown out by security guards. Once in the hospital, patients will stand in another line. It’s the second, and there are more to come. They scan the board of available specialists, selecting one based on their best self-diagnosis. If they’re lucky, the one they choose will have time to see them. For those who choose wrong, the cycle will begin again tomorrow. Others prefer to solve their problems at home.A spokeswoman at the Arizona Department of Health Services said it was also aware of the allegations and would conduct an inspection of the Hacienda Nursing Facility. Records posted to the Medicare website indicate that the care center received a “below average” rating from health inspectors in 2017. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rated its quality of resident care as “much below average.”
+“I want to assure our patients, their loved ones, our community partners, the agencies we do business with, Governor Ducey and the residents of Arizona, we will continue to cooperate with Phoenix Police and the investigating agencies at all levels in every way possible,” Mr. Orman said in the statement. “And we will do everything in our power to ensure the safety of every single one of our patients and our employees.”
+[Detectives in Phoenix have opened an investigation into sexual assault allegations at the nursing home.]
+The nursing home, which is about seven miles south of downtown Phoenix, specializes in the care of people with intellectual disabilities and has at least 74 patient beds, according to federal records. State records indicate that some patients have lived there for decades.
+This is not the first time that investigators have expressed concern about the facility.
+In 2013, the Arizona Department of Health Services found that a male employee mistreated some patients by making sexually explicit remarks about them. A state report issued at the time did not allege physical abuse at the center, and its operators said the employee in question had been fired. It said employees would be given new training on how to report the suspected abuse of patients.Day 18 of the U.S. government shutdown
+The partial U.S. government shutdown, now the second longest in history, is like sand in America’s gears.
+Impact: Secret Service agents, who are working without pay, told us that there is growing agitation in their ranks. The president they protect said on Twitter last week that “most of the workers not getting paid are Democrats.” But federal prison workers in the deeply Republican Florida Panhandle, already bedraggled by Hurricane Michael, are among the 800,000 federal workers affected. “We’re tired of being put in the middle,” one said.
+A near-standstill at the Securities and Exchange Commission is just one of the government’s many stoppages of major functions, with more looming. Some economists on Wall Street are predicting the shutdown will measurably reduce growth.PAGES A2–A3
+A picture caption with the Inside The Times feature on Thursday about reporting on a volunteer medic who was killed in Gaza misidentified the woman being interviewed by Iyad Abuheweila and David M. Halbfinger. She is Eslam Abu Dagga, not Eslam al-Najjar.
+INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about the Chinese photographer Li Zhensheng referred incorrectly to the publication of the first Chinese-language edition of “Red-Color News Soldier.” It was published in July, not October.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Saturday about pet insurance policies, using information supplied by Healthy Paws Pet Insurance, misstated how a pet’s age affects premiums for the company’s policies. The pet’s age affects the premium at the time of enrollment and as the pet gets older, not just at enrollment.
+•
+The Common Sense column on Saturday about the forecast for stocks in 2019 misspelled the name of a research firm. It is InvesTech Research, not InvestTech. The error was repeated in a picture caption.A spinoff of “The Fosters” debuts on Freeform. And a scripted drama series begins on the History channel.
+What’s on TV
+GOOD TROUBLE 8 p.m. on Freeform. By the time “The Fosters” wrapped up last summer, fans were already itching to keep the drama going with this spinoff series. After graduating, sisters Callie (Maia Mitchell) and Mariana (Cierra Ramirez) move into a shabby communal home in downtown Los Angeles where dinners bring the residents together and rats roam free. They take up new jobs — Callie works for a conservative judge (Roger Bart) and Mariana joins a male-dominated start-up — that leave them wanting more. True to coming-of-age fare, their new reality proves that “adulting” comes with plenty of battles. “Good Trouble” echoes the social consciousness of “The Fosters,” the creator Joanna Johnson told Variety, but it is on the lighter side and draws out the story through a more complex, nonlinear narrative.
+LINDSAY LOHAN’S BEACH CLUB 8 p.m. on MTV. Lindsay Lohan has been out of the limelight in recent years. This new series highlights one of the projects that has kept her busy: opening Lohan Beach House, a sprawling beach club in Mykonos, Greece. In “Vanderpump Rules” format, the show follows a very serious Lohan as she manages the club’s eight employees at the sun-drenched tourist destination.Good Tuesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• The impact of the partial government shutdown began to ripple across the economy — delayed mortgage applications, missed paychecks, stymied farmers and public companies unable to get approval to raise capital. The shutdown is entering its 17th day.
+• Two meetings on the shutdown this weekend offered little progress, and instead underlined the stalemate in which lawmakers find themselves.
+• President Trump will make his case for the border wall in a prime-time TV address from the Oval Office on Tuesday evening, and he plans to travel to the border later in the week.HONG KONG — An oil tanker caught fire in Hong Kong on Tuesday morning, leaving one man dead and rescuers scrambling to find two other crew members who were missing. At least 23 others were rescued.
+Crew members on the tanker had been connecting hoses with an oil barge for a refuel, officials said. Then there were three explosions before the tanker went up in flames.
+“We could see that the victim who passed away had been burned,” Wong Wai-hang, a police representative, said in a briefing. “There were clear injuries on his head and fractures in his hands and feet.”
+The tanker was listing by about 30 degrees, but the authorities said it was not currently at risk of sinking. No oil spills were visible on the water’s surface.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+naïveté
+ä-ˌēv-ˈtā, -ˌē-və-; nä-ˈēv-ˌtā, -ˈē-və-; nī-\ noun
+: lack of sophistication or worldliness
+_________
+The word naïveté has appeared in 98 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Nov. 20 in “My Life as a Hopeless Romantic” by Robbie Harms:
+Growing up, I became invested in the love stories of Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling in “Crazy, Stupid, Love,” of Mandy Moore and Gabriel Macht in “Because I Said So,” and of every character in “Love Actually.” Dramatic kisses in the rain, serendipitous encounters at restaurants — this was, in my young eyes, how love worked. There was someone in the world, your soul mate, as the movies told me, who would become the person you spent the rest of your life with. Your task was simply to wait until you met him or her. As I grew older, my naïveté wore off. I learned that this kind of romance clashed with reality — and with the way my generation dates.[explosion] If that seems like a volcano, well, you’re almost right. It’s an experimental re-creation of what happens sometimes when cold water meets hot lava in a real volcano. Researchers at the University at Buffalo created this explosion, and lots of others, and they did it to study one of the dangers of volcanic eruption. They did the experiments out in the country about 40 miles south of Buffalo. The first step was to make homemade magma, and they did that by heating chunks of basalt. That’s essentially ancient magma now found in quarries. The rock they used was formed in volcanoes 70 million years ago. They heated the basalt for four hours. They brought it to a temperature of 2,400 degrees — that would melt many metals like silver and gold and do unimaginable damage to human skin, if, somehow it spilled. For that reason, the researchers suited up with protective gear, as you can see. They poured the homemade lava into a container fitted with heat-resistant steel tubes. Those tubes would allow the researchers to inject water into the molten rock. They did that remotely for obvious reasons. Sometimes, the water set off an explosion. But sometimes, they needed a swinging sledgehammer to trigger the lava bomb. The combination of homemade explosions and sophisticated video analysis turns out to be a good method for studying this process. Oh, and they recorded some really great explosions. Next up, more research using the same method because there’s no question about the value of knowing more about lava bombs. And it’s a lot safer to study a barrel of homemade magma than to get near a live volcano.When lava meets water, the results are often explosive.
+Last year, lava from Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano flowed into the ocean , creating bombs of molten rock that were flung into the sky and then smashed into a nearby tourist boat, injuring 23 people.
+In 2010, a glacier-covered volcano in Iceland called Eyjafjallajökull erupted and spewed a plume of ash 30,000 feet into the air, causing hundreds of flights in Europe to be grounded.
+Scientists want to better understand these violent reactions to help prepare communities near volcanoes and bodies of water or groundwater. But doing so at active sites can be impractical. Instead, a team of researchers recently brewed their own backyard lava.
+“We are not just crazy people mixing and seeing what happens,” said Ingo Sonder, a volcanologist at the University at Buffalo. “We are scientists and we want to quantify, and we do have an idea of what we are doing here.”How involved are your parents or caregivers in your day-to-day life? Are they hands-on — planning and signing you up for activities, helping you with homework, making your meals, attending your games and recitals, checking on your grades, throwing you birthday parties, helping you apply to college and generally knowing your whereabouts? Or would you describe them as more hands-off?
+How do you feel about the way they parent you?
+In your opinion, are parents today too involved in their children’s lives? Or is hands-on parenting the best way to help children be happy and successful? Why do you think the way you do?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out what experts and parents say.At Lambda, students pay nothing upfront. But they are required to pay 17 percent of their salary to Lambda for two years if they get a job that pays more than $50,000. (Lambda says 83 percent of its students get a job with a median salary of $70,000 within six months of graduating.) If they don’t get a job, or their salary is lower, they pay nothing. Payments are capped at $30,000, so a highly paid student isn’t penalized for success, and if a student loses a job, the payments pause.
+It is a model that so far has been aimed at vocational education but has the potential to end the crushing cycle of student debt and change the way schools think about students.
+“It aligns the incentives fully,” said Mr. Lewis, the venture capitalist.
+The school is incentivized to only enroll motivated students who won’t drop out; it is incentivized to successfully teach them the skills they will need on the job; it is incentivized to find them a job; and it is incentivized to make sure they are a success once they’re on the job because the school relies on employers to keep hiring its graduates.
+“There are no schools that are incentivized to make their students successful anywhere,” said Austen Allred, co-founder and chief executive of Lambda. “The schools get paid up front, they get paid in cash, whether that’s by the government or whether that’s by an individual doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, the schools get paid no matter what.
+“I think in order to create better outcomes the school has to take the hit,” he said.
+Mr. Allred said he doesn’t see Lambda as a replacement for a four-year education — yet.
+“What we’re built to do right now is close employment gaps,” he said. “So if you have a field where there is a shortage of employees the obvious place for us to start is by building programs to fill those holes.”
+Whether this model can — or should — be applied to the larger education system remains an open question. It clearly improves the financial incentives for the school and the student. But, if expanded more widely, it could press programs to ignore a traditional liberal arts education, where the earning power is reduced. If a student dreamed of a major in Russian literature, she may struggle to find a school that sees a knowledge of Tolstoy to be particularly marketable.Afrocentric schools aim to empower black children in ways that traditional schools in America historically have not. Though integration advocates want the same, some parents and educators across the country believe high-quality Afrocentric schools can achieve that goal in a different way — by asserting black power, pride and excellence close to home.
+And though a recent study found that some Afrocentric charter schools are low-performing , they remain popular among parents and many educators. Milwaukee and Chicago both have prominent black-centric charter schools. In Georgia, some black parents have decided to home-school their children to help ensure they learn about black history. New Afrocentric public schools and programs have recently sprouted in Washington, D.C., and Oakland, Calif
+But even as the concept is spreading, decades of research have shown that integration can redistribute resources across schools and thus boost academic performance, and experts warned that abandoning integration could backfire. “Segregation leads to inequality,” said Andre Perry, a fellow at the Brookings Institution. “You can’t just do that away. If you’re going to ignore this issue, it will come back to haunt you.”
+“It wasn’t going to be enough to be a really good school”
+Bedford-Stuyvesant, home to tree-lined, brownstone-filled blocks, is experiencing a surge of interest in schools like Ember, as evidenced by new parent groups and increasing enrollment. Interviews with more than 30 parents, school officials and community leaders, along with visits to schools and parent meetings in central Brooklyn, found growing enthusiasm for the schools, particularly in light of the city’s renewed debate about integration.
+“We were really aware in the beginning that it wasn’t going to be enough to be a really good school,” said Alisa Nutakor, the school’s dean of students, as she wove through Ember’s bright yellow and red hallways.
+Instead, Ms. Nutakor’s goal was to offer minority students the same opportunities as white children in private schools. That has meant sending dozens of middle-school students to South Africa for six weeks, and forgoing strict discipline in favor of strong mental health services.
+And on a recent Friday, it meant that Ember’s third and fourth graders were watching a clip of Beyoncé’s 2016 Super Bowl halftime performance. Tanequa Neale, Ember’s dean of culture, asked the students, “Does the song make me feel beautiful, or better about myself?”Ms. Iturbide made the photo after happening upon Zobeida Díaz at a farmer’s market while living with the Juchitán of southeastern Oaxaca in 1979. It took several tries — the iguanas kept moving around, falling off, reducing her subject to laughter — but on her contact sheet, Ms. Iturbide found her “Nuestra Señora de las Iguanas (Our Lady of the Iguanas),” an image so arresting that 40 years later, its popularity is still growing.
+In Mexico, “Nuestra Señora” is on murals, posters, postcards and road signs to Juchitán, and rendered into a life-size bronze sculpture in the Juchitán town square. It covers a brick building wall in East Los Angeles. It has gone viral. Fans have taken the rich black-and-white image and recreated it into graphic art, self-portraits, YouTube videos.
+No wonder Ms. Iturbide says the image “is no longer mine.”
+Nor is that iconic image her only claim to fame. In a long and varied career, Ms. Iturbide, 76, has done deep dives into her beloved country. She has documented the Seri Indians of Sonora, goat-slaughter festivals among the Mixtec of Oaxaca, funeral rites, cultural practices, complex landscapes, birds, herself.Before reading the article:
+What do you know about opioids and the national opioid epidemic?
+Do you know anyone who has been affected by the opioid epidemic?
+Scroll through the article and look at the accompanying illustrations. What story do these images tell about opioid addiction?
+Now read the article, “Heroin Addiction Explained: How Opioids Hijack the Brain,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins dramatically: “The opioid epidemic is devastating America.” What evidence does the author provide to support this statement? Do you believe this claim is justified?
+2. According to the author, why do people start using opioids? What are endorphins? What is their role in addiction? Explain the statement: “A drug like heroin creates a tidal wave in the reward circuits of the brain.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Colbert Returns From Self-Imposed Shutdown
+After a two-week hiatus, Stephen Colbert greeted his audience the best way he knew how: with a sidelong jab at President Trump. The president is threatening to continue the government shutdown, which began on Dec. 22, for months to come if he does not receive congressional approval for funding a border wall.Two weeks into my freshman year of college, I noticed, after showering in the communal bathroom, dozens of hairs strewn across the basin of the sink. Distantly, I had known this moment would come, that I would join the ranks of bald men, but I had not expected it would come so soon. As a boy, I eyed my tonsured uncles warily, wincing at their scalps, revolted by the way their domes gleamed wetly on torrid summer days. But deep down I knew my repulsion was self-directed — that one day I would end up like them.
+Elsewhere on campus, my fellow first-year students were experimenting with gravity bongs and casual sex, while I spent most nights hunkered in isolation, applying minoxidil to my scalp. The chemical — which is the active ingredient in many hair-growth treatments — reeks of wet pennies and leaves the skin numb and tingly, like the flush of good Champagne. But the application process itself was gruesome and complex. After an hour of squeezing an eyedropper and scrubbing off the spillage, I would finally don a protective hairnet and climb into bed, a routine I kept up until the spring of my sophomore year. By then, blotches of peach fuzz had begun sprouting along my temples, which brought to mind “Teen Wolf” and was enough to make anyone jettison the whole enterprise.
+To fully appreciate the extent of my trauma, you must understand that I had, for one fleeting season, a truly luxurious mane. Even today when I see photos of myself from high school, I can barely register the fact that I once treaded through the world so oblivious to the gift I’d been given. Autumn-colored ringlets fell past my brow like those of Botticelli’s infants. Random strangers would compliment me on the street. “Your hair!” a friend’s mother once remarked, with a twinkle in her eye. “You look just like Cat Stevens.”
+If my hair loss was particularly punishing, it was because it occurred in the midst of my 20s, when most men are entering their romantic prime. Baldness, by contrast, has long been associated with impotence, a bond that goes back to the Old Testament story of Samson, if not earlier. The Roman poets agreed. “Ugly are hornless bulls,” Ovid wrote. “So is a tree without leaves, so is a head without hair.” The only arena where bald men eke out a slight advantage is in the appearance of wisdom — cold comfort when you’ve been consigned to the phenotypical dustbin.Lawyers for Mary Boone, the veteran art dealer who is facing possible prison time for filing false tax returns, are asking that she be spared incarceration, saying her offenses were the product of trauma, not greed.
+Ms. Boone is scheduled to be sentenced later this month after pleading guilty last September to two counts of filing false returns for 2011 for herself and her gallery. Federal authorities had charged her with reporting a false business loss and claiming about $1.6 million in personal expenses as business deductions.
+Each of the two counts carries a possible penalty of three years in prison.
+But in a memorandum to Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, Ms. Boone’s lawyers asked that she be sentenced instead to home confinement and probation with up to 1,000 hours of community service. Her troubled and unstable childhood led to mental health issues, a suicide attempt and drug and alcohol abuse, they wrote, and played a role in the crimes she committed. In particular, they said the poverty of her early life had left her fearful that, despite her success, she would end up destitute and dependent upon others.
+“Behind the facade of success and strength lies a fragile and, at times, broken individual,” the lawyers wrote in the filing made last month.Do you own a smartphone? How often do you use it?
+Now imagine: How long could you go without your phone? Months? Weeks? Days?
+In the Opinion article “In Search of Lost Screen Time,” Paul Greenberg writes:
+More than three-quarters of all Americans own a smartphone. In 2018 those 253 million Americans spent $1,380 and 1,460 hours on their smartphone and other mobile devices. That’s 91 waking days; cumulatively, that adds up to 370 billion waking American hours and $349 billion.
+He describes some of the many things we could do if we didn’t spend so much time on our phones. For example, we could:
+Circumnavigate Last year the globe-circling Scottish cyclist Mark Beaumont smashed the world circumnavigation record by riding around the world’s land mass in 79 days. He pedaled 16 hours a day for a total of 1,264 hours — or just under a year’s worth of smartphone usage. Average humans couldn’t match Mr. Beaumont’s feat, but the money and time saved by ditching their phones would afford them a lot of time with a personal trainer. Play Smartphone usage is highest among teenagers and people in their early 20s. And it’s at this crucial time when virtuosity in a musical instrument can be attained. At current rates of device usage, most young people will burn through the famous 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell associated with becoming an “elite pianist” over the course of the next decade. How many virtuosos will we lose in the years ahead if device use among young people continues to grow apace?
+Save The average American spends $14,000 per decade on smartphones. That’s $70,000 over the course of an average working life. Invested in a conservative mutual fund with an annual rate of return of 4 percent, that would yield over $1.3 million in retirement savings. (The current median household retirement savings is $5,000.)
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— How much time do you spend on your phone each day? What kinds of things do you do on your phone?
+— Could you go a year without your smartphone? Why or why not?
+— What benefits does your phone have for your life? In what ways do you think it negatively affects your life?
+— If you don’t have a smartphone, what are the advantages to not owning one? What are the disadvantages?
+— Does the article persuade you to give up your phone for a year? Which of the examples provided by the author are most persuasive? How would you spend your time if you were to live without a phone for a year?Clear aligners, around since the 1970s, can now be generated from 3-D scans electronically sent to a manufacturer along with X-rays, photos and a detailed prescription from the orthodontist directing how to address misaligned teeth, known as malocclusions. The patient gets a series of sequential, snug-fitting, clear plastic aligner trays, which usually can move the teeth into the desired position in six to 18 months depending on the complexity of the case.
+Aligners initially were marketed as braces for adults, but as the products improved, manufacturers saw an opportunity to sell them to an appearance-conscious younger market. Invisalign Teen was introduced in 2008. In 2017, the company introduced a new version of the product, which is intended to both align the teeth and move the lower jaw forward.
+“I think it started out by orthodontists who used aligners aggressively in their practice of adults, and started experimenting with teens,” Dr. Larson said.
+Consumer demand is a big factor driving the trend, energized by a culture of social media in which teens increasingly feel they are defined by how others perceive their physical appearance. Direct-to-consumer advertising and technology allowing for customization also play a part.
+According to Dr. Larson, there are not many well-designed clinical trials showing the effectiveness of aligners for adults, and even fewer for teens, but there is a lot of clinical evidence and experience showing that for certain types of dental problems, aligners can be very effective.
+When clear aligners first arrived on the scene, the technology was inefficient and orthodontists were skeptical. “Now, after years of thinking they were an inferior appliance in all cases, we see them being equivalent in many cases and superior in some cases,” said Dr. Alexander Waldman, an orthodontist in private practice in Los Angeles.
+The advantages of clear aligners include invisibility, removability and less pain. “There’s no teenager who wants braces. It’s awkward to wear them. The little kids sometimes don’t mind as much but if I have a 14-year-old girl in my chair, it better be a clear aligner case,” said Dr. Elliott Moskowitz, a clinical professor in orthodontics at New York University College of Dentistry who is also in private practice in New York City.Old Souls
+You’ve read work by poets from 14th-century Iran (Hafiz) and 15th-century India (Kabir); have you tried the work of the 13th-century Sufi mystic poet Rumi? “The Essential Rumi,” translated by Coleman Barks, includes three poems in particular (among many!) — “Two Kinds of Intelligence,” “Say I Am You” and “The Seed Market” — in which the metaphysical and the terrestrial mingle. Then, for more ancient beauty and even more brevity, try the 17th-century haikus of Matsuo Basho collected in “On Love and Barley,” translated by Lucien Stryk. The Japanese Zen Buddhist’s lines — full of cherry blossoms and “plum scent” and a cricket’s song — offer a transcendent connection to nature that spans centuries.
+Inside Out
+Two contemporary poets who map external landscapes while navigating internal terrain may provide just what you need to spark discussion and reflection among the women in your group: “I used to pretend to believe in God. Mainly, I liked so much to talk to someone in the dark.” The first two lines of Ada Limón’s “Miracle Fish” give you a sense of the whole of her searching, vital collection, “Bright Dead Things.” There are horses and trees and birds throughout — try “Drift,” “Lies About Sea Creatures” and the startling and powerful “How to Triumph Like a Girl” — as well as plenty of space for believers and agnostics to meet.
+Faith surfaces frequently in “Otherwise,” the new and selected work by Jane Kenyon published in 1996, the year after she died. Many of Kenyon’s poems are attuned to seasons, in both nature and life. And most are grave and still, though in certain entries — notably “Evening Sun,” “Things” and “Let Evening Come” — movement and light flash from line to line.
+Double Takes
+In much of Joy Harjo’s work belief takes shape as an origin story. Both “Once the World
+Was Perfect,” from her 2015 book, “Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings,” and “Remember,” from 1983’s “She Had Some Horses,” reveal the ties between selfhood and the wider, wild universe.
+Finally, “Black Nature,” an anthology of nature poems by black writers edited by Camille T. Dungy, is an invaluable resource that you’ll want to keep close at hand. A sprinkling of Richard Wright’s haikus appear throughout the book’s 10 thematically organized sections, creating witty respites amid the longer verse. The book’s second poem, Lucille Clifton’s “the earth is a living thing,” evokes rich, mythic images of blackness — a bear, a hawk — to convey an encompassing vision of the world. The lens narrows in Robert Hayden’s chilly, holy whisper, “Ice Storm.” Bracing clarity also reigns in Marilyn Nelson’s “Last Talk With Jim Hardwick,” which includes the line, “Nothing is wasted / or permanently lost / in Nature,” and stretches down the page in an elegant strip, as deep and direct as a homily.Corinth’s infrastructure runs so leanly as to be almost invisible: There are no public buses, and Alcorn County recently announced that it would stop funding the local railroad museum. Tax rates in Corinth have dropped slightly in recent years, while the percentage of revenue generated by criminal-justice-related debt has grown. According to the annual audit submitted by Corinth to the state, in fiscal year 2017, the year Jamie Tillman was arrested for public intoxication, general fund revenues for the city were just $10.8 million. Total revenue for the year was $20.3 million, half of which came from taxes; close to $7 million came from “intergovernmental revenue,” or grants and funds from the state and federal authorities. And approximately $623,000 came from what the city defines as “fines and forfeitures.”
+The Corinth city clerk declined to answer questions about the breakdown of the budget or how the revenue from fines compares with those of neighboring towns, referring questions to the city attorney, Wendell Trapp, who did not respond to emails seeking comment. But a report completed in 2017 by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights offers some answers. Combing Census Bureau data and city audit documents, the commission noted that of nearly 4,600 American municipalities with populations above 5,000, the median received less than 1 percent of their revenue from fines and fees. But a sizable number of cities, like Doraville, Ga., or Saint Ann, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, have reported fines-and-fees revenue amounting to 10 percent or more of total municipal income.
+Corinth’s revenue from fines in 2017 was 5.7 percent of its general fund revenues, putting it — if not quite at the Saint Ann level — at the high end when compared with the municipalities in the Commission on Civil Rights’s report. When I sent Joanna Weiss, of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, a copy of the 2017 Corinth audit, she noted that this would be dismaying enough in itself. “But you can also see,” she added, “that the biggest expenditure, by far, for the city of Corinth is public safety” — including court and police services, or the very people extracting the fines.
+In 2017, Micah West and Sara Wood of the S.P.L.C. drove to Corinth to open an investigation into the Municipal Court, with an eye toward later filing a lawsuit — the most effective way, they believed, to halt Judge John C. Ross’s jailing of low-income defendants. During court sessions, they would often walk down the hall to the clerk’s office, where defendants were permitted to use a landline phone to make a final plea for the cash that would set them free. The space amounted to an earthly purgatory: Secure the money, and you were saved. Fail, and you’d be sent to jail. “All around us, people would be crying or yelling, getting more and more desperate,” Wood recalled.
+That October, she watched a 59-year-old man named Kenneth Lindsey enter the office, his lean arms hanging lank by his side, his face gaunt and pale. Lindsey had been in court for driving with an expired registration, but he hadn’t been able to afford the fines: He was suffering from hepatitis C and liver cancer, and he had spent the very last of his savings on travel to Tupelo for a round of chemotherapy. Until his next state disability check arrived, he was broke. “Can you help?” Lindsey whispered into the phone.
+A few seconds of silence passed. “All right, then. Thanks anyway.”
+Finally, around 1:45 p.m., Lindsey managed to get through to his sister. She barely had $100 herself, but she promised to drive it over after her shift was through.New this week:
+PORTRAITS WITHOUT FRAMES By Lev Ozerov. (New York Review Books, paper, $16.95.) Composed in free verse, these 50 portraits of Soviet writers, composers and artists trapped between art and politics span the famous — like Anna Akhmatova, Isaac Babel and Dmitry Shostakovich — to the lesser known. IRON CURTAIN JOURNALS By Allen Ginsberg, edited by Michael Schumacher. (University of Minnesota, $29.95.) The great Beat poet traveled to Communist countries in the first half of 1965, Cuba and Poland among them. These journals convey his impressions, both insightful and banal. FROM GUTENBERG TO GOOGLE By Tom Wheeler. (Brookings, $24.99.) Wheeler, the former chairman of the F.C.C., turns to “network revolutions” of the past, like the invention of the printing press and the telegraph, to better understand our present. WINTER WAR By Eric Rauchway. (Basic, $28.) Rauchway explores the now forgotten moment in 1932 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected, but before he was inaugurated, when his nascent plans for the New Deal faced a formidable critic in the man he beat, Herbert Hoover. PSYCHEDELIC PROPHETS Edited by Cynthia Carson Bisbee, Paul Bisbee, et al. (McGill-Queen’s University, $65.) Beginning in 1953, Aldous Huxley began a correspondence with Humphry Osmond, a British psychiatrist interested in the potential of psychedelic drugs to treat mental illness. The doors were open and a lengthy exchange of letters, collected here, followed.
+& Noteworthy
+In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.
+“At the beginning of the year, I had the brilliant idea to read some Russian novels. That idea seemed less brilliant once I moved to the politics team to cover the midterm elections. For months, I lugged Leo Tolstoy’s ANNA KARENINA through airports, stuffing it into my backpack as I traveled around the country. There it sat in the passenger seat of my rented Corolla in Valencia, Calif. There it was again, in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Alone at night in cities far from home, I would try to read a few pages — about family, about betrayal, about revenge — before falling asleep. More than once, I stopped in awe as I recognized in myself Tolstoy’s descriptions of love and anger, jealousy and delight. ‘Whenever, at whatever moment, she might be asked what she was thinking about,’ Tolstoy wrote of Anna, ‘she could answer without mistake: about the same thing, about her happiness and her unhappiness.’ As Anna famously threw herself under the wheels of a train, part of me felt relieved that I would no longer have to carry her around. A bigger part of me felt like I had lost my closest companion.”
+— Sydney Ember, politics reporterEase, comfort, and pleasure are what millennials, those members of the high-anxiety “Doom Generation,” really want — and capitalism is into it. A new beverage called Recess is a case study in where those desires meet. Bubbles? Yes. CBD? Check. Sans-serif block font? Yeah! A knowing, nudging, creepily on-point Instagram presence? Obviously.
+Recess is a sparkling water infused with CBD (government name: cannabidiol), a nonintoxicating hemp extract that is said to act as a pain reliever, anti-anxiety, anti-inflammatory and chillifier. The drink also contains adaptogens, ephemera from the neverland of is-it-food-or-not that are supposed to reduce stress and improve memory, focus and immunity. Their efficacy is without definitive evidence, but both CBD and adaptogens are decidedly a thing in functional health and wellness — and their marketing.
+Recess is headquartered in New York City and made in the Hudson Valley (it was formulated in Beacon and is produced in Fishkill). The company was founded and is still owned by a millennial named Benjamin Witte, who previously worked in tech marketing in San Francisco.
+In the era before the commodified wellness movement, this kind of drink would have been tucked into the dimmest refrigerated corner of the spookiest health-food store, not in high demand at $29.99 for a six pack. (The company has since caught up, but Recess says that a few weeks after its October start it had 4,000 back-orders.) Now, the mania for CBD (and the vague curiosity about adaptogens) means that Recess — the matte, sunset palette of the cans as appealing as a luxury lip gloss or free candy or a toy car — has lit up the shifting aspirations of the middle and upper classes of millennials.“Not that long ago, women weren’t even allowed to walk on the floor of these chambers,” she said.
+Ms. Stewart-Cousins then proceeded to list the many reforms she said will follow this year. A sampling: the codification of abortion rights under state law; expansion of voting rights; protection of child sex abuse victims; bail reform; a revamp of campaign finance laws.
+“There is nothing to stop us, and there is so much more that we have to accomplish,” she said.
+While that may be true on some bills — the ones above are expected to sail through — on others, fissures are already showing. And for the most part, the disagreements are within the Democratic Party: between urban legislators and those from outside cities, moderates and progressives.
+In other words, the liveliness of the first day is sure to continue in the months ahead, but the fate of the optimism remains to be seen.
+Here are five of the most pressing and vexing questions that loom in Albany:
+How will we fund the subway system?
+The subways need money. The subways have no money. On that much, lawmakers agree. But when it comes to how to get that money, things get complicated fast.BILBAO, Spain — Europe’s midseason soccer transfer window is open this month. For teams battling relegation, and potential financial ruin, it brings a last, vital chance to strengthen a leaky defense or fortify a goal-shy forward line ahead of the second half of the season.
+Among those teams is Athletic Bilbao, which is in 17th place in La Liga, the 20-team Spanish league, and already on its second manager this season.
+Financially, Athletic, a century-old power on Spain’s northern coast, has little in common with the clubs that find themselves in a similarly grim position. The team is flush with cash, with about 200 million euros, or about $228 million, in reserves, and has access to another 90 million euros that — if deployed to lure talent from soccer’s global marketplace — would probably go a long way toward firing it up the league standings and out of danger. But unlike almost every other team in the market, Bilbao cannot spend those millions on just anyone.
+Athletic is a throwback. Tradition dictates that it can only field players who were born in the Basque Country — territory that includes seven provinces that stretch from northern Spain into France — or who moved to the region in their youth and learned to play soccer here.Logistically, impeaching a president or other top government official involves two steps.
+A majority of the House must first vote to approve articles of impeachment, which essentially serve as an indictment of the official and sets up a trial in the Senate. Then, two-thirds of the Senate must vote to convict the official to remove him or her from office.
+To date, only two presidents have been impeached — Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. Both were acquitted in the Senate. According to the Congressional Research Service, of the 15 federal judges, one senator and one cabinet member whom the House has voted to impeach since 1797, the Senate convicted eight federal judges.
+For those hoping that Congress might impeach Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, there is even less precedent for impeaching members of the nation’s highest court than for the presidency. The House has only once voted to impeach a Supreme Court justice — Justice Samuel Chase in 1804 — and he was also acquitted by the Senate.
+Mr. Trump, for his part, has cast impeachment proceedings as a political liability for Democrats. In a Friday tweet, he also again wrongly claimed that he is the most popular Republican president in histo ry.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+WASHINGTON — America’s carbon dioxide emissions rose by 3.4 percent in 2018, the biggest increase in eight years, according to a preliminary estimate published Tuesday.
+Strikingly, the sharp uptick in emissions occurred even as a near-record number of coal plants around the United States retired last year, illustrating how difficult it could be for the country to make further progress on climate change in the years to come, particularly as the Trump administration pushes to roll back federal regulations that limit greenhouse gas emissions.
+The estimate, by the research firm Rhodium Group, pointed to a stark reversal. Fossil fuel emissions in the United States have fallen significantly since 2005 and declined each of the previous three years, in part because of a boom in cheap natural gas and renewable energy, which have been rapidly displacing dirtier coal-fired power.
+Yet even a steep drop in coal use last year wasn’t enough to offset rising emissions in other parts of the economy. Some of that increase was weather-related: A relatively cold winter led to a spike in the use of oil and gas for heating in areas like New England.Relatability is the chief psychological lubricant that glides you thoughtlessly down the curated, endless scroll of your feed. It is the coin of the digital-media realm, a mealy concept that delights advertisers and publishers alike because it all but guarantees to garner a reader’s attention. Whether it’s attached to cats jumping into and out of cardboard boxes or Ariana Grande saying that she hates America or Beto O’Rourke’s own Instagram stories, which the website Mashable says are “so relatable that often people have no choice but to screenshot his posts and literally write ‘MOOD,’ ” “relatable” can encompass it all. The word is now so pervasive that the #relatable hashtag has become a kind of winking gesture at its own utter meaninglessness as a form of social connection. The familiar has been funneled into our eyes so constantly for the last few years that even it has been rendered alien.
+Why do we want to share what is relatable? The French critic and philosopher René Girard suggested that all desire is mimetic, that we like things simply because we observe other people — our friends, Rihanna — liking those same things, too. The California rock star and lay philosopher David Lee Roth touched on a similar idea when he suggested that music critics enjoy Elvis Costello “because they all look like Costello.” He wasn’t exactly wrong. Even the critics who turned up their nose at the bombast of Van Halen in favor of the bookish pop-rock of “Armed Forces” weren’t exactly innocent of such blinkered, ego-driven pathology. Relatability is a desire for a connection to the world, to want what we see in others — especially if what we see in others is ourselves.
+Though it now feels as common as air, the modern meaning of “relatable” is a relatively new addition to the lexicon, first used in education journals in the late 1940s. Before that, the word meant something more like “comprehensible.” This new definition — that which you can relate to — entered mainstream circulation as television-industry jargon in the 1980s. It was a metric for quiz shows like “The Newlywed Game,” whose host, Bob Eubanks, praised it in a 1981 Washington Post article for its “relatable humor, the kind that takes place in every home.” As shows like “Hill Street Blues” and, later, “Twin Peaks” began to elevate the medium of TV, the word helped signify the stuff that would play in Peoria.
+In marketing language for movies and television, “relatable” became the go-to word when you wanted something that created a stronger relationship with the show than simply “likable.” This was you on the screen, beaming into millions of homes. In 1996, the head of marketing for Fox Filmed Entertainment spoke to The Times about trying to expand that relationship to a younger generation through their new MTV-ified Baz Luhrmann adaptation of “Romeo and Juliet.” The zip-bang style of the movie was all part of a targeted campaign, and the goal was to make Shakespeare’s play “tremendously relatable to young people.” Eighteen years later, it was Shakespeare again who inspired Rebecca Mead to write in The New Yorker about the “scourge of relatability” after Ira Glass, host of “This American Life,” complained that Shakespeare’s plays were “not relatable.”THE WATER CURE
+By Sophie Mackintosh
+269 pp. Doubleday. $25.95.
+In most apocalyptic tales, the reader is expected to accept certain baseline assumptions. The first is that the apocalypse is real; the second, that the story’s main characters represent its truest victims. Sophie Mackintosh subverts both of these assumptions in her sumptuous yet sparsely written debut, “The Water Cure,” which was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker Prize.
+On an island somewhere near a mainland, three girls grow up under the care of their father, called King, and their nameless mother. King seeks to keep them all safe from a peculiar plague that, among other things, makes women effectively allergic to men. Nearly everything in the preceding sentence is questionable, however — including the nature of King’s fatherly love, as it immediately becomes clear that his oldest daughter, Grace, is pregnant by him. This questionable love also plays out via bizarre “therapies” to which the three girls are subjected in order to purify them of unspecified toxins. The girls are kept on a strange diet and made to sweat themselves into unconsciousness in saunas, freeze their hands in buckets of ice water, hold their breath until they pass out. Knowing no better, they are willing participants; to them, this is the only safe love, given that they have been taught to fear strangers — especially men. Men other than King, that is.
+In one of the cruelest therapies, the family “draws the irons,” small tokens that determine who among them is permitted to be the focus of the others’ love. Middle girl Lia is the one most often left love-deficient — which has devastating effects when King vanishes and, later, three strangers come to the island. The strangers are two adult men and a young boy, apparent refugees from whatever is happening on the mainland. When one of the men shows sexual interest in Lia, she responds with greedy desperation, and all three sisters react through the warped and violent lens of what love means to them.
+Image
+So is this an apocalyptic tale of women surviving in a world that has turned strange and cruel? Perhaps more a tale of patriarchal family structures taken to an extreme — the father as both predator and god, the mother a collaborator who occasionally protects, all three daughters hovering in a limbo somewhere between cherished possessions and future concubines for the patriarch. There is also a distinctly cultlike element to the family dynamics, from the myths that both parents weave in order to maintain control, to the unquestioning relentlessness shown by Sky, the coddled youngest daughter, whenever something threatens the family home.To update a bathroom, you could swap out the cabinet pulls and switch the faucet. But if you’re ready for a bigger change, almost nothing is more effective than new tile.
+Replacing tiles that are damaged, stained, outdated or just not to your liking is an opportunity not just to refresh a bathroom, but to give it a whole new style. And with all of the materials, shapes and colors currently available, you have the chance to create something extraordinary.
+But that’s also the problem: With all those choices, how do you know you’ve made the best one?He has since been released on grounds there was not sufficient reason to hold him in detention pending the outcome of the investigation, said Georg Ungefuk, a prosecutor with the Frankfurt-based office responsible for cybercrimes, which is carrying out the investigation.
+Germany’s main government network was breached by hackers in 2015, and the authorities worried that information obtained then would be used against politicians leading up to the 2017 election. Those fears were largely unfounded, but Mr. Seehofer, the interior minister, warned that last month’s breach should be a warning to everyone, especially ahead of the European parliamentary election in May.
+“We must be prepared that outside actors may want to influence this election and take every precaution to prevent this and do what we can to recognize such an action as early as possible,” he said. “It could be a very different perpetrator.”
+Despite the shock that a single person was able to agitate and alarm the country’s political establishment, Mr. Münch pointed out that many young people had committed crimes from computers in their bedrooms, citing examples of teens who had been caught selling weapons or drugs over the “dark web,” areas of the internet hidden from the view of most users.
+Dirk Engling, spokesman for the Chaos Computer Club, a German collective of hackers, said the hack itself wasn’t technically difficult, but required a great deal of patience in order to learn the necessary passwords.
+He listed previous examples in Germany of such hacks where an individual’s private information was stolen for the purposes of publishing online, known in the tech world as “doxxing,” but pointed out that they had largely gone ignored by policymakers.
+“Now that they have been snatched from their online accounts, suddenly it seems to have changed some minds,” Mr. Engling said.Today, Democrats in the House plan to start the process of passing individual appropriations bills to reopen the government, beginning with legislation that would fund the Treasury Department, including the I.R.S.
+Notable: In making his case for a wall, Mr. Trump has said his predecessors in the Oval Office had admitted to him that they should have built the barriers themselves. But all of the living former presidents say that’s not true.
+Explainer: The White House has raised the idea of invoking emergency powers to build the wall without lawmakers’ approval. We examined how that might work.
+The Daily: In today’s episode, a Times reporter who covers immigration discusses the situation at the southwestern border.Dr. O’Neill said that he and his colleagues had worried about communities’ reaction to the program. “But people who understand dengue and live in transmission areas are horrified and scared,” he said. “I live in Saigon, where transmission is through the roof. We’re not seeing any community pushback.”
+The cost of the program in Townsville was $13 per person covered, but that was because it’s a sprawling city. In a place like Rio, where people live closer together, the cost is $4 per person. That might save Rio money over all. It’s a onetime cost. And treating dengue and Zika are expensive; babies with Zika-related microcephaly may need lifelong care. Dr. O’Neill said he hoped to get the cost down to $1 per person.
+The program’s strategy of replacing bad mosquitoes with good ones has some disadvantages as well. Unfortunately, it doesn’t reduce the number of mosquitoes or their bites.
+Also, there’s a trade-off. The better Wolbachia does at blocking disease, the more it weakens the mosquito. Weaker mosquitoes are less able to spread into the population and maintain their hold. The World Mosquito Program is using the best Wolbachia strain possible, said Dr. Xi, who is not involved in the program. “ But the technology needs to be improved so we are able to develop a mosquito that can completely block the virus and still be able to spread into the population.”
+Dr. Xi, who is now a professor at Michigan State University, uses Wolbachia in a different way: to eliminate the mosquito population. He heads a research collaboration between M.S.U. and Sun Yat-sen University, in which the universities built a mosquito factory in Guangzhou, China. Dr. Xi also is leading a project with Autonomous University of Yucatán to start another factory, in Merida, Mexico.
+The China factory can produce 60 million Wolbachia-infected male mosquitoes per week, he said. Unlike the replacement strategy, an elimination strategy releases only males. Sex-sorting is expensive and difficult. Essentially, mosquitoes are put through a giant sieve, which separates males from the larger females. But releasing only males makes it possible to clear an area of all mosquitoes: When the existing females, which are all uninfected, mate with an infected male, their eggs won’t hatch. So the population is gradually reduced.
+This strategy creates a double attack on dengue and Zika: The infected mosquitoes don’t transmit disease, and their population dwindles to the point where they can’t keep an epidemic going. It could also get a warmer welcome from local residents, as the only mosquitoes released are males, which don’t bite.Their entry was followed by violent protests, many carried out by young men with the backing of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which governs India. The Sabarimala row has now engulfed not only Kerala, but the rest of the country. Religious sentiment and political opportunism have kept the issue in the spotlight, where it is likely to remain as the country braces for a parliamentary election this year.
+India’s reputation as a brutally patriarchal society isn’t misbegotten, but it ignores how varied the status of women is here. In Kerala, because of early social justice movements and relatively enlightened governance, women have enjoyed freedoms not common elsewhere in the country. Over the 20th century, women in the state had freer access to health care and education than in many parts of India. Some communities had inheritance customs that gave women an unusual amount over control of property and private finances.
+But Kerala’s Hindus could also be more rigid and hierarchical than their counterparts elsewhere. The 19th-century reformer Swami Vivekananda called the state a “lunatic asylum” for its humiliating range of caste discriminations.
+Sabarimala devotees often pride themselves on having escaped these fetters. The shrine is nominally open to persons of all religions. It is not known to have practiced caste exclusion, and its priests have said they will admit transgender people without a menstrual cycle. While other Ayyappan temples in India admit women of all ages, the faithful say that the exclusion of notionally fertile women is essential to the practices of this one shrine. Some female supporters of the ban even began a campaign called #ReadyToWait — that is, for menopause.Is There a Crisis at the Border? President Trump says there’s a problem, but it may be one of his own making.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Jessica Cheung and Theo Balcomb, and edited by Paige CowettYesterday, for example, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo appeared with Hillary Clinton to discuss approving stronger abortion rights laws early in the new legislative session, which begins tomorrow.
+My colleagues have a story looking at other major issues Mr. Cuomo or his Democratic colleagues plan to tackle, such as school and subway funding and single-payer health care.
+But there are a lot of bills that never really had a chance of passing when Democrats controlled only the Assembly, and Republicans held the State Senate.
+One example: removing President Trump’s name from a state park in Westchester and Putnam Counties.
+“That’s something I wanted to get done but obviously couldn’t,” said Nily Rozic, a Democratic assemblywoman from Queens. “Now we have no excuse, right?”
+She also plans to reintroduce legislation to incarcerate inmates near their children, which supporters say helps keep families intact and reduce recidivism.BANGKOK — Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, the 18-year-old Saudi woman who fled her family and avoided deportation from Thailand by barricading herself in an airport hotel room and posting about her plight on social media, spent her first day of freedom in Bangkok on Tuesday.
+After appearing to be headed for deportation back to her family, whom she accused of abusing her, Ms. Alqunun won a reprieve from the Thai authorities on Monday night. Those officials turned her case over to the United Nations Refugee Agency, which will take up to 10 days to process her request for refugee status and find a country that will accept her.
+Those days will be critical to her fate. Even as Saudi officials continue to lobby the Thai government to send her back against her will, United Nations officials have begun gathering information to determine whether she qualifies for refugee status and eventual asylum.
+Here is the path ahead for Ms. Alqunun.
+What happens to her now?
+Ms. Alqunun is in the care of the United Nations Refugee Agency, also known as U.N.H.C.R. After leaving the airport on Monday night, she is staying at an undisclosed hotel in Bangkok, and could not be reached for comment on Tuesday.BRUSSELS — The Trump administration downgraded the diplomatic status of the European Union’s delegation to the United States last year without making a formal announcement or informing the bloc about the change, a European official said on Tuesday.
+After protest from Brussels and discussion between the European Union and the Trump administration, the reclassification of the delegation and the consequent demotion of the ambassador, David O’Sullivan, is understood to have been reversed, at least temporarily, the official said.
+Mr. Trump has been critical of multilateral institutions, and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, delivered a provocative speech in Brussels on Dec. 4 in which he questioned the value of multinational organizations and institutions like the United Nations and the European Union. Mr. Pompeo then asked whether the European Union was “ensuring that the interests of countries and their citizens are placed before those of bureaucrats here in Brussels.”
+The next day, the European Union’s demotion from a member state to an international organization became clear at the funeral of President George Bush, when Mr. O’Sullivan’s name was not called in the expected order, dictated by diplomatic protocols. The names of diplomats who had gathered in Washington to pay their respects were spoken, as is custom, from the longest-serving to the newest ambassador, a European Union official told the German news agency Deutsche Welle. “But he was called up as the last person.”Myanmar says its army will “crush” an insurgent group that attacked four police stations in a western border region last week, the latest escalation in a tangle of slow-burning civil wars between the government and armed ethnic insurgencies.
+The attacks Friday in the western state of Rakhine came less than three weeks after the government declared a temporary suspension of military operations against other armed groups in parts of the country’s north and east. Analysts see a familiar pattern, in which halting progress toward peace in one part of Myanmar is undercut by flaring violence in another.
+The attacks on the police stations, carried out by an armed group called the Arakan Army, are part of a monthlong insurgency that has displaced thousands of civilians in Rakhine State. The campaign has “added another complicated level of complexity onto an already complicated situation, and revealed the depths of a Rakhine nationalism which has not been well understood since 2012,” said David Scott Mathieson, an independent political analyst in Myanmar.
+Mr. Mathieson was referring to a year when violence flared between Rakhine Buddhists and Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine, leaving more than 100,000 people homeless. Both groups have long been marginalized by Myanmar’s Bamar ethnic majority, and the Arakan Army was formed about a decade ago by Rakhine nationalists who oppose Bamar-centric rule.SHANGHAI — China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has offered carrots to President Trump to stop a trade war that has contributed to a sharp slowdown in the Chinese economy. On Tuesday, he also seemed to brandish a stick.
+Kim Jong-un, North Korea’s leader, arrived by train in Beijing on Tuesday to meet with Mr. Xi during the second day of talks nearby between midlevel trade negotiators from China and the United States. Though the government said the events were unconnected, Mr. Kim’s surprise visit was an unmistakable reminder that China could complicate the Trump administration’s pursuit of other goals — including ridding the North of nuclear weapons — if the two powers fail to strike a deal on trade.
+The trade talks were originally set to wrap up Tuesday, but wound up being extended into Wednesday. The two sides are laboring to finish a deal before March 2, when higher American tariffs will kick in and escalate the trade war.
+Mr. Kim’s arrival was the clearest sign yet that China is looking for ways to prod the United States to settle the dispute quickly. China’s economy has slowed significantly. Both business and consumer confidence have fallen. Car sales have plunged. Weak smartphone purchases contributed to Apple’s warning last week that its sales figures would be lower than expected because of results from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan.Good Tuesday morning. (Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
+Could venture capitalists make student debt obsolete?
+Silicon Valley is captivated by a new concept that could eliminate student debt, Andrew writes in his column.
+Students were saddled with $1.5 trillion in debt last year, a record high. An idea called Income Share Agreements has been talked about for years as a way to alleviate that burden. Under this system, tuition is free, but students agree to pay back a percentage of their income for several years if they get good jobs after graduation.
+Lambda School, an online learning start-up founded in 2017 with the backing of Y Combinator, has $30 million in funding today from venture capitalists to make the concept a reality.
+Andrew writes:
+The investments will be used to turn Lambda, which has focused on subjects like coding and data science, into a multidisciplinary school offering half-year programs in professions where there is significant hiring demand, like nursing and cybersecurity. It’s an expansion that could be a precursor to Lambda becoming a full-scale university.
+The Lambda model is being closely watched. It’s meant to treat students as investments rather than cash cows — and potentially lift their crippling debt load.Lin-Manuel Miranda is already a composer, a lyricist, an actor and an author. Now he’s going to be a bookseller.
+Mr. Miranda and three of his “Hamilton” collaborators have purchased the Drama Book Shop, a century-old theater district purveyor of scripts, sheet music and other stage-related reading material.
+The surprise move is an effort to sustain the store, which is a mainstay of New York’s theater scene — in 2011 it was recognized with a Tony honor for excellence — but has struggled to survive the brutal Times Square real estate market and recently announced that it was being forced to move from its current location.
+The rescue plan is a joint venture between the “Hamilton” team and the city, which has pledged to find the store an affordable space in Midtown.HONG KONG — A man attacked and injured 20 children with a hammer on Tuesday at an elementary school in Beijing, the local authorities said.
+Three children at the Beijing No. 1 Affiliated Elementary School of Xuanwu Normal School in the district of Xicheng were seriously injured in the late-morning attack, the district government said on the social media site Sina Weibo. But none of the injuries appeared to be life-threatening, it said.
+A 49-year-old maintenance worker at the school was taken into custody by the police, the government said. The statement identified the man by his surname, Jia, and said he was from the northeastern province of Heilongjiang. It said he was believed to have attacked the children because the school would not renew his contract.
+The man attacked the students between classes with a hammer that he used for repairs, the statement said.Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed this past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you'll find the answer.
+Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.Three years ago, after Clemson defeated college football’s signature team, Notre Dame, through a South Carolina downpour, Coach Dabo Swinney coined a kind of motto for his program, describing the attitude that would bring the second school of a smallish Southern state to the sport’s heights.
+“Tonight it was B.Y.O.G. — bring your own guts,” he said then.
+Monday night’s 44-16 victory over top-seeded Alabama (14-1), which gave the Tigers their second national championship in three seasons, was not so much about guts but domination. The dominance began on Alabama’s first drive — which ended abruptly when the sophomore cornerback A. J. Terrell intercepted Alabama’s Tua Tagovailoa, the Heisman Trophy runner-up, and took it 44 yards for a touchdown — and basically never stopped.
+The victory came a little more than a week after Clemson (15-0) ran through Notre Dame in the national semifinals. That wasn’t a B.Y.O.G.-type game. Rather, it was a 30-3 demolition.
+Yet the roots of these performances lay in an incredibly gutsy decision Swinney made, not amid the playoff’s high drama but during late September’s uncertainty.$6.2 MILLION
+18-05 Ditmars Boulevard (at Shore Boulevard)
+Astoria, Queens
+A real estate investment firm has bought this four-story 1927 walk-up on the northeast corner, across the street from Astoria Park to the south and the East River to the west. It has 20 rent-stabilized one-bedroom apartments of which seven are vacant and are to be renovated. Most apartments have views of either Manhattan or Astoria Park. The building, which was partly held in trust and partly as an estate, was owned by the same family for more than 50 years. The cap rate was 3.2 percent.
+Buyer: Fairfield Acquisitions
+Seller: Diamantoukos Estate & Trust
+Broker: Steven Llorens, Douglas Elliman Real EstateLast month, Mr. Ghosn and Nissan itself were indicted on charges that they had withheld millions of dollars of his income from Nissan’s financial filings for years when he was both chairman and chief executive of the company.
+Mr. Ghosn and his lawyers portrayed him on Tuesday as a dedicated executive committed to overseeing the alliance. His actions, they said, were disclosed to and approved by other company officials. In his statement to the court, Mr. Ghosn said he had “never received any compensation from Nissan that was not disclosed.”
+Late last month, he was rearrested on the allegations that he had improperly transferred investment losses to Nissan, and his detention was extended.
+Mr. Otsuru said at a news conference that Nissan’s own board minutes showed the company had agreed that Nissan would temporarily provide collateral for Mr. Ghosn when he incurred deep paper losses on foreign exchange investments after the financial crisis of 2008.
+The board minutes have not been publicly released.
+In a statement submitted to the court for the hearing on Tuesday, Mr. Ghosn’s defense lawyers described the board minutes as authorizing a Nissan “secretarial section” to enter into foreign exchange contracts “for the benefit of non-Japanese corporate officers and directors at no cost to the company.”
+Mr. Ghosn, the statement said, had asked the board to pass a resolution with general language that did not specifically include his name so that “he would not have to explain the situation where he had to pay for significant losses” as the “suspect, if possible, did not want to have all of the people attending the board meeting to know that he had incurred significant valuation losses.”This article is part of the David Leonhardt newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.
+I’ll confess to being torn about the major television networks’ decision to air President Trump’s speech tonight on the border wall. On the one hand, the networks said no to President Barack Obama when he asked for airtime to give a speech on immigration in 2014. They said it was too political to deserve a free prime-time spot — and Trump’s speech is clearly political, as well.
+But if they had said no to Trump, the decision would have dominated the political conversation for at least a couple of days. The issue would be a fight between Trump and the media as much as it would be about the government shutdown or immigr ation policy. And I think fights between Trump and the media tend to benefit Trump . They turn attention away from his own presidential incompetence and misbehavior toward journalists , who aren’t exactly the most popular group of people in the country.
+Of course, this whole situation means that Trump is effectively rewarded for his scorched-earth style of politics — with a prime-time address. But don’t despair. The speech probably won’t matter, as Jonathan Bernstein of Bloomberg Opinion explains. “We have plenty of evidence on this one: Presidential speeches rarely change minds,” he writes this morning. “Voters most likely to tune in to such a speech are the partisans least likely to change their minds, either about the policy or the president.”Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email)
+After California’s deadliest wildfire all but wiped out the town of Paradise and killed 86 people in November, calls have risen for Pacific Gas & Electric to be held financially accountable for any role the company may have played in sparking the blaze.
+More fires have been traced to equipment owned by the utilities, but in 2017, legislators moved to protect the companies from bearing the cost, arguing that the companies otherwise risked bankruptcy. Utilities are seeking the same thing for 2018.
+My colleague Ivan Penn, who covers energy, wrote about how those moves by lawmakers followed extensive lobbying pushes by PG&E and other utilities. I asked him about what that means.
+Jill Cowan: What are the stakes if PG&E goes bankrupt? Are we talking about a loss of power? Or would that come at a later point?1st Half: Slow Start for Clemson
+Clemson got the ball first but the Tigers went absolutely nowhere, gaining 3 yards before settling for a punt. Trevor Lawrence, Clemson’s freshman quarterback, threw a pair of incompletions on the drive, with his attempt to Hunter Renfrow on 3rd-and-7 sailing well out of the wide receiver’s reach.
+Alabama now takes over looking to get something started.
+Clemson 7, Alabama 0: Clemson’s Defense Gets the Jump
+In a shocking turn of events, Alabama looked to be moving the ball early in its first drive but A.J. Terrell stepped in front of Tua Tagovailoa’s third pass of the game, intercepting and returning it 44 yards for a touchdown.
+Before the interception, Tagovailoa had started the game 2 for 2 for 20 yards with a picture-perfect 12-yard pass to DeVonta Smith that had gotten the Crimson Tide a first down.I am a single mom of a teenage son, and we are very close and open with each other. He has three friends from his previous school whom he still sees regularly. Recently he confided that the boys told him they had skipped school twice over a few weeks, renting bikes and riding from one end of town to another to spend the day at one of the boy’s homes while his parents were working. I sat with this information for a day and then felt compelled to call the boys’ parents. My rationale was that I have known them for years, and if the roles were reversed, I would want to get the call. I asked the parents not to divulge where they were getting their intelligence, but unfortunately they threw my son under the bus. He is livid with me. He said that he shared this information with me privately and that I betrayed him. He said that he will never tell me anything ever again and that I have destroyed his friendships. I stuck to my guns and apologized only for not explaining to him earlier that, as the grown-up, I have a responsibility to report things when I think others may be putting themselves in harm’s way. What do you think? Name Withheld
+Your resentment toward these other parents for throwing your son “under the bus” may be justified, but you should have foreseen that your actions were likely to implicate him: How many people were in a position to know? And though you’re clearly pleased by the openness of your relationship with him, he will have noticed that it wasn’t reciprocated. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to discuss your intentions with him before you made the calls? He’s old enough that he might have had relevant things to say in making the case for not doing so: e.g., that because he was likely to be fingered as the source, you were about to blow up his friendship with these kids, who no doubt would complain to other classmates about his snitching, thereby jeopardizing his social standing at an age when that’s a carefully tended thing. And for what?
+You mention nothing that suggests these boys were actually in danger. Yes, they were deceiving their parents and their school, but what they were up to sounds like the tamest of truancies. They weren’t laying plans to deal fentanyl; more likely they were leveling up in Fortnite. And you’ve made it less likely that your own son will trust you with this sort of information again.
+Given the quality of your relationship, he’ll probably forgive you eventually, though he’s reaching an age when you should expect him to share less information with you anyway. That’s part of growing up. You’re a loving mom with an easy-to-love kid. But soon enough you’ll need to leave the helicopter parked on the tarmac.
+I am the owner of a small business with just a few employees. I maintain a very positive work environment and rely on their skilled and dedicated work to keep the business running. It would be very disruptive if any of them left, and they would be hard to replace. I received a message for one of them on the firm’s voice mail from a staffing company, which suggests that he may be looking for a new position. I would do whatever I can to retain him. But is it ethical for me to broach the subject, having intercepted a call that was intended for him? Name Withheld
+It is, yes. Unless you’ve left something significant out of the story, you didn’t come by the information by doing anything wrong. Any displeasure he may have about the disclosure should be directed at the indiscreet people at the staffing company. It certainly shouldn’t be directed at you. In fact, he should be delighted to learn that you value his services and want him to stay.AJ writes: For years I’ve used the word “Kimble” to refer to zip-front sweatshirts, because this is what Harrison Ford wore when he portrayed Dr. Richard Kimble in “The Fugitive.” My sons grew up using this word, too. But recently I was bragging to a friend about my coinage, and my youngest, now 18, was aghast to learn that I had made it up. Not only does he now reject “Kimble,” he also rejects my attempts to educate him on any topic, at any time.
+You had a good run. You were alive in the ’90s when we had no idea what was coming for us. You got to see “The Fugitive” in theaters. You made up a legit funny pop-culture joke word and used it to trick your sons for two decades. You did a good dad job. And now your son is doing his job: rejecting everything you are and have done. If you take his abuse graciously, he eventually may come back to his Kimbles (and maybe even “Lee Joneseys,” which is my word for the mom jeans Tommy Lee Jones wears in that movie).In December, President Trump made an extraordinary declaration about U.S. involvement in Syria: “We have won against ISIS. Now, it’s time for our troops to come back home.” Ignoring advice from his generals and advisers, Trump said that the U.S. would leave Syria. Defense Department officials said that they were ordered to do it within 30 days. [explosion] Then came a flurry of criticism, even from inside his own party. “I believe it is a catastrophic mistake.” “This is very disappointing.” “It needs to be reconsidered.” Then, the resignations. First, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit. And America’s chief diplomat in the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, soon followed. Now, the timeline for a full withdrawal is unclear. “I never said we’re doing it that quickly.” He went on to say that the U.S. will leave at a proper pace while continuing to fight ISIS, a shift from — “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The nearly eight-year-long war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. [explosion] So, how did we get here and what are U.S. forces doing in Syria? In 2011, uprisings rippled through the Middle East. Leaders fell in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. And after months of anti-government protests in Syria, the U.S. had a message for President Bashar al-Assad: “This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.” He didn’t and the conflict escalated. In 2012, Obama warned Assad against using Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons against his own people. “That’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing the use of chemical weapons.” A year later, Assad’s army launched a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, killing 1,400 people. [screaming] In response, the U.S. debated airstrikes, but they were avoided when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. But a new threat was also emerging — ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. began supporting rebel groups to fight extremists, while also conducting airstrikes as part of an international coalition. These efforts expanded and the U.S. troop numbers grew from hundreds to the low thousands. In 2016, U.S.-supported fighters took control of the ISIS stronghold of Manbij — and in 2017 their de facto capital, Raqqa. There are now around 2,000 American forces in Syria who are largely fighting alongside the Kurdish groups. This has been a problem for America’s ally Turkey, which has a long-standing conflict with the Kurds. U.S. troops have had run-ins with Assad’s forces as well as groups backed by Russia and Iran. Since taking office, Trump has ordered two strikes on areas controlled by Assad in response to chemical weapons attacks. “We are prepared to sustain this response, until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.” U.S. officials and allies dispute the claim that ISIS has been defeated. They warn that an American departure will weaken U.S. influence in the region and may embolden Russia, Iran and Turkey, who are also on the ground. The other worry? The move may inspire some ISIS fighters to return to Syria.BERLIN — Three men attacked a lawmaker from the far-right party Alternative for Germany, the police said Tuesday, leaving the official with serious injuries to his head and upper body.
+The lawmaker, Frank Magnitz, 66, the leader of the party’s chapter in Bremen, was attacked on Monday and remained hospitalized on Tuesday, Thomas Jürgewitz, the deputy head of the Bremen chapter, said in a telephone interview. He added that Mr. Magnitz was expected to make a full recovery.
+A photograph posted to Facebook by the AfD Bremen chapter showed Mr. Magnitz bloodied and bruised, with a deep gash on his forehead. The brutality of the attack and the rarity of such violence against a public official prompted widespread condemnation and calls for justice from across the country’s political spectrum.
+“The brutal attack on the member of the Bundestag Frank Magnitz in Bremen is to be condemned sharply,” Steffen Seibert, a spokesman for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, wrote on Twitter. “Hopefully, the police will be able to catch the perpetrators quickly.”A year ago, Jeromy Gaviola was struggling to find steady and meaningful work in San Francisco. Living in the working-class neighborhood of Hunters Point, he heard about a program that was training residents to build the Chase Center, the $1 billion, 18,000-seat arena in Mission Bay that will be the new home of the Golden State Warriors when it opens this fall.
+Mr. Gaviola, 33, applied to the program, was accepted and completed six weeks of training in early September. He then began working at the arena and was recently installing insulation and acoustical ceiling tiles above the Warriors’ practice court.
+“I’m very fortunate to have a job and be part of this,” he said. “I was doing little delivery jobs, just to get by with the bills, and was really close to being homeless.”
+Mr. Gaviola’s experience mirrors that of hundreds of others nationwide as demand for construction labor outstrips supply. Eighty percent of contractors were having trouble finding skilled workers, according to a national survey released last year by the Associated General Contractors of America trade group and the software designer Autodesk.But China had imposed measures on soybeans and cars to retaliate against American tariffs last summer on $50 billion of Chinese goods. By dropping them, without requiring the United States to abandon theirs, China is signaling that for now it is willing to accept higher American tariffs on some of its goods, provided they are not applied more broadly.
+China’s other peace offerings are more ambiguous.
+Chinese lawmakers last month released a draft of a proposed law that would stop local officials from forcing foreign companies to transfer their technology as a cost of doing business. The Trump administration says that Chinese industries like cars and aviation have benefited from American technology.
+The law may not change things meaningfully, said Donald Clarke, a specialist in Chinese law at George Washington University. The draft is vaguely worded, he said, and doesn’t acknowledge that the pressure American companies face to share their know-how often comes from behind-the-scenes maneuvering rather than strict government requirements.
+As with many laws in China, it could also be moot if local governments decide not to enforce it or if penalties are not stiff enough.
+“These forced tech transfers that people complain about don’t occur because some government department issues an order saying, ‘Transfer this tech,’” Mr. Clarke said in an email.
+“It’s done through the government department getting involved behind the scenes in the negotiations, or not granting discretionary permission to do something unless some tech is transferred. It’s very hard to stop through a specific rule.”
+Still, Chinese analysts say the pledges are significant. Chinese laws and regulations are often succinct — only a page or two when American laws or regulations would require dozens or even hundreds of pages. The real work lies in carrying out the regulations, and Beijing is now prepared to impose the new rules diligently, Chinese analysts say.Stocks added to a streak of recent gains on Tuesday, as investors anticipated progress in trade-deal negotiations between the United States and China.
+The S&P 500 rose nearly 1 percent and shares in Europe were modestly higher. Trading in Asia was mixed.
+[Read more about the state of the trade talks in Beijing, and what a visit by Kim Jong-un to China might mean.][What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who in 2016 met with Trump campaign officials in Trump Tower, was charged on Tuesday in a separate case that showed her close ties to the Kremlin.
+Ms. Veselnitskaya, a pivotal figure in the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election, was charged by federal prosecutors in Manhattan with seeking to thwart an earlier investigation into money laundering that involved an influential Russian businessman and his investment firm.
+The money-laundering case was not directly related to the Trump Tower meeting. But a federal indictment returned in Manhattan seemed to confirm that Ms. Veselnitskaya had deep ties to senior Russian government officials and rekindled questions about whether the Kremlin tried to use her as an intermediary to Donald J. Trump’s campaign.
+The charge stems from a 2013 civil investigation by the Manhattan prosecutors into the role that some of Ms. Veselnitskaya’s clients — Prevezon Holdings and its owner, Denis P. Katsyv — played in a scheme to launder ill-gotten money through New York real estate purchases.The top health official who created the San Francisco program, Mitchell H. Katz, is now the head of New York City’s hospital system and will oversee the city’s effort, branded as NYC Care. “It’s a much bigger and more compassionate vision,” said Mr. Katz, comparing New York’s proposed program to the much smaller one in San Francisco.
+The mayor was quick to say that the plan would not be a substitute for any universal health care at the state level or a national single-payer plan. But, aides said, it was something the city could do immediately and on its own, without approval from the State Legislature, which is weighing some form of universal health insurance for New York State.
+Indeed, the mayor’s proposal is a mix of insurance and direct spending, and Mr. de Blasio said it would take about two years to get it fully running. The city already has a kind of public option for health insurance for low-income New Yorkers, through an insurance plan run by city hospitals known as MetroPlus.
+The new proposal would improve that coverage, which already insures some 516,000 people, and aim to reach more of those who are eligible, such as the young and uninsured, and others who qualify but have not applied.
+It would also provide additional direct city spending, at least $100 million per year when fully implemented, officials said, for the city’s hospital system to support care for those without insurance. The city estimates the uninsured population to be about 600,000 people, including as many as 300,000 undocumented residents. A major component of that effort would be improving customer service, including the phone line, to help those with questions about their care.
+Part of the goal of NYC Care, aides to the mayor said, was to direct people to medical care earlier — before they seek more expensive services in an emergency room — while providing them with better health care.
+The effort is also aimed at getting some of the so-called young-and-invincible uninsured population into the health care system, either through the city’s insurance plan or through its hospital system.Katie Morillo used to be a rushing New York commuter. She knows all too well that people are trying to get where they’re going as quickly as possible — and are easily frustrated by anything that slows them down.
+Now she’s on the other side of the equation.
+When Ms. Morillo was 20, a car accident left her paralyzed from the waist down. She now uses an electric wheelchair.
+“There’s always that one person that has that attitude and says something,” Ms. Morillo, 34, said in a recent interview. “It doesn’t faze me. We’re all trying to get somewhere. You’re taking it out on me? It’s not working.”LONDON — The waterfront of Sidmouth, a sleepy coastal town in southwestern England, looks serene even on a winter’s afternoon. But a monster lurks beneath the calm: a mass of fat, oil and wet wipes extending for at least 210 feet.
+Known as fatbergs, such greasy, compact masses are an established urban peril. The Museum of London holds a sample of an 800-foot specimen that blocked a sewer under the capital’s East End in 2017, and New York has long battled similar agglomerations.
+Sidmouth, however, has only about 13,000 permanent residents, and its fatberg was discovered in a routine check under The Esplanade, a picturesque seafront road full of hotels and restaurants.
+“It is the largest discovered in our service history and will take our sewer team around eight weeks to dissect this monster in exceptionally challenging work conditions,” said Andrew Roantree, director of wastewater at South West Water, the company that manages the sewers in Sidmouth and across 4,300 square miles of England, including the cities of Exeter and Plymouth.Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, used a response to the president he streamed live on YouTube to brand Mr. Trump a liar, and ticked down a list of misstatements the president uttered during his address.
+“It gives me no pleasure to tell you what most of you already know, and that is that President Trump lies all of the time, and in remarks tonight and in recent weeks regarding immigration and the wall, he continues to lie,” Mr. Sanders said.
+He went on to discuss the plight of millions of Americans who lack health insurance, elderly people who have no retirement savings, millions more with crippling student debt and the specter of global climate change, arguing that those challenges were far more pressing than the one posed by illegal immigration.
+“We don’t need to create artificial crises,” Mr. Sanders said. “We have enough real crises.”
+Mr. Trump is planning a trip to the border in McAllen, Tex., on Thursday, while Democrats plan to bring up a succession of bills this week to reopen shuttered parts of the government, including the Internal Revenue Service, to allow tax refunds to be paid, and the Agriculture Department, to ensure that food assistance and farmer support payments can be made.
+The Treasury Department and the I.R.S. will come first, then Agriculture and Interior Department programs, including the national parks, on Thursday, followed by transportation and housing programs on Friday.
+“We are going to, daily, urge and take efforts to open up the government,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader. “Whatever problems confront us, they are exacerbated — not relieved — by shutting down government.”
+A group of Senate Democrats spent Tuesday evening taking turns on the Senate floor calling on Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, to bring up the House-passed legislation to reopen the government. The dozen Democrats, led by Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia and Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, plan to spotlight the harm from the shutdown on federal workers and those who benefit from government programs.MADRID — Four decades after Spain transitioned from Franco’s dictatorship to democracy, the country’s far right has found its voice again in the nationalist, anti-immigrant Vox party.
+The group made its mark in December in regional elections in Andalusia, in southern Spain, where it won parliamentary seats for the first time.
+In the greater political sphere in Spain, Vox remains a small player. But some analysts say its appeal could spread, making it an important wild card in European Union parliamentary elections in May, when more traditional parties will be trying to hold off nationalist parties on the Continent.After the Fire
+My whole hand used to fit in my mother’s palm. When I was sad and scared, she would squeeze me tight and say it’s all going to be all right. Now I’m 24. My parents lost everything in Northern California’s Tubbs Fire in October 2017. Both surgeons, they are strong and brave, but sometimes wake up at night in their temporary home with nightmares of the recent deadly fires. I can’t bring back their treasures or take away their stress, but I can tell them I love them and hold my mother’s hand like she once held mine. — Siena CanalesLynne Goldberg always remembers to bring deodorant and antiperspirants to the weddings she plans. “Very often I have someone who says, ‘I’m sweating like crazy. What am I going to do?’” said Ms. Goldberg, who is the owner of Ms Wedding Planner in Boca Raton, Fla.
+Her firm oversees about a dozen weddings a year in warm locales like Florida, California and Nevada. And so she’ll have plenty of fans available, too, including pocket-size varieties for each person in the wedding party, along with extra shirts for grooms and other family members. Cornstarch also helps combat sweat when applied to the underarm portions of dresses, she says.
+Whether it’s rising temperatures, a warm wedding venue or pure nerves, excessive sweating can spoil anyone’s walk down the aisle. While fans and deodorants can certainly help keep you dry, many brides are opting for medical treatments to prevent sweat disasters on their big day.
+“The No. 1 thing that shuts down the perspiration is Botox,” said Dr. Dennis Gross, a board certified dermatologist on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Botox is approved by the Food and Drug Administration to treat hyperhidrosis, or excessive sweating. About 365 million people worldwide suffer from this condition, according to the International Hyperhidrosis Society.WASHINGTON — Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh issued his first Supreme Court opinion on Tuesday, writing for a unanimous court in a minor arbitration case. His eight-page opinion was crisp and clear.
+Only seven of his colleagues were present as he summarized the opinion from the bench. For the second day in a row, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is recuperating from cancer surgery, was missing. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. announced that she would participate in the day’s two cases by reviewing the transcripts of the arguments.
+The question in the arbitration case, Henry Schein Inc. v. Archer & White Sales Inc., No. 17-1272, was who should decide whether a dispute should be resolved through arbitration rather than litigation. Justice Kavanaugh said arbitrators, rather than judges, should decide whether contracts calling for arbitration applied to the disputes before them.
+The case arose from an arbitration contract between a firm that made dental equipment and one that distributed it. The contract called for disputes arising under the contract, with a few exceptions, to be sent to arbitration.Which other teachers did you love?
+[Anatole] Oboukhov — he screamed in that big voice that came from under his shoes. He was passionate. He taught me how to fly. He didn’t talk. He grunted at things. But I got to understand about our wings [She touches her mid-back] and that ability to fly. To go past everything.
+To move big?
+It was to transcend the whole thing. I studied with his wife, Vera Nemtchinova, who was out of the Diaghilev company. She would tell me about watching Nijinsky. She would stand in the wings and say, “Vaslav, how you do that?” And he would say, “By the ears.” [She pulls the tips of her ears up.] I never forgot it.
+What can you say about your new dances?
+They’re a mix of things. I feel a little embarrassed how good a time I’ve had. They could put me in jail for too good a time. The last thing I finished is a duet for two men. One is a man I adore who I’ve worked with for years, Arthur Aviles, and the other is a new guy, Andy Chapman. I got interested in their differences but there’s something similar about them. I just was playing. I’ve been looking a lot at birds and thinking about how they fly and those joints. So the end of the piece, they become birds and I dress them that way.
+Did you get to attend many ballet performances when you were younger?
+I didn’t have much money, and neither did Jimmy. So Jimmy taught me how to climb up the fire escape at City Center. You got directly in the theater that way, and you took a seat. There was an alleyway, and in those days when you went to the ballet you had stockings and heels, and it was lady time. With the heels, it was a little bit iffy, but not that iffy. This way, you got to see the whole thing.
+And you spent time together outside the studio?
+We’d hang out in the Automat on 57th Street. Once Jimmy said, “I’ll bring you some Jell-O,” and I said, “I don’t like Jell-O.” He said, “Why don’t you like Jell-O?” I said, “Because it shakes.” So of course Jimmy brought me Jell-O. He said, “That’s prejudice. It’s like saying you don’t like red or yellow or blue.”
+What else did he teach you?
+That there was nothing that wasn’t important. Jimmy was always sewing. He would be taking this little piece of gauze here that had a little pearl inside of it and put a little sequin over it and then he was going to put it under the third petticoat that somebody was wearing. I said, “But Jimmy nobody’s going to see that.” He said, “But they’ll feel it.” And he was absolutely right.BANJA LUKA, Bosnia and Herzegovina — After his 21-year-old son David was found dead in a creek last March, Davor Dragicevic, a waiter in a cafe, took matters into his own hands.
+Dissatisfied with official explanations that David Dragicevic had been a drug addict and a thief, and had killed himself or been murdered by a criminal gang, Mr. Dragicevic started a one-man protest movement that has grown into the largest antigovernment demonstration in Bosnia in decades.
+Now the elder Mr. Dragicevic, 49, has not been seen in public since Dec. 30, when he led thousands on a march around Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb autonomous region in eastern Bosnia, demanding the resignation of the interior minister, Dragan Lukac. He was last seen by local journalists as he was being pursued by plainclothes police officers.
+The Bosnian Serb police have issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Dragicevic, charging him with incitement and threatening public safety. On Monday, Mr. Dragicevic posted a video message on Facebook.The scientists first reported finding it in 1992: a giant mushroom that weighed as much as a blue whale and sprawled across more than 30 acres of forest in Michigan’s upper peninsula. It wasn’t some Alice-in-Wonderland-type toadstool but a 1,500-year-old parasitic mold, with growing tentacles that foraged beneath the soil for roots and decaying wood to devour.
+Nearly 30 years later, the same scientists — using new technology for genetic analysis — wanted to know whether they had properly measured this unusual example of fungal life.
+“We made this outlandish prediction that the fungus is more than 1,000 years old,” said James Anderson, now a retired mycologist and emeritus professor at the University of Toronto. “And so an obvious outcome of that, is after three decades, it ought still be there, and if not, we’d have some explaining to do.”
+Recently they published what they uncovered in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Their original humongous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is even older and bigger than first estimated: the 2,500-year-old parasite spreads across 180 acres of forest. And its genome harbors a mysterious survival strategy: an extremely low mutation rate.WASHINGTON — President Trump has invited representatives from cable and broadcast news channels to an off-the-record lunch at the White House ahead of his prime time speech Tuesday night, an address in which he is expected to frame his demand for border wall funding as a response to a national security and humanitarian crisis.
+The White House has requested about eight minutes of broadcast time from the networks for Mr. Trump’s Oval Office remarks. The president appears to be preparing for the event as if he is delivering a miniature State of the Union message — typically, television anchors meet with the president over lunch ahead of his annual address to Congress.
+As the partial government shutdown enters its third week, Mr. Trump’s aides have been making the case that there is a crisis at the border in briefings with staff members on the Hill and in meetings with journalists.
+The White House has floated the idea of invoking emergency powers to build a wall along the country’s southwestern border without approval from Congress. But while Democrats have been bracing themselves for him to make that declaration on Tuesday night, administration officials who had seen a draft copy of his speech said the president was not preparing to do so.Among the few notable things about this year’s Golden Globes was that so many women dispensed with long curling-ironed hair or chignons or whatever other frippery and just chopped it. Saoirse Ronan had a lob, or “long bob,” styled by Ben Skervin. Claire Foy: mini-bob. Maya Rudolph: sharp medium-long bob. Lobs, too, for Lucy Boynton (“Bohemian Rhapsody”) and Irina Shayk, a model.
+This major bob moment comes exactly 100 years after an avalanche of women — 20,000 per week, according to the Women’s Improvement League — scandalized the world by cutting off their waist-long, painstakingly coiffed Gibson girl dos.
+They chose instead an ear-grazing crop cut that until then had been worn only by willful, freethinking renegades — Bolsheviks, the Bloomsbury set, the up-and-coming Coco Chanel, Greenwich Village radicals, the fashion-forward ballroom dancer Irene Castle, who catapulted the bob into the American mainstream.Slide 1 of 10,
+The menu at David Chang’s new restaurant, Bang Bar, is brief: three breakfast sandwiches called “minis” and two lunch sandwiches, including the chicken U. The name comes from the shape, a long, thin wrap folded in half in the middle.Mr. Chang is a close observer of the ways society assigns high status to the food of some cultures and devalues the cooking of others. One of his greatest hits is a riff about New Yorkers who complain about $17 bowls of ramen while paying $30 for spaghetti. If he has a routine about vertical rotisseries I’ve never heard it, but surely he is alive to the associations they conjure, from Greek diners to taco trucks to the Halal Guys carts parked near Columbus Circle. If anybody grasps the cultural implications of bringing $6 street-meat sandwiches indoors where they can perfume the air breathed by consumers of Pink shirts and Floga furs, it is Mr. Chang.
+Bang Bar might make more sense as a provocation than a business concern. It begins serving at 8:30 a.m. and closes when the food is gone, usually by 1 or 2 p.m. In the weeks after its opening, on Halloween, the lines were worthy of the Department of Motor Vehicles. Employees tried to appease the horde by handing out off-the-menu snacks, like rice porridge with fermented shiitakes, and asking whimsical survey questions. (“Do you keep peanut butter in the fridge?”)
+After Mr. Chang opened a Momofuku Noodle Bar in the space next door, Bang Bar’s crowds grew somewhat more manageable, and when I showed up for breakfast at the end of December, there was no line at all. Maybe Deutsche Bank employees will keep Bang Bar’s early shift afloat, but right now its success seems to hinge on the lunch rush.
+There are two rotisseries. After 11 a.m., one spit is buried deep inside a missile of dark chicken marinated with a yakitori-style glaze. The other is at the center of a red, dripping, gochujang-rubbed tower of pork. Ideally, whichever meat you choose will have built up a dark outer bark that can be lopped off with a few knife strokes and stacked on to a disc of griddled flatbread. The bread, thicker than a tortilla and less oily than a roti, will be rolled tight, like a cigarette, then bent in half, with both open ends at the top. This is called, in Bang Bar parlance, a U.LONDON — The idea was to show that the British government could deal with the chaotic cross-channel truck traffic expected in the event of a cliff-edge, “no-deal” Brexit. But only 89 of the 150 trucks expected showed up for the exercise, despite the offer of $700 to participate. And even those who took part ended up dismissing “Operation Brock” as “window dressing” and “too little, too late.”
+As Parliament prepares for a momentous debate over Prime Minister Theresa May’s unpopular plan to leave the European Union, it is often hard to tell if her government wants to convince people of the utter calamity of a no-deal exit — the better to secure passage of the proposal — or to reassure them that everything is under control. It seems to be failing at both.
+In the past week, it has awarded a $17.5 million contract to provide ferry service to a company with no ferries and conducted the widely mocked Operation Brock.
+Far from allaying fears, Michael Gove, the environment minister, gave a speech to a farm group last week in which he warned of devastating 40 percent tariffs on British beef and lamb exports after a no-deal Brexit.The rising star Laura Harrier, 28, is in high demand. You’ll find her in one of the buzziest films of this awards season, Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman,” which vied for Best Motion Picture, Drama at the Golden Globes last weekend. And she will appear in two movies this year, including the sci-fi thriller “Warning” with Annabelle Wallis and Alice Eve. In the near term, there is the Screen Actors Guild awards, where Ms. Harrier and her “BlacKkKlansman” cohort are up for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.
+Though awards season is exciting, it can also be a grind. See what beauty products Ms. Harrier, a native of Evanston, Ill., is using to survive the back-to-back red carpets.
+Skin Care
+In the shower, I use a face wash from my aesthetician Shani Darden. And she has this lactic peel that I do when I get out of the shower. I alternate between that and serums by iS Clinical. If I’m breaking out, I’ll go for the Active serum, and if my skin is dry, I do the Pro-Heal.
+When I moved to L.A. from New York, almost exactly a year ago, I didn’t know anyone. The girl who does my eyebrows, Kim Nguyen, told me about Shani, and she kind of saved my face. I like that she’s straight up and tells you exactly what you need to do. For me, it’s dealing with breakouts. I didn’t struggle with it until late in my 20s. That has been really annoying. It’s all the travel, stress and whatever else.Headliner
+Violet
+Rhode Island, where Emily and Matthew Hyland met in college, has inspired their sixth and most elegant restaurant. For this latest venture, the two, who were instrumental in bringing square Detroit-style pizzas to Brooklyn, Manhattan and Nashville, are focusing on grilled pizzas in the style of Al Forno in Providence — neither round nor square but “misshapen,” as Mr. Hyland put it. They’re topped with clams, hoisin sauce and duck prosciutto; grilled squash, Sichuan oil and chevre; and other combinations. There are also stuffies, the fist-size baked clams loved by Rhode Islanders, though Mr. Hyland said he would use more modest littlenecks instead of quahogs. The chef on hand is Alex Ureña, whose restaurant Ureña received two stars from Frank Bruni in The New York Times in 2006. Mr. Hyland will oversee the menu , which includes varying pasta dishes and plates . All come from an open kitchen in the back of the intimate space, which has a warmly lit arched ceiling and Art Deco touches. (Opens Thursday)
+511 East Fifth Street (Avenue A), 646-850-5900, violeteastvillage.com.
+Opening
+La Central
+In planning the menu for the restaurant in the Hôtel Americano in Chelsea, the chef Franklin Becker started to look to Mexico. (The hotel’s owners are from Mexico City.) But then, he said, he spoke with members of his staff, who came from Peru, Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia and the Dominican Republic, in addition to Mexico, and invited them to explain the dishes they like to cook. Those conversations informed the menu. Acapulco-style ceviche, Peruvian leche de tigre shrimp, Colombian potato empanadas and Salvadoran mushroom pupusas are some of the dishes. Tacos, fish or steak for two, and arbol-spiced chicken are also on the menu. Mr. Becker has come up with savory churros crullers stuffed with cheese and garlic-jalapeño butter. The room is mostly gray, with marble tables and black leather seating. (Thursday)
+518 West 27th Street, 212- 216-0000, hotel-americano.com.
+Gitano Jungle Room
+Last summer in SoHo, palms and other greenery decorated Gitano NYC, a pop-up version of a restaurant in Tulum, Mexico. It stayed open until October, despite a couple of interruptions by the city health department. Now James Gardner, who runs Grupo Gitano, has relocated it to the nearby James Hotel. The semi-underground room that was David Burke Kitchen is thick with trees and plants. Gitano’s esteemed consulting chef, Mads Refslund of Sweden, and the executive chef and partner Yvan Lemoine are overseeing the creative Mexican menu.
+The James Hotel, 23 Grand Street (Avenue of the Americas), 212-201-9119, grupogitano.com/nyc.
+Fiaschetteria Pistoia
+A West Village branch of this Italian restaurant with roots in Pistoia, Italy, near Florence, has opened. For fans of its mostly Tuscan menu, it’s in the nick of time: A fire on Christmas morning caused the East Village location to be closed temporarily. The new restaurant seats only 20, and does not take reservations.
+114 Christopher Street (Bedford Street), 646-609-2911 .Gumbo’s flavor is further influenced by roux, the blend of fat and flour used to thicken the broth. It’s a French technique adopted by Louisianians , who often cook the roux so long that it darkens and takes on bitter notes reminiscent of Mexican mole. Sliced okra and the sassafras powder known as filé, a Native American contribution to Louisiana cooking, are also used as gumbo thickeners, either in combination or in place of roux.
+All of which is to say that New Orleans gumbo welcomed considerable variation and interpretation even before chefs and home cooks started to add collard greens and Vietnamese fish sauce to their pots.
+The pale-roux gumbo with shrimp, crab and oysters that Billy Thurman, a commercial fisherman, cooks at home in Meraux, a 25-minute drive down the Mississippi River from the French Quarter, has little in common with the inky brown duck-andouille gumbo served at Upperline, a traditional restaurant in Uptown.
+“Everybody likes it different,” Mr. Thurman said as he stirred his roux with a rubber spatula.
+That a single dish can encompass such a broad spectrum of flavor is a big part of gumbo’s enduring local appeal. “Of all the many dishes in Louisiana cooking, gumbo is the one that most singularly defines us,” said Frank Brigtsen, the chef and an owner of Brigtsen’s Restaurant, where rabbit filé gumbo has been a signature offering for 25 years.
+Mr. Brigtsen echoes the sentiments of local chefs who came of age, as he did, in the 1980s and ’90s. In those years, the city’s economy realigned around tourism and the rising national fame of its restaurants and chefs. It would have been unthinkable for a restaurant serving New Orleans food to leave gumbo off its menu.
+Emeril Lagasse, arguably the most famous chef to come out of New Orleans, has served gumbo at all of the 18 restaurants he has opened since he started his empire in 1990.To the Editor:
+Re “Tell Me One More Time What to Do About Grief,” by Jo Firestone, a comedian (Sunday Review, Dec. 30):
+As I have lost relatives and friends, I’ve noticed that each grief is different. And people do try to get us to feel better.
+What I have always needed is for people to listen when I feel like talking about my pain and for people to let me avoid the pain any way I want to.
+For me, humor doesn’t come right away, but eventually it becomes possible to laugh again.
+Beth Rosen
+BronxThe most recent season of FXX’s astringent comedy “You’re the Worst” ended, if not with a proposal, at least with a panicked surrender to the idea of marriage. Having fled, “The Graduate”-style, from a safe boyfriend, Gretchen (Aya Cash) turned to her dark-night-of-the-soul mate, Jimmy (Chris Geere), and said, “So, what are we thinking, October?” He gulped and grimaced for a short eternity and managed to croak out, “October could work.”
+Since the series is a romantic comedy — one of the purest examples on television, if also one of the most twisted, acidulous and sex-drenched — the question for its fifth and final season (beginning Wednesday) should be whether it will stick the wedding. And the 13 episodes do loosely follow a matrimonial checklist: site visits, cake tastings, centerpiece choices.
+But nowhere does the course of true love run less smoothly than on “You’re the Worst,” and the season is like one long held breath. Will the misanthropic, elitist writer Jimmy, who yells “Eject” when he wants someone else to stop talking, and the needy, clinically depressed publicist Gretchen make it to the finish line? A season-long series of cryptic, near-future flash-forwards teases the possibility that they won’t.
+It’s the job of romantic comedies to throw obstacles in the way of lifelong happiness, and “You’re the Worst” has tackled that obligation with unmatched enthusiasm. Gretchen and Jimmy (who met and bonded as the two biggest jerks at someone else’s wedding) were boorish, narcissistic commitment-phobes from the start, and in subsequent seasons the show’s creator, Stephen Falk, worked in Gretchen’s mental illness as a consistent and serious element. Cash has deftly handled the challenge of a character who, when she’s not partying or copulating, spends a lot of time hiding under blankets and staring out windows.When he wrote it in 2016, the composer Huang Ruo couldn’t have imagined that his immersive multimedia work “Resonant Theater: The Sonic Great Wall” would be so timely. But before conducting it on Monday at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, Mr. Ruo asked audience members to take up a pen and paper.
+“Write down what comes to mind when you think of a wall,” he said. “Any wall.”
+Earlier in the day, President Trump, who has brought the federal government to a partial shutdown in an effort to obtain funding for a wall along the southern border of the United States, had announced he would speak from the Oval Office to make his case for this wall as a national imperative. “The Sonic Great Wall” became a way for its audience to grapple with the concept of barriers and borders.
+In the piece, Mr. Ruo — whose expansion of his opera “An American Soldier” was one of my favorite musical events of 2018 — attempts to break down walls between musicians and audiences. The Great Wall of China, he said on Monday, was erected as a barrier against China’s enemies. But its watchtowers also became a series of signaling stations; the Great Wall was a kind of ancient telegraph system.Putting to rest any suspicion that the sightings at Heathrow, about 15 miles west of central London, were false alarms, Commander Cundy said, “Police officers were amongst those who saw the drone and a full criminal investigation has been launched.”
+The Metropolitan Police, which investigates cases believed to involve terrorism throughout Britain, played a secondary role behind the Sussex Police in investigating the Gatwick case, because officials never determined whether it might be terrorism. That prompted calls from some lawmakers for the Metropolitan force to take over the investigation, particularly after two suspects were arrested by the Sussex Police, but then cleared and exonerated.
+Operating a drone within a kilometer of an airport is illegal, but aviation security experts have called for an exclusion radius of five kilometers, or about three miles.
+The partial shutdown on Tuesday was all the more dispiriting because it came only days after Heathrow and Gatwick announced they had ordered military-grade anti-drone equipment to ward off incursions. Both airports have declined to say what the new technology is, or what anti-drone measures they already had in place.
+A spokeswoman for Gatwick told British news outlets that its new system had been installed and that it matched the capability of the military, which deployed at the airport during the shutdown there. The airport said it had spent several million pounds to purchase the equipment.
+It was not clear whether Heathrow had already installed its new defense system. The airport was said by a person briefed on its security to have some limited anti-drone technology in place before the Gatwick incursions.
+A BBC producer, speaking on Tuesday from a plane that was waiting to take off from Heathrow, told the network that passengers on her flight had not been given a reason for the delay. “At the moment,” she said, “we’ve been told we’re not going anywhere.”To the Editor:
+“The Plot to Pump in Prison” ( Sunday Business , Jan. 6) identifies unacceptable barriers to women’s ability to pump breast milk upon returning to work. Stories abound of women being forced to pump in fetid restrooms or in their cars; denied adequate time to pump, leading to severe infections; and experiencing sexual harassment by co-workers and bosses.
+This treatment is discrimination based on pregnancy, childbirth and related medical conditions, and local anti-discrimination laws, like New York City’s Pregnant Workers Fairness Law, are filling the legal gap left by inadequate federal laws.
+The city’s law, and legal enforcement guidance issued by the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 2016, make it explicitly clear that employers must provide reasonable accommodations to pregnant and nursing workers, or face legal consequences, including fines of up to $250,000 for each act of discrimination.
+Workplaces can no longer ignore the needs of pregnant and nursing workers, forcing them to make devastating decisions about when they stop breast-feeding their babies or toddlers, or ridiculing them for one of the most personal decisions a new mother can make.To the Editor:
+Re “American Jews and Israeli Jews Break Up,” by Jonathan Weisman (news analysis, Sunday Review, Jan. 6):
+We would do well to consider the theology of the Zionist Martin Buber. In the relationship Buber calls “I-thou,” parties remain concerned with each other’s fears and hopes while maintaining the right to advance their self-defined interests.
+Liberal American Jews (I am one) cannot expect the Israeli government to abandon political alliances it deems necessary for survival, negotiate a two-state solution and support equal rights for non-Orthodox Jews just because we want it. Nor can the Israeli government suppose that liberal American Jews will forsake our moral assumptions and defend Israeli policies those principles impel us to challenge.
+American Jews and Israeli Jews need each other and must support each other. But we cannot govern for each other, and we remain fully within our rights to critique each other.
+There are times we don’t like those we love. Yet Buber reminds us that with patience and effort, the “I-thou” can be re-established, as it can be between American Jews and Israeli Jews. Governments change. External crises arise, overriding the luxury of internal disputes. Mr. Weisman’s “Great Schism” is far from inevitable.Is there a medical insurance code yet for street-style whiplash? Everyone in Florence, Italy, develops it at some point, a chronic neck ache caused by abruptly swiveling your head to get a load of some Instagram apparition in dandy drag.
+The complaint is particularly acute during Pitti Uomo, the twice yearly trade fair that is to men’s wear what Coachella is to indie bands. Style mobs from all over the planet descend on this Renaissance city, trunks crammed with looks used to bait the style paparazzi who also arrive in hordes.
+Part spectacle, part farce, these so-called influencers have become so essential an element of the theater of fashion that without them the giddy atmospherics of most fashion weeks might burn off like industrial gas flare. What we’d be left with would be the reality that these trade fairs are no more intrinsically interesting than a boat or auto show.
+Yet here is a notion out of left field: Maybe it is time to tune out social media. Perhaps by filtering some of the seductive static produced for online consumption by guys wearing plus-four trousers or spats or capes or waxed mustaches or deerstalker caps, we can refocus on things no less radical for being subtle and discreet.“When the president of the United States asks for time to make an address to the American public, I don’t think you can say no,” Ted Koppel, the longtime ABC anchorman, said in an interview. Any concern about misleading claims, he added, “is a judgment you can only make after you hear what he has to say.”
+Others argued that traditional ways of covering the president should not apply to the norm-breaking Mr. Trump. Former aides to President Barack Obama pointed out that his request for airtime in 2014 to discuss immigration reform was turned down by the networks, which called the subject overly political. One aide, Dan Pfeiffer, wrote on Twitter after Mr. Trump’s remarks on Tuesday night that “the Networks got played.”
+Still, producers at several networks cited the uncertainty surrounding the shutdown, and an impending suspension of federal paychecks, as inherently newsworthy.
+Executives were juggling a slew of concerns, some tied to public responsibility and others crassly commercial. Tuesday is a relatively slow night for prime time, so airing the president’s address would not pre-empt a ratings magnet like a National Football League game. Executives in New York are mindful of their national affiliates, many of which cater to red-state audiences that might be antagonized to discover their local station is declining to show Mr. Trump’s remarks.
+Even as the news landscape has fractured, the four major networks still have the biggest audience in mass media. Some journalists had questioned if a different approach was necessary.
+“There are so many sources of news now, but the networks’ policies haven’t changed very much,” Andrew Heyward, a former president of CBS News, said before the speech. “One very attractive option would be to promote the fact that it’s live with a crawl, and then if it turns out to be newsworthy, you can do a special report. You then pull selected sound from it and give it context, as opposed to having to get trapped in something and having to react to it.”
+For those who sought counterprogramming on Tuesday, one former Trump associate offered an alternative.The South by Southwest Film Festival has chosen one of this spring’s most anticipated movies for its opening night: Jordan Peele’s new horror thriller, “Us.” The director’s follow-up to his Oscar-winning 2017 hit “Get Out” follows a family (headed by the “Black Panther” veterans Lupita Nyong’o and Winston Duke) terrorized by what seem to be evil doppelgängers of themselves. The film’s trailer, which debuted Christmas Day, has been discussed and analyzed by fans on social media for clues to the plot.Anyone who’s taught literature in a college or university lately has probably had a conversation like this. The passion for social justice that many students feel — a beautiful passion for social justice — leads them to be keenly aware of the distasteful opinions held by many writers of earlier generations. When they discover the anti-Semitism of Wharton or Dostoyevsky, the racism of Walt Whitman or Joseph Conrad, the sexism of Ernest Hemingway or Richard Wright, the class snobbery of E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, not all of them express their repugnance as dramatically as the student I talked to, but many perform an equivalent exercise, dumping the offending books into a trash basket in their imaginations.
+After we moved on from Edith Wharton, we had a pleasant conversation about the different kinds of time machines in fiction and popular culture, from the vaguely described contraption in H. G. Wells’s “The Time Machine” to the tesseract in Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” and the TARDIS in “Doctor Who.”
+It was only after the student left the train that I had the rather obvious thought that an old book is a kind of time machine too. And it struck me that the way he’d responded to “The House of Mirth” betrayed a misunderstanding of what kind of time machine an old book is.
+I think it’s a general misunderstanding, not just his. It’s as if we imagine an old book to be a time machine that brings the writer to us. We buy a book and take it home, and the writer appears before us, asking to be admitted into our company. If we find that the writer’s views are ethnocentric or sexist or racist, we reject the application, and we bar his or her entry into the present.
+As the student had put it, I don’t want anyone like that in my house.
+I think we’d all be better readers if we realized that it isn’t the writer who’s the time traveler. It’s the reader. When we pick up an old novel, we’re not bringing the novelist into our world and deciding whether he or she is enlightened enough to belong here; we’re journeying into the novelist’s world and taking a look around.President Trump takes his case to the public
+The president will argue for a wall along the Mexican border in a speech beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern. It is expected to be about 10 minutes long and will be broadcast across the four major American TV networks.
+After his speech, the networks will broadcast a response from the Democratic Party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
+We’ll have a stream of the president’s speech on nytimes.com — and a team of reporters providing live fact-checking and analysis. Here’s what to watch for and the larger issues the president faces.President Trump’s greatest hurdle in persuading Americans that there is a national security crisis on the southwest border may well be his own credibility.
+Mr. Trump is using a rare currency — a prime-time address to the nation — to make the case for a border wall with Mexico, an issue that has forced a partial shutdown of the federal government.
+His penchant for superlatives — “the best,” “the worst,” “never,” “always,” and now, “crisis” — and his record of falsehoods, misstatements and exaggerations on the topic will likely be challenged as never before .When the choreographer Reggie Wilson curated “Dancing Platform, Praying Grounds: Blackness, Churches and Downtown Dance,” a series of performances, talks and walking tours at Danspace Project last year, he wove together three rich threads into a tapestry full of history and heart. The aftereffect of that platform still echoes at Danspace, which also, of course, happens to be a church — St. Mark’s.
+This week, the work he choreographed in honor of the platform, “… they stood shaking while others began to shout,” returned to Danspace Project as part of American Realness 2019. (The Gibney dance organization is a co-presenter.) Inspired partly by black Shakers, mainly the religious activist Mother Rebecca Cox Jackson, Mr. Wilson explores the intersection of worship and dance with poetic imagination. Within the frame of postmodern dance — and with a heady mix of spirituals, contemporary music and field recordings — he produces a remarkable work that flows seamlessly from start to finish.
+Each program starts with a performance lecture. There are three possibilities for any given night; the one on Monday, opening night, lasted slightly longer than the dance and covered ring shout, African dance and postmodern dance. Mr. Wilson discussed the rhythmic ritual that moves in a counterclockwise circle with shuffling feet and also screened video excerpts from different styles of African dance and contemporary pieces to show, among other things, how cultural appropriation works.The fall 2019 men’s shows have wrapped, and T’s photographers were on the ground to catch all of the action in London, Milan and Paris. Here, a day-by-day recap, along with our favorite images from the runways.
+PARIS
+Sunday, Jan. 20
+At his first stand-alone men’s wear show for Celine, Hedi Slimane delivered a very Hedi collection that featured New Wave tailoring with a rock edge. From sequin blazers and studded leather jackets to boxy overcoats paired with skinny ties and looser cropped trousers (and nary a sneaker), Slimane made the case for a more dressed-up, polished look.Roy J. Glauber, a theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2005 for using quantum theory to explain the field of optics and how light interacts with matter, laying the foundation for the field of quantum optics, died on Dec. 26 in Newton, Mass. He was 93.
+His son, Jeffrey, confirmed the death. He said his father had entered Newton Wellesley Hospital that morning having difficulty breathing. No specific cause was given.
+Dr. Glauber’s seminal work addressed an area of research that had been largely ignored in quantum physics. For much of the first half of the 20th century, physicists had concentrated on trying to understand the nature of matter, neglecting the field of optics. That began to change with the development of the laser in 1960. Physicists wanted to understand how it worked vis-à-vis quantum mechanics, the mysterious rules that govern subatomic particles.
+For his part, Dr. Glauber became intrigued by an experiment, performed in 1956 by the British astronomers Robert Hanbury Brown and Richard Q. Twiss, to measure the apparent angular diameter of visible stars. (The angular size of a star is essentially how large the dot of light appears in the night sky.) The two scientists had set up two detectors, which received photons and sent them to a central device for measurements.For the second time in two years, Los Angeles detectives have found a man dead inside the apartment of Ed Buck, a political activist who rose to national prominence in the late 1980s for his effort to recall the governor of Arizona, the authorities said.
+The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said it received a 911 call shortly after 1 a.m. on Monday from a person who claimed that a man inside a West Hollywood apartment had stopped breathing and could not be resuscitated. When emergency responders arrived at the residence, a second-floor unit on Laurel Avenue, they declared the man dead.
+The authorities have not determined how the man died, nor have they publicly released his identity other than to say he was an adult black man. A group of protesters rallied outside Mr. Buck’s apartment throughout the day Monday and demanded justice for the man and for another black man, Gemmel Moore, who was found naked and dead of a drug overdose on a mattress in Mr. Buck’s living room in July 2017.
+The sheriff’s office said that homicide detectives were among those who responded to Mr. Buck’s residence on Monday, and that it would review its investigation into the death of Mr. Moore, 26, and conduct new interviews. Mr. Buck, now 64, was not charged in Mr. Moore’s death.[baby fussing] Sorry, guys. That’s all right. Honestly, don’t worry. It’s O.K. The whole process, you’re led to believe, as a woman, that it’s the most natural thing that can happen to you, sort of the purpose of your body. Except it felt incredibly unnatural and alien to me. I hated the bit at the beginning where you don’t really look pregnant. You just look like you’ve let yourself go. You look like you’ve had too many Greggs or something. I liked that bit where I looked discernibly pregnant, and, like, my tits went really massive and I was a bit, like, that felt like quite sexy. I was like, “Hey, yeah. I’m just carrying a child.” It was really nice having nice hair. It was wavy and long. And there was more of it. And I had beautiful nails. That was really nice. The come down from that, not so nice. But I’d say, the middle of the pregnancy is a really great time, because you’re still feeling really comfortable and you get all the benefits of the hormones kicking in. So that was awesome. The first time I was pregnant, I didn’t get stretch marks until the last month. With him it was way more challenging on my body. I put on more weight. Funny enough, the stretch marks are not the thing that bothered me the most. It’s the breasts. Because my boobs are huge, way bigger than it was with Bebe. And they fell a bit. It’s life. You know, it’s gravity. And in the beginning, I was really upset about it and I was telling my husband, you know, “I’m going to get a boob job when I stop breastfeeding.” The funny thing is is that it took so long to accept that this is my body and I should be happy and it’s not good or bad, it’s just me. And then you get pregnant. And then you slowly start seeing it change, which is fine, because you’re growing a human being. But when you finally give birth and then you’re left with this new body that you took — it took you 30 years to accept and to love and to figure out and figure out what works and doesn’t work and all of a sudden, it’s a completely different body. I think that’s where my issues with giving birth came from. Not being able to wear your own clothes sounds trivial. But actually, just is another thing that really makes you not feel like yourself. And it’s one of the things that makes your life legible to you. Feeling my boyfriend slightly recoil from me, like on a sexual level. Like he would probably object to that word, but feeling that shift of his perception of me as no longer a sexual being, he was like, “I don’t want to cover you in spunk, I want to look after you.” I expected lots of negative things from pregnancy and from giving birth. And I was prepared that it’s going to be hard and everything. But I wasn’t expecting so much love. I really didn’t even know that I’m capable of so much love, which dwarfs everything else in comparison. But I was never really too much in tune with myself as a woman to know how I looked down there or can’t even define how I felt down there. But the minute I gave birth, I knew that everything changed. For me, it wasn’t really bouncing back into my normal intimate life with my husband. That took long, long time and I think two bottles of wine. But I mean, I’m talking about like seven months I think. The last couple of weeks of being pregnant, I lost all sensation in my hands. So one after another, all 10 fingertips went numb. It’s some syndrome where your wrists swell up so much that the nerves that go through your wrist stop sending the impulses through from your fingertips. I think it took probably more than two to three months for sensation to come back in my hands. If you can’t feel what you’re doing, it’s a very weird thing to be taking care of a very little child. I never had a serious or real injury before in my life until C-section. So that was a big thing. I had no idea what’s going to happen there or how it’s going to look like after the surgery. I had a scar. I had stretch marks. I don’t have flat belly at all. But all that physical changes comes together with the everyday work of being a mom. Even the tension you put on your muscles, you should hold her tight, because like you shouldn’t drop her, and things like that. You know what I mean? Yeah. The C-section, I think it was hard on my body. And yeah, it made me dislike my body even more. You know, obviously, even things like now, you know, we’re thinking of going on holiday and I’m like, I always liked wearing bikinis. I’m Brazilian. I grew up on the beach. Now I’m like: swimsuit. I don’t want to show my belly. I don’t want to show my scar. Although I don’t think I should be ashamed of it, of course, but I do have to look at myself sometimes and admit, I don’t like it. I don’t love it. I love to send the message to people, yes, show it. Be proud of it. But I’m still working on it, let’s say. You just keep looking at yourself and you’re just, what is that? And it, actually, it affected me bonding with my baby, because you’re meant to love and protect automatically, which I did, I protected my baby, but I just didn’t like him for what he did to me. It took me like eight weeks to get into, “Oh, O.K., you’re my son. I love you.” I had some tears and I was showering six times a day, because that was the only time I could pee without feeling pain. And half my digestive system was hanging out of my butt. It was really disgusting. How do I go to the bathroom, you know? How do I take a shit? These were the kind of things that I was apprehensive about. So I had, like a two for one deal. I had like a full labor, like 36 hours of that. And then, an emergency C-section. I definitely had no idea what level of pain you can be in without being dead. It would have been really nice to just be told, it’s going to be almost as if you were going to die. Post-surgery recovery, that was a lot longer than I thought. And there were a lot more unexpected things that happened. Like the vaginal walls were really irritated, which nobody could really explain. I was forever bleeding, like every day for half a year. And nobody could tell me why or whether it was going to stop. Just before I got pregnant, I’d finished my master’s. So I’d gone from this being very stimulated intellectually to those first stages of looking after an infant, which are boring. There’s a lot of monotony. And you’re very, very tired. And so it’s a bit like, well, if no one fancies me, my brain’s not involved in the same kind of activity it used to do, then who am I? I started working out six weeks after having a baby. And I did it because I wanted to go back to how I looked as quick as possible. It’s such a weird balance of trying to diet, but at the same time, worrying about are you giving enough nutrients to your kid through your breast milk? Am I being selfish by compromising his food supply, because I’m trying to lose weight and look good, which is such a superficial thing to want? And what a selfish thing to want, you know? It felt really important to me that I wanted to breastfeed. And I think also I would have felt like, I had really failed Wolfie if I hadn’t. But afterwards, my breasts, they were quite empty. They were quite haunted, basically. The skin never kind of went back. When Wolfie was a year old, I had a breast augmentation and breast lift. For me, it felt like it was just taking ownership back of my own body. No, yeah. Breasts are only for my daughter now, definitely. Like nobody else can touch them. It is. It is. It’s different. Yeah. It’s a different feeling. But it’s generally after giving birth and being so preoccupied with keeping her alive and everything, that I put all that part of myself aside for a long, long time. Something that made me self-conscious about having sex in both pregnancies is milk, because I don’t want anyone near my boobs while I’m breastfeeding. And it’s really weird, because you have to change how you do things a bit, basically. It’s not about a sex thing, but like it’s about feeling of my boobs only belong to Luna kind of thing, which was so silly. But like, you only have that tolerance and patience just for your baby and nothing else. Sex used to be natural and fun and spontaneous and beautiful and you can’t wait for it or sometimes you want it. Sometimes you don’t. Now, it’s like this psychological thing. And I never thought that would be the problem with having a baby. The amount of pressure and the amount of responsibility that’s placed on our shoulder the moment we give birth and they give us this baby and they’re like here you go, good luck. The anxiety. I was overwhelmed with anxiety constantly. And even when Wolfie was asleep, I couldn’t sleep, because it was like having a tiny bomb that could go off at any moment. I mean, I can’t look back at the aftermath of pregnancy and birth with anything other than, I feel traumatized by that really, still. Yeah. I plan to have another one as well. And all these changes doesn’t have any effect on it, because apart from everything, each second I share with her is just amazing, just like heaven. Right. I mean, I oscillate wildly between thinking, I really want to have another baby and to I don’t want to have any children. I don’t want to have any family. I want to be on my own, just on my own on Tinder. I guess after having two children, I basically don’t give a fuck to, like, anything else anymore. Do you know what I mean? I feel like, look, my body’s not, yeah, it’s not how I want it to be, but you know, who cares, basically?[baby fussing] Sorry, guys. That’s all right. Honestly, don’t worry. It’s O.K. The whole process, you’re led to believe, as a woman, that it’s the most natural thing that can happen to you, sort of the purpose of your body. Except it felt incredibly unnatural and alien to me. I hated the bit at the beginning where you don’t really look pregnant. You just look like you’ve let yourself go. You look like you’ve had too many Greggs or something. I liked that bit where I looked discernibly pregnant, and, like, my tits went really massive and I was a bit, like, that felt like quite sexy. I was like, “Hey, yeah. I’m just carrying a child.” It was really nice having nice hair. It was wavy and long. And there was more of it. And I had beautiful nails. That was really nice. The come down from that, not so nice. But I’d say, the middle of the pregnancy is a really great time, because you’re still feeling really comfortable and you get all the benefits of the hormones kicking in. So that was awesome. The first time I was pregnant, I didn’t get stretch marks until the last month. With him it was way more challenging on my body. I put on more weight. Funny enough, the stretch marks are not the thing that bothered me the most. It’s the breasts. Because my boobs are huge, way bigger than it was with Bebe. And they fell a bit. It’s life. You know, it’s gravity. And in the beginning, I was really upset about it and I was telling my husband, you know, “I’m going to get a boob job when I stop breastfeeding.” The funny thing is is that it took so long to accept that this is my body and I should be happy and it’s not good or bad, it’s just me. And then you get pregnant. And then you slowly start seeing it change, which is fine, because you’re growing a human being. But when you finally give birth and then you’re left with this new body that you took — it took you 30 years to accept and to love and to figure out and figure out what works and doesn’t work and all of a sudden, it’s a completely different body. I think that’s where my issues with giving birth came from. Not being able to wear your own clothes sounds trivial. But actually, just is another thing that really makes you not feel like yourself. And it’s one of the things that makes your life legible to you. Feeling my boyfriend slightly recoil from me, like on a sexual level. Like he would probably object to that word, but feeling that shift of his perception of me as no longer a sexual being, he was like, “I don’t want to cover you in spunk, I want to look after you.” I expected lots of negative things from pregnancy and from giving birth. And I was prepared that it’s going to be hard and everything. But I wasn’t expecting so much love. I really didn’t even know that I’m capable of so much love, which dwarfs everything else in comparison. But I was never really too much in tune with myself as a woman to know how I looked down there or can’t even define how I felt down there. But the minute I gave birth, I knew that everything changed. For me, it wasn’t really bouncing back into my normal intimate life with my husband. That took long, long time and I think two bottles of wine. But I mean, I’m talking about like seven months I think. The last couple of weeks of being pregnant, I lost all sensation in my hands. So one after another, all 10 fingertips went numb. It’s some syndrome where your wrists swell up so much that the nerves that go through your wrist stop sending the impulses through from your fingertips. I think it took probably more than two to three months for sensation to come back in my hands. If you can’t feel what you’re doing, it’s a very weird thing to be taking care of a very little child. I never had a serious or real injury before in my life until C-section. So that was a big thing. I had no idea what’s going to happen there or how it’s going to look like after the surgery. I had a scar. I had stretch marks. I don’t have flat belly at all. But all that physical changes comes together with the everyday work of being a mom. Even the tension you put on your muscles, you should hold her tight, because like you shouldn’t drop her, and things like that. You know what I mean? Yeah. The C-section, I think it was hard on my body. And yeah, it made me dislike my body even more. You know, obviously, even things like now, you know, we’re thinking of going on holiday and I’m like, I always liked wearing bikinis. I’m Brazilian. I grew up on the beach. Now I’m like: swimsuit. I don’t want to show my belly. I don’t want to show my scar. Although I don’t think I should be ashamed of it, of course, but I do have to look at myself sometimes and admit, I don’t like it. I don’t love it. I love to send the message to people, yes, show it. Be proud of it. But I’m still working on it, let’s say. You just keep looking at yourself and you’re just, what is that? And it, actually, it affected me bonding with my baby, because you’re meant to love and protect automatically, which I did, I protected my baby, but I just didn’t like him for what he did to me. It took me like eight weeks to get into, “Oh, O.K., you’re my son. I love you.” I had some tears and I was showering six times a day, because that was the only time I could pee without feeling pain. And half my digestive system was hanging out of my butt. It was really disgusting. How do I go to the bathroom, you know? How do I take a shit? These were the kind of things that I was apprehensive about. So I had, like a two for one deal. I had like a full labor, like 36 hours of that. And then, an emergency C-section. I definitely had no idea what level of pain you can be in without being dead. It would have been really nice to just be told, it’s going to be almost as if you were going to die. Post-surgery recovery, that was a lot longer than I thought. And there were a lot more unexpected things that happened. Like the vaginal walls were really irritated, which nobody could really explain. I was forever bleeding, like every day for half a year. And nobody could tell me why or whether it was going to stop. Just before I got pregnant, I’d finished my master’s. So I’d gone from this being very stimulated intellectually to those first stages of looking after an infant, which are boring. There’s a lot of monotony. And you’re very, very tired. And so it’s a bit like, well, if no one fancies me, my brain’s not involved in the same kind of activity it used to do, then who am I? I started working out six weeks after having a baby. And I did it because I wanted to go back to how I looked as quick as possible. It’s such a weird balance of trying to diet, but at the same time, worrying about are you giving enough nutrients to your kid through your breast milk? Am I being selfish by compromising his food supply, because I’m trying to lose weight and look good, which is such a superficial thing to want? And what a selfish thing to want, you know? It felt really important to me that I wanted to breastfeed. And I think also I would have felt like, I had really failed Wolfie if I hadn’t. But afterwards, my breasts, they were quite empty. They were quite haunted, basically. The skin never kind of went back. When Wolfie was a year old, I had a breast augmentation and breast lift. For me, it felt like it was just taking ownership back of my own body. No, yeah. Breasts are only for my daughter now, definitely. Like nobody else can touch them. It is. It is. It’s different. Yeah. It’s a different feeling. But it’s generally after giving birth and being so preoccupied with keeping her alive and everything, that I put all that part of myself aside for a long, long time. Something that made me self-conscious about having sex in both pregnancies is milk, because I don’t want anyone near my boobs while I’m breastfeeding. And it’s really weird, because you have to change how you do things a bit, basically. It’s not about a sex thing, but like it’s about feeling of my boobs only belong to Luna kind of thing, which was so silly. But like, you only have that tolerance and patience just for your baby and nothing else. Sex used to be natural and fun and spontaneous and beautiful and you can’t wait for it or sometimes you want it. Sometimes you don’t. Now, it’s like this psychological thing. And I never thought that would be the problem with having a baby. The amount of pressure and the amount of responsibility that’s placed on our shoulder the moment we give birth and they give us this baby and they’re like here you go, good luck. The anxiety. I was overwhelmed with anxiety constantly. And even when Wolfie was asleep, I couldn’t sleep, because it was like having a tiny bomb that could go off at any moment. I mean, I can’t look back at the aftermath of pregnancy and birth with anything other than, I feel traumatized by that really, still. Yeah. I plan to have another one as well. And all these changes doesn’t have any effect on it, because apart from everything, each second I share with her is just amazing, just like heaven. Right. I mean, I oscillate wildly between thinking, I really want to have another baby and to I don’t want to have any children. I don’t want to have any family. I want to be on my own, just on my own on Tinder. I guess after having two children, I basically don’t give a fuck to, like, anything else anymore. Do you know what I mean? I feel like, look, my body’s not, yeah, it’s not how I want it to be, but you know, who cares, basically?Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who were given time immediately following Trump to present a rebuttal, clearly expected and were ready for that. In ticking off reasons that an expensive and expansive border wall wasn’t needed, Pelosi kept saying, “the fact is,” “the fact is.” It was a mantra meant to humiliate Trump, which is a sport that she is developing an ever greater taste for.
+When it comes to the border and the wall, Trump’s willful estrangement from reality is so profound that network executives and newspaper editors spent part of Tuesday in strategy sessions about how to respond to his inevitable barrage of falsehoods. Should there be a crawl of words on the bottom of the television screen to correct him in real time? Could fact checkers work speedily enough to post rebuttals online within minutes of his misrepresentations, before they took root? This is where we find ourselves. Other presidents have been untrustworthy, and others have had to be called out on it. But not like this. This is surreal.
+It’s a function of, more than anything, his ego, his vanity, to which the television networks, furloughed federal workers — all Americans — are hostage. He’s not remarkable among presidents in having a high opinion of himself and in desperately wanting others to share it. A robust measure of arrogance and some degree of neediness are what make the grind of the campaign trail and the glare of the media bearable. And all presidents want to rack up triumphs that make them look and feel large. But none in my lifetime has spun so many falsehoods in the service of that. None has been so naked in his hunger for that heft.
+To live with his resounding defeat by that “nasty woman” in the popular vote, Trump had to invent the specter of millions of illegally cast ballots. He never did produce any evidence of that. To not feel eclipsed by President Barack Obama, he claimed there was a media conspiracy to undercount his inauguration crowd. But photographs don’t lie. Not the way a president does.
+The day after his inauguration, in a visit to the C.I.A. headquarters, against a backdrop of stars that symbolized men and women who had been killed on the job for America, he used his remarks to tally his appearances on the cover of Time magazine. “I think we have the all-time record,” he said, but “we” as usual meant “I.”
+There’s no occasion unsuitable for bragging, no mission more vital than the exaltation of Trump. When, over the recent Christmas holiday, he at last paid a visit to a combat zone and spoke to American troops in Iraq, he seemed less intent on thanking them for their service than in having them thank him. He dwelled on a pay increase that they had received and claimed — erroneously — that they had gone without one for 10 years, until he came along.
+“We got you a big one,” he said. “I got you a big one. I got you a big one.” I. Big. That’s the Trump credo in two words.In 2015, Mr. Redstone forced Ms. Herzer, who is at least four decades his junior, out of his mansion in Beverly Hills and removed her from his will. Ms. Herzer had challenged these actions, claiming that Mr. Redstone was not competent to make the decisions. A Los Angeles judge dismissed her case in May 2016, saying Mr. Redstone made it clear in a videotaped deposition that he did not want Ms. Herzer making decisions about his care. Ms. Herzer had appealed that ruling.
+Ms. Herzer’s claim had cast doubt over Mr. Redstone’s empire. Through National Amusements, he wrested control of a vast $30 billion media empire that includes the CBS television network and Viacom, the entertainment company with properties like MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central and Paramount Pictures.
+As Mr. Redstone’s health deteriorated in recent years, a war had broken out over who would control the businesses. Any doubt over his mental capacity put pressure on the Redstone family. At stake were the fortunes of his family and several former confidants as well as the fate of Viacom and CBS. But a settlement agreement in 2016 left Mr. Redstone and Ms. Redstone in firm control of the empire.This article contains multiple spoilers for the Netflix film “Bird Box.”
+The bird box in “Bird Box” is full of holes so the birds can breathe; “Bird Box” the movie is full of holes so the audience can meme.
+For a certain type of fan, half the fun of watching “Bird Box” is pointing out all the logical gaps. The rules in “Bird Box” are never fully articulated, never fully understood, leaving room to debate its mysteries and its deeper allegorical meaning (if any). It’s a movie that loves to raise unanswerable questions, and over the last few weeks, the internet has followed suit: Where did these monsters originate? Was Jacki Weaver’s character a doctor the whole time? Where did Felix and Lucy go?
+The film has drawn widespread comparisons to last year’s other big sensory-deprivation horror film, “A Quiet Place,” which has plenty of its own inconsistencies. But many of the apparent gaps in “Bird Box” have explanations if you know where to look: Some are tucked away in the movie itself; others can be found in the source novel by Josh Malerman.
+Below, we’ve done our best to plug some of the holes. And while we may never know what really caused the suicide pandemic — or why any normal person’s kitchen needs a huge glass-fronted freezer — we do think the Janet Tucker School for the Blind has a few things to investigate.Looks like the Golden Globes and the Directors Guild of America are in agreement.
+Two days after the Globes featured a best-director category consisting of Bradley Cooper for “A Star is Born,” Alfonso Cuarón for “Roma,” Peter Farrelly for “Green Book,” Spike Lee for “BlacKkKlansman,” and Adam McKay for “Vice,” the D.G.A. has nominated those five men for its top honor, as well.
+Will Oscar now follow suit? The Academy Awards typically make at least one substitution in this race: Last year, the “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” director Martin McDonagh scored a D.G.A. nomination but was replaced by Paul Thomas Anderson for “Phantom Thread” come Oscar time.
+Still, the Directors Guild nominations continue to add momentum to several strong contenders, including Cuarón, who won the best-director Globe and whom many presume to be the Oscar front-runner, as well as Farrelly, whose film won best musical or comedy at the Globes. In the wake of a few high-profile Globe losses on Sunday, Cooper can comfort himself with the knowledge that “A Star Is Born” has now been nominated by every major guild, indicating a wide base of industry support.
+Snubbed by the D.G.A. were a few directors who could still find favor with Oscar, like Ryan Coogler for “Black Panther,” Yorgos Lanthimos for “The Favourite,” and Barry Jenkins for “If Beale Street Could Talk.” And though “Bohemian Rhapsody” has picked up steam in recent weeks as an award contender, winning two Golden Globes on Sunday, the Directors Guild’s largess did not extend to Bryan Singer, who was fired during the film’s production.In December, President Trump made an extraordinary declaration about U.S. involvement in Syria: “We have won against ISIS. Now, it’s time for our troops to come back home.” Ignoring advice from his generals and advisers, Trump said that the U.S. would leave Syria. Defense Department officials said that they were ordered to do it within 30 days. [explosion] Then came a flurry of criticism, even from inside his own party. “I believe it is a catastrophic mistake.” “This is very disappointing.” “It needs to be reconsidered.” Then, the resignations. First, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit. And America’s chief diplomat in the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, soon followed. Now, the timeline for a full withdrawal is unclear. “I never said we’re doing it that quickly.” He went on to say that the U.S. will leave at a proper pace while continuing to fight ISIS, a shift from — “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The nearly eight-year-long war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. [explosion] So, how did we get here and what are U.S. forces doing in Syria? In 2011, uprisings rippled through the Middle East. Leaders fell in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. And after months of anti-government protests in Syria, the U.S. had a message for President Bashar al-Assad: “This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.” He didn’t and the conflict escalated. In 2012, Obama warned Assad against using Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons against his own people. “That’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing the use of chemical weapons.” A year later, Assad’s army launched a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, killing 1,400 people. [screaming] In response, the U.S. debated airstrikes, but they were avoided when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. But a new threat was also emerging — ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. began supporting rebel groups to fight extremists, while also conducting airstrikes as part of an international coalition. These efforts expanded and the U.S. troop numbers grew from hundreds to the low thousands. In 2016, U.S.-supported fighters took control of the ISIS stronghold of Manbij — and in 2017 their de facto capital, Raqqa. There are now around 2,000 American forces in Syria who are largely fighting alongside the Kurdish groups. This has been a problem for America’s ally Turkey, which has a long-standing conflict with the Kurds. U.S. troops have had run-ins with Assad’s forces as well as groups backed by Russia and Iran. Since taking office, Trump has ordered two strikes on areas controlled by Assad in response to chemical weapons attacks. “We are prepared to sustain this response, until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.” U.S. officials and allies dispute the claim that ISIS has been defeated. They warn that an American departure will weaken U.S. influence in the region and may embolden Russia, Iran and Turkey, who are also on the ground. The other worry? The move may inspire some ISIS fighters to return to Syria.How do we spot the difference between those related but very different aims? Artists who ritually engage with cruelty see that engagement as a form of truthfulness — a way to be frank; a way to honor the reader, not to bludgeon her. Here is Flannery O’Connor again, writing to a novelist friend about his work in progress: “Isn’t it arbitrary to call these images such as the cat-faced baby and the old woman that looked like a cedar fence post and the grandfather who went around with Jesus hidden in his head like a stinger — perverse? They are right, accurate, so why perverse?” Or turn to Mary Gaitskill, whose influence can be felt on every page of Roupenian’s collection, and whose fiction is full of brutality but also deep sympathy for her characters: “I’m picturing a small core place in a person’s heart that is hard to touch but that everyone wants touched,” she has said about her work.
+With Roupenian, there is just the giddiness of her imagination, of what she can get away with. In the first story, “Bad Boy,” a couple becomes fixated on having a friend overhear them having sex. After a while, they invite him to watch, and later, participate. They order him into various acts of humiliation that culminate in a gamy little climax that would be horrifying if it weren’t so sudden, so random and, finally, so meaningless. When the couple taunts him — “Look at what you’ve done” — I was shaken out of my numb disdain into a kind of anger. No, it’s what the author has done, and why? I wanted better for these characters — lives with real emotional stakes, actual personalities and not just kinks.
+Ellie in “Biter” bites. Ted in “The Good Guy” needs to fantasize about stabbing women to sexually perform. Laura in “The Matchbox Sign” imagines that her body is crawling with parasites — and her boyfriend participates in the fantasy. These characters remain their pathologies; the curtain falls on them before we can ever ask: Now what?
+There’s none of the simmer of “Cat Person” or its attention to language in the rest of these stories. Roupenian will work a metaphor until it screams. On a walk in the woods: “The vaginal lips of a pink lady’s slipper peep out from behind some bushes; a rubber shred of burst balloon, studded by a plump red navel knot, dangles from a tree branch, and the corpse of a crushed mushroom gleams sad and cold and pale.”
+I might stay indoors for the rest of my life.
+But there might be another chance for this book’s raw material. The collection will be a series on HBO. “You Know You Want This” has a quarry’s worth of raw suffering; maybe in the adaptation, we won’t be just shocked, but shocked into something — into a kind of understanding or feeling. That’s what I know I want.A chorus of criticism inevitably greeted Mr. Trump’s recent statement that Iranian forces “can do what they want” in Syria. Yet read as a statement of fact rather than the extension of a green light, he stumbled upon a self-evident truth: Notwithstanding Israel’s successful efforts to limit Iran’s importation of advanced weaponry into Syria, Tehran’s position in the country is essentially secure.
+Mr. Trump is correct that the better course is to extricate ourselves from Syria, but his fatal error has been in its implementation. Most egregiously, his snap decision during a telephone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey betrayed our Kurdish partners who led the fight against the Islamic State and risked being exposed to assault by Turkey and the Syrian regime.
+A more responsible course would have been to use the prospect of an eventual American withdrawal to help avert a subsequent conflict between the Kurds and their adversaries. If, as he is now suggesting, the president withdraws the troops more gradually rather than right away, that opportunity might still exist.
+It requires Mr. Trump to use that time wisely. He should start by abandoning the dangerous notion of Turkey seizing areas controlled by Kurdish forces and instead allow the Kurds — in the absence of long-term American protection — to negotiate an understanding with the Syrian regime. This might entail returning some aspects of the Syrian state to northeast Syria, Kurdish forces retaining their military capacity but lowering its profile and a degree of self-governance for the region.
+In Afghanistan too, Mr. Trump’s bottom line was correct. After more than 17 years of combat and a virtual stalemate, at best, for more than a decade, there is little rationale for continuing to expend American blood and treasure on a conflict trending badly, with unclear objectives.
+But here too, the self-proclaimed “great negotiator” erred in folding America’s limited cards for nothing in return, rather than using his willingness to withdraw as an incentive for the Taliban — currently locked in negotiations with Mr. Trump’s own diplomats — to make peace.
+So much is objectionable about the Trump era that it is hard for critics to know which targets to strike. But principled opposition requires that progressive opponents of President Trump not distort their beliefs for quick rhetorical wins. Whatever administration eventually follows will have many messes to clean up and will need to distinguish those that truly matter.To the Editor:
+Re “Debating the Use of Drugs to Curb the Abuse of Drugs” (front page, Dec. 30):
+It’s time to dispense with the artificial “abstinence versus medication” dichotomy. Taking appropriately prescribed medicines helps the individual to achieve and maintain abstinence from the substance that is maintaining the disease of addiction. Ignorance of this has been driven by the fact that the vast majority of “treatment” programs are operated by individuals with no medical training. As a result, deaths due to opioid addiction needlessly continue to occur.
+Methadone and buprenorphine are not “one drug replacing another.” They provide unique effects, repairing the stress-response system of the brain.
+Using opioids repetitively leads to significant changes in the brain, especially the circuits that are used to detect stress and prepare the brain to respond to it. Over time, it is the experience of stress itself that creates craving for opioids.
+By repairing these circuits with methadone or buprenorphine (naltrexone does not do this), the individual is able to learn to cope with stress without the development of craving. It is not abstinence versus medication; it is abstinence, maintained by medication.Why Mr. Manafort wanted them to see American polling data is unclear. He might have hoped that any proof that he was managing a winning candidate would help him collect money he claimed to be owed for his work on behalf of the Ukrainian parties.
+About the same time, Mr. Manafort was also trying to curry favor with Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian billionaire close to the Kremlin and an associate of Mr. Kilimnik. In July 2016, Mr. Manafort, then the Trump campaign chairman, told Mr. Kilimnik that he could offer Mr. Deripaska “private briefings,” according to emails reported by The Washington Post. Mr. Deripaska had claimed Mr. Manafort owed him millions from a failed business venture, and Mr. Manafort may have been trying to use his status in the campaign to hold him at bay.
+The surprise disclosures about Mr. Manafort were the latest in two years of steady revelations about contacts between associates of Mr. Trump’s and Russian officials or operatives. In another development on Tuesday, the Russian lawyer who met with senior campaign officials at Trump Tower in June 2016 was charged with obstruction of justice in an unrelated case. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan said that the lawyer, Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, had pretended to a federal judge that she was purely a private defense lawyer when in fact she was working with the Russian government to thwart the civil prosecution of a Russian company.
+Of the various Russian intermediaries to the Trump campaign, Mr. Kilimnik appears to be one of the most important to Mr. Mueller’s inquiry. A Russian citizen and resident, he faces charges from Mr. Mueller’s team of tampering with witnesses who had information about Mr. Manafort, but Mr. Kilimnik is not expected to ever stand trial. He did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment on Tuesday.
+His relationship with Mr. Manafort dates back years. The two men worked together to promote a Russia-aligned politician, Viktor F. Yanukovych, who rose to Ukraine’s presidency, was ousted in a popular uprising and fled to Russia in 2014. The two men continued working together over the next three years as Mr. Manafort’s financial troubles grew and investigators began to investigate a fraud scheme that eventually led to his conviction for 10 felonies.
+In August 2016, apparently just before Mr. Manafort was fired from the Trump campaign, he and Mr. Kilimnik met to discuss a plan for Ukraine that seemed to further Russia’s interests. They also met several times afterward, including once in Madrid in early 2017. In an interview in February 2017 in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, Mr. Kilimnik suggested the plan would have involved reviving the political fortunes of Mr. Yanukovych, the ousted Ukrainian leader.
+For Russia, trying to influence the incoming Trump administration’s policy on Ukraine was of paramount importance. The economic sanctions imposed after Russia annexed Crimea damaged the Russian economy, and various emissaries have tried to convince administration officials to broker a resolution to a long-running guerrilla war between Russia and Ukraine.Daniel Borden, one of four men convicted of beating a black man at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, was sentenced this week to nearly four years in prison.
+In May, Mr. Borden entered a plea acknowledging that there was enough evidence to convict him but that did not acknowledge guilt for taking part in the malicious wounding of DeAndre Harris at the “Unite the Right” rally. On Monday, after a monthslong postponement, he received a 20-year sentence, with all but three years and 10 months of it suspended.
+Mr. Borden, 20, was one of six men who surrounded and attacked Mr. Harris, 20 at the time, in a parking garage on Aug. 12, 2017, beating him with metal pipes and wooden boards. Mr. Harris was left with a broken wrist and a head wound that required staples. The beating was captured in a video that spread widely on social media.
+Two of the six men remain unidentified. Of the four who were arrested, Mr. Borden was the last man to be sentenced.At times, this plays out as if all of them are having nervous breakdowns, which of course they basically are. The tension typically derived from subtext is realized in this New Saloon production by having Vanya, Sonya, Yelena, Astrov and the rest of their dysfunctional boondocks household utter the same line serially in two or three different renderings from the Russian.
+Those renderings cover quite a stylistic range, from Marian Fell’s fusty 1916 version (the first in English) to the deliberately anachronistic one by New Saloon’s Milo Cramer (using “911,” “OxyContin” and unprintable oaths for shock value) to the weird output of Google Translate, with several stops in between.
+The result is a group portrait of minds divided, and yet at the same time multiplied, against themselves. When Sonya, the underappreciated chatelaine of the estate, pronounces herself “unattractive,” “not pretty” and also “plain,” she is making fine distinctions but also loathing herself harder as all three. And when all of the translations have beautiful Yelena answer the question “Are you happy?” with an unequivocal “No!” you somehow feel its finality more than ever.
+In order to achieve the piling-on effect, another gimmick is engaged: Most of the play’s eight main characters are played by several actors in the eight-person cast. The roles are assigned regardless of gender, race and physical type or resemblance, so that Yelena is sometimes Madeline Wise, sometimes Ron Domingo and sometimes Rona Figueroa, or all three at once; at other times the same actors show up as almost anyone else. The benefit is that each brings a unique intelligence to the roles; the disservice is that, with only a stole or a pair of gloves to hint at whom they’re playing, you can easily lose track.
+You don’t lose track of David Greenspan, though. Fittingly, he (and only he) plays Serebryakov, the gouty, egotistical professor for whom everyone else must sacrifice. (With all the doubling and tripling, it now seems as if 21 people are kowtowing.) Mr. Greenspan, his whiny dial turned up to max, unearths laughs I’ve never heard Serebryakov get in more traditional, exquisite productions like the recent revival at Hunter College. As “Uncle Vanya” is supposed to be a comedy, I found this revelatory.What to know: A common feeling with a weak pelvic floor is that there’s something stuck in the vagina. Childbirth can exacerbate or cause a weak floor, since tissue that stretches is more vulnerable to age and injury. There is also a big genetic component, and smoking can weaken the floor.
+A tense floor is more complex, in that women can have it from birth or develop it at an early age. A floor can also tighten or spasm after sexual trauma or an event that caused pain, including a yeast infection.
+Pelvic organ prolapse
+What is it? It’s the sagging of one’s cervix and vaginal wall toward the vaginal opening.
+What to know: It occurs normally with age since pelvic tissue, stretchy by nature, is more vulnerable to gravity and aging. Fifty percent of women will develop some form of it over time, and most women don’t get symptoms until it has progressed.
+The most common symptom is the feeling that something is falling out. But it’s important to note that a pelvic floor spasm, which in many ways is an opposite condition, can cause the same sensation.
+Incontinence
+What is it? There are two main types: stress incontinence, when urine leaks when pressure is exerting on the bladder by coughing, sneezing, laughing, exercising or lifting something. And there’s overactive bladder, or having to urinate even though there’s only a small amount of liquid in the bladder. It’s possible to have both conditions at the same time.
+What to know: A lot of women are not screened for incontinence, and ignoring it can lead to a lot of issues. If it gets severe, it can lead to social isolation. There are effective treatments, including medication, physical therapy or bladder retraining. It can also be controlled with an incontinence ring called a pessary. Injecting Botox into the bladder, a treatment for overactive bladder, is extremely effective by preventing muscles in the bladder from spasming from low volume of urine.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court refused on Tuesday to intercede in a mysterious fight over a sealed grand jury subpoena to a foreign corporation issued by a federal prosecutor who may or may not be Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel investigating the Trump-Russia affair.
+The court’s action means the corporation, which has not been identified, must provide information to the prosecutor or face financial penalties. The court’s two-sentence order gave no reasons and provided no details.
+Almost everything about the case has been cloaked in secrecy. But a three-page order issued on Dec. 18 and a more detailed opinion studded with blacked-out passages issued on Tuesday after the Supreme Court acted, both from the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, provided a few hints.
+Judges David S. Tatel and Thomas B. Griffith joined the appeals court’s unsigned majority opinion, and Judge Stephen F. Williams agreed with the outcome but not all of the majority’s reasoning.On New Year’s Day in Sydney I spent seven hours at the beach. Doing what, I can’t quite tell you. But seven hours spent in a shady spot by the sea with friends and food went by in the blink of an eye. I haven’t had a hangout like that since college. Here, that is typical on any given Sunday.
+Part of the beauty of the way Australians hang out isn’t just how relaxed it is, but the inclusive, rolling nature of how they socialize. I showed up for a drink at a friend’s place one evening last month and within an hour four people had turned into eight and by the time I left more were en route.
+Happy hour is simply not a thing because it lasts only an hour. I went to an office Christmas party that began at 3 p.m. in one venue, stumbled into dinner and then morphed onto karaoke. When I hailed a cab at 11:30 I was the first to leave. In my experience, American office Christmas parties mean that everyone gets a thimbleful of lukewarm Champagne in a plastic cup. We have a lot to learn.
+Which brings me to another thing Australians do better: vacation.
+My local cafe here closed the day before Christmas. It reopens on Jan. 15. And no one here thinks that’s strange. January here is like August in France. The only labor taking place in summer seems to be tunneling into coconuts to sip from by the pool.
+Many public pools, by the way, are called “baths” in Australia. Parks tend to be “gardens.” This makes me feel like I am in a Jane Austen novel.
+Word play here is a national pastime. Christmas presents: Chrissy prezzies. A bar mitzvah: a barmy. McDonald’s: Macca’s. Breakfast is brekkie, Australia is Straya, avocado is avo, but you already knew those.
+You can roll your eyes or you can appreciate the fact that everything here sounds a bit cuter. I opt for the latter.The company’s largest creditors will ultimately decide whether they would recover more money by letting Mr. Lampert keep the company going or by selling Sears off piecemeal.
+On Friday, Sears determined that Mr. Lampert’s bid was not adequate, which led analysts and investors to believe that the retailer was headed toward a fire sale.
+But lawyers for a committee of independent directors and Mr. Lampert negotiated through the weekend and Monday in an effort to save the company. The bankruptcy hearing, scheduled for Tuesday morning in White Plains, was delayed by three hours, while the two sides talked.
+[Read more about what led Sears to a bankruptcy filing.]
+To buy an extra week, Mr. Lampert, through his hedge fund ESL Investments, said he would put down a $17.9 million nonrefundable deposit — which is how much it will cost to keep Sears open through Monday’s auction.
+This was an important concession to creditors, many of whom believe their losses mount every day that the company keeps its doors open.LONDON — The European Union penalized Iran on Tuesday over allegations that the country’s intelligence service orchestrated a series of assassination plots in Europe in recent years, including the killing of two Iranians in the Netherlands with ties to anti-government extremist groups.
+In a letter outlining its justification for sanctions, the Dutch Foreign Ministry cited “strong indications that Iran was involved in the assassinations of two Dutch nationals of Iranian origin,” one in 2015 in the city of Almere and another in 2017 in The Hague.
+European intelligence officials have also linked the Iranian government to unsuccessful plots in Denmark and France.
+“In the Dutch government’s opinion, hostile acts of this kind flagrantly violate the sovereignty of the Netherlands and are unacceptable,” the letter said.It was the kind of short, dry announcement that pops up from time to time and goes virtually unnoticed. A cyclist had tested positive for a banned substance and had been disqualified.
+What stood out was this cyclist’s age: 90.
+Had Carl Grove of Bristol, Ind., actually taken steroids before competing in the 90-to-94-year-old division at the Masters Track National Championships? And why had he bothered, considering he was the only entrant?
+No other nonagenarians turned up to challenge Grove in the 2,000-meter individual pursuit last July in Breinigsville, Pa. But his victory was not just ceremonial. Grove completed six laps of the velodrome in 3:06.12, setting a world record.
+Afterward he supplied a urine sample. It tested positive for epitrenbolone, which is a metabolite of the prohibited steroid trenbolone. He was stripped of his national title, lost the world record and was issued an official warning.WASHINGTON — Emboldened House Democrats, seeking a politically charged debate on gun control, unveiled legislation on Tuesday to expand background checks to nearly all firearms purchases, a move timed to mark the eighth anniversary of the mass shooting in Arizona that nearly killed former Representative Gabrielle Giffords.
+By introducing the measure less than one week after taking control of the House, Democrats are signaling that it is a top priority. A vote could come within the first 100 days of the new Congress. The measure, and a companion bill introduced Tuesday in the Senate, also reflects the changing politics around gun laws, an issue many Democrats once shied away from.
+The bill, which will almost certainly pass the House but will face a steep climb in the Republican-controlled Senate, would require background checks on the purchases of nearly all firearms, including those sold at gun shows and over the internet. There would be limited exceptions, including for law enforcement officers and for guns transferred between close family members.
+Polls have shown that a vast majority of Americans — by some estimates, 90 percent — support universal background checks for all gun purchases. Many Democrats, including Representative Lucy McBath, a freshman from Georgia whose son was shot and killed at a Florida gas station, were elected last year after promising to address gun safety.Two months ago, while walking through the old market in Sharm el Sheikh by myself, I tried to just embrace it. I had no plan, no internet, and no direction whatsoever. I wandered into a textile shop and saw elaborate designs that reminded me of Lahore. I wandered into a hidden tea market and bought two bags of tea that smelled like mangoes for my sister. I wandered into a tiny local skin care shop, where I had a two-hour conversation with the salesman and bought the best rose face mask I’ve ever used. It doesn’t even have a name.
+During a recent trip to South Africa, my friend Natasha Khan found herself off track while hiking a trail near Cape Town. She got separated from her group as she stopped to take photos of the various flora and fauna. Hurrying to find them, she went the wrong way and ended up on a main road, which just happened to be near an African penguin sanctuary.
+“There was a man sitting on the side of the road,” she said, “with the biggest, cheesiest smile plastered on his face.”
+His smile caught her eye, so she walked over. He was surrounded by small tin cups and plates, on which he had hand-painted penguins. They talked for awhile and she bought some cups for herself and her friends. Now she keeps them on her shelf to remind her of that moment. That little diversion turned out to be one of the best memories she has from the trip.
+It’s increasingly difficult to really be lost. Google Maps, Yelp and a seemingly endless number of other apps are always waiting in our pockets to help us find our way. But maybe that convenience has a cost. Sure, it’s nice to discover the best restaurant nearby and have your phone guide you there, but I have a feeling we’re losing something. What are we missing when we only see what we want to see?Image Credit...
+Botox injections are approved to reduce the frequency of migraine headaches, but studies of their effectiveness have had mixed results. Now a review of studies has concluded that Botox has small but significant benefits, with few serious side effects.
+Researchers analyzed data from 17 studies, including 3,646 patients, that tested botulinum toxin injections against placebos. More than 86 percent of the patients were women, and 43 percent had chronic migraines, with more than 15 headache days a month. The analysis is in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery.
+Treatment usually consists of 15 to 20 shots around the head and neck given once every three or four months. The pooled data showed that in comparison to a placebo, Botox injections resulted in an average 1.6 fewer attacks per month for chronic sufferers — those with more than 15 headaches a month.
+Botox did have more side effects than a placebo, including a greater incidence of muscle weakness, double vision, drooping eyelids, neck pain and muscle tightness, though no severe side effects were reported.Gunn: When I had met you in Sonoma last year and we were kind of becoming friends — and I started talking to you about this label, Light in the Attic, which is going to reissue “Misora” — I told my record-nerd friends that we hung out. And they were like, “Wait, what?” No one really believed me. I don’t think a lot of people knew that you were living in California or in the States.
+Kanenobu: In 1972, when I first moved to New York, I wasn’t making music because I had two babies, you know. I was mostly taking care of the kids. But Paul played music all the time and I was getting into that.
+Gunn: When did you start writing music again?
+Kanenobu: Really when I met Philip K. Dick. He changed my life and got me to play music again. Paul took me to meet Phil when he was living in Sonoma with his girlfriend. He asked, “Are you still writing songs?” I said, “No, I’m very busy, you know?” And he said, “You shouldn’t stop writing, you have a gift.” He made my eyes all jumbly. I was so touched, and felt so deeply. He really illuminated my heart and soul.
+T: Is it true he started producing one of your records before he died?
+Kanenobu: He did. He did one single record, “Fork in the Road / Tokyo Song.” At one point, Paul and I drove all the way to see Phil in Santa Ana, where he lived and brought him an older record of mine — he had this big fancy player — but when we tried to put it on, it didn’t work. Phil was really angry. He said, “I’m going to throw this whole system out the window,” and he really started picking it up, but we stopped him. Later, we played him the album and he loved it.
+I wrote some new English songs after Phil had told me I should, instead of in Japanese. He started talking about making an album together — he would produce it and he’d be in the studio this time. That was 1982, around February. I was so excited, and then he died in March. It was so sad, the darkest time in my life. He was like my muse. He always called me and encouraged me and read me short stories and made me laugh. I am actually writing a book about the whole thing.Eddie Martinez
+Through Feb . 17 at the Bronx Museum; 718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org.
+Painting might be summed up as a process of accretion: You start with a blank canvas and end with a covered one — unless you are Eddie Martinez, for whom the act of adding and subtracting remains in play throughout the making. Mr. Martinez’s assertive-but-sly approach is on view in “White Outs” at the Bronx Museum, a selection of recent, ostensibly white paintings.
+Mounted in a long, white-walled space, the show suggests a simulated snowstorm: the artificial version of a natural whiteout. In some works, Mr. Martinez, who started out as a graffiti artist, silk-screens his own drawings onto canvas and paints over the colored forms or outlines them with white paint. The idea of blotted-out forms producing new ones, as in the abstract shapes created by graffiti painted over in public spaces, is suggested in “Earth Colonic” (all works 2018) and “All That Something…,” while “Sand Lines” and “White Blockhead Stack” conjure other line forms, including the whiting out of text.
+There are obvious allusions and debts here, to Willem de Kooning — a similarly gestural painter, but also a chronic over-painter and destroyer of his own work — as well as to Robert Ryman 's white-on-white paintings and Jean-Michel Basquiat and Joyce Pensato’s graffiti-influenced Expressionism . (Mr. Martinez was also inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” from 1953, in which the young Rauschenberg acquired a drawing from the older de Kooning and, using a rubber eraser, reduced it to a near-monochrome.)
+This fascination with appearing and disappearing forms is pushed into three dimensions in a series of small sculptures made from everyday objects or constructed with fragments of junk, then bronzed and painted. These sculptures echo Rauschenberg’s and Jasper Johns’s rough-but- exacting execution but add something kind of endearing. Mr. Martinez is like a graffiti-artist coming off the street to quarrel with his heroes, except he’s more about homage than erasure. MARTHA SCHWENDENERMary Kay Stearns, who with her husband, Johnny, starred in “Mary Kay and Johnny,” a very early television sitcom that set the stage for better-known marital fare like “I Love Lucy,” died on Nov. 17 in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 93.
+Her son Jonathan informed The New York Times of her death recently; it had not been previously reported.
+Ms. Stearns was a theater actress in 1947 when an agent suggested that she audition for a job on a New York garment maker’s primitive TV show.
+“What it consisted of is Mary Kay, looking 14 years old, wearing junior dresses and modeling them and telling about the belt and this and that,” Johnny Stearns recalled in an oral history for the Archive of American Television in 1999. When someone asked him what he thought of the program, Mr. Stearns responded that he didn’t think it was much of a program at all and suggested that the garment maker instead sponsor a show that the Stearnses would create about a fictional couple not unlike them.Angela Davis, the activist and scholar, said this week that she was “stunned” after a civil rights group in her native Birmingham, Ala., reversed its decision to honor her with an award amid protests over her support for a boycott of Israel.
+Professor Davis, once a global hero of the left who has since earned renown for her scholarship, had been selected for the human rights award months ago by the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, but the group’s board rescinded the honor on Friday.
+In announcing the move, the institute did not offer an explanation, saying only that “she unfortunately does not meet all of the criteria on which the award is based.” But Professor Davis said in a statement on Facebook on Monday that she had learned it was because of her “long-term support of justice for Palestine.” The revocation of the award, she added, was “not primarily an attack against me but rather against the very spirit of the indivisibility of justice.”
+In a statement expressing dismay at the controversy, Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham said the decision had come amid “protests from our local Jewish community and some of its allies.”It took one visit to Yellowstone National Park for Mike Skelton, 60, to decide that he should move closer.
+But as trash started to pile up in the park during the partial federal government shutdown, Mr. Skelton, who moved to Gardiner, Mont., from Dallas in 2015, felt he could not sit idly by. So he assembled a cleanup crew — “local area residents turned gardeners,” he said.
+“We all live here,” said Mr. Skelton, who runs a sightseeing company providing wildlife and scenic park tours. “When it gets down to it, it is our park and it belongs to all of us in this country.”When Bernice Sandler was a schoolgirl in the 1930s and ’40s, she was annoyed that she was not allowed to do things that boys could do, like be a crossing guard, fill the inkwells or operate the slide projector.
+When she was older, teaching part-time at the University of Maryland, she was told that she wasn’t being hired for a full-time job because “you come on too strong for a woman.” Another interviewer complained that women stayed home when their children were sick. Another rejected her by saying that she was “just a housewife who went back to school.”
+By that time, which was 1969, Dr. Sandler was more than annoyed. She was good and mad. And that led her to become the driving force behind the creation of Title IX, the sweeping civil rights law of 1972 that barred sex discrimination by educational institutions that received federal funding.
+Dr. Sandler, who died on Saturday at 90, was known as “the godmother of Title IX.” She was central to its development, passage and implementation.The notion that streaming services afford wide audiences a chance to sample overlooked pockets of world cinema gains some support with the release of “Lionheart,” a Nigerian feature now on Netflix. For many American viewers, the film will be an introduction to Genevieve Nnaji — one of the biggest stars of the Nigerian movie industry, or Nollywood, who has more than 100 credits.
+In “Lionheart,” which is also her directorial debut, Nnaji plays Adaeze, the logistics director of a family transportation business that is working to win a critical state contract. Her father, Chief Ernest Obiagu (Pete Edochie), publicly praises Adaeze’s abilities at the pitch meeting — then suffers an apparent (but nonfatal) heart attack on the spot. That contrivance offers a sense of the movie’s storytelling, which tends toward the earnest and the functional.Tanisha Keller, a single mother who works for the federal Census Bureau, used to live paycheck to paycheck. Now, she is living nothing to nothing.
+Payday would have come this week for Ms. Keller, 42, and many of the 800,000 other federal workers across the country caught up in the partial government shutdown. But as the standoff drags on, no paychecks are arriving to replenish their savings or pay down their maxed-out credit cards.
+Ms. Keller’s bank balance has dipped to negative $169. She can no longer afford the $100 stipends she once sent to her son, Daniel, to help out with his college books and groceries. She does not know how she will make next month’s $1,768 rent on her apartment in Waldorf in Southern Maryland, or how she will cover the bills that automatically debit from her checking account, or even how she will gas up the car she has been trying not to drive.
+“There’s no cushion,” she said. “When February rolls around, my rent’s going to be due, and I’m going to need the nation to help.”It’s been more than two weeks since the partial government shutdown took effect. On Tuesday, President Trump delivered a national address on immigration to make his case for a border wall again, but Democrats and a growing number of Republicans are ready to reopen the government. These three books offer perspective on the current shutdown: the inner workings of the government offices affected, the political precedent for the present bipartisanship and the debate over a border wall.
+Image
+THE FIFTH RISK
+By Michael Lewis
+221 pages. W.W. Norton & Company. (2018)
+Lewis has a reputation for livening otherwise dry material, and according to our reviewer, “you’ll be turning the pages” of this story about government bureaucracy. The fifth risk in his title (after an attack by North Korea or war with Iran, for instance) is project management, or rather the mismanagement he details within the Trump administration. Key government positions remain unfilled, and others are occupied by nonexperts in their respective offices. “The Fifth Risk” provides insight into how government offices function, particularly under the current administration.
+Image
+THE RED AND THE BLUE
+The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism
+By Steve Kornacki
+497 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. (2018)The Shed — one of the most significant additions to New York City’s cultural landscape in decades — finally has an opening date.
+On that day, April 5, the Shed is set to join a rare lineage of new institutions that offer wide-ranging, interdisciplinary programming on a large scale, like Lincoln Center in the 1960s, or the Museum of Modern Art in the late ’20s.
+And for its inaugural season, the Shed — a flashy, 200,000-square-foot modular building designed by the firms Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Rockwell Group, at the heart of the Hudson Yards development in Manhattan — has commissioned more than a dozen exhibitions, performances and lectures with an aim of presenting both well-established and emerging artists from the worlds of theater, dance, visual art, poetry, film, and classical and pop music.
+“We wanted this to be a building that could bring parity across pretty much all art forms,” Alex Poots, the Shed’s artistic director and chief executive, said in an interview.1. President Trump’s national address lasted just nine minutes. Watch it here.
+Mr. Trump argued that there is a crisis on the southern border that must be addressed before the government shutdown — now the second longest — can end. He was at times misleading. Here’s what he said and how it stacks up against the facts.
+Here is the response from the Democratic Party leaders, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.“Let’s hope so,” said Mr. Office, 61.
+The measure known as Amendment 4 was approved in November by nearly 65 percent of Florida voters, leaving just two other states — Kentucky and Iowa — with laws in place that prevent people with felony records from voting. But the state’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican who was sworn into office on Tuesday, has suggested that the amendment could face challenges down the line.
+Mr. DeSantis has said state lawmakers should craft legislation when their session begins in March to define exactly which former felons are now eligible, though the amendment appears to lay that out explicitly.
+“It’s not delaying it — the people spoke on it,” Mr. DeSantis told reporters in Tallahassee, the state capital, on Monday. “But I think it’s got to be implemented the way that the people intended. And I don’t think that they wanted to see any sex offenders fall through the cracks.”
+The language of the amendment was intended to be self-executing, making the restoration of rights automatic for former felons without murder or felony sex convictions “after they complete all terms of their sentence including parole or probation,” without the need for any additional legislative rules. Previously, ex-felons could apply for re-enfranchisement from the governor and state Cabinet, but that strict clemency process was long and laborious, with no set criteria for success.
+More than five million Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 4. That’s more votes than any candidate on the ballot received.MEXICO CITY — Jair Bolsonaro was sworn in last week as Brazil’s new president. Nicolás Maduro, having taken over from the deceased Hugo Chávez in 2013, will be sworn for a second six-year term as Venezuela’s president on Thursday. These inaugurations illustrate the threats facing Latin America’s democracy, international alignments and unity.
+Mr. Bolsonaro is a right-wing former military hothead, with a record of incendiary statements on everything from gay rights to women, Afro-Brazilians to Donald Trump. He was elected on a wave of anti-corruption and anti-establishment sentiment in Brazil that was further fueled by a citizenry dismayed by record-high crime (even though his own family has already been accused of corruption). He immediately proceeded to pick fights with other leaders in Latin America — rescinding invitations to Mr. Maduro and Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, to attend his inauguration — and has practically broken off diplomatic relations with Venezuela.
+Venezuela’s foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, said President Maduro “never considered attending” the Bolsonaro inauguration, and few guests will be joining Mr. Maduro at his own party. The Latin American Group of Lima, the European Union, and several other countries refused to recognize the legitimacy of his re-election; only the Cubans, Bolivians, Nicaraguans and Salvadorans will figure among Latin American guests, and perhaps an envoy of the new Mexican government, which has clear sympathies for Mr. Maduro, but prefers to be discreet about it.
+In addition to his fraudulent election, Mr. Maduro has egregiously violated human rights, driven the Venezuelan economy into the ground, and generated a humanitarian crisis that has forced nearly three million of his countrymen into exile. With prices languishing for oil, Venezuela’s only export, the country will sink even further into chaos.WASHINGTON — The federal budget deficit continued to rise in the first quarter of fiscal 2019 and is on pace to top $1 trillion for the year, as President Trump’s signature tax cuts continue to reduce corporate tax revenue, data released Tuesday shows.
+The monthly numbers from the Congressional Budget Office also show an increase in spending on federal debt as rising interest rates drive up the cost of the government’s borrowing.
+The widening deficit comes despite a booming economy and a low unemployment rate that would typically help fill the government’s coffers. Federal spending outpaced revenue by $317 billion over the first three months of the fiscal year, which began in October, the budget office reported. That was 41 percent higher than the same period a year ago, or 17 percent after factoring in payment shifts that made the fiscal 2018 first-quarter deficit appear smaller than it actually was.
+The report did show one area of increasing revenue — from Mr. Trump’s sweeping tariffs. Revenue from levies on imported steel, aluminum and Chinese goods were up $8 billion from the same quarter a year ago, an 83 percent increase. That increase, however, is nowhere close to the levels needed to support Mr. Trump’s frequent claims that his tariffs will help pay down the national debt.The young black girl’s killing prompted fears of a hate crime after the family and authorities described the gunman as a gaunt white man in his 30s or 40s. That narrative was upended on Sunday when the police charged a 20-year-old African-American man named Eric Black Jr., who the authorities say admitted to taking part in the shooting, with capital murder. Sheriff Ed Gonzalez of Harris County, Tex., said that it was most likely a case of “mistaken identity,” and that Jazmine’s family’s car might not have been the intended target.
+Shortly after the funeral ended on Tuesday, the sheriff’s office announced that a second man, Larry D. Woodruffe, had been charged with capital murder in Jazmine’s death.
+[Read more here about how trauma can affect witnesses’ memories.]
+Jazmine’s father, Chris Cevilla, said at the funeral that his daughter was a positive force who improved the lives of those around her. She lay in a white coffin that said “Princess Jazmine.”Other states have adopted far more significant changes to voting rules. In Oregon, Washington and Colorado, all registered voters are automatically sent a mail-in-ballot, while Maine and Vermont allow felons still in jail to vote.
+In New Jersey, Mr. Murphy overcame a contentious relationship with two legislative leaders — Stephen M. Sweeney, the Senate president, and Craig Coughlin, the Assembly speaker — to pass last year’s voting bills. One law, which automatically renewed mail ballots for people who had voted by mail in the 2016 election, resulted in more than 400,000 votes being cast by mail during the 2018 midterms, by far the most for any election, including presidential elections, in state history.
+The changes in voting laws followed efforts that date to 2015 when Democratic lawmakers passed an act that contained versions of the proposals Mr. Murphy is now promoting, as well as new proposals like language accessibility, which would require ballots to be printed in more languages if populations were represented in significant numbers in election districts. Mr. Murphy’s predecessor, Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, vetoed the bill, which has been reintroduced in the Assembly.
+More recently, Democratic lawmakers have found themselves the target of intense criticism from voting rights activists over a controversial effort to change the way New Jersey draws its legislative districts. The proposal called for enshrining a formula into the state Constitution that would have tipped the playing field to favor Democrats.
+Mr. Sweeney was a sponsor of the bill. Mr. Murphy, progressive Democratic groups and Republicans all opposed the effort; Mr. Sweeney eventually announced that he would not bring the measure for a final Senate vote.
+Mr. Sweeney declined to say whether he would support Mr. Murphy’s electoral package, while Mr. Coughlin said he believed in expansive voting reforms.
+“Speaker Coughlin is committed to changing New Jersey’s antiquated voting laws and will work to protect voting rights for New Jerseyans across the state,” said Liza Acevedo, a spokeswoman for Mr. Coughlin.Three investigations into sexual assault allegations against the celebrity chef Mario Batali have been closed because detectives could not find enough evidence to make an arrest, a New York Police Department official said Tuesday.
+Three women had come forward to report that Mr. Batali sexually assaulted them years earlier at two Manhattan restaurants where he was an owner or an investor. In all three cases, the victims said they had been drinking and could not fully remember what happened.
+[Read more about how the allegations have affected Mario Batali’s restaurant empire.]
+Charges could not be brought in two of the cases because they were beyond the New York State statute of limitations, which was lifted in 2006 but not made retroactive. Those investigations were closed last summer, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official is not authorized to discuss the cases.
+Prosecutors could not bring charges in the third case because cold-case detectives in the Special Victims Division could not find enough evidence to prove that a crime had occurred. That case was closed in August, the official said.The Arizona Cardinals hired Kliff Kingsbury as their new head coach, becoming the latest team to bet on a high-flying offense to bring them success.
+Kingsbury, a former head coach at Texas Tech and a proponent of the air raid offense, has worked with Patrick Mahomes, Baker Mayfield, Johnny Manziel, Case Keenum and other quarterbacks during his time as a college coach, which included stops at Texas A&M and Houston. Kingsbury’s arrival comes just days after the Cardinals cut ties with Steve Wilks, a defensive-minded coach who was fired after just one season.
+The Cardinals, who handed the starting job to the rookie quarterback Josh Rosen in Week 4, had a league-worst record of 3-13, and scored just 225 points, the least in the league.
+Kingsbury, who signed a four-year contract according to multiple news media reports, will be expected to replicate the success that Coach Sean McVay had with the Los Angeles Rams in a similar situation: a young offensive coach being paired with a promising young quarterback (for the Rams, that player was Jared Goff). The Cardinals’ announcement of Kingsbury’s hiring went as far as pointing out that Kingsbury and McVay are friends.The executive director of the Friars Club, a Manhattan institution long known for its celebrity roasts and as a hangout for entertainers like Frank Sinatra and Jack Benny, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to having filed false income tax returns.
+Prosecutors said the director, Michael Gyure, failed to report roughly $433,000 in compensation between 2012 and 2016. That included reimbursements and payments he used for personal expenses including wine, international travel for himself and family members, clothing and groceries.
+Mr. Gyure pleaded guilty in Federal District Court in Manhattan to one count of filing false returns, and has agreed to pay $156,920 to the Internal Revenue Service. Mr. Gyure, who started work at the club in 2008, according to a spokesman, could face a maximum of three years in prison.
+Mr. Gyure’s unreported compensation — which also included the forgiveness of $160,000 in loans the club made to him at various points — came amid financial turmoil at the storied institution. By 2015, it was asking vendors to accept late or reduced payments, and did not pay several hundred thousand dollars in state sales tax between 2015 and 2016, according to investigators.If they all adopt the per-capita consumption habits of today’s Americans, we’re going to burn up, heat up, eat up, plow up, choke up and smoke up the planet, whether the climate changes or not. That means that clean power, clean cars, clean manufacturing, clean water and energy efficiency have to be the next great global industries — otherwise, we humans are going to be a bad biological experiment, whether the climate changes or not.
+Who believes that America can remain a great country and not lead the next great global industry? Not me. A Green New Deal, in other words, is a strategy for American national security, national resilience, natural security and economic leadership in the 21st century. Surely some conservatives can support that.
+And to make sure that they have an incentive to, I would also guarantee that a portion of every dollar raised by a carbon tax in a Green New Deal would be invested in two new community colleges and high-speed broadband in rural areas of every state. Each state could decide where. Every American needs to feel a chance to gain from a Green New Deal.
+But which Green New Deal? Mine is focused on innovation. I believe there is only one thing as big as Mother Nature, and that is Father Greed — a.k.a., the market. I am a green capitalist. I think we will only get the scale we need by shaping the market. If I were drafting a Green New Deal platform today, it would put in place steadily rising mileage, manufacturing and emissions standards; stronger building codes; and carbon market prices that would say to our industries and innovators: Here are the goals, here is the level of clean power or efficiency that you have to hit every year — and may the best company win.
+As I wrote in my 2007 column: “To spark a Green New Deal today requires getting two things right: government regulations and prices. Look at California. By setting steadily higher standards for the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances — and creating incentives for utilities to work with consumers to use less power — California has held its per-capita electricity use constant for 30 years, while the rest of the nation has seen per-capita electricity use increase by nearly 50 percent, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. That has saved California from building 24 giant power plants.”
+To keep it simple, my goals would be what energy innovator Hal Harvey has dubbed “the four zeros.” 1. Zero-net energy buildings: buildings that can produce as much energy as they consume. 2. Zero-waste manufacturing: stimulating manufacturers to design and build products that use fewer raw materials and that are easily disassembled and recycled. 3. A zero-carbon grid: If we can combine renewable power generation at a utility scale with some consumers putting up their own solar panels and windmills that are integrated with the grid, and with large-scale storage batteries, we really could, one day, electrify everything carbon-free. 4. Zero-emissions transportation: a result of combining electric vehicles and electric public transportation with a zero-carbon grid.
+That’s my Green New Deal circa 2019. It basically says: Forget the Space Race. We don’t need a man, or woman, on Mars. We need an Earth Race — a free-market competition to ensure that mankind can continue to thrive on Earth. A Green New Deal is the strategy for that. It can make America healthier, wealthier, more innovative, more energy secure, more respected — and weaken petro-dictators across the globe.The N.B.A. will formally review the Cleveland Cavaliers’ recent signing and near-immediate release of the restricted free agent Patrick McCaw for possible salary cap circumvention, according to a person with knowledge of the league’s stance.
+The investigation was requested by the Golden State Warriors, who had held McCaw’s rights, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.
+In such cases, officials from the Cavaliers and the Warriors, as well as McCaw’s representatives, are typically interviewed before the league office rules whether Cleveland will face punishment.
+Signing a player to a nonguaranteed offer sheet is technically not against league rules, nor is waiving him shortly thereafter. But because McCaw lasted only a week in Cleveland before the Cavaliers released him, some around the league have suggested that the move was designed more to help McCaw extricate himself from the Warriors than because of any true interest in the player on Cleveland’s part.R.O.G.D. is not a clinical term. It’s a political one, designed to undermine the validity of these young people’s transitions.
+The term originated a few years ago on three blogs with a history of promoting anti-trans propaganda. There has been only one study on it, in the journal PLOS One. But the study isn’t about the children in question; it’s about their parents, who were recruited for the study by ads placed in the conservative blogs that had invented the concept of R.O.G.D. in the first place.
+A child’s transition can indeed seem heartbreaking for parents at first. I understand that because I am a parent who, in experiencing it, felt as if my heart was breaking. And we, trans people, need to understand that too. It was heartbreaking for my own mother, even though she told me love would prevail, and it was heartbreaking for me, in spite of — or because of — the fact that I am trans myself.
+What was my problem, you ask? Above all, I did not want my child’s life to be hard, in the way that my own life has been hard.
+But if you want your children’s life to be hard, the quickest way to that end is to tell them that their deepest sense of self is nothing but a fad, and that you know them better than they know themselves.
+I’ve noticed something fascinating since my child came out, and it reflects the difference between generations over what being trans means. When I began to share my truth, almost 20 years ago, I spent a couple of years going around to people apologizing, begging for understanding, begging, at times, for forgiveness.
+But my daughter’s generation is different. She has never apologized for who she is. Since she came out, her friends have reacted with joy and happiness for her, even — dare I say it? — indifference. Their sense is that being trans is just one more way of being human, and surely no source of shame.OTTAWA — The driver of a truck pulling two trailers laden with bales of peat moss roared past four warning signs and an oversized stop sign at highway speed just before it was struck by a bus carrying a Saskatchewan hockey team last April.
+The collision at an intersection killed 16 people, most of them young players on the Humboldt Broncos, injured 13 and spread sorrow throughout Canada.
+But the details of precisely what happened on April 6, 2018, only emerged on Tuesday after Jaskirat Singh Sidhu, the truck driver, pleaded guilty in a Saskatchewan court. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation obtained a copy of a statement of facts negotiated by prosecutors and Mr. Sidhu’s lawyers.
+The five page document, based on an exhaustive investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, concluded that Glen Doerksen, the driver of the bus, had tried to avoid an unavoidable collision. The bus skidded nearly 80 feet before striking the truck’s trailers. There were no skid marks from the truck.Friday was the 35th and last day of the government shutdown after President Trump agreed to a plan to reopen the government.
+The shutdown is affecting about 800,000 federal employees—many of whom live paycheck-to-paycheck—and services for millions of people in the public. The longer it lasts, the more its effects are felt.A representative for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office declined to comment. Representatives for R. Kelly also declined to comment, but have said in the past that the women living with Kelly were doing so voluntarily. The district attorney’s contact with the Savages’ lawyer was first reported on Tuesday by TMZ.
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+Griggs said that he provided the investigators with access to the Savages for questioning, along with additional witnesses.
+The television special included accusations, first reported by Buzzfeed in 2017, that Kelly has been keeping women in a so-called sex cult in recent years. The episodes featured numerous women who described being controlled or abused by the singer, often beginning when they were teenagers. It also featured a series of former associates who said they had assisted Kelly with his sexual arrangements, as well as family members, including the Savages, of women who have lived with Kelly.
+The Savages say that their daughter, Joycelyn, has been held and mistreated by Kelly, first in an Atlanta residence beginning in 2016, and then in Chicago. She is still believed to be living with him.
+A woman who lived with Kelly in the past, Asante McGee, described the arrangement in interviews with Buzzfeed and Teen Vogue last year, detailing mental, physical and sexual abuse. She said the women were forced to refer to Kelly as “Daddy” and required his permission to bathe, eat, use the bathroom and move between rooms. A representative for McGee said that she had not been contacted by investigators.Here’s what the president said, and how it stacks up against the facts.
+“The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only: because Democrats will not fund border security.”
+False.
+Democrats have offered $1.3 billion in funding for border security measures like enhanced surveillance and fortified fencing. They do not support Mr. Trump’s border wall.
+At a meeting with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer in December, Mr. Trump took responsibility for the partial government shutdown.
+“I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it,” he said.
+— Linda Qiu
+“Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country.”
+This is misleading.
+In November, the agency, which is actually named Customs and Border Protection (and which oversees the Border Patrol), apprehended 51,856 people trying to cross the border illegally. That’s about 1,700 per day.Cyberconflict right now, at this very moment, is like this airplane. It was the first military airplane that was ever built — back in 1909. But in just a few decades, planes would be capable of destroying entire cities. Right, so when we talk about cyberweapons, we’re still basically in 1909. “That’s why you have to have some humility about what’s going to happen in the world of cyberconflict.” David, here, is a national security correspondent for The Times, and he’s written a book about cyberconflict. It seems like we’re hearing more and more — “One of the worst cyberattacks ever.” — about state-sponsored cyberattacks. “Occasionally, there are going to be breaches like this.” “And this weapon will not be put back into the box.” “We have more to lose than any other nation on earth.” So, we really wanted to find out just how bad things are. And how bad they could get. Should we be afraid? “Yes, you should be afraid, but not for the reason you think — not because somebody is going to come in and turn off all the power between Boston and Washington. You should be worried about the far more subtle uses of cyber.” For example, not an overt attack on U.S. troops, but instead, maybe hacking into military health records and switching around people’s blood types. It still causes havoc. “Think terrorism —” “About a third of the building has been blown away.” “— instead of full-scale war.” “Why do you call it the perfect weapon?” “Because it’s deniable. If you can’t figure out right away where the attack’s coming from, you can’t really retaliate.” Plus, you can fine-tune the strength of cyberattacks. You can make them just strong enough to do real damage, but not so strong that they trigger a military response. “It’s cheap compared to, say, nuclear weapons. You just need some twenty-somethings who are good at programming, a little bit of stolen code and maybe some Red Bull just to keep them awake during the night.” That’s why cyberweapons have only just begun to spread. “And cyber is the perfect weapon for a country that’s broke.” “And we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” Take that time North Korea hacked into Sony — “Because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco.” What if they didn’t have cyberweapons? “Maybe they would have landed some commandos at Long Beach, called an Uber, stuck some dynamite underneath the Sony computer center and run like hell.” So really, North Korea’s only option was to use cyberweapons. But it wouldn’t be so easy for the U.S. to hit North Korea’s cybernetworks. “They have fewer IP addresses — Internet Protocol addresses — in North Korea, than you have on any given block of New York City.” Still, we wanted to know who’s the best at cyberconflict. “Russia, China, Iran, they use it regularly to advance their political agendas. The Russians to disrupt, the Chinese frequently to steal information, the Iranians to show that they can reach the United States.” “How good or bad is the U.S. at this stuff?” “Among the very best at cyberoffense. The problem is that while we’re good at offense, we’re the most vulnerable in the defensive world because we’ve got so many networks that form such a big target. The United States has 6,200 cybersoldiers.” “Are these people sitting in military fatigues behind a computer?” “They are sitting in military fatigues behind a computer. But the Russian hackers, or the Chinese hackers, may not be in uniform. They may be in blue jeans. They are probably sitting at the beach somewhere — someplace that’s got a really good internet connection.” All this cyberconflict really kicked off in 2008. Right, that’s when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. “It was the most sophisticated use of cyber by one state against another, and it opened up the Pandora’s box.” And remember — it’s still only the beginning. “We haven’t seen a full-blown war, and we don’t know what one looks like.” “What’s the most challenging part about covering this beat?” “The hardest part about covering the state use of cyber, is the enormous secrecy that the U.S. government wraps around it. But we’ve hit the point where the secrecy has actually begun to impede our ability to deter attacks. Because others don’t understand what we can do to them, and what we’re willing to do to them. In other words, we’re not setting any red lines out there.”COLUMBUS, N.M. — Just minutes from the border in rural New Mexico, the Borderland Cafe in the village of Columbus serves burritos and pizza to local residents, Border Patrol agents and visitors from other parts of the country seeking a glimpse of life on the frontier. The motto painted on the wall proclaims “Life is good in the Borderland.”
+“This is the sleepiest little town you could think of,” said Adriana Zizumbo, 31, who was raised in Columbus and owns the cafe with her husband. “The only crisis we’re facing here is a shortage of labor. Fewer people cross the border to work than before, and Americans don’t want to get their hands dirty doing hard work.”
+President Trump has shut down part of the government over border security and his plan to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and in a prime-time speech on Tuesday night he painted a bleak picture of life in towns like Columbus.On New Year’s Day, part of Belgium put into effect a ban on the way Muslims and Jews slaughter animals. The law declares that the animals must be stunned insensible before they are killed, a practice widely applied in the global food industry but rejected by some observant Muslims and Jews, who insist that their time-honored method of slashing an animal’s neck is mandated by their religion and fully humane.
+It should be obvious to any reader even from this brief summary that there is bound to be impassioned debate on the issue. And indeed animal-rights advocates and religious leaders have squared off on social media and the internet, citing volumes of scriptural injunctions and scientific studies.
+In fact, Muslims and Jews in Belgium and other countries that ban ritual slaughter can still import halal or kosher meat from other countries, and many Muslim communities do allow some forms of electrical stunning that satisfy civil codes. The debate, moreover, is hardly new. Regulations across the European Union require stunning an animal before slaughter, a practice that generally means either firing a bolt into its brain or an electric shock. Most European countries allow religious exceptions, but several — including Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark and Slovenia — do not.
+But on a continent with a long history of anti-Semitism and a newer spread of animosity toward Muslim immigrants, any regulation that appears to discriminate against Jewish or Muslim practices and traditions — circumcision and dress are other examples — is bound to be viewed by the religious as insulting and hostile.The man who the authorities believe shot and killed a 7-year-old girl from the Houston area while she was in a car with her family was charged Tuesday with capital murder.
+The man, Larry D. Woodruffe, 24, had been in custody since he was arrested on Saturday on a felony drug possession charge, according to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Since his arrest, investigators were able to gather “actual evidence” that led them to believe Mr. Woodruffe had fatally shot Jazmine Barnes, Tom Berg, the Harris County first assistant district attorney, said in a statement.
+A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to be more specific on what that evidence was.
+The murder charge against Mr. Woodruffe on Tuesday came on the day of Jazmine’s funeral. Two days earlier another man, Eric Black Jr., was charged with capital murder in Jazmine’s killing.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In February 2010, an undercover F.B.I. agent met in a Manhattan hotel with a Colombian info-tech expert who had been the target of a sensitive investigation. The I.T. specialist, Christian Rodriguez, had recently developed an extraordinary product: an encrypted communications system for Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.
+Posing as a Russian mobster, the undercover agent told Mr. Rodriguez he was interested in acquiring a similar system. He wanted a way — or so he said — to talk with his associates without law enforcement listening in.
+So began a remarkable clandestine operation that in a little more than a year allowed the F.B.I. to crack Mr. Guzmán’s covert network and ultimately capture as many as 200 digital phone calls of him chatting with his underlings, planning ton-sized drug deals and even discussing illicit payoffs to Mexican officials. The hours of Mr. Guzmán speaking openly about the innermost details of his empire not only represented the most damaging evidence introduced so far at his drug trial in New York, but were also one of the most extensive wiretaps of a criminal defendant since the Mafia boss John Gotti was secretly recorded in the Ravenite Social Club.
+The existence of the scheme — and several of the phone calls — were revealed for the first time Tuesday as Stephen Marston, an F.B.I. agent who helped to run the operation, appeared as a witness at Mr. Guzmán’s trial. In a day of testimony, Mr. Marston told jurors that the crucial step in the probe was recruiting Mr. Rodriguez to work with the American authorities.There are more women over 50 in this country today than at any other point in history, according to data from the United States Census Bureau. Those women are healthier, are working longer and have more income than previous generations.
+That is creating modest but real progress in their visibility and stature.
+“Age — don’t worry about it. It’s a state of mind,” Ms. Zirinsky said on Tuesday when asked about the effect of her age on her new job. “I have so much energy that my staff did an intervention when I tried a Red Bull.”
+[‘She Literally Never Stops.’ CBS News Turns to Susan Zirinsky]
+Men, of course, have led major organizations well into their seventh and even eighth decades, retaining their power and prominence. But the #MeToo movement has toppled some high-profile males, from 77-year-old Charlie Rose to Les Moonves, 69, who was ousted as head of CBS after multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, creating unexpected openings for the elevation of women.
+And Susan Douglas, a professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan who is writing a book on the power of older women, said “a demographic revolution” was occurring — both in the number of women who are working into their 60s and 70s and in the perception, in the wake of #MeToo, of their expertise and value.
+“Older women are now saying ‘No, I’m still vibrant, I still have a lot to offer, and I’m not going to be consigned to invisibility,’ ” she said. “These women are reinventing what it means to be an older woman.”2:22
+‘Can The President Be Impeached?’ We Answer Your Questions
+2:58
+How Police Tried but Failed to Protect the Capitol
+2:55
+‘Hold the Line, Patriots’: New Scenes From the Capitol Riot
+1:58
+‘Protesters Are in The Building’: How an Electoral Count Turned Into Chaos
+4:02
+Will Every Vote Count in Pennsylvania?
+7:22
+Trump’s Campaign Is Building an Army of Poll Watchers. What Can They Actually Do?
+5:48
+Watch: Highlights From the Final 2020 Presidential Debate
+6:22
+Breaking Down the Biggest Moments of Trump’s Speech
+0:49
+Trump Slams Biden During Ohio Speech
+7:01
+Why Trump’s Tulsa Rally Put the City’s Black Residents on Edge
+1:23
+Amid Pandemic and Protests, Trump Rally Fails to Fill Arena
+1:442:22
+‘Can The President Be Impeached?’ We Answer Your Questions
+2:58
+How Police Tried but Failed to Protect the Capitol
+2:55
+‘Hold the Line, Patriots’: New Scenes From the Capitol Riot
+1:58
+‘Protesters Are in The Building’: How an Electoral Count Turned Into Chaos
+4:02
+Will Every Vote Count in Pennsylvania?
+7:22
+Trump’s Campaign Is Building an Army of Poll Watchers. What Can They Actually Do?
+5:48
+Watch: Highlights From the Final 2020 Presidential Debate
+6:22
+Breaking Down the Biggest Moments of Trump’s Speech
+0:49
+Trump Slams Biden During Ohio Speech
+7:01
+Why Trump’s Tulsa Rally Put the City’s Black Residents on Edge
+1:23
+Amid Pandemic and Protests, Trump Rally Fails to Fill Arena
+1:44Larry P. Langford, a former broadcaster whose made-for-television tenure as the mayor of Birmingham, Ala., began with ambitions for a $500 million domed stadium and came to an extraordinary end with his conviction on public corruption charges, died on Tuesday in Birmingham. He was 72.
+His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his lawyer, Tiffany Johnson-Cole. While the cause was not announced, Mr. Langford had an array of health problems, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart failure, which in December prompted a judge to order his release from the federal prison where he was serving a 15-year sentence.
+With a showman’s touch and a penchant for defiance, Mr. Langford was a proudly unorthodox political figure in a state full of them. In and around Birmingham, where he was a public figure for more than four decades, he was regarded with an intriguing mix of admiration — for his creativity, zeal and unstinting confidence — and derision, which flowed from his reputation as a politician who dealt in himself and in spectacularly unrealistic ideas.
+Indeed, Mr. Langford, who served as mayor from 2007 until he was convicted and forced from office in 2009, was but one of the mayors who saw Birmingham, Alabama’s largest city, as an unrealized regional prize that could rival Atlanta. But Mr. Langford harbored the highest hopes of any elected official for the old steel hub.How fitting is it that President Trump’s first Oval Office address, which he requested be televised live in prime time by every major network , was aimed at stirring up the American public about a crisis largely of his own making?
+Not that the border crisis is one of Mr. Trump’s self-serving political fictions — like the deep state or widespread voter fraud. It may have started out that way, but the situation has, with the president’s nurturing, become something far more tragic.
+Pursuing poorly thought-out and even more poorly executed policies on the pretext of battling a nonexistent national security crisis, Mr. Trump has helped create a pressing humanitarian one. Desperate migrant families being detained en masse at the border are overwhelming a system pushed beyond its limits by an administration that chose to ignore the implications of its actions — overcrowding, children falling gravely ill and, paradoxically, the haphazard release of throngs of detainees into border communities stretching from California to Texas.
+Mr. Trump is now invoking the urgency of the situation as a justification for pursuing more wasteful, hard-line measures that most Americans do not support, chiefly the ludicrous border wall over which he has shut down critical pieces of the government. The president and his enablers have been busily knitting together inaccurate data, misleading anecdotes, exaggerations and other “alternative facts” about the flow of criminals, drugs and terrorists across the southern border. He seems to hope he can paint a dystopian landscape of security threats and human suffering so dire that the American people will rally to his side and pressure congressional Democrats to succumb to his demands for a towering wall — preferably concrete, but at this point, it seems, steel will suffice.The play begins with one of those adversaries, Bobby, whispering slurs to fluster Pharus as he sings the school’s prayerful anthem, “Trust and Obey.” Bobby (J. Quinton Johnson) is an obvious hothead homophobe, complete with mama issues, but he is also the nephew of Headmaster Marrow (Chuck Cooper) — so it’s Pharus who gets in trouble. Even so, Pharus refuses to rat Bobby out, in misguided deference to the school’s code of honor.
+This is the first of many plot points that feel both obvious and false, like pieces of the wrong puzzle ham-hammered into place. Too frequently, information that if delivered sooner would have forestalled the plot completely is delivered hastily later, as if to sweep it under a dorm bed. In any case, Trip Cullman’s tonally blurry staging for the Manhattan Theater Club does not help you understand what to make of such logical inconsistencies, though it is at least swift enough to keep you from dwelling on them.
+But a similar problem eats away at the credibility of most of the characters as written. Two of the choir boys, Junior (Nicholas L. Ashe of “Queen Sugar”) and David (Caleb Eberhardt), get approximately one trait each. Junior is pleasantly dim; David is tortured by something you’ll see coming a mile away.
+The adults have it worse. Even the venerable Mr. Cooper can’t make Marrow coherent in his fecklessness, and a subplot in which a retired teacher returns to the school to lead a seminar in “thinking” has the subtlety of a shoehorn. It’s not just that the teacher, played charmingly by Austin Pendleton, is a caricature of a fuddy-duddy. (As part of an assignment, he suggests that the students “get i-mail or g-tunes.”) It’s that he is used like a piece of furniture, with no story of his own, for others to walk around or trip over.
+[What’s new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter]
+It likewise becomes difficult to sort out how much of the action results from ambient gay animus toward Pharus and how much from his own lordliness: He’s the best singer, and he knows it. (His name means “lighthouse.”) With good cause, Marrow calls him gifted, ambitious and “operating.”FRONT PAGE
+An article on Thursday about the exodus of academics and business people from Turkey misstated the number of Turks who emigrated in 2017. It was 113,126, not more than a quarter-million, which was the number of all people — Turks and foreigners — who had left the country.
+•
+An article on Tuesday about the impact of the government shutdown on workers misidentified the agency that approves new beer labels for craft brewers. It is the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, not the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
+INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Tuesday about a televised speech delivered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in which he attacked a corruption investigation into his dealings with Israeli media tycoons misstated the length of his address. It lasted seven minutes, not 20.
+•
+An article on Tuesday about a coup attempt in Gabon, using information provided by the government, misstated who was among those killed in the episode. Lt. Kelly Ondo Obiang, the leader of the self-declared Patriotic Movement of the Defense and Security Forces of Gabon, announced the coup but was not one of the plotters killed in the attempt.“It’s not going to change a damn thing, but I’m still doing it,” Mr. Trump said of the border visit, according to one of the people, who was in the room. The trip was merely a photo opportunity, he said. “But,” he added, gesturing at his communications aides Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, “these people behind you say it’s worth it.”
+Mr. Trump plans to head to the Capitol on Wednesday to attend a Senate Republican lunch and later will host congressional leaders from both parties to resume negotiations that so far have made little progress. Mr. Trump has insisted on $5.7 billion for the wall, while Ms. Pelosi said she would not give him a dollar for a wall she has called “immoral.”
+In a nod to Democrats, Mr. Trump spent the first half of his talk on the humanitarian situation at the border before even mentioning the wall, expressing sympathy for those victimized by human smugglers. “This is a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul,” he said.
+Even so, he directly took on Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer. “The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,” he said.
+Mr. Trump has made the wall the singular focus of his presidency as he enters his third year in office. His promise to erect a “big, beautiful wall” along the border became perhaps the most memorable promise on the campaign trail this fall, eliciting chants from supporters of “build the wall,” and he has been frustrated by his inability to deliver on it.
+But his alarming description of a “crisis” at the border has raised credibility questions. While experts agree there are serious problems to address, migrant border crossings have actually been declining for nearly two decades. The majority of heroin enters the United States through legal ports of entry, not through open areas of the border. And the State Department said in a recent report that there was “no credible evidence” that terrorist groups had sent operatives to enter the United States through Mexico.“Put your pipes on a diet, and don’t feed the fatberg.”
+ANDREW ROANTREE, the director of wastewater for a company that manages the sewers in Sidmouth, England, where a huge mass of fat, oil and wet wipes was discovered.WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — That Trenton Charlson . On and on he goes, until you feel like he could fill up an entire grid by talking about himself.
+But he wouldn’t do that, would he?
+Tricky Clues
+18A: A “Pupil’s place” is in school for sure, but in this puzzle the pupil we are supposed to be thinking of is the one in your eye, so the answer is IRIS.
+20A: We think of “Face cards” as the jack, queen and king in a deck of playing cards, but how can they be referred to “informally,” as it says in the clue? In this case, they’re not playing cards at all. They are cards that show your face, as in identification cards, or IDS.
+53A: Hi, kids! In the days before women worked in offices (I know, hard to believe, right?), snail mail used formal terms of address, like “Dear SIRS” or “SIRS” because everyone knew there was little to no chance that there would be any “Madams” around. Eventually, these same formal letters would be addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam,” and these days, hardly anyone addresses anyone else for any reason, except to tweet at each other very informally.The company has had several strong quarters since his arrival, but in its most recent earnings report, a critical sales growth measure was less than half what Wall Street had expected. The company’s stock has tumbled 17 percent since the miss in late November; Mr. Bogliolo largely blamed weak spending by Chinese tourists, who have scaled back amid a trade war with the United States and a slowing economy at home.
+Tiffany hopes to perk up interest in the brand with its program on sourcing. Initially, it will tell customers the country where the diamond came from. In 2020, it will share information about where each diamond was cut, polished and set. Mr. Bogliolo said he hoped to someday be able to provide the name of the mine where it was found, the artisan who shaped its contours and the jeweler who secured it in its setting.
+“It’s relevant nowadays for customers,” he said, surrounded by archival sketches and vintage Tiffany jewelry at the company’s headquarters in Manhattan. “Customers are very educated, mature and demanding.”
+Tiffany’s efforts to attract younger shoppers extend to the Instagram-ready cafe it opened in 2017 inside the nearly 80-year-old flagship store in Manhattan. Its recent ads have featured Zoe Kravitz, an actress described as “the reigning millennial fashion icon,” and a remix of “Moon River,” the classic song from the 1961 film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” performed by the rapper A$AP Ferg and the actress Elle Fanning. At the Golden Globes on Sunday, Lady Gaga wore a custom necklace with more than 300 Tiffany diamonds to collect her trophy for Best Original Song.
+Although the company hopes its information-sharing campaign endears it to younger buyers, the initiative has its limits.The federal government remains shut down for one reason, and one reason only, because Democrats will not fund border security. My administration is doing everything in our power to help those impacted by the situation, but the only solution is for Democrats to pass a spending bill that defends our borders and reopens the government.
+This situation could be solved in a 45 minute meeting. I have invited congressional leadership to the White House tomorrow to get this done. Hopefully we can rise above partisan politics in order to support national security.
+Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized.
+America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien, just came across the border. The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country. Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders.
+In California, an air force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.
+Over the last several years I have met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I have held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief stricken fathers. So sad, so terrible. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls. How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?
+To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask, imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken. To every member of Congress: pass a bill that ends this crisis. To every citizen, call Congress, and tell them to finally, after all of these decades, secure our border.As the former president of New York City Transit — a part of the M.T.A. responsible for the city’s buses and subways — and someone who witnessed firsthand the level of destruction and its impact on subway infrastructure as a result of Superstorm Sandy, I am concerned that the decision to change course on the Canarsie Tunnel project is premature and uninformed. This new plan has not been fully evaluated in terms of costs, available M.T.A. resources and, most important, safety.
+Nor am I aware that the technology recommended to repair the benchwall has ever been used in an under-river environment. As president of New York City Transit, I would have found this new course of action completely unacceptable.
+It is totally understandable that for those living in the communities affected, this news is wildly popular, as it will allow for trains to run through the tunnel during construction. However, since transit engineers were not consulted as part of this new plan, the lack of in-depth knowledge of what’s at stake leaves me concerned for the future safety and reliability of this under-river tunnel.
+The decision to reconstruct the tunnel after the storm was not made lightly. Transit leadership and the M.T.A. board knew the effects on the community would be extraordinarily difficult. We looked at every possibility before deciding to shut down the entire tube. We modeled numerous operation and construction scenarios short of a total shutdown, but all had significant safety and operational concerns and fell well short of a long-term fix.
+Believe me, transit decision makers would have seized on a viable solution that would have accomplished the task and still allowed for adequate and safe train service — but that solution did not materialize. While a total shutdown is painful to the community and businesses alike, the pain was measured in months rather than years, and safety and the long-term viability of the tunnel were at the center of that decision.DeMarcus Cousins is scheduled to make his long-anticipated debut with the Golden State Warriors during the team’s Los Angeles road trip later this month, according to two people with knowledge of the team’s plans.
+The Warriors will play the Clippers on Jan. 18 and the Lakers on Jan. 21, with Cousins expected to make his return from a torn Achilles’ tendon he sustained in January 2018 in one of those two games, according to the people, who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.
+After Golden State’s 122-95 rout of the Knicks on Tuesday night, Warriors Coach Steve Kerr would not make any promises but acknowledged that activating Cousins for either Jan. 18 or Jan. 21 is “definitely the range.”
+“It’s not as simple as, ‘That’s the game’ — it’s somewhere in that neighborhood,” Kerr said. “Now that we are getting closer, like I told you guys yesterday, he’s made some big strides the last week or two, conditioning-wise.”From the moment President Trump began speaking Tuesday night, in an Oval Office address urging the public to support his controversial border wall, Democrats who may run for the White House in 2020 were responding in real time with sharp criticisms and common themes:
+• Mr. Trump is holding federal workers “hostage” — a popular word in the responses — and causing them economic hardship.
+• A wall would be ineffective and “medieval,” another popular word.
+• The president’s willingness to shut down the government over his demand for a wall has actually harmed border security by denying pay to Customs and Border Protection officials.
+• Mr. Trump, not congressional Democrats, is responsible for the shutdown. The Democrats repeatedly noted that the Senate unanimously passed a bill last month that would have kept the government open.
+• There is no immigration crisis at the border, and any crisis that does exist is a humanitarian one caused by the president himself.“My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border. Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them. And we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country. As part of an overall approach to border security, law enforcement professionals have requested $5.7 billion for a physical barrier. At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier, rather than a concrete wall. This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. The federal government remains shut down for one reason, and one reason only: Because Democrats will not fund border security.” “The president has chosen fear. We want to start with the facts. The fact is: On the very first day of this Congress, House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation to reopen government and fund smart, effective border security solutions, but the president is rejecting these bipartisan bills, which would reopen government, over his obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall. A wall he always promised Mexico would pay for.” “We don’t govern by temper tantrum. No president should pound the table and demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down. This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration. The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”If you had the word “crisis” in your presidential address drinking game, my sympathies.
+In President Trump’s first televised address from the Oval Office, and the rebuttal from Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer, there was a lot of crisis talk: “Crisis of the heart,” “Manufacturing a crisis.” The president cast the crisis as a dire, dangerous wave of immigration coming across the Mexican border. For the Democrats, the crisis was the extended government shutdown, precipitated by Mr. Trump’s insistence on funding for his promised border wall.
+What there was not, after two days of media drama, was a convincing argument for why this needed to be a prime-time event at all. There was no news. There was no new argument. There was just a wall of sound, and the American viewing audience paid for it.
+Nor was there much compelling television, unless you’re an avid maker of internet memes. This was not a friendly setting for either party.
+The Oval Office, which can confer gravitas on a typical president, simply saps this atypical one. Mr. Trump comes alive playing off a crowd, like the ones he drove wild with promises that Mexico would pay for the wall. Plopped behind a desk, sniffling, reading sleepily from a teleprompter, he was a comedian playing an empty room.ABOARD SEA-WATCH 3, Off Malta — Four years ago, he escaped jihadists in West Africa. Last year, he survived slavery in Libya. But for Daouda Soumana, a 20-year-old trader from Niger, one of the cruelest experiences of his quest for safety occurred this week — within sight of the southern shores of Europe.
+From the deck of the Sea-Watch 3, a rescue ship owned and run by a small German charity, Mr. Soumana could see the white cliffs of Malta gleaming in the sunlight, and even the outlines of seaside buildings. The German crew members could reach that coast within 45 minutes by speedboat. Not Mr. Soumana.
+He was one of 49 migrants stranded aboard a pair of rescue ships whose requests for safe harbor had been ignored or refused by every national government bordering the Mediterranean Sea since their rescue in December, until Malta agreed on Wednesday to let them come ashore
+“We are crying,” Mr. Soumana said in an interview on the boat this week, before Malta announced the move. “We can see Malta with our own eyes, but we are still stuck on this ship.”TIJUANA, Mexico — With the bullhorn of a nationally televised address and the prestige of the White House around him, President Trump delivered a dark, if familiar, message to the American people on Tuesday night: The United States needs a border wall to stanch the flow of drugs and criminals, and it has no more room for migrants.
+In Mexico — the supposed origin and pipeline of these menaces — leaders and citizens reacted with a weary shrug.
+In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, where thousands of migrants have gathered seeking entry to the United States, most of the televisions in a downtown restaurant showed soccer matches and basketball games. Mr. Trump’s voice, nearly drowned out by music, emerged faintly from a screen in the back.
+Almost no one seemed to care, or even listen to what the American president had to say.
+Luis Arce, a 32-year-old lawyer, was among the few who took a moment to reflect on Mr. Trump’s speech. He said he was not surprised by Mr. Trump’s insistence on building a wall, nor by anything else in the remarks.A prime-time clash over the U.S. shutdown
+On the 18th day of the partial government shutdown, President Trump gave a national address from the White House, citing misleading statistics to declare that there is a “humanitarian and security crisis” on the southern border and demanding billions of dollars in funding for a wall, which he claimed would be “indirectly paid for” by Mexico.
+That was one of many assertions we fact-checked in a live briefing on the address.
+In a Democratic rebuttal moments later, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, joined by Senator Chuck Schumer, said that Mr. Trump “must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must reopen the government.”
+On the ground: Americans living near the border show little enthusiasm for a wall.
+Looking ahead: Mr. Trump will travel to the Texas border on Thursday. But privately, he has dismissed his own new strategy of persuading the American people as pointless, and the shutdown is set to drag on. For many federal workers, that means no paychecks. So far, polls show Mr. Trump taking most of the blame for the shutdown, and Senate Republicans are increasingly anxious.The police collected the DNA of male employees of a private nursing home in Arizona this week as they broadened the investigation into allegations that a woman in a vegetative state there who gave birth to a child last month had been sexually assaulted.
+On Wednesday, the Phoenix Police Department appealed to the community for information related to the case and said the investigation could evolve as detectives learn more about the circumstances of the woman’s pregnancy and the conception of the child.
+“Right now we are investigating a sexual assault,” Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a police spokesman, said at a news conference. “Wherever this investigation takes us, we are prepared to go forward with it.”
+The moves represented an escalation in the case, which on Monday prompted the resignation of the longtime chief executive of Hacienda HealthCare, the parent company of the nursing home. The police announced Friday that they had opened the investigation into the alleged assault.Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall. It was his first prime-time Oval Office address, a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work.
+• The nine-minute speech made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions. The Times fact-checked the president’s remarks.
+• The Times sent correspondents to the four states bordering Mexico and found few who shared the president’s sense of alarm. Many said there was indeed a humanitarian crisis unfolding — but they blamed the Trump administration for worsening it.A spinoff of “The Goldbergs” debuts on ABC. And Rodrigo Cortés’s horror film “Down a Dark Hall” is available to stream.
+What’s on TV
+SCHOOLED 8:30 p.m. on ABC. Adam F. Goldberg trades Toto for Nirvana in this spinoff of “The Goldbergs” — Goldberg’s successful sitcom built partly on nostalgia for the 1980s. In “Schooled,” he and the writer Marc Firek (both creators of the new show) move a decade ahead to the ’90s, where AJ Michalka’s character, Lainey — previously a fashion school dropout with rock singer aspirations — is beginning a job as a teacher at the prep school she once attended. Tim Meadows’s guidance counselor character is now a principal.
+THE DICTATOR’S PLAYBOOK 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The first episode of PBS’s new documentary series on dictators follows the rise of the North Korean leader Kim Il Sung, who began the Kim dynasty and the Korean War during his reign, from 1945 until he died in 1994. The episode begins with his death, after which, the journalist Jean H. Lee explains, the country was “shocked because they had been raised to think of him as a god; they didn’t know that he was even mortal.” The program pays special attention to the use of fear, violence and propaganda by several dictators and draws parallels among their tactics; later episodes cover Benito Mussolini, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and others.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+bombardment \ ˈbäm-ˌbärd-mənt \ noun
+1. an attack by dropping bombs 2. the heavy fire of artillery to saturate an area rather than hit a specific target 3. the act (or an instance) of subjecting a body or substance to the impact of high-energy particles (as electrons or alpha rays) 4. the rapid and continuous delivery of linguistic communication (spoken or written)
+_________
+The word bombardment has appeared in 100 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 30 in “Your Kid’s Apps Are Crammed With Ads” by Nellie Bowles:
+In apps marketed for children 5 and under in the Google Play store, there were pop-up ads with disturbing imagery. There were ads that no child could reasonably be expected to close out of, and which, when triggered, would send a player into more ads. Dancing treasure chests would give young players points for watching video ads, potentially endlessly. The vast majority of ads were not marked at all. Characters in children’s games gently pressured the kids to make purchases, a practice known as host-selling, banned in children’s TV programs in 1974 by the Federal Trade Commission. At other times an onscreen character would cry if the child did not buy something. .... To Dr. Radesky, this bombardment of advertising undercuts most of the educational content an app may include. “There’s very limited research showing how children learn from interactive media,” she said. “But the one thing that’s consistent is if you have lots of distracting bells and whistles, children don’t comprehend the underlying learning material as well.”BANGKOK — A young Saudi woman who barricaded herself in a Bangkok airport hotel room to avoid deportation was granted refugee status Wednesday by the United Nations refugee agency, Australian officials said, clearing the way for an asylum request.
+The woman, Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, 18, had said she feared her relatives would kill her if she was forced to return to them. She escaped from her family in Kuwait on Saturday by boarding a flight to Bangkok, intending to fly from there to Australia and apply for asylum. But Thai immigration officials blocked her from entering the country and threatened to deport her.
+After a tense 48-hour standoff that was followed around the world on social media, the Thai Immigration Bureau agreed to let her leave the airport under the protection of the United Nations agency, also known as UNHCR.
+Now that the agency has granted her refugee status, the next step will be to find a country that will agree to take her in on an urgent basis. Australia’s Department of Home Affairs said on Wednesday that the United Nations had referred Ms. Alqunun’s case to Australia for refugee settlement.Have you seen the movie “Bird Box?” Have you heard of the “Bird Box” Challenge, where people upload videos of themselves doing everyday tasks blindfolded?
+Have you tried it yourself? Would you? What are your thoughts on it?
+What do you think of social media challenges, like this one, that have become commonplace in recent years? Have you ever participated in any of these dares? In your opinion, how does the “Bird Box” Challenge compare to others?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about the challenge and why Netflix has issued a warning against it.Three musical theater writers whose works cover Shakespeare, Afghanistan and a modern spin on the Greek Fates have been awarded the 2019 Kleban Prizes.
+The most promising lyricist award went to two winners: the performer and composer Shaina Taub and the playwright and musical theater writer Sarah Hammond. Charlie Sohne received the prize for most promising librettist.
+Ms. Taub wrote and starred in an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which premiered at the Public Theater last summer. She is currently writing a show about the women’s suffrage movement, and is working on lyrics for the upcoming Broadway musical production of “The Devil Wears Prada.”
+Ms. Hammond wrote the book for “String,” a modern-day fable that debuted in Washington last year. She is currently developing “Wind-Up Girl,” a musical about the French philosopher René Descartes.A friend of mine was telling me how she really wanted me to do a show for Nycha and asked if I would help.
+So, are you going to keep organizing comedy events until you get the $32 billion Nycha needs?
+Wouldn’t it be fun if that’s how it worked out? I solve poverty one comedy show at a time?
+We understand that the need is so great that one comedy show is not going to solve it. But it’s not a sad charity event. It’s still going to be a comedy show. It’s a secret lineup, because I didn’t want people to buy tickets based on the performers they’re going to see. I want people who really want to be there and really help.
+Going without heat, it really sucks.
+Did you go without heat?
+Of course. You think I lived in the one Nycha building with heat?
+You go without heat. You go without food. You go without doorknobs. You go without everything. Elevators don’t work. There was grease and oil inside the elevators to keep off graffiti, but then you couldn’t touch the wall.
+And the thing is, it’s all fixable! We can do something about this.
+Public housing developments also faced problems with crime and drugs in the ’80s. Were you exposed to that?
+You remember the people sleeping outside. You remember the murders of people in their teens and 20s, people making tons of cash who weren’t making tons of cash the day before. It’s a very familiar story.MELBOURNE, Australia — The consulates of several countries were evacuated on Wednesday in the Australian cities of Melbourne and Canberra after they received packages containing what the authorities described as potentially “hazardous material.”
+VicEmergency, a government website that aggregates alerts from the state’s emergency agencies, reported that police and ambulance crews had been dispatched to at least 10 locations, and television news stations broadcast footage of emergency responders outside the consulates of India, Germany, Italy, Spain and South Korea.
+The government of New Zealand also confirmed it had received a suspicious package. The Australian Broadcasting Company said the United States consulate had been affected, but because of the continuing government shutdown, consulate officials were not immediately available for comment.The following linked Times article is significantly longer — over 4,000 words — than most that The Learning Network uses for the Article of the Day. For those teachers who have limited class time, you might consider having your students read the first section of the article (ending at the section beginning “A long history of failure”) and answer questions 1-4. For teachers with more time, we encourage your students to read the whole article.
+Before reading the article:
+Do you feel your school meets your needs? Do you feel you are known and supported at your school? Do you feel that who you are — your identity, culture, community — is respected and valued? Does your school care if you succeed or fail?
+Now, read the article, “‘I Feel Invisible’: Native Students Languish in Public Schools,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins: “The faint scars on Ruth Fourstar’s arms testify to a difficult life on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation.” What are some of those literal and figurative scars?
+2. Ms. Fourstar, a 17-year-old student at Wolf Point High School in Montana, believes that school is a dead end. “I’m just there,” she said. “I feel invisible.” What does she mean by invisible? What are ways that she is invisible, according to the article?BRANTLEY For me, one of his most remarkable gifts is his ability to sustain a feeling of suspense (that Götterdämmerung doom) even though you know where you’re headed. And it works with dark, monumental classics like “View” and “The Crucible.” Curiously, his one attempt at Greek tragedy that I’ve seen, an “Antigone” starring Juliette Binoche, was utterly uninvolving.
+VINCENTELLI I’m fine with him always working in the same register. Are we complaining that Jerry Zaks always does comedy? He’s brilliant at it. As for gimmickiness — that criticism isn’t aimed at, say, Richard Nelson, whose Apple Family plays are just as gimmicky. But because they are in a familiar naturalistic mode, nobody notices or cares. What van Hove is doing is loosening up, if only a bit, the naturalistic grip on mainstream American stages. That’s a big deal in our world.
+ZINOMAN Now that he’s getting to work on the most prominent stages of the commercial theater, I do think his range matters. We agree “View From the Bridge” was wonderful. But is he the right director for “West Side Story”? This question is no longer academic.
+HELLER Part of what has gotten him these opportunities is the embrace of critics like the three of you. He has become a name, a brand of sorts, that theater fans follow. Or not. As one commenter to a Times review wrote: “Ivan Van Hooey. Enough. Please. Make him go away.”
+VINCENTELLI When you go to “The Damned” and you hear people having animated discussions — pro and con — on the street afterward, there’s something happening that I think is very exciting. People arguing over directorial choices! That is just incredible to me. I’ll forgive “Lazarus,” the Bowie show, just for that.
+ZINOMAN I agree with Elisabeth that inspiring heated argument about theater directing is wonderful. But I also think we have a bias for ambition that can make us go easy on van Hove. For instance, let’s take the most provocative decision I have seen him make, the molestation scene in “The Damned.” That was a very young actor, and he lingered in that scene in a way that was meant to make us uncomfortable. To be fair to him, the scene was in the film. But theater is a different medium. And when I watched it live, I didn’t think about the decadence of Nazi Germany or the corruption of that family or any contemporary parallels. The only thing on my mind was that actor: How did they explain this scene to her? Van Hove had already shown us executions, orgies, adult bodies smeared in blood and feathers. Did we need this too? Was it worth it?
+BRANTLEY All of your concerns were certainly on my mind when I watched. I think it would require more space than we have to justify that particular choice. But you’re right, it jerked us out of the moment. I, too, found myself wondering how the young actress had been prepared for that moment.Ivo van Hove is a rarity: a stage director who has bridged the divide between experimental European theatermaking and the story-driven demands of the commercial American stage.
+Who might follow in his arresting footsteps? Here, courtesy of critics and writers for The New York Times, are names to watch — and where to watch some of their coming productions.
+[Read our conversation about Ivo van Hove.]
+Thomas OstermeierFrom its first edition, the biennale has tried to reflect that inclusiveness. For this one, Ms. Dube recruited more than 100 artists from India and 30 other countries. More than half are women, and many, like Mr. Das, had received little previous exposure.
+Shambhavi, a painter and sculptor from the rural Indian state of Bihar, said that women who are artists had long struggled to get the same attention as men. Her work here — a cluster of 300 sickles and other abstract sculptures of farm life — has no distinct gender cast. “But the farmer's world is very feminine, close to the earth,” said Shambhavi, who uses one name professionally.
+Contemporary art can be difficult for audiences anywhere to understand, and especially so in India, a nation of 1.3 billion people with little arts education, few museums and almost no government support for the fine arts.
+Galleries and private museums have begun to take root in some cities. The Kerala government is a major sponsor of the Kochi biennale, which cost about $4 million.
+However, India’s leaders have generally focused on other needs, such as food and health care for the many Indians who live in deep poverty. The art that does get funded tends to support political goals. The government just spent about $430 million to build the world’s tallest statue — a 597-foot monument to the independence leader Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel by the sculptor Ram V. Sutar — in Gujarat, the home state of India’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi. Two bigger statues, of the ancient king Chhatrapati Shivaji and the Hindu deity Ram, are planned in other states run by Mr. Modi’s party.LONDON — “The Favourite,” a dark comedy about palace scheming under Queen Anne in 18th-century Britain, received 12 nominations on Wednesday for the EE British Academy Film Awards, five more than any other film.
+Its nominations for the British equivalent of the Oscars, commonly known as the Baftas, include best film. It will compete for that prize against “Roma,” “A Star Is Born,” “BlacKkKlansman” and “Green Book.”
+“Green Book,” a critically divisive road movie about race relations, was the surprise winner at the Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, winning best picture for a musical or comedy.
+“The Favourite” received rave reviews on its release in Britain and its three stars, Olivia Colman, Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz, all received nominations as did the director, Yorgos Lanthimos. Colman won the Golden Globe for best actress in a musical or comedy, one of the film’s five nominations.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+‘Just Give Trump the Wall’
+President Trump lobbied for a border wall in his nationally televised speech Tuesday night. The wall is his one precondition for reopening the government, which has been shut since Dec. 22. If Congress doesn’t bend to his demand, Trump has threatened to declare a national emergency.
+The move would give his office vast new powers; the Constitution is not clear on what limits those powers might have. Researchers in recent days have pointed out that in a national emergency the president could shut down communications between citizens, or dispatch troops within the country.Now that the shutdown is in its third week, what do you think should happen? Should the president stand firm for weeks, months or years? Should Democrats who oppose the president’s agenda continue to resist? Is there room for compromise on this issue?
+How should this standoff be resolved?
+In “Trump’s National Address Escalates Border Wall Fight,” Peter Baker writes about the president’s address to the nation Tuesday night about the shutdown and his proposed wall:
+WASHINGTON — President Trump doubled down on one of the biggest gambles of his presidency on Tuesday night with a televised appeal to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall, even at the cost of leaving the government partly closed until lawmakers give in.
+Embarking on a strategy that he himself privately disparaged as unlikely to work, Mr. Trump devoted the first prime-time Oval Office address of his presidency to his proposed barrier in hopes of enlisting public support in an ideological and political conflict that has shut the doors of many federal agencies for 18 days.
+In a nine-minute speech that made no new arguments but included multiple misleading assertions, the president sought to recast the situation at the Mexican border as a “humanitarian crisis” and opted against declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress, which he had threatened to do, at least for now. But he excoriated Democrats for blocking the wall, accusing them of hypocrisy and exposing the country to criminal immigrants.
+“How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?” Mr. Trump asked, citing a litany of grisly crimes said to be committed by illegal immigrants. Asking Americans to call their lawmakers, he added: “This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve.”
+Democrats dismissed his talk of crisis as overstated cynicism and, with polls showing Mr. Trump bearing more of the blame since the partial shutdown began last month, betrayed no signs of giving in. The White House earlier in the day dispatched Vice President Mike Pence and others to Capitol Hill to try to shore up Senate Republicans, who are growing increasingly anxious as the standoff drags on.
+In their own televised response on Tuesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, accused the president of stoking fear and mocked him for asking taxpayers to foot the bill for a wall he had long said Mexico would pay for.
+“President Trump must stop holding the American people hostage, must stop manufacturing a crisis and must reopen the government,” Ms. Pelosi said.“Is the horse breathing, and does it have a heartbeat?” Start with these questions, says Laura Javsicas, an equine veterinarian who has performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation on dozens of newborn foals. If everything goes right, a foal emerges from its mother front hooves first, head tucked like that of a diver. But four gangly legs can cause things to go awry. Foals born by cesarean section can be particularly at risk of needing CPR.
+If a newborn foal looks distressed, lay it on its right side and check for a heartbeat by placing your hand or a stethoscope behind its left front leg. To determine if it’s breathing, see if its rib cage is moving, or hold your fingers in front of its nose. Make sure nothing is obstructing the nostrils (horses can’t breathe through their mouths). Take a dry towel and vigorously rub the foal; this tactile stimulation mimics a mare’s postbirth licking and can trigger inhalation. If that doesn’t work, you’ll need to start breathing for it. In the veterinary hospital, Javsicas inserts a tube into the trachea and attaches a plastic respirator bag, which she squeezes to inflate the lungs. If you don’t have that equipment, begin mouth-to-nose resuscitation.
+“Hold your hand over the nostril closest to the floor,” Javsicas says. Take a deep breath, seal your lips over the other nostril and exhale. Repeat every two to three seconds. If you have a partner, that person should begin chest compressions by kneeling next to the animal, locking elbows and placing hands (one atop the other) at the highest point on the chest, behind the left front leg. Aim for 80 to 120 compressions per minute. “It’s very exhausting,” Javsicas says. If you’re alone, give two compressions, then a breath, and repeat. You can stop compressions once the heart rate is consistently above 60 beats per minute. If you see no progress after 15 minutes, stop.
+The process of breathing and pumping blood through the heart of another being is a strange kind of melding that will bond you to that animal. Javsicas tries to keep tabs on the foals she has brought back from the brink of death. “I like watching them grow up,” she says. Adult horses are extremely difficult to revive, however. Javsicas has tried, but never successfully. “Horses are just so much bigger than we are.”Looking back, my first mistake in this endeavor was, as usual, overthinking things. The best — and most popular — recipe I’ve ever written has three ingredients: buttermilk, chicken and salt. It’s simple, easy and extraordinarily tasty. Anyone with an oven can make it. It’s my favorite roast chicken, and it just so happens that buttermilk plays the role of three separate elements — a sugar, an acid and a liquid brine. The lactose in buttermilk produces the chicken’s signature mahogany-brown skin while the acids help tenderize the meat and offer a slight, pleasant tang. And some of the water the buttermilk contains makes its way into the chicken during the overnight marination, yielding moist meat.
+After deconstructing that recipe and examining what made it so wonderful, I wanted to put it back together in an even more appealing way. And what’s more appealing than a bread stuffing? Nothing, if you ask me. In keeping with the second cardinal rule of virality, I wanted to create a one-pan dinner. I like my stuffing to be absurdly moist; if I cooked the chicken atop the bread, it would absorb any drippings. If I brined the chicken in chicken stock, then the drippings would be doubly chickeny. There was my hook! Who’d ever heard of stock-brined chicken? And, as a bonus, I could dilute the brine with a little more unsalted stock and toss stale bread in the flavorful liquid so that nothing was wasted. At this point, I was feeling really proud of myself. Then I remembered that there isn’t anything sweet or acidic about chicken stock, which meant I would need to add more ingredients. I settled on apple cider and cider vinegar — both acidic and aligned with that slightly Thanskgiving-ish flavor I wanted for the stuffing.Perhaps no living scientist is as enthusiastic — or doctrinaire — a champion of Darwinian sexual selection as Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University. In May 2017, he published a book, “The Evolution of Beauty,” that lucidly and passionately explains his personal theory of aesthetic evolution. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, but within the scientific community, Prum’s ideas have not been as warmly received. Again and again, he told me, he has asked other researchers for feedback and received either excuses of busyness or no reply at all. Some have been openly critical. In an academic review of Prum’s book, Gerald Borgia, one of the world’s foremost experts on bowerbirds, and the ethologist Gregory Ball described the historical sections as “revisionist” and said Prum failed to advance a credible case for his thesis. Once, over a lunch of burritos, Prum explained his theory to a visiting colleague, who pronounced it “nihilism.”
+Last April, Prum and I drove 20 miles east of New Haven to Hammonasset Beach State Park, a 900-acre patchwork of shoreline, marsh, woodland and meadow on Long Island Sound, with the hope of finding a hooded warbler. Birders had recently seen the small but striking migratory species in the area. Before he even parked, Prum was calling out the names of birds he glimpsed or heard through the car window: osprey, purple martin, red-winged blackbird. I asked him how he was able to recognize birds so quickly and, sometimes, at such a great distance. He said it was just as effortless as recognizing a portrait of Abraham Lincoln. In Prum’s mind, every bird is famous.
+Binoculars in hand, we walked along the park’s winding trails, slowly making our way toward a large stand of trees. Prum wore jeans, a quilted jacket and a beige hat. His thick eyebrows, round spectacles and sprays of white and gray hair give his face a vaguely owlish appearance. In the course of the day, we would see grazing mallards with emerald heads, tree swallows with iridescent turquoise capes and several sparrow species, each distinguished by a unique ornament: swoops of yellow around the eye, a delicate pink beak, a copper crown. On a wooded path, we encountered a lively bird flinging leaf litter into the air. Prum was immediately transfixed. This was a brown thrasher, he told me, describing its attributes with a mix of precision and fondness — “rufous brown, speckled on the breast, yellow eye, curved beak, long tail.” Then he reprimanded me for trying to take a picture instead of observing with my “binos.”
+About two hours into our walk, Prum, who is a fast and fluid talker, interrupted himself midsentence: “Right there! Right there!” he said. “There’s the hooded! Right up against the tree!” Something gold flashed across the path. I raised my binoculars to my eyes and scanned the branches to our right. When I found him, I gasped. He was almost mythological in his beauty: moss-green wings, a luminescent yellow body and face and a perfectly tailored black hood that made his countenance even brighter by contrast. For several minutes we stood and watched the bird as it hopped about, occasionally fanning white tail feathers in our direction. Eventually he flew off. I told Prum how thrilling it was to see such a creature up close. “That’s it,” Prum said. “That moment is what bird-watching is about.”
+As a child growing up in a small rural town in southern Vermont, Prum was, in his words, “amorphously nerdy” — keen on reading and memorizing stats from “The Guinness Book of World Records” but not obsessed with anything in particular. Then, in fourth grade, he got glasses. The world came into focus. He chanced upon a field guide to birds in a bookstore, which encouraged him to get outdoors. Soon he was birding in the ample fields and woods around his home. He wore the grooves off two records of bird calls. He befriended local naturalists, routinely going on outings with a group of mostly middle-aged women (conveniently, they had driver’s licenses). By the time Prum was in seventh grade, he was leading bird walks at the local state park.
+In college, Prum wasted no time in availing himself of Harvard University’s substantial ornithological resources. The first week of his freshman year, he got a set of keys to the Museum of Comparative Zoology, home to the largest university-based ornithological collection in the world, which today has nearly 400,000 bird specimens. “I’ve been associated with a world-class collection of birds every moment of my adult life,” he says. “I joke with my students — and it’s really true — I have to have at least 100,000 dead birds across the hallway to function intellectually.” (He is now the head curator of vertebrate zoology at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History.) He wrote a senior thesis on the phylogeny and biogeography of toucans and barbets, working on a desk beneath the skeleton of a moa, an extinct emu-like bird that stood 12 feet tall and weighed 500 pounds.The other group focused on diets and eating behavior. Its participants were given a 480-calorie liquid meal and told to finish it, then describe how full they felt, while researchers drew blood to test the levels of certain hormones that are known to be involved in making people feel satiated or not.
+Later, on a separate visit to the lab, the volunteers learned their supposed genetic test results. Some of those in the exercise group were told that they had a particular gene variant that makes people likely to have low endurance and find prolonged exercise difficult. This gene variant exists and is associated with a low response to endurance training. But most of the participants who were told that they carried this gene type in fact did not.
+Similarly, the researchers told some of the people in the diet group, incorrectly, that they carried a gene variant that could reduce how full they felt and nudge them to overeat, or that their variant of the gene should make them feel full quickly and reduce their risk for obesity.
+Afterward, the men and women repeated the treadmill or the meal session.
+The results of each session were telling. Those people in the exercise group who had been told — almost always inaccurately — that their genes made them unlikely to respond well to exercise tired more quickly now than they had before, and their oxygen uptake and lung capacity were significantly lower.
+In the diet group, those people who erroneously thought they had the protective variant of the appetite gene felt fuller after drinking the shake than before and their bodies produced more of a hormone that increases satiety.
+In both cases, people’s psychological beliefs about their genetic risks had altered their physiological responses to the testing.
+Perhaps most interesting, the researchers then compared the physical effects of having a gene variant with believing, incorrectly, that you did.I’ve had a hard time describing your recent documentary, “Minding the Gap,” to my friends. What do you think it’s about? I struggle with this. When we first got into Sundance, and we had to write the description, we fought really hard to not put the word “skateboarding” anywhere in there. I’ve just seen too many skateboarding movies that either are competition narratives or come off as a bit angsty. There was also a lot of talk among us about taking out any reference to social issues in the promotional materials, whether domestic violence or child abuse, and I was like, “I guess that makes sense.” But I’m torn about the effect that’s had, because on the one hand, the film is doing exactly what I want it to — young people who would go seek out a skateboard film anyway, it seems to be destroying them by the end emotionally. But it has turned off a lot of people, too. I talk to film lovers who say, “I didn’t even watch the film because I saw the word ‘skateboarding.’ ”
+Who do you want to see it? The 15-year-old kid in rural Arkansas who doesn’t have any gauge to let him know that he doesn’t have to repeat this pattern of growing into an adult in ways that are both toxic and vapid.
+So make them think it’s about skateboarding and then have it be about something much more serious? Well, when I first started the project, I was like: “How do I get people in? How do I get young people to engage in things like violence in the home? Let me use the vehicle of skateboarding.”“Jared is particularly interesting because it shows where America has come to,” he said, “and that America is a much, much more tolerant place than it was.”
+That shift may resonate most strongly with those who have known the country as it was.
+For Mr. Miller, who grew up in Colorado’s more conservative, red-leaning Western Slope, the election of a gay governor was all the more satisfying for being in his own state. “For me, on election night, seeing Jared and Marlon up on that stage and him giving his victory speech — I so much would have loved to have known what that would have felt like back when I was in high school,” he said.
+This rang true even for young local voters, who in the week leading up to the inauguration described feeling elated. Jean Peterson, a paralegal in Denver who turns 26 this week, described watching Mr. Polis’s November victory speech with her girlfriend, tears in her eyes.
+“It was really moving,” she said, “to see him point to his partner and all the support that his partner gave him, to have someone acknowledge their partner … We were both kind of crying.”
+At his inauguration on Tuesday, the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus warmed up with “True Colors” (Cyndi Lauper, who first recorded it, was booked for the inaugural ball that night) before remarks from local grandees and faith leaders and the new officials were sworn in. Mr. Polis sat with Mr. Reis and their children behind a pane of bulletproof glass, a precaution one veteran Colorado reporter noted he hadn’t seen in five previous inaugurations. But when Mr. Polis got up to speak — after a quick selfie with the crowd — he addressed divisiveness and diversity only briefly.Last year, for the first time, we sent one intrepid traveler, Jada Yuan, to all 52 destinations on our Places to Go list. This year, we decided to do it again. Once again, we got applicants from around the world and from a variety of backgrounds (meet some of them here). After weeks of assessing them, we settled on a handful of finalists. From that group, we chose Sebastian Modak, one of our finalists from last year, and a journalist with an impressive background and résumé. Just weeks before he sets off to his first destination — Puerto Rico, which took the No. 1 spot on the list this year — we asked him some questions about himself and the trip ahead.
+So, how does it feel to be the 52 Places Traveler for 2019?
+In a word: surreal. It’s a lot of emotions at once — gratitude, excitement, anxiety — but mostly I’m still finding it hard to wrap my head around it concretely. I’m starting to think the sheer scope of what I’m doing won’t hit me until I make landfall in the first destination and start reporting. Luckily, data scientists at the travel aggregator Kayak have helped us sketch out an itinerary for the year in advance — as they did last year for Jada — so I have some sense of what the structure of my year looks like. That said, this trip wouldn’t be nearly as interesting if I knew exactly what to expect, right? I’m ready to embrace all the uncertainty that comes with an opportunity like this and see where it takes me.
+Have you been following Jada Yuan, our 2018 Traveler? Anything in particular you’ve picked up from her dispatches?
+I’ve read every one. It’s been a real pleasure following along and I know I’ve got some big, well-worn shoes to fill. My favorite moments from Jada’s dispatches were the interactions that, on the surface, may seem everyday, but in actuality tell much bigger stories about a place: a night out in Kigali, a meal in La Paz, a haphazardly assembled trip-planning committee in China built out of nothing but the kindness of strangers. Those stories get at the heart of why we travel. I’m hoping to bring the same openness and down-for-anything attitude that led Jada to those moments.Before his untimely death (it may or may not have been an accident), Ayoola and Korede’s father was a master of the dodgy deal, selling refurbished cars to a dealership as brand-new and building his smart new ranch house on the proceeds. He beats his daughters, tries to pimp them out to important friends and colleagues and brings home his mistress despite his wife also being there at the time. When she screams, he looks at her with indifference. “If you don’t shut up now, I will deal with you.” The girls’ mother reaches for the Ambien.
+Image
+Braithwaite writes in a rat-a-tat style that forces the plot along at a clip. Short chapters headed “Bleach,” “Body,” “Scrubs,” “Heat,” “Questions” follow one another in a taut rhythm like that of a drumbeat. A lazier writer would have left it at that. But Braithwaite’s tale takes a darker turn when Ayoola tips her cap at the very man Korede herself is secretly in love with, the warmhearted Dr. Tade Otumu, who keeps a bowl of candy on his desk for his child patients and sings a lullaby to an inconsolable toddler recoiling from being given an injection. “Is there anything more beautiful than a man with a voice like an ocean?” Korede asks herself. The little girl “waddles towards him. When she is older, she will remember him as her first love.”
+Although Tade feels affection and respect for his head nurse, he quickly forgets her when Ayoola crooks her little finger at him. For Korede’s sister, the doctor is just another man to play with. He sends her orchids. She sends him a text: “I. Really. Prefer. Roses.” “All he wants is a pretty face,” she tells Korede. “That’s all they ever want.” Despite this, Korede keeps looking after her sister, steering her away from social media because she should still be mourning her latest dead beau if she doesn’t want to raise suspicions about how he passed away.
+To stop herself from going crazy, Korede confides in Muhtar Yautai, a patient who for months has been in Room 313. Whenever she feels low, Korede enters his room, lifts the chair from beside the table in the corner, sets it down a few inches from his bed and pours her heart out. “I came to talk to him about Ayoola,” she confesses. “But it is Tade whom I cannot seem to get out of my mind. I … I wish. …” Turning to the subject of Ayoola and the men she is killing, she says: “Femi makes three, you know. Three, and they label you a serial killer. … Somewhere, deep down, she must know, right?”
+Muhtar was badly injured in a car accident. He’s been in the hospital for five months, and it helps that he is in a coma. But then he wakes up and begins to remember what Korede has told him. All of a sudden the story takes a different turn.The society has preliminary counts from 97 sites, most of them along California’s coast, representing an area that traditionally accounts for nearly 77 percent of the state’s winter monarch population. In 2017, the sites hosted about 148,000 monarchs. But in 2018, that dropped to an estimated 20,456 monarchs, with large numbers of them counted in Pismo Beach, Big Sur and Pacific Grove.
+In November volunteers fan out across California’s coastal cities to find and count the monarch population. Ms. Pelton said the total count could be higher once final numbers from the census arrive next week.
+Monarchs in the western part of the United States migrate for the winter to California, where they gather mostly among fragrant eucalyptus trees, which provide hospitable living conditions.
+Monarchs from the eastern part of the United States, by contrast, winter in Mexico. Ms. Pelton said the count of eastern monarchs had not been released.
+Ms. Pelton warns that if nothing is done to preserve the western monarchs and their habitat, the butterflies could face extinction. In a 2017 study, scientists estimated that the monarch butterfly population in western North America had a 72 percent chance of becoming near extinct in 20 years if the monarch population trend was not reversed.After two days of sightseeing with a friend, my wife and I met with an experienced amateur battlefield historian named Jack Letscher, in the lobby of a Hilton resort that overlooks the East China Sea. Together we headed south across the island. Already hot and sweaty, my wife and I followed Letscher across a parking lot and down a narrow sidewalk to an elevated crosswalk that arched over a busy four-lane highway. The sun broiled the already red and tender skin on my neck and arms, where my T-shirt gave no protection. Letscher was taking us to the base of Kakazu Ridge. I felt as if I was finally approaching a mountain I had only dreamed of ascending.
+When we reached the apex of the crosswalk, Letscher pulled out a ragged copy of an official military history and flipped through it until he found a map marked with a red sticky note. “Right here,” he said pointing to a topographic view of the land we were now standing over. “This road we’re overlooking is the same one your grandfather’s company traveled to get to Kakazu. Right under our feet. This is where they were.” I felt a weight in my stomach. My grandfather likely wouldn’t have recognized Kakazu Ridge today. What was once a verdant, rolling landscape was now a bustling, crowded city. “Up there on the hill — see that blue tower with the roof?” Letscher asked. “That’s the top of the ridge. That’s where the heaviest fighting took place.”
+When the tanks arrived on the eastern edge of the village, they found the remnants of wooden huts surrounded by once-sturdy stone walls and hedges that had been reduced to rubble by an American bombardment. Sighting through their periscopes, the gunners inside the tanks shot their .30-caliber machine guns at anything that moved; Japanese soldiers fell like tenpins as they emerged from their emplacements. The tanks armed with flamethrowers shot long, sticky streams of rage into cave openings and whatever buildings remained. Slowed down by steep, broken terrain and caught without infantry support, the tanks were vulnerable to various forms of attack that the Japanese exploited to near perfection. In addition to antitank guns and mines, one of the most effective methods for destroying tanks was to immobilize them with a small explosive and then run up and hit them with magnetic demolition charges or Molotov cocktails. If the crew decided to stay buttoned up in a disabled tank, attackers would pry open the hatch and throw in grenades. According to Gene Eric Salecker’s authoritative history of tank warfare in the Pacific, “Rolling Thunder Against the Rising Sun,” the loss of 22 tanks in the assault on Kakazu Ridge on April 19 “was the greatest loss of American armor” in a single engagement “during the entire Pacific war.”
+Two days before Christmas, seven months after I returned from Okinawa, I wrote a long essay recording everything I had seen and learned while I was there. As my father read it, I could see his shoulders relax and a great sense of relief bubble to the surface. Less than a week later, I received a small manila package of documents I had requested back in June from the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, where all the remaining military personnel records from the Second World War are stored. In 1973, a fire erupted that destroyed about 80 percent of all Army personnel records from before 1960, including my grandfather’s discharge paperwork. Fortunately for me, more than 100,000 reels of Army and Air Force morning reports — which contained information about the individual soldiers in a given company, including their assignments and injuries — survived the blaze.For as long as I can remember growing up in Puerto Rico, El Morro, the indestructible fort with the endless lawns at the entrance to San Juan harbor, was where you went to fly a kite. And on a recent sunny afternoon, just as expected, a couple and their young son were there trying to catch an updraft to loft a plastic butterfly with a long blue tail into the sky.
+On Fortaleza Street, an art installation of colorful umbrellas hovered above pedestrians, triggering countless selfies. A short ferry ride away from the old city, at the Bacardí rum distillery in the town of Cataño, visitors sipped cocktails in an open-air pavilion with a roof shaped like a bat in flight.
+But as Puerto Rico tries to come back as a premier Caribbean destination after the devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria in Sept. 2017, just a short drive from the pricey beachfront hotels, hundreds of residents are still living under leaky tarps, their poverty on display in glaring bright blue.WASHINGTON — Democrats, transitioning into the House majority, have quietly sent dozens of letters in recent weeks seeking documents and testimony from President Trump’s businesses, his campaign and his administration, setting the table for investigations that could reach the center of his presidency.
+Clear targets have emerged in the process, and some others appear to have fallen away, at least for now. Family separation and detention policies at the border have jumped to the forefront. So has the acting attorney general’s oversight of the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. But Democrats, after slamming House Republicans for their inadequate inquiry, do not plan to reopen a full-scale Russian interference investigation. They have also chosen to hold off on an immediate request for Mr. Trump’s tax returns.
+For eager liberals coming off two years of Republican oversight paralysis, the next few weeks may feel something like a game of hurry up and wait. Arranging witnesses and wrangling sensitive government documents take time, and most House committees have yet to be populated with lawmakers, not to mention much of the legion of lawyers who will do a lot of the work of investigations. The Intelligence Committee did not technically have a chairman until last week.
+“Those people who are expecting some kind of Hollywood movie here are going to be disappointed because it is going be very orderly,” said Representative Jim Himes, Democrat of Connecticut and a senior member of the Intelligence Committee.In 1966, Face-o-Metrics were taught at Alexander’s department stores. (It was an era when department stores were still gathering places, vibrant agoras for more than just shopping.) These facial workouts were invented by one Jessica Krane, the “prophet of the basic woo and the ostrich,” as the paper described her. The basic woo, the article went on to say, is the shape your mouth makes “as if one were uttering a very intense woo” — go on, try it — and its practice, with variations, promised to erase lines around the mouth. The ostrich, designed to banish double chins and jowls, required leaning your head back as far as possible.
+Another exercise was to obscure your age, if you were a woman older than 25. The article portrayed Ms. Krane’s own face as being wrinkle free, though it pointed out, rather nastily, that she did look as if she were over 25.
+In 1969, The Times declared that exercise studios, particularly those run by a certain Russian émigré , had become as modish as restaurants. Women who were attuned to aspirational signifiers like the right hairdresser or, as the article said, “that little jewel of a manicurist” — these included a copywriter from Cosmopolitan, a filmmaker’s assistant and the wife of a television personality — were drawn to places like Alex & Walter on West 57th Street, where they might hang from rings like circus performers or real gymnasts.
+[Follow us on Instagram for more discoveries from the Times photo archives.]
+More populist was an establishment that cannily operated across the street from Macy’s, where fashion collided with reality on a daily basis. The trauma of the dressing-room mirror greatly benefited the Health Spa, as it was blandly named, which saw as many as 400 clients a day. “Hot pants, especially, have gotten us a lot of clients,” its proprietor said.Slide 1 of 10,
+Madison Square Park is an anchor for the neighborhood known as NoMad, for North of Madison Square Park. A reflecting pool at the northern end of the park offers a gathering place for young families who have moved into the area recently, attracted by the central location, renovated historic buildings and new condominiums.Although the term NoMad has been used intermittently for about two decades to refer to the area immediately north of Madison Square Park, many New Yorkers remain unfamiliar with it and the location.
+Nicole Risener wasn’t among them, however, when she and her husband, Edward, both 31, began looking for an apartment in a family-friendly neighborhood close to Penn Station. They found it in 2014, at the northern edge of NoMad. “I knew it was an up-and-coming neighborhood,” Ms. Risener said.
+Recently married, they were living in a one-bedroom rental in Chelsea and planning to have children. In addition to a family-friendly area, they wanted easy access to trains to Long Island, where Mr. Risener teaches history at a middle school in Nassau County.
+The two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo they bought for $2.14 million “was the largest apartment we saw,” Ms. Risener said, and they found everything they wanted in their new neighborhood.Adding to the difficulty of reaching a deal has been the fractious nature of the Trump administration, with the three main government departments involved in the negotiations each pursuing a somewhat different agenda. Those different agendas to some extent reflect each agency’s institutional biases and responsibilities, but make it harder to predict what a final deal will look like.
+Robert E. Lighthizer, the United States trade representative and a hawk on trade issues, has led the push to impose tariffs on imports from China and has pursued an ambitious agenda that would require China to carry out verifiable and enforceable changes to the basic structure of its economy. Mr. Trump said last month that Mr. Lighthizer would be the lead trade negotiator with China.
+The Commerce Department, which oversees American export promotion activities overseas, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross have been pushing since the early days of the administration for a deal that would require China to buy more food, natural gas and other products from the United States. Beijing officials have been happy to go along, as their country is short on arable land and gas, and long-term purchase agreements fit easily into the Chinese government’s economic planning model.
+The Treasury Department, under Secretary Steven Mnuchin, has been pushing for a quick deal that would stop further increases in American tariffs. But Treasury would preserve indefinitely the 25 percent tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed in July and August on $50 billion a year in Chinese-made goods, or roughly a tenth of American imports, and the 10 percent tariffs that he imposed in September on an additional $200 billion in Chinese goods.
+That first set of tariffs covers several categories in which China does not export much now but plans to do so in the next several years. The most important products covered by the 25 percent tariffs are gasoline-powered and electric cars. At least six Chinese automakers have announced plans to start exporting cars to the United States in 2020, said Michael Dunne, the chief executive of ZoZo Go, an automotive consulting firm specializing in China.
+“Import duties will slow — but not stop — Chinese automakers’ plans to enter the U.S.,” he said. “With a slowing home market, pressure to export has never been greater.”
+Democrats and Republicans alike have been wary of allowing an influx of Chinese cars in an election year, particularly when manufacturing states like Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin have been among the main electoral battlegrounds in recent decades.The president’s direct appeal to the American people, and his planned trip to the border on Thursday, are meant to pressure Congress to approve $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall. Yet Mr. Trump privately acknowledged earlier Tuesday that the speech would change little.
+Democratic leaders then gave their own televised address, criticizing the president for asking taxpayers to pay for a wall he had long said Mexico would fund.
+Watch: The president’s speech and the Democratic response by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer. (Or read the full transcripts.)
+Fact check: We verified claims by Mr. Trump and the Democrats.
+The Daily: On today’s episode, two Times reporters discuss the president’s address.For years, New York City tried to be a cultural melting pot where people of different backgrounds live and work side by side. A “gorgeous mosaic,” as the city’s first black mayor, David Dinkins, liked to call it.
+Reality, though, is more complicated — particularly when it comes to schools. New York City public schools are among the most racially segregated in the country, according to a widely cited 2014 study.
+The city’s response to that study has been to try to integrate schools, largely by changing zoning and admission rules. Some white public school parents are resisting, leading to dramatic headlines about racism.
+Another, lesser-known reaction is also under way.
+“Rather than pushing for integration, some black parents in Bedford-Stuyvesant are choosing an alternative: schools explicitly designed for black children,” my colleague Eliza Shapiro writes:
+Children of any race may apply to an Afrocentric school, though they are overwhelmingly black. Some have sizable numbers of Hispanic students … but the schools typically have few or no white applicants … The schools are run and staffed mostly by people of color, and tend to have high graduation rates and standardized test scores at or above the city average.
+Many parents at these schools said their children were marginalized at integrated schools. One told Ms. Shapiro:
+“Even if integrated education worked perfectly — and our society spent the past 60-plus years trying — it’s still not giving black children the kind of education necessary to create the solutions our communities need.”
+Ms. Shapiro told me, “The debate on how to deal with the segregated city schools has been focused on white support, and opposition, to it. That is incomplete if it doesn’t take into account what black and Hispanic families want, since they make up a majority of city schools.”
+Was Ocasio-Cortez’s tax plan inspired by Trump’s?“My fellow Americans: Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border. Every day, Customs and Border Patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them. And we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country. As part of an overall approach to border security, law enforcement professionals have requested $5.7 billion for a physical barrier. At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier, rather than a concrete wall. This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. The federal government remains shut down for one reason, and one reason only: Because Democrats will not fund border security.” “The president has chosen fear. We want to start with the facts. The fact is: On the very first day of this Congress, House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation to reopen government and fund smart, effective border security solutions, but the president is rejecting these bipartisan bills, which would reopen government, over his obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall. A wall he always promised Mexico would pay for.” “We don’t govern by temper tantrum. No president should pound the table and demand he gets his way or else the government shuts down. This president just used the backdrop of the Oval Office to manufacture a crisis, stoke fear and divert attention from the turmoil in his administration. The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall.”The people who didn’t want television networks to cede a prime-time hour last night — or, as it turned out, a prime-time 10 minutes — to the president of the United States were implicitly giving Donald Trump a credit that he does not deserve. There is a kind of silver-tongued orator who can persuade in any situation, who like Caesar’s Mark Antony can find a crowd leaning one way and leave them stirred up for the opposite cause, who is legitimately dangerous when given a rostrum or a soapbox or a prime-time speech. But that is not our president: His rhetoric is a bludgeon, and what we saw last night was just an attempt to club his enemies and critics with the same arguments he’s made a thousand times before.
+In fairness to Trump, the immigration bludgeon was effective once — for two reasons that played out in surprising ways across the 2016 campaign. First, Trump-the-candidate’s dire warnings about criminals and terrorists crossing the southern border dovetailed with two 2016-specific trends — the spike in violent crime after decades of decline, and the rash of Islamic State-inspired attacks on both sides of the Atlantic.
+Second, the extremity of his rhetoric persuaded skeptics of mass immigration, long burned by politicians of both parties, that Trump would not betray them. In a political landscape where every year seemed to bring a new bipartisan push for amnesties and immigration increases, his xenophobic style was an effective political marker for anyone with inchoate anxieties about immigration. You didn’t have to literally believe that he would build the Wall and make Mexico pay for it to regard that wild promise as evidence that he would be more genuinely restrictionist and hawkish on the issue than politicians merely paying lip service to “border security.”
+[Want to join the debate? Follow us on Instagram at @nytopinion.]
+But the problem for Trump is that presidents have to deal with changing circumstances and cope with unexpected crises, not just fulminate in the same style regardless of the context. And the world of 2019 looks different than the world in which he campaigned. The crime rate didn’t keep rising, the pace of terror attacks hasn’t quickened, and fate has given him an immigration crisis that’s substantially different than the crisis of murderers and terror plotters that he invoked in his campaign rhetoric — a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of families and children, in which the problem isn’t the people that we can’t catch crossing the borders but the people who surrender willingly, hoping to exploit our overstrained asylum system and disappear with their kids into the American interior.Congress enacted a wide range of reforms that promised to restrain presidential power. The War Powers Act of 1973 created mechanisms to ensure that Congress authorized the deployment of American troops abroad. The Budget Reform of 1974 centralized the process used by the House and the Senate to make decisions about spending money so as to make the legislative branch more of an equal of the executive. The Campaign Finance Reform Act of 1974 established a system of public finance for presidential elections along with spending and contribution limits.
+The National Emergencies Act of 1976 authorized the president to initiate emergency powers of government, but with the condition that he or she specify the particular provisions in detail. (This is the authority President Trump has reportedly explored as a way of funding his wall.) Intelligence reforms imposed limits on the C.I.A. and F.B.I., whose surveillance and national security operations had greatly enhanced the president’s power. Last but not least, the Ethics in Government Act of 1978 sought to watch against a replay of Watergate by establishing the Office of the Independent Counsel to ensure that there would be independent investigations into executive branch corruption.
+Despite these reforms, four decades later, the “imperial presidency” still seems to be alive and well. What went wrong?
+The most familiar challenge stems from the fact that in the midst of national security crises, much of the nation remains willing to allow presidents to respond to its perceived enemies. Despite the War Powers Act and the larger lessons of Vietnam, Congress has continued to allow presidents to send troops into combat without a formal declaration of war. In response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Congress passed legislation authorizing a vast expansion of the national security system that gave President George W. Bush and his successors access to new organizations, programs and institutions through which to pursue national security goals without congressional support.
+Since the 1970s, Democrats and Republicans have sorted themselves by party, with less room for internal dissent and less of a will to criticize or challenge a president from one’s own party. Both parties have been willing to grant the president more authority when it served their purpose. The main dynamic for Democrats has centered around party leaders supporting presidents who use executive action, through regulatory orders and rule making, to deal with urgent policy problems that congressional Republicans oppose. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton turned to executive power to deal with energy and climate change when Congress refused to do so. President Barack Obama did the same on immigration after congressional obstruction prevented compromise legislation from passing.Kanter’s father, mother and sister remain in Turkey. He has not seen them since 2015 when, he said, the government destroyed his brother’s school, imprisoned his dentist and arrested a man after his child took a picture with Kanter.
+In 2016, the Kanter family’s house was raided and their electronics were taken.
+Kanter has stopped communicating with them because of the fear of retribution.
+His brother Kerem played basketball professionally in France and is now based in Chicago hoping to land a spot in the N.B.A.’s developmental league. Kanter’s youngest brother, Ahmet, plays high school basketball in Atlanta and is due to return to school this week after spending winter break in Turkey.
+Kanter said he does not think his recent comments — he called Erdogan a lunatic, a maniac and a dictator in one fell swoop — will further jeopardize his family. On the contrary, he said he thinks being outspoken will secure his family’s safety. If Turkish officials detain his brother at the airport or throw his father in prison, Kanter said, his voice will only grow louder.
+“I will speak to every newspaper and make it one of the biggest stories,” he said.
+Kanter has a close relationship with Fethullah Gulen, a cleric who has lived in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania for nearly 20 years and whom the Turkish government has accused of masterminding a bloody coup attempt in July 2016. Gulen denies the accusation.
+Kanter visits Gulen every two weeks when not traveling with the Knicks. For decades, Gulen’s Hizmet movement has claimed to be trying to push the country toward democracy, education and cultural openness. But critics say the movement has secretly undermined democracy by infiltrating its followers into government institutions in order to seize power.
+Kanter said he was with Gulen in Pennsylvania the night of the coup attempt, praying for peace. That comment is likely to outrage many in Turkey; the leading coup plotters were Gulen followers who ordered tanks and planes against protesters, killing 251 people, including several soldiers and 60 police officers.Good Wednesday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+The pain of the government shutdown is showing
+President Trump escalated the border wall fight in a televised speech last night, at the cost of leaving the government partly closed. He criticized political opponents for blocking the wall, although Democrats have offered $1.3 billion for border security measures like surveillance and fencing.
+The effects of the shutdown have begun to ripple across the economy, with mortgage applications delayed or canceled, public companies unable to complete deals and the well running dry for many federal employees.
+• Payday would have come this week for many of the 800,000 federal workers affected. With no paychecks on the way, their savings are evaporating and their credit cards are being maxed out.
+• The impasse is being felt elsewhere in the economy, including in home sales. Buyers are pulling out because of “economic uncertainty,” according to a National Association of Realtors survey. And closings are being delayed or canceled because customers’ mortgages were backed by federal agencies.ATHENS — A far-left militant group in Greece known for staging attacks on political and foreign diplomatic sites has claimed responsibility for a bombing near Athens last month outside the offices of a major broadcaster and newspaper publisher.
+In a post on the anti-establishment website Athens Indymedia on Tuesday night, the Group of Popular Fighters claimed responsibility for the Dec. 17 bombing, which caused serious damage to the facade of the building but no injuries. Greek news outlets reported at the time that 10 kilograms, or 22 pounds, of explosives had been used.
+In its statement, the militant group said it had targeted the broadcaster Skai and the newspaper Kathimerini, which are part of the same media group and are housed in the same building, because they were among outlets that “played a special role in preserving the rotten economic and political system” during the Greek debt crisis. For a decade, the country was required by international creditors to adopt austerity measures in return for bailouts.
+The group also accused news outlets of promoting a capitalist agenda in Greece and of “terrorizing society that beyond the E.U. there is nothing but chaos and hell.” It appeared to be referring to the idea, widely supported in 2015, that a compromise with creditors in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund was required to allow Greece to remain in the eurozone.The Korean War halted in 1953 with an armistice — but a formal peace treaty was never signed. As part of the armistice, the American-led United Nations Command and the Communist generals of North Korea and China agreed to create a two-and-a-half-mile-wide buffer zone that divides the Korean Peninsula to keep the warring armies apart.
+Known as the DMZ, the buffer zone was supposed to be “demilitarized,” but soon became a heavily fortified frontier riddled with land mines and surrounded by fences and guard posts.
+Then last year, South Korea’s president, Moon Jae-in, and North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, took a symbolic step. Hand in hand, they crossed over the demarcation line, signifying what many hoped was the start of a new era.
+The two leaders’ summit meeting itself offered little in the way of a concrete plan for peace, but the theater of the crossing resonated globally. Still, while a formal peace agreement may finally be in sight, the border remains heavily fortified.Monk and Fox are on a group chat with a couple of other former teammates at Kentucky, Monk said, and they message one another all the time. Monk roots for Fox — “I tell him, ‘Keep killing, Fox,’ ” Monk said — but he cannot help noting the opportunity that Fox has gotten, and how much he has made of it.
+“If you get down on yourself, that’s going to mess everything up,” Monk said. “So I just try to stay positive. You have to be patient, man. Patience.”
+Borrego benched Monk for two games last month — the coach was frustrated with the team’s defense — but said on Tuesday that he was pleased with Monk’s progress.
+“He’s just got to be more consistent on the defensive end,” Borrego said, “and we’re seeing that growth.”
+Monk’s minutes, though, have been sporadic — much as they were last season under Steve Clifford, who now coaches the Orlando Magic — and he said he was learning to adapt. Everyone wants to start, he said, but maybe he was meant to come off the bench and develop into an elite scorer like Lou Williams or Jamal Crawford, two players who have turned their reserve roles into art forms. Or maybe, Monk said, his career will take a different turn.
+“There are always teams watching,” Monk said. “So, I mean, if this is not your spot, it might be somewhere else, and there’s always somebody watching — and it’s probably somebody that likes you. So you’ve got to go out there and do stuff for you and for your team. If you do both of those things together, you’ll be all right.”
+Asked if he was happy in Charlotte, Monk said: “I’m playing basketball. So, yeah, I’m learning, and I’m watching the best every night. If you’re not happy doing this, I don’t know why you came to the N.B.A. So me playing or not, I’m still going to learn, I’m still going to smile, and I’m still going to be who I am. So I’m glad I’m in this situation.”WASHINGTON — When Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California stepped to a microphone last week and pronounced President Trump’s border wall “an immorality,” most Democrats cheered and nodded their heads.
+But a few privately grimaced, worried that such stark terminology could make it more difficult for Democrats and Republicans to find their way out of an impasse over border security that has partially shuttered the government for three weeks, deprived about 800,000 federal workers of their pay and increasingly threatens beneficiaries of federal programs.
+Democrats, said one Democratic lawmaker from a Republican-leaning district who insisted on anonymity to offer a candid assessment, cannot be seen by the public as calling border security immoral.
+The divide illustrates why Democrats are working to focus public attention on the painful costs of the partial government shutdown — vulnerable families going without food assistance, farmers forgoing crop payments, national parks trashed — and Mr. Trump’s recklessness in courting it, rather than delving into the specific details of erecting a barrier on the southwestern border.Coachella, Lollapalooza and Bonnaroo, the three biggest, are now highly developed brand names, with the drawing power to sell out well in advance; tickets for Coachella’s two weekends, for example, sold out in a matter of hours last week.
+There is even a competing Woodstock: the Bethel Woods Music and Culture Festival, over the same anniversary weekend — which will also feature “TED-style talks” — will be held on the same grounds as the original, around 60 miles from the town of Woodstock. (The Watkins Glen site is further afield, about 30 miles west of Ithaca.)
+For many concertgoers, another issue is whether the Woodstock name itself was damaged by the 1999 festival, which was marred by fires, rioting and reports of sexual assault.
+“It’s not tainted,” Mr. Lang said. “’99 was more like an MTV event than a Woodstock event, really. I take some responsibility for that. It was also kind of an angry time in music.”
+And then there is the corporate consolidation of the concert business, which has grown especially intense over the last few years as two companies, Live Nation and AEG, compete to book major tours. Live Nation is a partner in the Bethel Woods event.
+“The industry has completely changed since 1999,” said John Scher, the veteran concert promoter who was a partner with Mr. Lang on Woodstock ’94 and ’99. “The entrepreneurial spirit of 1969 doesn’t exist anymore.”WASHINGTON — Rod J. Rosenstein, a lifelong Republican with a tough-on-crime record, was eager to put his stamp on the Justice Department when he was sworn in as the deputy attorney general in the early months of the Trump administration.
+Instead, he was abruptly thrust into a political maelstrom after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director only two weeks later. Mr. Rosenstein appointed a special counsel to investigate Russia’s election interference and spent the next year and a half defending that inquiry from both Mr. Trump’s unwavering attacks and attempted political intrusion by his congressional allies.
+Now Mr. Rosenstein plans to step down as the United States’ No. 2 law enforcement official after Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, is confirmed, three administration officials said on Wednesday. Senators could vote to confirm him as early as next month.
+Mr. Barr will represent a new chapter for the Justice Department and for the Russia investigation, which is nearing its final stages and is expected to be finished in the coming weeks or months, according to senior law enforcement officials. They cautioned that like any investigation, it could be prolonged if the special counsel overseeing the inquiry, Robert S. Mueller III, were to cover uncover new evidence central to his mandate.To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Appeals Directly to U.S. for Border Wall” (front page, Jan. 9 ):
+In his brief address from the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday night, President Trump relied on tired stories of immigrant violence that he has often repeated, backed by statistics of dubious validity and delivered in his typically nonemotive style. Mr. Trump’s advisers thought this speech would move the nation and cause a dramatic shift in public sentiment to support the wall or take the onus of the government shutdown off him. They were wrong .
+Arguably, the speech is simply a sign of his desperation. The man is consumed by an obsessive need to fulfill a campaign pledge punch line. He seems to believe that to abandon the wall might risk losing some of his core base, the same group whose good will he may need to help him overcome a future impeachment challenge.
+Mr. President, as you have done so many times in your two years as president, your speech further debased the dignity of the office. In the past, Oval Office speeches have been reserved for true national crises, not those manufactured to serve a president’s own political self-interest. As if we really need any more evidence, Mr. Trump once again underscored that he is unfit to occupy the White House.
+Ken Derow
+Swarthmore, Pa.
+To the Editor:
+Much of President Trump’s Oval Office address focused on the crimes committed by illegal immigrants. We need to remember that wherever you have people, you have sin. Even our outstanding military has a small percentage of personnel who commit crimes while serving overseas. I hope that no one would argue that because of this minuscule minority the military should be forbidden from serving overseas.Slide 1 of 24,
+An 1886 Victorian house in the Mount Adams neighborhood of Cincinnati, with three bedrooms and four bathrooms, is on the market for $425,000.Cincinnati | $425,000
+A three-story Victorian built in 1886, with three bedrooms and four bathrooms
+This house is in the historic neighborhood of Mount Adams, with views of downtown Cincinnati courtesy of a parking lot across the street that leaves the vista open. (Residents can also pay to park there.) The drive to the central business district is less than 10 minutes in moderate traffic; Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is about 20 minutes away. Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park, a regional theater in the 186-acre Eden Park, can be reached in five minutes on foot. A few more minutes takes you to the Cincinnati Art Museum.
+Size: 2,115 square feet
+Price per square foot: $201
+Indoors: This home was a multifamily residence before the previous owners restored its single-family configuration. The current owners replaced much of the exterior siding, repainted the interiors, updated a second-floor bathroom and lightly remodeled the other three full bathrooms.
+A foyer with an original leaded-glass transom and new ceramic-tile flooring leads to a combined living-and-dining room with hardwood floors and a decorative fireplace. A coat closet and full bathroom are off the dining area; the eat-in kitchen beyond has granite counters, a desk area and a pot rack hanging over a central island. Sliders open to a three-season sunroom.
+Up a staircase painted to emphasize the original hardwood details, one finds two bedrooms on the second level. One has an en suite bathroom with marble floors and shower and a mirrored vanity; the other has an en suite bathroom with a walk-in shower, a niche with built-in bookshelves and a gas fireplace. A spiral staircase leads from this room to the third floor, where there are an additional bedroom and bathroom.The 2015 closing of Gotham Chamber Opera, which performed operatic rarities from all eras in locations as varied as the Hayden Planetarium and a Lower East Side burlesque house, dealt a blow to New York music lovers. The company boasted creativity, musicality and frugality, but it still failed to survive — shutting its doors amid a sea of red ink.
+Now its founder, Neal Goren, is back in business — thanks to an unusual collaboration between his new company, Catapult Opera, and Peak Performances at Montclair State University, which will present four of Catapult’s productions, beginning with the premiere of a new Robert Wilson staging of Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors” in the fall of 2020.
+The collaboration promises to bring an important artistic voice back to the region, and to offer hope of a financially viable model for Mr. Goren to continue putting on chamber opera. Jedediah Wheeler, the executive director of Peak Performances, said he had long admired Mr. Goren’s “tremendous imagination and gumption,” and added that the new partnership dovetails with his vision of universities as incubators of new work.
+“For lack of a better term, the Medicis of our time are at the universities,” he said.
+Mr. Goren, who was also Gotham’s conductor and artistic director, said he had pored over the company’s old financial statements to see where he could find savings. “The biggest expense after payroll was real estate, basically: performance space, rehearsal space and office space,” he said. “I thought, how can we reduce that?”Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+Remember how we said we’d be trying out some new things in the newsletter? Today, we’re going to let images do most of the talking.
+This month, the San Francisco Art Institute and U.C. Santa Cruz will host an exhibition featuring archival photographs of Black Panthers by Pirkle Jones and Ruth-Marion Baruch, many of which were first shown 50 years ago at the de Young Museum.
+Some of them, though, haven’t been exhibited before — and I’m excited to say we have an exclusive preview.
+The original 1968 exhibition drew more than 100,000 visitors, according to The Times’s obituary for Mr. Jones — it included now-iconic images of young black men and women, clad in leather jackets and berets, solemnly holding guns or waving flags.Slide 1 of 16,
+This five-bedroom property, on the Bodrum Peninsula in southwestern Turkey, is on the market for about $2.6 million. The Aegean Sea is visible behind the house.A Five-Bedroom Estate in Southwest Turkey
+$2.6 MILLION (2.25 MILLION EURO)
+This five-bedroom property occupies a 1.25-acre plot of land in Yalikavak, a town on the Bodrum Peninsula in southwestern Turkey, about two miles from the Aegean Sea. It is 10 miles northwest of Bodrum, the Turkish port city known for its beaches, boating and historical ruins.
+Completed in 2012, the property includes a two-bedroom villa, a three-bedroom guesthouse and a one-bedroom staff house, as well as a large swimming pool and several covered terraces with views of the Aegean coast. The houses were built out of steel-reinforced concrete and adorned with local stone, giving them a traditional Turkish Aegean aesthetic. The interiors have wood-framed windows, rustic stone walls, oak and tile floors, and hefty oak ceiling beams.
+A long driveway leads past the staff quarters to a graveled parking area. The front door of the approximately 3,230-square-foot main house opens to a dining area adjacent to the kitchen. To the right is a living room with built-in oak bookshelves, a fireplace and a cozy seating area facing the sea. The kitchen, to the left of the dining area, has Turkish tile floors, chestnut cabinets and chestnut-framed French doors opening to expansive terraces and al fresco dining spaces.
+Image A stairway adjacent to the main house leads to the property's guest quarters, with the Aegean Sea in the distance. Credit... Heike Tanbay/Engel & Völkers
+Upstairs, the master suite has an large arched window, a spacious bathroom and a private balcony with water views. The second en suite bedroom downstairs is typically used by guests, said Heike Tanbay, managing director of Engel & Völkers Bodrum, which has the listing. The home’s furnishings and decorations, a mix of antiques and Turkish textiles, are included in the asking price (excluding certain collectibles).Stedfast Baptist Church is part of a nationwide network of almost 30 independent Baptist churches associated with Mr. Anderson, who founded Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Ariz.
+He gained notoriety in 2009 for saying in a sermon that he had prayed for the death of President Barack Obama, and was criticized by the Anti-Defamation League in 2014 for what it called his “history of anti-Semitism.”
+Both churches are vehemently opposed to homosexuality and have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks extremism in the United States. The website of Faithful Word Baptist Church describes homosexuality as “a sin and an abomination which God punishes with the death penalty.”
+“This network is not coming out of nowhere, it’s not like it’s one little church in one little place with some guy who liked to go to prostitutes,” said Heidi Beirich, a researcher at the law center. “It’s a network of congregations across the country with this guy who preaches a — I don’t want to call it a theology because it is so hateful, but who preaches that gay people are destroying the country.”
+Mr. Romero and Mr. Anderson were among a small group of extreme Christian conservatives who were widely criticized in 2016 for praising Omar Mateen, the gunman who killed 49 people that year at Pulse nightclub, a center of gay night life in Orlando. Mr. Mateen said at the time that he was acting in the name of the Islamic State.
+More than 50 additional people were injured in the attack. In a sermon shortly after the shooting, Mr. Romero said he hoped they would die, too.
+In the sermon, which was posted to YouTube, Mr. Romero told congregants that gay people were all pedophiles and that he hoped the injured would die of their wounds “so that they don’t get any more opportunity to go out and hurt little children.”
+“I’ll pray to God that God will finish the job that that man started,” he said, referring to Mr. Mateen. The video of the sermon has since been removed from YouTube.LONDON — Though she admits disliking the social side of politics, Prime Minister Theresa May hosted lawmakers at a party in Downing Street this week, hoping to salvage her much-maligned plans for Britain’s departure from the European Union, or Brexit.
+But despite wine, canapés and what one guest called a “very pleasant social occasion,” Mrs. May brings her deal to Parliament on Wednesday knowing that she faces virtually certain defeat in a vote next week — one that could mean weeks of perilous political brinkmanship for Britain.
+Mrs. May postponed the vote last month, calculating that she would lose, yet has little to show for the delay. More than two and a half years after Britons opted to leave the European Union, a divided country is still wrestling with the implications of that referendum decision and, as ever with Brexit, the answers seem to lie just over the horizon.
+“We won’t get to the endgame until one or other of the options for Brexit are eliminated,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center of European Reform, a research institute, “and maybe not until March.”One solo for Patricia Delgado — the former Miami City Ballet dancer, who happens to be married to Mr. Peck — is about color. “Many choreographers are afraid of it,” Mr. Baker said. Another solo moves through extreme angles of light, in an arc, as if from sunrise to sunset. A third, for the City Ballet principal Taylor Stanley, demonstrates the varieties of white light. “Choreographers will often tell me, ‘This is a white light dance,’ and I’ll ask, ‘what kind of white?’” Mr. Baker said.
+In a recent interview, Mr. Baker spoke about his essential but rarely discussed art: pointing out mistakes and misconceptions, revealing just how quickly he has to work and explaining the artistic satisfactions of service. “Just being part of this thing that’s bigger than I could ever be is all I ever wanted,” he said. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
+How did you get interested in something as specific as lighting for dance?
+I grew up as a musician playing in rock bands in Van Nuys, Calif., but I’ve always been deeply inspired by visual art. When I was 13, I went to see a musical and I was, like, “Wow, lighting is this beautiful bridge between the visual spirit and the musical spirit.”
+How so?
+In the same way that a painter may use a brush to create phrases and mix color, I’m doing that with light. And lighting also has rhythm and pace. My friends back home will say, “Why did you give up music?” But I never gave up music. I just use a different instrument now.
+But practicing stage lighting isn’t quite like practicing the guitar.
+Right. I don’t own any lights. I did study at the California Institute of the Arts. All my roommates there now work for Pixar. But one common misunderstanding is that people think of lighting designers as technicians. There’s a whole different union in charge of that.
+So what is your role, then?
+To create a frame and a point of view. Like a cinematographer. I create a visual language and a color palette that is specific to each ballet. Each work should be a single statement, and the choreographer and I have to decide what it is.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+Televised prime-time speeches are performances. No matter how serious the subject, they are an opportunity for politicians to use the tools of entertainment — lighting, setting, writing, delivery — in the service of persuasion.
+Neither President Trump nor the Democratic congressional leaders did a particularly effective job last night, in their dueling speeches about the government shutdown. Trump is almost comically stiff while reading a pre-written speech. He spent much of his Oval Office address squinting in the camera, as if he couldn’t read his teleprompter, and — as social media noted — he audibly sniffed after many of his lines.
+Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, for their part, crowded next to each other at a single podium — an awkward set-up that, as Clare Malone of FiveThirtyEight pointed out, is likely to be parodied on Saturday Night Live this coming weekend.The N.F.L. and its players association defended their policy of random drug testing of the league’s players on Wednesday after Carolina Panthers safety Eric Reid suggested that he had been subjected to a curiously high number of them this season.
+Reid, who joined the Panthers in Week 4, noted in December that he had been selected for a drug test for the seventh time this season. Ten players from each team are selected for testing each week, according to the league’s drug policy, and Yahoo Sports reported that the chance a single player would be chosen for so many tests randomly was about 1 in 500.Do you remember the winter of debt?
+In late 2010 and early 2011, the U.S. economy had barely begun to recover from the 2008 financial crisis. Around 9 percent of the labor force was still unemployed; long-term unemployment was especially severe, with more than 6 million Americans having been out of work for 6 months or more. You might have expected the continuing employment crisis to be the focus of most economic policy discussion.
+But no: Washington was obsessed with debt. The Simpson-Bowles report was the talk of the town. Paul Ryan’s impassioned (and, of course, hypocritical) denunciations of federal debt won him media adulation and awards. And between the capital’s debt obsession, the Republican takeover of the House, and a hard right turn in state governments, America was about to embark on a period of cutbacks in government spending unprecedented in the face of high unemployment.
+Some of us protested bitterly against this policy turn, arguing that a period of mass unemployment was no time for fiscal austerity. And we were mostly right. Why only “mostly”? Because it’s becoming increasingly doubtful whether there’s any right time for fiscal austerity. The obsession with debt is looking foolish even at full employment.
+That’s the message I take from Olivier Blanchard’s presidential address to the American Economic Association. To be fair, Blanchard — one of the world’s leading macroeconomists, formerly the extremely influential chief economist of the I.M.F. — was cautious in his pronouncements, and certainly didn’t go all MMT and say that debt never matters. But his analysis nonetheless makes the Fix the Debt fixation (yes, they’re still out there) look even worse than before.Michael Zorc, the team’s technical director, was disappointed. But he also knew such a day would come: Pulisic had never been shy about his ambition to play in England.
+So Dortmund and Pulisic quickly set about moving forward with parallel goals: the club hoping to maximize the value of an attractive young asset still under its control, the player trying to make sure his dream move landed him in the right place.
+“There was a lot of trust in these talks,” said Zorc, who said multiple clubs expressed interest in Pulisic and that at least one other Premier League team was willing to pay Dortmund’s final asking price.
+His transfer will bring an end to three remarkable years at Dortmund. As a 17-year-old, he broke into the club’s first team and promptly became the youngest non-German to score a Bundesliga goal. But his rise slowed somewhat this season as injuries and the emergence of other young players diminished Pulisic’s playing time. Zorc said he suspected the transfer negotiations had distracted Pulisic this season — “maybe his mind was not so clear” — but hopes the resolution will have a positive effect on the field. Pulisic agrees.
+“I feel much, much clearer in my head now that all this is passed,” he said about making the deal public.
+Pulisic has five more months to contribute at Dortmund, which leads the Bundesliga with 42 points — 6 ahead of Bayern Munich — through 17 games. After that, he will continue his development at Chelsea, a club not particularly known for nurturing young players.
+Still, it was not lost on Pulisic — or his father, Mark, who worked closely with him to evaluate his transfer destination — that Chelsea’s roster situation, with several forwards potentially moving on this summer, could work in his favor.LONDON — When a technical error forced a Norwegian Air jet to land at Shiraz Airport in Iran last month, the Boeing 737 touched down in uncharted territory.
+The airline, known for cheap long-haul flights from Europe, does not have a base in Iran. It had never flown there before. And nearly a month after it left Dubai, the brand-new American-made jet, delivered to Norwegian Air only in October, was still sitting in Shiraz.
+The jet appeared to be caught up in United States sanctions on Tehran’s nuclear program that prohibit civilian aircraft sales, including services and parts. Those came into force again last year after President Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal that had eased punitive measures in return for verifiable pledges of peaceful nuclear work.
+A technical error in one of the engines prompted the landing on Dec. 14, a spokesman for Norwegian Air said by phone on Tuesday, and the 186 passengers and six crew members on board were unharmed. They spent the night in Iran and flew to Oslo the next day.Good morning. My pal Nick has some pork for me, off the two pigs he raised for slaughter up in the Catskills this year. My brother’s got some goat and lamb and venison, and it’s a long story where that all came from, but the meat is good and there’s a lot of it. In addition to smothered chops and roasts and curries and pies, I’ll be making a lot of spiedies these next few months.
+Of course you can follow the recipe (above). But having done so once or twice, you can also veer off into our Wednesday tradition of cooking without one, and simply respond to a prompt: Bloody Mary-marinated spiedies, meat of your choosing, broiled crisp and salty and tight. So: tomato juice, vodka, salt and pepper. Loads of hot sauce and lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce, whisked with olive oil. Some like a punch of garlic, onion powder, some celery seed. I demand a big hit of horseradish. Slide some cubed protein into that and let it sit for a day. Then thread the cubes onto bamboo sticks and broil them, turning them often to crisp and cook them through. Serve with cheap Italian bread, warmed and buttered, and Utica greens.
+I like to marinate spiedies for a long time, like 24 hours. So tonight maybe I could cook linguine with shrimp and these lemon-pistachio-mint bread crumbs that Colu Henry came up with the other day. Though maybe this vegetarian carbonara with spinach might be easier than arguing with the children about whether they actually dislike shrimp. Or halibut with brown butter, lemon and sage? (That’s a great dish even if halibut’s not a fish you can get. Try it with flounder or snapper, grouper or sea scallops instead.) “But I don’t like halibut,” says a child. Ah, who needs the conflict? Chicken teriyaki for the win.
+There are many thousands of recipes appropriate to midweek cooking awaiting your attention on NYT Cooking. (You will, yes, need a subscription to access them. Subscriptions are how we keep the lights on, and heat under the pots and pans.) You can find even more inspiration on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. And if you run into trouble with your cooking or our technology, you can always write us at cookingcare@nytimes.com for assistance. We’re prepared.4. Do you have enough restrooms for our guests?
+Don’t want a long line at the bathrooms? Make sure a venue has enough restrooms to accommodate your number of guests, said Diana Romero, a wedding planner At Your Side Planning in San Diego. “A couple who hired us last minute to assist with their urban wedding at a new spot near downtown San Diego had challenges the night of the wedding that could have been avoided by knowing the restroom availability,” said Ms. Romero. The space had only one restroom with a single stall, which wasn’t enough for the 60-person wedding. “Needless to say, with a hosted bar, lines for the restroom were long and one stall was not enough,” Ms. Romero said.
+If it’s an outdoor venue, you may be able to add extra bathrooms to accommodate your needs. But, instead of bringing in portable toilets, consider getting a luxury restroom trailer so that your guests have access to a convenient, and more classy bathroom.
+5. What equipment and décor do you provide?
+Obviously, you’re going to need tables and chairs for your wedding, but there are some commonly overlooked wedding equipment and decorations. For instance, some places provide linens, china and glassware, but others don’t, said Nicole Simeral, a Boston wedding and events planner. Also, “those items may be dated, or they may not fit the desired aesthetic for the event and will require the couple to rent items that fit their desired look,” said Ms. Simeral.
+Kristin Watkins, the owner and lead planner at Stephanie Rose Events in San Diego, has encountered this issue a number of times. “We plan lots of weddings at nontraditional venues: the beach, a ranch, a backyard with a view,” said Ms. Watkins. “Couples always think these venues will be simple and save them money, but once you bring in every table, chair, fork, napkin, restroom, lighting, generator and pay the extra delivery fees for carrying furniture to your reception space, the wedding is always way over budget.”
+The morale: Find out what you’ll need to rent or buy in order to make an events space suit your needs.ADAMS A really great text is just so generative; it produces the best music. If I have a concern about some operas these days, it’s that the texts are just not good enough. It doesn’t have to be someone with a deep literary background; it can be a David Bowie or Brian Eno. The great thing about American music is the total bleed-through of, if you want to call it that, high or low, popular versus art. I think both Philip and I share this. We have very loose filters in terms of classification.
+When did you first hear each other’s music?
+ADAMS The thing I remember most vividly is a tour of the ensemble doing excerpts from “Einstein on the Beach,” which I heard in San Francisco sometime in the 1970s. Then I actually conducted quite a bit of his music — a little piece, “Facades,” and then I think we did the very first performance of parts of “Akhnaten” in L.A. on a Phil program, 50 minutes’ worth. I did the Ninth Symphony, again with L.A., and then this.
+I came of age during what we now call the bad old days, when the world said you had a choice between European modernism and its American version, or Cagean aesthetics. Hearing Philip’s music and Steve [Reich’s] music was this wonderful, new possibility of a language that embraced both tonality and sort of living with a pulse, new, original and fresh.
+GLASS I was very much taken with hearing John’s work — of course, “Nixon in China,” we talked about a number of times. It’s not enough to create a style of music or identity of your own; what you really want to be is in the company of other people. It’s more meaningful to be part of a large group of people sharing ideas.
+He was the first time I met someone who wasn’t part of my immediate generation but had the interest and talent. How many operas do you have now? Five or six?
+ADAMS [Laughing] Not as many as you do! [Depending on how you count, Mr. Glass has composed nearly 30.]No one in Vernessa Perez’s small family could understand the behavior she began to exhibit as a teenager.
+In high school, she began feeling overwhelmed and uninterested in her studies. After dropping out, she began withdrawing from other parts of life. Her days were spent inside, in solitude.
+“You want to get away from everyone,” Ms. Perez, now 30, said of her mental state at the time. “You want to be in a hole by yourself. You don’t want to bring out ideas or brighten up everyone. You just want to stay in a corner.”People have plenty of opinions as to whether the depiction of teen sex on TV is moral enough or whether it’s responsible enough. There’s less talk about whether it’s bad enough. Too often it’s airbrushed and idealized, rather than a fumbling, awkward, slapstick process of trial and eros.
+There is, as the title advertises, plenty of sex in “Sex Education,” the sweet and raunchily funny British teen comedy arriving Friday on Netflix. But the most engaging thing about it is the “education” part. Like its middle-school American counterpart, “Big Mouth,” “Sex Education” explores sex as a learning experience about who you are, what you want and how you relate to other people.
+Its unlikely educator is Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), an awkward, inexperienced teenager. His mother, Jean (a wonderfully deadpan Gillian Anderson), is a sex therapist, with frank manner and a limited sense of personal boundaries. She explains sex to a very young Otis in a flashback thus: “Intercourse can be wonderful. But it can also cause tremendous pain. And if you’re not careful, sex can destroy lives.”
+You’ve heard the line about the cobbler’s children not having shoes? Otis is fixed fine for footwear. But he can’t masturbate. His adolescent anxiety about his body (he’s not crazy about erections, either) is intensified by the constant T.M.I. factor of living with an oversharing parent in a house with erotic art on the walls and exotic implements in the drawers.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Mayor Bill de Blasio pledged on Wednesday to make New York the first city in the nation to require private employers to provide at least two weeks of paid vacation to all employees.
+The proposal, which requires City Council approval, comes a day after Mr. de Blasio announced a $100 million effort to help ensure that the city’s health care resources are used by the uninsured, including undocumented immigrants — a move that immediately set up a contrast with Republican leadership in Washington.
+Mr. de Blasio appeared eager to billboard that contrast with both announcements, leading to speculation among political consultants in New York City that his larger aim leading up to his State of the City address on Thursday is to thrust his name back into the national conversation as a leader of progressive Democratic principles.
+Mr. de Blasio did nothing to alter that impression during a news conference in City Hall, in which he presented his plan for paid time off as a link in the long history of workers’ rights initiatives going back to the New Deal. He said that he would travel the country “very soon” to encourage other cities and states to follow suit.WASHINGTON — President Trump stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders on Wednesday after Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not fund a border wall even if he agreed to reopen the government, escalating a confrontation that has shuttered large portions of the government for 19 days and counting.
+Stunned Democrats emerged from the meeting in the White House Situation Room declaring that the president had thrown a “temper tantrum” and slammed his hands on the table before leaving with an abrupt “bye-bye.” Republicans disputed the hand slam and blamed Democratic intransigence for prolonging the standoff.
+When the meeting was over, talks to reopen the government appeared to be in disarray. The contentious, brief and futile session underscored an impasse that is looking each day like an insurmountable gulf between the two sides. Mr. Trump will visit the border on Thursday in McAllen, Tex., leaving little hope of a resolution for a shutdown that will tie the longest in the nation’s history on Friday.
+“It wasn’t even a high-stakes negotiation; it was a petulant president of the United States,” Ms. Pelosi said as she returned to the Capitol. “A person who would say, ‘I’ll keep government shut down for weeks, months or years unless I get my way.’”Kevin Hart shut the door on hosting the Oscars in an interview on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday.
+“I’m not hosting the Oscars this year,” Hart told Michael Strahan, one of the morning show’s hosts, citing the lack of preparation time for the Feb. 24 ceremony and the shoot schedule for his next film, a sequel to “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle.”
+He added: “If I do something, I want to be able to give it my all and make sure that the production is a great representation of me and my talent. I can’t do that right now.”
+Talk of Hart’s being reinstated as host of the Academy Awards was ignited after he made an appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show last week. DeGeneres implored him to reconsider his withdrawal and said that she had called someone at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to vouch for him. It is unclear whom she spoke to and the Academy never confirmed the call. At the time, Hart said he was re-evaluating the decision to withdraw as host.LONDON — A group of 49 migrants stranded at sea after being refused entry to any European port in late December, in a case seen as emblematic of the region’s increasingly hard-line approach to immigration, was finally allowed to land in Malta on Wednesday.
+The asylum seekers, who had been sheltering aboard two private rescue boats, will be shared among nine member states of the European Union, the Maltese prime minister, Joseph Muscat, said in a statement. A further 224 people who had been brought to Malta by the Maltese Coast Guard will also be distributed across the nine nations.
+The announcement brought to an end a 19-day wait for 32 of the stranded migrants, who were rescued from a faulty rubber dinghy off Libya on Dec. 22 by the Sea-Watch 3, a ship owned by the private German rescue organization Sea Watch. The 17 others were picked up a week later by another German group, Sea Eye.Song Minji, the founder of Pygmalion, a design and publishing company in Seoul, said she had decided not to replace two departing employees and instead had parceled out their responsibilities to the eight who were left and enlisted freelancers.
+Though the Moon administration has offered subsidies to small companies like Ms. Song’s to mitigate the jump in labor costs, she said they were insufficient and so complicated to obtain that she has given up trying.
+“It would have been better if the policies were applied in steps rather than in one go,” Ms. Song said.
+Others say Mr. Moon is moving too slowly. Some union leaders argue that the minimum wage is not rising quickly enough, and they objected to a proposal that would give businesses more flexibility in meeting limits on working hours. On Nov. 21, an estimated 160,000 workers went on a general strike .
+“We had high expectations for this government,” said Lee Joo-ho, an executive director at the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions. But now “there is a possibility that the government is backing out or even reversing on the intention of their policies.”Mr. Cohen has made gifts from his collection to more than 30 institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He recently donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York a group of portraits of individuals in the “paper moon” photo booths popular in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. These will be included in the forthcoming exhibition “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,” which opens in July in time for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.
+The show will be co-organized by Mia Fineman, associate curator in the department of photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who helped to curate “Other Pictures: Vernacular Photographs from the Thomas Walther Collection” (including that naughty dog and those nuns) at the Met in 2000.
+“For people interested in photography, there’s a special charm to these objects in terms of what they do and how they have been used. They speak directly to the viewer,” Ms. Fineman said. “The medium has its own genius. It produced images more surprising than anything that existed before photography.” Images expressively distorted by double-exposure or by what Ms. Fineman called the “slapstick struggle between human and machine” are particularly admired.
+Because of their relatively low market value, these everyday images aren’t the stuff of sales at Sotheby’s and Christie’s. But Swann Auction Galleries in New York includes a “visual culture” section in its three annual sales of photographs. On Feb. 21, the company is to offer groups of anonymous snapshots of American factory machinery from the 1950s, estimated at about $2,000 per lot. The sale will also include images of women wrestlers from the 1970s and Mobil Oil service station from the 1930s to ’50s. So far, spiritualism has proved Swann’s most valuable vernacular subject. In 2013, an album of 27 photographs taken during séances in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the early 1920s sold for $93,750.Artificial sweeteners offer no health benefits, a large review of studies found. But it found no proof that they do any harm, either.
+Researchers looked at 35 observational studies and 21 controlled trials of nonsugar sweeteners in children and adults. Some compared intake of sweeteners with no intake; others compared lower with higher intakes.
+They found no convincing evidence that nonsugar sweeteners had any effect in adults on eating behavior, cancer, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, mood, behavior or cognition. The study, in BMJ, did find a slight benefit in promoting weight loss and improving fasting blood glucose levels, but only in small studies and over short periods of time.
+Eight studies in children showed similar results. Some studies found weak evidence that children who used artificial sweeteners had larger increases in blood glucose levels than those who used sugar.Water towers are beloved fixtures of the New York skyline, inspiring urban myths and song lyrics (see: Beastie Boys and Bruce Springsteen). Five years ago, an artist even built a clandestine bar inside a water tower in Chelsea. Now, a tourist-friendly and Instagram-ready version has been erected in Brooklyn, on the rooftop of the new Williamsburg Hotel.
+The Water Tower, which opened in November, is built of steel and glass, rising some 175 feet. While the structure never held water, patrons don’t seem to mind as they take selfies next to the D.J. booth or on the wraparound balcony, with its panoramic views of actual water towers.
+The Place
+The bar is in a hotel-packed corner of Williamsburg (the Hoxton, the William Vale and the Wythe are nearby). The circular space is roughly 800 square feet and is decked out with plush sofas, a mural of graphic posters, and floor-to-ceiling windows, the better to take advantage of the views.With the start of the new year, Belgium became the latest European country to ban traditional Jewish and Muslim animal slaughtering practices. The move was applauded by animal rights activists but condemned by religious leaders who see the ban as a threat to their communities.
+At issue is whether to allow religious exemptions to European Union rules that state animals must be knocked out before they are slaughtered, which supporters say is more humane. The United States has similar regulations, but allows for religious exemptions.
+Both faiths require that the animal be treated well in life and be healthy and unharmed before slaughter, which all Jewish religious authorities and some Muslim ones interpret as a prohibition of “stunning” before slaughter.
+Religious leaders say minimizing an animal’s pain has always been central to their traditions, and a ritual slaughter — carried out with a sharp blade to the neck — should be quick and almost painless.What is undeniable is the humanitarian crisis in Tijuana. But it is a crisis created in part by Mr. Trump. Record numbers of desperate families, fleeing violence, corruption and extreme poverty, have been arriving in caravans to our southern border. Instead of their asylum requests being promptly processed, as established by international and United States laws, only a few are allowed in every day. This policy of cruelty by design has unjustly affected children and the most vulnerable people in our hemisphere. These refugees certainly do not pose a danger to our national security.
+There is no need for a new wall — except, of course, in Mr. Trump’s mind. The closest he got to building his wall was in January 2018, when Democratic senators negotiated a compromise for a wall in exchange for legislation on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Then the White House unexpectedly walked away from the deal.
+Would the Democrats revisit the offer? Luis Gutierrez, who recently retired from the House of Representatives after 26 years, once explained to me that it was like paying a ransom for a kidnapping. If the White House brings up the deal this time, it will put the Democrats in a moral dilemma: Protect the Dreamers — maybe including siblings and families — and, in the process, open the government. But the wall would be an essential element of any new deal.
+It won’t be easy. It is no longer 2018. Things have changed dramatically. Democrats control the House and the wall has become toxic. And then, there is the racist thing.
+The wall has become a metaphor to Mr. Trump and his millions of supporters. It represents a divide between “us” and “them,” a physical demarcation for those who refuse to accept that in just a few decades, a majority of the country will be people of color.
+This is about more than just a wall. Mr. Trump promised it in 2015, in the same speech in which he announced his candidacy, the same speech in which he called Mexican immigrants rapists, criminals and drug traffickers. His goal was to exploit the anxiety and resentment of voters in an increasingly multicultural, multiethnic society. Mr. Trump’s wall is a symbol for those who want to make America white again.
+The chant “Build that wall, build that wall” became his hymn — and an insult not just to Latinos but also to all people who do not share his xenophobic ideals. The wall went from a campaign promise to a monument built on bigoted ideas. That is why most Americans cannot say yes to it. Every country has a right to protect its borders. But not to a wall that represents hate, discrimination and fear.Even in a room dotted with Hollywood luminaries, the arrival of Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper at a table at the National Board of Review awards gala Tuesday night caused a special kind of commotion.
+Chairs were pushed aside. A group of onlookers formed seemingly out of nowhere, many raising their phones over each other trying to snap a picture. When a server balancing a platter of food approached the fray, a waitress offered her colleague two words: “Good luck.”
+Generally speaking, the mood at the gala, held at Cipriani 42nd Street, was more casual than other awards season events, due in part to the fact that, as is always the case, the night’s winners had already been announced. (“Green Book” won best picture and actor; “A Star Is Born” took best director and actress.) Also, the event isn’t televised so acceptance speeches, unencumbered by broadcast time limits, were much looser and longer (and at times more rambling) than the Golden Globes on Sunday. Walkoff music played only when speeches were actually finished.
+The night’s winners took advantage of that freedom to comment on the diversity in the teams behind this year’s movies.A federal government shutdown might seem like a great way to save money: When agencies aren’t open, they aren’t spending tax dollars. But history shows us that closing the government actually costs more than keeping it open.
+Shuttered parks can’t collect entrance fees. Furloughed workers will ultimately get paid for not showing up to work. And the government will wind up having to pay interest on missed payments to some contractors.
+“There’s nothing good about this shutdown, from a fiscal or a budgetary standpoint,” said Michael A. Peterson, chairman of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which advocates fiscal prudence and federal debt reduction. “We’re absolutely not celebrating not spending money.”
+Here are some ways that the shutdown raises costs for the federal government.
+Federal employees will eventually get their salaries — for work they weren’t allowed to perform
+As a general rule, when the government spends money on something, it’s better to get something in return. Paying someone to empty trash bins in parks is better than paying that same person to sit at home, while the trash piles up, and then paying more, later, to actually empty the trash.Critics routinely complain about screen versions of literary works that take either too many liberties or too few. And then there are the flat-out misreadings and the uninteresting, mystifying interpretations, those adaptations that veer so far from the source material that you wonder what attracted the filmmakers in the first place: the chance to revisit or flip a classic or just the box-office potential of its fan base? Too bad that the best that can be said about the woeful movie version of the “The Aspern Papers,” based on the Henry James novella, is that it might send you running to the original.
+That book, published in 1888 (and set roughly around the same time), has much to recommend it, notably its exploration of the personal and the private, and a sharp view of fandom. Its unnamed narrator — called Morton Vint in the movie and played by an ill-used, miscast Jonathan Rhys Meyers — has traveled to Venice to find the papers of his idol, Jeffrey Aspern, a dead Romantic poet. This pursuit leads to Juliana Bordereau, an Aspern acquaintance and possible former lover, and one of those wizened mysteries of fiction with a fantastic past and a terminally defeated companion for a chew toy.
+The good news is that Bordereau is played by Vanessa Redgrave, who shows you the movie that might have been. From her first appearance, hunched in a wheelchair, partly obscured by darkness and a green eyeshade, Redgrave draws you in, making you wonder about the enigmatic Bordereau. With gestural precision and a modulated delivery that breathes life into each word, Redgrave dominates the movie even in her character’s absence by filling it with a complicated sense of loss. She’s nicely matched by her daughter Joely Richardson, who plays Bordereau’s companion, Miss Tina, as an emblem of thwarted female existence.MELBOURNE, Australia — They’ve found a home in Hollywood, appearing in some of the biggest films and TV shows of the year. But on a balmy December evening, a group of young Asian-Australian actors were relaxing together in a place where they’re rarely recognized: the country where they grew up.
+Over beers and cigarettes at a Melbourne rooftop bar, they were reflecting on their year’s work.
+“It’s the most I’ve ever auditioned,” said John Harlan Kim, 25, a Korean-Australian actor, who moved to the United States five years ago and recently wrapped a four-season stint on “The Librarians.”
+Chris Pang, 34, who appeared in 2018’s box office hit “Crazy Rich Asians,” agreed. “Right now diverse content is selling and it’s hot,” he said, adding: “It’s now or never. We’ve got to keep the momentum going.”
+For many of Australia’s most lauded white actors, making a name for themselves at home was a critical milestone on the way to success in Hollywood. But Asian-Australian actors say there are few roles available to them in Australia, and those parts are often ancillary or based on outdated stereotypes.This uncertainty, it turns out, is central to how so much contemporary misinformation works. O’Connor and Weatherall make a distinction between absolute certainty and the confidence necessary to make informed decisions. “The worry that we can never gain complete certainty about matters of fact is irrelevant,” they write — though it comes up again and again in “The Misinformation Age,” as they show how industrial interests have repeatedly exploited any whiff of uncertainty to argue against government regulation.
+The book contains useful summaries of the debates in the 1980s around the ozone layer and acid rain. Drawing from the research of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in “Merchants of Doubt” (2010), O’Connor and Weatherall compare industry-sponsored campaigns questioning environmental damage to the strategic skepticism of tobacco companies, which disputed the link between smoking and lung cancer by insisting that the link wasn’t utterly definitive. As one tobacco executive put it, “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the public.”
+The debate — or as the authors might put it, “debate” — around climate change has followed a similar narrative. O’Connor and Weatherall point out that the scientific consensus has long coalesced around human-caused climate change, even if denialists insist that the science is still unsettled.
+The one thing you begin to notice in this book is that propagating a reflexive skepticism and sowing discord aren’t terribly difficult, especially when there’s a vested interest willing to pay for it; “merely creating the appearance of controversy” is often all that needs to be done.
+Latour’s “Down to Earth” is a wilder, more playful book — even if, like “The Misinformation Age,” it covers big subjects like truth and the fate of the species. The election of Donald Trump, Latour says, was a clarifying event, not only for Americans but for the world. Here, finally, was a political figure whose brazen repudiations of reality laid bare what Latour has been saying all along — that a complacent faith in the ability of facts to speak for themselves was what rendered them vulnerable to Trumpian renunciation in the first place.
+Image Bruno Latour Credit... Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times
+Latour’s talk about how facts derive their authority from trust might sound squishy and abstract, but he considers himself a realist. He says that climate change renders the old dichotomy of the global versus the local completely futile. Trump and the “obscurantist elites” who enable him are nurturing an “Out-of-This-World” fantasy by unleashing an aggressive despoliation of the earth that ultimately rejects the world they claim to inhabit. At the same time, Trump pacifies his base with panicky nationalism and border walls, delineating a “rump territory” that is “no more plausible, no more livable” than the globalized world they rail against.Through heartache, rejection, workplace harassment and pervasive disillusionment, Alex Lilly’s songs keep their cool on her debut album, “2% Milk.” Her voice is supple and relaxed; she often sounds like a smile is tugging at the corners of her mouth. And she brings a wry, analytical skepticism even to matters of the heart. In “Boomerang,” about giving an ex another chance, she sings, “I’ve tried to find someone new/Believe me though it’s hard to, they’re all worse than you.”
+Lilly, who is based in Los Angeles, has been writing songs while working as a keyboardist and backup singer on tour with Beck, Lorde and others, including a longtime spot in the suavely devious pop band the Bird and the Bee; “2% Milk” arrives on the label founded by Inara George, who leads the Bird and the Bee with the producer Greg Kurstin. And like the Bird and the Bee, Lilly delivers structural and emotional complexity with deceptive nonchalance.
+Image “2% Milk” is Lilly’s debut album.
+Lilly’s songs are full of musicianly gamesmanship. They’re synth-pop built around a decidedly human protagonist; they use hopscotching melody lines, shifty meters, subtly intricate counterpoint and spongy, unconventional synthesizer tones. But Lilly isn’t just showing off. Her convolutions also tell stories.“It was a difficult decision,” he said. “It happens to all of us. We reach the point when it is not as easy to do the work.”
+Active in Democratic politics since his youth, Mr. Brown had risen to become a state appellate judge in June 1991, when Gov. Mario M. Cuomo tapped him to replace the Queens district attorney, John J. Santucci, who had retired. Mr. Brown won his first election that fall and went on to win re-election six more times.
+Mr. Brown said in a recent interview that the criticism lodged against his office is “totally unjustified.” His senior staff highlighted a number of innovative programs the office has launched over the years. Mr. Brown was among the first prosecutors to create a domestic violence bureau and to set up an office to help immigrants navigate the legal system. Queens also processes arrests faster than the other counties in New York City, and has dozens of alternatives-to-incarceration programs.
+Yet the office still prosecutes minor marijuana offenses and fare evasion. It also employs a number of hard-nosed policies aimed at compelling people to plead guilty. Queens prosecutors, for instance, will only negotiate plea deals before a grand jury indictment, a period when defendants have not seen the evidence against them. The office also encourages defendants to waive their rights to a speedy trial or risk losing a chance at a plea deal.
+Grass-roots campaigns pushing for more progressive, forward-thinking prosecutors have helped transform district attorney elections in several major cities. In Philadelphia, the longtime civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner, the city’s new district attorney, won over voters last year with a radically progressive campaign to end mass incarceration.
+But some political strategists and law enforcement officials question whether Queens — where pockets of conservative voters remain in one of the most diverse counties in the country — will elect a prosecutor with a left-leaning platform.
+Historically, the Democratic Party has had enormous influence in choosing the city’s district attorneys. The races often attract little interest, and low voter turnout allows the favorites of the political machine to win, cementing long, unchallenged tenures. Nowhere has that been more true than in Queens, where the Democratic Party has picked the county’s district attorney for decades.But Weibo is still a good place to check out the hottest topics and trends. That’s where I found people to talk to for a column I wrote about the generation that grew up without Google, Facebook or Twitter.
+How do people in China use tech differently, compared with people in the United States?
+The first thing many visitors to China notice is how mobile the Chinese are. Many Chinese never owned a laptop or a PC, and their first computer was their smartphone. Email never really took off in China. Some big corporations do use it. But people usually resort to WeChat for a quick response.
+Because of WeChat’s prevalence, few Chinese carry business cards any more. At many meetings in China, there’s a time when everybody takes out his or her phone and scans the WeChat QR codes of others to become “friends.” I personally like having contacts on WeChat rather than on business cards. Because it’s a social media platform, you learn about your contacts as individuals beyond their business titles.
+Many businesspeople I know have two or more WeChat accounts because WeChat allows only 5,000 contacts for one account. A young venture capitalist told me that it had taken him only two years to reach the limit. I don’t know how they manage so many contacts.
+Generally, Chinese are more receptive to new things and more tolerant of imperfect products, including mobile apps. Some commentators here say Facebook is almost a Chinese company because of its “move fast and break things” mantra. Many people in China’s internet industry work super-long hours to make sure they beat competitors to roll out new features first.
+Why are mobile wallets so popular in China?
+When I moved from New York to Beijing in 2008, China was still a cash-based nation. Not many people had credit cards, and it wasn’t easy for small businesses to get approval to install the machines. I used to have to go to the A.T.M.s all the time. Going to the banks, mostly giant state-owned enterprises, was torturously time-consuming.“I’ve never told you what this is about,” Adina Pintilie says at the beginning of “Touch Me Not.” The target of the confession is vague; it’s possible to imagine that her words are addressed to a lover, a friend, a parent or the viewer, who will be further challenged to interpret what follows.
+Propelled by intuition, emotion and philosophical inquiry rather than by plot, Pintilie’s debut feature is a semidocumentary essay exploring what it means — how it feels, why it matters — to dwell inside a body. You could say that what the film is about lies just beyond the reach of images or words. It’s a necessarily cerebral meditation on the nature of physicality.
+The director’s initial verbal reticence contrasts with both the eloquence of some of her characters and subjects and the explicitness of the images she captures. Nakedness and intimacy — the first almost too easy to achieve, the second almost impossibly difficult — are the basic themes of “Touch Me Not.” A handful of people from different countries, some professional actors, some sex workers, talk about their desires, anxieties and inhibitions in ways that are sometimes painfully open and often highly abstract.
+The result is a curiously intense, weirdly tranquil experience, at times hard to watch and then hard to shake. Our attention shifts among several characters, two of whom might be called the protagonists: Laura (Laura Benson), a middle-aged woman who seems to struggle with loneliness and erotic alienation; and Tómas (Tómas Lemarquis), a younger man whose malaise may have something to do with the alopecia that has rendered his body hairless. Separately, Laura and Tómas show up at a hospital, where Laura visits a dying man (possibly her father) and Tómas participates in a discussion group for people with disabilities.Paula Cantos and David Damon got engaged in June and are aiming to be married Jan. 18 in Washington. It will be an outdoor ceremony near the Capitol Building. Odds are good the union will be legal, but as of today no one is willing to guarantee that.
+Ms. Cantos, 34, and Mr. Damon, 35, are among the many couples whose plans to marry in our nation’s capital have been complicated by the partial government shutdown. When the shutdown began on Dec. 22, Washington’s Marriage Bureau was one of the nonessential services that closed, leaving couples unable to obtain marriage licenses. Some have postponed their weddings. Others are holding a second, legal ceremony in nearby Maryland or Virginia, said Maggie Gaudaen, a co-founder of Pop! Wed Co., a local wedding planning service that specializes in what it calls “flash” weddings at sites throughout the city, like the steps of the Supreme Court.
+Ms. Cantos and Mr. Damon started planning their wedding months ago. Location, as with most of Ms. Gaudaen’s clients, has been their top priority.
+“David and I met almost two years ago during the women’s rally, right outside the Capitol Building near the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool,” said Ms. Cantos, who works as a chemist in the government’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which deals with currency; she and Mr. Damon, who installs solar panels, live in New Carrolton, Md. “That’s why we picked the spot. It has meaning for us.”BERLIN — Two days after a right-wing politician was assaulted in Germany, drawing international attention, the authorities on Wednesday said that several elements of the account given by his political party appeared to be false.
+Frank Magnitz, 66, a member of Parliament from the Alternative for Germany party, suffered head injuries in the attack in Bremen on Monday. Party officials said that three men had attacked him, beating him with a piece of lumber and then kicking him after he had fallen to the ground.
+But after reviewing a video of the attack, law enforcement officials said that one assailant had struck Mr. Magnitz once from behind, knocking him down, before he and two others fled the scene.
+No one hit the lawmaker with an object, they said, and no one kicked him.
+“We assume that all of the injuries are the result of the fall,” said Frank Passade, a spokesman for the state’s attorney’s office in Bremen, which is investigating the assault.On Jan. 10, 1999, a mobster walked into a psychiatrist’s office. What happened next — over the course of eight years — was a television revolution. By the time the writer and producer David Chase brought “The Sopranos” to a close on June 10, 2007, he had helped establish HBO as a cultural force and make literary symbolism, cinematic style, long-form storytelling and complicated antiheroes the norm for high-end TV dramas.
+With the 20th anniversary of “The Sopranos” premiere happening this week, there’s a lot of chatter right now about the show’s legacy. If you’re already a fan, it might prompt you to want to do a rewatch. But who has time for 86 hourlong episodes? If you’re interested in a more efficient way to re-immerse yourself, what follows are some suggestions, for both a short dip and a deeper dive.
+This guide is designed for people who’ve already watched the entire “Sopranos” series at least once, broken down by different viewing strategies. Spoilers are kept to a minimum, though, so in theory, newcomers could try one of these paths as well.
+[David Chase looks back at “The Sopranos” 20 years after its debut — including that ending.]
+So grab a platter of “gabagool” and “moozadell,” keep an eye out for wily Russians and let’s head back to Jersey. (Stream the entire series on HBO or free on Amazon with a Prime subscription.)WASHINGTON — House Democrats have summoned Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, to Congress on Thursday to deliver a classified briefing about the Trump administration’s plans to end sanctions on companies linked to the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska.
+The briefing is an early instance of Democratic lawmakers flexing their new oversight muscles after taking control of the House last week. Such requests from Democrats were generally ignored or rebuffed during President Trump’s first two years in office, but cabinet officials are expected to face intense scrutiny over past decisions.
+Congress is reviewing the administration’s decision — announced in December by the Treasury Department — to lift sanctions against three companies that Mr. Deripaska controls, EN+, Rusal and JSC EuroSibEnergo. Rusal is the world’s second largest aluminum company and concerns about its fate roiled the industry after the Trump administration announced sanctions last year.
+The Treasury Department delayed the implementation of the sanctions several times amid an aggressive lobbying campaign by Mr. Deripaska’s corporate empire. The administration ultimately decided to lift the sanctions in the waning days of the last Congress — timing seen as intended to reduce the likelihood that Congress might block the move.WASHINGTON — A long-running dispute between a Nevada man and California tax authorities made its third appearance at the Supreme Court on Wednesday, prompting spirited arguments about the power of precedent and the limits of state sovereignty.
+The question for the justices was a fundamental one: May states be sued in the courts of other states? The Supreme Court said yes in 1979 but came close to overruling that decision in 2016, in an earlier encounter with Wednesday’s case, Franchise Tax Board of California v. Hyatt, No. 17-1299.
+Back then, the court was short-handed after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and it deadlocked 4 to 4. Now that the court is back at full strength, it will almost certainly resolve the question.
+Justice Stephen G. Breyer, perhaps thinking of other precedents that may be at risk now that the court has a solid conservative majority, expressed worry that the court may be inclined to overrule decisions too lightly.The president insisted that he maintained “tremendous” Republican support, even as nearly a half-dozen Republican senators have said directly or strongly suggested that they wanted to reopen the government, then have the debate about the wall.
+“I think we have tremendous Republican support,” Mr. Trump said. “The Senate has been incredible. Mitch McConnell has been incredible,” he said, referring to the Senate majority leader.
+The president, who has refused to sign any bill to fund the government that does not include $5.7 billion for the wall, also said some Democrats were moving to his point of view, although he did not offer any names.
+“The fact is that there is tremendous support,” he said.
+“If I did something that was foolish, like gave up on border security, the first ones that would hit me would be my senators — they’d be angry at me,” he said. “The second ones would be the House. And the third ones would be frankly my base and a lot of Republicans out there and a lot of Democrats that want to see border security.”Into this quagmire bravely wade Ari Folman and David Polonsky, the creators of “Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation,” a stunning, haunting work of art that is unfortunately marred by some questionable interpretive choices. As Folman acknowledges in an adapter’s note, the text, preserved in its entirety, would have resulted in a graphic novel of 3,500 pages. At times he reproduces whole entries verbatim, but more often he diverges freely from the original, collapsing multiple entries onto a single page and replacing Anne’s droll commentary with more accessible (and often more dramatic) language. Polonsky’s illustrations, richly detailed and sensitively rendered, work marvelously to fill in the gaps, allowing an image or a facial expression to stand in for the missing text and also providing context about Anne’s historical circumstances that is, for obvious reasons, absent from the original. The tightly packed panels that result, in which a line or two adapted from the “Diary” might be juxtaposed with a bit of invented dialogue between the Annex inhabitants or a dream vision of Anne’s, do wonders at fitting complex emotions and ideas into a tiny space — a metaphor for the Secret Annex itself.
+Image
+The comedy of the “Diary” — one of the book’s most charming and often overlooked aspects — shines in this form. The tension between the Franks and the van Daans, the family with whom they go into hiding (a dentist, Alfred Dussel, joins later), is a rich vein of material for Anne, who sees Mrs. van Daan as obnoxious and vain; she cares only about her own family’s survival and is harshly critical of Anne’s manners and attitude. Here, she is often depicted wearing her trademark fur coat; when her husband threatens to sell it, Polonsky draws its collar with live rabbits, one of which speaks up in her defense. Anne also aims her satire at the limited food options in the Annex, offering sardonic menus and diet tips. In the graphic novel, one spread depicts the families at dinner, each character represented by an animal. Anne’s sister Margot, whose saintly composure she often envied, is drawn as a bird, gazing at an empty plate: “I feel full just by looking at the others,” the thought bubble above her head reads. Meanwhile, Mr. van Daan is an enormous bear, shoveling cabbage into his mouth with both paws even as he demands more.
+[ Meyer Levin on Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl,” a book too tenderly intimate to be frozen with the label “classic” ]
+There are so many wonderful juxtapositions of text and imagery that it feels cruel to focus on only a few, but another consistent standout is the way the graphic novel conveys Anne’s fantasies and emotions — so crucial to the “Diary.” In a line taken almost verbatim from the book, Folman’s Anne wonders, “How can we, whose every possession, from my panties to Father’s shaving brush, is so old and worn, ever hope to regain the position we had before the war?” Polonsky’s accompanying illustration depicts the Franks as beggars huddled on the side of an elegant street lined with cafes and restaurants, while passers-by in fancy clothes — including the van Daans — ignore them. In a page illustrating Anne’s most tumultuous inner thoughts, Polonsky draws her as the figure in Munch’s “The Scream”; for a calmer moment, she’s Adele Bloch-Bauer in Klimt’s “Portrait.” When 16-year-old Peter van Daan and Anne first begin to fall in love, Polonsky depicts their faces reflected in each other’s pupils, as if to indicate the depth of their feelings.
+This graphic adaptation is so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the “Diary” in classrooms and among younger readers. For that reason especially, it seems a mistake not to have included more in the way of critical apparatus to explain the ways the creators diverged from the historical record, especially when they touch most directly on the Holocaust. There is, for example, a naïve, stylized rendering of a concentration camp scene, which makes sense as a representation of Anne’s fantasies — she didn’t know the barbaric specifics of what was going on around her — but risks confusing students, who might not know that Auschwitz wasn’t in fact a big green square surrounded by pleasant-looking buildings with huge canisters reading “GAS” plugged into them.His own Dominican province in the western United States recently hired an outside law firm to sift through personnel records and release names of abusers stretching back to the 1930s. The Conference of Major Superiors of Men has encouraged orders to release names, but the group has no authority to force disclosures, Father Padrez said.
+After the clerical abuse scandal exploded in 2002, the Conference of Major Superiors of Men adopted its own reforms following the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Orders added victim assistance offices and background screenings for candidates, and hired accrediting companies to audit their sexual abuse responses.
+The fate of abusers in religious orders can differ from diocesan priests. A 2013 update on the orders’ response to the crisis says that canon law requires orders not to expel abusers if they are repentant, but to instead try to keep them within their religious communities, under close supervision and away from children.
+Last January, Robert Krankvich, 37, said he was gripped with terror when he picked up the phone to report his own story of sexual abuse to the Diocese of Joliet.
+Mr. Krankvich said it began when was a freshman at Providence Catholic High School, and the school’s charismatic president, an Augustinian priest named Richard McGrath, befriended him. Mr. Krankvich filed a lawsuit, which is still pending, against the Augustinians saying that Father McGrath repeatedly abused him from the age of 13 to 15.
+Years later, after suicide attempts, struggles with alcohol and drugs and depression, Mr. Krankvich saw news reports that Father McGrath had left the school after a student reported seeing him look at “potentially inappropriate material” on his phone. Father McGrath could not be reached for comment.
+But when Mr. Krankvich called the Joliet diocese, he said church officials referred him to a priest who was Providence’s new president.KATHMANDU, Nepal — When Amba Bohara’s period came this week, she followed a familiar routine in western Nepal. Considered impure in her village because she was menstruating, Ms. Bohara barricaded herself in a tiny hut, built a fire and braced for an icy winter night with her two young children.
+By Wednesday morning, all three were dead.
+“It seems they died from suffocation,” said Uddhab Singh Bhat, the deputy superintendent of police in the area. “The hut was so small. It was very difficult to breathe.”
+Ms. Bohara and her children were the latest victims of a centuries-old tradition of banishing menstruating women and girls from their family homes. Though Nepal criminalized the practice last year, many villages in the country continue to follow the taboo, known as chhaupadi in Nepali.
+During their periods, women living in places where chhaupadi is followed are unable to visit temples, use other villagers’ kitchen utensils or wash in communal water sources. Some religious Hindus consider it bad luck to touch menstruating women and girls.The Fed is “bordering on going too far and possibly tipping the economy into recession,” Mr. Bullard said. He added that other Fed officials were coming around to his position that the Fed should pause.
+The Fed at its December meeting raised its benchmark rate into a range between 2.25 and 2.5 percent. It was the fifth consecutive quarterly increase. Mr. Powell said the rate now stood near the lower end of the range that the Fed regards as neutral territory — neither encouraging nor discouraging borrowing and economic growth.
+At a news conference after the December meeting, Mr. Powell emphasized that economic growth remained strong, and that the Fed expected to continue raising rates in 2019. Investors registered their disapproval by driving down asset prices, exacerbating a market slump.
+Since then, Mr. Powell and other Fed officials have sought to deliver a more nuanced message, emphasizing that they are paying attention to investors’ concerns, and that the absence of inflationary pressure means the Fed can afford to postpone judgment.
+The account of the December meeting reinforced that message.
+The Fed, according to the minutes, said that “participants expressed that recent developments, including the volatility in financial markets and the increased concerns about global growth, made the appropriate extent and timing of future policy firming less clear than earlier.”
+The Fed’s own economic outlook remains upbeat. The minutes described economic data in the final months of 2018 as even stronger than the Fed had expected. Mr. Rosengren said consumers remained “willing to spend,” and he expected unemployment would continue to fall.
+Mr. Evans said he was still forecasting “another good year in 2019.”
+But uncertainties have piled up in recent months. The minutes said investors were particularly concerned about trade tensions between the United States and China, and about global growth.To the Editor:
+Re “In Era of San Francisco-ization, What Do San Franciscans Fear?,” by Emily Badger (The Upshot, Dec. 27):
+Elected officials are right to fear the San Francisco-ization that Ms. Badger describes. And at this unique moment in New York’s economic development history, which includes Amazon’s arrival, New York City leaders have looked west and seen what hasn’t worked.
+To this end, I would like to offer a definition for New York-ification: to make investments in affordable housing while diversifying the economy and ensuring that tech jobs are widely accessible. Unlike San Francisco, New York will never be a one-industry town. Moreover, the city is dismantling San Francisco’s legacy of a homogeneous tech sector and is committed to connecting New Yorkers of all backgrounds to these opportunities.
+But New York is really proving to be the anti-Silicon Valley by curbing gentrification through affordable housing. Mayor Bill de Blasio has committed to build or secure 300,000 affordable homes by 2026. If becoming New York means securing housing for generations while working to build pipelines from public housing, high schools and colleges to well-paying tech jobs, other cities should be so lucky.
+James Patchett
+New York
+The writer is president and chief executive of the New York City Economic Development Corporation.Ms. Bezos, 48, has written two books. In 2005, she published “The Testing of Luther Albright: A Novel,” a psychological thriller set in Sacramento, Calif. The New York Times called it a “quietly absorbing first novel.” Her second book, “Traps,” is a tale of four women who meet on a road trip to Las Vegas.
+In a 2013 interview in Vogue to promote “Traps,” Ms. Bezos said she met her husband when she interviewed for a job at D.E. Shaw as a research associate in 1992. After being hired, she sat in an office next to his. Ms. Bezos grew up in San Francisco and attended Princeton University, where she was an assistant to the novelist Toni Morrison. Ms. Bezos told Vogue that she asked Mr. Bezos to lunch and that within three months, they were engaged. They married in 1993.
+Mr. Bezos, who spent summers working at his grandfather’s cattle ranch in Texas, also went to Princeton, where he studied computer science. He described his younger self in the Wired profile as a “professional dater” who had set up a systemic approach to dating modeled after the criteria investment bankers used to analyze deals. (He added then it did not work.)
+Mr. Bezos later told Vogue, “I think my wife is resourceful, smart, brainy, and hot, but I had the good fortune of having seen her résumé before I met her, so I knew exactly what her SATs were.”
+The couple lived in a one-bedroom rental in downtown Seattle until 1999, when Wired reported the couple moved into a $10 million mansion in suburban Lake Washington. Mr. Bezos now owns several properties, including a mansion in Washington, D.C.Saudi Arabia: The young Saudi woman who barricaded herself in a Bangkok airport hotel room to avoid deportation was granted refugee status on Wednesday by the U.N. refugee agency, Australian officials said, clearing the way for an asylum request.
+Nepal: A woman and her two children died in a menstruation hut, the latest victims of a centuries-old tradition of banishing women from their homes during their periods, when they are considered impure. The practice was criminalized last year but many villages continue it.
+Australia: Foreign consulates in Melbourne and Canberra were evacuated after they received suspicious packages containing what the authorities described as potentially “hazardous material.”
+Rod Rosenstein: The U.S. deputy attorney general, who has been overseeing the special counsel’s Russia investigation, is expected to step down after President Trump’s choice to run the Justice Department is confirmed, according to administration officials.
+Women in power: There are now more women over the age of 50 in the U.S. than at any other point in history — and they’re becoming more visible and powerful, writes our gender editor.
+Norwegian Air: The low-cost airline was forced to land a flight in Iran because of a technical error. A month later, the American-made jet is still stuck because U.S. sanctions have made it difficult to get spare parts.
+Iran: The E.U. penalized the country over allegations that its intelligence agency orchestrated a series of assassination plots in Europe in recent years, including the killings of two Iranians in the Netherlands who had ties to anti-government extremist groups.To the Editor:
+Re “Deal With Altria Vexes F.D.A.” (Business Day, Jan. 5):
+One in five high school students uses e-cigarettes. The deal between Juul and Altria is more likely to increase use than encourage people to quit.
+As a national youth ambassador for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, I spoke at a news conference alongside Surgeon General Jerome M. Adams and Dr. Scott Gottlieb , the Food and Drug Administration commissioner, to discuss the destructive effect that Juul has nationwide. These products are pervasive, and they are destroying the lives of young people everywhere.
+This epidemic is alarming, but it isn’t unstoppable. In 2009, flavored cigarettes were banned because of the influence they had over young people. Our next step is to ban flavored e-cigarettes. Flavors are the leading reason for youth use of these products.
+The health of my generation is more important than the success of the tobacco and vaping industries. We all deserve better.Clay might not be the most high-tech beauty ingredient — the fine, earthy sediment has been used in facial remedies for centuries — but it’s one of the most efficient. When used in a paste or scrub, it is particularly adept at temporarily removing “surface oil and bacteria,” says the New York City dermatologist Rachel Nazarian, and can lead to a cleaner, brighter-looking complexion. Yet, slathering on clay is not always pleasant: The mineral-rich substance has the texture of thick mud, is messy to apply and often becomes dry and flaky when spread on the face. But there is a better way. The latest wave of clay treatments come in innovative new formats — from soft creams to sheet masks to customizable powders — that can help clear out pores with minimal irritation (and frustration). Here, four tips for choosing the best mask for your skin type and schedule.
+Creams Are Best for a Mild Cleanse
+Pre-mixed, clay-based cream masks often have milder formulas that only gently exfoliate the skin, making them a good option for dry or sensitive skin. Dr. Barbara Sturm’s Deep Hydrating Face Mask ($160), for example, pairs kaolin clay with calming aloe vera and has a dewy texture that retains moisture while the mask is on the face (for a recommended 10 minutes). Those with oilier skin types might prefer Lixirskin’s Soft Clay Rubber ($32), a mask and scrub with a pliable, gel-like feel that can either be massaged onto the skin then rubbed off to manually lift dead skin or, for a gentler fix, left on for five minutes and then rinsed off.
+Try a Sheet Mask for a Deeper Detox
+Sheet masks infused with clay fit snugly over the face, which helps the ingredients sink in deeply, usually in about 10 minutes. Patchology SmartMud’s No Mess Mud Masque ($30 for a four-pack) has a noticeable cooling effect while its mix of clay, volcanic ash and activated charcoal absorbs debris and impurities. MagicStripes’ Deep Detox Tightening Mask ($50 for a three-pack) boasts bentonite, a “unique clay that has evidence showing it calms irritated skin,” says Dr. Nazarian. Despite claims to the contrary, though, neither mask is completely mess free: Be prepared to get some clay in your hair, as the one-size-fits-all cloths are cut generously and are well saturated.
+A Powder Lets You Tailor the Results
+If you don’t mind investing the time, dry clay powders can be customized to target your skin concerns and left on for about 15 minutes. Ranavat Botanics’ Flawless Veil Illuminating Masque ($65), which contains a mixture of dehydrated clays and pulverized plants, can be blended with either a few teaspoons of water, to slough skin, or a splash of toner, to replenish lost moisture. Odacité’s Synergie[4] Immediate Skin Perfecting Beauty Masque ($59) includes a recipe card with optional mix-ins: Combine with apple cider vinegar to decongest pores, lemon juice to dissolve dead skin or organic milk for a brightening effect.“I don’t know what he was thinking” Mr. Gonzalez said. “What did he think, the officer was going to back away?”
+In the video, the shaven-headed officer flicks open an extendable baton and strikes Mr. Williams, the shorter of the two men, twice over the head. Another officer wearing a watch cap takes a backhanded swing at Mr. Williams, striking him in the face.
+A woman off-camera can be heard saying in Spanish, “They were telling them to move away from there, and they didn’t want to. The two of them squared with the police.”
+The video shows Mr. Grissom chasing one of the officers down 169th Street; they grapple and fall to the ground. Other uniformed and plainclothes officers rush to join the fight, kicking and striking Mr. Grissom with fists and batons.
+One baton strike appears to catch Mr. Grissom flush in the face, dazing him, the video shows. The shaven-headed officer strikes Mr. Grissom multiple times with a baton while he is pinned to the ground. One of the plainclothes officers can be seen repeatedly kicking Mr. Grissom in the torso.
+Police officials confirmed that two detectives and an off-duty police officer came to the assistance of the two transit officers. The Police Department did not identify the officers involved. None have been placed on modified duty.
+Mr. Grissom and Mr. Williams were arrested at least once before, on Dec. 5, in an attack on two transit officers. The officers had told them not to loiter in the mezzanine area in the same station, court records show.Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
+Hi, everybody! At the risk of sounding like a broken record, we start with unpleasant news on the climate front: Emissions of carbon dioxide in the United States shot up in 2018, even though a near-record number of coal plants closed during the year. Our colleague Brad Plumer reports that the estimated 3.4 percent increase was the largest in eight years.
+As we’ve written in the past, the earth’s average temperature has already risen by one degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, since the beginning of the industrial age, and the consequences of warming by 1.5 or two degrees Celsius are potentially grim. But the world is on track to blow past those numbers.
+In the case of the new United States estimates, extra oil and gas heating during a relatively cold winter and spiking emissions from factories, planes and trucks help explain the jump. The deeper message is clear: Closing coal plants won’t be enough to rein in planetary warming.
+Calls for action may be increasingly urgent, but the partial government shutdown has put the brakes on some of the science that helps track phenomena like climate change. And while the Trump administration does not fully accept the science of global warming or the need to address the problem, young, progressive new members of Congress are pushing for a “Green New Deal” that is getting attention now that Democrats control the House of Representatives.He will replace Bill Damaschke, a former DreamWorks Animation executive.
+Time’s Up, the organization founded by women in Hollywood in response to the #MeToo movement, criticized Skydance as “providing another position of power, prominence and privilege to a man who has repeatedly been accused of sexual harassment in the workplace.” The hire, Time’s Up added in a statement, “endorses and perpetuates a broken system that allows powerful men to act without consequence.”
+Time’s Up, whose founders include Reese Witherspoon and Shonda Rhimes, said three things were needed for men like Mr. Lasseter to return to positions of authority: a demonstration of true remorse, deep work to reform their behavior and restitution to those harmed.
+“Offering a high-profile position to an abuser who has yet to do any of those things is condoning abuse,” the organization said.
+The accusations against Mr. Lasseter did not rise to the level of those against powerful Hollywood figures like Harvey Weinstein, who has been accused of acts of sexual misconduct and rape going back decades, or Leslie Moonves, the former CBS chief who was found to have engaged in “multiple acts of serious nonconsensual sexual misconduct,” according to a report by CBS investigators. Both Mr. Weinstein and Mr. Moonves have denied engaging in nonconsensual sexual activity.
+But the complaints made by Pixar and Disney employees against Mr. Lasseter were serious enough to prompt his ouster. The Hollywood Reporter cited “grabbing, kissing and making comments about physical attributes” as recurring behavior by Mr. Lasseter in meetings and at work events, particularly when he had consumed alcohol. Multiple staff members — none who came forward publicly — also told managers at Disney that Mr. Lasseter had become increasingly domineering over the years.
+As word spread in Hollywood this week that Mr. Lasseter was close to finding new employment, several influential women involved with the #MeToo movement noted that he expressed no regret for his behavior or discussed making efforts to reform when he left Disney in June. In a statement at the time, he said he had made his own decision to “begin focusing on new creative challenges.”
+Disney had put Mr. Lasseter on leave in November 2017. At that time, he sent an email to employees at Pixar and the separate Walt Disney Animation studio apologizing “to anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of an unwanted hug or any other gesture they felt crossed the line in any way, shape or form.”“From the New York Times Magazine, this is Behind the Cover. I’m editor in chief Jake Silverstein.” “I’m Kathy Ryan, the director of photography.” “Gail Bichler is out this week. Our cover story is about the function of beauty in the animal kingdom. For a long time, beauty was considered to be a function of natural selection. Though this was never accepted in his time, Darwin actually believed beauty to be merely an aesthetic pleasure that animals are drawn to.” “We commissioned Kenji Aoki to go to Yale to photograph the birds in the archive there. He has an ability to somehow get at the essential beauty of whatever object that he’s photographing.” “That’s right.” “This bird is a lesser bird of paradise, known for its beautiful plumage.” “We couldn’t afford to get the greater bird of paradise?” “I’m not sure, but that’s its technical name.” “This is a theatrical, almost operatic —” “It’s operatic, I agree.” “I think that most readers will have an intuitive understanding of this thesis. We think some things are beautiful. There doesn’t have to be any further meaning to that pleasure than the pleasure itself.” [music]RIO DE JANEIRO — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil said Wednesday that his government would no longer be a party to a United Nations migration accord signed last month, arguing that “not just anyone can come into our home.”
+The decision is not expected to have any immediate impact because the deal, known as the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, is not legally binding on the more than 160 nations that signed it.
+But it may signal that Latin America’s largest nation, which has long been welcoming to foreigners, may adopt a harder line on immigration as Mr. Bolsonaro’s far-right administration gets settled.
+“Brazil has a sovereign right to decide whether or not it accepts migrants,” Mr. Bolsonaro said in a message posted on Twitter. “Anyone who comes here must be subject to our laws and customs, and must sing our national anthem and respect our culture.”Carlos Sánchez, who for nearly four decades played Juan Valdez, the embodiment of Colombian coffee and one of the most recognizable pitchmen in the world, died on Dec. 29 in Medellín. He was 83.
+His death was confirmed in an email from Colombia’s National Federation of Coffee Growers, which did not specify the cause.
+Mr. Sánchez first donned Valdez’s signature wide-brimmed hat in 1969. He took over for Jose F. Duval, a Cuban actor who had played the character since it was created by the New York advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1959.
+Mr. Sánchez was Colombian and grew coffee as a youth before turning to painting and acting. As Valdez, an indefatigable farmer with a warm expression, a lush mustache and a mule named Conchita, he became an avatar for the farmers who harvested Colombia’s coffee beans and a positive depiction of a country that was often equated with terrorism and drug trafficking.Coogler goes about things differently. “My experience is that most directors who lead with ego are not so secretly very insecure or self-conscious,” Morrison said. “Ryan’s comfortable in his own skin and confident in who he is, and that allows him to turn to his D.P. and ask what she thinks of the script, or ask the writer what he thinks of the cinematography.”
+“For Ryan, it’s important to have a lot of different perspectives around the table, not just his,” said Beachler. She recalled a moment on “Black Panther” when a line gave her pause and Coogler suspended shooting the scene to discuss her concerns. “He took the time to make sure I felt good about it, and safe,” Beachler said. “And that does not happen on other sets.”
+For Coogler, this approach is common sense. “The more angles you have when you’re making something, the more it helps the film cut through, in my opinion,” Coogler told me. “I think that’s why this is made for the audience, at the end of the day: Film is a collective experience.”
+It’s been that way for Coogler ever since he grew up in the Bay Area, when his parents would throw movie-marathon house parties for him, his two brothers, and their cousins. “I was watching high-quality stuff at an early age,” Coogler said, crediting his mother, Joselyn, for helping him become a cinephile. “We used to joke and call her IMDb, because before IMDb even came out, she used to say, ‘You see that actress there in the back corner? She played this person in that TV show.’”
+When Coogler speaks about the crucial people who have helped him develop as a filmmaker, many of them are women, including his wife, Zinzi, who weighs in on casting decisions, and a college teacher, Rosemary Graham, who encouraged Coogler to take up screenwriting and still reads many of his drafts. According to Jordan, his longtime friend and muse, giving female perspectives priority is a throughline that began in Coogler’s childhood and extends throughout his work.
+“The strongest warriors in Wakanda are the women, and the smartest,” Jordan noted, likening that lineage to the matriarchies found in many African-American communities. “That’s how it is in our households and our culture, and that’s what our family dynamic is made out of.”The most surprising news came when a host of tech companies announced they were working with Apple to bring some of the company’s content and virtual assistant capabilities to their devices.
+Vizio, the TV maker, said its newer TVs would work with AirPlay, an Apple software feature for streaming video and audio content from an iPhone or Mac to a television screen. People will be able to speak to Siri on their iPhones to play content they had purchased from iTunes on the Vizio TVs. Samsung, Sony and LG announced similar partnerships with Apple.
+In the past, AirPlay and iTunes videos were mostly tied to Apple-made hardware like the Apple TV set-top box. Their expansion to third parties underlines Apple’s ambition to expand the revenue it generates from its internet content and services. That’s especially important now that sales of Apple’s cash cow, the iPhone, are slowing. This month, the company reduced its revenue expectations for the first time in 16 years.
+The move is also notable because it illustrates an unusual willingness by Apple to open its technology to other companies, including competitors like Samsung.Which was the first piece that made you feel like a collector?
+The very first piece I got that I felt was real art was this screen print by Yuki Nakamura. She had had some beautiful large installs at the gallery next to the frame shop, then had a show with cheap prints. I ran and got one for $20.
+How have you found quality work on a limited budget?
+This portrait, “Attempted Murder,” by Chris Crites, was the first piece I ever got from a gallery with a payment plan. It was only $400 or $500, but I paid it off over three or four months. A bunch of these other works were trades. I was working in that frame shop for about five years, and during that time, I made about 50 websites for artists, galleries and arts organizations. There are probably 20 or 25 pieces in the apartment that are traded, either for a website or for a piece of my own work.Alluding to Mr. Trump’s Oval Office address on Tuesday night, in which he demanded the construction of a border wall, Mr. Steyer said the president had “once again lied to the American people, repeatedly, for his own political skin.” He described Mr. Trump as having already committed numerous offenses warranting his removal from office, and warned Democrats that shying away from an impeachment battle would serve to “enable” the president.
+Mr. Steyer, 61, left himself some wiggle room to change his mind on 2020, saying in prepared remarks that he had decided against running “at this time.” But his announcement ended — at least for now — the latest of several flirtations with seeking high office, which have also included abortive candidacies for the United States Senate and for governor of California. He considered running for president in 2016 before ultimately endorsing Hillary Clinton.
+In some respects, the Democratic primary landscape appeared inviting for a candidate like Mr. Steyer, with his sterling credentials as a Trump antagonist and a virtually bottomless well of money to spend on advertising. He has been one of the Democratic Party’s most prolific donors over the last few elections, eclipsed in 2018 only by Michael R. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is considering a presidential campaign of his own.
+Anticipating a likely race, Mr. Steyer had settled on a close adviser, Heather Hargreaves, to serve as his eventual campaign manager. He had conducted research into his own political vulnerabilities, in anticipation of attacks from other Democrats in a rowdy primary, and had mapped out how to reorganize his advocacy groups to comply with the fund-raising regulations that apply to presidential candidates.
+Mr. Steyer also recently retained a new senior adviser, Doug Rubin, who previously advised former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts on a possible 2020 run. Mr. Patrick announced last month that he had closed the door on a presidential candidacy.The cover of Gossamer’s debut issue features a mouthwatering image of orange juice being poured into a glass dotted with beads of condensation. Inside there’s an article about books as home décor status items, a Q. and A. with the writer and director Janicza Bravo, and a fashion spread featuring the clothing lines of Rosetta Getty and Gabriela Hearst.
+The magazine’s tag line and de facto motto, “High Quality,” is opaque enough to not raise any red flags to narcs, but also serves as a winking reference to its connective thread and defining subject matter.
+Marijuana.
+In Broccoli’s fourth and most recent issue, between advertisements for the cannabis body care brand Apothecanna and the weed delivery service Eaze, there’s a profile of the women who founded an “ungendered skatewear” brand and an advice column from Emily Post concerning how to “tactfully talk about weed.”
+And at Miss Grass you’ll find a recipe for cucumber, tomato and CBD salad; a three-step how-to on rolling the perfect joint; and a guide to Los Angeles’s best cannabis-friendly attractions. Miss Grass’s slogan? “Welcome to the high road.”“I have to say, I haven’t heard a new question about ‘The Sopranos’ in a long time. I’m sorry.” “What do I think about ‘The Sopranos?’” “Yes.” “Cold. Being out on set in the cold.” “I still have people asking me, ‘What the hell was that last episode?’” “Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show?” [ominous music] [gunshot] “It so doesn’t feel like it’s 20 years, I have to say. I mean — ” “Somebody said it’s the 20th anniversary, and I was just shocked.” “‘Sopranos’ was the beginning of a particular genre, you know?” “And you can see the influence of ‘The Sopranos’ certainly in all the antihero shows that came afterward.” “People seemed hungry to have a lead character that was perhaps as complicated as they are.” “Tony Soprano is more like me than a doctor, or a cop, or a judge.” “But the idea that a bad person can also be lovable, and that you can care about his family, how do I feel about this?” “Every once in a while, he’d make Tony do something truly awful just to remind us that we are rooting for a monster. Before ‘The Sopranos,’ TV was largely about providing answers. Think about the setup, punch line of a sitcom. Or think about cases that get solved before the last commercial break in a cop show. There’s certainly been good and ambitious shows on television before, but what ‘The Sopranos’ did is it showed that pondering questions that don’t have any answers can be satisfying too.” “You know I’ve been working with the government, right, Ton?” “‘Sopranos’ trained viewers in a way to learn to be O.K. with being a little confused.” “It was a fish that talked, for God’s sake. I’m just saying. You can walk a very tricky line when you start to do things like hallucinations, things that appear that don’t really exist. That can be a ‘jumping the shark’ situation. And rather than taking you out of the show, it just sort of added another dimension.” “A lot of people hated those dreams sequences. There were people who just wanted a mob show. And their motto was, less yakking, more whacking. So when I would read things like that, it would only make me do more yakking, so.” “Well, I think what we learned is that people want to be challenged in that way. I don’t know. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for.” “I didn’t want to change things. This Elvis Costello song where he says, ‘I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly.’ That’s the way I always felt about working at the network. And I think I bit it.” “Now, the script, the pilot script, David Chase had been shopping it around for a long time, and nobody wanted it.” “David Chase didn’t ever expect it really to go anywhere. Not only did it go somewhere, it became suddenly the thing that everybody wanted to talk about.” “All the reviews were extremely positive except for one. And I thought, what is this?” “We started to get this feeling like, I think people are responding to this.” “Well, I remember when the show was on the air, you couldn’t pick up The New York Times, for example, without a mention of it. There was just constant, constant, constant. And it’s still happening.” “But back then, people would say, ‘Oh, Sunday night in my house, people knew they couldn’t call, and we’d have these big meals.’” “When I heard that people had parties around it, that was the best thing I heard. And still is, in a way.” “There was something also about having to wait. Like wondering what might happen next, and then the next day, people would talk about it. We’re in a different time now. If you have five hours, you could sit and watch a majority of a series now. And here it is, a million years after we finished it, and I still can’t quite fathom the experience of that of a viewer, or of a fan of the show. I feel like, oh, I wish I’d gotten to see that.” “I don’t rewatch the episodes unless there’s something I need for research or something.” “Me and Aida Turturro, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who played Janice on the show — a couple of summers ago, we decided to sit down and watch the series, because there are many we both hadn’t seen. And we got four episodes in, and we couldn’t do it. It’s just too evocative. First of all, because Jim is gone. And we were all so young when we first started it. And the kids were, I think, 11 and 14. And we worked on it for 10 years, and they were so little. And it was so emotionally turbulent, I thought, I can’t do this.” [laughs] “We gave up.” “Which, of course, brings us to the ending of “The Sopranos,’ which is arguably the most famous thing about the show, still.” “I remember when I first read the script, I thought I was missing pages, just like people thought their TVs had broken. I’ve met so many people say to me about the ending, ‘So what the hell was that?’ And I’m like, ‘I know pretty much what you do.’ And they’re like, ‘Come on, I get it. But what really happened?’ I was like — “ [chuckling] [Music — Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’”] “They yelled cut and we all went home. That’s what happened.” “Made a lot of people angry. And sometimes, I couldn’t believe that it was that important to people. Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show? I don’t think so.” “There was no way to make everybody happy with the end of that show. No way. And I loved that people were left with their own uncomfortability about this. They weren’t being force fed. That’s not always easy.”Dennis Johnson, a composer who in 1959 wrote a trailblazing Minimalist work, a six-hour piano meditation of repeated notes and long pauses that went unheard for 50 years before being rediscovered, died on Dec. 20 in Morgan Hill, Calif. He was 80.
+His half brother, Don Wilson, said the cause was complications of dementia.
+Until 10 years ago, long after Mr. Johnson had dropped composing for a career as a mathematician, his music was known only by reputation. References to it were found in the writings of the composer La Monte Young, who described Mr. Johnson as one of his closest musical allies when they were students at the University of California, Los Angeles.
+Mr. Young is a founder of Minimalism, a genre of composition marked by repetition, gradual development and sometimes spare harmonies. Some of the most important contemporary composers, including John Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, are at times associated with the movement or at least have incorporated such elements in their work.
+Mr. Young is credited with composing the first Minimalist work, his String Trio of 1958, which unfolded so slowly that listeners focused less on its sequence of notes than on its long, sustained tones and glacial pace.“Wait —” is a weekly newsletter that brings you fresh and frisky updates on things you 100% want to know. Please! Come and take a little journey with us, into a the silly or the serious.
+Sometimes the most interesting things are lurking in plain sight or sound, like the mysteries of glitter or the incidental music of reality television. Yes please, sign up right here.LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles teachers’ union on Wednesday postponed a districtwide strike until Monday, after questions about whether a court could delay the strike arose on the day before some 30,000 teachers were expected to walk off the job.
+While the postponement could reopen negotiations, the union also suggested that it and the Los Angeles Unified School District are far from an agreement and that a strike in the nation’s second largest school system remains all but inevitable.
+A Los Angeles Superior Court judge was expected to rule this week on whether the union, United Teachers Los Angeles, had given the school district the proper legal notice that its members would no longer work under the terms of its most recent contract, which expired more than a year ago.
+Teachers say they can no longer work in what they call untenable conditions. They are demanding higher pay, smaller class sizes and more support staff like counselors and librarians. But district officials say that meeting those demands would bankrupt the school system, which is already paying for rising pension and health care costs, and that the strike will hurt the most vulnerable schools and students.Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
+Laura de Force Gordon was speaking from experience when, in 1893, she described in a speech how “society has sneered at learned women.”
+Gordon, a suffragist, journalist and lawyer, had spent several decades establishing herself in fields that had been historically limited to men, and was frequently met with scorn and opposition.
+When she was barred from attending law school in 1878, she was told it was because “rustling skirts” distracted the male students. When she became the second woman admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1885, a newspaper lamented “hens” piping “shrill clarions” at the justices. And in 1889, as she worked to advocate for women’s suffrage, another newspaper dismissed her as an “apostle of discontent for the profit she can make out of it.”The longest shutdown in American history ended on Friday, after 34 full days. That easily exceeded the previous record, under President Bill Clinton in 1995, of 21 days.
+In total, there have been 21 gaps in government funding since 1976, though the level of shutdown has varied. The current federal shutdown is a partial one, as many agencies were already funded through this fiscal year, which ends in September.
+START DATE PRESIDENT LENGTH IN DAYS DEC. 22, 2018 Trump 34 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X DEC. 16, 1995 Clinton 21 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X OCT. 1, 1978 Carter 17 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X OCT. 1, 2013 Obama 16 X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X OCT. 1, 1977 Carter 12 X X X X X X X X X X X X OCT. 1, 1979 Carter 11 X X X X X X X X X X X OCT. 1, 1976 Ford 10 X X X X X X X X X X NOV. 1, 1977 Carter 8 X X X X X X X X DEC. 1, 1977 Carter 8 X X X X X X X X NOV. 14, 1995 Clinton 5 X X X X X DEC. 18, 1982 Reagan 3 X X X NOV. 11, 1983 Reagan 3 X X X OCT. 6, 1990 Bush 3 X X X NOV. 21, 1981 Reagan 2 X X OCT. 1, 1984 Reagan 2 X X JAN. 20, 2018 Trump 2 X X OCT. 1, 1982 Reagan 1 X OCT. 4, 1984 Reagan 1 X OCT. 17, 1986 Reagan 1 X DEC. 19, 1987 Reagan 1 X FEB. 9, 2018 Trump 1 X Note: Start dates are the beginning of each shutdown, which is one day after budget authority expired. The length of completed shutdowns is the number of full days before the day that funding was approved.
+The roots of today’s dysfunction date back to some critical decisions starting in the 1970s. Here’s a look at why the American government has lurched into crisis over the budget so often since then.
+(Last month, The New York Times examined the history of federal government shutdowns. Below is a version of that breakdown, which has been lightly edited.)
+Before the 1970s, the federal government would in some cases spend money without prior congressional approval, said Jim Broussard, the director of the Center for Political History at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa.
+A 1974 law reorganized the budgeting process, shifting power from the executive branch to Congress. Tense disagreements quickly emerged.
+President Jimmy Carter at the White House in October 1978. Bob Daugherty/Associated Press
+In 1977, the House of Representatives and the Senate fought over whether Medicaid should be used to pay for abortions. That led to three separate instances in which the government could not provide funding for the Departments of Labor and Health, Education and Welfare. The shutdowns added up to a total of 28 days that year.
+Another gap in funding the following year, when President Jimmy Carter took issue with a costly public works bill and defense spending, lasted 17 days.
+Benjamin R. Civiletti taking the oath of office as United States attorney general in 1979. Associated Press
+Two legal opinions issued by the United States attorney general, Benjamin R. Civiletti, in 1980 and 1981, made shutdowns much more severe.
+Until that point, most agencies could continue to operate even if funding bills hadn’t been passed, with the understanding that money would eventually be approved.
+[Sign up for the Morning Briefing newsletter for a look at what you need to know to begin your day.]
+But Mr. Civiletti argued that it was illegal for the government to spend money without congressional appropriations. The few exceptions included work by federal employees to protect life and property, he wrote.
+That, in turn, prompted an increased frequency of small shutdowns as politicians struggled with deadlines, said Roy T. Meyers, a political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has written about the history of shutdowns.
+President Ronald Reagan in November 1981. United Press International
+In November 1981, President Ronald Reagan, in a fight with Congress over $8.5 billion in budget cuts he wanted, ordered the furlough of 241,000 government employees. It was the first time a shutdown of that size was ordered.
+A congressional subcommittee estimated that the two-day shutdown cost taxpayers between $80 million and $90 million, including administrative costs, such as figuring out who could and couldn’t work and paying workers who didn’t work.
+Shutdowns that included furloughs in 1984, 1986 and 1990 cost taxpayers at least $128 million, according to government estimates.
+A 21-day government shutdown in 1995 and 1996 during President Bill Clinton’s administration had been the longest. David Scull/The New York Times
+The longest previous shutdown came in 1995. At issue was a long-term budget backed by Republicans, who won control of both the House and the Senate halfway through Mr. Clinton’s first term.
+Their plan limited spending for Medicare and turned Medicaid and most other welfare programs over to the states. House Republicans, in particular, were keen on using a shutdown to get Mr. Clinton to sign their bill.
+A five-day shutdown in November was followed by the record-breaker — 21 days — starting in mid-December. That conflagration helped pave the way for the 2013 shutdown over President Barack Obama’s health care law.
+Left: Speaker of the House John A. Boehner before voting on Oct. 16, 2013. Right: President Barack Obama at the White House on Oct. 11, 2013. Doug Mills/The New York Times
+The 2013 shutdown lasted for 16 days and ended amid dire warnings from the Treasury Department that it was about to run out of money. Having failed in their bid to defund Obamacare, Republicans leaders eventually worked with their Democratic counterparts on a plan to reopen the government and raise the debt ceiling.What a difference a cast makes. If the director Neil Burger’s decision to have Bryan Cranston and Kevin Hart play the leads in the odd-couple comedy “The Upside” — a remake of the 2012 French film “The Intouchables” — doesn’t erase the original’s sins, it blurs them just enough.
+As a result, this impolitic (some might say offensive) tale of Phillip (Cranston), a wealthy, white quadriplegic, and Dell (Hart), the black parolee who restores his will to live, is surprisingly winning. Some squinting will be required to block out the race and class stereotyping, as well as the puddles of sentiment scattered throughout the highly predictable plot. Yet Jon Hartmere’s script has genuinely funny moments and is blessedly short on crassness: even a scene involving catheters and colon hygiene is less cringey than you might expect.Anita Radini, an archaeologist at the University of York , in England, spends a lot of time looking at tartar. Really old tartar.
+Tartar, or dental plaque — that film of bacteria that feels like sweaters on your teeth — contains a wealth of information about what long-dead individuals encountered in their daily lives. Dr. Radini has seen all sorts of things trapped in it: food particles, textile fibers, DNA, pollen, bacteria and even wings of tiny insects.
+But several years ago, when studying the dental plaque of a nun from medieval Germany, Dr. Radini saw something entirely new: particles of a brilliant blue. She showed the findings to Christina Warinner, another tartar expert, who was shocked.
+“They looked like little robins’ eggs, they were so bright,” said Dr. Warinner, group leader of archaeogenetics at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany. “I remember being dumbfounded.”Skin bleaching is a billion-dollar industry in predominantly black countries, but some governments want that to change.
+Rwanda is one of them. Pointing to the chemicals’ harmful health effects, the country has begun a crackdown to enforce its ban on bleaching agents, especially hydroquinone and mercury, that are found in cosmetics.
+“We have been conducting inspections on cosmetics to ensure that they are hydroquinone- and mercury-free,” Simeon Kwizera, a spokesman for the Rwanda Standards Board, said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “We are seizing some cosmetics, inspecting the shops and markets and advising the sellers.”
+In Rwanda and other countries, people use cosmetics to bleach their skin because they feel that lighter skin is the ideal or indicates higher social status. Dark-skinned people do not necessarily see people like them in billboards, movies and advertisements, and dark-skinned celebrities sometimes grow more popular after bleaching their skin. This all makes it easier to believe that darker skin is of lesser value or is not considered as beautiful.#SpeakingInDance is a weekly visual exploration of dance on Instagram. Watch the video from our most recent post below, and follow us at @nytimes.One of the most prominent materials in the British designer Craig Green’s fall 2019 collection, which he showed this week in London, was a thin glossy plastic akin to the polyethylene of a trash bag. It came in a range of vivid neon hues — highlighter yellow, shocking pink, radioactive green — and was used for slim-fitting pants and tops with billowing extensions and abstract hoods. Green had been concerned with “ideas of tradition and craft,” he explained backstage: There were “a lot of medieval techniques that we attempted to make lighter or used in a way that you’re not meant to.” Elsewhere in the collection, he experimented with tassels and crochet. While Green, who founded his brand in 2012, is best known for his utilitarian work-wear-inspired silhouettes, these handmade elements added softness and even a little romance. “Emotion doesn’t mean weakness,” he said. “It can also mean strength.”
+We sent Green an instant camera and asked him to capture the preparations for the show at his London studio. The images — of his reference materials, the production of the handmade crochet and the final adjustments backstage — serve as a visual diary of the collection.The New York City Council voted on Wednesday to institute a two-year moratorium on violations related to store signs and awnings after a mysterious spike in 311 complaints that led to costly penalties for small businesses.
+The bill, which Mayor Bill de Blasio is expected to sign, would also create an interagency task force to study the issue, waive or return fines for some past violations, and require the city to provide education and training to help small businesses ensure their signs comply with the law.
+“Businesses will not have to feel the burden of these unjust fines while we work on comprehensive reform,” said Councilman Rafael L. Espinal Jr., the Brooklyn Democrat who sponsored the bill.
+Two years ago, businesses in his district, which includes Cypress Hills and East New York, were hit with a wave of sign violations, whose fines start at $6,000. More recently, businesses in Sunset Park, Bensonhurst and other Brooklyn neighborhoods were targeted for inspection.No sooner was Jair Bolsonaro sworn in as president of Brazil on New Year’s Day than he let loose a fountain of far-right decrees, undermining protections for the environment, indigenous land rights and the L.G.B.T. community, putting nongovernmental organizations under government monitoring and purging government contractors who do not share his ideology. This thrilled Donald Trump, who tweeted enthusiastically, “Congratulations to President @JairBolsonaro who just made a great inauguration speech — the U.S.A. is with you!”
+Mr. Bolsonaro returned the love, tweeting back, “Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to our people!”
+His actions were a sad but not unexpected performance by Brazil’s new leader, a onetime military officer whose 27 years in the Brazilian Congress were notable only for crude insults to women, sexual minorities and blacks. “A good criminal is a dead criminal,” he declared; he promised to send “red outlaws” to prison or exile; he dedicated his vote to impeach former president Dilma Rousseff to the military officer responsible for her torture under the former military dictatorship.
+None of that seemed to matter to voters laboring under an economic collapse, a crime wave and a corruption scandal that undermined any faith in the political establishment. Mr. Bolsonaro’s promise of change, any change, was enough to sweep him into office with 55 percent of the vote in October. The language of his inaugural address — “I come before the nation today, a day in which the people have rid themselves of socialism, the inversion of values, statism and political correctness” — was music to the ears of his reactionary base, investors and Mr. Trump, who shares his values and his bluster. The stock market soared to record highs and the Brazilian real strengthened against the dollar.She added that she enjoyed solving a three-dimensional problem like, “How do you make a soap bubble out of clay?”
+Reto Thüring, who put on a solo show of Ms. Schutz’s work in 2018 for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and is now the chairman of contemporary art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, pointed to how “her work has become more layered over time.” He added, “There’s more variety in how the paint is applied. It has become almost sculptural.”
+The blowback from the Whitney controversy has followed Ms. Schutz to her 2017 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, as well as the Cleveland exhibition.
+“We received negative feedback” for showing her work, Mr. Thüring said. “And I welcomed that. It was a learning experience for us.”
+For her part, Ms. Schutz seemed resigned to the fact that the debate over “Open Casket” was “not quite resolved.” Setting out on new adventures — not so different from when she was 7 — seems like the only way forward.
+“Painting itself kind of actually felt more urgent, after all that,” she said of the last two years. “It was a relief where you just felt grateful to be able to paint. For me at least, that feels like the only way to get through something.”A 16-year-old American boy fighting on behalf of the Islamic State was captured on the battlefield in Syria, an American-backed force fighting the militants said Wednesday.
+If the teenager is proved to be a United States citizen, he would be the first American minor to be caught fighting on behalf of the terrorist group overseas.
+His arrest follows the capture of Warren Christopher Clark, 34, a former substitute teacher from Texas whose seizure in the same area was announced on Sunday. They are among the handful of American citizens — just five so far — who have been taken alive on the front line in the battle against the Islamic State, according to a database maintained by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University.
+The militia that announced the boy’s capture, the Syrian Democratic Forces, said he was among eight foreign fighters who were apprehended this week in the last sliver of Islamic State-held territory in northeastern Syria. The others included citizens of Germany, Russia, Ukraine, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.MEXICO CITY — Almost a dozen years ago, a panel of international prosecutors backed by the United Nations arrived in Guatemala. Their goal: to team up with the Guatemalan attorney general’s office, strengthen the rule of law and combat the criminal networks that had taken hold after the country emerged from more than three decades of civil war.
+It was a bold experiment in outsourcing justice, but given Guatemala’s fragile democracy, its weak institutions and the extent of corruption in the country, the government was prepared to cede sovereignty.
+Since the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala began its work in 2007, it has peeled back layers of corruption, helped strengthen the courts and professionalized the attorney general’s office, winning the approval of the Guatemalan people and sending powerful politicians, leaders of organized crime and businessmen to jail.
+But when a 2017 inquiry into illegal campaign financing focused on President Jimmy Morales directly, he began to stifle the work of the commission, known as Cicig, according its Spanish initials.Image
+Oral hormone replacement th erapy, or H.R.T., increases the risk for potentially fatal blood clots. But a study in BMJ found that hormone replacement delivered through the skin by injection or skin patch entails no increased risk for blood clots.
+British researchers looked at 80,396 women who had blood clots while on various H.R.T. regimens, comparing them with 391,494 controls. After adjusting for ethnicity, smoking, alcohol use, chronic medical conditions and other factors, they found that oral preparations increased the overall risk of clots by 43 percent. Oral drugs containing equine estrogen more than doubled the risk in some regimens, although the absolute risk for blood clots is small.
+But skin treatments, including patches, creams, gels and under-the-skin injections, had no effect on the risk for blood clots.
+About 80 percent of the women in the study using H.R.T. took the medicine orally, and among the women who used transdermal regimens, 87 percent used the skin patches.“ILSI does not profess to have been perfect in our 40-year history,” the statement said. “Not surprisingly, there have been bumps along the way. This is why ILSI has analyzed best practices and has committed to ensuring scientific integrity in nutrition and food sector research.”
+Coca-Cola said in a statement that it had also been changing the way it funded scientific research through greater transparency and by ending its practice of providing the lion’s share of money for studies. In recent years, it added, Coca-Cola has sought to address mounting obesity in China by offering an array of new sugar-free beverages and through improved nutrition labeling on products. “We recognize that too much sugar isn’t good for anyone,” it said.
+Professor Greenhalgh’s findings were based on interviews with Chinese officials and scientists, and a review of public documents produced by Coca-Cola and ILSI.
+She said the industry efforts have been wildly successful, in part because China lacks a free media or watchdog organizations that might have been critical of the relationship.
+In just a few decades, China has gone from a nation plagued by food shortages to one buffeted by soaring obesity and chronic diseases tied to poor diet. More than 42 percent of adults in China are overweight or obese, according to Chinese researchers, more than double the rate in 1991. In Chinese cities, nearly a fifth of all children are obese, according to government surveys.
+The increases closely follow growing prosperity in China that began in the 1980s as Beijing embraced market economics after decades of isolation. In 1978, Coca-Cola was among the first companies allowed into the country, and ILSI arrived soon afterward. Seeking to identify influential scientists it could work with, the group found a partner in Chen Chunming, a leading nutritionist who was the founding president of the Chinese Academy of Preventive Medicine, the forerunner of China’s C.D.C.
+In 1993, Ms. Chen became the head of ILSA-China and she remained a senior adviser to the organization until her death last year. Professors Greenhalgh and Popkin said that Ms. Chen was instrumental in stymying attempts to address soaring obesity by stressing the harmful impact of consuming highly processed food and sugary soft drinks.The method was first developed in ancient Greece, but popularized in “The Art of Memory,” by Frances A. Yates, in 1966. Also called a “memory palace,” MoL involves placing items throughout a familiar place. In this case, your home. Mr. Foer in his book suggested walking through the front door and then letting your eyes gaze from left to right, top to bottom. In our example, we started with a map, placed a plush figure below it, and then a dog with a pair of socks in its mouth.
+Seven digits, though, is child’s play. Gary Shang once used MoL to memorize pi to 65,536 digits.
+How Mnemonics Work
+In an evolutionary sense, our memory hasn’t quite become a powerhouse for nonvisual information. Early hominids had little need to remember dates or phone numbers. They did, however, require an acute sense of what times of the year were best to plant crops, what flora were edible, and when they might need to pack up and move to keep pace with nomadic food sources.
+“From an evolutionary prioritization perspective, I think most of this comes down to gating mechanisms we have in place for denoting and ‘tagging’ incoming stimuli as important for the continuation of our existence,” Nicco Reggente, Ph.D., a cognitive neuroscientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, said.
+Even today, sensory representations drive memory in ways mere memorization can’t touch. Dr. Reggente explained that this is best seen in the hippocampus, a part of the brain that originally evolved to support movement. “In order for this movement to be purposeful, it must be guided via prediction,” he said. “It is the same region that is now, in our modern age, repurposed for non-spatial (non-movement based) memories as well.”
+It’s why visual mnemonics, like MoL, are so effective; we’re piggybacking on a cognitive system that was fine-tuned over millions of years to work best with visual and spatial representation. “Visualization is typically beneficial due to its translation of the abstract form of the object (or concept) into a spatial medium,” Dr. Reggente said.
+How to Remember Names
+Names are actually best remembered by focusing on the text as it’s spoken and then using it immediately. “The most useful trick isn’t a trick at all,” Mr. Mullen, the memory champion, noted. “It’s focus.”
+As mnemonics go, all the experts we spoke with suggested the same technique for remembering names. It involves singling out a particular trait of the person you’re speaking with. For Mr. Mullen, in a made-up example, that was hair color. The trait most noticeable about “Karen” was her orange hair, about the same shade as a carrot. He’d then imagine Karen with carrots for hair, perhaps munching on them as they spoke.1. President Trump abruptly walked out of a meeting on the government shutdown with Democratic leaders at the White House.
+“Just left a meeting with Chuck and Nancy, a total waste of time,” the president tweeted. “I asked what is going to happen in 30 days if I quickly open things up, are you going to approve Border Security which includes a Wall or Steel Barrier? Nancy said, NO. I said bye-bye, nothing else works!”
+Democrats said that the president had thrown a “temper tantrum.” Above, Senator Chuck Schumer after the meeting.Even in its heyday, “The Apprentice” never earned ratings like this.
+President Trump’s appearance in network prime time on Tuesday — a nine-minute speech from the Oval Office on border security that mostly recycled his usual talking points — drew roughly 40 million television viewers, according to statistics released on Wednesday by Nielsen.
+That audience fell short of Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address last January, which drew about 45.6 million viewers, and past landmark presidential moments, like Barack Obama’s announcement of the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011, which reached 56.5 million people.
+But Mr. Trump’s appearance edged Mr. Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address (31.3 million), a 2014 speech that Mr. Obama delivered about the Islamic State (34.1 million) and, for good measure, the first-season finale of “The Apprentice” in 2004 (28 million).
+The decision by broadcast networks to pre-empt programming for Mr. Trump, who requested time to discuss the government shutdown, touched off a vigorous debate.WASHINGTON — The Food and Drug Administration has stopped routine food safety inspections of seafood, fruits, vegetables and many other foods at high risk of contamination because of the federal government’s shutdown, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner, said on Wednesday.
+F.D.A. inspectors normally examine operations at about 160 domestic manufacturing and food processing plants each week. Nearly one-third of them are considered to be at high risk of causing food-borne illnesses. Food-borne diseases in the United States send about 128,000 people to the hospital each year, and kill 3,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
+Domestic meat and poultry are still being inspected by staff at the Agriculture Department, but they are going without pay. The F.D.A. oversees about 80 percent of the nation’s food supply, as well as most overseas imports.
+In a series of tweets, Dr. Gottlieb said he was taking steps to restore food safety surveillance inspections and to cover more of the high-risk sites as the shutdown continued. He said he hoped to bring back about 150 inspectors who had been furloughed during the shutdown, perhaps as early as next week.And so, to survive the brain-dissolving internet, I turned to meditation.
+Don’t roll your eyes. You’ve heard about the benefits of mindfulness before. Meditation has been rising up the ladder of West Coast wellness fads for several years and is now firmly in the zeitgeist.
+It’s the subject of countless books, podcasts, conferences, a million-dollar app war. It’s extolled by C.E.O.s and entertainers and even taught in my kids’ elementary school (again, it’s Northern California). The fad is backed by reams of scientific research showing the benefits of mindfulness for your physical and mental health — how even short-term stints improve your attention span and your ability to focus, your memory, and other cognitive functions.
+I knew all of this when I first began meditating a year ago, but I was still surprised at how the practice altered my relationship with the digital world. At first, it wasn’t easy: After decades of swimming in the frenetic digital waters, I found that my mind was often too scrambled to accommodate much focus. Sitting calmly, quietly and attempting to sharpen my thoughts on the present moment was excruciating. For a while, I flitted among several meditation books and apps, trying different ways to be mindful without pain.
+Then, about four months ago, I brute-forced it: I made meditation part of my morning routine and made myself stick with it. I started with 10 minutes a day, then built up to 15, 20, then 30. Eventually, something clicked, and the benefits became noticeable, and then remarkable.
+The best way I can describe the effect is to liken it to a software upgrade for my brain — an update designed to guard against the terrible way the online world takes over your time and your mind.
+Now, even without app blockers, I can stay away from mindless online haunts without worrying that I’m missing out. I can better distinguish what’s important from what’s trivial, and I’m more gracious and empathetic with others online. As far as I know, people are still wrong on the internet, but, amazingly, I don’t really care anymore.
+I can anticipate your excuses. First, this is all very old news: As Buddhists have known forever, meditation is really good for you, and The New York Times’s new Op-Ed columnist is On It. And second, it’s all a bit too woo-woo — it sounds promising, but you’re not one to go full Goop.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+WASHINGTON — The two-week-old shutdown has halted one of the federal government’s most important public health activities, the inspections of chemical factories, power plants, oil refineries, water treatment plants, and thousands of other industrial sites for pollution violations.
+The Environmental Protection Agency has furloughed most of its roughly 600 pollution inspectors and other workers who monitor compliance with environmental laws. Those scientists, engineers and analysts are responsible for detecting violations that endanger human health, as they did, for example during an August 2018 airborne inspection that found that oil and gas fields in Karnes County, Tex., were leaking illegal levels of chemicals into the atmosphere, in violation of the Clean Air Act.
+While the inspection personnel represent a relatively small proportion of the E.P.A.’s total of about 15,000 workers, their absence increases the chances that, either by design or by accident, companies might emit illegal levels of contaminants into the air or water without detection, for weeks on end, according to people familiar with the E.P.A. inspections.
+“There are plants that discharge wastewater into streams and rivers, places that store hazardous chemicals in containers that could leak — we show up and test these places to see if they’re meeting pollution laws,” said Garth Connor, a furloughed E.P.A. inspector based in Philadelphia who has been off the job since Monday. “Now there’s nobody out there to check if they’re complying.”WASHINGTON — It was almost lunchtime at a food court downtown and Yonas A. Seyoum, the manager of the Esprinto Café, marched over to the cash register and printed out the morning’s sales.
+“It’s crazy,” he said, holding up a drooping receipt.
+He had done $52.71 of business in five hours, miserable even for January.
+“Not even enough to pay her,” Mr. Seyoum said, motioning to the cashier, a young woman leaning on the counter and playing gin rummy on her phone.
+He added: “It’s like a ghost city — totally dead.”
+As the country nears the end of its third week of a government shutdown, the consequences of Washington’s political dysfunction are landing right on the city’s doorstep. The Washington metro area is home to the largest number of federal workers in the country, and as their paychecks begin to stop, the negative effects threaten to spread across the region.A state investigative report into the shooting, delivered to lawmakers last week, revealed in painful detail how eight sheriff’s deputies had heard gunshots but remained outside the building, wasting valuable time to try to save lives.
+Sheriff Israel’s office bills itself as the largest accredited sheriff’s department in the country, with some 5,800 employees. The sheriff faced intense criticism after the shooting once it became evident that police radios jammed and deputies lacked recent training on how to handle active shooters.
+The Parkland shooting has become a catalyst for the national debate on gun control. Stoneman Douglas students became youth activists for new gun legislation, and Sheriff Israel himself, who has been twice elected in a heavily Democratic county, clashed head-on with the powerful National Rifle Association. During a town hall-style event broadcast by CNN days after the shooting, the sheriff told Dana Loesch, an N.R.A. spokeswoman, that her organization was obstructing the police’s ability to keep people safe.
+“You just told this group of people that you are standing up for them,” he told her. “You’re not standing up for them until you say, ‘I want less weapons.’”
+Sheriff Israel then became a frequent N.R.A. target on social media. And as reports surfaced of deputies’ shortcomings at Stoneman Douglas, Republican opposition to the sheriff grew. Eventually, several vocal parents of victims whose opinions carry significant political weight also announced their lack of confidence in him.
+“If you had one deputy that doesn’t go in, it could be easily called a lack of courage, or a mistake, or a fluke,” said Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter, Alaina, was killed in the rampage. “But when you have eight deputies that don’t go in when they’re hearing gunshots inside of a school, that’s a systemic failure. Systemic failures point in one direction: They point to the leader.”
+Deputies told investigators they had struggled to learn what was happening the day of the massacre because their radios had jammed — the same problem they had confronted more than a year earlier at a shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport.Ten days after Congolese voters cast their ballots in their oft-delayed presidential election, the oft-delayed results were at last going to be announced late Wednesday night in Kinshasa, the capital.
+Riot police officers were deployed, citizens waited anxiously, the hour appointed by the electoral commission — 11 p.m. — came and went. But not a word was heard.
+It appeared there was yet another delay. Early Thursday morning, hours after the scheduled announcement, election officials began announcing the winners of hundreds of provincial deputy seats, but not the presidential race.
+What it all meant in a country whose longtime leader did all he could to extend his grip on power before finally agreeing to step down was anyone’s guess.The struggle in the abortion debate is, in many ways, a struggle over language.
+For example, I am pro-life. I strongly support rights and protections for mothers and children, including prenatal children, and other vulnerable populations. I want to see the laws of this country protect these people as well. In my view, this makes me pro-life. That’s why I use the phrase “prenatal child” where other people would say “fetus.”
+In the view of those people, and of mainstream news outlets, I am not pro-life; I am anti-abortion. This language allows critics to dismiss me and fellow pro-lifers as single-issue obsessives, which we are not.
+In recent years abortion-rights supporters moved from using neutral language like “autonomy” and “choice” toward using positive, stigma-defying language. Groups like Planned Parenthood now speak about “abortion care.” Oprah profiled activists who urge people to #ShoutYourAbortion. Billboards erected by abortion-rights supporters proudly say that abortion is a “family value.”
+Defying stigma is one thing. But the stakes of this debate are never higher than when we decide on language to describe the object of abortion.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When Jameek Lowery started filming inside a New Jersey police station, he was panicked and afraid. As he waited for an ambulance, he told officers that he was paranoid and insisted that they were trying to kill him.
+Two videos he streamed live to Facebook on Saturday morning depict a frantic Mr. Lowery, 27, asking viewers for help and calling out to the Paterson, N.J., police officers for water. Then he turned the camera toward himself.
+“Ma, I’m sorry,” he said. “They’re going to do this to me. They’re going to kill your baby boy.”
+About 10 minutes later, Mr. Lowery, a father of three, was unresponsive. Two days after that, he was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.The job of commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department has proved to be one of the most tenuous in the country.
+The mayor this week selected Michael Harrison as the city’s fifth police chief in four years, and asked him to try to solve a list of persistent problems that chased most of the others from the job. Among the tasks: Reducing one of the nation’s highest murder rates; building trust among residents who widely view the department as racist, corrupt and indifferent; and earning the support of rank-and-file officers.
+And lately, doing all of this under a federal court order intended to curb the department’s long history of abusive and discriminatory practices.
+If that were not enough, perceived success has often boiled down to one yardstick — the tally of murders and other violent crimes — whose roots, many experts say, lie to a large extent in a stew of deeper problems beyond the reach of a police chief.RICHMOND, Va. — A judge in Virginia reopened a more than two-year-old case on Wednesday to consider accusations that the powerful consultancy McKinsey & Company had defrauded his court while advising a bankrupt coal company.
+“These are some of the most serious allegations that I have ever seen,” said the judge, Kevin R. Huennekens of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, in Richmond.
+The decision to reopen the bankruptcy case of Alpha Natural Resources was the latest in a series of court actions and legislative maneuvers meant to examine whether McKinsey has failed to disclose investments in the entities it helps reorganize — an arrangement that could allow the company to profit off the plan it helped put in place. The request to reopen came from a retired turnaround specialist, Jay Alix, and was supported by the Justice Department’s Office of the United States Trustee.
+The federal bankruptcy code bars the professionals who work on bankruptcies from hiding their stakes, although possessing an interest in a company is not automatically disqualifying. The regulations require the disclosure of such connections between companies to ensure fair treatment of all parties.With a percussive forehand and a booming serve that topped out at 120 miles per hour, Marino surged to a high of 38th in the rankings in the summer of 2011, when she was 20. Not a highly touted junior prospect, she had planned to enroll in college before her tennis successes mounted, catapulting her faster and further than she was prepared to handle.
+“Not expecting it, I felt like I was thrown into this machine, and I didn’t understand how it worked,” she said.
+Marino stepped back from the sport for the first time in 2012, taking seven months off. After returning for several months, she retired in February 2013 at age 22.
+In a conference call announcing her decision, Marino revealed her struggles with depression; days earlier, she had discussed her social media abuse in an interview with The New York Times. Her leaving the sport was often attributed to one of those factors, or both of them, which Marino said was inaccurate in retrospect.
+“When I look back, I wouldn’t necessarily say it was depression,” she said of her decision to stop playing. “It was burnout, and it was expectations put on my shoulders by myself and others, and I just wasn’t able to cope. It kind of all came to a head in a big, giant burnout, I guess.”About 800,000 federal workers are furloughed or working without pay across the country because of the government shutdown, many of them concentrated in the West.
+Some States Feel the Shutdown More Than Others
+Number of federal workers at agencies affected
+by the shutdown per 10,000 workers
+Over all, federal workers account for about 1.5 percent of the country’s labor force, with a fifth of them in the Washington metro area. But the shutdown has hit some agencies — and states — harder than others.
+Outside the capital, states with large numbers of workers for the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior are more likely to feel the shutdown’s effects. And nearly the entire staff of the Environmental Protection Agency is furloughed, including hundreds of workers in North Carolina and Illinois.
+A budget agreement to end the shutdown remains the subject of a fierce partisan fight in Congress, with federal workers caught in the middle. Some senators who count these workers among their constituents are pushing for an end to the impasse, but federal employment does not appear to have a clear relationship to lawmakers’ positions on the shutdown.
+Senate Democrats in Virginia and Maryland, two states where federal employment is high, have urged their colleagues to vote on a House-passed bill to end the shutdown. Senator Jon Tester of Montana, the state with the second-highest concentration of affected federal workers, has similarly called for a resolution.Both sides have taken absolutist positions that leave no room for the kind of split-the-difference compromise that usually ends budget impasses. Mr. Trump refuses to accept anything less than his demand for about $5 billion in wall spending, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said his wall along the southern border would be immoral.
+But Mr. Trump’s claim that he can and may attempt to build his wall another way opens the door for him to sign a spending bill with no wall funding, reopening the government without capitulation by either side.
+While any such move by Mr. Trump is certain to prompt outrage from his critics and wild approval from his supporters, there is good reason to believe that it is unlikely to result in much immediate change. His push for a wall would be channeled into a lengthy court fight, keeping lawyers far busier than construction workers, at least initially, as his term ticks away.
+“We’re going to be in 2020 before this gets resolved,” said Walter E. Dellinger III, a former solicitor general in the Clinton administration, adding: “If they are just planning where to build slats, judges are unlikely to decide that requires expedition in the Supreme Court. I think they would recognize the wisdom of going slow.”
+If, in the end, the Supreme Court were to rule that emergency-power laws give Mr. Trump authority to proceed, he would probably face still more litigation with property owners over whether the government may use eminent domain to force them to sell their border lands. There may be little time left in his term after all that to add more than a few miles, if any, of barriers to the 1,954-mile border, which already has 654 miles of fencing.We need to look at the bright side of Donald Trump’s border wall fixation.
+Sure, he’s shut down the government and thrown the nation into chaos. But it could be worse. He could be demanding a fiery moat between us and Canada. Or building a 36,000-foot-deep barrier across the Pacific Ocean to drive home his commitment to tariffs.
+See? There’s always a silver lining.
+Trump wants a $5.7 billion down payment to build a wall along the Mexican border to protect us from caravans of terrorists and drug dealers. We hadn’t heard a lot about the caravan menace since the midterm elections, but the president brought it back on Wednesday. This was shortly before he walked out of a meeting with Democratic leaders about the government shutdown.
+The two sides disagreed on who caused the talks to collapse. Obviously, it was something about the you-know-what. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer claimed that when the wall came up, Trump “sort of slammed the table … and said we have nothing to discuss.” Republican leaders tried to pin all the blame on obdurate Democrats.
+“I said bye-bye,” tweeted the president.
+O.K., this one is pretty clear. The meeting was brief. After only about 30 minutes, he who says “bye-bye” is the culprit. Even if, as House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy claimed, Trump “brought a little candy for everybody.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In the last few months, the 18 jurors at the drug conspiracy trial of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo, have been inundated with evidence exposing the innermost secrets of his global narco-empire. But on Wednesday, the panel got a riveting and unexpected look at something even more revealing: dozens of text messages Mr. Guzmán sent to his wife and mistress.
+The private messages — obtained by the F.B.I. with the assistance of an info-tech expert who worked for Mr. Guzmán — painted an astonishing portrait of the crime lord not only as a serial philanderer, but also as a man who, mixing sex and business, relied on the women in his life to help him conduct his daily operations.
+In one set of messages, Mr. Guzmán and his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro, cooed together over the cuteness of their twin baby daughters and then, in a flash, discussed whether his soldiers had been slaughtered in a gunfight.
+As page after page of these intimate notes — one describing how Ms. Coronel’s enchiladas had made the kingpin fall in love with her — were displayed to the jury in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Ms. Coronel herself sat in the room, stoic and silent, wearing a pair of black designer glasses.The Jets have come to the realization that if they could not beat Adam Gase, they might as well hire him.
+After a busy, 10-day coaching search that saw the team chairman Christopher Johnson and General Manager Mike Maccagnan interview eight candidates, the Jets decided on Wednesday to name Gase their next head coach, according to a person familiar with the deal who is not authorized to comment publicly about it.
+The hire was first reported by ESPN and NFL Network, and a formal announcement is expected to come on Thursday.
+Gase went 23-25 in three seasons with the Miami Dolphins in the A.F.C. East, reaching the postseason in just one of those years. But he was 5-1 against the Jets, including two wins in 2018.“Donald Trump is an irrepressibly press-savvy, communications-centric president,” Ms. Conway said. Of Mr. Shine, she added that he “has a gut for what sells and an eye for what compels.”
+A longtime associate of Mr. Ailes, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Mr. Trump thought he was “getting Roger,” who built Fox with a keen eye for aggressive political strategy, in his hire. But Mr. Shine, according to his critics, has shown little understanding of the conservative media beyond the cable news ecosystem and his former network — the one place where the president does not need much assistance, and where Mr. Shine has few remaining admirers.
+Mr. Shine has survived mainly by fulfilling the president’s desire to be in charge of his own messaging.
+“He understands really strong personalities,” Mr. Gingrich said, noting Mr. Shine’s past at Fox. “He understands that his job is to operate within the framework of that personality, not to try to change that.”
+Mr. Shine, for his part, has told several colleagues he is used “to working for crazy bosses,” a reference to his time at Fox that made its way back to the network, where officials were displeased.
+At 55, Mr. Shine is older than many other aides in the West Wing. He is widely described as genial and good humored by his colleagues, several of whom refer to him as an “adult in the room.” He is usually at his desk around 6:45 each morning, a White House official said. Bearded, tall and often bleary-eyed, he works late into the evenings as a rotating cast of reporters filter in and out of his office. He is known as a level presence and, in the words of one senior administration official, is good at “staying in his lane.” Unlike many other White House aides, Mr. Shine tends to avoid matters that are not in his immediate purview.
+Exactly what that purview is can be hard to discern. Multiple people close to the White House, for instance, said the communications office issued no guidance on what points they should make on television after Mr. Trump’s Oval Office address.The secret effort that first drew Mr. Jones’s concern — and a wave of criticism from Democrats and Republicans alike — included the creation of a Facebook page that stirred support for a conservative write-in candidate during Mr. Jones’s race against Roy S. Moore, the Republican nominee. The surreptitious tactics also included what an internal report called a false flag operation to make it appear as if an army of Russian accounts were following Mr. Moore on Twitter.
+That overall effort, which cost $100,000, was underwritten through an intermediary by Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn. Mr. Hoffman apologized last month but said he had not sanctioned the tactics that were used in Alabama. Instead, he said he had been trying to support “organizations trying to re-establish civic, truth-focused discourse” and had not been aware of the deceptive work during the 2017 campaign.
+“I categorically disavow the use of misinformation to sway an election,” said Mr. Hoffman, who added that he “would not have knowingly funded a project planning to use such tactics, and would have refused to invest in any organization that I knew might conduct such a project.”
+In his statement, Mr. Hoffman said an inquiry of the kind Mr. Jones suggested was “a good idea.”
+A separate effort, which The Times reported on Monday, involved a group of progressive Democrats who pretended to support a new era of Prohibition in Alabama — and suggested that Mr. Moore would support such a ban. The idea behind the “Dry Alabama” tactics, people involved in the effort said, was to drive a wedge between Mr. Moore and business-oriented conservatives, who would perhaps redirect their support to Mr. Jones.
+Those tactics, which also cost $100,000, were funded by two donors from Virginia who wanted to defeat Mr. Moore, a former Alabama Supreme Court chief justice who was accused of pursuing sexual relationships with underage girls when he was a young prosecutor in northeast Alabama. Mr. Moore has denied any misconduct.“Our Kiki is fearless. I’m going to give her an AK-47 so she can hang with me.”
+JOAQUÍN GUZMÁN LOERA, the Mexican kingpin known as El Chapo, in a note to his wife joking about their daughter.The Hubble Space Telescope has a new problem. NASA reported on Wednesday that one of its most frequently used cameras, known as the Wide Field Camera 3, had turned itself off the previous day.
+The trouble has been traced to one of the telescope’s channels that handles observations in the ultraviolet and visible-light parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, according to Tom Brown, head of the Hubble mission at the Space Telescope Science Institute. Another channel, which handles infrared observations, is fine, he said.
+As of Wednesday afternoon, the engineers had not yet isolated the fault. Although initial suspicions had focused on electronics, Dr. Brown said, there was a good chance that it was a case of corrupted data, and could be solved by rebooting the instrument in a few days, once it has been deemed safe to do so.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Wednesday about a court filing indicating that Paul Manafort shared polling data with a contact tied to Russian intelligence misidentified the people to whom Mr. Manafort wanted the contact to send the data. Mr. Manafort wanted the data sent to two Ukrainian oligarchs, Serhiy Lyovochkin and Rinat Akhmetov, not to Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin.
+•
+An article on Wednesday about the increasing number of women over 60 achieving senior roles in business and government misidentified the university where Susan Douglas is a professor of communication studies. It is the University of Michigan, not Michigan State University. The article also misstated the age of Representative Maxine Waters. She is 80, not 79.
+NATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about inquiries into claims of physical and sexual abuse by R. Kelly misstated the year a Buzzfeed report about R. Kelly was published. It was 2017, not last year.
+STYLES
+The Critical Shopper column last Thursday, about visits to the Allbirds and Birkenstock stores in SoHo, applied an erroneous distinction to that Birkenstock location. It is the first company-owned Birkenstock store in the country; it is not the first store to bear the Birkenstock name.Congolese election officials, rejecting independent assessments that a prominent opposition figure was the runaway winner of the recent presidential election, on Thursday bestowed victory on a candidate considered more acceptable to the departing President Joseph Kabila.
+The decision dashed hopes that the Democratic Republic of Congo might experience its first undisputed transfer of power by the ballot box since independence six decades ago. And it was unclear how it would sit with the population.
+Still, however malleable the declared winner, Felix Tshisekedi, may seem to Mr. Kabila, he was not his first choice. Mr. Kabila had backed a top aide to succeed him.
+The election commission’s early-morning announcement amounted to a startling official admission that Mr. Kabila’s candidate had suffered a defeat so big that his government — in power for 18 years — could not simply hand him the presidency without risking widespread violence and international condemnation.Fiat Chrysler Automobiles has agreed to pay nearly $650 million to settle lawsuits over its use of illegal engine-control software on diesel vehicles that produced false results on emissions tests, two people briefed on the matter said Wednesday.
+The Justice Department sued the company in 2017 over the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that it had used illegal software that turned off pollution controls under certain driving conditions. The E.P.A. contended that the software enabled the vehicles to pass emissions tests while allowing them to release higher levels of pollutants in normal driving.
+The settlement, which is expected to be announced on Thursday, includes no admission of guilt by Fiat Chrysler or an E.P.A. finding of wrongdoing. The company will pay $305 million in penalties to the federal government and to the State of California, which also brought suit.
+As part of the agreement, Fiat Chrysler will recall about 104,000 diesel-powered Ram 1500 trucks and Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utility vehicles from the 2014, 2015 and 2016 model years, a person briefed on the settlement said. The recall repair involves installing new software in the vehicles.THURSDAY PUZZLE — Administrivial Update: Thanks to all who have written to let us know about the commenting issue. The community team is currently working on it and we thank you for your patience.
+It’s always a pleasure to see a new constructor make a debut in The New York Times, and today we welcome Jeff Slutzky, who learned the ropes from Derek Bowman.
+A side note before we look at their puzzle: I’d like to reiterate that the best way to get started making crossword puzzles is to find a mentor and to work with that person on polishing skills before submitting work to an editor. The learning curve for making crosswords is steep and hard to climb alone. Still, some aspiring constructors avoid this step.
+Maybe they want to be left alone to practice on their own, or maybe they are sensitive to criticism. For whatever reason, they avoid working with a pro and find themselves facing a long list of rejection emails, whereupon they give up and walk away from a fun hobby and a wonderful community.Mr. Weinstein has denied engaging in nonconsensual sexual activity.
+“We have said from the beginning that this claim was unjustified, and we are pleased that the court saw it as we did,” Phyllis Kupferstein, a lawyer for Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement. “We believe that we will ultimately prevail on her remaining claims.”
+In September, Judge Gutierrez ruled that Ms. Judd could not claim sexual harassment because she did not have a specific business relationship with Mr. Weinstein at the time — a requirement of the statute. But the court allowed Ms. Judd to amend the sexual harassment part of her complaint and resubmit it. Her lawyers did so, citing end-of-year revisions to California sexual harassment laws and arguing that the changes should be applied retroactively.
+It is rare for people to recover damages for smear campaigns — for instance, quietly labeling actresses as “difficult” when they do not acquiesce to powerful men — because of how complicated it can be to prove the action took place, much less harmed a career. But Ms. Judd has an A-list director on her side: Peter Jackson, who came forward early last year to say he removed Ms. Judd from a “Lord of the Rings” casting list “as a direct result” of what he now thought was “false information” provided by Mr. Weinstein.
+In her original suit for defamation, Ms. Judd said that, until Mr. Jackson came forward, she did not know that “something unseen was holding her back from obtaining the work she wanted, and had been doing so for decades.”On the 19th day, the president pounded a table
+President Trump’s frustration boiled over as a partial government shutdown in the U.S. lurched into its 19th day. He stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders after Speaker Nancy Pelosi again said she would not fund a wall on the southern border even if he agreed to reopen the government.
+Democrats accused the president of throwing a “temper tantrum,” while Mr. Trump dismissed the meeting on Twitter as “a total waste of time.” Democrats have been emphasizing the costs of the shutdown — farmers missing crop payments, national parks trashed — rather than delving into the question of a barrier.
+Possible end game: Mr. Trump again raised the option of declaring a national emergency and ordering the wall constructed himself, which could be a face-saving way out but could also be a violation of constitutional norms.Adam Toren remembers the last time he crawled into bed, pulled the covers over his head and took off sick from work. “My whole family got wracked by the flu around 2006,” said Mr. Toren, a tech entrepreneur and writer. “Hopefully, that was the last time.”
+Thirteen years later, Mr. Toren, who lives in Phoenix, said he has not missed another day of work from illness, a streak of which he is exceedingly proud. To keep it going, “I monitor my sleep cycles,” he said , laying out the things he believes keep him healthy. “I don’t drink coffee. I drink specialty teas — Gyukuro, a Japanese tea. I take turmeric and resveratrol,” a supplement.
+Mr. Toren’s attendance streak may be an outlier, but more and more, the sick day is disappearing from the office vocabulary, even as we hit peak flu season. Once, a sick day was just that — a day away from work to focus on recovery (or at least pretend to: Think “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”).
+But in recent years, it has become something murkier in definition and more reflective of our highly competitive, 24-7 work lives. The shifting definition and expanding mobility of the office — thanks to remote work and the rise of contractors in the gig economy — is also making the sick day somewhat passé , at least for some jobs.Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump stormed out of a White House meeting with congressional leaders, calling it a “total waste of time,” after Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not fund a wall on the southern border.
+• In a luncheon with Senate Republicans, Mr. Trump warned that he was still considering declaring a national emergency to build his border wall without congressional approval.
+• If the president invokes emergency powers, it could be a mutually face-saving way to reopen the government, but also a violation of constitutional norms.“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end.” —Tony Soprano
+You’re wrong about that one, Tony. It may be that no TV show does anything entirely new — change always builds on change. But “The Sopranos” was as clear a marker of the beginning of an era (even if I hate the term “Golden Age”) as anything in TV.
+Before “The Sopranos,” yes, TV dramas could take risks (“Twin Peaks”) and tell stories about difficult people (“NYPD Blue”). But after the ducks landed in Tony’s backyard pool in January 1999, an immense flock followed. TV series, we saw, could rely on audiences to pay close attention to a long-running story. They could have high visual and narrative ambitions. They could resist quick answers (or any answers, in the case of the Russian from “Pine Barrens”) and tidy moral conclusions.
+If “The Sopranos,” which debuted 20 years ago this week, built the ground floor, this list looks at what TV erected on top of it. These are the 20 best drama series to emerge since “The Sopranos,” arranged in chronological order.
+For the sake of focus and sanity, Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I limited our debates to American series TV drama. What is American? (Shows made specifically for the United States TV market rather than acquired.) What is a series? (Shows that were meant to continue more than one season.) What is TV? (What isn’t, these days? Anything broadcast, cable or streaming was fair game.)
+Oh, yeah: What is “best”? It’s not “most influential” (sometimes great art is inimitable) or “most widely praised” (a cop-out). Here, it’s the subjective, rough consensus of three humans, each with different tastes and priorities, after argument and bargaining. It ain’t science. The final judgment, while hopefully well-informed, is no more inherently right than yours.
+The trickiest question, though, was, What is a drama? Episode length isn’t an absolute guide, and awards nominations are no help. (“Orange Is the New Black,” say, has been Emmy nominated as both comedy and drama.)
+I’d like to say we came up with some bulletproof formula — length plus tears divided by jokes — but truth is, we went by feel. “Transparent,” by our lights, is clearly a drama, awards submissions notwithstanding; “30 Rock” is plainly not. The nebulous in-between zone is where some of the best TV is being made now, and that’s where some of our later picks come from (like “Atlanta,” which can be TV’s best drama or its best comedy any given week).
+If our resulting list stretches the definition of drama, good: “The Sopranos” certainly did. (It was the funniest show on TV most weeks it was on.) You’d swap out some shows here and there. (So would we, individually, and we wrote about some of our near-misses too.) But step back, and I think this list broadly tells the story of what American TV drama has become over two decades.
+Looking at this period historically, or geologically, I see three somewhat overlapping sub-eras. Concurrent with “The Sopranos,” a set of dramas took TV staples (the cop show, the western, the sci-fi saga), roughed them up and problematized them. Next, starting around “Mad Men” (from “Sopranos” alum Matthew Weiner), drama ventured into more varied subject matter (and a greater variety of outlets).
+Finally — the period we’re still in now — came the Great Diversification, not just of characters (Tony’s early followers were a lot of middle-aged white guys with agita) but formats, styles, voices and tones.
+What comes next? We were conscious (and maybe a little surprised) that only one streaming-TV series made this list. I’ve theorized before that just like in the early days of TV, comedy is more easily adaptable to new platforms, whereas drama is still figuring out how to mesh episodic TV with the endlessness of the binge. Very likely the next version of this list (which you’ll read in 10 or 20 years on your corneal implants) will reflect how the next wave of dramas evolved to master that format, and maybe others.
+“The Sopranos,” we all remember, ended with a cut to black. The genre that followed, though, takes its cue from the lyrics of Tony’s final jukebox selection, “Don’t Stop Believin’”: It goes on and on and on and on.Andy Samberg’s cop comedy “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” makes its sixth season premiere on NBC, and the first season of “Lodge 49” is available to stream on Hulu.
+What’s on TV
+BROOKLYN NINE-NINE 9 p.m. on NBC. After Andy Samberg’s police comedy was canned from Fox in May, NBC announced that it had picked up the show for its sixth season. The NBC premiere follows Samberg’s Jake Peralta and Melissa Fumero’s Amy Santiago on their honeymoon, while Captain Holt finds out whether he’ll become the new N.Y.P.D. commissioner.
+TRUTH AND LIES: MONICA AND BILL 9 p.m. on ABC. It’s been nearly 20 years since Congress attempted to impeach President Bill Clinton for charges that stemmed from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but the bombshell political saga continues to reverberate across pop culture. Last year, it became the subject of the second season of Slate’s “Slow Burn” podcast, and the events were also considered for an installment of Ryan Murphy’s “American Crime Story” series. (The creator reconsidered.) On Thursday night, however, a two-hour special on ABC takes a closer look at the scandal, including hours of phone calls Linda Tripp secretly recorded between herself and Lewinsky, who was then a White House intern. The special also features surveillance material and recordings gathered by the special counsel, and excerpts from Barbara Walters’s 1999 interview with Lewinsky. The “Truth and Lies” series has delved into true crimes like the Menendez brothers murders and the Jonestown massacre.The squeeze will continue for decades, as Greece is committed to an annual surplus of 3.5 percent through 2022 and will be under strict supervision until it repays its loans by 2060, according to its commitments. This problem is compounded by the enormous growth of private debt. Nearly half the total loans owed to the country’s four main banks, or about 86 billion euros, are delinquent or close to it. This prevents them from injecting cash into the economy. Companies that try to borrow abroad face high interest rates.
+Some 4.2 million people are in arrears to the state, with delinquent tax debts of around 103 billion euros. Authorities have confiscated salaries, pensions and assets of more than one million people. Overdue debts to social security funds are currently at 34.4 billion euros.
+With high taxes and with nearly half of the new jobs being lowly paid part-time or shift work, these debts are likely to grow. More people are now classified as being at risk of poverty or social exclusion (34.8 percent of the population in 2017) than at the beginning of the crisis (27.7 percent).
+The poor have become poorer while the middle class has struggled under a growing burden. Taxes on property jumped to 3.7 billion euros in 2017, from around 600 million euros before the crisis. Some 19 percent of taxpayers account for 90 percent of income tax revenues, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras has acknowledged. Property values reflect the higher taxes and lower rents, with apartments losing an average of 41 percent in value between 2007 and 2017, according to the Bank of Greece.
+The need to pay taxes and meet other obligations has seen private deposits in Greek banks drop to 131.385 billion euros last November, from 237.8 billion in 2009. Many people have been forced to sell gold heirlooms and other valuables to survive. Pawnbrokers and gold buyers have done a roaring trade across the country, melting jewelry and other items into gold bars.
+The police recently arrested scores of people suspected of smuggling gold to Turkey. The daily turnover averaged 400,000 euros — the equivalent of about 11 kilograms of gold each day. The bust was a dud: It turned out that the dealers did not need permits to export to Turkey. The investigation, however, shed light on one of the less visible, personal costs of the crisis.
+But nowhere is the hemorrhaging of Greece more severe than in the departure of young people. Greece has seen mass emigration in the past, as poverty, war, dictatorships and lack of prospects drove mostly unskilled people to seek their fortunes in America, Australia, Europe and Africa. This time, though, most of those leaving are depriving the country of their skills and of its investment. Some 92 percent are university or technical college graduates, with 64 percent of the total holding postgraduate degrees, including doctorates, the ICAP consultancy found in a survey of 1,068 Greeks in 61 countries. Some 18,000 medical doctors have left during the crisis; each had cost the state 85,000 euros to train, according to the Athens Medical Association.MELBOURNE, Australia — A 48-year-old man was charged on Thursday with mailing suspicious packages to foreign consulates in Australian cities this week, which the authorities said may have contained an unspecified hazardous material.
+The man, Savas Avan, was arrested on Wednesday night at his home in the city of Shepparton, about 120 miles north of Melbourne, the police said. He appeared Thursday morning before the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court, where he was charged with sending dangerous articles to be carried by a postal service.
+The authorities did not offer a motive for Mr. Avan’s alleged actions. If convicted, he could be sentenced to 10 years in prison.
+In total, 38 suspicious packages were delivered to consulates and embassies this week in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra, the capital, including those of New Zealand and the United States. The police have not said what the packages contained, but Australian news reports said some of them included messages suggesting that they contained asbestos.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+malingerer \mə-ˈliŋ-gər-er\ noun
+: someone who shirks duties by feigning illness or incapacity
+_________
+The word malingerer has appeared in seven articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Sept. 25 in the book review “A Rifle-Wielding Nun, a Medical Student and a Crackling World War I Tale” by Anthony Marra:
+“The Winter Soldier,” Daniel Mason’s excellent World War I novel, begins with a murky X-ray of the human brain. “The light was hazy, like puffs of smoke blown into the skull. Nothing to see … just cloudy shades of gray and lighter gray, tricks of shadow that played upon the eye and yielded nothing. And yet! Thought was there.” It’s a tantalizing image from a historical moment fraught with scientific possibility and geopolitical peril. While Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud were peering inside the body and mind, Europe was sleepwalking toward a war that would tear open both with horrifying efficiency. … With a cast of oddball orderlies, Margarete and Lucius transform a dilapidated church into a field hospital. The most haunting casualties are anatomically intact, but mentally maimed. It’s here that Mason, a professor of psychiatry by day, really shines. PTSD is still decades away from being recognized, and shellshocked soldiers are assumed cowards or malingerers …SEOUL, South Korea — President Moon Jae-in of South Korea said Thursday that the visit to China this week by the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, heralded an imminent second summit meeting between Mr. Kim and President Trump to negotiate the terms of denuclearizing the North.
+Mr. Moon held his New Year’s news conference in Seoul, South Korea, on Thursday, hours after Mr. Kim wrapped up a four-day trip to China, which included his fourth summit meeting with President Xi Jinping. China is considered the best buffer North Korea has against American pressure and sanctions as Mr. Kim prepares for a second meeting with Mr. Trump. He also consulted with Mr. Xi before and after his first meeting with Mr. Trump, which took place in Singapore in June.
+The June meeting produced a vaguely worded agreement to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” and “new” relations between North Korea and the United States, which have been adversaries for seven decades.
+But talks have since stalled over how to implement the Singapore deal. Washington wants North Korea to declare and start dismantling its nuclear facilities and weapons, while the North has demanded that the United States first build trust with corresponding measures, starting with the easing of sanctions.What do you think this illustration is saying? Do you agree with its message? Why or why not?
+Can you connect to its message personally in any way? Have you ever had an experience that could be represented by this image?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this image is all about.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Even when there are no subway delays, it takes Amy Sacks at least an hour and 20 minutes to get to work in the Bronx.
+The problem is that the subway still leaves her about a mile — and a bus ride away — from her office. “There’s always a transfer unless I use my feet for the second half,” said Ms. Sacks, a writer who lives in Manhattan.
+But the key to a shorter, easier commute lies just outside her office door: railroad tracks that run through the Bronx.
+The tracks are used by Amtrak trains, but would be opened to new commuter trains under a billion-dollar expansion by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority of rail service linking Manhattan with suburbs north of New York City. Four new train stations for the Metro-North Railroad would be built along the line in the eastern Bronx, where subway service is sparse and buses are often slow and unreliable.MOGHKHAIL, Afghanistan — The A-29 attack plane was a white speck in the bright skies over eastern Afghanistan as it launched a dummy bomb that exploded just yards from the target, a wrecked truck. “Spot on!” said an American adviser watching the exercise.
+The plane’s Afghan pilot had been guided by an Afghan coordinator on the ground — but only after previous bombing runs had struck well wide of the truck.
+Eleven years after the United States began building an air force for Afghanistan at a cost now nearing $8 billion, it remains a frustrating work in progress, with no end in sight. Some aviation experts say the Afghans will rely on American maintenance and other support for years.
+Such dependence could complicate President Trump’s moves to extricate the United States from the 17-year-old war against Taliban insurgents — a war in which they lately appear to be gaining ground.A very different sort of Broadway musical set in Europe is “The Sound of Music,” from 1959, the world-famous blockbuster that vies with Mozart for being the most famous export of Salzburg, Austria.
+“Sound of Music” kitsch practically runs through the medieval alleyways of that alpine city. One place you won’t find it, though, is on the stage of the Salzburger Landestheater, where the Rodgers and Hammerstein classic has been given a sober and elegant staging by the directors Andreas Gergen and Christian Struppeck.
+I admit that my first glimpse of Maria sprawling on AstroTurf (“The hills are alive…”) briefly had me in stitches. But once the fake grass is rolled offstage, the production grows uncommonly serious and effective. The fluid, uncluttered staging, with sets and costumes by Court Watson, is blessedly free of the schlock that has accumulated on the musical like edelweiss over the past 60 years.
+Hovering over the domestic drama of the von Trapps is the Nazi nightmare that will soon descend. The Third Reich is frequently invoked through brief newsreels of Hitler and a flash-forward to 1945. At the musical’s climax, S.S. men descend into the auditorium and block the exits. It’s a far cry from “Springtime for Hitler.”
+Aside from the cleareyed production, Milica Jovanovic’s charismatic and mischievous Maria is the best reason to see this “Sound of Music.” She channels Julie Andrews, especially while singing, yet also succeeds in making the role her own, in her subtly wry and sexy performance. Other standouts include Axel Meinhardt as the theater impresario Max Dettweiler and the no-nonsense Franziska Becker as Captain von Trapp’s erstwhile fiancée, Elsa Schrader. As for the rigid paterfamilias, Uwe Kröger, a veteran to the role, delivered far more dramatically than vocally. The seven von Trapp children, several of whom will be switched out over the course of the run, were adorable without being cloying.
+The Landestheater is a state-run cultural venue that encompasses dramatic and musical theater, opera and dance. Outside of Salzburg’s storied, elite summertime festival, it’s one-stop shopping for culture in the city of Mozart. Given the shrinking size of pit bands on Broadway, one of the main advantages of seeing musicals in a theater designed for opera is hearing the score performed by a full orchestra. The Mozarteumorchester Salzburg, led by Robin Davis, made Richard Rodgers’s rapturous and infectious music sound fuller and grander than it probably has since the film version from 1965.• What questions do you have about bull riding?
+Now, read the article, “How to Make a Bucking Bull: Good Breeding and, Just Maybe, a Cow’s Love,” and answer the following questions:
+1. What is the opening event of the Professional Bull Riders circuit at Madison Square Garden like? What details in the photos and the opening paragraphs of the article help set the scene?
+2. Why is bull riding so dangerous for the riders?
+3. James Gorman, the author, writes that the bulls are “animal athletes.” How are bulls treated like athletes in this sport?
+4. The article says that bulls are becoming harder to ride. Why? What evidence does the author give to support this statement?
+5. How did bull riding become a professional sport?
+6. The current trend in breeding is to focus on the cows. According to the breeder H.D. Page, why is the mother critical to breeding a successful bucking bull?
+7. Jeannette Vaught, who has written about human-animal interactions, including rodeos, debunks several common misconceptions about the bull’s welfare in bull riding. What are two of those misconceptions and what evidence does Dr. Vaught give to disprove them?Photographers have pretty much always creeped out people.
+Initially, they simply couldn’t help it. The world’s introduction to photography, the daguerreotype process, produced a shimmering, ghostly image that seemed at once so lifelike and so utterly unlifelike that it could have been made possible only through a kind of sorcery. For many, looking at a daguerreotype — a precise artifact of a moment from the irretrievable past — was like staring death itself in the eye.
+Photographic technology evolved in a decidedly less eerie direction, but in the following decades, many photographers didn’t shy away from the medium’s inherent bond with the strange. Instead, they actively embraced its curious connection to death and its unique capacity to simultaneously record reality and warp it. In the photography collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art — including a recent gift of more than 1,300 images from the former NOMA curator Tina Freeman — those photographers abound.There are also new resources for support. The Alliance for Women Film Composers was founded in 2014, and now has close to 400 members. It has raised the visibility of women through concerts and advocacy work, and provides solidarity in a lonely profession with no formal union. “It’s a sisterhood, it’s a resource,” said Ritmanis, president of the alliance. “And although we are very much competitors, we are also each others’ cheerleaders.”
+“I think because of the global awareness of women’s rights, and #MeToo, and Time’s Up and all these different movements,” she added, “there is an interest and a call to action” among studios and decision makers. “People call me wanting to meet and figure out what they can do, and I do think that there’s a lot more opportunity for women to be part of the big audition process” for major feature assignments.
+As there should be, given their talent, said Doreen Ringer-Ross, an executive in the film music division of Broadcast Music Inc., the performing rights organization which manages the catalogs of many of Hollywood’s top composers. “The job of a composer is to be really sensitive, is to interpret the emotion of things, musically,” she said. “And women are traditionally great at doing that.”
+Still, emerging composers face a double standard. Jesi Nelson has been apprenticing with several male composers as she develops her own career, and she’s dealt with potential bosses commenting about her legs or musicians assuming that she’s somebody’s personal assistant when she’s actually running a recording session.
+“I do get angry, and sometimes I’m just like, what’s the point?” Nelson said. “If I’m working these ridiculous hours — seven days a week, 18-hour days — and it’s paying off for somebody to diminish everything that I’ve worked hard for in a few words based on my gender, like, why am I even doing this? But I love it way too much, so I won’t stop.”LONDON — If James Graham has learned one thing from writing his latest political drama, it is this: “Brexit sends reasonable people mad,” he said. “You are stepping into an arena where normal rules don’t apply.”
+That drama, “Brexit: The Uncivil War,” a TV movie about the 2016 referendum in which Britain voted to leave the European Union, was broadcast in the country on Monday and debuts on HBO in the United States on Jan. 19. The show’s making was unusually fraught, plagued by the leaks, squabbles and contradictory briefings that also characterize British politics.
+First, in July, an early draft of the script was leaked and commentators rushed to mock it and question its truthfulness. Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist and a vocal supporter of Brexit, weighed in, branding the unfinished work “a clown show” and “a comic-book fantasy.”
+Then, in December, HBO shared a trailer for the movie, starring a balding Benedict Cumberbatch as Dominic Cummings, the director of the official “Leave” campaign. Uproar, once more.Its rise onto the charts comes long after SmartStudy, a Seoul-based company that has produced thousands of children’s videos under the Pinkfong brand, first posted it on YouTube in November 2015. The company remixed it, adding a new beat and melody, in the now-popular version posted in June 2016. It has now been adapted into more than 100 versions in 11 languages, the company said.
+The song was helped along by attention from K-pop acts in Korea and spread throughout Southeast Asia before eventually finding its way to the United States in 2018, when a social media challenge invited people to post videos of themselves dancing to the song. Participants included Ellen DeGeneres and James Corden, while Kylie Jenner and Cardi B made references.
+It first appeared on Billboard’s Kid Digital Song Sales chart in July, followed by the Streaming Songs chart in November. It also made it to the U.K. Top 40, which is not produced by Billboard, in September.
+Making a Top 40 list is far from easy. Jimi Hendrix made it to Billboard’s just once. Wu-Tang Clan never made it.
+But today’s charts are different, and often include an eclectic mix of music. Billboard has made a series of changes to its rankings for an era in which viral hits on social media can capture more attention than sustained radio airplay, and consumers download more music than they buy in record shops.Kevin Hart dropped by “The Late Show” on Wednesday, and Colbert wasted no time addressing the elephant in the room: Hart’s ouster as the host of this year’s Oscars, over homophobic Twitter posts and jokes he had made.
+Ellen DeGeneres went to bat for Hart last week, saying she spoke on his behalf with a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and encouraging Hart to consider re-enlisting as host. But Hart put an end to the speculation on Wednesday morning when he appeared on “Good Morning America” and ruled out changing his mind. (Variety reported on Wednesday that the Oscars would go without a host this year for the first time in almost three decades.)
+When Colbert pressed Hart on the issue, Hart insisted he was “over it” and said he didn’t want to continue addressing the story. “I don’t have anything else left to say,” he said. But he did lament that he would not be able to do the show. “I had some heat,” he said. “I had some real good jokes.” Then he previewed some of the quips, mostly about how uptight the stars in the audience are on Oscars night.
+The Dangers of Drinking to Trump’s AddressAre you someone who likes to travel — to other countries, to neighboring cities or just to new sites in your hometown? If so, why do you enjoy traveling? If not, why not?
+Each year, the Times Travel section publishes a list of “52 Places to Go.” Here are a few of the destinations the editors suggest visiting in 2019:
+Puerto Rico A year and a half after Hurricane Maria slammed into this United States territory and other Caribbean islands with devastating force, Puerto Rico is on the rebound. The number of daily flights is still below normal, but tourism officials say that cruise ship traffic is healthy, hotel room occupancy is climbing back to prehurricane levels and many major attractions are open or partly open. A big draw to start the year: performances of the musical “Hamilton,” with Lin-Manuel Miranda reprising his lead role, at the Centro de Bellas Artes Luis A. Ferré in San Juan to raise funds for arts organizations on the island. A new entertainment complex is under construction near the Convention Center in San Juan. District San Juan (or District Live! as it will be known locally) will feature movie theaters, restaurants, a zip line tower and a 6,000-seat concert hall and is scheduled to open by year’s end. And cruise lines are finding a new destination: Port of the Americas in the south-coast city of Ponce, where passengers can visit museums, a boardwalk and the plaza with its historic firehouse. Hampi, India At the height of the Vijayanagar Empire in the 16th century, Hampi thrived as one of the largest and richest cities in the world. Its architectural legacy lives on in the southwestern state of Karnataka with over 1,000 well-preserved stone monuments, including Hindu temples, forts and palaces. Spread over 16 miles near the banks of the Tungabhadra River, and surrounded by a sea of granite boulders, the Unesco World Heritage site has been notoriously difficult to reach, until now. TruJet recently began daily direct flights from Hyderabad and Bangalore to Ballari, a 25-mile drive from Hampi. Travelers can stay in the newly refreshed Evolve Back Kamalpura Palace or at Ultimate Traveling Camp’s new Kishkinda Camp, which introduced 10 stately tents in December. Outfitters Black Tomato and Remote Lands now offer journeys in the region, from guided archaeological tours to rock climbing and river jaunts in basket boats Columbus, Ohio With a revitalized riverfront and booming downtown, Columbus is already one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities. Now, it’s poised to become the model for the future of innovative urban transportation, with self-driving shuttles carrying travelers along the Scioto Mile, which recently completed a massive revitalization, adding 33 acres of riverfront green space for festivals, water sports and outdoor art. (The newly opened National Veterans Memorial and Museum also sits on the Scioto Peninsula.) Among the newest dining options are Veritas, which specializes in small-plate offerings; Service Bar, run by the young chef Avishar Barua, a veteran of New York’s Mission Chinese and WD-50; and in the North Market neighborhood, veggie-forward Little Eater. The ultracool Short North Arts District offers access to the city’s notable local businesses like the new fashion store Thread and the original Jeni’s ice cream store. But don’t skip Italian Village and German Village neighborhoods, where innovators and dreamers have opened destination shops like Stump Plants and Vernacular and bars like Cosecha. Panama Two new Pacific island resorts are expanding Panama’s west coast appeal, not far from the marine preserve around Isla Coiba. Cayuga Hospitality recently opened Isla Palenque in the Gulf of Chiriqui, with eight casitas and one villa on a lush 400-acre island. Besides offering access to seven beaches, mangrove kayaking and whale-watching, the resort grows some of its own food, has furniture made from fallen trees and maintains a no-plastics policy, including subbing papaya shoots for straws. In the Gulf of Chiriqui, Islas Secas Reserve & Panama Lodge will open in January on a 14-island archipelago. The solar-powered, nine-bungalow lodge will offer sport fishing and scuba diving, and will compost food waste and recycle water for irrigation. A Ritz-Carlton Reserve property is also under construction in the Pearl Islands.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Where, of the 52 places named by The New York Times, do you most want to go and why? Have you been to any of these destinations? If so, which ones and what did you think about them?
+— Are there any cities or countries that did not make the list that you would recommend for travel? What are they and why do you think people should visit them?
+— What is your ideal kind of travel destination? A place to be adventurous or a place to relax? A country where you can learn about a different culture, try new foods and practice speaking another language? Or somewhere more familiar? A site where you can enjoy nature or revel in the excitement of a bustling city?
+— For the second year in a row, The Times has hired a travel writer to visit all 52 places on the list and write about them. Would you like to have that job as the 52 Places traveler? What would be fun about this job? What might be challenging?Adam writes: My brother Noah and I have been home from school for the holidays. While there, I baked an apple pie for a party, setting aside more than three-quarters of it. Noah ate roughly half of it. I baked another pie for the party and brought a supermajority of it. I went home from that party with an unopened salami — only to wake up to find out he had half of it for breakfast.
+Like many young men, Noah is starving and selfish and dumb, so of course he ate half a salami for breakfast — especially because he knew it would piss off his brother. But though it’s natural, it’s not right, and I find in your favor. However, you also require some instruction on being a human, specifically: Stop bringing partly eaten pies to parties. A “supermajority” of pie is not a gift; it is food waste. Grow up, you guys.Because?
+“The moment you try to publish something, people will think of you as. ...”
+Consider the evidence. When Ullmann’s first novel, “Before You Sleep,” was published in the United States in 1999, and she stipulated, in interviews, that she would not respond to questions about her parents — her father, the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman; her mother, the actress Liv Ullmann — the headline of the review, in The New York Times, nonetheless punned on a title of one of her father’s films in which her mother acted; or, consider the headline of the review of her third novel, “Grace,” in The Times in 2005, which was not a pun on a title of one of her father’s films but the actual title of one of her father’s actual films and, as it happens, the very same film the earlier review had already punned on; or consider that, in every review of her novels in The Times — not merely the first, when she was 33, or the second, when she was 37, or the third, when she was 38, or the fourth, when she was 42, or the fifth, when she was 47 — the names of her famous parents were not occasionally but always mentioned, not infrequently in the first paragraphs. She was never not viewed, presented and considered as, fundamentally, their child, which is to say a child. This despite the fact that when she has done interviews throughout her career, she has maintained her ban on their discussion. And, though her six novels differ radically, consider that she is often charged, vaguely, even approvingly, but to my mind lazily, and therefore condescendingly, with being an inheritor of her father’s cinematic themes, tendencies and preoccupations.
+The varied forms of Ullmann’s autonomous novels have performed the struggles of reconciling the self with a family past — how, through a story, those struggles might be shaped into something tangible, if not always beautiful. In her second novel, “Stella Descending,” a woman falls from the top of a building — perhaps slipping; perhaps jumping; perhaps pushed by her husband — the novel tracing her literal path down to death, the narrative built from the monologues of those who witnessed her life’s literal or figurative descent, a novel of voices that leaves the woman in perpetual suspension, a portrait of the way life can seize someone. Or Ullmann’s fourth, “A Blessed Child,” in which an 84-year-old man, a noted gynecologist and researcher, announces to his family that he intends to end his life, the news compelling his three daughters to make the journey to the distant island where he lives alone, the daughters mulling their lives and their losses as they approach, the women never making it to the island, the book enacting in its form how we often try to avoid where we came from.
+Throughout Ullmann’s novels, you encounter dominating and disappearing fathers, distant, heavy-drinking mothers, narcissistic husbands, unfaithful partners, children whose adult lives of disappointment and error are visited by violence — rape, murder, the death of children — events that, metaphorically, reveal the inner violence humans try to navigate. They are not autobiographical in any obvious sense: There are no famous film-director fathers, there are no movie-star mothers and the fates of her characters are inventions, not reports from the field.
+I was aware of Ullmann’s lineage, but in fairness, I was not a devotee of either her father’s four dozen films or of his three novels, nor an aficionado of her famously beautiful mother’s performances in some of her father’s and in many other movies, not to say of her mother’s two memoirs or her own films as a director. Rather, I came to Oslo as an admirer of Ullmann’s novels — their formal variety and daring; their commitment to seeking out the rough edges of the world; their complexity in presenting emotion in duress; their fraught depictions of childhood’s perils; their originality in dramatizing the particular struggles of young women; their unflinching ability to depict moments of violence; the rigor and surprise of their sentences. But I was interested to know how an artistic ego as autonomous and fully realized as Ullmann’s had managed to form despite, as Gulliksen said, her being the daughter of “those people” with those famous names.
+“It was very important,” Gulliksen told me, “that she was a critic before she was a novelist. We haven’t had a critic like her afterward.” Speak to writers in Norway as I did, and a clear consensus forms: Ullmann was the most important literary critic of her generation, a James Wood of Norwegian writing. Unable to read Norwegian, I wanted to know what that meant.It is said that artists are never fully appreciated until they die. The same goes for snails, apparently.
+For roughly a decade, the land snail species Achatinella apexfulva, which used to be plentiful on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, was believed to be down to a single survivor. His name was George, and he lived his last days alone in a terrarium in Kailua, Hawaii, alongside an ample supply of fungi (a food his ancestors liked to scrape off leaves in the wild).
+But on Jan. 1, George died, according to Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources. He lived to about age 14 — a good, long life for a snail of his kind, experts say. His death was symbolic of a steep decline in the population of land snails, once a fantastically diverse group of mollusks in Hawaii, as well as the rapid extinction of species around the world.
+Scientists estimate that dozens of species go extinct each day, but few receive this kind of news media attention on their way out. Naming George probably boosted his standing, said Michael G. Hadfield, who founded a program meant to protect snail populations in Hawaii.Meet the Hosts
+Ross Douthat
+Image
+I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist since 2009, and I write about politics, religion, pop culture, sociology and the places where they all intersect. I’m a Catholic and a conservative, in that order, which means that I’m against abortion and critical of the sexual revolution, but I tend to agree with liberals that the Republican Party is too friendly to the rich. I was against Donald Trump in 2016 for reasons specific to Donald Trump, but in general I think the populist movements in Europe and America have legitimate grievances and I often prefer the populists to the “reasonable” elites. I’ve written books about Harvard, the G.O.P., American Christianity and Pope Francis; I’m working on one about decadence. Benedict XVI was my favorite pope. I review movies for National Review and have strong opinions about many prestige television shows. I have three small children, two girls and a boy, and I live in New Haven with my wife.
+Michelle Goldberg
+Image
+I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 2017, writing mainly about politics, ideology and gender. These days people on the right and the left both use “liberal” as an epithet, but that’s basically what I am, though the nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency has radicalized me and pushed me leftward. I’ve written three books, including one, in 2006, about the danger of right-wing populism in its religious fundamentalist guise. (My other two were about the global battle over reproductive rights and, in a brief detour from politics, about an adventurous Russian émigré who helped bring yoga to the West.) I love to travel; a long time ago, after my husband and I eloped, we spent a year backpacking through Asia. Now we live in Brooklyn with our son and daughter.The author, most recently, of the memoir “Inheritance” turns to family and friends for reading suggestions: “My 19-year-old son is a voracious reader and constantly recommends books to me.”
+What books are on your nightstand?
+I fall asleep reading every night without fail, so I always have a teetering pile of books on my nightstand to nourish me before I drift off. I keep in mind Jane Kenyon’s lovely instruction to writers: “Have good sentences in your ears.” Late at night it isn’t large swaths of narrative I crave, but small gems — poems, prose that can be read in pieces, the strange, the spiritual, the beautiful. Currently the pile includes the graphic novel “Are You My Mother?,” by Alison Bechdel; “Sum,” by David Eagleman; “What the Living Do,” by Marie Howe; “A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety,” by Donald Hall; “A Path With Heart,” by Jack Kornfield; and “Silence: In the Age of Noise,” by Erling Kagge. Virginia Woolf’s “A Writer’s Diary” is never far from reach either. I dip into it at random, part of a conversation I’ve been having with Woolf since I began reading her in my 20s.
+What’s the last great book you read?
+“Exit West,” by Mohsin Hamid. I’d like to go back and reread it, in fact. I tore through it the first time as a reader, but I’d also like to study it as a writer, asking the question: “How did he do that?”
+What do you read when you’re working on a book? And what kind of reading do you avoid while writing?As three dozen Democrats consider a 2020 run, potential candidates are taking populist positions on capitalism, income inequality, taxes and health care and embracing the favored label of the moment: “progressive.” Many of them have little interest in the pragmatic politics and big-donor appeal of Hillary Clinton, the 2016 nominee. But with Democrats needing to define themselves in what will likely be a crowded field, the most liberal candidates are making an issue of wealth even though some of these billionaires have liberal policy views themselves.
+On Wednesday, Mr. Steyer took himself out of the 2020 running after weeks of hinting that he might enter the race. A fierce advocate of impeaching President Trump and a longtime environmentalist, Mr. Steyer sidestepped a question about Ms. Warren and self-financed campaigns as he announced he would focus his time and money on trying to get Mr. Trump impeached.
+“I believe in the grass roots, just as Senator Warren does,” he said. “What we have pushed for is the broadest possible democracy, power to the people, at all times. What we’re saying is — what counts in this is the voice of the American people.”
+[Make sense of the people, issues and ideas shaping American politics with our newsletter.]
+Ms. Warren has moved out front quickly to use wealth as a cudgel against potential opponents and try to establish herself early with voters as a vanguard of middle-class and working-class concerns — a kind of “people-not-the-powerful” message that Democrats like Al Gore tried in the past. If they run, liberals like Mr. Sanders, Mr. Brown and former Representative Beto O’Rourke are likely to advance similar arguments as well.
+Anti-billionaire populism is convenient for both Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders. Neither has the financial wherewithal to fund their own campaign, and both have well-developed lists of online donors. With ideological leftists ascendant in the party — like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her call for much higher taxes on the wealthy — their attacks on billionaires may appeal particularly to liberal millennials and middle-class workers in early caucus and primary states.Hundreds of dogs report for duty at airports across the country, trained to sniff out bombs and other explosives for the Transportation Security Administration.
+Many have ears that hang low, delightfully dangling around their faces. Some have ears that stand tall and upright, flickering at every sound. All have ears that are, of course, adorable — a 12 out of 10, if you will.
+But the T.S.A. has made it clear that it has a preference. The agency said it favors floppy-eared dogs over pointy-eared dogs, especially in the jobs that require interacting with traveling passengers, because floppy-eared dogs appear friendlier and less aggressive.
+“It presents just a little bit less of a concern,” the T.S.A. administrator, David Pekoske, said last month during an event at Washington Dulles International Airport. “Doesn’t scare children.”CARACAS, Venezuela — When President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela was sworn in for his second term on Thursday before the country’s Supreme Court, a small group of supporters standing outside greeted the news by waving tiny flags with little enthusiasm.
+The huge crowds that gathered to greet him after his first inauguration were nowhere to be seen.
+In the years since Mr. Maduro first took office, violence and hunger have become emblematic, inflation has skyrocketed, and the migration of Venezuelans out of the country has reached unprecedented levels.
+Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, presided over the free fall of what was once Latin America’s wealthiest nation. The country’s economy continues to unravel at an alarming rate. And Mr. Maduro’s re-election last year was widely denounced by other countries as fraudulent.
+Venezuela’s increasing isolation was evident inside the Supreme Court on Thursday. The presidents of Bolivia, Cuba, El Salvador and Nicaragua did attend the ceremony, along with representatives from China, Mexico and Turkey.When to go
+A woman’s first gynecologist visit should happen at the age of 21 for cervical cancer screening, however, any woman or teenager who is younger than 21 and is sexually active should be seeing a provider who is comfortable with gynecologic care for annual chlamydia screening. Annual chlamydia screening is recommended for sexually active women age 24 and younger. Screening for other sexually transmitted infections may also be needed. Urine screening is very effective, so taking a pelvic exam out of the equation often makes this screening easier for many women regardless of age.
+Other reasons to see an OB/GYN before the age of 21 include irregular periods, heavy periods (soaking onto clothes is a good proxy for being heavy), or period pain that is interfering with daily activities despite the use of over the counter pain medications, such as acetaminophen or ibuprofen.
+[Have a question about women’s health? Ask Dr. Gunter yourself.]
+How to prepare your daughter for her first visit
+For a young woman who has never had a pelvic exam, I recommend a “get to know you” visit with an OB/GYN before her visit for cervical cancer screening. This is a good time to develop a rapport without the worry of an exam looming in the background. A good doctor should be able to show your daughter the tools he or she uses during the exam, talk to her about the importance of cervical cancer screening and screening for S.T.I.s, and ease any concerns she has about the exam.
+If a teenager or woman has been using tampons or a menstrual cup, then she may have a greater degree of comfort with the exam, but everyone is different. As an expert in pain with sex, I hear from many women who were traumatized as young women by painful exams. A pelvic exam shouldn’t be painful; there may be pressure or it may feel “weird,” especially to a young woman who has never used a tampon or menstrual cup, but it should not hurt. Tell your daughter that if a pelvic exam is painful, she should let the doctor know and ask them to stop.
+Something to think about: As a parent, it is important to think ahead health-wise about your daughter’s transition from adolescence to adulthood. Keep in mind that while they may tell you otherwise, some teenagers are already sexually active or are planning to be sexually active. That is one reason to offer to let your teenager speak to her doctor without you present for part of the visit. This way she can speak freely.
+Dr. Jen Gunter, Twitter’s resident gynecologist and author of The Vagina Bible, is teaming up with our editors to answer your questions about all things women’s health. From what’s normal for your anatomy, to healthy sex, to clearing up the truth behind strange wellness claims, Dr. Gunter, who also writes a column called, The Cycle, promises to handle your questions with respect, forthrightness and honesty.It’s time to see the numbers.
+Investors are about to get a read on the health of corporate America, as businesses begin releasing quarterly profit reports and laying out expectations for the coming year.
+The results may resolve a roaring debate on Wall Street that has pitted economists, who have argued that the economy remains healthy, against investors, who pushed stocks to the brink of a bear market over concerns that growth is waning.
+“As we hear from more companies about how the year ended, we’ll get more color on which side has a better feel, the economics community or the equity community,” said Lori Calvasina, head of United States equity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
+On the whole, the numbers are expected to be solid. Analysts estimate that, when all the results are in for S&P 500 companies, fourth-quarter profits will have risen 15 percent over a year earlier. That would be the fifth-straight period of double-digit profit growth, according to I/B/E/S data from Refinitiv.“The little things that were nice to have became possible all in one apartment,” Rocky said. “None of these things are deal-breakers — like, who would not move into an apartment because it doesn’t have a walk-in closet? But this had a walk-in closet.”
+Now, with the windows open, they hear sirens and traffic, but there are no neighbors partying all night. “The peacefulness was deeply appealing to me,” Jaime said.
+They pay their rent and make repair requests online, a far cry from “texting the super and he would maybe respond,” Rocky said. “It is nice having a lot of infrastructure.”
+Image The towering Hub, on Schermerhorn Street, offered not just a pool but a dog park for their two French bulldogs. The couple received one month free on a 13-month lease. Credit... Stefano Ukmar for The New York Times
+They use the dog park every day, and during the summer they invited friends to swim. Of course, not everything is perfect: The elevators are too often out of service, leading to overcrowding and long waits. And with the dogs, they go up and down a lot, “so waiting 10 minutes for an elevator seems a super long time when you have somewhere to be,” Rocky said.
+As for Downtown Brooklyn, they have learned that it serves more than just their car-rental needs. The neighborhood makes it easier to explore the rest of the city, both on foot and by subway. In Williamsburg, they felt marooned on weekends, with few good transit options beyond the finicky L train.
+Now they no longer worry about the L, regardless of its future. “I am glad to be away from the uncertainty of it,” Jaime said.
+Email: thehunt@nytimes.com
+For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.“It would be a home run if we got to 60 to 65 percent” self-sufficiency for the Afghan Air Force, said a retired general who commanded the air training mission in 2013 and 2014.
+Why it matters: Afghanistan could rely on American support for years, complicating President Trump’s efforts to withdraw U.S. troops.
+How Coke influences nutrition policy in China
+Two studies published on Wednesday document how Coca-Cola and other Western companies have helped shape Chinese food and beverage regulations.
+An organization funded by some of the biggest names in snack food has offices inside China’s Health Ministry, and it has worked to stave off food regulations and soda taxes.
+Response: The director of the group said that its activities “are based on science and are not affected by any business.”
+Background: Coca-Cola tried similar tactics in the U.S. several years ago, saying that exercise, not dieting, was the solution to the obesity crisis. After an outcry from public health advocates, it stopped those efforts.3 p.m. Unable to begin my mural, I instead join two of the curators of Artmossphere on a day of museum-going.
+11 p.m. My wall is finally prepped. My concept was solidified in New York, and the blueprint of my design was created to fit the wall exactly. I work until 1 a.m. getting the outline of the letters in place before calling it a night.
+Monday
+11 a.m. Walk to Red Square, passing by the Kremlin and St. Basil’s Cathedral. Then to the new Zaryadye Park, designed by a New York-based architecture firm. It’s a totally different design aesthetic than the rest of Moscow.
+1:30 p.m. Meet with local graffiti artist Cozek, who I consider to have the best style in Moscow. His crew, ADED (All Day Every Day), has been tapped for a collaboration with the fashion label Off-White that’s scheduled to release next week at KM20, a fashion-forward shop in town. We discuss how artists can leverage working with designer brands to benefit their careers. Cozek also has a collaboration with a furniture company debuting next week at the Cosmoscow art fair, and he was hired as the curator for Social Club, a new restaurant and private club opening next week in Patriarch Ponds. He wants to commission me to paint a mural at the restaurant while I’m in town.
+2:30 p.m. Cozek gives me a tour of the space. The venue is beautifully designed and he invites me to choose any wall I want. All of the walls are exposed concrete, and if you paint it, there’s no going back. I seem more concerned about that than he does. I’m drawn to a horizontal wall that would be perfect for my work, but also recognize I have an 80-foot mural to paint and have my return flight scheduled for the end of the week. It would be great real estate, as this place will cater to Moscow society, but I’m reluctant to bite off more than I can chew with my limited time in town.
+4 p.m. Cozek and I walk to Belief Moscow, one of the coolest shops in the city. I painted a mural in the entryway last year, and I’m happy to see that it’s still there. The co-owner, Sergey Kub, lights up when he sees me, as the visit was completely unexpected. He’s also preserved another 20-foot mural of mine behind a false wall. It reads “Resistance is Patriotic.” I show him that it’s one of the designs selected by Rei Kawakubo for my upcoming collaboration with Commes des Garçons, coming out in January.
+6 p.m. I’d planned on putting in a full night of work on the mural, but receive an email that there’s a big group dinner for all of the artists and curators. Afterward, when everyone else goes back to the hotel to sleep or keep drinking, I go to Winzavod to work.In late 2017, under the auspices of The Jewish People Policy Institute, I teamed up with Prof. Camil Fuchs of Tel Aviv University, one of Israel’s leading pollsters, to study Israeli Judaism. (At the end of 2018, we published a book.) Our findings provide a window through which to understand how Israel is changing — and to explain what might be happening in this election cycle.
+The most significant finding in our study is that 55 percent of Israeli Jews belong to a group whose like-minded identity we call “Jewish-Israeli.” This runs counter to the conventional wisdom, which holds that Israel is divided between left and right, and secular and religious groups. These Jews’ identity is, in many ways, a new brand of Judaism born from mixing a strong affinity for Jewish traditions and a national sentiment in a way that makes the two almost indistinguishable. For example, they are Jews who keep a kosher home and send their children to serve in the military; they put up an Israeli flag on Independence Day and celebrate their son’s bar mitzvah. This is not about religiosity; it is about culture — a culture whose pillars are ancient Judaism and modern Israelism. This group also shares some core beliefs about politics, including a realization that peace in the Middle East won’t happen any time soon.
+This demographic is the key to understanding Israel’s political system because it is the group that all parties need to win over if they want to control the government. A successful political party today has to offer a Jewishly flavored Israeli patriotism. Other parties battling to represent the political center in Israel — such as Yesh Atid and Kulanu — succeed in attracting this pool of “Jewish-Israelis.”
+But the Labor Party is chained to its historical role as the party of a patriotic, nontraditional Israelism. It is the party formed by a generation of pioneers who cast aside traditional Jewish practice and aimed to create a new Jew, a Jew whose connection to a Jewish past and whose tendency to perform Jewish practice is relatively weak. Today, this population is small in number and seems to be shrinking. But Labor continues to cater to it, and to some of the dwindling pool of people who still have hope for a peace process. This still allows for political survival (our study identified a group of about 15 percent of Israelis who score high on Israeli patriotism and low on Jewish tradition) but it isn’t enough to win an election.
+Jewish Home is in trouble for a somewhat similar reason. Its forebears, the Mizrahi and National Religious parties, emerged when the state was founded as the political home for religious Zionists, a relatively powerless minority at the time. This minority needed a party to protect its interests, to make sure its religious schools were funded, to represent its ideology. But today, this group no longer feels that it is a fragile minority. Its voters are a part of the “Jewish-Israeli” mainstream and they have representatives in many parties.“Because I think we might work a deal. And if we don’t, I may go that route. I have the absolute right to do a national emergency if I want. Oh, I think we have tremendous Republican support. I tell you what, I just spoke to a few of the people in the House. We have tremendous support. The Senate has been incredible. Mitch McConnell has been incredible. He said if the president’s not going to sign it, I’m not going to waste my time. If I did something that was foolish like gave up on border security, the first ones that would hit me are my senators. They’d be angry at me. The second ones would be the House and the third ones would be frankly, my base and a lot of Republicans out there — and a lot of Democrats that want to see border security.”“People who have experienced higher inequality during their lives are less in favor of redistribution,” write Christopher Roth and Johannes Wohlfart, economists at the University of Warwick in Britain and Goethe University in Germany, in their November 2018 paper, “Experienced Inequality and Preferences for Redistribution.” They are “less likely to support left-wing parties and to consider the prevailing distribution of incomes to be unfair.”
+In another essay from November 2018, “Inequality and Participative Democracy. A Self‐Reinforcing Mechanism,” Ioannis Theodossiou and Alexandros Zangelidis, economists at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, describe the way income inequality leads to political apathy and back again:
+Greater income inequality alienates and discourages people from engaging with common affairs, thus leading to lower political participation. Yet, lower electoral participation leads towards a less equitable distribution of income. Hence, this study reveals a self‐reinforcing mechanism where the unequal distribution of income leads to political exclusion, which in turn leads to more inequality.
+In other words, increasing inequality undermines support for a progressive agenda — the agenda most likely to improve the life chances and conditions of the least well off.
+Steven Pearlstein, a columnist at the Washington Post, in his 2018 book “Can American Capitalism Survive?” describes this negative feedback loop succinctly:
+As a society, we are now caught in one of those self-reinforcing, downward spirals in which the erosion of social capital, government dysfunction, rising inequality and slowing rates of economic growth are all feeding off each other, with more of one leading to more of all the others.
+Pearlstein continues:
+Income inequality and political polarization have become mutually reinforcing, creating the vicious circle that now manifests itself daily in the erosion of norms around civility and truth telling, the declining trust in political institutions, legislative gridlock and political dysfunction.
+Unsurprisingly, such problems lead to ever more disquieting outcomes.
+Anthony Chen, a sociologist at Northwestern, wrote by email:
+Weakened opposition is one reason why business influence over political and regulatory decisions seems greater today than it did before.
+In addition, Chen argued,
+one of the big political advantages that business enjoys is that it is continually able to recruit good players and send them to play every game worth playing in the American political and legal system. And there are a lot of games worth playing. Those games might entail having key language inserted into a piece of legislation as it gets finalized by Congress, or sending a top-notch legal team to Federal District Court when a favorable way of interpreting a particular statutory provision is potentially at stake, or making sure that business views are amply reflected in the EPA’s notice-and-comment rule-making process. And those are just some of the games that are being played at the federal level.
+Still, the newly elected Democratic House majority does not enter the fray without some effective tools of its own. Perhaps most important is the changing source of campaign money.
+Earlier this month, two reporters for The Times, Stephanie Saul and Rachel Shorey, reported that
+Democratic candidates in the general election collected nearly $296 million in small donations, more than three times the $85 million collected by Republicans.
+ActBlue, a liberal internet-based nonprofit fund-raising organization, told Saul and Shorey that
+it helped raise $1.6 billion in the 2017-18 election cycle, including money it collects for interest groups and state candidates. The average donation was $39.67.
+The growth of small donor contributions online has lessened the dependence of Democratic candidates on the network of Washington-based PACs and lobbyist-run fund-raisers. The question now, Walter Shapiro, a fellow at the Brennan Center, writes, is whether Democrats “can withstand the inevitable pressure to adapt to business as usual in Washington by resisting the traditional advice to court big-money contributors.”
+La Raja of warned in an email that
+A potentially larger challenge in any Democratic effort to reduce inequality is that allied interest groups and individual donors — as progressive as they are — focus on issues that are not necessarily about reducing inequality for the poor and working class. Instead, the emphasis is often on social issues such as abortion and civil rights, or protecting the environment.
+Jesse Rhodes, also a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts, questioned in an email whether Democratic donors support the goal of reducing economic inequality:
+I think that, all things considered, there is probably more tension than alignment with this goal. To be sure, donors tend to be more ideological than non-donors, so donors to Democratic candidates and/or the Democratic Party are going to be fairly liberal on average. At the same time, donors, particularly significant donors, are likely to be fairly affluent, and therefore heavily invested in the status quo.
+Democratic campaign contributors, Rhodes continued, would in all likelihood be
+supportive of progressive policies that would reduce economic inequality at the margins — e.g. shoring up Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, supporting increases in the minimum wage, and so forth — but I’m skeptical that they would be enthusiastic about more dramatic policy proposals that would require large tax increases on high incomes.
+The larger question in the wake of the 2018 elections is whether the forces that propelled Democrats into the majority in the House are powerful and persistent enough to force a shift from the rightward direction of policymaking that has held sway over a significant stretch of the past 40 years.
+The 2018 election outcome demonstrated that the left has regained momentum and enthusiasm, but the interest group elite — the prime movers of the regressive distribution of income described by Drutman, Grossmann and LaPira — have demonstrated exceptional staying power.
+“Business groups are simply more numerous and better resourced than any other type of interest group,” Chen writes in “In the Private Interest? Business Influence and American Democracy,” which also appears as a chapter in “Can America Govern Itself?”
+Corporations and trade groups are far more likely than citizen groups to employ hired lobbyists and former government officials, and the average spending of corporations and trade groups on lobbying and campaign contributions routinely exceeds that of citizen groups by several multiples.
+Especially in the case of the finance industry, Chen writes,
+there is rapidly accumulating evidence that campaign contributions deliver a definite and non-trivial improvement in the probability of obtaining a favorable vote.
+According to Bloomberg, three major business groups — the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Realtors — invested over $50 million in lobbying to win passage of the trillion dollar Trump tax cut.The momentum behind the American economy is strong. In 2018, unemployment hit its lowest rate in 49 years, 3.7 percent. Real wages were (finally) increasing and inflation remained muted. In 2019, growth is projected to slow but still remain above 2 percent.
+Yet risks abound. The trade war and the escalating drama over the government shutdown threaten growth. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve’s inaugural Financial Stability Report, an early warning system for the financial markets, recently highlighted the vulnerabilities created by investors who show a “high tolerance for risk-taking” in the market for corporate debt. The economy’s continued health will hinge on whether big Wall Street banks can withstand shocks caused by these or other threats and continue lending.
+On this front, it is far from certain that banks and their regulators are prepared.
+Years of low interest rates have brought about excessive business debt and elevated prices for corporate bonds. The corporate bond market has swelled to nearly $7 trillion. The debt owed by businesses as a percentage of gross domestic product is at a record high. But the credit quality of investment-grade bonds has deteriorated. Underwriting standards on “leveraged loans” to risky companies have eroded. And until recently, yields on junk debt remained low, a sign that investors are too willing to take on the risk of bonds held by companies with less-than-stellar credit.
+These vulnerabilities can amplify shocks and create systemic disruptions. In a market downturn, widespread downgrades of corporate bonds could induce a sell-off, precipitating sharp declines in the price of bonds and feeding a cycle of further downgrades, margin calls and sell-offs. Highly leveraged corporations may have difficulty refinancing or getting more credit, increasing the risk of corporate defaults and bankruptcies.Wendy MacNaughton is a graphic journalist based in San Francisco. You can find her via website and Instagram.Good luck, Mayor Bill de Blasio!
+At 11 a.m. today, he gives his annual State of the City speech, on the Upper West Side. Earlier this week, he trotted out some major policy ideas: guaranteed health care access for all and mandatory paid vacations for private-sector workers. A few weeks ago, he announced his support for legal marijuana.
+Having already made those announcements, what is this speech really about?
+I asked the Times City Hall reporter J. David Goodman.
+How many of these speeches has Mayor de Blasio given?
+Six counting today.
+In the first one I covered, in 2016, the mayor had a lot of forward-looking plans about changing the streetscape.
+In 2017, he didn’t have a written speech — just bullet-point notes. He focused on broader issues of income inequality. The speech was meant to be emotional and raise people up. But the reaction in the room was quite negative. People felt it didn’t have any focus. It was vision without a lot of practical substance.
+Who is the audience for these speeches?
+In 2016, the mayor wanted the audience to be the general public. So he gave his speech in the evening, when more regular people could watch. They did the same thing last year and I guess they haven’t gotten the eyeballs they wanted. This year, they’re doing it at 11 a.m., a more web-friendly time.As activists, we’ve also witnessed this firsthand. Twenty years ago, when we helped the filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons make “NO! The Rape Documentary,” she was initially rejected by every major distributor. An executive from HBO even told her in 1998, “Let’s face it, very unfortunately, most people don’t care about the rape of black women and girls. And therefore, we’re concerned that there won’t be many viewers who will tune in to watch NO!, were we to air it on our network.”
+Even today, as #MeToo continues to dominate headlines, black girls have been invisible in the movement. Instead, the media has primarily focused on white Hollywood actresses who have come forward with their accounts of systemic abuse and harassment.
+But we learned through our work with A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit we founded in 2003 in response to Salamishah’s own experience of rape when she was 17, that one of the most overlooked yet effective ways to create social change is to just believe the stories that girls and young women of color tell us. And since black girls live at the crossroads of gender and racial violence, if we want to empower them, we have to confront and dismantle each system of oppression that affects them.
+This past summer, for example, young artists and activists in our organization, which works to end violence against girls and women, led their first public art campaign, called “The Visibility Project.” They took over Douglas Park in Chicago, where several girls from their school had been abducted and later sexually assaulted. It’s also where a 22-year-old black woman, Rekia Boyd, was killed by an off-duty police officer in 2012.
+As the girls shared their stories of sexual assault or gang violence, they refused to separate the impact of sexual violence, gun violence and political brutality on their lives and on their city. And there was a ripple effect. We’ve noticed in our work that black girls are very powerful organizers; they recruit boys, other girls, their parents and ultimately their community into the movement. That’s another reason we have to make sure that this current moment of listening to and believing black girls and young women is durable. If it’s fleeting, the#MeToo movement will fail.
+This requires new forms of collaboration and coalition-building. Legacy civil rights organizations must prioritize sexual assault and domestic violence with the same passion that they bring to voting rights or criminal justice reform. White feminists should organize for equal pay and reproductive rights around an anti-racist framework. Victims’-rights organizations must offer culturally specific resources and lift up the work of organizations led by black women that have long been on the front line of these issues like Black Women’s Blueprint, Girls for Gender Equity, Love With Accountability, Project Nia and the Sasha Center.
+With each passing day, more young women accuse R. Kelly of sexual assault. That means more people and institutions — with the glaring exception of his label, RCA — are taking their voices and by extension, girls who look like them, seriously. We’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time. Let’s not squander it.Good Thursday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Trade negotiators offer hope but few details
+Trade talks between midlevel American and Chinese officials, extended from a planned two days to three, ended yesterday in Beijing after negotiators made progress but released few details.
+What happened: According to U.S. officials, negotiators discussed intellectual property protections, so-called forced tech transfer and China’s promise to buy “substantial” amounts of American agricultural, energy and manufacturing products. China’s commerce ministry spoke of “extensive, in-depth and meticulous exchanges.” Wang Qishan, China’s vice president, said today that the two countries “must adapt to the new reality, keep looking for and expanding our common interests, deepening and promoting practical cooperation.”
+What’s next: No date or location is set for the next round of talks. Higher-level discussions could occur in Davos, Switzerland, if President Trump attends the World Economic Forum meeting there, starting Jan. 22. But he may cancel if the partial government shutdown is not resolved by then. China’s economic czar is expected to visit Washington sometime after that. The Trump administration has set a March 2 deadline to wrap up negotiations, after which it says it could raise tariffs.
+What’s at stake: If China and the U.S. let tensions escalate and investors pull back, “you’re looking at enough of a tightening in financial conditions to say that a global recession is a real risk,” Peter Hooper, a former Federal Reserve official and Deutsche Bank’s chief economist, told Bloomberg.Sometimes only a fine line separates tragic sweep from a movie that never comes to life as anything other than actors dressed in costumes, straining to inhabit an alien chapter of history.
+The latest exhibit is the World War II drama “Ashes in the Snow,” adapted from Ruta Sepetys’s novel “Between Shades of Gray.” The director, Marius A. Markevicius, working from a screenplay by Ben York Jones, tells the story of a Lithuanian family swept up by Stalin’s army and sent to Siberia, first to a labor camp where farming is possible, then to the region’s deadly northern reaches.
+Bel Powley stars as Lina, a promising young artist, and Lisa Loven Kongsli (from “Force Majeure”) as Elena, her mother. The Russian characters speak Russian and the non-Russians mostly speak English. While “Ashes in the Snow” is hardly the first film on this era to wrangle an international cast, the recurring issue of translation strains verisimilitude.If you like your torture movies tight, twisty and decently executed, then “Pledge” is for you. There’s nothing particularly innovative about its systematic abuse of three nerdy college freshmen seeking membership in any fraternity that will have them. But the director, Daniel Robbins, is willing to move beyond the tease of his setup to deliver a ringing indictment of popularity as the cheese in a deadly mousetrap.
+After multiple, humiliating rush-week rejections, Justin (an excellent Zachery Byrd), David (Zachary Weiner, who also wrote the script) and Ethan (Phillip Andre Botello) are approached by a slinky coed (Erica Boozer) who invites them to a mysterious off-campus mansion. A night of wild partying with half-dressed honeys and a slew of sexual and pharmaceutical favors persuades our grateful geeks to return for an initiation ceremony. You don’t have to be an Eli Roth fan to see where this is going.In “Perfect Strangers,” a new film from Mexico directed by Manolo Caro, three heterosexual married couples, and one fellow attending stag, submit to a queasy dinner party game, one suggested by the hostess — a psychologist. Tonight, they’re not going to be rude and leave the table with their phones whenever they get a text alert or an incoming call. Instead, the guests all place their phones at the center of the table, and when there’s an alert, they will reveal to their friends their texts and Facebook messages and hold conversations with incoming callers on speaker. This promises to be a revealing evening, and that promise is fulfilled.
+And if you think this sounds like a nifty premise for a contemporary adult drama, you are hardly alone. This movie is a remake of an Italian one from 2017, which has also been remade in Greece, Turkey, Hungary, France and South Korea.But charities that support survivors of forced marriages said the policy had ignored the unusually risky position those women were in. They often had to ask family members for help cobbling together the money, forcing them to turn to some of the same people who had coerced them into the marriages in the first place.
+Those who could not get help from relatives or friends had to sign emergency loan agreements before the British government would send them back home. They also had to forfeit their passports until the repayments were complete, and faced a 10 percent surcharge on anything they owed after six months.
+Under the policy, detailed in articles in The Times of London last week, four British women were each charged roughly $900 for the government’s efforts to free them from a religious institution in Somalia where, they said, they had been chained, whipped and told they would be held until they married. The women’s families had sent them there because they thought the women were too independent.
+The biggest number of forced marriage cases was in Pakistan. In all, the Foreign Office helped bring home 82 survivors over 2016 and 2017. Mr. Hunt said that “only a small minority” had to sign loan agreements with the government; the rest, he said, were able to find others to pay the fees.
+Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons, wrote a letter to Mr. Hunt last week challenging the repayment policy. “Members of the Foreign Affairs Committee are deeply concerned that victims may be forced to pay for their own rescue or, worse, may be dissuaded from asking for help if they have not got the funds,” it said.BEIJING — China’s ambassador to Canada has said that “Western egotism and white supremacy” were behind calls for Beijing to release two detained Canadians, further straining relations between the countries after the arrest in Canada last month of a Chinese technology executive.
+The ambassador, Lu Shaye, wrote on Wednesday in an op-ed for The Hill Times, an Ottawa-based newspaper, that Canadians were applying “double standards” to the cases.
+Some Canadians, he wrote, argued that their country was merely enforcing the law when it arrested Meng Wanzhou, the finance chief of the Chinese technology giant Huawei, but insisted that Beijing was out of line when it detained two Canadians soon after.
+“It seems that, to those people, the laws of Canada or other Western countries are laws and must be observed,” Mr. Lu wrote, “while China’s laws are not and shouldn’t be respected.”MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams could face a fourth-round match against top-seeded Simona Halep, or perhaps her sister Venus, in the Australian Open, which begins on Monday.
+Williams, who is seeded 16th and seeking a record-tying 24th Grand Slam title, will play her first match on Tuesday against 71st-ranked Tatjana Maria, a neighbor of hers in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. In the second round, she could face the 2014 Wimbledon runner-up, Eugenie Bouchard.
+Venus Williams could be Halep’s third-round opponent, meaning the Williams sisters could face off in the fourth round. The last time they faced each other in Melbourne was in the 2017 final, which Serena won, 6-4, 6-4, while two months pregnant. Serena Williams has not played the Australian Open since then.
+As she seeks a second Grand Slam title, Halep will first have to make the best of a second chance.
+At the draw ceremony on Thursday evening, Halep drew Kaia Kanepi for a first-round match for the second consecutive Grand Slam event.There is evidence that most other people have made the same judgment, yet it turns out that we’ve been making a mistake. The turgid language in these dull corporate reports is actually sprinkled with important clues about major problems — and there is a way to get an inkling about them without actually having to read every word.
+Those are the main insights of “Lazy Prices,” a fascinating research paper featured in the November issue of The NBER Digest, a publication of the National Bureau of Economic Research. It found that corporate reports are, indeed, repetitious, but when the language in the current text varies a great deal from previous versions, it frequently signals trouble that will become evident several months later.
+Three economists — Lauren Cohen and Christopher Malloy of the Harvard Business School, and Quoc Nguyen of DePaul University — downloaded every quarterly and annual corporate report of every publicly traded American company from 1995 to 2014.
+They then sifted through thousands of reports, using a text analysis program. “We filtered out the reports that made a lot of wording changes over the previous year’s version,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview. “It turned out that when there are a lot of changes, there’s a good chance that something important is going on, and most of the time, it’s negative.”
+Among the reports that included many such changes, the researchers found a high probability that the companies’ share prices would decline several months after the reports appeared.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.McALLEN, Tex. — President Trump arrived in this border town Thursday on a trip that he did not want to take to discuss a crisis that Democrats say does not exist, repeating his request for a long-promised border wall that has led to a bitter political impasse and a 20-day government shutdown.
+Flanked by Border Patrol officers, as well as Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, and a cache of drugs, cash and weapons seized by the authorities at the border, Mr. Trump again blamed the protracted shutdown affecting vast swaths of the federal government on Democrats. He reiterated an untrue claim that Mexico would indirectly pay for the wall through a revamped trade agreement, and heard from people who had loved ones killed by immigrants.
+“If we had a barrier of any kind, whether it’s steel or concrete,” Mr. Trump said of tragic stories involving violence and human trafficking, “they wouldn’t even bother trying. We could stop that cold.”
+But as the government shutdown neared the end of its third week, the president left Washington with no additional negotiations scheduled with congressional leaders over a possible compromise that could both provide border security and open the government. In remarks to reporters on Thursday, Mr. Trump did not rule out declaring a state of national emergency that could allow him to bypass Congress to fund the wall.LOS ANGELES — At the midpoint of the N.B.A. season, Kyle Kuzma was daydreaming about something the Lakers have yet to unveil: a small-ball lineup with LeBron James manning the center position. The Lakers already generate the third-highest pace in the league using a traditional lineup, so imagine the possibilities.
+“That small-ball lineup is going to be huge for us,” Kuzma told reporters on Wednesday morning, “especially in the playoffs when everybody’s going to be going small.”
+Kuzma, a second-year forward, was making two assumptions: first, that the Lakers would make the playoffs, and second, that they would have enough time to experiment with the lineup and refine it ahead of a hypothetical trip to the postseason. Not to stamp all over Kuzma’s enthusiasm, but neither of those is a guarantee given the way the Lakers’ hodgepodge season has gone.
+Coach Luke Walton, to his credit, is taking a more pragmatic approach. Though he entered the season hoping to unleash a smaller lineup that could cause mismatch problems, the Lakers do not have time to mess around with experiments, he said, not right now, not after their recent struggles, not with their continuing rash of injuries and absences.OSLO — The wife of a wealthy Norwegian businessman has been kidnapped, and demands have been made for a hefty ransom paid in cryptocurrency, the police revealed this week, as a drama that had been playing out secretly for months burst into public view.
+Anne-Elisabeth Falkevik Hagen went missing on Oct. 31 from her home near Oslo, and international police investigations and back-channel negotiations with the people believed to be her captors have so far failed to secure her release.
+At news conferences on Wednesday and Thursday, the police said they had established a line of communication with people claiming to be holding Ms. Hagen, but would not elaborate. They conceded that they did not know who the captors were, or even whether Ms. Hagen, 68, was still alive.
+“There are no known signs of life,” Tommy Broske, head of the police unit investigating the disappearance, said on Thursday.This past weekend, as Blanchard approached the end of his tenure as the president of the American Economic Association, the field’s main professional organization, he gave an outgoing address at a conference in Atlanta. It had a clear message: The world has been too obsessed in recent years with the supposed costs and risks of government debt.
+Other economists have already begun hailing the speech as an important corrective — “really, really, really important,” says Jason Furman — to the always-fashionable scaremongering about debt.
+Blanchard’s case revolves around the fact that economic growth rates in modern times are usually higher than interest rates. This pattern means that governments can often repay their debts more easily than people expect, because economies produce more than enough bounty to cover interest payments. And debt can bring enormous benefits, by allowing governments to invest in education, transportation, scientific research or other programs that often don’t yield much of a profit for private companies — but can substantially lift economic growth.
+“You can use it, if you use it wisely,” as Blanchard said after the talk, referring to debt.
+The classic example of a government that repaid a large debt with relative ease is the American government after World War II, as my colleague Paul Krugman writes in a piece on Blanchard’s address. The federal government didn’t repay its wartime and Depression debts through higher taxes or spending cuts. It repaid them with the tax revenue created by economic growth. In recent years, growth rates have been lower than they were in the middle 20th century — but interest rates have been lower, too.
+There are limits to the idea, of course. For one thing, a government should take out debt for productive reasons. President Trump’s make-the-rich-richer tax cut doesn’t count as a productive use of debt. And at a certain point, debt could reach a level that would indeed be damaging. The notion that debt doesn’t matter — which is gaining some currency on the left — is wrong. The long-term costs of Medicare, for example, continue to be a real problem in this country.LONDON — Ford said Thursday that it would cut thousands of jobs across Europe as it struggles to reduce costs while tougher emissions rules and declining demand are hurting profits.
+The company, which has 68,000 workers in Europe, including through joint ventures, did not specify how many jobs it would shed, but a spokesman said the number would be in the “thousands.” Ford said that it planned to consult with labor unions about the cuts, which will affect all departments, and that it hoped that as many as possible would be voluntary.
+The carmaker also said it would close a transmission factory in Bordeaux, France, at the end of August. Among the possible cuts, Ford is: considering ceasing production of two minivan models at its factory in Saarlouis, Germany, as the European market for such vehicles shrinks; reviewing a joint venture in Russia, Ford Sollers; and planning to consolidate its headquarters in Britain.
+The global auto industry is showing signs of strain. Car sales in the United States appear to have peaked, as incentives like low-interest loans end. Officials in China said this week that car sales there plummeted 19 percent in December, the steepest decline in modern record-keeping that coincides with a broader slowdown of the Chinese economy. In Europe, automakers are grappling with various challenges, including Britain’s looming exit from the European Union, which could result in higher tariffs on cars and car parts.Slide 1 of 14,
+Five-Bedroom in Southport • $899,999 • FAIRFIELD • 940 Hulls Highway
+A five-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath home with 3,080 square feet, three fireplaces, walnut floors, a front parlor, a formal dining room with built-in corner cabinets, a large family room, a sunroom with a vaulted ceiling, central air-conditioning and an attached two-car garage, on 1.97 acres in the Southport section of Fairfield. Libby McKinney-Tritschler, Al Filippone Associates/William Raveis Real Estate, 203-913-9454; afahomes.comSlide 1 of 19,
+Harlem Condo • $2,350,000 • MANHATTAN • 117 West 123rd Street, No. 8B
+A three-bedroom, two-bath unit with hardwood floors, ample closets and three outdoor areas totaling 350 square feet, in a modernistic mid-rise with a part-time doorman. Patrick V. Lilly, CORE, 917-863-7873; corenyc.comOn the Market
+Homes for Sale in New York and Connecticut
+This week’s properties include a five-bedroom in Southport Conn., and a four-bedroom in Bayville, N.Y.
+On the Market in the New York Region 14 Photos View Slide Show › Susan Fisher Plotner for The New York TimesClick on the slide show to see this week’s featured properties:
+In Harlem, a three-bedroom, two-bath unit with hardwood floors, ample closets and three outdoor areas totaling 350 square feet, in a modernistic mid-rise with a part-time doorman.
+In Carnegie Hill, a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment with beamed nine-foot ceilings, a living room with space for a dining table and a renovated windowed kitchen, in a prewar non-doorman building.Smooth moves are important
+On dry pavement, tires have so much grip that drivers can accelerate hard, slam on the brakes and make sudden, sharp turns, Mr. O’Neil said.
+But that all changes on a slippery surface.
+“We have less grip in the winter. One of the things you have to do in the winter is be way smoother,” Mr. O’Neil said. Otherwise, the tires can quickly lose what little grip they have.
+On dry pavement it may be possible to brake while going through a turn. On snow it is safest to slow the vehicle first and then make the turn, he said.
+“It’s sort of like walking on the ice. You take smaller, little tiny steps. You don’t try to run on the ice. It’s the same idea with a car,” he said.
+Four-wheel drive isn’t a cure-all
+“A lot of people overestimate the capabilities of their vehicles, especially people driving all-wheel drive. They mash the gas pedal and the thing goes forward with all four wheels pulling and they get a false sense of confidence,” Mr. Cox said.
+“The beauty of all-wheel drive is to help get you moving from a complete stop, that is where it is the best — or climbing a steep hill. But when it comes to braking and cornering, all-wheel drive doesn’t give you much or any benefit. Often they are the first ones in the ditch.”
+Be wary of all-season tires
+All-season tires are a compromise, just like a houseboat, said Travis Hanson, the director of operations at Team O’Neil. “It’s not a good house, and it’s not a good boat,” he said.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+During the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, I drove out with a few girlfriends to stay at a house in Yucca Valley, not far from Joshua Tree National Park.
+This was just a short time into the government shutdown and things felt normal, not chaotic. The Joshua Tree Saloon was bustling, not wild.
+Now, though, we’re almost three weeks into a national ordeal that doesn’t seem to have an end in sight — and it’s going to end up costing more than if the government was operating normally.
+Thousands of federal workers already living paycheck to paycheck are worried about making rent and feeding their families.$3,683 a month | 650 Montgomery Street, No. 504, Jersey City
+Coming in at No. 5 was a penthouse rental in Jersey City with direct views of Manhattan. The home has two bedrooms and two full bathrooms, high-end modern finishes and a private 400-square-foot roof deck with a grill.
+Broker: Weichert, Realtors
+For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.wesley morris
+When I was about 11, maybe 12—
+jenna wortham
+Mhm.
+wesley morris
+—I did something that I have now come to regret. [LIGHT PERCUSSION]
+jenna wortham
+Oh, wow. What happened?
+wesley morris
+Well, I used to pop my sister’s bra strap. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+jenna wortham
+Wesley Robert Morris. No, you did not.
+wesley morris
+I did. My sister and I were very close. We are very close. Her name is Robin. She’s two years younger than I am. So it means that, at some point, her body started to develop and change, and she had a training bra. We would go outside and play. And knowing at some point that I wanted to do something that would make everybody in the group laugh, I would pull the strap of her bra as far back as I could get it, like a catapult.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god.
+wesley morris
+And I’d let it go. And it would make an actual snap. I distinctly remember this now.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god. Where did you get that idea from?
+wesley morris
+I don’t think I saw anybody do it. But I definitely know that the atmosphere of doing things to girls that other people would find funny, I probably got from this movie called Zapped. [CARTOON MUSIC PLAYING] [MAN YELLING] [WOMAN GASPING]
+speaker 3
+Wow. [WOMAN YELPING]
+wesley morris
+And the plot of Zapped is basically—
+speaker 3
+What the hell’s going on here?
+wesley morris
+Scott Baio is endowed with telekinesis, and uses his telekinetic powers to pop open girls’ shirts and lift their skirts.
+jenna wortham
+I honestly can’t even believe that was a movie. I mean, I can believe it, but I’m horrified. That’s awful.
+wesley morris
+Yeah, I know. Welcome to 1983, four, five, six, seven— eight.
+jenna wortham
+Lord. OK. Go on.
+wesley morris
+But I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking when I did it, except I loved that everybody else found it funny. What never registered to me was how upset my sister was. She would scream at me and tell me that it’s not funny.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+wesley morris
+She’d run into the house and tell my mother.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god.
+wesley morris
+My mother would then say, Wesley, you can’t do this.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my gosh.
+wesley morris
+Stop it. But I kept doing it.
+jenna wortham
+Did you ever actually apologize to Robin?
+wesley morris
+I did apologize. But I apologized, like a very sort of perfunctory “I’m sorry.” I mean, I knew I was apologizing for popping her bra strap.
+jenna wortham
+But the deeper meaning of the apology maybe hadn’t sunken in yet.
+wesley morris
+No. It didn’t sink in until four months ago.
+speaker 4
+What is the strongest memory you have? The strongest memory of the incident— something you cannot forget. Take whatever time you need.
+christine blasey ford
+Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter— the uproarious laughter between the two. And they’re having fun at my expense.
+wesley morris
+Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation fiasco— watching that hearing, it just made me want to apologize to my sister again.
+jenna wortham
+So what was the grown, adult version of that apology like for you?
+wesley morris
+It wasn’t about absolution, which I think, as a kid, you want to be acknowledged for having done the right thing in apologizing.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+wesley morris
+It was about acknowledging that I’d done this horrible thing. It was about outlining my perception of the depth of the injury and giving that back to her to do whatever she wanted to do with.
+jenna wortham
+Well, what did she do with your apology?
+wesley morris
+It gave her a kind of lightness. But it doesn’t even make the fact that I did it better to her. I think it just makes it real. [MUSIC - KINDNESS, “WORLD RESTART”]
+jenna wortham
+I’m Jenna Wortham.
+wesley morris
+And I’m Wesley Morris. We’re two culture writers at The New York Times.
+jenna wortham
+And this is Still Processing. [MUSIC - KINDNESS, “WORLD RESTART”] I have a story like that too, unfortunately. But the key difference between you and me is that I did not apologize.
+wesley morris
+So what happened?
+jenna wortham
+So I have this childhood friend named Nikki. We grew up together. Both of our parents were in the PTA. For a while, we had the same babysitter. And very quickly, we became best friends we went to the same elementary school. And then we actually lived in different school districts, so we were separate for middle school and high school. And then towards the end of high school, we realized that we’d gotten into the same college. And we decided to be roommates. And college was a really tough transition for me for many reasons. And it was really nice to have somebody that felt like family around. And I just remember really fun times, like late night talks in our dorm beds, like sharing clothes, like real sistership. So at some point, Nikki goes home for the holidays, and she comes back with a box full of memorabilia from our childhood. And she pulls out this journal that she kept as a kid. And inside, there’s a drawing of one kid pushing the other on the playground. And I was the one doing the pushing. So we’re looking at this picture, and we’re both laughing about it. But she turns to me and says, you were really mean to me when we were kids.
+wesley morris
+You were a bully.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. I mean, it’s really hard to say it. But I was. You know, as an adult now, looking back, I understand why Nikki was— she was the golden child of our school. She was in all the gifted and talented programs. She was always picked to do the readings in front of the school. She was really beautiful, really feminine. She just had all this gorgeous natural curly hair. She was lean. She was leggy. She was popular.
+wesley morris
+She was Beyonce?
+jenna wortham
+She was baby Beyonce. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. It all makes sense. And I was chubby. And I was androgynous. I think I was also a really unhappy little kid. I think I was being bullied by my older sister, and I didn’t really know what to do with it. But I was just acting out this trauma and this unrest. And I just always felt like I could. I could get away with it. And I have to admit, Wesley, I feel really ashamed of that behavior. And I feel really embarrassed and mortified that I never actually dealt with it.
+wesley morris
+Well, if anything, not apologizing makes you fundamentally American, I would say.
+jenna wortham
+That’s horrible.
+wesley morris
+Well, no, it’s true. We live in this country—
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+—in which there is no apology for the land that was taken from indigenous peoples. I mean, think about it. Some people from one country come to some other country. They kill everybody who was already here.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+They put them on other land, make them live there. And there’s lore that gets passed down through the centuries—
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+—that this massacre, this genocide is a thing to break bread over.
+jenna wortham
+Right. Which we do every year—
+wesley morris
+Every year.
+jenna wortham
+—without any acknowledgment of where our abundances and our blessings actually come from.
+wesley morris
+It’s the sorry, not sorryest holiday in the history of the world, I’m going to bet.
+jenna wortham
+It’s tough.
+wesley morris
+We have no reparations for black people whose enslaved ancestors helped build this country on the land that they took from the indigenous people.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+Also, Jenna, your failure to apologize actually puts you in very good company. There is an entire section of the American popular music canon devoted to not apologizing.
+jenna wortham
+There’s at least enough for a really good “sorry, not sorry” playlist. But let’s start at the beginning. What you got? [MUSIC - TOM PETTY, “I WON’T BACK DOWN”]
+tom petty
+(SINGING) Well, I won’t back down.
+wesley morris
+[INAUDIBLE] the top of my head— “I Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty.
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+tom petty
+(SINGING) You could stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won’t back down.
+wesley morris
+One of the great American “I’m not sorry” songs— it makes me proud to be an American just to sing it. [MUSIC - OUTKAST, “MS. JACKSON”]
+outkast
+(SINGING) I’m sorry, Ms. Jackson.
+jenna wortham
+Also, OutKast, “Ms. Jackson.”
+outkast
+(SINGING) Never meant to make your daughter cry. I apologize a trillion times. Me and your daughter got a special thing going on.
+jenna wortham
+I mean, great song, love it. But Ms. Jackson didn’t do anything. You didn’t do to Ms. Jackson. Like, talk to her daughter. Maybe you should “I’m sorry, young Jackson.”
+wesley morris
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+You need to deal with the problem and stop avoiding it. [MUSIC - NIRVANA, “ALL APOLOGIES”]
+kurt cobain
+(SINGING) What else should I be? All-
+wesley morris
+Nirvana’s “All Apologies.”
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+kurt cobain
+(SINGING) What else could I say? Everyone is gay.
+wesley morris
+Which is a song that really is about not saying sorry for saying something that’s true.
+jenna wortham
+Right. [MUSIC - BEYONCE, “SORRY”]
+beyonce
+(SINGING) Sorry. I ain’t sorry. I’m sorry. I ain’t sorry. I ain’t sorry. Nigga, nah. I’m sorry.
+wesley morris
+Beyonce.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my gosh. The anthem.
+wesley morris
+That’s an anthem.
+jenna wortham
+The anthem.
+wesley morris
+These aren’t just songs on— song 11 on some album you’ve never heard of before.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, they’re major hits. Truth be told, Wesley, it’s not just in music, even though music is the soundtrack for our non-apologetic culture. It’s everywhere in popular culture. I mean, it feels like every single day you turn on the news or turn on Twitter or turn on Instagram— do you have high talk about social media as though it’s a television set? But you put on— any anytime you read anything, there’s essentially someone who did something and isn’t sorry for it and doesn’t want to apologize for it, doesn’t want to deal with it.
+wesley morris
+Or they think they’re apologizing, but they really are not. Hey, Kevin Hart, we’re talking about you. [JENNA LAUGHING]
+jenna wortham
+Correct.
+wesley morris
+Kevin Hart is announced as the host of next month’s Academy Awards. He is very excited to do it. Everybody’s kind of like, oh, this is interesting. Kevin Hart’s going to host. This should be a change of pace. He seems to really want to do it, unlike some of the other hosts, although I think Jimmy Kimmel actually did want that job and was good at it. But anyway, that excitement lasted for, what, 30 seconds?
+jenna wortham
+If even. Milliseconds.
+wesley morris
+A day.
+jenna wortham
+And then Twitter said, oh, no, he didn’t. We’ve got all the receipts. I’m making the hand gesture of just spraying out cash.
+wesley morris
+So many.
+jenna wortham
+All the receipts from Mr. Hart’s past of making homophobic after homophobic joke and using the F word, the other F word, and just really being trash online. And he had to step down.
+wesley morris
+Well, he opted to step down is what he did.
+jenna wortham
+But he had to.
+wesley morris
+He chose— I don’t know if we agree or disagree about this, but I don’t think he had to turn the job down. I think what he had to do was give a good apology.
+jenna wortham
+Well, he clearly didn’t want to.
+wesley morris
+But instead—
+jenna wortham
+The thing is Kevin Hart thinks that what he did was give an apology. But he actually just threw up a bunch of defense mechanisms, and essentially, was just like, I’m sorry that you’re mad. You know? He didn’t really address the impact of his actions. He didn’t really acknowledge any harm that he might have caused, and he didn’t even try to empathize or have compassion with the people who were upset. He basically said, this is a you problem, not a me problem. I’m moving on with my life.
+wesley morris
+I mean, can you imagine how many movies, how much culture would be different if people would just apologize from the giddy up? Take Poltergeist, for example.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god. OK. Let’s go.
+wesley morris
+The story of a nice white family who moves into a suburban subdivision.
+speaker 5
+There’s one more thing. A terrible presence is in there with her— so much rage, so much betrayal. I’ve never sensed anything like it. I don’t know what hovers over this house. But it was strong enough to punch a hole into this world and take your daughter away from you.
+wesley morris
+Only to discover that the reason there’s all this craziness is because they built this place on ancient burial grounds, and nobody atoned for it.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+Oh. Oh. Here’s another one.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, yeah.
+wesley morris
+Would there be a Best Man?
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god.
+speaker 6
+So Lance figured it out, didn’t he?
+speaker 7
+Yeah. He figured it out, promptly beat my ass, and well, called off the wedding. So Best Man, which is a movie about a writer who writes a really scandalous tell-all fiction— I’m using air quotes here— about his friend group from college. They’ve all regathered for a wedding. And everyone’s got copies of the book. And they slowly realize that he’s used their lives to make all this money, and revealed some really deep and personal secrets.
+speaker 8
+See, they would be in marital bliss by the time the book was supposed to have come out. But thanks to you, Miss I Want an Exclusive, I got my ass whooped.
+wesley morris
+If Taye Diggs had just said, you know what, you guys—
+jenna wortham
+All he had to do— all Harper had to do was say, I got y’all some TGIF gift cards so y’all can go out at your leisure, take yourself to dinner, get an extra entree or two if you want for the kids, bring some home, get some honey. They have good margaritas. All you need to do is— no, I didn’t mean to cause you harm. But no. Personally, I’m glad he didn’t apologize, because then he wouldn’t have such a delightful franchise. But if he had, everything would have been fine. That is what leads to a culture of non-apology, is the inability to actually address a weakness, right, and admit a weakness, and be vulnerable. And look, as a culture, I don’t think that we have the tools to metabolize shame. Trauma that is not dealt with, that’s not transformed into something else, guess what? It doesn’t disappear. It goes somewhere else, usually into another person— a child, a family member, a partner. It’s like matter. You just can’t get rid of it. It has to go somewhere else.
+wesley morris
+It’s like Poltergeist.
+jenna wortham
+It’s like a poltergeist, exactly. And on that note, we’re to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+wesley morris
+Well, Jenna, your wisdom has just reminded me of something— in terms of what makes for a good apology.
+jenna wortham
+Mhm.
+wesley morris
+And I’m thinking about the incident in which the television writer and showrunner Dan Harmon—
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+—was accused of sexually harassing one of his fellow writers.
+jenna wortham
+Yes, yes.
+wesley morris
+One of his employees, Megan Ganz—
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. So here’s what happened, for those who missed it. In early 2018, Megan Ganz, who was a writer on the show Community, calls out her former boss, Dan Harmon, for workplace misconduct, harassing her. But she’s not specific. She just kind of alludes to it. Dan apparently reaches out directly and apologizes, but then goes a step further, and addresses it on his podcast, because, as he says, he doesn’t want to perpetuate the problem. And he also wants people to learn from his mistakes.
+dan harmon
+And she said the same thing she’d been saying the entire time. Please, don’t you understand that focusing on me like this, liking me like this, preferring me like this, I can’t say no to it. And when you do it, it makes me unable to know whether I’m good at my job. And because I finally got to the point where I said to her, I love you— because that’s what I thought it was, when you target somebody for two years— and it was therefore rejected that way, I was humiliated. So I wanted to teach her a lesson. I wanted to show her that if she didn’t like being liked in that way, then oh boy, she should get over herself. After all, if you’re just going to be a writer, then this is how just writers get treated. I crushed on her and resented her for not reciprocating it. And the entire time, I was the one writing her paychecks and in control of whether she stayed or went, and just treated her cruelly, pointedly— things that I would never ever, ever have done if she had been male.
+jenna wortham
+What he does is offer a very unvarnished window into why he felt entitled to pursue her, and what he realized was the impact of his sort of unrelenting advances on her, which she turned down repeatedly, put her in a position of low self-esteem, low self-confidence, and frankly, job peril, right, because she’s in a position where turning down her boss means she might lose her job and never work again in this industry, which, as we know, happens to women in these industries.
+wesley morris
+Yep.
+jenna wortham
+So after the podcast comes out, Megan Ganz tweets, here’s a weird one for you. Last week, I called out my former boss, Dan Harmon, for sexual harassment. And today, I’m going to ask you to listen to his podcast. She continues, yes, I only listened because I expected an apology. But what I didn’t expect was the relief I’d feel just hearing him say these things actually happened. I didn’t dream it. I’m not crazy. Ironic that the only person who could give me that comfort is the one person I’d never ask. She also adds, this was never about vengeance. It’s about vindication. That’s why it didn’t feel right to just accept his apology in private, although I did that too, because if any part of this process should be done in the light, it’s the forgiveness part. And so, Dan Harmon, I forgive you. And what I think is really remarkable in this whole exchange, and why it really stands out as an example of a good apology is because the people who maybe idolize Dan Harmon or liken themselves to him or find themselves in a similar position of power or a similar position of privilege can understand that that line of thinking is so toxic and very damaging, and can hopefully understand how not to do what he did in the first place.
+wesley morris
+I also think that it’s good to talk about that Dan Harmon apology, because there’s a version of it— and we’ve seen so many of them—
+jenna wortham
+Mhm.
+wesley morris
+—in which Dan Harmon just says, I’m sorry you felt that way—
+jenna wortham
+Mhm.
+wesley morris
+—or, I did do that, but it wasn’t the way you think it was.
+jenna wortham
+The Dan Harmon apology is devoid of defensiveness. It’s devoid of blame. It’s devoid of deflection. It’s not an attempt to avoid the impact of the act.
+wesley morris
+Right.
+jenna wortham
+It’s a direct dealing with it.
+wesley morris
+Which brings us back to Kevin Hart. Now, Jenna, I have seen three versions of this apology now. And I’d like to stop for a second and think about why none of them works and why all of them, all of the subsequent non-apologies, deserve an apology. So here’s what he posted on Instagram.
+jenna wortham
+And it’s important to note that the video is—
+wesley morris
+Oh, lord.
+jenna wortham
+—Kevin Hart laying in bed, shirtless, voice all gravelly. He hasn’t had his first green juice of the day— just bejeweled in necklaces.
+wesley morris
+There are like little pearls.
+jenna wortham
+I mean, he couldn’t even be bothered to put a shirt on to talk about this incident.
+wesley morris
+All right. So this is from the Instagram post.
+kevin hart
+I swear, man, our world is becoming beyond crazy. And I’m not going to let the craziness frustrate me or anger me, especially when I worked hard to get to the mental space that I am at now. My team calls me. Oh, my god. Kevin, the world is upset about tweets you did years ago. Oh, my god. Guys, I’m almost 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to hold people in a position where they always have to justify or explain their past, then do you. I’m the wrong guy, man. I’m in a great place— a great mature place, where all I do is spread positivity. If you’re not doing that, you’re not on my page.
+jenna wortham
+That is a textbook non-apology. It’s actually a schoolyard taunt. I’m rubber. You’re glue. Whatever you say bounces off of me and sticks to you. I mean, there is just no willingness whatsoever to absorb any critique or any feedback from anyone. And he’s flipping it back on anyone that has a problem with him.
+wesley morris
+What Kevin Hart is doing is defensive. He’s not hearing the complaint about his behavior. He’s not hearing the hurt.
+jenna wortham
+Right. Right. He does not manage to find empathy or compassion for the communities that are impacted by his glibness around sexuality.
+wesley morris
+Yes. That is the most nauseating quality of a bad apology. In terms of glibness, it’s a thing that never penetrates. It’s a non-serious gesture. Jenna, we should just say that he did get around, at some point, to making an actual apology to gay people—
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+—and the community. And what he said was, I have made the choice to step down from hosting this year’s Oscars. This is because I do not want to be a distraction on a night that should be celebrated by so many amazing, talented artists. I sincerely apologize to the LBGTQ community for my insensitive words from my past.
+jenna wortham
+Eye roll. If you could hear an eye roll, you would have just heard that.
+wesley morris
+Oh, my god. It’s the rock rumbling toward Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. So what is wrong with this part? Because this part, to me, gets to the fundamental question of what a good apology is. You have to at least restate what you did. He kind of— [INAUDIBLE]
+jenna wortham
+No.
+wesley morris
+—reinsert who he wronged.
+jenna wortham
+No. No. I’m just going to stop you right there. [WESLEY LAUGHING] He says, for my insensitive words from my past.
+wesley morris
+Yes, that’s true.
+jenna wortham
+And he also didn’t quite even get the updated version of the acronyms. There’s now a Q, A, an I, and a plus, sir. So you should have just tried a little bit harder.
+wesley morris
+Oh, my god.
+jenna wortham
+I mean, you could have made a donation to an organization. You could have volunteered some time. There are a lot of ways to show genuine remorse, and enough words to max out a tweet ain’t always it.
+wesley morris
+And then last week, Ellen Degeneres basically had him on her show.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+kevin hart
+It’s 10 years old. I’ve addressed it. I’ve apologized for it. I don’t want to have to have this conversation anymore, because I know who I am. I’m not that guy.
+ellen degeneres
+I know you’re not that guy, because I know you.
+kevin hart
+Mhm.
+ellen degeneres
+I really want you to host the Oscars. I called the Academy today. I said, Kevin’s on. I have no idea if he wants to come back and host. But what are your thoughts? And they were like, oh, my god. We want him to host. Whatever we can do, we would be thrilled, and he should host the Oscars. [AUDIENCE CHEERING, APPLAUDING]
+wesley morris
+And she basically exonerated him.
+jenna wortham
+But the thing is that Ellen is essentially seeing herself as a peacekeeper, as a gatekeeper. She is deciding to be this liaison to help heal the relationship between the Academy and Kevin Hart—
+wesley morris
+As a former Oscar host herself, yes.
+jenna wortham
+Right. And look, she’s decided to spend all of her gay capital coins on Mr. Kevin Hart by insisting that she believes that he’s apologized. I just feel like if he’s already apologized once, what’s the harm in doing it again? And the worst thing about this entire dynamic is Kevin Hart keeps insisting over and over and over again, throughout the entire appearance, he’s already said sorry. But if you’ve already said sorry, Mr. Hart, where are the damn receipts? You keep saying, the people that found the tweets, find the apology. No. You should be playing the apology. Ellen should say, roll the clip. And your apology should come up.
+wesley morris
+Yes. Yeah. But that wasn’t enough. He then had to go on his own Sirius XM show, Straight from the Hart, and apologize, but in the third person. He did not say, I apologize. He said, Kevin Hart apologizes. And then a couple days after that, he goes on Good Morning America and tells Michael Strahan and the millions of people who were watching that morning that he’s literally over it. But I would say he’s literally under it. But whatever. Let’s just take a step back, away from Kevin Hart, to just walk us through a little bit of a history of how we got to the word “apology.”
+jenna wortham
+Oh, all right, Professor Morris. Is that why you’re in a suit and tie today? [LAUGHING]
+wesley morris
+I did that for you.
+jenna wortham
+Thank you.
+wesley morris
+And the people who can’t see me. In Plato and Socrates’s days, an apology wasn’t what we think of an apology as being now. An apology actually is the Tom Petty version. An apology was the Beyonce version. It’s Demi Lovato’s sorry not sorry. So at some point, Socrates is dragged before the court to apologize for corrupting the youth of Athens. And he basically has to give an apologia. And his apologia basically amounts to a self-defense. It is almost like a, you want me to be sorry, but I’m not sorry, and here’s a case I’m going to present to you as to why. For anyone who wants to read about this, I highly recommend Plato’s The Apology of Socrates— fine reading, very enlightening. But that is originally the way an apology functioned. You presented yourself before court, made a case, often mockingly, by the way, of the people accusing you of having done something wrong—
+jenna wortham
+Wow.
+wesley morris
+—by offering an apologia.
+jenna wortham
+Fascinating.
+wesley morris
+That has evolved to basically mean exactly the opposite.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+wesley morris
+It means you are sorry for a thing that you did.
+jenna wortham
+Interesting. So Wesley, I have an idea.
+wesley morris
+OK.
+jenna wortham
+Now that we know what a bad apology looks like, why don’t we run through the elements of a good apology. For anyone listening who wants a little help, has something they need to make amends for, we’ve got a template for you.
+wesley morris
+It is 2019.
+jenna wortham
+New year, new you.
+wesley morris
+Yes. Get your apology game right. I mean, I know I could use some help with mine.
+jenna wortham
+Same. OK. I would say use “I” statements. I messed up. I’m sorry. It’s all about taking responsibility, accepting the ownership of what you did wrong, and not putting it back on the other person.
+wesley morris
+I would also say, as a corollary to that, no “you” statements. This is the apologizer saying what they did wrong.
+jenna wortham
+Correct. If you use too many “you” statements, you run into the problem of flipping the blame around on the other person.
+wesley morris
+Yes. Just don’t— you made me, you felt— [JENNA STUTTERING] [LAUGHING]
+jenna wortham
+Just let it go.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+No ego. Pay the coat check, the $2. Just leave your ego at the door. And really come in super vulnerable, super soft, super tender. This isn’t about making yourself look good.
+wesley morris
+Yes. I would say no defense or explanation.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+wesley morris
+I don’t want to know that you were bullied, so you’re bullying me, because you got bullied too. You already bullied me.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+wesley morris
+I mean, we can talk about that after I get my apology.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+wesley morris
+And that is going to probably mean restating the offense, and saying, I did this to you. I acknowledge that I did it. And this is what I’ve learned in being able to get to a point to give this apology.
+jenna wortham
+Correct. Correct. And also, know your intentions going into the apology.
+wesley morris
+That’s a good one.
+jenna wortham
+If you’re doing it because you want this other person to respond in a particular way, let it go. It’s not about you.
+wesley morris
+Mhm.
+jenna wortham
+This is about them. This is about atoning for something that you did wrong. You cannot expect anything from the person that you’re making this topology to. All you can do is essentially lay yourself out at their feet, admit the wrongdoing, and say, I hear you and I get it. And if I could do it again, I wouldn’t do it.
+wesley morris
+Acknowledge that what you did was wrong. Acknowledge that you hurt the person. And don’t expect anything in return.
+jenna wortham
+Ding, ding, ding. That is the key.
+wesley morris
+It’s an utterly selfless act.
+jenna wortham
+It has to be.
+wesley morris
+It has to be. And the thing about the Kevin Hart apology is that it’s totally selfish.
+jenna wortham
+Exactly.
+wesley morris
+Who is hearing that and thinking, oh, you know what? I forgive you.
+jenna wortham
+Read his comments— tons of people, which just gives you more insight into the conundrum we’re in, and why this is exactly who we are as a country.
+wesley morris
+Well, we’re going to take a break. But before we do, there’s a very, very easy, simple, good song that pretty much sums up how to give an apology, covered by many people. Nobody’s version is more iconic than Brenda Lee’s.
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+This is her just simply saying, I’m sorry. [MUSIC - BRENDA LEE, “I’M SORRY”]
+brenda lee
+(SINGING) I’m sorry, so sorry. Please accept my apology. But love was blind. And I was too blind to see. Sorry. [PHONE RINGING] [JENNA CLEARING THROAT] [PHONE RINGING]
+nikki (on phone)
+Hello?
+jenna wortham
+Hi, Nikki. [LAUGHING] Hey, girl, hey.
+nikki (on phone)
+Hey. How you doing? Oh, my gosh, it’s been forever.
+jenna wortham
+Well, thanks for being down for this call. I did actually want to talk about something really specific from our childhood that I’ve been meditating on.
+nikki (on phone)
+OK.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+nikki (on phone)
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+Well, what do you remember about us as kids?
+nikki (on phone)
+I remember really enjoying your company and your conversation. And I felt like I identified with you a lot. But I kind of felt like an outsider at the same time.
+jenna wortham
+Mm.
+nikki (on phone)
+I felt like you were a popular person, and I was kind of a nerd, like I didn’t know all the cool things, and I wasn’t— I just didn’t feel like I was part of the in crowd.
+jenna wortham
+Really?
+nikki (on phone)
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god. See, I remember you as the pretty popular girl.
+nikki (on phone)
+That’s so funny.
+jenna wortham
+Mmhm.
+nikki (on phone)
+Really?
+jenna wortham
+Everybody loved you.
+nikki (on phone)
+Wow.
+jenna wortham
+So I have this really specific memory that I want to run by you.
+nikki (on phone)
+OK.
+jenna wortham
+So our first year in college, we lived together.
+nikki (on phone)
+And you hated every second of it. No.
+jenna wortham
+I loved it. No, I loved it. I felt like, because we went to different high schools and we fell out of touch during our most formative years, I felt like it was so nice to get to know you as an adult and to— I don’t know. I have such good memories of that time.
+nikki (on phone)
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+I have this really clear memory of one weekend, you’d gone home— it might have been for the holidays. I’m not sure. But you’d gone home for the weekend and you brought back some box of memorabilia. In that box, there was a journal or a notebook of yours.
+nikki (on phone)
+Mhm.
+jenna wortham
+And you were flipping through it. And you were like, look at this picture. And it was a drawing. And remember, in Cameron, the playground had those tunnels you could climb on top of, those huge sculptural tunnels you could sit on top of or climb through on the playground?
+nikki (on phone)
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+Do you remember that?
+nikki (on phone)
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+So the picture you showed me was a little girl sitting on top of the tunnel with a smile on her face, a big grin. And she had a curly Afro. And then there was another child with pigtails, flying off the tunnel. So the picture was depicting me on the tunnel with my curly Afro, having just shoved you off the tunnel with your braids. Do you remember this at all?
+nikki (on phone)
+I don’t remember this picture. But I probably have— I know what diary you’re talking about. And I think I have it somewhere downstairs in my storage. But I don’t know about the picture itself.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, OK. Well, it was just a drawing. And you were like, you were kind of really mean to me when were kids.
+nikki (on phone)
+Maybe that picture— do you remember how I told you how I felt like an outsider?
+jenna wortham
+Uh-huh.
+nikki (on phone)
+You’re pushing me off a tunnel, so I must not feel like I have a place or feel like maybe I just felt like— I don’t know— some sort of negative energy or something. I’m not sure.
+jenna wortham
+But I think that did happen, though. I don’t think that was a depiction. And I mean, maybe it didn’t happen exactly like that.
+nikki (on phone)
+Mhm.
+jenna wortham
+But I do recall picking on you. I really recall being mean to you.
+nikki (on phone)
+Oh, that’s so strange, because I had the feeling. But I don’t remember specific instances. So maybe I didn’t want to believe that you were being mean to me. And I can disassociate pretty easily. So maybe, even if it did happen, any sort of bullying or anything like that, me being like, no, she didn’t really— I don’t know.
+jenna wortham
+Nikki I want to take responsibility for what happened in our past. And being a little kid doesn’t matter. The point is, I harmed you. I’m really sorry I did those things to you. [NIKKI CRYING QUIETLY] Oh, Nikki. [NIKKI BREATHING]
+nikki (on phone)
+OK.
+jenna wortham
+Aw.
+nikki (on phone)
+I didn’t really know that was there. So— [SNIFFLING] Wow. OK. I think I just— I love you. And I guess I was willing to just suppress. I just remember a feeling. I don’t remember specific things. So to actually have you say that things did happen between us, it just brings everything together.
+jenna wortham
+Mhm.
+nikki (on phone)
+Because I mean, we were both going through our own stuff as kids, too.
+jenna wortham
+We had tough childhoods. But that doesn’t make it OK. You know? Are you OK? I didn’t want to cause more harm, you know?
+nikki (on phone)
+No, as far as like digging deeper, I’m not afraid of that. So I appreciate it actually, because just digging through your childhood, you can kind of see how the story is painted, or how you become who you are, you know?
+jenna wortham
+Do you want to keep talking about it? Maybe I can text you, and we can set up a phone date to do part two offline.
+nikki (on phone)
+Sure.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+nikki (on phone)
+I would love to.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. I miss you so much.
+nikki (on phone)
+Yeah, I miss you too. You know, I heard you loud and clear, and thank you so much for taking the time and wanting to talk through this.
+jenna wortham
+Love you, boo.
+nikki (on phone)
+Love you. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+jenna wortham
+Still Processing is a product of The New York Times.
+wesley morris
+It’s produced by Neena Pathak.
+jenna wortham
+Our editors are Sasha Weiss, Larissa Anderson, and Wendy Dorr.
+wesley morris
+We get editorial oversight from Lisa Tobin and Samantha Henig.
+jenna wortham
+Our engineer is Jake Gorski.
+wesley morris
+And our theme music is by Kindness. It’s called “World Restart” from the album Otherness.
+jenna wortham
+You can find all of our episodes and various things at nytimes.com/stillprocessing.
+wesley morris
+And, if you don’t mind, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We appreciate it.
+jenna worthamThe Upright Citizens Brigade, facing substantial financial pressures, announced on Wednesday that it would be closing its East Village location in Manhattan, a month after laying off several staff members. That will leave the comedy theater with three venues: Its struggling flagship in Hell’s Kitchen, which opened last year, and two locations in Los Angeles.
+“The cost of operating two venues in Manhattan has become too high, and after extensive consultation, the UCB4 has decided an exit is necessary,” Michael Hartney, the artistic director for the New York theaters, said in an email to the U.C.B. community. U.C.B.4 refers to the theater’s founders: Amy Poehler, Ian Roberts, Matt Walsh and Matt Besser, who turned a barely available art form in New York City into an institution, and then some.
+Hartney added, “It is sad to lose a venue, especially when it affects employees we care about.”
+Pat Baer, the longtime technical director for U.C.B., said in a post on Twitter that he was losing his job.
+Baer wrote: “After Feb 9th, I will no longer be a UCB employee. April would have been 15 years. I’m heartbroken and a bit numb. I will accept condolences, high fives, and job offers.”CHELMSFORD, England — On a farm 15 minutes north of downtown Chelmsford, a smallish Essex commuter city 30 minutes by train from London, Jordan Cardy has begun turning his 1990s dreams into reality.
+A couple of months ago, the 22-year-old musician who records as Rat Boy rented a huge empty warehouse a short walk to a lovely little stream and a slightly longer walk to a small black sign leaning against a decayed wall that reads FARM TOILET. Here, slowly, he, his father, and brother have been building out the raw space into a place — inspired by the Beastie Boys’ old G-Son Studios in Los Angeles — where he can work, and also play.
+A few days before Christmas, it was mostly empty save for a roughly fashioned studio. On one wall was a Public Enemy “Fear of a Black Planet” poster. On a shelf was an autographed vinyl copy of the Beastie Boys’ “Hello Nasty.” On the center table, an old issue of the Beasties’ publication Grand Royal and some obscure graffiti magazines. Up against the wall, a small-scale screen printing rig and several of Cardy’s ghoulishly realistic illustrations. Sitting on a pallet under a blanket was an Amek Einstein console, the same kind that the Dust Brothers used to work on, that Cardy bought for about 6,000 pounds on the internet from Peru. It’s the most money he’s ever spent on anything, he said, but he still wasn’t sure it worked.
+This month Cardy will release the second Rat Boy album, “Internationally Unknown,” a high-energy collision of punk convulsion and hip-hop storytelling full of raucously fun, sharp-tongued songs about slackerdom, resistance and disorderly joy. It’s shaped by late 1970s punk with flickers of dub, nods to 1990s hip-hop (and also the early 2000s English rapper the Streets), and embraces the musical exuberance of 2000s pop-punk.These are far from the methods of Cubist collages, which made a virtue of their elements’ disjunction, or of New York School abstraction, which emphasized the gestural production of painterly marks. Instead Ms. von Heyl layers, blurs, masks and copies, soldering together parts into a single, solid image whose genesis is never quite clear. As Mark Godfrey and Andrianna Campbell have written, these painterly techniques are familiar from Photoshop, InDesign and other desktop publishing applications, whose users stack and transform layers to produce a document or a JPG.
+That’s what makes “Dunesday” and “Mana Hatta” so bewitching in the gallery: the back-and-forth between the means of composition and the resultant image, between the three-dimensional object on the wall and the two-dimensional impression it gives. They’re conversant with digital imagery, but they insist on the value of the handmade. (Unlike Albert Oehlen, a key influence for Ms. von Heyl, she does not use computers to make her paintings.) And their layers resolve into images that would flummox earlier generations of abstract painters, but that we, as offspring of the screen, can dive into.Our pop music critics are keeping an eye on Billie Eilish, Nakhane and Nicola Cruz this year.
+Credit... From left: Roger Kisby for The New York Times; Tarryn Hatchett; Hanna Quevedo[Read more about the decades of sexual abuse allegations detailed in the documentary.]
+“Do What U Want” was controversial when it debuted, with many fans rejecting the collaboration based on much earlier reports about Kelly’s behavior with women. The single’s music video, which was never released, was shot and directed by the photographer Terry Richardson, who has also faced repeated accusations of sexual misconduct.
+Lady Gaga previously defended the song, calling it a “natural collaboration.” At a 2013 news conference, she said, “R. Kelly and I have sometimes very untrue things written about us, so in a way this was a bond between us.”
+Following the airing of the Lifetime series, Chance the Rapper apologized “to all of his survivors for working with him and for taking this long to speak out.” He added: “The truth is any of us who ever ignored the R. Kelly stories, or ever believed he was being setup/attacked by the system (as black men often are) were doing so at the detriment of black women and girls.”
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+Representatives for Jay-Z, who released collaborative albums with Kelly in 2002 and 2004, have declined to comment. Sony Music, which oversees Kelly’s record label, RCA, has also declined to comment on the allegations.BERLIN — Once-in-a-generation heavy snowfall has paralyzed travel and tourism in parts of the Alps, with conditions that have left at least six people dead, Austrian officials said on Thursday.
+Heavy snowfall and strong winds are projected to continue in Austria and southern parts of Germany until at least Friday, bringing at least an additional 20 inches, or 50 centimeters, of snow over 24 hours to parts of the Alps that have already seen as much as 10 feet over the past week.CAIRO — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid out his vision for America’s role in the Middle East on Thursday, telling a university audience in Cairo that “the age of self-inflicted American shame is over” and that the United States would pursue a more activist policy, despite President Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria.
+Mr. Pompeo’s prescription was short on specifics, beyond bolstering alliances with Arab autocrats loyal to Washington. Instead he painted a picture of a Middle East cast into chaos by President Barack Obama, and that can only be rescued by crushing Iran.
+He advocated a policy of containment of Iran’s power, pressing for allies in the region to isolate the country. He vowed to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria, but offered no plan to achieve that goal at a moment when the American force of 2,000 troops is scheduled to withdraw.
+And in an unusually explicit and personal attack on a former president’s foreign policy, a decade after Mr. Obama delivered a landmark speech at another Cairo university, Mr. Pompeo excoriated Mr. Obama for “fundamental misunderstandings” about the region that “underestimated the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islamism.”Ms. Richards’s dissension from the swelling chorus of #DeleteFacebook is notable and worth considering. In refusing to delete her Facebook account, she is refusing to turn the power abuses of the tech industry into an issue of personal responsibility.
+The impulse to delete Facebook is understandable. In an era of political gridlock and dysfunction, it feels good to start somewhere. There is the hope that waves of deletions will send a signal to the company’s leaders and to the lawmakers who are meant to regulate it.
+But it would also seem to be the case that if millions of angry individuals were going to save us from the worst excesses of the tech industry, we would have been saved from them by now. Collective action is difficult against a global behemoth like Facebook. Even were such action to succeed, the company also owns WhatsApp and Instagram. With a couple of billion users on Facebook alone, it is hard to fathom how many deleted accounts it would take to drive genuine change.
+And it’s possible that #DeleteFacebook might actually play into Facebook’s hands, by recasting a political issue as a willpower issue. As Ms. Richards asks, thinking of her son overseas, should the burden of fixing Facebook, and data privacy in general, really fall on her? Or is telling people to delete their accounts on a platform to which there are few alternatives the digital equivalent of ordering women to smile more if they want to get ahead at the office?
+If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I might actually relish seeing my users agonize over the question of “to delete or not to delete.” Every moment they are talking about whether to walk away from the content they’ve created and the network they’ve built is a moment they aren’t talking about Facebook executives being brought to justice and the company brought under proper regulation.When he was living in Tangier, the writer Paul Bowles befriended the Moroccan author and artist Mohamed Mrabet, who taught Bowles how to make a chicken tagine with almonds and prunes.
+According to literary and culinary legend, the dish became a staple at dinner parties Bowles hosted, and he often made it for the poet and publisher Daniel Halpern, who lived in the apartment downstairs in the late 1960s. Halpern used the recipe, crediting Bowles, in his 1985 cookbook, “The Good Food,” which over the decades gained a cult following among writers and foodies (its devotees include the novelist Michael Chabon and the chef David Chang).
+Early one evening last month, Mrabet’s chicken tagine — as interpreted by way of Bowles and Halpern — was served to a small group of writers at a dinner party hosted by chef Wylie Dufresne at his apartment near Union Square.
+The guests — a group that included the novelists Francine Prose and Jennifer Egan, the short story writer Deborah Eisenberg, the writer and foodie celebrity Padma Lakshmi and the journalist Steve Kornacki — had assembled to celebrate the republication of “The Good Food,” which Halpern is releasing this month through his own imprint, Ecco.“I have to say, I haven’t heard a new question about ‘The Sopranos’ in a long time. I’m sorry.” “What do I think about ‘The Sopranos?’” “Yes.” “Cold. Being out on set in the cold.” “I still have people asking me, ‘What the hell was that last episode?’” “Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show?” [ominous music] [gunshot] “It so doesn’t feel like it’s 20 years, I have to say. I mean — ” “Somebody said it’s the 20th anniversary, and I was just shocked.” “‘Sopranos’ was the beginning of a particular genre, you know?” “And you can see the influence of ‘The Sopranos’ certainly in all the antihero shows that came afterward.” “People seemed hungry to have a lead character that was perhaps as complicated as they are.” “Tony Soprano is more like me than a doctor, or a cop, or a judge.” “But the idea that a bad person can also be lovable, and that you can care about his family, how do I feel about this?” “Every once in a while, he’d make Tony do something truly awful just to remind us that we are rooting for a monster. Before ‘The Sopranos,’ TV was largely about providing answers. Think about the setup, punch line of a sitcom. Or think about cases that get solved before the last commercial break in a cop show. There’s certainly been good and ambitious shows on television before, but what ‘The Sopranos’ did is it showed that pondering questions that don’t have any answers can be satisfying too.” “You know I’ve been working with the government, right, Ton?” “‘Sopranos’ trained viewers in a way to learn to be O.K. with being a little confused.” “It was a fish that talked, for God’s sake. I’m just saying. You can walk a very tricky line when you start to do things like hallucinations, things that appear that don’t really exist. That can be a ‘jumping the shark’ situation. And rather than taking you out of the show, it just sort of added another dimension.” “A lot of people hated those dreams sequences. There were people who just wanted a mob show. And their motto was, less yakking, more whacking. So when I would read things like that, it would only make me do more yakking, so.” “Well, I think what we learned is that people want to be challenged in that way. I don’t know. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for.” “I didn’t want to change things. This Elvis Costello song where he says, ‘I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly.’ That’s the way I always felt about working at the network. And I think I bit it.” “Now, the script, the pilot script, David Chase had been shopping it around for a long time, and nobody wanted it.” “David Chase didn’t ever expect it really to go anywhere. Not only did it go somewhere, it became suddenly the thing that everybody wanted to talk about.” “All the reviews were extremely positive except for one. And I thought, what is this?” “We started to get this feeling like, I think people are responding to this.” “Well, I remember when the show was on the air, you couldn’t pick up The New York Times, for example, without a mention of it. There was just constant, constant, constant. And it’s still happening.” “But back then, people would say, ‘Oh, Sunday night in my house, people knew they couldn’t call, and we’d have these big meals.’” “When I heard that people had parties around it, that was the best thing I heard. And still is, in a way.” “There was something also about having to wait. Like wondering what might happen next, and then the next day, people would talk about it. We’re in a different time now. If you have five hours, you could sit and watch a majority of a series now. And here it is, a million years after we finished it, and I still can’t quite fathom the experience of that of a viewer, or of a fan of the show. I feel like, oh, I wish I’d gotten to see that.” “I don’t rewatch the episodes unless there’s something I need for research or something.” “Me and Aida Turturro, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who played Janice on the show — a couple of summers ago, we decided to sit down and watch the series, because there are many we both hadn’t seen. And we got four episodes in, and we couldn’t do it. It’s just too evocative. First of all, because Jim is gone. And we were all so young when we first started it. And the kids were, I think, 11 and 14. And we worked on it for 10 years, and they were so little. And it was so emotionally turbulent, I thought, I can’t do this.” [laughs] “We gave up.” “Which, of course, brings us to the ending of “The Sopranos,’ which is arguably the most famous thing about the show, still.” “I remember when I first read the script, I thought I was missing pages, just like people thought their TVs had broken. I’ve met so many people say to me about the ending, ‘So what the hell was that?’ And I’m like, ‘I know pretty much what you do.’ And they’re like, ‘Come on, I get it. But what really happened?’ I was like — “ [chuckling] [Music — Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’”] “They yelled cut and we all went home. That’s what happened.” “Made a lot of people angry. And sometimes, I couldn’t believe that it was that important to people. Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show? I don’t think so.” “There was no way to make everybody happy with the end of that show. No way. And I loved that people were left with their own uncomfortability about this. They weren’t being force fed. That’s not always easy.”In the speech, Mr. de Blasio presented his mayoralty as one that has made streets safer and brought new protections for tenants and workers. He cast himself as an aspiring Robin Hood — aiming to take from the rich and give to the poor — even as he has thus far been unsuccessful in his many attempts to raise taxes on high earners.
+Major elements of the speech had been set out by Mr. de Blasio in recent days: a plan to improve customer service for the city’s public hospitals and better connect uninsured residents to primary care physicians; and legislation to require paid vacation for private-sector workers.
+Others were new, if somewhat less grand. The ferry system would expand to include new routes to Staten Island and Coney Island. The city would create a program to help workers save for retirement, if the companies they work for do not offer savings plans.
+[Looking for more on the mayor’s speech? Here are some takeaways.]
+Mr. de Blasio tiptoed around some of the thornier challenges of his administration, such as the soaring number of homeless and the city’s scandal-plagued and deteriorating public housing system, which he mentioned once and appeared to promise more than he could deliver. “The New York City Housing Authority has a plan to bring brand-new everything to 175,000 Nycha residents,” he said.
+The mayor also did not mention that he had secured the promise of 25,000 jobs by reaching a deal two months ago to bring Amazon offices to Queens, even though a pledge to bring 100,000 good-paying jobs to New York City was a centerpiece of his 2017 address. The deal to lure Amazon to New York City, at a cost of about $3 billion in state and city incentives, is deeply unpopular among some liberals.But in recent years, many restaurant owners and chefs have embraced a new aesthetic in professional kitchens that is less hierarchical , more comfortable and inclusive of bodies of all shapes, sizes and genders .
+As the culinary world distances itself from a boys' club mentality — most recently because of the #MeToo movement — so have kitchen-wear companies like Hedley & Bennett, Tilit and Polka Pants, which design clothes that are both comfortable and stylish.
+All three were founded by former cooks nearly six years ago to combat their growing frustrations with kitchen uniforms. Both Hedley & Bennett, in Los Angeles, and Tilit, in New York City, stock all their styles in separate sizing and cuts for men and women to accommodate a variety of figures.
+“Offering a women’s XS all the way up to a men’s 4XL was a no-brainer for us,” said Alex McCrery, who founded Tilit with his wife, Jenny Goodman. Ellen Bennett, the founder of Hedley & Bennett, said she created products like her “Big” apron line to fit many body sizes.
+At Cafe Altro Paradiso and Flora Bar in Manhattan, Ms. Pickowicz’s solution was a baggy white short-sleeve shirt with a single row of buttons or snaps down the middle. Known as a dishwasher shirt, the uniform was once solely associated with people who did the dirty work in restaurants: cleaning, hauling and washing.I never much cared for butterflies as a child, because to me they symbolized death. Their very existence represented the end of a caterpillar’s life, and I have always preferred beginnings to endings, no matter how beautiful.
+My mother was notoriously indecisive, and one summer, when she took my sister and me on a road trip to visit her family in New Jersey, we returned to find that our father had taken it upon himself to purchase a house for $0 down.
+She was livid, but I was elated when the home soon became infested with caterpillars. I would trap and tend to them in small buckets in our garage, but the inevitable cocooning would come and then they’d be gone. Caterpillars could never stay the same, and I hated butterflies for it.
+My mother, Eileen, died in 2010, and my sister and I sat shiva for a week. When we finally emerged for the customary walk around the block, the first thing we saw was a fluttering yellow butterfly — the first butterfly I had ever seen on the streets of New York. In that moment it was a cruel, complicated, beautiful reminder that nothing can stay the same.The hype: Kratom, an ancient medicinal leaf from Southeast Asia, is the most recent cure-all to rise from the wellness fringes, particularly among those who frequent head shops for the latest medical breakthroughs. It’s kind of like herbal Valium. Or maybe herbal Tylenol.
+Elevator pitch: Kratom leaf, which is related to the coffee family, is touted as a plant-based alternative to Big Pharma. Popped in capsule form or prepared as tea, kratom can produce a mild psychotropic effect, though it’s more of a gentle sense of well-being than a so-called trip.
+Some use kratom as a mood booster, while others say it alleviates chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and depression. It has also been used to treat opioid addiction, though some government authorities say that kratom can be as dangerous as the opioids themselves.
+Adopters: Despite its smoke-shop association, kratom is not limited to denizens of the Burning Man playa. As the recent Netflix documentary “A Leaf of Faith” makes clear, kratom has struck a chord with many, including war veterans, pain-addled athletes and professional wrestlers, as an alternative to opioid painkillers.Consistency, though, is an odd achievement for a series in which the creator Nic Pizzolatto has insisted on swinging hard and hitting or missing big. Season 1 suffered from florid dialogue and stereotyped characters, especially the women — but when it connected, especially in Matthew McConaughey’s performance as the haunted Rust Cohle, it was breathtaking. Season 2 was an admirable effort to change scenery, but it fell apart like a handful of California desert dust.
+The new story returns to the South, a scrubby, hard-luck patch of Arkansas where the partners Hays and West catch a case involving two children who disappeared on a bike ride. They crack the story open like a rotting log, and all manner of sadness scurries out: the local dead-enders who come under suspicion, the spiraling marriage of the children’s parents, Tom (Scoot McNairy) and Lucy Purcell (Mamie Gummer).
+The season is nominally a story of partners, as if to keep up the tradition (and honor all those “True Detective 3” internet memes). But the show really belongs to Ali (who just won a Golden Globe for “Green Book”), and he’s coolly magnetic.
+As Hays in 1980, he has a dry, outsider affect; he served in Vietnam as a solo reconnaissance tracker, and as a black man in a largely white community, he stands apart. (The season’s exploration of race is intriguing but can feel forced, like the treatment of gender in Season 2.) In 2015, he is shaky and guarded, his memories splintered by dementia, as he tries to recall the case, and what may have gone wrong, for a “Making a Murderer”-style documentary.
+Of course, acting talent has never been the problem with “True Detective,” give or take a miscast Vince Vaughn. Overacting, or at least speechifying, is another matter, and both Ali and Pizzolatto (who writes the first five episodes, with an assist from David Milch of “Deadwood” in Episode 4) rein it in. The dialogue is more streamlined but keeps the leavening banter. (“You know how many times rats almost ended civilization?” Hays asks, in a tangent about vermin. “How many?” West answers. Pause. Distant stare. “I don’t know. At least two.”)A former El Museo board member, Alex Gonzalez, said he had asked the museum how Princess Gloria, who was reported to have once blamed the nature of Africans for spreading AIDS on that continent, “aligns with the mission and purpose of a Latinx institution” — but had not received an answer.
+“Her views on the African AIDS crisis were so lacking in humanity and expressed so publicly on live TV that it should have raised a red flag,” he said on Wednesday in an email message.
+After inquiries by The New York Times on Wednesday, the museum issued a statement on Thursday morning. “As a cultural institution founded on the principles of inclusion, civil rights and diversity, El Museo del Barrio is committed to honoring individuals that uphold those values and support the elevation of Latino and Latin American art and culture both in the United States and beyond,” the museum said. “As a result, El Museo del Barrio has decided to part ways with H.S.H. Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis.”
+Princess Gloria, reached on Thursday by email, said: “I am disappointed to what degree the society is divided today and that there seems to be absolutely no room for tolerance whatsoever. My conservative religious views have absolutely no impact on my open mind on cultural diversity and inclusion. I have been friends with all sorts of people of different political and religious views all my life.”
+The criticism is the latest in a series of controversies to buffet El Museo, a respected institution that has put on well-received shows but which has also experienced serious setbacks. Financial shortfalls have forced staff cuts and reduced operating hours. Several high-profile executive departures have created a sometimes acrimonious climate.“America will not retreat until the terror fight is over. We will labor tirelessly alongside you to defeat ISIS, Al Qaeda and other jihadists that threaten our security and yours.” “We are pulling back in Syria. We’re going to be removing our troops.” Same administration, different messages. Last month, President Trump announced the U.S. won its fight in Syria and is leaving. “I’ve been president for almost two years. And we’ve really stepped it up and we have won against ISIS.” His defense secretary resigned in protest, and lawmakers questioned the decision. “None of us believe that ISIS has been defeated. It is in our national security interest not to withdraw at this time in my view.” Since the surprise announcement, Trump’s advisers have been pushing a seemingly different message. “We’re going to be discussing the president’s decision to withdraw, but to do so from northeast Syria in a way that makes sure that ISIS is defeated.” “This isn’t a change of mission. We remain committed to the complete dismantling of ISIS, the ISIS threat and the ongoing fight against radical Islamism in all of its forms.” Trump and Pompeo have also contradicted each other on Iran. “Iran is pulling people out of Syria — they can do can do what they want there, frankly.” “The United States will use diplomacy and work with our partners to expel every last Iranian boot and work through the U.N.-led process to bring peace and stability to the long-suffering Syrian people.” Without a uniform message on Syria, American allies are increasingly concerned that Trump isn’t on the same page as his national security team.[music] Alex Honnold is the foremost free-soloist in the world. He has free-soloed routes that no one else can. To free-solo means to climb without ropes or safety equipment. One false move, one slip, and it’s over. [music] The risk in free-soloing is always to fall off and fall to your death. I mean, that’s pretty straightforward. My directing partner and husband, Jimmy Chin, is a professional climber, and we were interested in making a feature-length documentary about his friend Alex. When Chai and I first talked about making a film about him, we were talking about a character study, a general portrait of Alex, why he was extraordinary. But we realized Alex was dreaming of doing something much bigger, much more dangerous. The only thing that would justify making a movie with me is doing something that I’m, like, truly proud of. To me, the big dream has always been free-soloing El Cap. That is the culmination of anything I can imagine. El Cap is monumental — 3,000 feet of sheer granite. Free-soloing it would be one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of climbing. But is it ethical to film someone as he risks his life? When I found out Alex was thinking about free-soloing El Cap, Chai and I needed to step back and take some time to really think if this was something we wanted to take on. Every journalist and documentary filmmaker goes into situations without knowing what happens next. This is the truth of nonfiction. You can be mindful not to put the needs of a film before those of your subject, but how much precaution is enough? We had this ethical question — is he more likely to fall when we were there because we can be a distraction than if he is by himself. I’m aware that a camera changes the dynamic in some small way. And when the margins of success and failure are very, very thin, you just don’t know what it’s going to be that might tip the scale. Yeah, buddy. Hey, guys. Crested the mountain. That was perfect. That was like — that was pretty sick. Mikey looks traumatized, dude. Are you O.K.? You know, it’s a little stressful, I won’t lie. [music] Alex was going to do the climb with or without us, but we decided that, to be able to live with ourselves filming it, we needed to set certain guidelines. First, Alex’s safety was always going to be the priority. And second, we needed to protect the integrity of his experience. [music] To be able to move forward on this film, the makeup of the crew was critical. They had to be elite professional climbers who understood what Alex was doing. Their interactions with Alex had to be carefully managed, and they had to remain completely neutral about Alex’s decision to make or not make the attempt to free-solo El Cap. [music] Even though we thought through every scenario carefully, it was still difficult to film Alex. Do you ever get nervous before, like, wrapping – Do I ever get nervous? Yeah. Yeah. I get nervous every time I step to the edge. You want to be nervous. If you stop being nervous at all, you’ll blow it. [music] See you on the other side. The people we chose for the crew had to be not only great at shooting, but also very strong climbers, and able to work under incredibly stressful situations and not make any mistakes. It also helped that the crew was made up of Alex’s friends. That added a layer of comfort, camaraderie and trust. But I also understand the reality of when something unexpected happens that’s outside of your control. And then it doesn’t matter how good you are, it doesn’t matter how talented you are. I put my foot on what looked like part of the wall, and a piece about the size of a small backpack launched. And Jim is below me, Dave is below me. It flew, like, right here. And then another one went, like, right here. Oh. Ah! Part of being a professional climber is identifying and acknowledging the risks. Assessing them, minimizing them, and then moving on. It’s so — Yeah. It got real down there. Why are we up here again? We’re up here because practice makes perfect. And I am far from perfect. Essentially, over the course of two years, in the process of Alex training to free-solo El Cap, our process was to film him on the route and refine our choreography for the big day. One thing we knew was that, in certain instances, we needed to give him more space. A good example was the Boulder Problem, the hardest part of the climb. Alex’s issue is not that he could possibly die, it was that he didn’t want to die in front of his friends. So ultimately, we decided to film that section remotely, to minimize our presence. They’re remote cameras because we want to stay out of Alex’s line of sight. It was very technical filming the climbing. It was dangerous, it was extreme. And at the same time, we had to capture Alex’s most intimate moments, and try to get to know this person who is very, very uncomfortable with intimacy. As he’s preparing for the most difficult thing he’s ever done in his life. So you’re kind of tinkering in his head, and is that even a good idea. When the guys were still coming down from the wall, you know, Clair Popkin and I would be on the ground and start this, you know, second wave of Alex filming, where he had to explore ideas that were very, very personal. The most challenging thing about all of the verité filmmaking was that a lot of the – we’d spend six or eight hours on the wall doing very physically toiling work, and then I’d get down and then there’s another camera with a different crew that’s all fresh and ready to hang out for the whole evening. And I’m like, I’m so pooped, I just want to lay down. But those are kind of the key moments in which to film. And you know, I get that. But it’s still hard sometimes. More pressing questions of any kind? We followed him for two years as he practiced and weighed whether to attempt the solo climb. It’s early June 2017. I can tell that Alex is kind of peaking in terms of his training and everything he’s doing. We had everybody dialing in our plans. We knew exactly where everybody needed to be, what their shots were. But I refuse, as a personal line that I’m not willing to cross, to ask Alex when he thinks he’s going to do it. The directive was to stay out of his sight unless you were filming with him. Our goal was to reduce any sort of external pressure, and we really focused on giving him the purest experience that he could have. Nice work. Oh, yeah. Jesus. You crushed it. Oh. Geez. On June 3, 2017, he decided he was ready to do it. Well, he’s definitely not going back down. He’s coming up for sure. He’s only going one way. [music] I am running through all the different scenarios. You know, if he fell, like, what it would sound like, what I would say to people after it, what — I don’t know, like what the footage would be like, you know? And I’m just like — in my mind, I just almost couldn’t control it. [music] For almost four hours, we were on the edge of our seats watching Alex make his way up El Cap, achieving something no human had ever done before. [cheering] Oh, god. [laughing] Oh my god. I’m so glad this is over. [music] Jimmy, how do you feel? Like a gigantic weight off of my shoulders, dude. That was a lot of stress for everybody. [laughing] [music]As an actor, Charles Martin Smith once played a fictionalized version of the real-life writer Farley Mowat in “Never Cry Wolf,” a sometimes strenuously realistic Arctic adventure. The role must have made an impression: As a director, Smith made “The Snow Walker” (2003), an Arctic survival tale also based on a Mowat story.
+Some of Smith’s feel for landscape and animal life resonates in his latest directorial effort, “A Dog’s Way Home,” which is adapted from a novel by W. Bruce Cameron, whose “A Dog’s Purpose” was made into a film in 2017. Not to break this particular puppy on some perverse auteurist wheel, but Smith also directed “Air Bud,” about a basketball-playing dog, and there’s a touch of that here, too.With just a few clicks on my computer or phone, I can order a rare book from San Francisco, a country ham from Kentucky or a dazzling box of chocolates from Vermont. I can track the shipments to the door of my New York apartment building, where I will receive them, marveling at our effortless access to almost anything we desire.
+That modern convenience, however, is denied to wine lovers who live in the 37 states that prohibit interstate shipping from retail wine shops. A consumer in a rural community , for example, with few good wine shops within easy reach, is forbidden to order wine from an out-of-state source with great bottles galore.
+This may change in the not-too-distant future. A case to be argued before the United States Supreme Court on Wednesday may decide whether states can prohibit retail wine shops from shipping to consumers in another state. A ruling might even affect access to small-production beers and spirits, although it's not clear whether it would extend beyond wine.
+The case, Tennessee Wine and Spirits Retailers Association v. Blair, does not hinge directly on the issue of interstate retail sales. It instead is focused on the effort of Total Wine & More, a national retail chain of almost 200 stores, to open an outlet in Tennessee. A group of retailers in the state sued in an effort to block the move, arguing that Tennessee law required the retail owners to be residents of the state.“It’s pretty much been a disaster,” Mr. Ramsey said. “This is evidence that they couldn’t actually make it work, but continued to sell them and market them for years.”
+Fifteen years ago, Mercedes-Benz, BMW and Volkswagen joined forces to develop “clean” diesel, as part of their effort to meet stringent new regulations on tailpipe emissions being put into place in Europe and the United States. By 2011 Volkswagen had built a growing following for its diesel Jetta, Beetle and other models, and other automakers raced to offer their own clean diesel models.
+Fiat Chrysler introduced diesel versions of its Ram 1500 pickup and Jeep Grand Cherokee in 2014.
+For a time, environmental scientists marveled at the vehicles, which offered power and efficiency for moderate prices while seeming to emit far less pollution than older diesel engines. But research at West Virginia University eventually showed that while Volkswagen’s diesels passed emissions tests, they released far more pollutants than allowed in real-world driving.
+In 2015, Volkswagen acknowledged that its diesel cars were equipped with software that activated robust emissions controls in testing but disabled them at other times, a revelation whose legal and reputational costs continue to reverberate. After that, the United States Environmental Protection Agency began looking more closely at other companies that made diesel vehicles, and Fiat Chrysler was one of them.
+In 2017, the Justice Department sued the company over the E.P.A.’s finding that Fiat Chrysler had used illegal engine-control software that turned off pollution controls under certain driving conditions. The E.P.A. contended that the software enabled the vehicles to pass emissions tests while allowing them to release higher levels of pollutants in normal driving, conduct the agency called “serious and egregious.”While it remains off limits for people in China, official media outlets like the Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily newspaper and the Xinhua news agency have used Twitter to shape perceptions of the country in the rest of the world.
+“On the one hand, state media takes advantage of the full features of these platforms to reach millions of people,” said Sarah Cook, a senior analyst for East Asia at Freedom House, a pro-democracy research group based in the United States. “On the other hand, ordinary Chinese are risking interrogation and jail for using these same platforms to communicate with each other and the outside world.”
+LinkedIn, the business networking service and one of the few American social media outlets allowed in China, has long bowed to the country’s censors. It briefly took down the Chinese accounts of Peter Humphrey, a British private investigator who was once imprisoned in China, last month and Zhou Fengsuo, a human-rights activist, this month. The company sent emails to both containing language similar to the messages it sends users when it removes posts that violate censorship rules.
+“What we’ve seen in recent weeks is the authorities desperately escalating the censorship of social media,” Mr. Humphrey said. “I think it’s quite astonishing that on this cloak-and-dagger basis, LinkedIn has been gagging people and preventing their comments from being seen in China.”
+Both accounts have been restored. In a statement, LinkedIn apologized for taking the accounts down and said it had done so by accident. “Our Trust and Safety team is updating our internal processes to help prevent an error like this from happening again,” the statement said.
+Image Peter Humphrey, a private investigator who was once jailed in China. LinkedIn, the business networking site, briefly took down his Chinese account last month. Credit... Frank Augstein/Associated Press
+With Twitter, Chinese officials are targeting a vibrant platform for Chinese activists.
+Interviews with nine Twitter users questioned by the police and a review of a recording of a four-hour interrogation found a similar pattern: The police would produce printouts of tweets and advise users to delete either the specific messages or their entire accounts. Officers would often complain about posts that were critical of the Chinese government or that specifically mentioned Mr. Xi.Mungau Dain, a tribal villager from Vanuatu who starred in “Tanna,” an Oscar-nominated film about his Pacific island homeland, died on Jan. 5 at a hospital in Port-Vila, the country’s capital. He was 24.
+Jimmy Kawiel, a former official at the tourism department in Tafea Province, which includes Mr. Dain’s home island, Tanna, confirmed the death. He said the cause was an infection, which was not immediately treated, that Mr. Dain had developed after cutting his leg in Port-Vila on New Year’s Eve.
+Martin Butler, one of the two directors of “Tanna,” said Mr. Dain had traveled to Port-Vila because he was seeking work as a fruit picker in Australia or New Zealand.
+“Tanna,” filmed mostly in Mr. Dain’s tribal village and the surrounding jungle, chronicles the fate of two star-crossed lovers who rebel after one is steered into an arranged marriage. The cast is made up of villagers from the area, all untrained as actors, and many play themselves.The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau chief. Sign up to get it by email.
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+Every year, The New York Times publishes a list of 52 Places to Go — a massive guide to great getaways all over the world.
+Last year’s edition included Tasmania, the area around Darwin, and Fiji.
+This year’s 52 also includes a few places in the region — Paparoa Track, New Zealand, and Tahiti — and two locations in Australia: The Northern Rivers region of New South Wales, and Perth.
+Many of you may be wondering how these places get chosen. Anyone who lives near Perth and the Northern Rivers (where officials were thrilled to have been picked) are no doubt curious as well.Showtime announced on Thursday that Gary Levine and Jana Winograde would become the new presidents of entertainment at the cable network.
+The move provides a new leadership structure three months after Showtime’s chief executive, David Nevins, was named the chief content officer of the cable network’s troubled parent company, CBS.
+Mr. Nevins essentially got the creative portion of the CBS job that used to belong to Leslie Moonves, the former chief executive of CBS who was pushed out in September after being accused of sexual misconduct by numerous women. In the months since then, CBS has made several executive changes, including the appointment of Susan Zirinsky as president of its news division this week.
+Mr. Nevins remains the chief executive and chairman at Showtime — the home of shows like “Billions” and “Ray Donovan” — and Mr. Levine and Ms. Winograde will both report to him.And they got it about half right. As refreshing a character as Raza is, and as crackling as the scenes in his milieu can be, there’s another chunk of the story — the cop chunk — that appears to have been beyond Haines and Noshirvani. For every cliché and leaden bit of dialogue they kept out of the story of immigrant life, they tossed one into the story of undercover police work and its toll on those who are condemned to do it.
+That makes “Informer” an up-and-down experience as the complicated, somewhat disjointed story barrels along. Considine, a fine actor in a dour role, plays Gabe Waters, a former undercover cop who now seeks out, trains and handles informants in the South Asian community. Powley plays his new partner, Holly Morten, who’s an equally overworked type, the female cop whose talent is matched by awkwardness and antisocial tendencies.
+Under pressure to find a terrorist leader thought to be in London, Gabe and Holly stumble on Raza when he spends a night in a holding cell, and pressure him into becoming an informant. He’s appalled at the thought of snitching. But the twist is that his natural charm and quick wits make him good at it, and as he gets deeper into the job during the show’s middle episodes, he begins to take pride in it.
+Just about everything having to do with Raza, as he insinuates himself with Albanian gangsters and disaffected Muslims, is fun to watch, particularly the scenes pairing Rizwan with Roger Jean Nsengiyumva as Dadir, another son of the projects who isn’t quite as polished as Raza. Not as good but still entertaining is the interplay between Rizwan and Considine, as Gabe instructs Raza in the undercover arts.
+That leaves the time-consuming but not particularly significant subplots about Gabe’s past undercover work among neo-Nazis (shades of the F.B.I. agent Stan Beeman in “The Americans”) and the problems Gabe’s workload causes in his marriage (Jessica Raine plays his wife). Those are the times for checking email.WASHINGTON — Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, reiterated Thursday that the Fed plans to evaluate the health of the economy before moving ahead with any new interest rate increases.
+Patience is the Fed’s new watchword, and Mr. Powell used it at least four times in his remarks.
+He said that 2018 was “a very good year for the economy,” and that the Fed saw signs of continued momentum in the latest economic data. Financial markets, on the other hand, have shown signs of anxiety about the economic outlook, particularly the slowing pace of international growth.
+“We have the ability to be patient and watch patiently and carefully as we watch the economy evolve,” Mr. Powell said Thursday in remarks before the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.
+He said the Fed would wait to see “which of these two narratives is going to be the story of 2019.”
+Richard Clarida, the Fed’s vice chairman, delivered a similar message in a speech on Thursday night in New York — including three mentions of patience.I should spend less time on my phone, but …
+Personally I’d say I spend about 1-2 hours on my phone everyday. The majority of the time spent on my phone is on Social Media and Music apps. I think if I wasn’t exposed to social media, and had another was of listening to music, I could go a year without a smartphone …I do think this article persuades me to give up my phone for a year because it showed me all the good I could do for myself and the world. The best examples given were the plant, purify, save, and heal. If I didn’t have a smartphone for a year, I would probably spend most of my time reading and growing my knowledge to do better in school and in life and going on adventures around the world.
+— Krystian30, Silverton
+The benefits that my phone has on my life is that I can easily get in touch with my friends and I can keep up with what’s going on with the world and other peoples life’s. Yes I think my phone does have a negative impact on my life. I am a very stressful person and I have heard that your stress levels go up when you use your smartphone. Also no amount of light hitting your eyeballs 1 foot away is good for eyes or your brain. I also tend to get really bad headaches from looking at my phone took much and that’s a major problem. Lastly I love my phone and the connection I can get with my friends over it, but I do think I need to spend less time on my phone and enjoy another persons company.
+— leialoha, silverton23
+I spend lots of time on my phone. On average maybe 30-40 hours per week. I am trying to cut down on the usage because I know I have more important stuff to do then just staring at my phone. When I heard what we could do to change this, I knew I needed to follow these …
+The benefits to not having a phone, (from my experience) is that you are in a better mood. You do more stuff with people and do more things that are active and healthy for you. I think it’s good to drop your phone once in a while to be more open. Open to the world, open to more activities. You are happier when not staring at your phone, and you are more talkative to a person. I think in general we should drop our phones for a week, and just experiment with the fun.
+— Madison2019, Silverton
+A year without a phone? I could do it.
+The benefits my phone has for my life is that I can stay connected with a lot of my peers around Oregon or my friends at my school. My phone keeps me entertained and helps me contact anyone at any time if its crucial or really important, it also keeps me in reach with my parents so that they know where I am at all times.
+But, the negative affects my phone has in my life is that it draws my attention so that whenever I have homework or something really important to do I don’t do it because I’m so focused on my phone. I make excuses that I don’t have time, but usually I roughly have 2 hours of free time to get all my homework done but instead I just go on my phone. Also, I do many sports and I always use the excuse that school is to hard or that sports are making it difficult but it really is just me choosing that my phone is more important than my education.
+So, yes I do think that I could go a year without my cellphone and that it would benefit me to get all the things I need to get done so that I can be successful as I get higher and higher at school.
+— Melia, Silverton23It will be hard to match the excitement of the N.F.L.’s wild-card weekend, in which the Colts won with an upset on the road, the Cowboys barely survived against the Seahawks, the Chargers invented a new defense to stop the Ravens and the Eagles shocked the Bears with help from a tipped field-goal attempt.
+Helping matters will be the playoff debut of the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes and the return to action of quarterbacks Tom Brady and Drew Brees. The Rams would also like to remind everyone that it was only a few weeks ago that they were considered Super Bowl favorites.
+Here are our predictions for how the divisional round will sort out, both in terms of who will win and who will win against the spread.
+Record against the spread in the wild-card round: 2-1-1Wrote Car and Driver magazine of its August 2018 test drive in the Jag: “It handles rougher surfaces well and, despite some enthusiastic throttle applications, never felt short of traction.” The review was headlined: “Battery Power Doesn’t Ruin the Jaguar E-Type.”
+Mr. Spires said a ride in Aston’s converted 1970 DB6 MKII Volante — successor to James Bond’s famous DB5 — conveys “an incredible sense of well-being.” It may not deliver the same soul-satisfying sounds and smells as a half-century-old original, he acknowledged, but silently cruising through winding country lanes in a vintage top-down roadster offers its own rewards.
+“We expect sophisticated global buyers, especially those who consider themselves socially and environmentally aware, to think more of Aston Martin,” Mr. Spires said. “This adds credibility to our value as a brand.”
+To be sure, electric automobiles are nothing new. Ferdinand Porsche unveiled the first hybrid-powered auto in 1900. Thousands of early electric cars, taxicabs, trucks and buses were built in the United States by firms like the Electric Vehicle Company. The hybrid Owen Magnetic a century ago, for example, used a gasoline motor to run its generator, a setup reminiscent of today’s Chevrolet Volt.
+Still, might not the Jaguar-Aston offerings rankle some purists as, well, heretical? “On the contrary,” Mr. Hagerty said, “it bodes well for the collector hobby.” Last year, for the first time, his firm recorded more requests for vintage-auto insurance quotes and greater usage of its valuation tools by Generation Xers and millennials than by baby boomers, he said.
+Something of a purist himself — he still drives the 1967 Porsche he restored with his father at the age of 13 — Mr. Hagerty added, “If this gives someone a reason to buy a vintage car for the first time, it’s awesome.”
+Even so, electric-minded collectors should brace for some sticker shock. Jaguar estimates something “in the region” of 300,000 pounds (a bit over $380,000) for a fully restored E-type Zero, and then about £60,000 (over $75,000) for a conversion.The American Psychological Association has released several guides for psychologists who work with people belonging to certain groups — members of ethnic and linguistic minorities, for example, or women and girls.
+It did not have a guide for working with males, in part because they were historically considered the norm. But in August, the A.P.A. approved its first set of official guidelines for working with boys and men.
+The guidelines, 10 in all, posit that males who are socialized to conform to “traditional masculinity ideology” are often negatively affected in terms of mental and physical health.
+They acknowledge that ideas about masculinity vary across cultures, age groups and ethnicities. But they point to common themes like “anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence.”“There has to be a crisis for positions to evolve,” he added.
+To keep alive any hope of passing her plan, Mrs. May needs to limit the size of any defeat next week, but it is not clear how she can. Concessions that she hoped might calm fears over the so-called backstop plans to keep goods flowing through the Irish border were dismissed as “cosmetic and meaningless,” by Nigel Dodds, the deputy leader of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, whose 10 lawmakers normally support Mrs. May’s government.
+In desperation, Mrs. May seems to be reaching out to pro-Brexit lawmakers with the opposition Labour Party by dropping hints that the government might accept amendments to her Brexit plan that would protect workers’ rights and the environment. She also made rare calls to two union bosses, though to no avail. And most Labour lawmakers would require a much bigger shift of policy to consider supporting the government, if they are persuadable at all.
+Another part of her strategy is looking less convincing by the day. Mrs. May argues that her deal, a fuzzy compromise that would maintain some close ties to the European Union, is the only alternative either to an economically catastrophic “cliff edge” rupture, or canceling Brexit altogether.
+But opponents of leaving without an agreement, the no-deal option, seem to have a good chance of blocking that avenue before the end date on March 29. On Tuesday they showed their strength by defeating the government over an amendment that restricts its ability to spend money on planning for such a departure.
+Adding to the gloom, Jaguar Land Rover said it would cut 4,500 jobs, as car sales have faltered not just in China, one of its prime markets, but also at home. The company has also complained about uncertainty over Brexit, which could pose a particular threat to automakers because of their complex supply chains.“I would like to understand what is happening,” Miguel Gutierrez said during his show at the Chocolate Factory Theater on Wednesday, looking comically lost and stressed out. He was speaking in rapid Spanish, with English translations projected on the walls beside him, as a baffled character in his own live, absurdist telenovela. At this particular moment, with dialogue flying among him and his fellow cast members, the audience might have wondered the same: What was happening?
+One joy of “This Bridge Called My Ass” — a dense, audacious and wickedly funny work that had its premiere as part of the American Realness festival — is the way that question evades any simple, stable answer. Mr. Gutierrez has long been a master of keeping an environment in flux, while somehow holding it all together. “This Bridge” contains multitudes and unflinchingly bears their weight.
+[Read about the making of “This Bridge”]
+Borrowing its title (in part) from the 1981 feminist anthology “This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color,” the work itself is as tangled as the questions propelling it. Collaborating with five stellar performers and the dramaturg Stephanie Acosta, all of Latin American heritage, Mr. Gutierrez set out to explore a perception pervasive in his artistic circles, one that links artists of color with identity politics and white artists with investigations of pure form (as if such a thing exists, as if whiteness were not an identity).
+At first, “This Bridge” reads like a sendup of a so-called formalist dance. As audience members take their seats, the performers are already engaged in matter-of-fact tasks, dryly reciting trabalenguas (Spanish tongue twisters) and rearranging objects strewn across the space: ladders, stools, laptops, power strips, swaths of pastel and fluorescent fabric. Stuff for stuff’s sake. Mr. Gutierrez fastidiously lays a pair of red mesh underwear next to a plastic fan. Evelyn Sanchez Narvaez bundles pink fabric draped from the rafters, as if drawing curtains.For a second time in eight days, Senator Bernie Sanders apologized to women on his 2016 presidential campaign, as he seeks to put behind him a series of damaging reports about the mistreatment of female staff members that threatens to undercut another likely White House bid.
+A political housecleaning appeared underway as well in the Sanders camp: Three top advisers from the 2016 campaign either will not return if Mr. Sanders runs in 2020 or will serve in different roles, according to people close to Mr. Sanders.
+One of those 2016 advisers, Rich Pelletier, who served as national field director and deputy campaign manager, was let go Thursday from the main volunteer effort trying to draft Mr. Sanders to run in 2020 after The Times reported on accounts that he mishandled concerns about allegations of mistreatment.
+Mr. Sanders’s two apologies follow several recent articles describing harassment, sexism and gender discrimination in his 2016 campaign, including a report last week in The Times and another on Wednesday night in Politico. Several of his top aides and advisers have been implicated; Jeff Weaver, his campaign manager, has said he would not return in the same role if the Vermont senator runs again.The speech on Thursday by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the American University in Cairo, laying out the Trump administration’s Middle East objectives, was strikingly at odds with a famed speech made by President Barack Obama in the same city nearly a decade ago.
+Mr. Pompeo blamed the prior White House administration for “fundamental misunderstandings” that “adversely affected the lives of hundreds of millions of people in Egypt and across the region.”
+Mr. Obama’s own speech in 2009 reads a little like an inversion of the Trump administration’s view. Here are some points of comparison:
+A ‘New Beginning’
+“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” Mr. Obama said, a theme that became the focus of much of his message to the Middle East. His policy aimed to “acknowledge the past” and work toward shared goals “based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”
+“Human history has often been a record of nations and tribes subjugating one another to serve their own interests. Yet in this new age, such attitudes are self-defeating. Given our interdependence, any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail.”
+Mr. Pompeo criticized the prior administration’s “reluctance to wield our influence” and asserted that under the Obama administration, the United States had been “falsely seeing ourselves as a force for what ails the Middle East.”
+“Now comes the real ‘new beginning.’ In just 24 months, the United States under President Trump has reasserted its traditional role as a force for good in this region, because we’ve learned from our mistakes.”
+Israel and a Palestinian state
+Mr. Obama adamantly supported a two-state solution, asserting America’s “unbreakable” bond with Israel while condemning Israeli policies that he said had undermined efforts to resolve one of the world’s most protracted conflicts.
+“So let there be no doubt: The situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity and a state of their own.” “Israelis must acknowledge that just as Israel’s right to exist cannot be denied, neither can Palestine’s.”
+Mr. Pompeo said little about the peace process and made no mention of a two-state solution, stating that the “Trump administration will also continue to press for a real and lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” Messages of support for Israel were woven prominently throughout the address.
+“We have adhered to our word. President Trump campaigned on the promise to recognize the city of Jerusalem — the seat of Israel’s government — as the nation’s capital. In May, we moved the U.S. Embassy there. These decisions honor a bipartisan congressional resolution from more than two decades ago.”
+Cooperation With Iran
+Mr. Obama opened the door to talks with Iran in 2009, acknowledging “a tumultuous history” and arguing that cooperation with Tehran was in the region’s interests.
+“Rather than remain trapped in the past, I have made it clear to Iran’s leaders and people that my country is prepared to move forward. The question, now, is not what Iran is against, but rather what future it wants to build.”
+Mr. Pompeo focused much of his speech on denouncing Iran, and criticized Mr. Obama’s willingness to negotiate with Iranian leaders.
+“Our desire for peace at any cost led us to strike a deal with Iran, our common enemy. “America’s economic sanctions against the regime are the strongest in history, and will keep getting tougher until Iran starts behaving like a normal country.”
+Combating Terrorism
+Mr. Obama did not use the words “terrorism” or “terrorist,” opting for “violent extremists” to describe radical militant groups who carry out attacks in the name of Islam.On Wednesday, Kevin Hart definitively ruled out hosting the Oscars on “Good Morning America,” even though he had been prodded to reconsider during an interview with Ellen DeGeneres.
+So who is going to host the 2019 Academy Awards? Is anyone?
+[Update: The 2020 Oscars will have no host.]
+It’s unclear. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has said nothing publicly about it and did not respond to a request for comment.
+What do we know?
+The Oscars are slated to be broadcast on Feb. 24 on ABC, a little over six weeks away. If there is to be a host, unless it’s a last-second reveal, one would have to be announced soon to get ready for the broadcast. The lack of preparation time is one reason Hart gave for not reconsidering the job.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+It’s important to make this clear from the start: They weren’t her feet.
+Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Democrat from New York whose outspokenness and progressive views have made her a target of conservatives, lashed out at the right-wing news site The Daily Caller after it posted an article on Monday showing a photo that had been falsely described as a nude selfie of the congresswoman with an emphasis on her feet.
+It was fake foot news.
+Confused yet? Here’s what happened. A photo that was apparently taken by a woman in a bathtub, showing her from the shins down, had been making the rounds on social media. A reflection of more of the woman’s body can be seen in the faucet. This led people to describe the photo as a nude selfie.
+By the time The Daily Caller had posted its article, the picture’s true origins had been uncovered, thanks in part to the sleuth work of a foot fetishist, an online photo gallery of celebrity women’s feet and a woman who traded sexts with former Representative Anthony D. Weiner.The 1970s, when New York City’s budget tanked and trash piled up in the streets, was a golden age of downtown performance art. And no artist shone brighter, or better commanded the street as a stage, or made more transformative use of trash, than Stephen Varble.
+If you happened to be in SoHo on a Saturday in 1975 you might have seen him suddenly appear, dressed in a robe made from chicken bones, tea bags and six-pack holders, for one of his “Costume Tours” of art galleries. And if you followed him — and you did; he was magnetic — as he led you from Leo Castelli to Holly Solomon to some poster shop or other, swooning with mock-delight as he went, you knew you were seeing something you wouldn’t forget.
+Then, within a few years, he was gone — rumored, when he was remembered, to be living uptown, reclusive, attached to a mystical cult until he died in 1984. Soon, for the amnesiac art world, he was gone entirely from the historical record, to which he has now, at long last, been restored by the exhibition “Rubbish and Dreams: The Genderqueer Performance Art of Stephen Varble” at Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan.Science fiction has become so central to our culture that it can be easy to take it for granted, but its modern form arose at a specific historical moment. During the genre’s golden age, which is conventionally dated from 1939 to 1950, its ideas were refined by a relative handful of authors, editors and artists — and its most immediate impact came through its illustrations. Out of the pulps emerged an entire visual language that relied on striking painted covers to attract newsstand buyers, and while it took years for the stories inside to live up to readers’ dreams, the pictures were often unforgettable from the beginning.
+This evolution is clearly visible in the magazine best known as Astounding Science Fiction, the most influential title in the history of the field, and in its sister publication, Unknown, which played much the same role for fantasy. Most of the art was produced by commercial freelancers in New York who collaborated closely with editors. The interior drawings tended to strictly follow the text, but cover artists could let their imaginations run wild. Thanks in large part to their work, science fiction in the midcentury achieved its enduring sense of wonder, and its images from this period may turn out to be the genre’s most lasting contribution to our collective vision of the future.WASHINGTON — President Trump on Thursday canceled his planned trip to the annual and glittering economic conference in Davos, Switzerland, citing what he called the Democrats’ intransigence on his funding request to build a wall along the United States’ southern border.
+Mr. Trump and congressional Democrats are at an impasse over the president’s request of over $5.7 billion to build the wall. That impasse caused a partial government shutdown, which has been going for nearly three weeks.
+Earlier on Thursday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he still planned to go to the World Economic Forum in Davos later this month. It was not immediately clear what made him change his mind when he posted his change of plans on Twitter.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+Scientists say the world’s oceans are warming far more quickly than previously thought, a finding with dire implications for climate change because almost all the excess heat absorbed by the planet ends up stored in their waters.
+A new analysis, published Thursday in the journal Science, found that the oceans are heating up 40 percent faster on average than a United Nations panel estimated five years ago. The researchers also concluded that ocean temperatures have broken records for several straight years.
+“2018 is going to be the warmest year on record for the Earth’s oceans,” said Zeke Hausfather, an energy systems analyst at the independent climate research group Berkeley Earth and an author of the study. “As 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year.”
+As the planet has warmed, the oceans have provided a critical buffer. They have slowed the effects of climate change by absorbing 93 percent of the heat trapped by the greenhouse gases humans pump into the atmosphere.Sometimes, though, you get a whiff of the bad old days, like a sudden glimpse of the seedy, pre-Disney Times Square. That was the perverse glory of the “Aida” on Monday. Returning for four performances after a starry run in the fall — followed by three more, with a new cast, later in the winter — the show stumbled from start to finish.
+Summoning a quartet of great Verdi singers — soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor and baritone — isn’t easy, but there’s no reason a major opera house should go 0 for 4. The tenor Yonghoon Lee fared best of the central foursome as Radamès, but apart from a loud, tightly ringing high register, his sound lost energy lower down and tended to thin into a croon at anything softer than a scream. Roberto Frontali’s voice lacked focus as it delved into Amonasro’s baritonal depths.
+The mezzo Dolora Zajick, who has been singing Amneris at the Met for 30 years, is, at 66, a wonder of longevity. But her once-mighty volume has faded, other than an occasional forced burst of blunt power, leaving only her stolid, vaguely querulous portrayal of this complex character.
+Making her Met debut as Aida, a role she’s sung around the world, the soprano Kristin Lewis lacked vocal fullness and color; her performance gave the impression of a faint pencil sketch of the part. (Sondra Radvanovsky was originally scheduled, but canceled on Christmas Eve.) The bass Soloman Howard, as the King, was the only one onstage with a dependably steady, clear, penetrating sound. This muted ensemble was presided over with brisk facelessness by the conductor Nicola Luisotti, who gave little sense of the majestic atmosphere that should fill the work’s civic scenes, nor of the urgency of the personal drama.
+It was a vexed evening all around. Ms. Lewis seemed to be nearly crushed by a lowering set before “Ritorna vincitor.” The amplification of the offstage priests in the Judgment Scene was distorted, resulting in weird sibilants blaring from above the proscenium. Even one of the horses in the Triumphal Scene bridled hard, all too ready to bolt the stage.The acclaimed jazz pianist and composer Ted Rosenthal was inspired to write the opera “Dear Erich” by a box of letters that sat in his attic for 20 years, untouched. Herta, a grandmother Mr. Rosenthal never met who died in a Nazi concentration camp, wrote the letters to her son, Erich, Mr. Rosenthal’s father, who left Germany in 1938 to attend college in Chicago. Erich did not know what precisely happened to his mother after her letters ended. For years, he was loath to talk about it with his children.
+In 2015, during a visit to his grandmother’s hometown, Mr. Rosenthal met a scholar who translated Herta’s more than 200 letters and fleshed out her story. This gave Mr. Rosenthal the idea for “Dear Erich,” a jazz opera, as he calls it, which was commissioned by New York City Opera and had its premiere on Wednesday at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Lower Manhattan. Presented with the National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene (which won raves for its Yiddish production of “Fiddler on the Roof,” soon moving to Stage 42 in Midtown), it’s a simple and fluid production, sensitively directed by Mikhaela Mahony.
+There are some compelling elements to “Dear Erich,” which has a libretto by Mr. Rosenthal and his wife, Lesley Rosenthal. Though it dramatizes situations and invents details, the opera tells the true, wrenching story of a decent son trying to start a new life in America but anguished over his mother left behind. The two-act work deftly shifts between present-day scenes of the aging Erich; flashbacks to his college days in Chicago; and earlier scenes in Germany, in which the headstrong young man refuses to go into the family scrap metal business, determined to pursue an American education.
+You care about these characters. And the cast is gifted. But the libretto (which has additional lyrics by Barry Singer, E.M. Lewis and Edward Einhorn) is proliferated with lame rhymes (“I need to go, I need to grow,” young Erich tells his parents) and often wallows in mawkishness. (“The darkness comes before the morning,” Erich’s wife tells him when he’s disconsolate).To the Editor:
+Re “Spring Is Coming,” by Margaret Renkl (column, Jan. 5):
+What a pity that Ms. Renkl, like so many others, appears to go through winter wishing for the next season rather than mostly enjoying the season that’s here .
+Spring has its beauty, but so does winter. Holidays aside, the air is crisp and invigorating; even in a big city there is a certain sense of quietness that descends; silent walks in the uncrowded parks give one a sense of peace; branches interlace in a choreography that is hidden by foliage in spring and summer; how wonderful to leave a theater or just take a stroll on a long, starry night.
+And best of all is the special silver light of winter; the dramatic and ever-changing sky; the deepening colors of the rivers; cardinals etched against the snow.
+Spring will have its day, but winter’s beauty is upon us. Enjoy!
+Ellen Shire
+New YorkPompeo takes shots at Obama’s Middle East policies.
+Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a speech in Cairo, declared that the U.S. would take a more activist role in the region. He also rejected much of President Barack Obama’s human-rights-based approach there, outlining an approach that is based on a close alliance with authoritarian rulers.
+Mr. Pompeo — whose remarks came almost exactly a decade after Mr. Obama delivered a landmark speech in the same city — denounced the former president for underestimating “the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islam” and his policies on Iran. Here are the many ways Mr. Pompeo departed from Mr. Obama.
+Confusion: Mr. Pompeo apparently sought to reassure jittery nations with his declaration that “when America retreats, chaos follows” and that the U.S. would “expel every last Iranian boot from Syria,” but the effect was confounding to many, coming weeks after President Trump’s impulsive announcement that United States forces would leave Syria.
+Go deeper: The U.S. has spent $8 billion to build a strong Air Force in Afghanistan but it is still struggling, which could complicate President Trump’s efforts to pull out of the country.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Michael Cohen: President Trump’s former personal lawyer, who implicated the president in a scheme to pay hush money to two women who say they had affairs with Mr. Trump, has agreed to testify publicly before Congress on Feb. 7.Meeting attendees also expressed frustration with what they said was the association’s response to the allegations against Mr. Fryer, who had been due to join the A.E.A.’s executive committee this month. After the Times article was published, the association issued a two-sentence announcement that Mr. Fryer had resigned, but made no other public statement.
+“The silence from the executive committee has really been deafening,” Jennifer Doleac, a professor at Texas A&M, said at Friday’s business meeting. “A lot of the profession is really waiting to hear from you, and for some semblance of leadership about the direction of the profession and what will be tolerated and what won’t be.”
+Olivier Blanchard, the association’s departing president, said for the first time Friday that the executive committee had asked Mr. Fryer to resign. He called that request “the best way out” because the association had no formal procedure to remove an elected officer. The committee, Mr. Blanchard said, is now working to develop such rules.
+Some members of the executive committee wanted to go further and establish procedures to punish or expel members for violations of the code of conduct. There are currently no such penalties.
+Other members seemed more skeptical of that idea when it was raised in a closed-door session last Thursday, according to several people who were there. Mr. Blanchard cut off discussion, saying he was hungry and it was time for lunch, these people said. The committee will take up the issue again in April.
+Mr. Blanchard, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, did not dispute that account. “The job of the person in charge of the meeting is to make sure that all issues on the agenda are taken up and discussed,” he wrote in an email on Wednesday, adding a parenthetical: “and yes, that people, including me, have time to eat.”
+He also said that he was “happy” that the profession was taking women’s concerns seriously, and that “I think the A.E.A. is playing a strong role” on the issue.Nike said in its own statement that the investigation was “without merit.”
+“Nike is subject to and rigorously ensures that it complies with all the same tax laws as other companies operating in the Netherlands,” the company, which is based in Beaverton, Ore., said in the statement.
+The Netherlands has long been a magnet for multinational corporations, attracting more foreign investment than Germany or France because of its business-friendly tax laws and its accommodating officials.
+Big companies have typically worked out arrangements with the Dutch Finance Ministry under which they minimized their tax bills by funneling profits to offshore tax havens with little or no corporate taxes. About €22 billion a year flows through the Netherlands to low-tax countries, according to the ministry, which did not provide an estimate of how much Nike might have saved.
+Airbus, Fiat Chrysler, Google, IBM and the Renault-Nissan alliance are among the corporations that have headquarters in the Netherlands. Nike’s European headquarters are in Hilversum, just south of Amsterdam.
+The Netherlands has come under pressure from the European Commission and Dutch citizens disgruntled about special favors for big companies. Officials in Amsterdam have responded by vowing to tighten rules that allow companies to camouflage profits as “royalties” and protect them from taxes.To the Editor:
+Re “A Woman’s Rights” (editorial series):
+As a reproductive health care provider at Family Health Options Kenya, I found that my efforts to resuscitate dying women and children were the most devastating moments of my career.
+I remember Jennifer (it’s a pseudonym), 21, who was 33 weeks pregnant, living in Kibera , an urban slum in Nairobi. “Please help; she’s dying!” her brother shouted as he rushed her to the emergency room, but it was too late. Jennifer and her unborn baby died there because of domestic violence. Jennifer died a preventable death.
+Every day, young women like Jennifer face inaccessible health care, domestic violence, delayed decision-making that leads to dangerous abortions, unintended pregnancy and criminal prosecution.
+And as if these series of abuses aren’t atrocious enough, women who do survive life-threatening abortions and miscarriages are increasingly being criminalized, from Guatemala to Indiana.To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Walks Out When Pelosi Says No to Wall Funds” (front page, Jan. 10):
+Much has been made of the fact that as a candidate Donald Trump promised repeatedly to build a border wall that Mexico would pay for. We should not forget, however, that he also claimed that nobody negotiated better deals than he did and that Americans would soon be winning so much that we would tire of winning.
+Even someone who isn’t the world’s greatest negotiator can recognize that demanding “I want this much money to do something you oppose, I will accept no less and I will give up nothing in exchange” is, in general, a terrible negotiating strategy.
+We have 800,000 federal workers either furloughed or working without pay , countless contractors put on hold, and millions of Americans already negatively affected by Mr. Trump’s petulant shutdown, all because the world’s self-proclaimed greatest negotiator is hung up on getting funding for a wall that he promised we wouldn’t have to pay for and most of us know we don’t need.
+If this is winning, Mr. Trump is right: I’m tired of it.
+Jonathan Maskit
+Granville, Ohio
+To the Editor:
+When are the Democrats going to realize that President Trump’s wall has nothing to do with border security? Mr. Trump is first and foremost a builder; for him, a wall is the ultimate vanity project. Hadrian had his eponymous wall, and the Ming Dynasty emperors had their Great Wall of China .Afterward, Diana Oh took the New Year’s Eve sex party as a sign. Just over a year ago, this multi-hyphenate artist rang in 2018 so near the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn that she wondered, when she got the address, if the secret party was actually at the theater.
+No such luck. But Ms. Oh — who is 32 and probably best known as the creator and lead performer of the protest piece “{my lingerie play}” — fondly remembers that evening as “very queer” and “super consensual.”
+And when, a week or so later, the Bushwick Starr’s artistic director, Noel Allain, invited her to make a work for this season, the confluence of events inspired her own sparkly revel.
+The Infinite Love Party, Ms. Oh’s contribution to the Bushwick Starr’s winter lineup, begins on Friday. Billed as a celebration of queer people, people of color and their allies, it’s a party, not a play. But there is a definite structure to the proceedings, and on Tuesday night, wrapped in a silky robe and with lacy black kitten ears on her head, Ms. Oh welcomed an invited crowd to a kind of dress rehearsal: a practice run with the same sleepover option that regular guests will get.MAZAR I SHARIF, Afghanistan — Violence in northern Afghanistan has intensified in recent days, with both Afghan security forces and the Taliban suffering heavy casualties, but the heavy fighting has failed to shift the battle lines.
+While many previous winters in the 17-year-old war brought a relative lull to the fighting, as low temperatures and snow set in, this year the fighting has continued amid stalled efforts to persuade the Taliban to sit down for talks with the Afghan government.
+Despite meeting repeatedly with American diplomats to discuss the withdrawal of United States forces from Afghanistan and the release of their prisoners, the insurgents have refused to meet Afghan peace negotiators.
+Instead, the Taliban have carried out deadly attacks in Balkh Province, a commercial hub in the north that had long remained one of the safest parts of the country, and in several neighboring provinces.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday defended its decision to lift sanctions on companies linked to the billionaire Russian oligarch Oleg V. Deripaska, despite deep concerns from newly empowered House Democrats that the move was an effort by President Trump to help an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.
+In a 90-minute classified briefing with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, explained the administration’s decision to lift sanctions on three companies controlled by Mr. Deripaska: EN+, Rusal and JSC EuroSibEnergo. He told lawmakers that the White House played no formal role in the decision and denied that the Treasury Department’s political appointees overruled career officials on the matter, according to lawmakers who attended the briefing.
+Democrats left the briefing unconvinced and unimpressed, and Mr. Mnuchin told reporters after the meeting that he would consider delaying the lifting of the sanctions so skeptics in Congress could have more time to review the decision. However, he did not indicate that he was rethinking it.
+Just hours before the meeting, the Treasury Department released a statement saying the administration had taken significant steps to ensure that Mr. Deripaska did not reassert his control over the three companies.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a major speech in Cairo on Thursday, rebuked the Obama administration’s policies in the Middle East and hailed the accomplishments of the Trump administration.
+“It’s the truth, lowercase ‘t,’ that I’m here to talk about today,” Mr. Pompeo said. “It is a truth that isn’t often spoken in this part of the world, but because I’m a military man by training, I’ll be very blunt and direct today: America is a force for good in the Middle East. We need to acknowledge that truth, because if we don’t, we make bad choices — now and in the future.”
+Yet Mr. Pompeo’s speech was not always accurate. Here’s a fact-check.
+What Mr. Pompeo Said
+“America’s reluctance, our reluctance, to wield our influence kept us silent as the people of Iran rose up against the mullahs in Tehran in the Green Revolution.”
+This is exaggerated.
+In June 2009, thousands of protesters took to Iran’s streets to dispute the election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and called for more political freedom, clashing with riot police officers. President Barack Obama’s response was muted, but he did speak about the “Green Movement,” or “Green Revolution.”
+“Like the rest of the world, we were impressed by the vigorous debate and enthusiasm that this election generated, particularly among young Iranians. We continue to monitor the entire situation closely, including reports of irregularities,” Robert Gibbs, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, said in a statement on June 13, the day election results were announced and protests erupted.(“Thank you to” is a phrase often useful for distinguishing entities winners feel obligated to thank — “Thank you to 20th Century Fox,” Rami Malek said in his speech on Sunday night — from those they want to — “I have to thank my mom and my family,” he continued.)
+So, who are the oracles who pronounced unequivocally that “Green Book” is either the funniest or most musical film of 2018?
+In short: Just some folks.
+The H.F.P.A . was born of the chaos of global warfare in 1943 when eight foreign-born journalists living in California banded together to, apparently, gossip privately about celebrities. (The H.F.P.A .’s website is vague: “At first, the members held informal gatherings in private homes.”)
+The lives of most of the founders remain obscure. By far the best known, a native Latvian who wrote a lengthy profile of Mussolini’s son-in-law for Esquire in 1937, would go on to publish a National Enquirer article titled “Space Alien Baby Found Alive, Say Russians.” He also reportedly lost an arm at some point between establishing the Golden Globes and his death.
+The first awards ceremony was held in 1944 on the lot of the studio that distributed the best picture-winning film ( 20th Century Fox and “The Song of Bernadette,” respectively), and it is this level of integrity that has characterized the Hollywood Foreign Press Association ever since.As the president fights to build a wall between the United States and Mexico, correspondent Azam Ahmed and photographer Meridith Kohut drove the approximately 1,900-mile border and sent dispatches from crossings along the way.
+In Tijuana, the border is a stage for political theater. The show’s producer? President Trump.
+A tourist takes a photograph through the border wall at the beach in Tijuana.
+Meridith Kohut traveled back to Venezuela, where she is based, to cover recent events. Adriana Zehbrauskas stepped in to photograph the final leg of the journey.
+TIJUANA, Mexico — A busy Friday at the Tijuana crossing between the United States and Mexico: Some 90,000 people stream across the lofted footbridge, a mix of tourists, shoppers, workers and students moving in a symbiotic rhythm.
+They spend, work and study on both sides of the border, with this back-and-forth flow happening in the face of arguably the most fortified part of the wall that sits between the United States and Mexico along the nearly 2,000-mile border.
+Reinforced walls have been a relatively recent addition to the local landscape. From the crossing between San Ysidro in San Diego and El Chaparral in Tijuana, one can see earlier, less foreboding iterations of the wall, like the one signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1993.
+Day 42 NEW MEXICO ARIZ. END Tijuana TEXAS MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN START Brownsville CALIF. Day 42 NEW MEXICO ARIZ. END Tijuana TEXAS MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+In the years since, the wall has been added to, adjusted and amplified — a living testament of sorts to the enduring and often political nature of wall-building along the border.
+On the immigration issue, Tijuana has long been a hot spot of political and media attention, a sort of stand-in for the border writ large, however mistaken the idea.
+And it was no different on a recent visit.
+Two sisters in the house they share with their family in Tijuana, just a few feet from the border wall. The family has been living there for 25 years yet has never been to the United States.
+Thanks to the arrival in the city of thousands of migrants, traveling in caravans for safe passage from Central America, and because of the hectoring focus of President Trump, Tijuana has attracted the bulk of attention.
+It has become the flash point and symbol for all that is happening along the border: the supposed chaos, the real desperation and the political crisis that has both bound and distanced the governments of the United States and Mexico.
+And so it was on a recent Friday that dozens of journalists, lawyers and aid workers gathered in the concrete plaza just outside the Tijuana crossing, waiting for the latest chapter in the border crisis to unfold.
+In an awkwardly coordinated effort, the American and Mexican governments had announced that they would start a “Remain in Mexico” program.
+The policy was aimed at forcing asylum seekers to the United States to return to Mexico while they awaited a decision on their application.
+The decision was sudden, and for migrants, devastating.
+Having endured the trek north, through routes brimming with thieves and smugglers, the migrants found that the road to asylum in the United States would end, for now, in Mexico.
+Pedestrians walk up a ramp at El Chaparral border crossing in Tijuana.
+The United States applauded what it called a binational effort.
+Mexican officials insisted, however, that the plan was forced on them and that they had no say in the matter, but that they would take the asylum seekers back in the spirit of humanitarianism.
+Those gathered to respond to the ramifications of the deal — reporters to cover it, along with lawyers and activists to offer counsel and assistance — filled the plaza in tribal clusters and waited for a returnee to pass back through the gates, which would be a repudiation of decades of asylum practices in the United States.
+Instead, the only thing that passed through the crowd was rumor.
+Someone heard that the first returnee was due at any moment. Within seconds, a line of journalists staged themselves in front of the exit. A family approached, carrying suitcases and small bags. They paused to look at the phalanx of journalists, then passed without a word. They were not the returnees.
+As the crowd waited for someone to come back, white vans were lined up in a parking lot, preparing to take another set of migrants across to apply for asylum.
+Volunteer aid workers stood pressed against the white metal bars, whispering goodbyes and shedding tears.
+They grew hostile as journalists took pictures, with a few of the volunteers shouting at the photographers to stop. These were asylum seekers under threat, the volunteers said, and they could be endangered if their image surfaced in the media.
+When that request didn’t work, the volunteers began sticking their hands in front of cameras to block them. A few tugged at camera straps. A Mexican journalist took issue with an American activist.
+“I have a right to do this,” he said in Spanish. “I’m following the law, in my country. When I’m in your country, I’ll follow the law there. But don’t tell me how to act in my country.”
+Journalists waiting for the arrival of the first group of asylum seekers to be returned to Mexico.
+His aggressor recoiled, and then claimed the high ground. She told the crowd she was prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice to save the migrants, who seemed to have no problem at all with the journalists taking pictures and asking questions.
+“I’ll take a black eye if I have to,” she announced, although the threat she seemed to be describing wasn’t immediately apparent. “I mean, I don’t want to, but it’s worth it to protect these people.”
+The standoff continued for a few more minutes, until the vans had loaded everyone up and driven away.
+The knot of journalists and activists loosened, and eventually, with no sign of any returnees, everyone left.
+Four days later, the first returnee, a bleary-eyed Honduran man worn from his multiday ordeal, would pass back into Mexico. Upon entry, he was whisked away by Mexican officials before he could be interviewed.
+If theatricality has become a reality along the border here, one could argue that Mr. Trump is its full-time producer.
+The language of crisis and chaos, however unfounded, has prompted a wave of coverage, especially in the United States.
+In Mexico, forcing migrants to wait months to cross and apply for asylum has left thousands in a state of man-made crisis.
+Some leave. Others find work in Mexico and wait for better days, or cross illegally elsewhere. A few have attempted to rush the wall, only to be beaten back with tear gas.
+Those images can lend credence to the border-as-chaos plotline — that the United States is under threat and that only walls and deterrence can protect it. That anyone, if given the chance, would gladly sneak across to make a new life in the United States.
+But where the border comes to its western end, where the wall dives into the Pacific Ocean and its barnacled stanchions split the crashing surf, another image prevails.
+A band plays on the beach in Tijuana.
+On the United States side, the beach is abandoned, undeveloped, barren. In the distance, San Diego is barely discernible in the evening haze.
+The entire beachfront on the Mexico side pulses with life. The portraits of misery and desperation give way to a Friday on the beach in Tijuana.
+A child runs in circles on the damp sand, screaming with delight as a small dog chases close behind. A group of hippies dance in a drum circle. Young couples saunter down to the water’s edge to snap selfies in front of the wall.
+Music rains down from the short bluffs overhead, as restaurants and bars begin to fill. Families spread blankets on the sand to watch the sunset. Beachfront stands sell sticks of grilled shrimp.
+An openness prevails. Amid the cacophony, a brass band begins a set of folk tunes, a sonic dissonance no one seems to mind.
+‘Protecting’ a wilderness. Trammeling it, too.
+Parker Deighan was one of the activists charged after trying to help migrants crossing a wilderness area in Arizona.
+AJO, Ariz. — "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."
+So begins Section 2 (c) of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a federal law that today protects some 110 million acres of land in the United States.
+It is also, today, being used to underpin a criminal complaint that has sent chills through the immigrant rights community.
+Day 26, Ajo NEW MEXICO ARIZ. END Tijuana TEXAS MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN START Brownsville CALIF. Day 26, Ajo NEW MEXICO ARIZ. END Tijuana TEXAS MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+Last year, federal prosecutors charged a group of activists with illegally entering the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona, a rugged area that spans some 800,000 acres of sepia-toned desert and pleated mountains along the border with Mexico.
+Their crime: entering without permits to leave supplies for migrants crossing into the United States.
+Four people from the group, No More Deaths, were convicted this month, and more face trial.
+Though not the first time the government has gone after the activists, the breadth of the campaign against them, and the use of the Wilderness Act, appears to be a first.
+A border patrol agent at the Cabeza Prieta wilderness refuge.
+Ordinarily, people caught wandering the refuge without a permit might be sent off with a warning or perhaps a summons. The Trump administration opted for the most severe approach.
+“The cases are on their surface about wilderness, but I think sitting in the courtroom and watching the trial really laid bare the fact that it’s not just about wilderness,” said Parker Deighan, one of the volunteers awaiting trial on a misdemeanor charge in the case. “It is about targeting humanitarian aid and targeting care for folks who cross the border.”
+In convicting the activists, a federal judge said their actions had eroded “the national decision to maintain the refuge in its pristine nature.” And “pristine” is a word that could be easily applied to much of the border area. Tracts of ridged desert populated by barrel cactus and giant saguaros that hug the skyline are untouched reservation land for 75 miles of the border.
+And yet a wall could be coming. This despite the fact that one already exists.
+The government’s action against the activists, whatever the legal merit, raises broader questions along the border, in particular here, where Arizona abuts its Mexican counterpart, Sonora.
+Among them: Who exactly owns the land and gets to say what can or cannot be done to it? Who can make permanent man’s touch on the wilderness, and who suffers for it?
+The ridged desert is populated by barrel cactus and giant saguaros. Much of it is untouched reservation land.
+A short drive from Cabeza Prieta lie lands held by the people of the Tohono O’odham Nation, which the tribe has occupied for centuries. Here, the trammeling of the land has been authored exclusively by the American government in its campaign to seal off the dry edges of the United States.
+“It is sort of a contradiction what they are doing here,” Verlon Jose, the Tohono O’odham Nation vice chairman, said on a recent tour through a section of the nearly three million acres granted to the tribe. “No one wants this wall, and they are saying they are going to build it anyways.”
+The tribe has occupied the land for thousands of years, since before there were countries to separate with borders. Its land once stretched from central Arizona all the way down to Hermosillo, Mexico, but geopolitics forced a retreat.
+Today, the tribe is fighting to preserve what’s left. Mr. Jose and others are in a pitched battle to halt the construction of any more walls on their land, which is a wilderness in all but name, replete with saguaro forests, untamed brush and tracts of desert arroyo and washes that flood every spring.
+The wall that exists now is a welded chain of X-barriers that form a straight line across the southern edge of Tohono O’odham land. To the side, a dirt road has been scratched out of the plains.
+Verlon Jose, the Tohono O’odham Nation vice chairman, at the existing border barrier.
+This was, to many on the reservation, already a sore point.
+More than 2,000 members of the tribe are registered in Mexico. Graveyards sit across the fencing in place now, accessible through a few unmanned border gates exclusively for tribe members.
+A new wall would upend nature entirely — from the unspoiled views across a landscape indifferent to borders to the animal life whose free passage between sides would end.
+“It’s our backyard,” said Mr. Jose. “There’s not just the physical effect of a wall. It’s psychological and emotional as well.”
+No wall needed: A shutdown can also bring things to a halt.
+The cliffs on either side of the Rio Grande at the Mexico-United States border are mirror images of each other in the Santa Elena Canyon. The Mexican state of Chihuahua is on the left, Texas on the right.
+BOQUILLAS DEL CARMEN, Mexico — The land here is indifferent to division, heeding no borders as nature claims both sides in its staggering sweep.
+The limestone cliffs soaring 1,500 feet over the banks of the Rio Grande are mirror images of one another on either side of the Texas and Mexico divide. So are the undulating hills that erupt into banded peaks. The waxy scent of creosote is everywhere.
+NEW MEXICO END TEXAS Tijuana Day 19, Boquillas del Carmen PACIFIC OCEAN MEXICO START Brownsville CALIF. NEW MEXICO ARIZONA Day 19, Boquillas del Carmen END Tijuana TEXAS MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+Still, the idea of the border has come crashing down all the same into the vast territory where Big Bend National Park runs into its Mexican counterparts, forcing both sides to yield to a political reality that trucks little nuance.
+In Boquillas del Carmen, a small speck of a town near the Maderas del Carmen park in the state of Coahuila, what tourism there was had come to a grinding halt, collateral damage of the monthlong government shutdown in Washington that just ended. The boats that ferried tourists across the river had stopped. Two restaurants that opened to serve a nascent industry were shuttered, for the moment.
+“The shutdown came in our peak season,” said Veronica Ureste, 32, a lifelong resident of Boquillas del Carmen, who sells artisanal products to tourists. She was standing in her kitchen as driving rain pelted her roof and intensified a general feeling of gloom. “We work during this tourist season to survive for the whole year.”
+Veronica Ureste, 32, feeds her 3-year-old son, Tadeo Mendoza, next to her sister, Carina Ureste, 26, in the kitchen of their home in Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico.
+Survival has been a relatively constant state of being for the people of Boquillas, which is nestled along a low bluff and is five hours from the nearest big town by alternating patches of paved and dirt road.
+Until tourism came along following the reopening of the river crossing in recent years, people were abandoning their homes to find opportunities elsewhere.
+Across the now-impassable river, Big Bend National Park, which sweeps over the southern edge of Texas to the banks of the Rio Grande, felt similarly forlorn amid a monthlong, partial government shutdown.
+Traffic had slowed there, too. Cars seldom pass. Campgrounds sit empty. On the most popular trails, tourists who made plans months earlier trudged through the natural habitat, equally frustrated and thrilled by the solitude.
+The nature of the land heeds no borders in Big Bend National Park, which sweeps over the southern edge of Texas to the banks of the Rio Grande.
+Phyllis and John Brewster were up early, hiking the Santa Elena Canyon in the sunless morning chill with a handful of other visitors. Mrs. Brewster glanced toward Mexico, and at the sheer rock wall that marked its start.
+Not much happening on that side, from what she could see.
+“There’s a natural boundary,” said Mrs. Brewster, 76, a retired elementary schoolteacher from Grosse Pointe, Mich., as she made her way up a walkway etched into the cliffs. “What the heck do you need a wall for?”
+John and Phyllis Brewster hike the Santa Elena Canyon in the sunless morning chill with a handful of other visitors.
+Mr. Brewster, a retired veterinarian and lifelong Republican, stood quietly, staring out over the flood plain and the narrow river at its center.
+“The migrants ought to know about this,” he said. “It’s a great place to cross the river.“
+Mr. Brewster wasn’t an obvious opponent of the current administration’s border policy. He voted for Donald J. Trump in 2016, a revelation that surprised even his wife. At the time, he said, couldn’t bring himself to go with a Democrat.
+Now, more than two years on, the scandals, the nativist language and the vitriol are just too much for him. He said he hated that none of his fellow Republicans seem willing to do anything about it. And he hates what he sees as the demonization of migrants trying to reach the United States.
+The boat that is used to ferry American tourists back and forth across the stretch of the Rio Grande between Big Bend National Park in Texas and Boquillas del Carmen, Mexico, floats unused.
+And now, here he was, in a nearly empty and unattended national park, bereft of personnel to police the border. Even the weather seemed intransigent — a dense fog refused to lift, practically plugging the canyon shut.
+The Brewsters did missionary work in Central America. They knew people there, he said. Good people.
+“It’s a travesty to close down a country,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “These people are escaping serious problems for a better life. All of our ancestors were immigrants at one point. To do this is a sinful act.”
+A frantic swim, a frigid river: ‘This is how you apply for asylum now.’
+An underage asylum seeker is taken into custody by the U.S. border patrol after swimming across the Rio Grande. The bridge connects Eagle Pass, Tex., to Piedras Negras, Mexico.
+PIEDRAS NEGRAS, Mexico — Stripped to their underwear, the small group of boys stood shivering on one of the bridge’s footings, pausing in the bitter cold to reconsider their crossing.
+They were nearly halfway across the Rio Grande, headed for Eagle Pass, Tex. Their clothes lay in a soggy pile to one side of them, discarded to reduce the drag on their remaining swim to the other side, where United States Customs and Border Protection agents lined the banks of the river waiting for them.
+NEW MEXICO END TEXAS Tijuana Day 14, Piedras Negras COAHUILA PACIFIC OCEAN MEXICO START Brownsville CALIF. NEW MEXICO ARIZONA END Day 14, Piedras Negras Tijuana TEXAS COAHUILA MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+Border patrol airboats circled nearby, passing beneath the bridge as the boys — most of them teenagers from Honduras — pondered whether to return to the frigid water.
+On the Mexican side, people lined the riverfront esplanade to watch, quieted by the spectacle of despair. Locals pressed up against the hand railings to get a better look. So did migrants, who were not crossing with the boys but wished them well.
+“This is how you apply for asylum now,” said Oscar Antonio González, a 21-year-old Honduran, bracing against the cold as he watched his countrymen’s trip across the river. He was not going with them. “You can’t make it across any other way.”
+Oscar Antonio González watched as teenagers tried to make it across the Rio Grande.
+Only one of the boys managed to reach the American side, in a final, frantic paddle. As soon as he reached the bank, he was gathered up by uniformed agents and whisked away in a S.U.V.
+The other swimmers gave up, boarded the airboats and were brought back to the banks of Mexico, where they had started and where ambulances now waited.
+Before a new border wall became the focal point of a bitter national debate in the United States, and the cause of what is now a monthlong partial government shutdown, most asylum seekers simply crossed the international footbridge that connects Eagle Pass with Piedras Negras. Migrants were allowed to enter, apply for asylum — and then wait for a decision.
+Today, border agents operate a checkpoint installed in the center of the bridge, which allows them to turn migrants back before they can enter United States territory.
+This leaves migrants with few options.
+They can go home, which few do, having come so far already. Or they can look for other ways across, often illegal ones.
+Ambulances waited on the Mexican side for some of the boys who didn’t make it across the chilly waters of the river.
+Mexico is unsafe almost everywhere it touches the United States, and Piedras Negras, a city of about 165,000 people, is no exception, despite notching some recent improvements in security.
+One asylum-seeking family from El Salvador was recently kidnapped here after it was turned away by United States agents, according to statements given to the American Civil Liberties Union. The family was forced to negotiate bribes to Mexican authorities before their release could be secured.
+It then took lawyers from the A.C.L.U. accompanying the family members for a second attempt at asylum before they were successful and processed at the port of entry in El Paso, hundreds of miles away.
+Most asylum seekers do not have the luxury of legal assistance, subjected to the vagaries of a system unevenly, crudely and sometime cruelly applied. And as the Trump administration turns up the pressure, their desperation has only intensified .
+But not their resolve.
+The desperation differs from crossing point to crossing point, our journey along the border has found.
+In some places, it's overcrowded migrant shelters. At others, its squalid encampments on bridges. Here in Piedras Negras, it’s children screwing up the courage to plunge into the cold water and the swift currents.
+And yet the migrants continue arriving at the border every day, some from as far away as Cameroon, traversing half the globe to find a new life in the United States.
+Oscar Lopez Elizondo, a former mayor of Piedras Negras, which, despite recent improvements in security, remains unsafe. A migrant family was recently kidnapped here after being turned away for asylum in the United States.
+But this part of Mexico is a good reminder that not all border stories run from south to north.
+In the town of Múzquiz, a few dozen miles from the border at Piedras Negras, the members of the Kickapoo tribe reside on a reservation granted to them by the Mexican government more than 150 years ago. Fleeing the brutality of American soldiers and marauders of the Old West, the tribes members crossed south into Mexico for safety, where they stayed and preserved their traditions.
+“The border protected us,” said Andres Aniko, the spiritual leader of the Kickapoo in the Mexican state of Coahuila. “It stopped the white man from coming over here.”
+The Kickapoo enjoy dual citizenship, and are allowed to cross the border without visas, though many are content to remain in Mexico.
+“We found peace here,” Mr. Aniko said from the tribe’s reservation, which is largely off limits to outsiders. “It’s one of the reasons we have been able to preserve our traditions. We were isolated here.”
+Goods flow freely. People? That’s another story.
+Asylum seekers who are waiting for a chance to present their case to American immigration authorities camp out on the bridge connecting Laredo and Nuevo Laredo.
+NUEVO LAREDO, Mexico – Thirteen thousand trucks a day. A million dollars a minute.
+That, on average, is the value of the cargo that crosses the border between Laredo and Nuevo Laredo on the United States-Mexico border.
+Here, between the two Laredos, the border is booming. Trucks loaded with everything from car parts to packaged food hum across a bridge that has been especially designated for commerce, making it the largest land port in the Americas.
+“We are the heart of Nafta,” says Edgardo Pedraza, the head of the Customs Brokers Association in Nuevo Laredo, who insists on being called Gary. “I think of the two sides as one Laredo.”
+NEW MEXICO END Tijuana TEXAS Day 8, Nuevo Laredo MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN START Brownsville CALIF. NEW MEXICO ARIZONA END TEXAS Tijuana Day 8, Nuevo Laredo MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+Gary himself has dual nationality, and is married to an American citizen. His children go to school in the United States, and the family has homes on both sides of the border.
+Geographically, the two cities practically run into each other, bisected only by the Rio Grande. Children cross from Mexico to the United States to attend school. Workers cross, too, as do shoppers, who return with outlet mall bags at all hours of the day.
+The outlet mall in Laredo, next to the border crossing bridge, seen from Nuevo Laredo.
+The two cities share a baseball team, and a history dating back a century and a half. Spanish is spoken on both sides, forging a cultural bond distinct to border towns.
+Neither side wants the wall. The river, for most, is border enough.
+But even here, there is a stark difference in the freedom of movement of goods versus people.
+Every day, hundreds of Mexicans, many with wives and children still living in the United States, are deported and dropped off in Nuevo Laredo.
+Migrants who have just been deported to Mexico are welcomed back in an orientation session at the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants.
+“We have grown so much with the United States in terms of trade, commerce and technology,” said José Martín Carmona Flores, the head of the Tamaulipas Institute for Migrants, a state agency tasked with managing the return to Mexico of tens of thousands of migrants. “But we have never really been able to achieve this with the flow of people.”
+Mr. Carmona had just finished a welcome session for deported migrants, a class of largely men haggard from spending a varying number of weeks in detention on the American side.
+Mr. Carmona spoke to them as a coach might to the players of a losing team. He told them they were special – not just anyone could make the passage north as they had done. They worked harder than most, clocking in 14-hour days in the United States, and Mexico needed them.
+“We can’t work like you guys,” he said.
+People waiting to apply for asylum stay at this overcrowded migrant shelter for weeks, sometimes months.
+“People may look at your tattoos, earrings or the way you walk and wonder what you’re all about,” he added, miming a tough-guy walk that elicited a round of laughter from the men.
+“The truth is, you guys are going to replace us, you work harder than we do,” he said. “And we need you. We need you to lift this country up.”
+A few faces crumpled, the men caught off guard by the kind words. One man began to weep. Afterward, Mr. Carmona sent them off to grab a meal before their bus trips back home.
+“Most of them, when they return, it’s their dignity that’s suffered the most,” he later explained. “Our job is to lift them up and tell them how important they are, to respect the sacrifices they made.”
+To help them acclimate, Mr. Carmona called in a pair of executives from a trucking company to register anyone interested in a job. With a nationwide shortfall of more than 200,000 drivers, the company promised good wages, at least by Mexican standards.
+Just past the American customs checkpoint on the Texas side, a torpid groan fills the air as tractor-trailers ease past in quick succession, destined for states across America.
+Trucks on the Texas side of the border.
+Drivers queue on the raised surface of a traffic island, waiting for their rigs to clear the booth and for the start of their shifts.
+“We need the U.S. and the U.S. needs us, too,” Jonathan Gamboa, a 29-year-old driver from Mexico, said one recent morning.
+Mr. Gamboa accepts his place in the order of things: He has a visa that lets him transit through the United States, but not live there. He could make a good living driving on the American side, but that was it.
+“Every day the merchandise crosses and I cross with it,” he said with a shrug. “And I’m O.K. with that. I just can’t live in Texas.”
+They were buried without names. Now some, at least, have recovered their identities.
+Anthropology students from Texas State University dig trenches in search of unmarked graves at the public cemetery in Falfurrias, Tex.
+"The Daily" is sending audio dispatches from this trip. Listen here.
+FALFURRIAS, Tex. – It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from the nearest border crossing to the town of Falfurrias, the seat of Brooks County, Tex.
+From the highway, Texas unfurls in wide sheets of scrubland, dense understories of small trees and thorny brush that rise in gnarled stands along the sandy plains. Patches of mesquite, blackbrush and huisache crowd the horizon.
+Like the border itself, which lies some 80 miles away, it is an unwelcoming place for migrants.
+NEW MEXICO END Tijuana TEXAS Day 5, Falfurrias MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN START Brownsville CALIF. NEW MEXICO ARIZONA END TEXAS Tijuana Day 5, Falfurrias MEXICO START Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+More than 700 have perished in transit through Brooks County over the last 15 years, claimed by heat and dehydration while trying to find their way along the parched tracts of ranchland. The real number is surely higher. The local sheriff, Benny Martinez, thinks only one in five is ever found.
+Migrants disperse here after crossing into the United States, avoiding a border patrol checkpoint. They trek through the dried-out terrain, seeking shade under the boughs of live oaks. Hunters occasionally stumble across hats, empty water jugs and leathered remains banked against trees.
+In spite of the risk, migrants continue to make the journey through the wilds of Brooks County year after year, carried along by hope. And every year, dozens die. No one believes his or her journey will end like this. They can't. Here, the dead do not teach the living.
+More than 700 migrants have died passing through Brooks County over the last 15 years, lost among the parched tracts of ranch land.
+For years, the remains were conveyed to the county cemetery in Falfurrias, then interred in the open space along its peripheries, often in plots too small or poorly located to sell.
+No one is quite sure how many were buried; until 2013, the county kept no records.
+But Eddie Canales, the founder of the South Texas Human Rights Center, has forced the remains into the open, hoping to rescue them from anonymity.
+Since 2013, anthropologists have been coming with their students to exhume the bodies and extract DNA samples. With no maps or records, they dig narrow trenches guided by the memories of local gravediggers. The samples are then cross-referenced with missing person databases.
+Of the more than 150 remains unearthed in this cemetery, 30 have been identified.
+“It’s for the families of the missing,” said Kate Spradley, a forensic anthropologist from Texas State University overseeing the effort.
+Dr. Spradley stood nearby as a team of students brushed the dirt away from a set of remains buried several feet deep. A worn trash bag, blistered by age, held the bleached bones stacked neatly inside.
+A worn trash bag, blistered by time, revealed bleached bones stacked neatly inside.
+Above that, packed into the soil, she spotted the faint traces of calcified bone poking through the grit. Another body. That made 16 exhumed in just under a week.
+The bodies tell their own stories, Dr. Spradley explained. One man carried photocopied money in his pockets to throw off robbers. Others are buried with stuffed animals. Some are buried clothed; others as skeletons, having died long before they were found.
+Each new discovery brings conflicting emotions, a sense of satisfaction tempered by sorrow. She wonders if they will ever find all of the remains.
+“You look around and you just think, ‘There’s an open space, there’s an open space,’” she said, scanning the verdant grounds, where fresh cut flowers lay against polished headstones. “And there could be a migrant buried anywhere there.”
+She paused for a moment. The sound of shovels striking dirt filled the cemetery.
+“I always think, you know, what if one of my family members went to another country and never came back,” she said. “Would anyone pick up the phone to help me? And if they picked up the phone, would they care enough to help me?”
+South Texas Human Rights Center staff and volunteers unload trucks after an afternoon spent resupplying water stations.
+Few did care here until 2013, when 130 bodies were found -- the largest number the county has ever recorded. It wasn’t that 130 died that year, only that, whether because drought cleared out more brush or out of plain dumb chance, they found that many remains.
+That was when Mr. Canales decided to come out of retirement to found the human rights center, after a career as a union organizer. A 70-year-old Texan with an easy laugh, he applied the same principles to human rights as he did to union organizing.
+“Developing a connection, basically,” he said, as he drove the public roads that demarcate thousands of acres of ranch land. “And then, you know, I mean, I'm still the same pushy guy.”
+Mr. Canales was on his way to replenish water stations that he maintains for migrants passing through. A little more work for him might mean a little less for the gravediggers. The large blue bins sit along the roadside every half-mile or so, and carry up to six gallons of fresh water. He’s planted a flag near most, to help migrants spot them from the brush.
+Arianna Mendoza, left, a staff member at the South Texas Human Rights Center, and volunteers Megan Veltri, center, and Laney Feeser, replenish water stations.
+Occasionally, people steal the barrels or puncture them to deter migrants. Canales brushes this off. “You gotta be able to laugh,” he said. “It’s the only way to do this work.”
+In the borderlands, of course, not everything is dark and serious. People live their lives as they do anywhere. Whatever the broader political debate, to most, this place is just home. And for some, it feels as though politicians who know little about the area are just trying to gain political points.
+“There’s certainly no crisis or state of emergency here,” said Phillip Gómez.
+Mr. Gómez was seated at the Jalisco Restaurant along the edge of the highway into town. The television was on over the bar, playing the highlights of President Trump’s speech in McAllen, Tex., about an hour and a half drive away.
+But no one was paying attention to that. The D.J. was gearing up for karaoke night. Regulars began filing in, introducing themselves to diners as if they owned the place.
+Phillip Gómez, right, sits at the bar in Jalisco Restaurant as, on the TV above, a paid commercial promoted Trump’s border wall.
+Mr. Gómez, a 64-year-old technician for DirecTV, sported a white handlebar mustache, plaid shirt and cowboy hat with a pair of sunglasses perched on top. He remained seated while he sang a slightly off-tune rendition of “The Chair” by George Strait.
+Afterward, he didn’t much care to talk politics, though he allowed that everyone else seemed to want to talk about the border whether they lived there or not.
+Then he talked about the border.
+He agrees with Mr. Trump, he said, and though he feels bad for migrants fleeing violence, that’s no reason to let everyone just come into the U.S.
+“Why do people have walls in their backyard?” he asked, passing off the microphone for the second time that night, after a second George Strait song. “Because they don’t want people in there. There’s no difference. Explain the difference to me.”
+Mr. Gómez, who speaks Spanish and whose great-grandparents immigrated from Mexico, doesn’t feel as if the system can bear much more.
+“I’m all for helping people,” he said. “But too many people are going to bring down our system.”
+The border can be an obsession. Or an afterthought.
+There are no fences or border guards where the Rio Grande empties into the Gulf of Mexico, at the eastern endpoint of the border.
+BROWNSVILLE — There are no signs, markers or commemorations. Just a languid river passing through, bearing the scent and sediment of its nearly 1,900-mile journey before it expires quietly in the Gulf of Mexico.
+A border comes to its end.
+NEW MEXICO END Tijuana TEXAS Day 1, Brownsville MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN CALIF. NEW MEXICO ARIZONA END TEXAS Tijuana MEXICO Day 1, Brownsville PACIFIC OCEAN
+There are no fences or border guards, no migrants huddled along its channeled banks. Just a few fishermen on either side casting into the low tide of an early morning, equally stymied by an indifferent catch.
+“Nada,” said Juan González of his quarry, echoing the deflated sentiment of his counterparts angling on the American side.
+For Mr. González, a gas station attendant from nearby Matamoros, the border was an afterthought.
+“I guess from here it’s pretty easy to cross,” said Mr. González, who comes to fish the river’s estuary twice a month and has never made the swim across. Never had any reason to, he said. “Here you don’t have walls and more walls like you do elsewhere.”
+As the sun burned away the morning haze, a large white surveillance blimp was visible in the distance.
+Migrant men get free haircuts at a shelter near Matamoros, in Mexico by the border with the United States.
+For José Jesús Espinoza, who sat at a migrant shelter an hour’s drive away in Matamoros, getting back over the border was all that mattered.
+His deportation from the United States earlier this week brought him back to Mexico for the first time in 15 years. The border now bisected his life, with his wife and three children still in North Carolina.
+He would cross again, he knew that much. Legally, if possible. If not, given the current impasse over the border and migration, a wall would not stop him.
+“We are going to cross one way or another,” he said, offering an incongruous smile. “I mean, we Mexicans have been doing that forever.”
+Just over the bridge, in Brownsville, Tex., Narce Gómez sat behind the counter of a hierbería, a store offering tarot card readings, statuettes of saints, herbal remedies and candles.
+Narce Gómez offers tarot card readings, herbal remedies and candles at a hierbería in Brownsville. Her clientele is largely Mexican-American.
+Her clientele is largely Mexican-American, a population whose predecessors carried their cultures with them across the border generations before.
+And perhaps that was the problem. There was a time, more than a decade back, when the lines of customers formed out the door to enter such shops. Nowadays, they are closing, one by one, as interest wanes.WASHINGTON — Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former personal lawyer who implicated him in a scheme to pay hush money to two women claiming to have had affairs with him, said on Thursday that he had agreed to testify before a House committee next month and give “a full and credible account” of his work for Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Cohen’s decision to appear before the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Feb. 7 sets the stage for a blockbuster public hearing that threatens to further damage the president’s image and could clarify the depth of his legal woes. Mr. Cohen, a consigliere to Mr. Trump when he was a real estate developer and presidential candidate as well as informally when he was president, was privy to the machinations of Mr. Trump’s inner circle and to key moments under scrutiny by both the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, and federal prosecutors in New York.
+He could soon share many of them on national television under oath. But potential constraints emerged almost immediately on Thursday when the committee’s chairman warned that Mr. Cohen most likely would be barred by Mr. Mueller from discussing matters related to Russia.
+“In furtherance of my commitment to cooperate and provide the American people with answers,” Mr. Cohen said in a statement, “I have accepted the invitation by Chairman Elijah Cummings to appear publicly on Feb. 7. I look forward to having the privilege of being afforded a platform with which to give a full and credible account of the events which have transpired.”“At the request of Congress,” Dr. Judd said in an interview after starting the new job, “we have prepared the Decade of the Brain, a research plan designed to bring a precise and detailed understanding of all the elements of brain function within our own lifetime.”
+It hasn’t happened. Despite billions of dollars in federal funding and advances in tools — brain imaging, genetics, animal models — the field has yet to deliver much of practical value to psychiatrists or their patients.
+“The problems of understanding the underlying biology turned out to be far deeper than any of us knew when we began,” Richard Nakamura, a former official at the mental health institute who worked with Dr. Judd, said in a phone interview. But, he added, “I think Lew would take credit, justifiably, for laying the groundwork for the advances that have been made, and for the work that is still to be accomplished.”
+Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a later director of the institute, said in an email that “the Decade had real value for morale and public communication.” It also coincided with the publication of the first Global Burden of Disease report, Dr. Hyman added, and together the two initiatives “helped make a critical contribution in educating policymakers and the public about the public health burden of mental illness.”I am a federal worker at the F.D.A. [Food and Drug Administration] with enough liquid savings to last for the next month or so, but there are plenty of federal workers who are early in their careers or have medical or family expenses who have already tapped those savings.
+Plenty of us are still working and incurring commuting costs — we’re just not getting paid. And we’re cleaning our own office restrooms because the contractors are not doing it. Those are the people I worry about the most, as they earn very meager wages to begin with and have no hope of recovering lost pay.
+— Kara M., F.D.A. employee, Frederick, Md.
+I have been a federal employee for almost 39 years. Not knowing if I can pay my rent or other household bills is frightening! I want the wall. I support it totally … But not at my expense!
+— Elenore Mary Maggio, Treasury employee, New York. Has savings for two months.
+I have five children and am a single father who has day care and preschool to pay for, not to mention a mortgage and basic necessities. My bills keep coming, gas to get to work still needs to be paid for. My creditors will allow me to miss payments but not without fees and ruining my credit.
+— Matthew F., Homeland Security employee, New York. Has savings for no more than two months.
+I was hired by the F.A.A. [Federal Aviation Administration] as an air traffic control specialist after over a year and a half of going through the hiring process. I was supposed to start Monday. I moved my fiancé e and me across the country, bought a house, only to find out that I won’t actually be starting until after the shutdown.
+— Tyler Lano, F.A.A. employee, Rochester, Minn. Has two months’ worth of savings.
+I am an air traffic controller in the New York City metro area. We can make it until February before defaulting on our mortgage.
+Having to deal with not receiving a paycheck while still working 50 to 60 hours a week is adding to the pressures of an already stressful job._________
+Updated: January 17, 2019
+Taking out college loans is one of the most significant financial decisions you may ever make. Knowing what you are getting into will affect how you live for years to come.
+Based on the costs of attending the college of your choice, the interest rate and term that is available to you, and your projected income upon graduation, the New York Times “College Loan Calculator” with its graph assists you in selecting your best college loan.
+The calculator also gives you the option to make voluntary additional loan repayments. If you could save $1,500 over the term of the loan by paying a mere $50 extra per month, would you consider it? Would you pay an additional $150 per month if that meant paying off the loan in 10 years instead of 30? These decisions have a significant effect on the total cost of your loan and how long it will take you to repay it. This is the kind of sensitivity analysis (see Stat Nugget below) you can do with the loan calculator.
+Maybe because students were trying so many loan structures in the loan calculator, we did not receive many headlines. We’ll be looking for headlines in the responses in the coming days. Use your creativity to create a catchy headline that will draw attention to the effectiveness of the loan calculator.
+You may want to think critically about these additional questions:
+■ Conduct your own sensitivity analysis. There are four inputs that you can vary: loan amount, interest rate, term and voluntary monthly payments. (See Stat Nuggets for explanations.) For federal loans, the interest rate until July 1, 2019 is 5.05% and the term is 10 years. Vary the loan amount or the additional payments to see how the payments are affected.
+■ Make a table with the 5.05% interest rate, 10-year term and no additional payments, but vary the loan amount. Include columns for the resulting monthly payments, total loan payments and recommended needed income. Which loan amount seems best for you? Explain your answer.
+■ You can make additional voluntary monthly payments to pay off the loan more quickly and thereby pay less interest. Make another table with the loan amount, interest rate and term held constant. Vary the additional payments, possibly an additional $10, $50 and $100 per month. See how the monthly payments, total loan payments and the recommended needed income change. Which additional payment amount seems best for you? Explain your answer.Cash sitting at home or in a regular checking or savings account is losing money, Ortega said, because it’s not keeping up with the rate of inflation. Let’s say you have $10,000. Determine how much you need to have readily available to feel secure ($3,000 for instance), put that in a high yield savings account, and invest the rest. “That money should be helping you make money,” she said. She recommends a 401(k), if your company offers it, or a Roth Individual Retirement Account (IRA).
+Don’t sleep on credit.
+“It’s true there are bad forms of debt,” Ortega said, like credit card debt that is rolled over month to month. “But good debt allows you to leverage and build wealth.” By good debt, she means credit cards that are paid off every month and on time, as well as federal student loans, which often carry a lower-than-average interest rate. How consistently you pay off these debts determines your credit score, and those who don’t have a good credit score (700 or higher) end up paying more in interest over time, especially on big budget items like a home or a car.
+When you file your tax returns this year, take the opportunity to request your free annual credit report and do a financial inventory. Look out for errors or old debts you can easily get rid of (like that $60 you still owe your phone company, for example).
+Budget for family support.
+“If you are sending remittances home and that is going to be something you do on the monthly, it has to be part of your financial plan,” said Ortega. It can also be a good idea to openly discuss with your siblings how you plan to support your parents, “perhaps setting up a separate account where you all contribute,” she added.
+A lack of financial literacy education means that many “end up making a ton of money mistakes over a lifetime that are extremely costly,” Ortega said. But investing for the future is “actually what creates financial stability over time.”
+Let’s secure the bag in 2019, shall we?
+Here are more stories to read this week.
+El Roundup
+WHEN THE NET IS CAST TOO WIDEI found something horrifying instead.
+Among other things, the trunk contained a piece of white cotton cloth, stretched over a stiff framework which made the cloth stand up to a point, and the point had a red tassel attached to it. Below that, holes were cut for eyes, nose and mouth.
+I knew right away what it was, having seen television news footage of Ku Klux Klan gatherings. I was almost afraid to touch it, because for me it was a symbol of pure evil.
+I was terrified that it might belong to my father, but I had to know, so I carried it by its tassel to my mother and asked her whose it was.
+She said it had belonged to my late paternal grandfather and my father was keeping it as a memento. I thought I was going to get in trouble for digging around in her closet, but instead she got her biggest pair of scissors and destroyed it.
+The hood was never spoken of again.
+— Susan HembreeKathryn Harrison’s recently published book, “On Sunset,” in which she describes being reared by her wonderfully eccentric grandparents in Los Angeles in the 1960s, is her fifth memoir. “Typically, when people hear the phrase ‘serial memoirist,’” I said to Harrison recently, “they think of Maya Angelou, who wrote eight memoirs, or Shirley MacLaine, who has written 11. How do you feel about being in that company?”
+Harrison, who has also written seven well-regarded novels, two biographies and a book of true crime, but who is best known for “The Kiss,” her controversial memoir about her four-year consensual romance with her father, replied, not uncheerily, “I’m O.K. with it.” But Harrison then recounted walking the Camino de Santiago, the pilgrimage in northern Spain which is the subject of memoirs by both Harrison and MacLaine. At one point during her walk, Harrison had fallen into conversation with a British man who was offering refreshments on the side of the path. “When he found out I was a writer, he said, ‘You must be here because of Shirley MacLaine.’ It was so insulting! I was not looking for my past lives!”
+A different combination of motives and inclinations prompts every serial memoirist to return repeatedly to the keyboard’s well-worn “I” button. If the searing emotionalism found in the work of most repeat memoirists (Angelou, Augusten Burroughs, Mary Karr, Jamaica Kincaid, Joyce Maynard, Frank McCourt, Lauren Slater) would seem to have been generated by forces other than those fueling writers who, at the end of, or well into, their careers, tack on a few autobiographical works to their oeuvres (Diana Athill, Gore Vidal), one quality unites all these writers. Their lingua franca is candor.MOSCOW — This was no ordinary shipment of tanks.
+The Russian Defense Ministry greeted it with a display of public pride, sending a crew from its official television channel to record the delivery’s departure from the far-eastern port of Vladivostok to a military base near Moscow, a trip that will take days along the Trans-Siberian Railway.
+They weren’t there to celebrate the latest advance in military technology. These tanks, dispatched from more than 2,700 miles away by the Lao People’s Army, are destined never to see combat again. They are T-34s, the design used by the Soviet Union in World War II and for decades after, returning home to star in military parades, museum shows and film shoots.
+As President Vladimir V. Putin promotes Soviet victory over Nazi Germany as a cornerstone of nationalist fervor, he has a pressing need for the T-34, which became a symbol of Soviet might.
+Squares in many Russian cities display T-34s, commemorating the war against Germany. Every year, at least one T-34 rolls over the cobblestones of Red Square during the May 9 Victory Parade.“Mr. Ronaldo has always maintained, as he does today, that what occurred in Las Vegas in 2009 was consensual in nature, so it is not surprising that DNA would be present, nor that the police would make this very standard request as part of their investigation,” one of Ronaldo’s lawyers, Peter S. Christiansen, said in a statement Thursday.
+Juventus declined to comment.
+Mr. Ronaldo and his lawyers repeatedly denied the rape accusation when it first emerged in October; Mr. Ronaldo labeled them “fake news” in a video posted on one of his social media accounts, and at one point his lawyers threatened to sue the German newsmagazine that was the first to publish Mayorga’s accusations.
+The magazine, Der Spiegel, said it had obtained confidential documents related to the case, and the purported payment to settle it, from the shadowy whistle-blower platform Football Leaks. Around the same time, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it had reopened its investigation into the alleged rape, following up on information it said had been provided to them by the victim.
+A number of the documents Ms. Mayorga’s lawyers say support her claim were published by Der Spiegel, which also published a lengthy interview with Ms. Mayorga. Mr. Ronaldo’s lawyers described the publication of the documents, which included a questionnaire Der Spiegel said detailed events that occurred in a suite at the Palms hotel almost a decade ago, as “blatantly illegal.”
+Mr. Ronaldo, now 33, was a star at England’s Manchester United when he met Ms. Mayorga, now 35, at a Las Vegas nightclub in 2009, just before his record-breaking transfer to Real Madrid. He invited her and others to his suite in the early hours of June 13, 2009, she said.For various reasons — we’re fighting colds, Times Square is stumbling through the usual post-holiday blahs, our colleagues in the Travel section just unveiled their latest sumptuous list of 52 places to visit — we’ve got globe-trotting on the mind this week. If you do too, might we recommend some short stories from Argentina? Or a new bayou murder mystery from James Lee Burke? A novel about Somali immigrants in Norway, or a collection of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s precise character studies of expats and emigrants? You’ll find all of those below, along with Paul Collier’s nonfiction book about retaining a sense of community in a globalized world. Closer to home, we offer a couple of food memoirs, and a natural history of the domestic biome that may have you urgently planning your next vacation to a technologically engineered cleanroom facility with a protective suit and a book. The cleanroom would be a mistake, our review makes clear. But a book is always a good idea.
+Gregory Cowles
+Senior Editor, Books
+MOUTHFUL OF BIRDS: Stories, by Samanta Schweblin. Translated by Megan McDowell. (Riverhead, $26.) This collection by the Argentine writer Samanta Schweblin, among the most acclaimed Spanish-language writers of her generation, has the surrealist echoes of her contemporaries Kelly Link and Jesse Ball. “But, to me, her true ancestor could only be David Lynch; her tales are woven out of dread, doubles and confident loose ends,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “Her stories are obsessed with notions of purity and danger; with the ways people can be deformed, very early on, in the name of tenderness, teaching and care.”
+THE NEW IBERIA BLUES, by James Lee Burke. (Simon & Schuster, $27.99.) In the latest Dave Robicheaux mystery, Burke’s lawman hero contends with multiple visitors to his Louisiana bayou parish: a murderer fleeing prison; a Hollywood director returning to his roots for a movie; a woman nailed to a wooden cross that washes up from the bay. It’s brutal and chaotic, but engrossing. “Does anyone really read Burke expecting a coherent narrative? We’re hanging on for Robicheaux’s pensées,” Marilyn Stasio writes in her crime column. “We’re keeping an eye out for vivid characters. … Maybe most of all, we’re waiting for those angry outbursts when Robicheaux lets it rip.”
+NORTH OF DAWN, by Nuruddin Farah. (Riverhead, $27.) The war between the middle-aged Somali couple in Farah’s new novel, set in middle-class Norway, is a proxy for the global clash between fundamentalism and secularism. “In the hands of a younger, brasher novelist, we might expect high drama, but here, instead, is a nuanced, quietly devastating family soap opera,” our reviewer, Melanie Finn, writes. Farah “uses the intimate as allegory for the national. If we cannot understand why a family falls apart, then neither can we understand why a nation does — a truth those of us weary from holiday-dinner-table political arguments may appreciate.”A third grader was having one of his meltdown days. He was throwing food in the lunchroom and cursing out everyone in sight. At most schools, this child would be out the door — suspended or expelled — but P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, known as the Island School, does things differently.
+The guidance counselor, Eddy Polanco, took the 8-year-old in hand, and over several months the boy came to recognize when he was about to blow a gasket. Then, with the school’s blessing, he’d take a walk until he calmed down. “That’s my coping skill,” he told Mr. Polanco.
+Such out-of-control moments are not uncommon at this school, which has about 500 students from prekindergarten through eighth grade. There’s a ready explanation — nearly half are homeless, living at a shelter across the street. “Most of the kids have strong emotional trauma,” the principal, Suany Ramos, told me. “We need to stabilize a child emotionally before we can work on the academics.”
+Island School is one of 247 “community schools” in New York. These are regular public schools, with a twist . They have longer days and longer school years: Island stays open 12 hours a day, six days a week, including spring and winter breaks as well as the summer. A psychologist makes weekly rounds. A dentist comes by regularly. So does an optometrist, and students who need glasses get them free. (The retailer Warby Parker donates the glasses, a good example of a public-private partnership.)In Isold Uggadottir’s new film, “And Breathe Normally,” a young boy (Patrik Nokkvi Petursson) and his mother, Lara (Kristin Thora Haraldsdottir), are looking at cats in an animal shelter when he asks her, “Why do they have to live in cages?”
+This innocent yet sincere question, about which he is persistent, ultimately stumps the impatient Lara but prompts both her and the audience to consider why we’ve come to accept common practices so morally unjust that even a child can detect them.
+The boy’s query — “Why do they have to live in cages?” — lies at the core of this quiet Icelandic film, now streaming on Netflix, in which Lara, a border control officer, learns what it means to be at the mercy of the law after she and her son, Eldar, are evicted and forced to sleep in their car.
+At work, where Lara has the power to reject or deny entry for migrants, she declines passage to Adja (Babetida Sadjo), a woman from Guinea who is traveling with her daughter and sister. The decision leads Lara to confront her privilege when she later finds she must accept help from someone she least expects: Adja, now living in a refugee center, who sneaks in Lara and Eldar so that they can have a warm bed.“We can declare a national emergency,” Mr. Trump said. “We shouldn’t have to.”
+Later, standing just by the Rio Grande with military vehicles and border agents as his backdrop, he said he would consider a compromise that would allow undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, often known as Dreamers, to maintain legal status they lost when he ended the Obama-era program that protected them.
+“I would like to do a much broader form of immigration,” Mr. Trump said. “We could help the Dreamers.”
+Only hours earlier, Mr. Pence had rejected such a deal, saying the president wanted to wait until the Supreme Court ruled this spring on whether the program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, was constitutional. “No wall, no deal,” Mr. Pence declared in a briefing with reporters on Capitol Hill. “We’re going to keep standing strong, keep standing firm.”
+The vice president faulted the Democrats, but he has essentially blocked potential solutions for the impasse. He has made it clear that Mr. Trump would not drop his insistence on funding for a wall on the southwestern border, which Democrats have branded a nonstarter.
+Mr. Pence also indicated that the president was disinclined to accept the idea behind a bipartisan plan that had been under discussion in the Senate that would trade wall funding for legal status for undocumented immigrants facing the threat of deportation, including the Dreamers and people who previously held Temporary Protected Status.
+Privately, he told Mr. Graham’s group that the president also would not support a proposal that would reopen the government for three weeks while Republicans and Democrats work to hash out a broader legislative deal on the wall and temporary grants of legal status for the two groups.When it came to sharing fake news on Facebook during the 2016 election, no age group was quite as active as those aged 65 and older, according to a new study.
+The study, published Wednesday in Science Advances, quantifies how aggressive seniors were in spreading misinformation, though the findings suggest that sharing such stories was relatively rare.
+On average, American Facebook users aged 65 and older posted seven times as many articles from fake news websites as adults 29 and younger, according to the study. And that was true regardless of ideology, education level or political affiliation: Older users just tended to share misinformation more.
+But before you blame America’s seniors for distorting political discourse, note the study’s main finding: Sharing articles from such disreputable sources was actually pretty uncommon.Something is happening out there, and astronomers sure wish they knew what it was.
+For the last several years, they have been teased and baffled by mysterious bursts of radio waves from the distant universe: pops of low-frequency radiation, emitting more energy than the sun does in a day, that occur randomly and disappear immediately. Nobody knows when these “fast radio bursts,” or F.R.B.s, will occur, or where exactly in the cosmos they are occurring.
+More than 60 of these surprise broadcasts have been recorded so far. About the only thing astronomers agree on is that these signals probably are not extraterrestrials saying hello.
+So it was big news a year ago when scientists found a repeating radio burster and tracked it to a dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years from Earth. Subsequent observations suggested that the burst was generated by extremely powerful magnetic fields, most likely ruling out lasers from alien spaceships.
+Now a group of astronomers from several Canadian universities have announced the discovery of a second radio repeater. The repeating bursts appeared last summer almost as soon as the team turned on and began tuning up a new telescope, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, or Chime, in British Columbia. The team announced the discovery in a pair of papers in Nature, and in a news conference at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle on Jan. 9.And more: Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has done live conversations that include both cooking tips and policy pronouncements, has posted stories of her congressional experience the way others post vacation or holiday or food photos and has clapped back expertly in pithy tweets at whatever gets dished out at her by the right.
+What she is doing is significant for politics, because of one key thing: She has made digital depictions of herself seem very analog. In other words, she is perfectly human online.
+The ability to take your message and yourself directly to people is perhaps one of this era’s most important talents. In this, as much as she’d hate to admit it, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is following in the footsteps of President Trump.
+I recently wrote a column about how Mr. Trump had been using social media to govern, noting that “we are now a government of the Twitter, by the Twitter and for the Twitter.” That’s even truer this week, as the government shutdown has dragged on and Mr. Trump has taken to Twitter to provide running commentary of the situation and also to make threats, attack foes, lob fact-free water balloons and generally conduct a bizarre play-by-play of his state of mind. After his television appearance this week to demand funding for his fantasy wall was widely panned as lackluster, he doubled down on tweets to make his ALL-CAPS points.
+What’s interesting about Mr. Trump’s digital efforts is that even though he is always online, he is not Extremely Online. Rather than fully engaging with the platforms and employing their nifty audio and video tools, he has stuck to text, using his own set of locutions and his own distinctive voice. While at first this made him seem, to many supporters at least, more authentic than the average politician, it is now making him look more and more like a giant cartoon bobblehead. The internet is not making him more of a person.In an increasingly visual age, how you look is part of the message you are communicating. That photo of Ms. Pelosi in an orange coat and dark glasses is more effective than any logo at communicating women’s relish at being on the front lines. (The director Barry Jenkins even put it on a sweatshirt , which he is giving away.)
+I don’t think there’s any question Ms. Pelosi picked a hot pink dress for her swearing-in both because she knew it would make her stand out in what was still a room full of dark suits, and because of the symbolic nature of the occasion: a color traditionally associated with delicate femininity had become a color associated with a seat of power. That’s a strategic and savvy choice, and to take notice of it is to acknowledge the multidimensional chess game Ms. Pelosi is playing, not to demean her.
+Image Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Erin Schaff for The New York Times
+We make instant judgments about each other based on image all the time. It’s human instinct, and part of how we decide if someone is “likable” or “believable” or a “leader,” and it’s part of the way our leaders try to influence our feelings about them.
+This is true for both men and women. A good friend of mine, a man who is a political crisis consultant (like Olivia Pope on “Scandal”), once told me I would not believe the amount of time he has devoted to discussing tie colors with clients (at their request) when they could have been talking about, say, a peace process.
+To ignore how public figures use what they wear is to ignore one of the ways our own understanding is being manipulated. I consider it part of my job as The Times’s chief fashion critic to help readers understand how fashion is being used to communicate, in the same way Andrew Ross Sorkin helps us understand economic policy.
+Admittedly, if this context is missing, that’s our mistake; if we are going to use clothes as a signpost of related substance, that connection should be clear. (That is why we deleted our tweet that referred to Ms. Pelosi’s dress: The context was missing.)Our guide to stand-up, improv and variety shows happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+BROOKLYN PODCAST FESTIVAL at various locations (Jan. 10-13). Podcasting has become so popular and omnipresent that we’re seeing more festivals devoted to allowing live audiences to get in on the action. This weekend at Brooklyn clubs such as the Bell House and Union Hall, there will be the first-ever live event for the website Jezebel’s “Dirtcast” featuring Aja from “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” sessions for NPR’s “Ask Me Another” and “Pop Culture Happy Hour,” Vulture’s “Good One” with special guest Julie Klausner, and “The Unofficial Expert” hosted by Marie Faustin and Sydnee Washington.
+cityfarmpresents.com/bkpodfestOur guide to the city’s best classical music and opera happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+JULIA BULLOCK at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Jan. 16-17, 8 p.m.). Bullock’s extraordinary, socially conscious residency at the Met continues with “Perle Noire,” programs of Josephine Baker songs arranged with typical imagination by the composer Tyshawn Sorey. Directed by Zack Winokur, with text by Claudia Rankine and choreography by Michael Schumacher, the programs are set on the steps of the museum’s Great Hall and feature the International Contemporary Ensemble.
+212-535-7710, metmuseum.orgOur guide to pop and rock shows and the best of live jazz happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+Pop & Rock
+BIG FREEDIA at Brooklyn Bowl (Jan. 11-12, 11:59 p.m.). The latest EP, “3rd Ward Bounce,” from New Orleans’s best-known bounce ambassador surges with a high-energy vibe, which concertgoers can expect to be in full force at these shows. And the late hour should enhance the performances, loosening the audience’s inhibitions and encouraging people from all backgrounds to twerk to the irresistible rap-dance blend. Bounce has had a notable influence on a number of recent pop hits, including Drake’s “Nice for What” and Beyoncé’s “Formation,” both of which feature Freedia.
+718-963-3369, brooklynbowl.com
+KATE BOLLINGER at Trans-Pecos (Jan. 12, 8 p.m.). This singer-songwriter from Charlottesville, who hasn’t yet graduated from the University of Virginia, makes delicate, R&B-tinged pop; her most recent song, “Tests,” sounds like a lullaby, but nearly imperceptible electronic percussion gives it some unexpected flair. She is joined on the bill by two other similarly minded artists, each abstractly confessional with guitars in tow: Caroline Schuck is a local who sings compellingly about identity crises; Grace Ludmila veers more toward dream pop. The bill’s gritty foil to these three performers is the experimental banjo player Gouox.
+thetranspecos.com‘LILIANA PORTER: OTHER SITUATIONS’ at El Museo del Barrio (through Jan. 27). This exquisite survey of 35 objects, installations and video by this Argentinian-born American artist covers nearly half a century, but feels unanchored by time and gravity. In pieces from the early 1970s, Porter adds spare pencil lines to a photographs of her own face as if to challenge optical perception: Which is more real, the artist or the artist’s mark? Later, she began assembling and photographing groups of toys and figurines found in flea markets and antiques shops to tease out political puzzles. And despite a witty use of miniaturist scale, cruelty and loss run through the work. In the 2009 video “Matinee,” tabletop statuettes live tragic lives: A ceramic child is suddenly beheaded by a hammer. (Cotter)
+212-831-7272, elmuseo.org
+‘POSING MODERNITY: THE BLACK MODEL FROM MANET AND MATISSE TO TODAY’ at Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University (through Feb. 10). This landmark show uses a new lens on 19th-century French art history. Progressiveness — both artistic and social — is measured by the way black women are depicted in the paintings of the period; this yardstick is also applied to subsequent generations of European, American and African artists. A revelatory thesis, brilliantly executed. (Smith)
+212-854-6800, wallach.columbia.edu
+‘STERLING RUBY: CERAMICS’ at the Museum of Art and Design (through March 17). Adept at most art mediums, this artist is at his best in ceramics, especially in the outsize, awkwardly hand-built, resplendently glazed baskets, ashtrays and plates and the objects that verge on sculpture in this show. These works actively incorporate accident and aspects of the ready-made, have precedents in the large-scale ceramics of Peter Voulkos and Viola Frey, but may be closest in spirit to the Neo-Expressionism of Julian Schnabel — rehabilitated, of course. (Smith)
+212-299-7777, madmuseum.org
+‘SCENES FROM THE COLLECTION’ at the Jewish Museum. After a surgical renovation to its grand pile on Fifth Avenue, the Jewish Museum has reopened its third-floor galleries with a rethought, refreshed display of its permanent collection, which intermingles 4,000 years of Judaica with modern and contemporary art by Jews and gentiles alike — Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and the excellent young Nigerian draftswoman Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze. The works are shown in a nimble, nonchronological suite of galleries, and some of its century-spanning juxtapositions are bracing; others feel reductive, even dilettantish. But always, the Jewish Museum conceives of art and religion as interlocking elements of a story of civilization, commendably open to new influences and new interpretations. (Farago)
+212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org
+‘SOUL OF A NATION: ART IN THE AGE OF BLACK POWER’ at the Brooklyn Museum (through Feb. 3). It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in the land. But that day’s not arriving any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s when civil rights became law that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki-torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a battle cry? Actually, African-Americans were able to see such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better. And no artists have responded to that history-that-won’t-go-away more powerfully than black artists have. More than 60 of them appear in this big, beautiful, passionate show of art that functioned as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon. (Cotter)
+718-638-8000, brooklynmuseum.org
+‘ANDY WARHOL — FROM A TO B AND BACK AGAIN’ at the Whitney Museum of American Art (through March 31). Although this is the artist’s first full American retrospective in 31 years, he’s been so much with us — in museums, galleries, auctions — as to make him, like wallpaper, like the atmosphere, only half-noticed. The Whitney show restores him to a full, commanding view, but does so in a carefully shaped and edited way, with an emphasis on very early and late work. Despite the show’s monumentalizing size, it’s a human-scale Warhol we see. Largely absent is the artist-entrepreneur who is taken as a prophet of our market-addled present. What we have instead is Warhol for whom art, whatever else it was, was an expression of personal hopes and fears. (Cotter)
+212-570-3600, whitney.orgHAPPY HIBERNATIONS! at the Staten Island Children’s Museum (Jan. 12, noon). Sleeping is certainly an appealing way to get through the winter. For certain species, though, hibernation is also a matter of survival. This program, part of the museum’s Con Edison Second Saturday Science! series, will focus on a variety of adaptations, including growing thicker coats and storing food caches, that enable wildlife to weather the cold months. It will focus particularly on the American beaver and the gray wolf, as well as native reptiles and birds. In addition to examining creatures’ pelts and bones, young participants will see some live animals from the Staten Island Zoo. (Space is limited.)
+718-273-2060, sichildrensmuseum.org
+HOLIDAY TRAIN SHOW AND ‘ALL ABOARD WITH THOMAS & FRIENDS’ at the New York Botanical Garden (through Jan. 21). Trains move in and out of New York all the time, but some that are traveling in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx these days aren’t your usual subway and commuter lines, offering mundane views (or none at all). In this garden’s conservatory, model locomotives zoom along almost a half-mile of track among miniature re-creations of city landmarks made from twigs, leaves, bark, pine cones, fruit and other natural materials. Created by Applied Imagination, the exhibition this year includes Lower Manhattan sites like the 1913 Woolworth Building and One World Trade Center, as well as early-1900s ferries. On weekends and Jan. 21, the garden offers a theatrical journey, too: Special tickets include the train show and a performance of “All Aboard With Thomas & Friends” (this Saturday and Sunday at 9 and 11 a.m. and 1:30 and 3:30 p.m.). Starring Driver Sam and Thomas the Tank Engine of storybook and television fame, this singalong musical enlists little audience members in “Thomas’ Budding Adventure,” helping the engine learn how to cultivate a garden.
+718-817-8700, nybg.orgOur guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.
+Previews and Openings
+‘THE CONVENT’ at A.R.T./New York Theaters (previews start on Jan. 16; opens on Jan. 24). A girls’ trip with monastic overtones, Jessica Dickey’s new play goes on retreat with a group of women trying to live like medieval nuns (though likely practicing better personal hygiene). Daniel Talbott directs the all-female cast, which includes Lisa Ramirez and Samantha Soule, as they recede from modernity.
+weathervanetheater.org
+‘GOD SAID THIS’ at the Cherry Lane Theater (previews start on Jan. 16; opens on Jan. 29). A companion play to Leah Nanako Winkler’s “Kentucky,” this Primary Stages piece finds a New Yorker, Hiro, returning to her old Kentucky home, braving her newly sober father, her born-again sister and her ailing mother. Morgan Gould directs, with Satomi Blair, Ako and Jay Patterson revisiting their roles.
+866-811-4111, primarystages.orgFIRST LOOK 2019 at the Museum of the Moving Image (Jan. 11-21). The museum’s annual series is really less of a first look than a look back (to under-heralded titles that screened on the past year’s festival circuit) and a look to new horizons (many films here are likely too experimental or niche to turn up in New York again soon). The opening weekend offers a double dose of the acclaimed Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, who will appear with the bleakly absurdist fiction feature “Donbass” (on Friday), a narrative relay set in that war-torn, Russia-bordering region of Ukraine, and with “The Trial” (on Saturday), a document of real people confessing to fictional crimes. Loznitsa pieced together the film from footage of a Stalinist show trial from 1930. As the movie proceeds, the subjects performing their confessions appear to become more emotional, more “genuine.”
+718-784-0077, movingimage.us
+KAY FRANCIS: THE QUEEN OF PLEASURE at the Metrograph (Jan. 11-Feb. 3). If you only know Francis as the perfume heiress from “Trouble in Paradise” (on Sunday and Jan. 18-20), this retrospective offers a snapshot of her charms in the period when she rose to stardom, unencumbered by the imposed gentility of the Production Code. It’s rare to see high-quality versions of these titles by directors such as George Cukor, Leo McCarey and King Vidor. Cukor’s 1931 comedy “Girls About Town” (on Friday, Saturday and Thursday) finds Francis and Lilyan Tashman seeking wealthy male accompaniment, with Francis targeting Joel McCrea.
+212-660-0312, metrograph.com‘AILEEN PASSLOFF, STEPPING FORWARD: ONE FOOT (IN FRONT OF THE OTHER)’ at the 92nd Street Y (Jan. 11, 8 p.m.; Jan. 13, 3 p.m.). In 1944 at the age of 13, this veteran dance artist made her debut at the Y performing in the company of the witty, influential James Waring. Now, Passloff graces the Y with four premieres: “Frolic,” a group dance set to music by Erik Satie; “Yo,” a solo created for Charlotte Hendrickson; “At the Window,” a solo set to John Cage’s “Suite for Toy Piano”; and an untitled duet for Arthur Aviles and Andrew Chapman. The program also features revivals: Passloff brings back “He Dreams of Small Battles,” a 1978 work dedicated to Waring, her mentor, while Waring’s solo “Octandre” (1958), created for Passloff, will be performed by Nic Petry. On Saturday, the Y hosts a program by David Parker’s the Bang Group, which, in a bit of a crossover, presents “Octandre” as well as Passloff’s “Nocturne for Bob.”
+212-415-5500, 92y.org
+‘PHYSICS AND DANCE’: AN OPEN READING AND BOOK SIGNING WITH EMILY COATES AND SARAH DEMERS at New York Live Arts (Jan. 17, 7 p.m.). Coates, a former member of New York City Ballet, and Demers, a CERN particle physicist, have written a soon-to-be-released book about how their respective disciplines relate to questions about the universe. Both on faculty at Yale University, they have forged a rich dialogue between art and science; Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of Live Arts, will introduce the pair, who will discuss topics ranging from quantum mechanics to classical dance; Yvonne Rainer, Patricia Hoffbauer, Lacina Coulibaly and Daniel Ulbricht will be on hand to demonstrate.
+212-924-0077, newyorklivearts.org
+For an overview of January and February’s cultural events, click here.Does that look like Trump’s idea of a “big beautiful wall”? Does it even look like the “steel slats” the president now offers as his idea of an aesthetic concession to Democrats? Not quite. Yet for the last 19 years it was all the fencing Israelis thought was necessary to secure its side of the Blue Line.
+That started to change in December, after Israel announced that it was conducting an operation to destroy tunnels dug by Hezbollah under the border. The tunnel construction — secretly detected by Israel some four years ago — was intended to infiltrate hundreds of Hezbollah fighters into Israel in the event of war. As an additional precaution, Jerusalem is spending an estimated $600 million to replace about 20 kilometers of the fence with a concrete wall, mainly to provide greater peace of mind to the 162,000 Israelis who live near the Lebanese border.
+Such a wall may look formidable. But it won’t stop tunnel construction or missile firing, the two principal threats Hezbollah poses to Israel. Nor has Israel felt the need to erect concrete walls along most of its border with the Gaza Strip, despite Hamas’s multiple attempts last year to use mass protests to breach the fence. Israel’s border with Egypt is marked by a tall and sturdy “smart fence” packed with electronic sensors, but not a wall. And Israel’s longest border, with Jordan, stretching some 400 kilometers (about 250 miles), has fencing that for the most part is primitive and minimal.
+So how does Israel maintain border security? Two ways: close cooperation with neighbors where it’s possible and the use of modern technology and effective deterrence where it’s not.Despite being crammed alongside 27,000 others per square mile, New Yorkers have a surprisingly hard time meeting people living less than 10 feet from their doormats. Benjamin Norman knows this well because he is one of them.
+“You’re pretty much moving every year or two,” Mr. Norman, 31, a photographer who has moved within the city eight times in the past 13 years, said. “It makes it hard to develop new relationships with your neighbors or anything like that.”“Government,” declared Ronald Reagan in his first Inaugural Address, “is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” Republicans have echoed his rhetoric ever since. Somehow, though, they’ve never followed through on the radical downsizing of government their ideology calls for.
+But now Donald Trump is, in effect, implementing at least part of the drastic reduction in government’s role his party has long claimed to favor. If the shutdown drags on for months — which seems quite possible — we’ll get a chance to see what America looks like without a number of public programs the right has long insisted we don’t need. Never mind the wall; think of what’s going on as a big, beautiful libertarian experiment.
+Seriously, it’s striking how many of the payments the federal government is or soon will be failing to make are for things libertarians insist we shouldn’t have been spending taxpayer dollars on anyway.
+For example, federal checks to farmers aren’t going out ­— but libertarian organizations like the Cato Institute have long denounced farm subsidies as just another form of crony capitalism.Two women were arrested this week and charged in the sexual assault of a transgender woman at a bar in Raleigh, N.C.
+The transgender woman, whose name has not been released, told the police that she had been assaulted on Dec. 9 at Milk Bar, a popular spot downtown. The details of the episode — which included verbal harassment and groping — were relayed in a 911 call she made the next day that was recently made public by the Raleigh Police Department.
+The incident led to the arrest of two women, Amber N. Harrell, 38, and Jessica L. Fowler, 31, both of Raleigh, who face charges of second-degree kidnapping and sexual battery.
+It began when the transgender woman entered the bathroom to check her hair and makeup, she said on the 911 call, and encountered two women who began taunting her.Republicans in the third-most-populous county in Texas voted overwhelmingly against the removal of one of their party leaders from his post on Thursday.
+The vote was not over qualifications or any misdeed by the party leader, Shahid Shafi, a surgeon and longtime Republican who was appointed vice chairman of the Tarrant County Republican Party six months ago.
+It was over whether Dr. Shafi’s Muslim faith disqualified him from the job. The vote — and the bitter clashes leading up to it — came as Democrats have been heralding the arrival of the first two Muslim women in Congress last week.
+“Religious liberty won tonight,” Darl Easton, the Republican Party’s county chairman, said after Dr. Shafi was supported, 139 to 49, in Thursday’s vote. “And while that makes a great day for the Republican Party of Tarrant County, that victory also serves notice that we have much work to do unifying our party.”I am a 13-year-old girl. I get good grades, I have good friends, and I’ve never given my parents any reason for concern. However, they don’t trust me with my own phone and have gone so far as installing an app on it to track what I do with it. I’m not worried about what they’re going to find, but I am upset by the fact that they don’t trust me. Now, I don’t trust them either. What should I do?
+LAUREN
+I would probably be more sympathetic to your plight, Lauren, if a responsible teenage boy I know hadn’t shared his Instagram password with a “good friend,” only to be betrayed by him when vulgar posts began popping up on his account.
+The virtual world can be an amazing place when it’s not terrifying or dangerous. By monitoring your phone, your parents are wisely (sorry!) trying to make sure that you’re ready to navigate it on your own. But I also get that their uncertainty feels insulting to you. So, let’s make this standoff productive.
+Have a direct conversation with your parents about what they’re afraid of: inappropriate text messages or posts on social media, visits to adult websites, online predators, or all of the above? You may have to help them out here. Your parents may not mistrust you, but there are still things they need to be aware of, such as unsolicited contact between adults and minors.No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch.
+This Weekend I Have … an Hour, and Let’s Talk About Sex
+‘Sex Education’
+When to watch: Now, on Netflix.
+This dirty, darling eight-episode series is a teen sex comedy, a perceptive family dramedy and a thoughtful examination of the roles sex and sexuality play in how we construct our social identities. Otis (Asa Butterfield) is a high school student whose mother, Jean (Gillian Anderson), is a sex and relationship therapist. Some of her therapeutic techniques have rubbed off on her anxious son, and he slowly becomes a therapist to his classmates.
+The show is forthright, sometimes surprisingly so, about the, uh, ins and outs of bodies and partnerships, but in a mostly sweet and sincere way.3. Along the border in Texas, on a trip that he did not want to take, to discuss a crisis that Democrats say does not exist, President Trump repeated his demand for a wall.
+He reiterated an untrue claim that Mexico would indirectly pay for the wall through a revamped trade agreement, and heard from people who had loved ones killed by immigrants. Above, Mr. Trump in McAllen, Tex.
+“If we had a barrier of any kind, whether it’s steel or concrete,” Mr. Trump said of tragic stories involving violence and human trafficking, “they wouldn’t even bother trying. We could stop that cold.”
+The president continued to float the idea of declaring a state of national emergency that could allow him to bypass Congress to fund the wall.
+Separately, our journalists are driving the length of the approximately 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border. They just sent in their first dispatch.“Every day that goes by that the government is shut down, safety is going to be compromised,” Mr. Perrone said. “Every day that goes by, something could occur that causes a crack in the system.”
+Their show of concern on Thursday was among the most visible efforts by public employee unions to try to highlight the consequences of the shutdown and urge President Trump and Congress to reopen the government.
+At a rally outside the headquarters of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., a short walk from the White House, hundreds of people, including federal workers and union leaders, also gathered to demand an end to the shutdown. They focused their blame on Mr. Trump and Republican lawmakers.
+“Shame on the Senate. Shame on the White House,” said Richard L. Trumka, the president of the federation. “This lockout has to end, and it has to end now.”
+Workers said they were facing urgent financial pressure.
+“I think from what I’ve saved up, I can last six months,” said Robert Reynolds, an aviation safety inspector who has been working for the Federal Aviation Administration for 14 years. “It’s still going to hurt.”But McAllen and the larger Rio Grande Valley region are also home to small but vocal numbers of Hispanic conservatives. Many are from middle-class Mexican-American families who have lived in the area for generations and do not identify with the Central American migrants fleeing poverty and violence.
+Like much else about life on the border, McAllen is never quite what people imagine it to be.
+One of the most frequent places to run into Border Patrol agents in McAllen is not on the border itself but at Wingstop or Buffalo Wings & Rings. McAllen has synagogues and country clubs. Its biggest employer is the local school district and community college. Its tallest building is the 17-story Chase Tower, home to real estate developers and Senator Ted Cruz’s district office.
+And its politics are far from predictable.
+As the president traveled through town, all he had to do was look out the motorcade’s windows to see a mix of opposition and support for his visit. Parts of the route were lined with protesters who waved signs — “Our home is not a crisis” and “No al muro” (Spanish for “No to the wall”) — and with Trump supporters who had their own signs.
+At one moment on the protester side, police officers wrestled at least one person to the ground as tempers flared.
+The McAllen police said two people were arrested following a confrontation between Trump supporters and protesters.KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — In the days after Congolese voters went to the polls late last month, as ballots were being counted, the opposition candidate widely believed to have won the presidency offered assurances to the regime that has long ruled the country.
+“If I am elected, there will not be revenge,” said the candidate, Martin Fayulu.
+Mr. Fayulu’s rival opposition candidate, who was handed victory by Democratic Republic of Congo election officials on Thursday, in a decision that has set the country on edge, may have done Mr. Fayulu one better.
+The president-elect, Felix Tshisekedi, declared that his predecessor, President Joseph Kabila, who agreed to step down only with the utmost reluctance after 18 years, will be an “important partner” in the transition. Mr. Tshisekedi’s comment reinforced speculation that his campaign had reached some kind of power-sharing agreement with the Kabila government.Settling allegations of discrimination filed by the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, Mutual of Omaha has agreed not to deny insurance to people who use medications to prevent H.I.V. infection.
+The insurer also has settled a lawsuit brought by an unidentified gay man in Massachusetts who was turned down for long-term-care insurance after acknowledging that he took an H.I.V.-prevention drug called Truvada.
+“Consumers looking to protect themselves from H.I.V. transmission should not be excluded from buying insurance,” Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, said in a prepared statement.
+The company admitted no wrongdoing in the settlements and will make a $25,000 payment to the state.
+Mutual of Omaha became the focus of discrimination complaints after applicants, mostly gay men, said they were denied disability, long-term-care or life insurance solely because they were taking Truvada to protect themselves from H.I.V., a practice called PrEP (short for pre-exposure prophylaxis).• Jumpy Republicans. On Wednesday night, eight House Republicans broke with the president and voted for a Democratic bill that would reopen the Treasury Department. At least four G.O.P. Senators have expressed some support for reopening the government. The most jittery of all? Republicans up for re-election in purple states.
+What the White House sees:
+• The other base. Mr. Trump measures his political success by whether he keeps his supporters happy. That’s part of why he rejected a deal on the shutdown negotiated by his own aides and G.O.P. leaders after conservatives voiced opposition. And his base wants that wall.
+• Mueller? Mueller? The constant focus on the shutdown provides Mr. Trump and the White House with a break from the story line that really makes them nervous: the special counsel investigation.
+What Republicans see:
+• Opposition to Mr. Trump never pays. There are 19 Senate Republicans up for re-election next year in red states. A lesson many took away from the president’s support of primary challengers during 2018 midterms was that Republican establishment doesn’t win by contradicting Mr. Trump.
+• A longer timeline. The decisions by the White House to pay out food stamps through February and process tax refunds means Republicans have a bit more breathing room. Particularly in poorer districts, extending these programs provides essential cash infusions to large parts of their voting base.
+• The elusive deal. Senate Republicans have grown increasingly aggravated with the lack of clarity from the White House, leaving them unsure about whether Mr. Trump would even sign a deal they managed to cut with Democrats. That’s part of why the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, has kept his distance from the talks. “It’s always difficult,” Senator John Cornyn told The Washington Post, “when the person you’re negotiating with is someone who changes his mind.”
+But don’t forget this:
+Elections are not won or lost on shutdowns.
+In 1995 and 1996, Americans blamed the Republican Congress for shutdowns. The party held onto its majorities in the 1996 election. In 2013, Americans once again blamed Republicans for the shutdown. In the midterms that followed the next year, the party gained seats in the House and won back the Senate.DENVER — In Georgia, a pecan farmer lost out on his chance to buy his first orchard. The local Farm Service Agency office that would have processed his loan application was shut down.
+In Wisconsin’s dairy country, a 55-year-old woman sat inside her new dream home, worried she would not be able to pay her mortgage. Her loan had come from an Agriculture Department program for low-income residents in rural areas, but all of the account information she needed to make her first payment was locked away in an empty government office.
+And in upstate New York, Pam Moore was feeding hay to her black-and-white cows at a small dairy that tottered on the brink of ruin. She and her husband had run up $350,000 in debt to keep the dairy running after 31 of their cows died of pneumonia, and their last lifeline was an emergency federal farm loan. But the money had been derailed by the government shutdown.
+“It has just been one thing after another, after another, after another,” Ms. Moore, 57, said.
+Farm country has stood by President Trump, even as farmers have strained under two years of slumping incomes and billions in losses from his trade wars. But as the government shutdown now drags into a third week, some farmers say the loss of crucial loans, payments and other services has pushed them — and their support — to a breaking point.This feature is meant to send you into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart. Want to get The Week in Good News by email? Sign up here.
+Here are seven great things we wrote about this week:
+A new year holds new opportunities for adventure, be it in a far-flung locale or in your own backyard. If travel is on your list of resolutions this year, we have a treat for you: The Times has recommended dozens of places for you to visit, from Puglia, Italy, to Huntsville, Ala. Puerto Rico tops the list, a year and a half after the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
+You can also get to know our new 52 Places Traveler. Sebastian Modak has the enviable job of visiting each of the destinations and sending us his dispatches. “For me, travel is all about immersing yourself in the unfamiliar, and embracing the feeling of humility that comes with that: There’s always something to learn from someone else, from somewhere else,” he said. Well put. Read more »“We claim we want nice people, but we don’t,” Mr. Pfeffer said. “Studies show that people want to associate with people who win.”
+“I’ve always won, and I’m going to continue to win,” Mr. Trump reportedly said in 2016.
+And Mr. Pfeffer noted that the “reality distortion field” that Mr. Trump deploys — ignoring the truth and creating an alternate set of facts — was once associated with the Apple founder Steve Jobs and remains prevalent in Silicon Valley and among entrepreneurial start-ups.
+Paul Glatzhofer, director of talent solutions at the consulting firm PSI International, agreed that Mr. Trump displayed some positive qualities of effective leadership, such as decisiveness, setting ambitious goals and self-confidence. “You may not like the idea of a wall, but it’s an ambitious goal,” Mr. Glatzhofer said.
+Nonetheless, he cautioned that the president’s other, negative traits could far outweigh any positives. “When we assess senior leadership, it doesn’t matter how many strengths they have if they also have these flaws that can derail their careers,” he said.
+Mr. Trump also gets credit for being himself, especially from passionate members of his base. “A quality he seems to have is that he doesn’t care what other people think,” Mr. Pfeffer said. “Not many of us are like that. But there’s a certain power in violating conventional norms.”
+These qualities helped Mr. Trump win in 2016, but they haven’t translated into effective governance, at least not yet. “People often equate the success of an individual with the success of an organization, but they’re not highly correlated,” Mr. Pfeffer said.
+Mr. Trump was able to assemble a relatively stable and loyal team of people who worked for him for years when he ran his private business. His failure to do so at the White House — save for a couple of survivors including Kellyanne Conway and family members like Jared Kushner — may be his most perplexing and conspicuous management failure.The words — composed by the speechwriter Peggy Noonan, who consulted closely with Mr. Reagan in those closing weeks of his reign — are as different in spirit and in substance from Mr. Trump’s as words could be and still be rendered in the same tongue.
+Invoking the Puritan John Winthrop, who in 1630 drew on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount when speaking of America as a “city upon a hill,” Mr. Reagan said, “I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it.” It was a free, proud city, build on a strong foundation, full of commerce and creativity, he said, adding, “If there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
+That’s manifestly not how Mr. Trump sees it. From his announcement-speech allusion to “rapists” coming in from Mexico to his lament about “American carnage” to his manufacturing of a “crisis” at the border that requires a wall, the 45th president speaks in the vernacular of darkness, not light; of exclusion, not inclusion.
+And whatever his faults — and he had many — Ronald Reagan believed in the possibilities of a country that was forever reinventing itself. He knew, too, that the nation had grown stronger the more widely it had opened its arms and the more generously it had interpreted Thomas Jefferson’s assertion of equality in the Declaration of Independence.
+He was about hope, not fear. And that is another reason his farewell address should be more widely appreciated: It’s a kind of final testament of an American president who had a genuine faith in the future. Mr. Reagan was a practical man, and he knew, as he put it, that “because we’re a great nation, our challenges seem complex. It will always be this way. But as long as we remember our first principles and believe in ourselves, the future will be ours.”
+Or so we can hope. His last words on that long-ago Wednesday bear hearing, and pondering. “And how stands the city on this winter night?” Mr. Reagan asked. “More prosperous, more secure and happier than it was eight years ago. She’s still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.”
+They hurtle through that darkness even now. Mr. Reagan would have us light the lamp and open our arms — for that’s what cities on a hill do.
+Jon Meacham, a historian, is the author, most recently, of “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.“There’s a real chance that the building that we’ve been spending all this time and money on could fall through if our landlord doesn’t want to sit around and wait for a couple of months while we wait for our license,” Jeff Tyler, the head brewer at Spice Trade, said. “Real estate prices are just going up. If this pushes us back, it could have a real impact on our rent price.”
+In New York City, Transmitter brewery in Queens is looking to expand from tiny quarters in Long Island City to a much larger facility in the Navy Yard in Brooklyn. But its move has also been held up by the shutdown.
+“People don’t even realize how deep it goes,” Rob Kolb, a founder of Transmitter, said. “We’re a small business and it could potentially ruin us. You can’t pay rent in two places without increasing revenue. and there’s no way to increase revenue if you can’t make beer.”
+The bureau’s oversight over labeling has also made the shutdown difficult. From graphic design to alcohol warnings to listing the percentage of alcohol by volume, every new beer must have its label approved before it can be sold nationally. Some states do allow breweries to sell in-state before getting federal label approval.
+For many smaller breweries, a constant churn of new beers is as important for attracting new customers as is having established fan favorites. Jersey Girl Brewing in Hackettstown, N.J., had been planning to introduce a beer each month and had begun to gather ingredients and lay out a brewing schedule. Without label approval, the beer already brewed could sit in tanks, go stale in cans, or, in a worst-case scenario, have to be thrown away.
+In Maryland, 1623 Brewing is in Carroll County, which shares a border with Pennsylvania and is a short drive to Virginia and West Virginia. The brewery had been increasing its production with plans to expand to those three states, but without label approval it will be left with a glut of beer.The man who was found dead this week inside the apartment of Ed Buck, a political activist and donor in Los Angeles, was identified Thursday as Timothy Dean, 55, of West Hollywood. He was described as a fashion consultant who had been friends with Mr. Buck and had played in gay basketball competitions.
+The authorities found Mr. Dean when they responded around 1 a.m. on Monday to a 911 call about a person in a West Hollywood apartment who was unconscious and not breathing.
+Detectives in the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department quickly turned their attention to Mr. Buck because they had visited the same residence under similar circumstances in July 2017. At that time, they found another man, Gemmel Moore, 26, naked and dead of a drug overdose on a mattress in Mr. Buck’s living room.
+Both Mr. Dean and Mr. Moore were black, which raised suspicions among political activists and critics of Mr. Buck, a 64-year-old white man who has given more than $116,000 to Democratic candidates and groups in the past decade or so. Protesters have gathered outside Mr. Buck’s apartment to demand justice for Mr. Dean and Mr. Moore.One of the W.N.B.A.’s original franchises could soon have a new owner. An investment group led by the billionaire Joseph C. Tsai, who completed the purchase of a 49 percent stake in the Nets in April, is close to an agreement to purchase the Liberty, according to a person briefed on the negotiations who was not authorized to comment publicly.
+The Madison Square Garden Company, which owns the Liberty as well as the Knicks, the Rangers and Madison Square Garden itself, announced 14 months ago that it was seeking to sell the team. It said the team had lost money in each year of its existence, a deficit of more than $100 million in total. After playing its first 21 seasons at the Garden, the Liberty spent last season in the decidedly less glamorous Westchester County Center in White Plains.
+It is not yet clear whether Tsai’s group will seek to rebrand the Liberty or have them play elsewhere. The W.N.B.A. season begins in May, and the team’s schedule currently has them playing their home games in White Plains.Kevin Fret, a Puerto Rican social media star who billed himself as the first openly gay Latin trap artist, was fatally shot in San Juan early Thursday, according to the police and local news reports.
+Mr. Fret, 25, was riding on a motorcycle in the Santurce neighborhood at about 5:30 a.m. when he was shot twice, in the head and the hip, the police said. He was taken to a nearby hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
+The police had not yet released the name of the man who was shot pending identification of the body, but Mr. Fret’s manager, Eduardo Rodriguez, confirmed his death in a statement to Billboard.
+His death came amid widespread concern about crime in Puerto Rico; on Wednesday, the top F.B.I. official there said the island was facing “a crisis of violence.”WASHINGTON — Hours after he was sworn in as America’s 45th president, Donald J. Trump and his wife, Melania, swayed together to a rendition of the Frank Sinatra classic “My Way,” as hundreds of their wealthiest and most influential supporters held aloft smartphones to capture the Trumps’ first dance following the inauguration.
+Serhiy Kivalov, a Ukrainian lawmaker known for pro-Russian initiatives, took photos of the dance, as well as of his coveted tickets and passes to the soiree where it took place, the Liberty Ball at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, posting them on Facebook and declaring that “it was an honor” to attend.
+He was one of at least a dozen Ukrainian political and business figures who made their way to Washington for the inauguration, several of whom attended the Liberty Ball. Most had more on their dance cards than just parties.
+They attended meetings and orchestrated encounters at Trump International Hotel with influential Republican members of Congress and close allies of President Trump. Representing a range of views, including a contingent seen as sympathetic to Moscow, they positioned themselves as brokers who could help solve one of the thorniest foreign policy problems facing the new administration — the ugly military stalemate between Russia and Ukraine and the tough sanctions imposed on Moscow following its seizure of Crimea.A media mystery popped up a week before Christmas: Leslie Moonves, who had just been fired as the chief executive of CBS after multiple accusations of sexual misconduct, appeared to give an exclusive, on-the-record interview to a little-known publication in which he bluntly addressed his dismissal.
+Agenda, a news service owned by The Financial Times, quoted Mr. Moonves in an article as saying, “How quickly the board forgets the job I did for CBS. They were a rudderless ship when I went there, when I took over.” Later in the article, the interview subject addressed the board’s decision to deny him a $120 million severance payment, saying, “I think the board will do the right thing, ultimately.”
+It was an unlikely-seeming exclusive. Mr. Moonves had shunned all interview requests since the publication of an article in The New Yorker last summer that included detailed, on-the-record accounts from women saying that he had sexually assaulted them.
+For much of 2018, reporters at major outlets, including The New York Times, had aggressively sought Mr. Moonves, with little success. The idea that Agenda, a niche outlet with 6,000 subscribers focused on corporate governance issues, had scored his first on-record comments since his firing struck many observers as implausible.“New York is moving from caboose to locomotive,” said Blair Horner, the executive director of the New York Public Interest Research Group, adding, “New York has been in the obstacle-creating business, as opposed to the obstacle-smashing business when it comes to voting.”
+The bills, which will be introduced as a package, would place New York in the same rank as other liberal bulwarks like California and Washington, at a time when Democrats are seeking to enhance voter involvement.
+Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has expressed support for such measures in the past, most recently last month, when he vowed to make an election overhaul a priority in the first 100 days of the new year. A spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said the administration is hopeful that the voting package is the start of a range of reforms lawmakers pass this session.
+“We look forward to working with them to go further and enact public campaign financing, make Election Day a state holiday and ban corporate contributions once and for all,” the spokesman, Rich Azzopardi, said.
+Mr. Cuomo has also favored a bill that would close the so-called “L.L.C. loophole,” which allows corporate interests to funnel almost unlimited amounts of money into campaigns through various anonymous limited liability companies. The loophole has been a bête noire of good government groups for years, but has been utilized by various powerful politicians in the state, including Mr. Cuomo, who has been one of its biggest beneficiaries.
+The Democrat-dominated Assembly has voted to close the loophole for years, but the measure went nowhere in the Republican-led Senate.
+On Monday, however, the new Democratic leadership in the Capitol intends to pass identical bills to cap contributions from L.L.C.s at $5,000, bringing them in line with limits on donations from corporations.The mayor has learned that the road to becoming a national progressive leader can be bumpy. His efforts to create a national debate around income inequality for the 2016 presidential election failed.
+Just a few years later, Mr. de Blasio is willing to try again.
+New York City needs Albany
+For all of Mr. de Blasio’s talk about how much his administration is doing to reduce inequality, the city still needs help from Albany to accomplish many of its most impactful goals.
+Want to fix the subway and bus systems? All of the funding sources the mayor suggested — a millionaire’s tax, congestion pricing or marijuana sales revenue — require Albany’s approval.
+Strengthening rent regulations and eliminating vacancy decontrol, which allows landlords to increase rents when tenants vacate apartments? Albany.
+Making it easier to vote? Albany.
+Speedy trial rules and bail reform that would help the city reduce the inmate population enough to finally close Rikers Island? Long-term mayoral control of schools? Albany.
+Mr. de Blasio has not been warmly welcomed in Albany during the first five years of his tenure. But now that Democrats control the Assembly and the Senate, the mayor expects thing to change.
+“We need Albany to do its job to finally fix the subways,” Mr. de Blasio said.
+“I don’t care if I have to pound on every door in Albany to get it done,” he added.SAN FRANCISCO — A shareholder lawsuit says the board of directors of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, played an “active and direct role” in approving a $90 million exit package for Andy Rubin, a senior executive, even though an investigation into a sexual harassment claim against him was deemed credible.
+The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in California Superior Court, said minutes from board meetings showed that the directors had agreed to ask for Mr. Rubin’s resignation while approving the sizable separation agreement to “keep the matter quiet.” The minutes were redacted in the court filing.
+In October, The New York Times reported that Google had paid the exit package after a female employee accused Mr. Rubin of coercing her into performing oral sex on him. At the time, it was not clear how much the board had known about the allegations or the company’s decision to pay Mr. Rubin.
+“The directors’ wrongful conduct allowed the illegal conduct to proliferate and continue,” the lawsuit said. “As such, members of Alphabet’s board were knowing and direct enablers of the sexual harassment and discrimination.”SACRAMENTO — Gov. Gavin Newsom proposed a blizzard of new spending in his first budget, calling for increased expenditures on education, homelessness and poverty, as well as programs to bolster California’s long-term fiscal health.
+His $209 billion proposal, which now goes to the Legislature, left little doubt that California, already one of the more liberal states in the nation, was taking a turn to the left, and moving beyond the fiscal restraint of his predecessor, Jerry Brown. Mr. Newsom’s new spending plans take advantage of a growing surplus he projects for the state.
+The governor laid out his plans on Thursday, his fourth day on the job, in a two-hour presentation, reading from notes scribbled on a legal pad and fielding often detailed questions.
+At one point, apparently speaking extemporaneously as he walked across a stage, Mr. Newsom offered state financial assistance for workers furloughed in the partial shutdown of the federal government — a huge community of workers in this state. “Any of those federal employees who are furloughed, come in and we’ll get you unemployment insurance,” he said.How did we get into this sorry situation? A meltdown of this magnitude typically has many causes. In this case, the president’s inability to reach some sort of deal rests heavily on several basic failures of understanding by him and his team. These include:
+1. A failure to grasp how divided government works. The president somehow came to believe that he’d have more leverage once the Democrats took control of the House. Maybe someone convinced him that, after the transfer of power, he could shift blame for the impasse onto Speaker Nancy Pelosi — a favorite villain of Republicans. Or maybe he assumed that Pelosi & Company would fold in the face of the dysfunction and public outcry a shutdown would bring. Whatever the logic, Team Trump assumed Democrats would b ecome more pliable , and a deal would emerge.
+Unfortunately, Mr. Trump has been spoiled by two years of Congress being led by weak-kneed members of his party who, even when troubled by his excesses, largely let him run amok, lest he call down upon them the wrath of the Republican base.
+But for their part, Ms. Pelosi and her new majority are concerned about presenting a united front against Mr. Trump’s challenges to constitutional authority. With the president’s wall having become a flash point, the political costs to Democrats for cutting a deal seen as advantageous to Mr. Trump would be steep.
+2. A failure to understand the costs of playing only to the base. While Republican lawmakers may be awed by Mr. Trump’s command of their party’s troops, Democrats are more motivated by the fact that the bulk of the electorate is tired of the president’s divisive demagogy. Time and again, Mr. Trump has chosen partisanship over leadership, doing nothing to expand his appeal. This puts him at a disadvantage in wooing the public to his side of the wall debate.
+3. A failure to understand Nancy Pelosi. Apparently, Mr. Trump never got around to reading “The Art of War,” or at least not Sun Tzu’s admonition to “know your enemy.” If he had, the president would have tried to develop at least a basic working relationship with Ms. Pelosi. The White House clearly assumed that, at some point — maybe after she secured the speaker’s gavel — Ms. Pelosi would bend to Mr. Trump’s will. But the speaker is not impressed with bluster. She is seldom cowed by political pressure from her own team, much less the opposing one. She plays the long game, and her will is as formidable as Mr. Trump’s, possibly more so. One key difference: Ms. Pelosi knows how the legislative process works.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Not long after his 21st birthday, Christian Rodriguez got the contract of a lifetime for his new info-tech company: The Colombian was hired as a cybersecurity consultant by Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo.
+While Mr. Rodriguez had little experience or formal education, he had been recommended by one of his other clients: Jorge Cifuentes Villa, a veteran trafficker who worked with Mr. Guzmán making cocaine deals with left-wing guerrillas in Colombia.
+And so in 2008, the ambitious, young techie visited Mr. Guzmán at one of his hide-outs deep in the Sierra Madre mountains, inspecting the kingpin’s communications system and his shoddy internet setup, which often broke down when it rained. In several follow-up meetings, Mr. Rodriguez testified this week, he pitched Mr. Guzmán on an elaborate plan to enhance his information security, offering to build him a private phone network that ran on the internet and was totally encrypted.
+That sophisticated system was, within three years, used against Mr. Guzmán after Mr. Rodriguez became ensnared in an F.B.I. sting operation and was then persuaded to become an informant. The I.T. expert helped the American authorities secretly collect a vast trove of the kingpin’s phone calls and text messages — among them, dozens he had sent to his wife and mistresses. In two days of testimony that ended on Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told this riveting story to great — and damaging — effect at Mr. Guzmán’s drug conspiracy trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.Part of the reason the Mets stumbled the last two seasons was a startling lack of depth. The teams that succeeded them as National League champions since 2015 — the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers — had versatile, interchangeable parts throughout their lineups. Their players stayed fresh and their managers had the tools to exploit matchup advantages. The Mets did not, and they fell far behind.
+To help remedy that, the Mets reached a two-year, $20 million contract agreement on Thursday with Jed Lowrie, an All-Star for the Oakland Athletics who hit .267 with a .353 on-base percentage and a career-high 23 home runs last season. The deal was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of it who could not speak publicly because Lowrie must pass a physical to make the contract official.
+Lowrie, a switch-hitter who turns 35 in April, has made 265 starts over the last two seasons at second base — the same position as Robinson Cano, whom the Mets acquired from the Seattle Mariners last month in Brodie Van Wagenen’s first trade as general manager. But the Mets do not see this as a problem.It basically worked. We’ve had four long economic booms since then. But there was an interesting cultural shift that happened along the way. In a healthy society, people try to balance a whole bunch of different priorities: economic, social, moral, familial. Somehow over the past 40 years economic priorities took the top spot and obliterated everything else. As a matter of policy, we privileged economics and then eventually no longer could even see that there could be other priorities.
+For example, there’s been a striking shift in how corporations see themselves. In normal times, corporations serve a lot of stakeholders — customers, employees, the towns in which they are located. But these days corporations see themselves as serving one purpose and one stakeholder — maximizing shareholder value. Activist investors demand that every company ruthlessly cut the cost of its employees and ruthlessly screw its hometown if it will raise the short-term stock price.
+We turned off the moral lens. You probably know the example of the Israeli day care centers. Parents kept showing up late to pick up their kids. To address the problem, the centers experimented with fining the late parents. But the number of late pickups doubled. Before, coming to pick up your kid on time was a moral obligation — to be fair to the day care workers. After, it was seen as an economic transaction. Parents were happy to pay to be late. We more or less did this as an entire society — we switched to a purely economic lens.
+A deadly combination of right-wing free-market fundamentalism and left-wing moral relativism led to a withering away of moral norms and shared codes of decent conduct. We ripped the market out of its moral and social context and let it operate purely by its own rules. We made the market its own priest and confessor.
+Society came to be seen as an atomized collection of individual economic units pursuing self-interest. Selfishness was normalized. As Steven Pearlstein puts it in his outstanding book, “Can American Capitalism Survive?” “Old-fashioned norms around loyalty, cooperation, honesty, equality, fairness and compassion no longer seem to apply in the economic sphere.”Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.Jakiw Palij, a former Nazi concentration camp guard who lived for decades in New York City and resisted deportation for 14 years, died on Thursday in a retirement facility in Ahlen, Germany. He was 95.
+German officials confirmed the death, according to an American Embassy official. No cause was cited.
+Before investigators traced him to the borough of Queens in 1993, Mr. Palij had lived for decades in anonymity, a Polish-born draftsman in one of the most diverse neighborhoods of a city famous for its immigrant communities.
+He had arrived in the United States in 1949 in his 20s, after receiving a visa meant for people left homeless by World War II, according to Peter Black, the former chief historian for a Justice Department unit devoted to deporting former Nazis.WASHINGTON — President Trump has long claimed that he puts “America first” overseas. But in two remarkable statements on Thursday, Mr. Trump and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, explicitly favored foreign autocrats over elected American leaders.
+Mr. Pompeo chose Cairo, the site of President Barack Obama’s 2009 address to the Islamic world, to deliver a caustic, point-by-point repudiation of Mr. Obama’s message. He paid tribute to Egypt’s repressive president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, for his courage in supporting Mr. Trump’s alternative approach.
+About an hour later, on the South Lawn of the White House, Mr. Trump said that China’s Communist Party bosses negotiated in better faith than the Democratic leaders in Congress, with whom the president is in a bitter standoff over his border wall that has shut down much of the federal government.
+“I find China, frankly, in many ways to be far more honorable than Cryin’ Chuck and Nancy. I really do,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “China is actually much easier to deal with than the opposition party.”Murray’s outlook in Melbourne looked bleak even before his announcement. In a practice match Thursday, Murray was thrashed by his longtime rival Djokovic, who led 6-1, 4-1, before their time slot on the court ended.
+“I can still play to a level — not a level that I’m happy playing at,” Murray said on Friday. “It’s not just that: The pain is too much, really. I don’t want to continue playing that way. I think I have tried pretty much everything I could to get it right, and that hasn’t worked.”
+Murray had hip surgery last January, and he said he had seen his Melbourne-based surgeon on Thursday. He said that although the operation had helped, it had not alleviated his pain, which he said had been the “driving factor” in his decision.
+“I can play with limitations, that’s not an issue,” Murray said. “It’s having the limitations, and also the pain is not allowing me to enjoy competing, training or any of the stuff I love about tennis.”
+Asked if the Australian Open could be his last tournament, Murray paused and wiped away tears again.
+“There’s a chance of that, for sure,” he said. “Yeah, like I said, I am not sure I am able to play through the pain for another four or five months.”
+Murray said that his injury had also taken an emotional toll.
+“I have talked a lot, way too much, about my hip for 18 months,” Murray said. “It’s a daily thing. It isn’t just people I work with that ask me; it’s everyone. So everyone I bump into, that is all I talk about it. It’s pretty draining.”WASHINGTON — As the partial government shutdown took hold over the holidays, President Trump seemed to express wonder at being alone in the White House with little but the cheeriness of heavily armed guards to keep him warm for the better part of a week.
+“I was waving to them,” Mr. Trump said just after New Year’s Day. “I never saw so many guys with machine guns in my life. Secret Service and military. These are great people.”
+Mr. Trump’s “Home Alone”-like Christmas tale has hardened into a 20-day standoff as relations between his administration and Congress over his $5 billion demand for a border wall grow ever frostier. The White House has stopped paying its water bill. Desks of some furloughed employees, whose job can include such drudgeries as helping their bosses work the copy machine, sit empty in the West Wing.
+And the Secret Service agents Mr. Trump was so impressed with, down to the officers who check IDs and wave black SUVs in and out of the gates surrounding the complex, are all working unpaid — everyone in the Secret Service is, according to an official at the agency.“We’re like lambs. They’re taking us one after another. We have no ability to fight back.
+PAN XIDIAN, a construction company employee who was forced to delete tweets and was later detained for two weeks after he criticized human-rights crackdowns.And, as a funk fan, having P FUNK right in the center made me smile.
+Tricky Clues
+1A: I think everyone is “Afraid of getting shot,” but in this case, we’re not supposed to be thinking about being shot with a gun. This clue hints at being shot with a camera, and so the answer is CAMERA SHY.
+10A: Internet lingo alert! If you are blowing up someone’s inbox with messages — even if they are totally innocent — that’s known as SPAMming. Used in a sentence: “Sorry to SPAM you, but I had a lot of thoughts that I sent as individual messages.”
+16A: We've seen this before and we’ll see it again, so it’s worth noticing. “Slanted writing” sounds as if it’s referring to italics, but it’s not. In this case, it’s hinting at an OP-ED COLUMN, which is written with a slant or bias.
+21A: I honestly had a tough time with “It’s a wrap!” and now that I know the answer I could just smack myself. But for me, a “wrap” is more like a shawl, and a BOA is much thinner and has feathers.
+37A: Thomas Pynchon knew how to call it. “There is no literature and art without PARANOIA,” said he. Why are you all staring at me?
+48A: The word “works” in the clue “Works toward one’s passion?” looks as if it is supposed to be a verb, but it’s not. In this clue, it’s acting as a noun, and the works about one’s passion are ODES.
+5D: I root for people, but I rarely ROOT ON them (the clue was “Cheer for”). Maybe I might ROOT them ON. But mostly I root for them.McALLEN, Tex. — When a president comes to town there are two realities, the one the White House hopes to create and the one that actually exists.
+President Trump arrived in this city on the Mexican border on Thursday to dramatize his desire for a border wall, a hardened position that has caused the partial shutdown of the federal government.
+He surrounded himself with border agents, victims of horrible crimes, a display of methamphetamine and heroin, an AK-47 and an AR-15 rifle, and a trash bag stuffed with $362,062 in cash that had been confiscated by law enforcement officials.
+In his view, it all added up to a single word, “crisis,” with a lone solution, building a wall — a point he emphasized in a discussion with the crime victims, law enforcement officers and McAllen residents.[Read our latest update on the Jayme Closs story.]
+Just when the family started to give up hope, Mr. Closs said, “we got the greatest news ever.”
+Jayme had been missing since Oct. 15, when the authorities found her parents, James and Denise Closs, dead in their home, the front door open and Jayme gone. The double homicide of the Closses, a quiet couple who worked at the local turkey plant, and the mystery of their daughter’s disappearance riveted Barron, a town of just over 3,400. A manhunt drew more than 2,100 tips and thousands of volunteers. All over town, shops and homes hung green ribbons bearing the words “Find Jayme Closs.” The local police force of 78 swelled as a corps of 200 federal, state and local officers joined a hunt that went on day and night.
+[Read more about how Jayme’s disappearance shook her hometown.]
+Her disappearance also drew national attention, and her name topped the F.B.I.’s missing persons list as the reward for her recovery grew to $50,000. “We have exhausted every lead,” Sheriff Chris Fitzgerald of Barron County had said. “There is no stone that has been unturned.”
+Weeks into the search, Jayme was found about 65 miles from where she disappeared — in the town of Gordon, Wis., at 4:43 p.m. Thursday, the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office said in a news release. A suspect was taken into custody at 4:54 p.m., also in Gordon, the authorities said.
+A couple who lives in the area, Kristin and Peter Kasinskas, told The Minneapolis Star Tribune that Jayme appeared on their doorstep about 4 p.m. Thursday, after she had been found by one of their neighbors who was out walking her dog. The neighbor pounded on the family’s door, the couple said. A skinny girl, who had matted hair and was wearing shoes too big for her feet, stood by her side.NATIONAL
+An article on Thursday about Bill Shine’s White House role misstated the location and theme of a poster displayed by President Trump. It was present at a cabinet meeting, not in the Oval Office, and it was related to sanctions on Iran, not the government shutdown.
+•
+An article on Monday about an expected teachers’ strike in Los Angeles misstated the causes behind the disproportionate numbers of black and Latino students in the Los Angeles school district. While white students’ enrollment in private schools and surrounding districts has contributed to the demographic shift, charter school enrollment has not. (The demographics of the city’s charter schools, over all, generally match those of the city’s traditional district schools.)
+BUSINESS
+An article on Thursday about the economic strategy devised by President Moon Jae-in of South Korea misstated Mr. Moon’s approval rating in the most recent Gallup poll. It was 45 percent, not 46 percent.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.Pompeo takes shots at Obama’s Middle East policies
+U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a speech in Cairo, declared that the U.S. would take a more activist role in the region. He also rejected much of President Barack Obama’s human-rights-based approach there, outlining an approach that is based on a close alliance with authoritarian rulers.
+Mr. Pompeo — whose remarks came almost exactly a decade after Mr. Obama delivered a landmark speech in the same city — denounced the former president for, he said, underestimating “the tenacity and viciousness of radical Islam” and for his policies on Iran. Here are the many ways Mr. Pompeo departed from Mr. Obama. We also fact-checked the speech.
+Confusion: Mr. Pompeo apparently sought to reassure jittery nations with his declaration that “when America retreats, chaos follows” and that the U.S. would “expel every last Iranian boot from Syria,” but the effect was confounding to many, coming weeks after President Trump’s impulsive announcement that U.S. forces would leave Syria.
+Go deeper: The U.S. has spent $8 billion to build a strong Afghan air force but it is still struggling, which could complicate Mr. Trump’s efforts to pull out of the country.Tony’s friend was all sharp angles, except for his laugh, which was soft and melodious. He had a gap between his front teeth and notched dimples in his cheeks. His eyebrows looked thick and jagged, as if they had been drawn on with Magic Marker.
+I disliked him immediately, which is to say, I liked him but hated the way he made me feel.
+Tony and I had been dating for a year. A year that had passed in a blur, a year in which I hadn’t cried once wondering if he liked me or worrying he wouldn’t call. Tony was all soft edges; round head, round belly, round calves and his emotions oozed out of him. Insecurity, jealousy and adoration bled over everything like the invisible ink they put on paper currency to catch bank robbers. If you were to shine a black light where Tony had just been, you would see the fluorescent marks of his feelings on every surface.
+Tony told me he loved me several times a day, rubbed my feet in the evenings as we sat on his couch looking out at the ocean, and always had a bottle of decent red wine. He liked to keep me close but never attempted to discover who I was deep down. He didn’t ask about the books I read or listen to my favorite songs for clues.Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Thursday was a busy day for the government shutdown, despite little progress toward a resolution. President Trump traveled to the southern border to bolster his case for a wall, and he canceled his trip to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, citing the Democrats’ “intransigence.” Also, Vice President Mike Pence went to Capitol Hill, digging in on a demand for the wall and shattering talk of a compromise with Democrats.
+• Years before Mr. Trump demonized immigrants, Representative Steve King of Iowa took to the House floor to show off a scale model of a 12-foot border wall he designed, called for the end of birthright citizenship and used misleading data to justify demeaning remarks about Latinos.
+• Farm country stood by Mr. Trump, even as it strained under billions in losses from the president’s trade wars. But with the shutdown now dragging into its third week, some farmers say they are at a breaking point.A “Star Wars” origin story is available for streaming. And Director X’s “Superfly” remake is on Starz.
+What’s Streaming
+SOLO: A STAR WARS STORY (2018) on Amazon, Google Play, Netflix, Vudu and YouTube. For a film that takes place in the galaxy far, far away, not many people saw “Solo: A Star Wars Story.” The arrival on Netflix of this “Star Wars” prologue — a letdown at the box office when it was released — will presumably shake loose some potential viewers who were too fatigued by the other recent “Star Wars” movies to cough up movie theater prices for this one in May. Those who choose to indulge now will learn a lot about the swashbuckling galactic cowboy Han Solo, made famous in the original films by Harrison Ford and here played in a younger version by Alden Ehrenreich. They will learn, for example, that Solo can be a dishonest card player when necessary, and that he met his first lover, Qi’ra (Emilia Clarke), while they were both living in the streets. Ron Howard directs an ensemble that also includes Donald Glover as Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams in the originals) and Woody Harrelson as a mentor to Solo. In a lukewarm review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott wrote that the movie is “a curiously low-stakes blockbuster, in effect a filmed Wikipedia page.”TOKYO — Japanese prosecutors brought fresh charges of financial wrongdoing on Friday against Carlos Ghosn, the embattled global auto chief who sits in a Tokyo jail.
+The new allegations raise the stakes in a showdown between Mr. Ghosn, until recently the head of the vast car-making alliance of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, and the prosecutors, who have been working in tandem with whistle-blowers inside Nissan. It also signals that prosecutors remain undeterred by Mr. Ghosn’s recent assertion of innocence in court.
+Mr. Ghosn’s lawyers said they had applied for his release on bail, but the court was not expected to rule until at least Tuesday and could still choose to hold the executive for months.
+Mr. Ghosn, his top aide Greg Kelly and Nissan are now charged with understating Mr. Ghosn’s income through March 2018, according to a statement from the Tokyo District Court. Mr. Ghosn was also charged with improperly transferring personal losses to Nissan’s books in 2008.SYDNEY, Australia — One of Australia’s most prominent television and musical performers, Craig McLachlan, has been charged with assault and eight counts of indecent assault relating to events reaching back to 2014 — a potential breakthrough for the media companies he has sued for defamation, and for the country’s nascent #MeToo movement.
+Mr. McLachlan, 53, a familiar face in Australia for starring roles in TV favorites like “Neighbours” and “Home and Away,” has been charged by the Victoria Police for indecent acts said to have occurred in Melbourne around the same time as his now-scrutinized performance in a stage version of “The Rocky Horror Show.”
+His interactions with women during that show’s run at the Comedy Theater in Melbourne were the subject of an investigative report from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and ABC, Australia’s public broadcaster, revealing that several female co-stars accused him of indecent and inappropriate behavior.
+Australia’s secretive judicial system — its strict privacy laws and restrictions on the sharing of information about individual cases — make it impossible to declare that the criminal charges directly relate to the “Rocky Horror Show” allegations.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+piscatorial \ ˌpi-skə-ˈtȯr-ē-əl \ adjective
+: relating to or characteristic of the activity of fishing
+________
+The word piscatorial has appeared in 11 articles on NYTimes.com in the past 13 years, including on Oct. 22, 2006, “An Epicurean Pilgrimage: Meals Worth the Price of a Plane Ticket” by R. W. Apple Jr.:
+I envy the Swedes their social conscience, their gift for design and urban planning and their fish. Especially their fish. And among their fish — sole, cod, plaice, scallops, langoustines — especially their unmatched herring. Leif Mannerstrom, who owns and cooks at this charming former warehouse of the Swedish East India Company, built on the waterfront in 1775, is so widely admired for his knowledge of things piscatorial that he is pictured on a national postage stamp, and more than 10,000 people come from all over Scandinavia each year for his Christmas-season feast of 16 herrings.SEOUL, South Korea — Prosecutors in South Korea confronted a retired Supreme Court chief justice on Friday with accusations that he conspired to delay a case that could upset relations with Japan, interrogating him in a closed-door hearing that is likely to lead to an unprecedented indictment.
+No former or sitting chief justice in South Korea had ever been summoned as a criminal suspect until Yang Sung-tae, 71, presented himself to address allegations that he had manipulated the case on behalf of the nation’s disgraced former president.
+The scandal involving Mr. Yang has drawn intense interest in South Korea, where a mistrust of the judiciary is a longstanding phenomenon. The depth of anti-judiciary sentiment is such that when a quixotic pig farmer angry over a court ruling threw a firebomb at the car of the current chief justice, Kim Myeong-su, the November incident received outsize news and social media coverage.
+Mr. Yang’s scandal is also being closely watched by diplomats because of its connection to the growing diplomatic schism between South Korea and Japan, both key American allies.What story could this image tell?
+Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by this illustration.
+Post it in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this picture is all about.“Winning back-to-back Australian Opens like this, in my mid-30s, it’s one of my favorite things I will look back on in my career,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to happen, and I had such a great time here in Australia the last couple of years and always enjoyed playing here.”
+Federer acknowledges his age readily, quipping at the Hopman Cup recently that his 20-year-old opponent, Stefanos Tsitsipas, “could be my son.” And he marvels at his own ability to run up the score in the record books — 99 titles and counting — at an age when many would count him out.
+But after an auspicious start to last season, when he won his first 17 matches, Federer seemed to trail off. After winning the title in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in February and briefly reclaiming the No. 1 ranking, Federer went without another tournament championship until October. After skipping the clay-court season for the second year in a row, he lost in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon after holding a match point against Kevin Anderson, and in the fourth round of the United States Open to John Millman.
+Federer played down the doomsday talk that accompanied his stagnation in the second half of the year.
+“I wasn’t too disappointed,” he said. “I was more surprised to hear that there was sort of concern, or people were saying, ‘What a bad second half to the year.’ ”LONDON — It just might be the most adorable thing on four wheels. People smile when one cruises by. They point, they wave, they use the word “cute” a lot, and they ask, “What is that?”
+The tiny Nissan Figaro has an almost cartoonish design that is guaranteed to stand out. To an American living in Britain, who regularly spots pristine Figaros, it would appear to be a highly popular model that was made recently.
+Every part of that guess is wrong: The Figaro is rather old, built for the 1991 model year, and there never were large numbers anywhere. Nissan never even exported it from Japan.On Jan. 3, the six-part documentary “Surviving R. Kelly” had its premiere on Lifetime, detailing decades of accusations of sexual misconduct and abuse against the R&B singer. Since the series aired, multiple news stories have followed: investigators are looking into the accusations; Lady Gaga and Chance the Rapper have apologized for collaborating with Mr. Kelly; and demonstrators are boycotting his music.
+Have you seen the documentary or read or heard any of the commentary on it? Have you been aware of the allegations against him? Have you ever been an R. Kelly fan? How has this news affected your feelings about him or his work?
+In “‘Surviving R. Kelly’ Documentary on Lifetime Details Sex Abuse Accusations,” Jacey Fortin writes about the series and the social upheaval that has followed it:
+The documentary has become the subject of widespread attention and fierce debate on social media, with many expressing gratitude to the women who continue to tell their stories. “I wish that he would experience a kind of social death, and that people who still vociferously declare him innocent — or their favorite artist, or worthy of having his work separated from who he is — that they are denied that,” said dream hampton, an executive producer of the documentary. The six parts of the series were scheduled over three days of broadcast, from Thursday through Saturday. The third and fourth episodes focused on Mr. Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial and the sex tape at its center. The fifth and sixth episodes examine more recent allegations and follow parents who were trying to free their daughters from Mr. Kelly’s influence, Ms. hampton said. While some fans of Mr. Kelly still defend him, many critics say that he has escaped the consequences of his actions for far too long. “No one cared because we were black girls,” the writer Mikki Kendall said in the documentary. Ms. hampton agreed that race was an integral part of this story. She added that black boys and girls in the United States were often perceived as older than they are, and mentioned Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer in Cleveland in 2014. “We know black boys are perceived to be older than they are by police, and we absolutely do an equivalent thing to black girls,” Ms. hampton said in an interview Friday. “We perceive them to be more sexual at an early age. We perceive them to be older. And that is rooted — there is no other way to say it, and it’s not hyperbole to say — it’s absolutely rooted in this country’s history of slavery, which has gone on longer than it hasn’t.” Mr. Kelly was still featured as an artist on the RCA website on Saturday. The label did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and a representative for Sony Music, which oversees RCA Records, declined to comment. Mr. Kelly’s management also declined to comment. His team has previously said it would “vigorously resist this attempted public lynching of a black man who has made extraordinary contributions to our culture.” Mr. Kelly is not currently facing criminal charges.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— What is your reaction to what you’ve read in this article?
+— We’ve asked before whether art can be separated from an artist. What do you think? Does the Kelly documentary or this article make you think any differently about that question? Why or why not?
+— What responsibility does the music industry have for holding Mr. Kelly and others accountable? Should streaming services, like Spotify, remove his music from their playlists? Should artists who have collaborated with or supported him in the past condemn him, as Lady Gaga, Chance the Rapper and John Legend have done? Should companies stop producing his music? What effects might these actions have on artists and are they deserved?
+— What responsibility do individuals have? Should people stop listening to his music? Will you stop listening to his music? Why or why not?
+— In a related Opinion piece, Salamishah Tillet and Scheherazade Tillet write:
+For 20 years, black girls and women accused the R&B singer Robert Kelly of sexually assaulting minors. Yet he still enjoyed enormous success.
+So his spectacular fall — due in large part to the work of Dream Hampton, an executive producer of the documentary — marks a seismic cultural shift. Over the past week, we’ve had conversations with many people who had never believed black girls’ allegations against him until they saw the documentary.
+What do you think of this statement? Have you noticed that the experiences of black women and girls have been ignored in the #MeToo movement? Do you think this is a watershed moment for women of color? Why or why not?“This isn’t your country, go home,” is what Ofelia Ruiz, a vendor at MacArthur Park, said she heard countless times from the police.
+“It was a lot of years of fighting, of suffering,” said Jose Ugalde, another vendor at the park. “A lot of criminalization.”1 of 11
+President Trump has repeatedly said he might declare a national emergency in order to bypass Congress and build a wall on the southwestern border.
+If he did so, the money to pay for the wall would be diverted from where?Before reading the article:
+Scroll through the images and videos in the article.
+What caught your eye? What trends do you see?
+If you had to write a headline, tweet or meme for the 2019 CES conference based on these images and videos, what would it be?
+Now, read the article, “CES 2019: It’s the Year of Virtual Assistants and 5G,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins: “The show must go on. That sentiment couldn’t have been stronger this week at CES, the largest consumer electronics convention in the country. The conference, which brought more than 180,000 people to Las Vegas, was a reminder of what the tech industry is best at: being optimistic about itself.” Why is the tech industry optimistic? What are reasons nonoptimists might be worried about bringing out new products now?
+2. What is the purpose of the CES conference? How many companies exhibited products and how many attended it?
+3. What were the hottest trends at the 2019 conference? Which do you think will be the biggest hit with consumers?What happens when the creative heart and soul of a studio retires? If it’s Hayao Miyazaki, the studio shutters with him.
+Not long after the legendary anime director, now 78, announced in 2013 that he was calling it quits (not his first time), his movie home, Studio Ghibli, halted production, ending its three-decade run with two Oscar-nominated films, “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” and “When Marnie Was There.” The news left animation fans across the globe wondering if the makers of such beloved films as “Princess Mononoke” and “Spirited Away” would ever release another feature.
+The decision also raised other questions. Could Miyazaki — one of the world’s most ambitious and tireless directors — actually stay retired? And what would all those other creative minds at the studio do?
+For the Ghibli producer Yoshiaki Nishimura (“Princess Kaguya”) the answer was simple, at least in theory. He would create his own studio, pulling some of the top talent from Ghibli’s deep stable of feature film animators.After a stroke had rendered him blind 10 years ago, Olmedini started working the trains with an assistant. To other Ecuadoreans who encounter him, he is a welcome link to their childhood, when the magician appeared on television shows and judged beauty pageants. “He was a fabulous magician back home,” Mr. Permuth said. “He opened for Menudo once. He was a celebrity.”
+He still is, just on a smaller, moving stage.A court in Myanmar rejected the appeal on Friday of two Reuters journalists sentenced to seven years in prison for reporting on atrocities against the country’s Rohingya minority.
+The journalists, U Wa Lone, 32, and U Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, were convicted in September of violating the colonial-era Official Secrets act. The verdict further dampened hopes that Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of Myanmar’s civilian government and a onetime human rights icon, would usher in an era of civil liberties in a country long controlled by a military government.
+The prosecution of the journalists was widely condemned by human rights and media freedom organizations, and they were included with the murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi among several journalists recognized as Time magazine’s person of the year for 2018.
+“Today’s ruling is yet another injustice among many inflicted upon Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo,” the editor in chief of Reuters, Stephen J. Adler, said in a statement. “They remain behind bars for one reason: those in power sought to silence the truth. Reporting is not a crime, and until Myanmar rights this terrible wrong, the press in Myanmar is not free, and Myanmar’s commitment to rule of law and democracy remains in doubt.”Fernando is planning a dangerous illegal escape from Tijuana into the United States. Tonight, he tells us, he’s going to swim across the border beyond the search lights, risking hypothermia and his life. A few days before, another migrant tried and drowned. It’s a gamble, but he thinks it’s his only chance to reach his pregnant wife in San Diego. On this side of the border, we met many migrants like Fernando who were growing more desperate by the day. Gang violence makes Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador have some of the highest homicide rates in the world. So in October, a caravan of close to 7,000 people fled Honduras and traveled north, finding safety in numbers. Migrants from other Central American countries joined along the way. The sheer size of the caravan drew attention to the migrants’ plight, but it also turned them into a political target. “Drug cartels, traffickers, smugglers —” “Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, ISIS —” “Covered in MS-13 tattoos.” “It’s like an invasion.” They covered over 2,000 miles to reach the border. Yet it’s here, within sight of American soil, that their dreams feel far away. There’s a wall covering this part of the border. U.S. agents patrol the area, and seeking asylum is a long and uncertain process. What we see are people wrestling with a set of tough choices, risking deportation, detention and death. Tijuana faces challenges that are typical of border cities: cartels, violence and trafficking. 2018 saw record homicides with nearly seven people killed here every day. Margarito is a Mexican news photographer documenting murder scenes and live-streaming the aftermath. Last month, two migrants were murdered, their naked bodies left on the street. The legal path to asylum in the U.S. begins here, with migrants waiting for their assigned numbers to be called off a list. Only then are they permitted across the border to make their case. Jaeme is number 1,681. She left her two sons behind in Guatemala. She’s been waiting nearly a month, and is hopeful now that her turn is coming up. But it’s making her anxious. If her claim is rejected, she’ll be deported back to Guatemala. That fear has her thinking about slipping illegally across the border, an idea that she keeps from her family. As we travel away from the border, we meet migrants who are coming to terms with a new reality: remaining here in Mexico, indefinitely. This is Tijuana’s biggest shelter, an old rodeo stadium that’s quickly filled up. Maria came from El Salvador with her family. She’s given up on waiting at the border. And now, she’s considering applying for a visa to work in Mexico. Others have given up altogether. Hundreds have already left Tijuana, regularly heading back home on buses paid for by the Mexican government. To push on, to stay or to leave. The outcomes of these choices are equally uncertain. Many of the migrants told us they are leaving their fate in the hands of God. Fernando didn’t make his swim. He backed down, at least for now.‘Becoming’
+To the Editor:
+Really? In the illustration for your cover review by Isabel Wilkerson of “Becoming” (Dec. 23), could you not depict Michelle Obama as her skin color really is, rather than as a black woman “becoming” white?
+Whether the decision was conscious or unconscious, you should do better.
+FRAN HAMBURG
+BROOKLYN
+♦
+To the Editor:
+I particularly enjoyed Isabel Wilkerson’s review of Michelle Obama’s “Becoming.”
+As a white teacher for 20 years at a predominantly black university on the South Side of Chicago, I passed thousands of black men and women heading to work when I got off the train at the Dan Ryan station. I walked by thousands of black kids, backpacks filled, hurrying down 95th Street going to their different schools.
+I taught thousands of young black men and women working determinedly to get their degrees and get ahead in life, just as Michelle Obama has done.You’ll need something to write with, of course. I am a big fan of fountain pens, which have a bit of a cult following even among those more accustomed to typing than writing. If you want in on the trend, Wirecutter suggests (as do I) the Lamy Safari — it’s a great gateway fountain pen. If you want something a little more traditional, here are some other pen options, and even some pencils.
+A gym tip you never knew you needed
+If going to the gym, or just working out, is a priority this year, you don’t need me to tell you what sweats to buy, or that you’ll need gym clothes. But make sure you get a good gym bag, pack it with your gear and leave it somewhere conspicuous.
+My best “make sure you actually go to the gym” hack has always been to pre-pack my gym bag with the things I need for a good workout (you know, a good water bottle, workout headphones, a quick-drying towel) and leave the bag somewhere I’ll virtually trip over. When I drove to work, I kept it in the back seat, where I normally toss my laptop bag after a long day, which reminded me I should hit the gym before returning home. Now that I commute by train, I leave it next to the door so it stares at me when I walk in after work.
+Go ahead and get all the new gym gear you want if it’ll help motivate you to work out, but don’t trust yourself to remember to use it. Give your willpower a little boost from past you. Future you will thank you for it.
+A few upgrades for a good night’s sleep
+If there’s anything I would recommend we all do in 2019, it’s get not just more sleep, but better sleep. What good is getting 10 hours of sleep if you still wake up feeling like everything hurts and you’re dying?The flip side of all of this is that moving to the densest urban areas remains a good bet for college-educated workers. Cities offer them very different kinds of jobs than small towns do. They can enjoy much higher wages for their skills there (in addition to all the amenities big cities provide).
+Other research Mr. Autor is conducting with Juliette Fournier, an M.I.T. doctoral student, suggests that the densest urban counties have become so appealing to prime-age workers that they’re now less likely to move away at life stages when previous generations have retreated to the suburbs, like when children arrive.
+Policymakers have suggested that low-skilled workers head to the same places where college-educated workers are growing wealthy, like New York and the Bay Area (although many have argued that high housing costs and strict land-use regulation in these places block lower-income workers from opportunity).
+The Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, whose work has long championed the benefits of cities, argues that they could still offer advantages to low-skilled workers because of high unemployment in many rural communities. Perhaps the kinds of low-skilled jobs that major metros offer are the same as those in smaller towns — but such jobs are a lot easier to find in big cities.
+Low-skilled workers may also find opportunities in cities that don’t come in the form of higher wages. They could come from the availability of nonprofits and social services, or of training programs, or from better access to health care and public transit. And there are other ways to measure opportunity in a community, like whether it enables poor children to get ahead.
+The wage pattern Mr. Autor describes looks startling to many economists in part because he has taken a well-recognized divergence in the labor market — between the boom in highly paid jobs for college graduates and the growth of low-paid service-sector work — and mapped it onto the country, by population density.
+But other scholars have been studying pieces of this picture for some time. The sociologist William Julius Wilson has documented the disappearance of precisely the kinds of urban jobs Mr. Autor describes.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The second time I met the man I would eventually marry, we sat down to Thai food in Brooklyn, and he asked me what my favorite building was in New York. Relatively new to the city, he posed the question as a litmus test, it seemed, to see who would answer honestly and who would strain to offer a contrarian response. Without any hesitation, I said that I loved the Chrysler Building beyond any other, and he laughed appreciatively at my total lack of interest in saying something original.
+The Chrysler Building is beautiful, but that alone does not explain the unequivocal, emotional reaction it provokes. Like all skyscrapers of the Modernist period, it conveys the grand ambitions of a new machinist age. But it also suggests something more intimate, that aspirations do not always play out predictably — that how you imagine you will experience the pinnacle is not, in fact, how you might actually experience the pinnacle. Distinctively, the building literalizes this view, forcing us to look up — delivering circularity rather than conclusion, surprise over certitude. Designed in the 1920s and completed in 1930, the spire was assembled the day before the stock market crashed in 1929.
+The Chrysler Building, currently owned by an Abu Dhabi wealth fund and the Tishman Speyer real estate empire, is now going up for sale. There is not an obvious buyer. Despite its significance, it is plagued by the same problems that face so many office buildings in the city that went up between the 1920s and the 1970s, many of them, like the Chrysler Building, on the east side of Midtown. They lack the light and efficiency of contemporary working spaces, and they are hugely expensive and time-consuming to repair and modernize, with warrens of rooms, interior columns and low ceilings.Through the divorce, I held on to my married name like a tether to the family I’d made. Chang was on my driver’s license, my passport, and my children’s birth certificates. You come to own your name just as you own your own body. It is the skin of you, your packaging, your label and your presentation. I was channeling Erica Jong, another Jewish writer who’d divorced a Chinese man and kept his surname. Plus, it felt right to have the same last name as my kids.
+“No one believes you’re my mom,” my almond-eyed son said once at camp pickup, wounded confusion in his voice. But the name was the proof.
+Yet, recovering in the hospital, battling the Big C — and preposterously negotiating the chaperoning of a roller-skating party — I was fiercely determined to survive, which took reconnecting to my essential self. Frankly, the whole fact of this cancer, a malignancy in my colon that later metastasized to my liver, felt inconceivable. I was young and fit, only in my 40s, but apparently part of the medical conundrum du jour, the sharp uptick of colorectal cancer diagnoses in Americans under 50.
+My Grandma Sooky would have had a psychological explanation for the target organ of my illness. “You’re eating your kishkes out over this divorce,” she’d have said, kishkes being Yiddish for intestines, or guts. Perhaps that old-world thinking contained a kernel of wisdom.
+Jack, my partner of six and a half years, had long observed that I hadn’t wholly let go of my ex. He was right, evidenced by the fact that I had kept his name. In the midst of my cancer recurrence, Jack and I married. We felt an urgency to make our love official. As a bonus, he had excellent health insurance.
+On our wedding day we sandwiched our visit to City Hall between a PET scan and a consult with a liver surgeon. I was literally radioactive when we said our “I do’s,” but I would have been glowing anyway.
+The irony is, I never once considered taking Jack’s last name. I don’t think it crossed his mind, either. The young woman I once was, seeking otherness and urbanity, a striver with class insecurities, had evolved into a stalwart mother in New Jersey, raising her kids in her hometown with their grandma. The mettle it took for my parents to muscle into the middle class turned out to be my lucky inheritance. The woman Jack married is her parents’ daughter, Pari Berk.3 of 7
+People who were told they carried a gene variant that curbed their appetites tended to respond to food in this way, even if they didn't carry the gene:The exiled Cubans decided she was a spy for the state, sent to infiltrate their weekly dinners. This is the fate that follows Cleo: She finds Cubans everywhere she goes, each with his or her own “personal Cuba.”
+Image
+The trouble with a censored text is that its censored-ness can become its only quality. Guerra’s own work — she is a protégée of Gabriel García Márquez, to whom the novel is dedicated — has been officially-unofficially banned in Cuba. But Guerra plays with the expectation one might have of an authoritative account of the island during the normalizing of United States-Cuba relations. As often as she gives a concrete description of Havana in the loosening grip of socialism, she gives one that dances and evades.
+More than in its plot — a Cold War conspiracy of sorts — the movement of “Revolution Sunday” is in the coming and going from the island, the beacon that will find Cleo in Paris, Barcelona and New York.
+“On this militarized island full of farewells,” she writes, back in Cuba, “we’re trapped between conformity and defecting. We Cubans have been well trained; our real damage is in our souls. Innocence isn’t possible here.”
+Yet this militarized Cuba isn’t uniformly sinister. It’s telling that the violent crime in the novel occurs in Mexico City, not Havana. And that Cleo enjoys a liberated and un-self-conscious sex life. She uses the bathroom with the door wide open while her Americanized Nicaraguan lover keeps the door shamefully closed. There’s humor, too, in totalitarianism. When Cleo is pulled aside at the airport to be questioned about her forthcoming essay collection, “Dissident Apprentice,” she sees that one of the officers has an advance copy: “I didn’t recognize the book until they put it in front of me. … I had it in my grasp for the first time. The cover was fantastic.”As an immigrant living in Arizona, a state that has come to be defined by its ugly history with immigration, I try to teach my bilingual, bicultural daughter — she was born in the United States to an American father and a Brazilian mother — to judge people by what we have in common. Moving around, for one thing: So many of us move to new cities or countries, new schools or new homes, and not always by choice. Movement means disruption, and every disruption forces us to learn and adapt. It forces us to grow.
+It is in this universal experience that Malala Yousafzai, the world’s youngest Nobel laureate, anchors WE ARE DISPLACED: My Journey and Stories From Refugee Girls Around the World (Little, Brown, 224 pp., $18.99; ages 12 and up). It is a stirring and timely book that strips the political baggage from the words “migrant” and “refugee,” telling the deeply personal stories of displacement and disruption that were lived by Yousafzai and nine other girls.
+Each of the girls we meet in these pages was pushed out of her homeland by violence. In the girls’ own words, we hear about escape, resettlement and the conflicting emotions that come with fitting into a new place when so much is defined by where they came from. The accounts are intimate, and strike me as honest. At times, it felt as if the narrator were sharing her story with a trusted new friend. Contextual information at the start of each chapter — explaining, for example, the persecution of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar — offers easy-to-digest lessons in world affairs.
+As many of her readers will already know, Yousafzai had been conspicuously advocating for girls’ education in Pakistan when a Taliban gunman shot her in the head in 2012, as she was boarding a school bus, at the age of 15. She detailed this life-altering event and herremarkable recovery in her 2013 memoir, “I Am Malala.” In “We Are Displaced,” she takes us to an earlier time, when she and her family hastily fled their home in Pakistan’s Swat Valley as the army waged war against Taliban forces that had occupied the area. “All you need to know is that when you go through that kind of experience,” she writes, “there are often two extremes: Either you lose hope completely and you shatter and break into pieces, or you become so resilient that no one can break you anymore.”But people like Sandra Oh Lin, the chief executive of KiwiCo, a seller of children’s activity kits, say that more money isn’t necessary. Ms. Oh Lin raised a little over $10 million in venture funding between 2012 and 2014, but she is now rebuffing offers of more just as her company has hit on a product people want — the very moment when investors would love to pour more gas on the fire. KiwiCo is profitable and had nearly $100 million in sales in 2018, a 65 percent increase over the prior year, Ms. Oh Lin said.
+“We are aggressive about growth, but we are not a company that chases growth at all costs,” Ms. Oh Lin said. “We want to build a company that lasts.”
+Entrepreneurs are even finding ways to undo money they took from venture capital funds. Wistia, a video software company, used debt to buy out its investors last summer, declaring a desire to pursue sustainable, profitable growth. Buffer, a social media-focused software company, used its profits to do the same in August. Afterward, Joel Gascoigne, its co-founder and chief executive, received more than 100 emails from other founders who were inspired — or jealous.
+“The V.C. path forces you into this binary outcome of acquisition or I.P.O., or pretty much bust,” Mr. Gascoigne said. “People are starting to question that.”
+Who dares question the hoodie
+Venture capital wasn’t always the default way to grow a company. But in the last decade, its gospel of technological disruption has infiltrated every corner of the business world. Old-line companies from Campbell Soup to General Electric started venture operations and accelerator programs to foster innovation. Sprint and UBS hired WeWork to make their offices more start-up-like.
+At the same time, start-up culture — hoodies and all — entered the mainstream on the back of celebrity investors like Ashton Kutcher, TV shows like “Shark Tank” and movies like “The Social Network.” Few questioned the Silicon Valley model for creating the next Google, Facebook or Uber.
+Those who tried to buck the conventional method experienced harsh trade-offs. Bank loans are typically small, and banks are reluctant to lend money to software companies, which have no hard assets to use as collateral. Founders who eschew venture capital often wind up leaning on their life savings or credit cards.About the best thing you can do with certain experiences is use them as material, and I admire Ellin’s fortitude in telling a story that risks making her look like a fool. She does try to pre-empt unsympathetic reader reactions, but also pulls off the tricky balancing act of avoiding either self-justification or self-castigation.
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+After recounting her own story, she goes on to explore every imaginable aspect of dishonesty and dual identity: deception in the animal kingdom, the lying of children, polygraphs and methods of divining truthfulness in antiquity, Winnicott and Jung, the modal theory of the brain, case histories of psychopaths, con artists, double agents, undercover cops, drug dealers, adulterers and wanted criminals living underground.
+Whether this exhaustive approach is an effort to understand what happened to her through breadth rather than depth or just an excuse to pad what began as a magazine article to book length, it threatens to diffuse the book’s focus to the point of becoming an Encyclopedia of Lies. It also risks conflating phenomena that are as superficially similar but ultimately unrelated as dolphins and sharks; the underlying psychology of fugitive ecoteurs is very different from that of frauds like her ex-fiancé.
+More than half the book is devoted to the motivations of people who engage in elaborate deceptions — the “unavoidable question of why The Commander fabricated so much of his existence.” Which seems like a considerably less interesting and pertinent question than: Why did she believe him? The pathology of liars like Ellin’s ex is of clinical interest; the psychology that made her susceptible to his lies is universal (and of urgent topical relevance).
+The Commander’s lies, described flatly, sound like stories an 11-year-old would make up: He was a Navy SEAL, always going on “secret missions”; he was friends with Barack Obama; he “judo chops” people. So how did an intelligent person trained as a journalist, a self-described congenital skeptic, fall for them? (Funny that the idiom “to fall for” applies to both love and scams.)From the start, Moss presents Silvie as attentive to the natural world. Unlike her mother, who stays close to the reconstructed roundhouse and tends the campfire, Silvie wanders. She is attuned to the habits of birds and bats and insects. She can identify roots and herbs. She reads waterways as if they were stanzas of music. Her presence in the novel is richly physical, and through her physicality, Moss immerses us in the pleasures of nascent sexuality and adolescent independence.
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+There is great strength in Silvie. She gathers much of the encampment’s food. She shows the male students, Dan and Pete, how to joint rabbits, the kind of “boys’ thing” at which she excels. Still, Silvie harbors contradictions. She whines about the inconveniences of Iron Age clothing. And she is so underwhelmed by the hard-won diet of bannocks and gruel, she partakes of contraband sweets purchased at a nearby convenience store. Like most teenagers, she is a whirring emotional whipsaw.
+“Ghost Wall” is tautly framed by Silvie’s point of view. Her conversations and interior monologues are embedded in lean, no-nonsense paragraphs. Moss is not much interested in giving Silvie and her rebellious tendencies room to breathe. This is a novel about being constrained, even trapped. Silvie soon finds herself hemmed in by her father’s abuse, her mother’s numb codependence and the students’ thoughtless privilege. Time and again, she fights through these obstacles to speak her mind or claim dominion over her body. But her battles come at a cost. Despite her considerable spirit, Silvie does not possess an unlimited trove of self-worth. Like most victims of abuse, she is in thrall to her abuser. To avoid pain, she can be persuaded to accept her lot, to obey. Sometimes, she tells herself, it is “better just to take what’s coming to you anyway.”
+Moss is sharply skeptical about historical re-enactment, especially the kind romanticized by men who seek lost “gender hierarchies.” She salts the novel with women who practice ancient skills with modesty, who honor historical experience without slavishly imitating it. There is the university lecturer who visits the camp to demonstrate basket weaving. There is the midwife, Trudi, whom Silvie and the lone female university student, Molly, meet when they sneak off for cakes and iced lollies. Trudi is bemused that the professor hasn’t asked “people who know” about local flora and fauna “rather than looking it all up in books.” And it is Molly — irreverent, intellectually curious, sexually bold — who probes Silvie’s attachment to her father and models possible paths to freedom. Indeed, Silvie’s poignant attraction to Molly sounds the deepest notes of desire in the book.
+If most of the women in “Ghost Wall” find solidarity through collaboration, the men become transfixed by their desire “to kill things and talk about fighting.” And it is with this theme that Moss lays down perhaps the most potent marker in the novel. The Berlin Wall has fallen not long before it takes place, leaving England vulnerable to new tides of immigration. In the shadows of Hadrian’s Wall, that most British of artifacts, the men construct a “ghost wall,” a palisade crowned by freshly boiled animal skulls. A ghost wall, the professor tells the group, was the Britons’ “last-ditch defense” against invading Romans. Building it, and performing ad hoc sacraments at its base, infuses the men with tribal passions. They are ready to defend their territory.Public art can dazzle, amuse and confuse.
+In New York City, statues of characters called Dogman and Rabbitgirl have been proliferating on city sidewalks and squares. Art critics have not been kind .
+Some have called the statues “gimmicky” and accused the two Australian artists behind the sculptures of bypassing channels for public feedback.
+Have you seen these statues, or other works of public art that vex or please you? Tell us about it, and if you have a photo or video of it, show us. Your submission may be selected for publication.Six new paperbacks to check out this week.
+KING ZENO, by Nathaniel Rich. (Picador, $19.) In 1918 New Orleans, a new style of music takes hold as the Spanish flu, the mafia and a serial killer ravage the city. Rich’s sprawling, unruly novel focuses on three characters — a Creole jazz musician, a detective recovering from World War I and the matriarch of an organized-crime family — whose lives are tossed into chaos by an ax-wielding killer on the loose.
+THE MONK OF MOKHA, by Dave Eggers. (Knopf, $16.95.) Mokhtar Alkhanshali, the Yemeni-American at the center of Eggers’s book, became captivated by the history of coffee in his family’s country and set out to encourage farmers there to revive the trade. Eggers tells his story, though the book is built less on a history of Yemen or coffee than on a more familiar theme: the American dream.
+THE AFTERLIVES, by Thomas Pierce. (Riverhead, $16.) At the opening of this debut novel, Jim Byrd is waking up after a heart attack, which left him dead for several minutes. But the world he finds after his revival seems strange and impossible (free-range holograms, disease-detecting condoms). As he encounters more and more supernatural elements, the sense that life is off-kilter nags at him, and at us.
+FUTUREFACE: A FAMILY MYSTERY, AN EPIC QUEST, AND THE SECRET TO BELONGING, by Alex Wagner. (One World, $18.) The only child of a Burmese mother and a white American father, Wagner grew up hearing stories of “escapes, settlement, assimilation.” She set out to understand her heritage, traveling across the world and turning to DNA tests. Our reviewer, Maud Newton, praised the book, writing, “It’s the concreteness of Wagner’s own search, in all its messy detail and lingering uncertainties, that underscores our interconnectedness.”This week, Ruth Franklin reviews a new graphic adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary, which was originally published in 1947 in Dutch. In 1952, Meyer Levin, the author of “Compulsion,” reviewed “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” for the Book Review. Below is an excerpt.
+Anne Frank’s diary is too tenderly intimate a book to be frozen with the label “classic,” and yet no lesser designation serves. For little Anne Frank, spirited, moody, witty, self-doubting, succeeded in communicating in virtually perfect, or classic, form the drama of puberty. But her book is not a classic to be left on the library shelf. It is a warm and stirring confession, to be read over and over for insight and enjoyment.
+The diary is a classic on another level, too. It happened that during the two years that mark the most extraordinary changes in a girl’s life, Anne Frank lived in astonishing circumstances: she was hidden with seven other people in a secret nest of rooms behind her father’s place of business, in Amsterdam. Thus, the diary tells the life of a group of Jews waiting in fear of being taken by the Nazis.
+Anne’s diary is a great affirmative answer to the life-question of today, for she shows how ordinary people, within this ordeal, consistently hold to the greater human values.One night, after Yuko and Koji walk in on Ippei and a lover, Koji ends up assaulting Ippei, bashing his head with a wrench.
+That’s the relatively normal part.
+When Koji is released from jail, Yuko takes him back under her wing. She is “censured for her rashness by the prison governor, who said he had never before heard of a case where a member of the victim’s family had become the criminal’s guarantor.” She brings him back into the orbit of her husband, who now has trouble communicating because of his injuries from the attack.
+“After two years of anguish, each of them had, perhaps, finally found happiness,” Mishima writes. “Yuko had Ippei exactly as she wanted him, Koji had his freedom, and, as for Ippei, he had something very peculiar.” What exactly does Ippei have? For the villagers (and for the readers) “there was pleasure in guessing how their immoral behavior would turn out.”
+The novel’s plot isn’t really enough to sustain even its relatively brief length, and there’s a slackness to certain scenes that’s missing in Mishima’s other work.
+But two primary things make this book worthwhile. First, it may be a minor work, but Mishima is a giant, and even the minor works of giants are inherently interesting. Second, the uniquely askew relationships at the center of the story mean that its most riveting scenes are well and truly riveting; unforgettable, even. There is a macabre fascination, tinged with pitch-black humor, in Koji’s meeting Ippei again after he is released from prison. And in a shocking moment when Yuko kisses Koji in front of her bewildered husband, there is the unveiling of a profound cruelty.In 1973, the performer Hugo Zacchini sued Scripps‐Howard Broadcasting after one of its news programs aired his entire act on television — an act in which he shot himself out of a cannon at an Ohio county fair and landed in a net 200 feet away.
+The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which found in his favor, saying, essentially, that if someone could watch the whole thing on television, why would they bother to get off the couch and see it in person?
+Today, a new set of cases is nudging the legal boundaries of who controls certain performances. This dispute centers on dancing avatars in Fortnite Battle Royale, one of the biggest video games in the world, and whether the moves they do are owned by somebody else.
+Three performers have sued Epic Games, which makes Fortnite, an addictive, money-minting juggernaut of a survival game where players fight it out to stay alive while they kill everybody else. The game is free to download, but players purchase add-ons as they go along, including a rotating offering of dance moves called “emotes.”In early 2015, Ashley Eddie started as a line cook at Santina, an Italian restaurant in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District. Within a year, she had caught the attention of one of the owners, Mario Carbone, who promoted her to sous chef. Last summer, she became the executive chef. Since taking over the kitchen, she has added several dishes like rigatoni with pumpkinseed pesto, as well as offering a gluten-free version of every dish on the menu. Ms. Eddie, 31, works between five and six long days a week, but Sundays are a guaranteed day off. “I use the time for practical stuff like errands but also to relax and practice some self-care,” she said. Her dog, Barbara, a terrier and Chihuahua mix, also factors into her day. She lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where she grew up.
+PETS KNOW Sunday is the one day where I get to wake up late, so I take advantage of it and won’t get out of bed before 9. Usually, I’m up between 6 and 7 after having gone to bed at 2 or 3 the night before, so I don’t get a lot of sleep. Barbara wakes me up early every day, but for some reason, she never bothers me early on a Sunday. It’s almost like she knows that I need the rest.U.S.A. Basketball compensates players who compete on national teams to make up for wages they could have earned working summer jobs rather than practicing or competing. The N.C.A.A. allows college athletes to accept those payments. It calls them broken-time payments.
+For players with high school eligibility remaining, U.S.A. Basketball typically inquires with individual state high school athletics associations to see if the payments can be accepted. Policies can vary by state.
+In this case, because of what Craig Miller, a spokesman for U.S.A. Basketball, termed a clerical error, nobody checked with the state high school athletic associations for the three players on the under-18 team with high school eligibility remaining. U.S.A. Basketball sent checks for $857.20 to Davenport and every other player on the team. On Aug. 27, Mario Davenport, Maori’s father, received it. Two days later, she cashed it.
+Two months later, U.S.A. Basketball realized the error. In November, an employee called the Alabama athletics association, which told the U.S.A. Basketball employee that under Alabama rules, athletes could accept broken-time payments only if the value was less than $200. On Nov. 26, a U.S.A. Basketball official called Davenport’s mother, Tara Davenport, and informed her that Maori was not allowed to accept the stipend. The next day, Tara Davenport reported the violation to the state association and informed Charles Henderson High School officials, and on Nov. 28 she repaid U.S.A. Basketball.
+Two days later, the state ruled Davenport ineligible for the rest of the season. Two appeals boards have upheld the ruling.
+On Wednesday afternoon, Tara Davenport said she hoped attention from the news media, as well as pressure from Alabama politicians, would convince the association to change the ruling. The Alabama House Republican Caucus unanimously approved a resolution supporting Maori Davenport, and its members were among the many local politicians supporting her. If the association’s officials were unwilling to change their ruling, Tara Davenport was prepared to take the next step.
+“If they don’t, we are definitely going to take some legal action to try to help get her on the court,” she said. The next day, she and Mario Davenport filed a lawsuit in Pike County Circuit Court seeking their daughter’s reinstatement.A few days later, Jodi has completed her quest and fulfilled her decades-old promise to Paula. Except the abused boy, Ricky, is now a troubled and troubling adult, rescued but not always grateful to his savior. Along the way Jodi has also found a new locus of desire, Miranda — a beautiful, impulsive young woman with an addictive personality and three young children from her broken marriage to a faded country music star. Jodi and Miranda’s complex relationship, with its tough and delicate moments of attraction and then romance, shapes one of the book’s strongest movements.
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+Before the six of them — damaged and desperate — shoehorn into Miranda’s Chevette and head up to West Virginia in time for Jodi’s first appointment with her parole officer, Jodi tells Ricky, “Whatever you want for a new life, bring it here with you in the morning.” But the new life they’re all fleeing toward is harsh, and its margins so tight that a welfare benefits card counts as a major asset.
+Throughout the narrative, which jumps back and forth in time between the late 1980s and 2007, the events leading to Jodi’s conviction spin in her memory, becoming clearer bit by bit. Her teenage affair with Paula once took Jodi into a dark, frightening and exciting underworld of gambling, guns and passion. At one point, remembering a flight in a small plane over the ocean with Paula, Jodi searches in vain for the right words to describe the color of the water, as elusive as her swirling emotions — words sufficient to “catch the heart-wild magic of it.”
+Now, back in West Virginia with her collection of fugitives, Jodi holds to her prison vision of living simply on the land, an old and deeply American dream that is hard to let go. She finds that her grandmother’s farm has been sold, but that doesn’t deter her from moving her group into the cabin anyway for a brief cigarette-and-whiskey outlaw idyll. Instead of peace and hope and love, however, they find they’re under constant threat in an Appalachian community gutted by meth and opioids, by fracking creeping so close that a neighbor can set his tap water on fire, and, as always, by limitations on upward mobility for the underprivileged that have been baked into American culture from its beginning.
+Though the powerful pulls of land and home and sense of place persist, one of the primary questions “Sugar Run” asks is what these concepts even mean now in this country. Maren is masterly at describing America’s modern wastelands, the blasted towns not yet and maybe never-to-be the beneficiaries of rehabilitation and reoccupation. The book’s landscape is dotted with roadside casino trailers, abandoned mining operations, country brothels set up like prisons with chain-link fences and armed guards to control both the customers and the immigrant prostitutes. Jodi’s own brother uses her in an opioid transaction and then threatens her by suggesting that locals might consider Miranda’s children better off with a “more Christian” family. How do you possibly find or make a home under such conditions?THE RED ADDRESS BOOK
+By Sofia Lundberg
+290 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $25.
+Most curmudgeonly protagonists, my own included, are barely eligible for senior discounts and ought to be booking cycling trips across Asia instead of shuffling about in their bedroom slippers (yes, I mean you, Ove). So it’s refreshing that Doris, the Swedish heroine of Sofia Lundberg’s debut novel, “The Red Address Book,” is truly old at 96 and depicted with an unflinching eye toward the realities of advanced age. Housebound and alone, she isn’t about to rise up and go on life-changing adventures. Death is, she says, “waiting in every little wrinkle, clinging to my body.”
+Doris has two things left in life. One is her weekly Skype visit with her American great-niece, Jenny, a married mother of three. The other is the memoir she is writing, prompted by names in the red address book given to her by the father she lost as a child: “All the names that come and go. That rip our hearts to pieces and make us shed tears. That become lovers or enemies.” The address book may wear a bit thin as a literary device, but each name unlocks a new adventure.
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+A maid in Stockholm at 13, a fashion model in 1930s Paris, unemployed and poverty-stricken in New York, torpedoed in World War II: Doris struggles like Job. But help always pops up in the nick of time. A fellow Swede on a New York bus offers a home; a sailor on a dark pier provides a disguise and a job on a ship to Europe; unexpected funds arrive in the mail. There is a slightly breezy overlooking of travel logistics and the realities of war, but the story is a colorful page-turner.In the Soviet Union, Stalin was certainly no progressive; he murdered his political enemies at will. But when the Nazis invaded in 1941, the Soviet Union’s most famous female pilot — Marina Raskova — persuaded Stalin to let women fly and fight the Germans.
+In the years to come, Raskova’s regiments would fly as many as 300 missions a night — an estimated 24,000 in all — under conditions so brutal as to be absurd. Starvation and freezing temperatures. Stalin’s orders and Hitler’s invaders. Slow, primitive airplanes that would burn “like candles” if struck by antiaircraft fire. And, of course, the constant reminder that the next mission, in the cold Soviet night, might be their last. Dozens of Soviet airwomen — including some of the nation’s most beloved pilots — died during the war, flying, one woman reported, into “a continuous curtain of fire.”
+As a result, many women struggled with headaches and anxiety after the war. “We had been fighting for one thousand nights,” one female pilot said, “one thousand nights in combat.” But it was worth it, they believed — not just because they defeated the Nazis, but because they proved something: They were fighters just like the men. “I am completely absorbed in combat life,” one of them would say. “I can’t seem to think of anything but the fighting.”
+It’s difficult to write a historical narrative with multiple characters — and Wein clearly grapples with that problem. At times, the book’s title — “A Thousand Sisters” — seems all too fitting. There are many names to remember. Wein also relies too much on italics or exclamation points to emphasize a fact that would be powerful enough on its own. Likewise, at the conclusion of the book she tells us how to feel, instead of letting us digest the amazing story and figure it out for ourselves.
+But readers will forgive these shortcomings, reveling instead in the story
+Wein hasn’t just brought a lost generation of airwomen back to life. “A Thousand Sisters” should inspire a new generation of young girls—and boys, too. This story proves what every child should know: A woman can do anything.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+New Yorkers are used to waiting in lines — for burgers, sneakers, the latest tech gadgets. But on a recent Sunday morning, the line at the Japanese teahouse Nippon Cha in Bayside, Queens, was different. For one thing, people weren’t hunched over, staring at their phones. They were too busy chatting about the intrigue of the pop-up inside.
+One young woman asked how quickly the products sold out. (“I think within the first two hours” came the answer from somewhere farther up.) An older woman joining the line announced that she was here with a specific order from a friend in the hospital. Japanese families at wide wooden tables briefly looked up from bowls of ramen to survey the crowd gathering at the entrance. Two French bulldogs who had tagged along with their owners were squatted on a bench made for humans, but no one seemed to mind.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The stone church has been in Brooklyn for almost 200 years, and it was easy to tell. The floor creaked under worshipers’ feet as they made their way to a pew, and a plaque in the vestibule commemorated past members who had fought in the Great War.
+Many who gathered for a recent Sunday morning service had been part of the congregation of New Utrecht Reformed Church for decades. Still, as they sang and prayed and wandered the aisles to offer peace to one another, many felt like they were acclimating themselves to the sanctuary. They had been locked out for some 15 years, as a renovation project swelled into an epic overhaul. They have only been allowed back inside to worship in recent weeks.
+“Welcome to God’s house,” the Rev. E.J. Emerson, the church’s pastor, said at the start of the service. The sanctuary was new to her, too. She had arrived six years ago, and until now, the space had been filled with scaffolding and tools. She had led services in a hall next door.Now, after making billions of dollars and joining forces with Big Tobacco, Juul is billing itself as a public-health crusader.
+Juul is far from the first company to attempt a humanitarian makeover. Facebook, an outgrowth of a Harvard student’s juvenile attempt to quantify the attractiveness of his classmates, now claims to have been motivated by a virtuous impulse to connect the world; Uber, created by two tech entrepreneurs who wanted to zoom around San Francisco in luxury cars, later tried to convince people that it wanted to provide affordable mobility to the masses.
+But in Juul’s case, revisionist history is particularly important, because the way Juul markets itself is central to the question of how it should be treated. Many consumers, investors and ethical technologists would rightly shun a company that knowingly targeted minors with harmful products, and cleaned up its act only after public pressure. But if you believe that Juul had a noble anti-cigarette mission all along, it’s easier to excuse its missteps as the product of innocent naïveté.
+Unfortunately for Juul, plenty of evidence suggests that the company didn’t always take its public health agenda so seriously.
+In 2015, in an interview with The Verge, Ari Atkins, a research and development engineer who helped create the original Juul, said that “we don’t think a lot about addiction here because we’re not trying to design a cessation product at all.”
+He added that “anything about health is not on our mind.”
+In other early interviews, James Monsees, Juul’s co-founder and chief product officer, played down the idea of a public health mission.
+“We’re not an activist company,” he said in a 2014 interview. “If you don’t like what we’re making better than cigarettes, then have a cigarette, that’s fine.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In 2017, around 33,000 criminal defendants in New York couldn’t post bail at their initial hearing. They went straight from a courthouse to jail simply because they were poor.
+States such as New Jersey, Arizona, and California have all recently adopted new rules eliminating or sharply curtailing the use of cash bail. The New York government could pass its own bill as soon as this spring. Advocates for criminal justice reform say that ending the bail system would help curb mass incarceration.
+Abolishing bail, however, raises the question of whether additional measures to detain criminal defendants will be needed. In a news conference last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the criminal justice system needs not only “reform” but also “tightening up,” particularly through allowing judges to consider a defendant’s level of “dangerousness” before granting bail.
+In response, a dozen advocacy groups, such as the Legal Aid Society, released a statement accusing the mayor of attempting to “derail essential reforms to New York’s bail and parole release systems and to reverse progress made toward the decarceration of New York’s jails and prisons.”Despite those daunting statistics, chances of winning are better than it may seem. That is because many of those who apply are disqualified, either because their earnings exceed or are below the requirements for a specific development, or because they fail to provide the necessary paperwork, including work history and tax records.
+And depending on the housing project, preference may be given to those who meet certain criteria, like municipal workers, the homeless or residents of the neighborhood where the development is being built. (The latter, known as community preference, has come under attack for perpetuating racial segregation in some neighborhoods, and in the wake of a growing homeless population, some have also criticized the lottery program for not giving enough preference to the homeless.)
+Those who have won housing lotteries are a diverse group, from a variety of socioeconomic, racial and geographic backgrounds. Despite their differences, however, they tend to have something in common: Many have faced challenging life events, and nearly all insist that the key to winning the lottery is determination.
+“You have to know how to hustle and be on it,” said Erika Lindsey, an urban planner who spent nearly a decade applying to lotteries before winning a one-bedroom in Brooklyn, near Barclays Center. “My main advice is to be persistent.”
+LIZZIE VILLAS BOAS
+Mott Haven, Bronx | $251 for a one-bedroom
+Lizzie Villas Boas suffers from hip dysplasia and has had 25 surgeries and four hip replacements. “I’ve had to learn to respect my pain,” said Ms. Villas Boas, 57, who is from Brazil. “I cannot change my life, and so I always try and find the happiness.”
+Her first purchase for her new home reflects that. In October, when she moved into her new one-bedroom in the South Bronx, Ms. Villas Boas went to Target to fill her empty refrigerator. As she wandered the aisles, her eyes alighted on a wooden sign that read, “Give Thanks Always.”
+Ms. Villas Boas, who gets around on a scooter, depends on Supplemental Security Income, and she couldn’t afford what amounted to a luxury, but she splurged on it anyway.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Government Shutdown, Contd.
+Amid the continuing government shutdown, Jimmy Fallon joked that it felt like one big metaphor for Donald Trump’s entire presidency.In December, President Trump made an extraordinary declaration about U.S. involvement in Syria: “We have won against ISIS. Now, it’s time for our troops to come back home.” Ignoring advice from his generals and advisers, Trump said that the U.S. would leave Syria. Defense Department officials said that they were ordered to do it within 30 days. [explosion] Then came a flurry of criticism, even from inside his own party. “I believe it is a catastrophic mistake.” “This is very disappointing.” “It needs to be reconsidered.” Then, the resignations. First, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit. And America’s chief diplomat in the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, soon followed. Now, the timeline for a full withdrawal is unclear. “I never said we’re doing it that quickly.” He went on to say that the U.S. will leave at a proper pace while continuing to fight ISIS, a shift from — “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The nearly eight-year-long war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. [explosion] So, how did we get here and what are U.S. forces doing in Syria? In 2011, uprisings rippled through the Middle East. Leaders fell in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. And after months of anti-government protests in Syria, the U.S. had a message for President Bashar al-Assad: “This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.” He didn’t and the conflict escalated. In 2012, Obama warned Assad against using Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons against his own people. “That’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing the use of chemical weapons.” A year later, Assad’s army launched a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, killing 1,400 people. [screaming] In response, the U.S. debated airstrikes, but they were avoided when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. But a new threat was also emerging — ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. began supporting rebel groups to fight extremists, while also conducting airstrikes as part of an international coalition. These efforts expanded and the U.S. troop numbers grew from hundreds to the low thousands. In 2016, U.S.-supported fighters took control of the ISIS stronghold of Manbij — and in 2017 their de facto capital, Raqqa. There are now around 2,000 American forces in Syria who are largely fighting alongside the Kurdish groups. This has been a problem for America’s ally Turkey, which has a long-standing conflict with the Kurds. U.S. troops have had run-ins with Assad’s forces as well as groups backed by Russia and Iran. Since taking office, Trump has ordered two strikes on areas controlled by Assad in response to chemical weapons attacks. “We are prepared to sustain this response, until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.” U.S. officials and allies dispute the claim that ISIS has been defeated. They warn that an American departure will weaken U.S. influence in the region and may embolden Russia, Iran and Turkey, who are also on the ground. The other worry? The move may inspire some ISIS fighters to return to Syria.Charles Darwin himself never thought that explained everything. Now biologists are revisiting his theory that animals can appreciate beauty for its own sake.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Missing girl is found: Jayme Closs, 13, disappeared in October on the night that her parents were shot to death in their rural Wisconsin home. She was found alive on Thursday, the authorities said. A suspect was in custody.
+Huawei arrest: The Polish authorities have charged a Chinese employee of Huawei, the telecommunications giant, and a Polish national with spying for China, officials said today. The arrests come as the U.S. and its allies have tried to restrict the use of Chinese technology based on espionage fears.
+Michael Cohen in Congress: President Trump’s former personal lawyer said on Thursday that he would give “a full and credible account” of his work for Mr. Trump to a House committee next month.
+Inauguration scrutiny: Federal prosecutors are investigating at least a dozen Ukrainians who were present during President Trump’s inaugural festivities . Some of them, or their allies, are thought to have promoted proposals aligned with Russia’s interests .
+New Carlos Ghosn accusations: Japanese prosecutors brought fresh charges of financial wrongdoing today against the former head of the automaking alliance of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi. He is in jail in Tokyo.LONDON — The Polish authorities arrested two people, including a Chinese employee of the telecommunications giant Huawei, and charged them with spying for Beijing, officials said on Friday, as the United States and its allies move to restrict the use of Chinese technology because of concerns that it is being used for espionage.
+The arrest of the Huawei employee is almost certain to escalate tensions between Western countries and China over the company, which the authorities in the United States have accused of acting as an arm of the Chinese government and making equipment designed for spying.
+In December, the daughter of Huawei’s founder was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States, which said she had committed fraud as part of a scheme to violate American sanctions against companies doing business with Iran. It was unclear whether the arrests in Poland had been requested by the United States. But a senior Western diplomat who was briefed on them said the Justice Department had been working with the Polish government.
+Europe is increasingly a battleground in the fight over Huawei, the world’s second-largest smartphone maker and a top supplier of networking equipment. The company’s sales in the region have been growing, but many countries there now face pressure to reconsider its presence, particularly as construction begins for the next-generation wireless networks known as 5G. Germany, Britain, the Czech Republic and Norway are among the nations that have recently questioned how deeply Huawei should be involved in developing 5G infrastructure.“Rabia is such a warm, beautiful person, maybe the best person I have ever met,” said the elder Mr. Pattison, who co-owns Control Technologies, a company, based in Williston, Vt., that installs temperature controls for heating and ventilation systems.
+“She’s the best thing that ever happened to my son, and as diverse as their backgrounds are, they are a match made in heaven.”
+Leonard Pattison was one of the many guests in attendance at the civil ceremony, which was presided over by Michael McSweeney, the New York City clerk, at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Other guests included Mr. Pattison’s mother, Linda Banks of Brevard, N.C., his stepmother, Eileen Pattison, and Ms. Ahmad’s sister, Maryam Ahmad, along with her 6-month-old-daughter, Naila Shah, who live in Hermosa Beach, Calif. (Her husband and a son could not attend, nor could Ms. Ahmad’s brother, Tariq Ahmad of Oakland, Calif., and his family.)
+“Christopher and Rabia, we wish for you a love that makes both of you better people and continues to give you joy that provides you with energy with which to face the responsibilities of your lives,” Mr. McSweeney said to the couple after they exchanged wedding rings and vows.
+Just after Mr. McSweeney pronounced the bride and groom married, they exited the building to showers of applause and confetti from family and friends, including three members of Ms. Rabia’s “New York Family,” Dan Marsili and Erik Batt, the fathers of the twin girls, and Shuaib Siddiqui, her best friend from N.Y.U.
+“Rabia is still the same old bubbly person she was the day I met her,” said Mr. Siddiqui, who has known the bride for more than 20 years. “When she was younger, she kept to a certain sense of the way things were supposed to be based on what her parents had taught her. But as I watched her mature, she forged her own path, and decided that she was not going to marry someone just because they were raised like she was. Instead, she would wait for someone, from any walk of life, with values and morals that fell in line with hers, someone with a lot of good inside of them, and she found all of that in Chris.”After years of being overshadowed by the likes of Apple and Alphabet, real estate funds have lately edged ahead of the overall stock market by betting mainly on old-fashioned assets like office buildings, malls and warehouses.
+In the fourth quarter, when the stock market really started to jitter and slide, the S&P 500 sank 13.52 percent, including dividends, but the FTSE Nareit All Equity R.E.I.T.s Index, a leading index composed of publicly traded real estate investment trusts, lost only 6.1 percent. For all of 2018, as the S&P 500 lost 4.4 percent, including dividends, the FTSE Nareit index lost only 4 percent.
+So it goes for this stalwart, if stodgy, sector: Real estate can often chug along when other sectors start to sputter. For that reason, a real estate mutual fund or exchange-traded fund may help buffer an otherwise diversified portfolio from some of the stock market’s swings. In addition, it’s an entree to investing in commercial real estate for someone who can’t afford the Empire State Building (which is owned by a R.E.I.T. named Empire State Realty Trust).
+R.E.I.T.s are property owners whose shares trade on stock exchanges. They can own a variety of real estate, ranging from the obvious — those office buildings, warehouses and shopping centers — to the more obscure — data centers, cell towers and even timberlands. Some own residential rental properties or finance home purchases, but those account for only about one-fifth of the overall R.E.I.T. market, according to the National Association of Real Estate Investment Trusts.We can declare a national emergency. We shouldn’t have to. But I would like to do a much broader form of immigration, and we could do immigration reform — it’ll take longer. It’s been complex. It’s been going on for 30, 35 years they’ve been talking about immigration reform. But we have to — before we do that — we have to create a barrier. That we could do very quickly. We could help the Dreamers. We want to help the Dreamers. I was ready to help the Dreamers and then we got a decision that the folks representing the Dreamers very strongly, which is us also, if you want to know the truth. But they said, well, we don’t have to do it anymore. So now it’s before the Supreme Court. We’ll see what happens. If the Supreme Court rules against the President Obama decision, which he knew would not hold up. If they — we will have a deal with the Dreamers. We could do it early. But this has to be done soon, so we get our folks paid in our country.It turned out that there was indeed an increase, but not everywhere. Cornell and a member of his team, Francis L. Huang, an associate professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia who specializes in quantitative research methods, found that in 2015, there’d been little difference in bullying rates between areas of the state that went for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and those that would support Trump. But in 2017, students reported 18 percent more bullying in Trump locales than the Clinton ones. In the Clinton regions, bullying actually declined slightly from 2015; in the Trump zones, it increased.
+The Trump areas saw particular increases in teasing about race and, to a lesser degree, sexual orientation. The greater the margin of Trump support in the community, “the higher the prevalence rates” of bullying, Huang told me, even after adjusting for factors like socioeconomic status and parental education.
+Cornell and Huang’s peer-reviewed paper, “School Teasing and Bullying After the Presidential Election,” was published on Wednesday. They don’t claim to have discovered that a region’s backing for Trump causes an uptick in reports of bullying, only that the two are correlated. Still, it’s not hard to imagine that kids who spend their time around Trump enthusiasts might be getting the message that picking on racial minorities, and those who deviate from traditional gender norms, is O.K.
+“The adults that voted for Trump are much more likely to emulate Trump and be supportive of attitudes that we saw turned into bullying and teasing in middle school,” said Cornell. “I suspect it’s an indirect effect of the social environment that kids are in. It may be their parents, it may be other adults, it may be the adults in schools.”
+In the 1990s, when Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky forced discussions of oral sex onto the evening news, many conservatives lamented the effect on impressionable youth. “Leaders affect the lives of families far beyond their own ‘private life,’” wrote a Republican candidate for Congress named Mike Pence. (He added, “In a day when reckless extramarital sexual activity is manifesting itself in our staggering rates of illegitimacy and divorce, now more than ever, America needs to be able to look to her First Family as role models of all that we have been and can be again.”)And yet I resist citing my “intelligence” or “abilities” to defend my presence here, because a human being need not be a Rhodes scholar to be treated with basic fairness and decency. A human being shouldn’t have to be a “genius” or “economically productive” to have access to equal opportunity.
+We are your co-workers, your friends, your classmates and your fellow Americans — we work, learn and laugh alongside you.
+As I attempt to make sense of what it means to be an undocumented immigrant, I often retreat into the Pusey Archives at Harvard to pore through the personal library of John Rawls. Rawls, considered the most important philosopher in the 20th century, concentrated on one crucial question: How can a society establish just institutions when there are seemingly irreconcilable differences among its members? He argues that we must recognize first and foremost those who stand among us, who are members of the union, and who therefore must be treated fairly.
+I plan to use my time at Oxford to think about how undocumented immigrants can urge this country to recognize that we are American — we stand among you and we are embedded in this country, its practices and its institutions. I hope to start a dialogue about how we as Americans can collectively forge a common identity that respects human rights.
+When I step on that plane in October and leave the United States for the first time since I arrived 16 years ago, I will think of the bustling flea market on 41st Street and Union Avenue in Flushing, and of the smell of freshly made spicy tteokbokki rice cakes in Korean eateries along Northern Boulevard that I pass on my way to the 7 train. These are my roots. These are the sights and sounds that nurtured me as I became the person I am today.
+Walking through those streets has taken on a new meaning as I grapple with the knowledge that soon it may very well be the last time I do so.
+There’s a Korean adage that warns that, “What becomes far from the eyes becomes far from the heart.” Yet I have no doubt that these sights and sounds will carry me and remain with me wherever I go, because that’s the nature of home: It stays with you even if the country you call home won’t accept you.
+Jin Park is a 2018 graduate of Harvard.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.The freedom that Mr. Bassem and others like him enjoyed was short lived. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were threatened by the popular uprisings of 2011 and bankrolled a counterrevolution, squashing protests in Bahrain and encouraging the Egyptian military to depose Mr. Morsi and take power. The authoritarian regimes that came to power determined to roll back the demands of the Arab Spring proceeded to ensure that what they saw as disrespectful speech was curtailed and policed.
+After President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took over in 2013, Mr. Youssef was harassed and threatened; his show was shut down and he soon left the country. Last February, the Egyptian pop singer Sherine Abdel Wahab, who joked onstage about the waters of the Nile being polluted, was sentenced to six months in prison for spreading false news.
+In the Saudi context, Mr. Minhaj is just the latest voice the authorities have tried to silence. They have remorselessly targeted artists and critics. Last spring, the Saudi police kidnapped Fahad Albutairi, a Saudi actor, from Jordan and returned him forcibly to the kingdom. Mr. Albutairi, who had a popular YouTube comedy channel, may have been targeted for his online monologues or for being married to Loujain al-Hathloul, a prominent feminist activist.
+Since his kidnapping, Mr. Albutairi has disappeared from the online public sphere and is no longer married to Ms. Hathloul, who has been held without charge for nine months now and has reportedly been waterboarded. Her crime, presumably, is having a voice at all, on a matter — women’s rights — that has become part of the crown prince’s brand.
+Saudi Arabia has been able to further curtail critical speech — funny or not — because along with the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, it owns all the major pan-Arab satellite television networks and can set the limits of admissible discourse. Even media in the Middle East that does not belong to Gulf countries often caters to their sensitivities because of their economic clout.
+Netflix doesn’t face the same pressures and dangers that Arab channels and artists do. This makes it all the more disappointing that it acquiesced to the Saudi demand, seemingly out of a desire not to be shut out of a new market.
+Netflix has defended its position by stating, “We strongly support artistic freedom worldwide and only removed this episode in Saudi Arabia after we had received a valid legal request — and to comply with local law.” But sometimes one has to choose artistic freedom over complying with a repressive and arbitrary law. Netflix would have done better to let Saudi Arabia censor Mr. Minhaj’s work than to censor it itself on the kingdom’s behalf.Anthony Braxton retired from academia in 2013, but at 73, he is far from idle. That much is clear when I recently walked into his apartment in Connecticut, a couple of dozen miles away from Wesleyan University, where he taught for more than two decades.
+After shaking my hand and taking my coat, this composer and saxophonist — a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, an N.E.A. Jazz Master and an eminence in improvisation and contemporary composition — showed me into a small but comfortable study, stacked with reams of large-format score pages.
+This was “Trillium L,” the next opera in his long-gestating cycle of works for the stage. Each act of a “Trillium” opera tells a different story, while using the same cast of singers, who rotate roles. Playing with stock genres — including elements of gangster noir, futuristic dystopia and cutthroat boardroom intrigue — has given Mr. Braxton the chance to explore ideas regarding cultural progress (or lack thereof). But gonzo, satirical humor often leavens the fundamental seriousness, in both sound and word.By the time the 2020 election kicks into highest gear, Trump will have been president for more than three years, barring his impeachment, his resignation or his spontaneous combustion (with him, you never know). We’ll have evidence aplenty to demonstrate that he’s ineffective and incompetent, an approach more likely to have traction than telling voters that he’s outrageous. They already know that.
+We just have to wean ourselves from his Twitter expectorations, which are such easy, entertaining fuel for talking — or, rather, exploding — heads. I’ve certainly been powered by that fuel, in print and on television, myself.
+“You know what would be great?” said Amanda Carpenter, who worked as a communications adviser and speechwriter for Ted Cruz and wrote the 2018 book “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us.” “Instead of covering Trump’s tweets on a live, breaking basis, just cover them in the last five minutes of a news show. They’re presidential statements, but we can balance them.”
+We can also allow his challengers to talk about themselves as much as they do about him. In 2016, Carpenter said, that didn’t happen. “It was deeply unfair,” she told me. “When the whole news cycle was microphones shoved in Republican candidates’ faces and the question was always, ‘What’s your reaction to what Trump just said?,’ there’s no way to drive your own message.”
+And when journalists gawp at each of Trump’s tirades, taunts and self-congratulatory hallucinations, these heresies blur together and he evades accountability for the ones that should stick. I asked Rather what he was most struck by in the 2016 campaign, and he instantly mentioned Trump’s horrific implication, in public remarks that August, that gun enthusiasts could rid themselves of a Clinton presidency by assassinating her.
+I’d almost forgotten it. So many lesser shocks so quickly overwrote it. Rather wasn’t surprised. “It got to the point where it was one outrage after another, and we just moved on each time,” he said. Instead, we should hold on to the most outrageous, unconscionable moments. We should pause there awhile. We can’t privilege the incremental over what should be the enduring. It lets Trump off the hook.
+So does anything, really, that tugs us from issues of policy and governance into the realms of theater and sport. That puts a greater premium than ever on avoid ing what Joel Benenson called “the horse-race obsession” with who’s ahead, who’s behind, who seems to be breaking into a gallop, who’s showing signs of a limp.Send questions about the office, money, careers, work-life balance and sex with your co-workers to workfriend@nytimes.com. Include your name and location, even if you want them withheld. Letters may be edited.
+They Finally Bred the Dream Labor Force
+I recently landed my first real job out of undergrad. While it’s a job that I find myself succeeding at when assigned to tasks, more often than not I am given no tasks. My team consists of myself and two males, one being my boss, and they are always busy. I have asked if there is anything I can do or learn, time and time again, only to be told: “No, you’re good.” Worst of all, I am often alone in the office, so when the phone rings or someone comes in or emails us, I can’t do anything, because I haven’t been trained to do anything.
+I work over 55 hours a week and I don’t know how many more times I can refresh Twitter at work before I lose my mind. I feel that I’m wasting my talent and their time by being here. How do I diplomatically approach this with my boss?
+— Emily
+I’m going to ignore the part where many of us just saw the phrases “I am given no tasks” and “I can’t do anything” and we all got that dreamy summer afternoon feeling — a soul-deep ASMR shiver. Shouldn’t you be spending those free and lovely empty hours working on your graphic novel, “Olivia Newton-John, Astronaut”? The world is giving you a gift! You’re sitting in an office alone with nothing to do, and you’re abusing yourself with the rotting meat-fountain of Twitter? Look at this job as a teaching moment and teach yourself something.On Wednesday, Mr. Brown, 86, announced his retirement. That opens the door to the first competitive district attorney election in Queens, the city’s largest borough, in nearly three decades.
+A lot has changed since Mr. Brown took office.
+The governor of New York is still named Cuomo. But instead of Mario, it is now his son, Andrew.
+Bill de Blasio still shows up to work at City Hall. In 1991, he worked for Mayor David Dinkins. Today, Mr. de Blasio is the mayor.
+And in 1991, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, arguably the most famous first-term member of Congress today, was 1 year 7 months old.
+Here is more about what Queens and New York were like when Mr. Brown first took office.
+Disappearing QueensSure, that’s more than a fighting chance, yet when active funds beat index funds in the United States, it typically wasn’t by much. Morningstar found that if it generously assumed an investor had the ability to invest in top-performing funds in each rolling three-year period since 2012, the median net excess return was 0.25 percent — or 25 basis points — above the index, and 0.3 percent ahead of the return of the iShares Core U.S. Aggregate Bond E.T.F.
+“If you are willing to spend the time and effort and do the due diligence of active managers in hopes of generating a few extra basis points of excess return, there is some room to do that,” said one of the authors of the study, Mara Dobrescu, associate director of fixed income strategies at Morningstar France.
+But because the potential payoff is typically close to peanuts, Ms. Dobrescu’s message for D.I.Y. investors is “it’s not worth expending all that time and effort.” Finding an active fund that persistently outperforms is no small hurdle, and today’s low-rate environment makes it tough to generate outsize excess returns without piling on a lot of risk.
+“If your point is to own bonds for defensive purposes and your aim is to hold long term and to minimize cost, then definitely passive is the way to go,” Ms. Dobrescu said.
+As chief investment officer at Huber Financial Advisors, Philip Huber is in the due diligence business. While the investment management firm tends to stick with index funds for equities, Mr. Huber said, he prefers active managers such as Pimco Total Return and DoubleLine Total Return for bonds.
+“I don’t have any problem with people wanting to index their bond portfolio,” he said, “but if you have the resources to research and understand what an active manager is doing, bonds is one area where active can work.”
+That said, it’s important to understand what has been driving the recent outperformance for fund managers: avoidance of low-yielding but, in some ways, ultrasafe United States Treasury issues.China trade talks head for Washington
+Negotiations between China and the U.S. are advancing, with China’s vice premier and economic chief, Liu He, heading to Washington on Jan. 30 and 31. He will meet with the U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, and the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, according to the WSJ.
+The next-level gathering, unless it is stymied by the government shutdown, will continue three days of midlevel discussions in Beijing that wrapped up on Wednesday with a sense of progress but few specific resolutions.
+This fight does have some winners: Tariffs on Chinese and American cars could bolster automakers in Japan. Restrictions on American soybeans could help farmers in Brazil and Canada.
+But investors want resolution. The standoff has shaken global markets, and signs of optimism from negotiators lifted stocks this week. Today in Asia, the Hang Seng, Nikkei, Kospi and Shanghai Composite indexes all closed higher.
+Espionage in China: A Chinese employee of Huawei and a Polish employee of the French telecommunications company Orange have been arrested in Poland, charged with spying for the Chinese government.
+Patience is the Fed’s new watchword
+Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, said the central bank would evaluate the health of the economy before any further interest rate increases, using the word “patience” four times in his remarks. Financial markets have shown signs of anxiety about the economic outlook, but Mr. Powell said 2018 was “a very good year for the economy.” The Fed, he said, saw signs of continued momentum.
+In other Fed news: Most private economists expect it to hold interest rates steady at least until June, according to a WSJ survey. Last summer, the Fed’s policy of quantitative tightening was expected to lift bond yields, but in the topsy-turvy world of Wall Street, the reaction has reversed in just a few months.Let’s make the future great again.
+Do you remember when the future was great? I do. Technology was going to fix our problems, changing the way we all live, work and play.
+That kind of utopian patter was big at the beginning of my career, when the hot new app was … fire.
+Over time, technologies changed but the overblown promises stayed. The internet was going to give us access to the best of the world’s information. Music services like Napster would be an infinite jukebox, and all free! Social media would connect us with our friends and families (and their pets, and vacation snapshots) and usher in new waves of democracy around the world!
+Google even started out with a beguilingly simple motto : Don’t be evil.
+We know how all that’s worked out. A relatively small number of people got rich. And, one by one, many of the companies they started have proved to be — well, if not outright evil, then less than entirely good. A familiar routine has emerged. Social media executives get dragged before Congress, apologize for privacy lapses, political manipulation and virulence, and promise to do better. Trust us, they say.
+But I can’t help but feel that these titans of industry are missing the point. They say they are sorry for committing blunders, but these aren’t bugs in the system; they’re the core of the business model.Jan. 10 Baghlan Province: nine security forces killed
+A Taliban Red Unit attacked three security bases in the Hussainkhel village of Pul-i-Kumri City, the provincial capital. Two local police bases were captured by insurgents; nine local police officers were killed and nine others were wounded in the clashes.
+Jan. 10 Badghis Province: eight security forces killed
+The Taliban attacked security outposts in Ab Kamari District, not far from the district governor’s office. Three members of a National Directorate of Security (N.D.S.) special forces’ unit and five soldiers were killed in the fighting. At least 16 people were wounded, including the district governor of Ab Kamari, five soldiers, seven members of the N.D.S. special forces unit and three police officers. The Taliban tried to capture the district, but was pushed back.
+Jan. 10 Takhar Province: eight security forces killed
+The Taliban attacked six security outposts at the center of Khwaja Ghar District by approaching the area from four directions. Seven local police officers and one national police officer were killed and five local police officers were wounded in the clashes. The Taliban fighters eventually were pushed back.
+Jan. 10 Kunduz Province: 10 security forces killed
+The Taliban attacked the center of Qala-e-Zal District, killing 10 security force members and wounding 10 others. Seven soldiers, two special forces police officers and a commander of a militia battalion were among those killed. Officials did not provide a breakdown of the wounded, but claimed they killed 15 Taliban fighters.
+Jan. 9 Balkh Province: 18 security forces killed
+Using laser weapons and night-vision goggles, the Taliban attacked two security outposts in the Timorak village of Charbolak District, killing eight members of the security forces. At least 15 security forces were taken prisoner and one other was wounded in the clashes. Officials did not provide a breakdown of casualties. The outposts were located along the highway that connects Balkh and Jowzjan. Reinforcements arrived to the area, but they were ambushed by the Taliban. Nine members of a special forces police unit were killed and three of their Humvees were destroyed in the ambush. The insurgents seized one Humvee and captured both outposts. Later, security forces abandoned five other outposts in the area.“What doesn’t get talked about is Chile and Peru, which are fundamentally strong countries. I don’t think of them as high risk. High-yield debt is risk. There, you’re lending to the lower-quality end of the U.S. corporate market, which is going to have to refinance a lot of debt at higher rates over the next two to three years.”
+Mr. Almeida said his R.E.I.T. bet stemmed partly from a presentation made by Richard R. Gable, portfolio manager of the MFS Global Real Estate Fund. “Rick was saying the R.E.I.T. sector was the cheapest it’d been, relative to financials and the rest of the equity market, in years,” he said.
+Among R.E.I.T.s, Mr. Almeida said, MFS prefers those “with properties that are really hard to replicate.” His fund’s top real estate holdings include the Simon Property Group, the United States’ largest shopping-mall owner, and AvalonBay Communities, an apartment owner that is strong in coastal urban markets.
+The American Funds College 2024 Fund and College 2027 Fund also buy both stocks and bonds. The two target-date college funds don’t invest directly in those securities but do so through other funds in the American family, which is managed by the Capital Group. Both college funds, for example, hold shares of the American Mutual Fund and the Bond Fund of America, which have been part of the American lineup for decades.
+The college funds are investment options in CollegeAmerica, a 529 college-savings plan sponsored by the state of Virginia. (That “529” refers to a provision of the United States Internal Revenue Code, and anyone can invest in the funds, not just Virginians, though the tax benefits may differ for people in other states.) The 2024 fund lost 1.27 percent in the fourth quarter, while the 2027 fund lost 3.26 percent. The 2024 fund has an expense ratio of 0.73 percent, while the 2027 has one of 0.8 percent.
+Wesley K.-S. Phoa, principal investment officer for American Funds’ target-date college funds series, said the funds’ bond investments didn’t carry excessive credit risk or unexpected correlations with the stock market, while the stock investments emphasized sturdiness, not sizzle. “We’ve picked stock funds that focus on solid blue-chip dividend payers, and that has delivered the resilience we hoped it would,” he said.
+Mr. Phoa said college funds present an unusual asset-allocation challenge in that investors — often parents — are seeking the savings growth that stocks can bring but they typically have only about 15 years to achieve that. That gives them less time to ride out down markets, like the fourth quarter’s thumping.In France, complex criminal cases are handled by special magistrates with broad investigative powers, who place defendants under formal investigation when they believe the evidence points to serious wrongdoing. But the magistrates can later drop the charges if they do not believe the evidence is sufficient to proceed to trial.
+In 2016, French prosecutors said they had uncovered more than $2 million in payments made by Tokyo’s bidding committee to a little-known Singaporean company, Black Tidings, during the competition to host the 2020 Olympics. That company was found to belong to a close friend of Mr. Diack’s.
+The Japanese authorities, at the request of their French counterparts, questioned Mr. Takeda about those payments in 2017 but have taken no action since. Officials said the payments were for consulting work, and a panel commissioned by the Japanese Olympic Committee said in 2016 that it had found that the payments were legitimate.
+It was unclear whether the Japanese committee would reopen is investigation in light of the French charges. Calls to the committee went unanswered late Friday.
+Tokyo beat out rivals Madrid and Istanbul to win the Summer Olympics for the first time since 1964. Back then, the Olympics symbolized Japan’s recovery from World War II; similarly, organizers in Japan had seen the 2020 Games as a chance to show the world that their country was bouncing back from the devastating March 2011 tsunami and the nuclear disaster at Fukushima. Now, suggestions that corruption played a role in Japan’s triumph have cast a pall over the preparations.
+The former prime minister Yoshiro Mori, who leads the Tokyo Olympics organizing committee, told the Fuji News Network that he was “simply shocked” by France’s move. The organizing committee was set up jointly by the Japanese Olympic Committee and the Tokyo metropolitan government, and Mr. Takeda serves as one of its vice presidents.
+“Perhaps perceptions differ from those of Japan, and I hope this is a mistake,” Mr. Mori said.
+Mr. Takeda is the second Olympic luminary to face serious legal action in recent months. In November, Sheikh Ahmed al Sabah, a member of Kuwait’s royal family and close ally of the I.O.C. president, Thomas Bach, temporarily stepped down from the committee after being accused by the Swiss authorities in a forgery case. He was also identified in 2017 as an unindicted co-conspirator in a soccer corruption filed case by the United States Department of Justice. He denies all the allegations.In a shaky stock market, you may be enticed by funds that promise to make money whenever stocks fall.
+There is a group of funds that actually fulfill this claim. Yet most people should beware: They are definitely not recommended for the casual investor.
+They are called inverse exchange-traded funds, and as their name implies, their value moves in the opposite direction of their benchmarks. When the stock market rises, they fall; when the market falls, they rise.
+In addition, some of these funds are leveraged, which means that they bet against their benchmarks by a factor of, say, two to one or three to one.Art: Primal Animals in Acrylic and Wood
+Through March 29; folkartmuseum.org.
+There’s an amazing little wooden tiger in the American Folk Art Museum’s teaching collection. Made around 1980 in Oaxaca by Manuel Jimenez, the piece is at once so simply shaped and so brightly painted that it comes across less as a depiction of any specific animal than as a vivid realization of the very idea of tigerness.
+Starting Jan. 16, you’ll be able to visit it, along with a spotted pig, a yellow fox and a green dog, in the lobby of the Citigroup Building in Long Island City as part of “A Kingdom in Pieces,” where they’ll be keeping company with contemporary animal-focused paintings by artists associated with the nearby Fountain House Gallery. WILL HEINRICHGlen Caplin, a spokesman for Ms. Gillibrand, declined to comment.
+Taking the step of actually retaining new staff — rather than merely conducting interviews or planning out staff recruitment — indicates that Ms. Gillibrand is probably in the very last stages of preparing for the 2020 race. Once politicians raise or spend more than $5,000 on their candidacy, they have just 15 days to file paperwork forming a campaign with the Federal Election Commission.
+Depending on when she announces her decision, Ms. Gillibrand, 52, could become the second high-profile Democrat to join the race, after Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Ms. Gillibrand has signaled that she will run as a progressive and has been an especially forceful advocate within the party on matters of gender equality.
+At least two other senators, Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey, are expected to announce in the coming weeks, joining a field that could grow to dozens. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, has also told associates he intends to make a decision this month and has been leaning toward running.
+While she has a high profile in the news media, Ms. Gillibrand is not well known among Democratic voters nationally. In a Quinnipiac University poll last month, 64 percent of Democrats said they did not yet know enough about her to form an opinion.
+As a senator, Ms. Gillibrand has relied on a tightly knit team of advisers who have counseled her for years, helping her navigate her appointment to the Senate in 2009, a special election to defend the seat in 2010 and a regularly scheduled Senate election in 2012. But she has been moving aggressively to add to her staff and compete with other Democratic contenders for prized talent in the party.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+First, Obamacare marches on: In the latest sign of the law’s success, Maine has become the 36th state to expand Medicaid, thanks to the insistence of the state’s voters.
+Janet Mills, Maine’s new Democratic governor, implemented the expansion more than a year after voters approved it in a ballot referendum. The previous governor — Paul LePage, a Republican — had refused to honor the referendum’s result. As a result of Mills’s move, more than 500 Mainers gained health insurance, and many more will be covered in coming years.
+The larger lesson is to avoid despair. Changing laws is hard work, often involving years of frustration. But it really is possible for politics to improve people’s lives. Congratulations to all of the voters, activists, politicians and medical professionals in Maine who kept fighting for this change.Because interest in these areas tends to come and go, Mr. Browne uses thematic E.T.F.s to carry out short-term asset allocation decisions. Haim Israel, head of thematic investing at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, by contrast, views several technologies covered by the E.T.F.s as long-term opportunities.
+The business and investment prospects associated with themes like Big Data, artificial intelligence, privacy and cyberthreats, the report said, will be helped by a “techceleration” resulting from the introduction of so-called 5G technology featuring much faster data transmission rates. The rollout of 5G “will bring about the fastest transformation in human history,” Mr. Israel predicted. The reduced time it will take to transmit data will help the spread of all sorts of technologies, like gaming or self-driving cars, he said.
+Mr. Israel’s analysis and outlook are plausible — for the world as it is today and for various technologies as they have developed so far. As for five years from now, who knows? Change, often radical and unforeseeable, is a hallmark of the sector, making most forecasts speculative at best. That is one of the main complaints that investment advisers have with thematic E.T.F.s.
+“We’ve been around long enough to see a lot of the ‘next big thing,’ said Leon LaBrecque, chief executive of LJPR Financial Advisors in Troy, Mich. “Remember Blockbuster or Boston Chicken? Anyone remember the first search engine? New tech becomes old tech.”
+For investors interested in taking a shot with thematic E.T.F.s, advisers suggest using risk capital, and then only small amounts of it.
+Mr. Masucci views thematic E.T.F.s as superior alternatives to buying individual stocks. These E.T.F.s “are a tax efficient, liquid, transparent way to give that exposure without relying on advisers’ ability to pick stocks,” he said.
+But Mr. Cordaro pointed to a conundrum that anyone contemplating investing in thematic E.T.F.s faces: “Because they can be riskier, you wouldn’t want them to be too much of your portfolio,” no more than 5 percent, he said. “The paradox is that’s not going to move the needle that much. You’re not going to make much money on it.”Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+Yesterday, on his fourth day on the job, Gov. Gavin Newsom laid out a sweeping budget proposal for the state that was, as predicted, a marked break with the famous frugality of his predecessor, Jerry Brown.
+Mr. Newsom called for ramping up spending on education, health care and homelessness, as well as to pay down the debt.
+And, as my colleagues Claire Cain Miller and Jim Tankersley first reported last week, the new governor aims to boost paid parental leave to the longest in the nation: six months.
+The United States remains the only industrialized country not to offer paid leave to parents, and such a policy has been a tough nut to crack at the federal level, because, well, no one can figure out where to get the money. The California proposal, right now, has the same problem.NEW DELHI — The 16-year-old girl had simply decided to go to her boyfriend’s birthday party. A week later, her body was found along a highway, her head and one of her arms chopped off. Her face may have been burned with acid.
+In her small town in eastern India, it is forbidden for a teenage girl to date, and the police believe the girl’s father arranged for her to be killed — supposedly to protect the family’s honor.
+It was yet another stomach-turning case of extremely sadistic violence against a woman or a girl in India. On Friday, the police said the girl’s father, Turaj Prasad, had been formally arrested, along with a friend of his who was suspected of carrying out the killing. Charges were expected to be filed later. (The police are withholding the girl’s name.)
+“It will be a long fight for the girl’s human rights,’’ said Gopal Patwa, an activist in Gaya, the main town in the area where the killing took place. “The condition her body was found in is inhuman, and I do not have words to describe the gory details.”SYDNEY, Australia — There was a hint of mauve peeking out from behind Joel Edgerton’s left eyelid, barely discernible beneath a newsboy cap.
+“I ran into my van, hit it on the awning,” he said, pointing at his face.
+But it was the camper van, not his face, that preoccupied the actor and filmmaker as we met at a coffee shop near a house he owns north of Bondi Beach.
+He took out his phone and pointed to custom trappings, an annex with a tent and shower at the back, all designed for surfing holidays along the Australian shoreline.
+And something more.
+“This is all part of the building of the enticement to come back home more often,” he said.Each week, technology reporters and columnists from The New York Times review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the tech industry. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.
+Hello, It’s Erin Griffith, reporting, happily, from my home base in San Francisco and not the carnival of virtual assistants, shiny screens, crowded smart homes and greasy VR demos in Las Vegas. Our correspondents made the CES maze of gadgets look almost fun, which anyone who has been there before knows is an impressive feat.
+Back in the land of magical, billion-dollar start-up unicorns, things have been quieter, thanks to the federal government shutdown. No Securities and Exchange Commission means no progress on initial public offering plans of the larger start-ups, including Uber and Lyft.
+Any other time in the last five years, this would not have mattered. The unicorns have been putting off their public market debuts for as long as possible — what’s another month or two? But a volatile stock market and signs of a possible recession have fostered a creeping sense of panic.Ever since Tracy K. Smith became the United States poet laureate in 2017, she has been hosting readings big and small in all corners of the country.
+Now she is spreading poetry through the air waves.
+Starting Jan. 14, her podcast, “The Slowdown,” will be broadcast on public radio stations in seven cities, including San Francisco, Honolulu and Charleston, W. Va.
+Produced by American Public Media with funding by the Poetry Foundation and support from the Library of Congress, “The Slowdown” debuted as a five-minute weekday podcast in late November. It’s available to stream on iTunes, Google Podcasts and other platforms. In each episode, Ms. Smith introduces, and then reads, a poem of her choosing.
+The idea for the podcast arose last year while she was visiting towns as part of a reading series called “American Conversations: Celebrating Poems in Rural Communities.”Health care stocks have traditionally done well during market downturns. But whether they can repeat the feat with continuing uncertainty about the future of health insurance in the United States is a big question.
+For one thing, in the declining stock market that began just before the fourth quarter, health care failed to hold its own. Through December, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds in the health care industry fell 14.6 percent, on average, since the market peak on Sept. 20, Morningstar said, compared with a drop of 13.3 percent for the S&P 500. And the iShares U.S. Health Care E.T.F., which tracks the Dow Jones U.S. Health Care Index, lost 10.2 percent.
+That’s not a performance for health care stocks that defensive-minded investors can celebrate.
+Health care has done well in rough periods for the market in the past, said Jean Hynes, a managing partner at Wellington Management, who runs the portfolio for the $48 billion Vanguard Health Care fund. But “it’s not cyclically immune,” she said.
+In a way, the sector’s current problems may stem from its multiyear outperformance before the most recent quarter. The sector went on a tear in the five years through September. The S&P 500 health care index returned 13.4 percent on an annualized basis then, beating the full S&P’s 11.6 percent gains, according to S&P Capital IQ.Staying up until midnight before release day to grab copies of the latest “Harry Potter” book straight from the shipping box became hallowed tradition for a generation of young readers. Now, the New-York Historical Society is offering a late-night Potter fix of a different kind.
+The museum announced Friday that it will extend its hours during the final week of “Harry Potter: A History of Magic.” Beginning Jan. 21 and continuing through the exhibition’s final day (Jan. 27), the museum will be open until 7 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and until midnight Friday and Saturday. It will close at 6 p.m. on Thursday and 7 p.m. on Sunday.
+“Harry Potter: A History of Magic” has proved a blockbuster exhibition for the museum, which has devoted considerable resources to it through additional programming, such as trivia nights led by a costumed staff member — complete with a cash bar and J.K. Rowling-inspired cocktails. (Those eager young midnight-release Potter fans have long since turned 21, of course; some may take advantage of the extended hours to bring along children of their own.)
+[Check out Our Culture Calendar here.]
+The exhibition unpacks Potter’s origins, looking at Rowling’s initial writing process but also at the history of magical myths in a broader sense through some of series’ cultural and scientific influences.In March of 1985, the photographer Robert Frank arrived with a paper sack at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to use Polaroid’s 20-by-24-inch camera. It was a hulking beast of an apparatus, worlds away from the diminutive 35-millimeter Leica that had freed him to roam the country while shooting “The Americans,” the 1959 book of photos that crowned him a king of counterculture and the most imitated photographer alive today.
+He emptied the bag of salvaged miscellany he’d brought to shoot, jotted a few cryptic words on bits of paper, and then pinned them together with old photos and other ephemera onto timeworn corkboards. In the resulting six-paneled work — “Boston, March 20, 1985” we see the corkboards arranged in grids like signs at an old grocer’s. Few clues reveal Frank’s intentions, but we know that his fellow trailblazing photographers, Robert Heinecken, Dave Heath and John Wood, were somehow involved: The images show scrawled dedications to them.
+The four renowned artists were brought together by two photographic historians, Susan E. Cohen and William S. Johnson, who pulled off a curatorial feat that would be unimaginable today. They persuaded Mr. Frank, Mr. Heinecken, Mr. Heath and Mr. Wood to collaborate with them on a project whose contours were hazy at best. And then they persuaded the Polaroid Corporation to finance it.The series is steamy but chaste. Scarcely a ripped bodice, with talk of bundling, in lieu of mating. I guess I’m asking, is sex impossible?
+Tune in to Season 2 to find out! I don’t want to give too much away, but in the first season, we have a bit of frottage, and that sort of heavy petting might involve a digit, and I really don’t want to go any further.
+Were those magic scenes — you bounding after a stag, Diana flying into the air — fun to shoot?
+In general, the magic didn’t seem very magic when we were doing it. Because it was actually things moving being attached to fishing wire, or your castmate on a rope. It felt quite low-rent, but it looks fantastic on the screen now that we have special effects. I did manage to break a bone in my hand in the Bodleian Library because for some reason the stunt guy was upset and wasn’t there. So I decided to do it myself. And here’s a little note, children: If you’ve got a really good stunt man standing by, let him do it.
+What’s it like to bite a neck?
+There’s giggling. Then there’s going hysterical.
+I know you’ve been sworn to secrecy about the “Downton Abbey” movie and appear briefly at the end. But Michelle Dockery has described Lady Mary and Henry Talbot as “settled” and “good friends.” Where did the passion go?!
+There’s a huge respect between them. He knows that she’s taking on the whole of the estate and everything else. And I would imagine that there’s a sort of rumpy-pumpy pretty frequent between the two of them. They’ve got a kid now, things are good now. They’re settled. He’s working. When he’s not away, he’s in bed with her, I would say, most nights — unless he’s parked out by the decanter, which is where he should be.
+Sadly, you’re now too young for Season 3 of “The Crown.”
+“The Crown” was a blast, actually. When you’ve got a brilliant actor [like Vanessa Kirby] opposite you and you’ve got great words to say and you’ve got a director like we had, it was just a joy. Ben Caron is really going places. And he’s directing the first four episodes of Season 3, which we shall all watch through gritted teeth because we would still like to be doing it ourselves. If you’ve seen Ben Daniels, he looks amazing as Antony Armstrong-Jones — he’s got the most piercing blue eyes — and I think he’s going to smash it out of the park. I just hope people will judge it for a different era rather than saying what I suspect they might: “Oh, he’s so much better than Goode.” [Laughs.]According to Elmore Leonard, aspiring writers should avoid using adverbs (“a mortal sin”). Zadie Smith says they should “work on a computer that is disconnected from the internet.” Roddy Doyle tells them, “Do not place a photograph of your favorite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.” And William Faulkner once famously said that anyone who wants to be a writer should be a reader first: “Read, read, read everything — trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read!” Some authors, like Roxane Gay, offer advice on Twitter; others, like Stephen King and Anne Lamott, have written entire books on the subject.
+Image J.K. Rowling Credit... Neil Hall/EPA, via Shutterstock
+Earlier this month J.K. Rowling posted some tips on her website. “I haven’t got 10 rules that guarantee success, though I promise I’d share them if I did,” she wrote. “The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process.”
+Rowling listed the various qualities a writer needs to have — discipline, resilience, humility, courage and independence — but stressed, like Faulkner, that anyone serious about writing books should also be a voracious reader. “You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader.”Two top N.B.A. teams battling into double overtime. Memorable individual performances. And points, points, points. Thursday night’s game between the San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder set a handful of records, but it was the Spurs who won, 154-147.
+LaMarcus Aldridge had his best night. Although he has averaged 20 points or more regularly, and frequently winds up in the 30s and 40s, Aldridge had never scored 50 points in an N.B.A. game until Thursday. And at halftime, it didn’t look as if Thursday would be the night, either; Aldridge had only 14 points. But a strong second half took him to 43, and the two overtimes gave him the extra minutes he needed to reach 56, a new career high.
+He tallied the 56 with six layups, three dunks, 11 midrange shots and 16 free throws. Notably, the 6-foot-11 Aldridge attempted no 3-pointers, which have powered most of the recent record-setting offensive performances in the modern N.B.A. (That was not surprising; Aldridge is only 2 for 14 on the year from distance.) Still, in padding his scoring in 1s and 2s, Aldridge became the first player to score 50 points without attempting a 3-pointer since Jermaine O’Neal had 55 for the Indiana Pacers in 2005.
+It was the most points by a Spurs player since David Robinson scored 71 in 1994, and the most against the Thunder franchise since Tom Chambers of the Suns poured in 60 against the team — then still the Seattle SuperSonics — in 1990.A Times Opinion piece this week brought up the film “NO! The Rape Documentary,” created 20 years ago by the filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons. It was initially rejected by distributors, and in 1998, an executive from HBO told Ms. Simmons: “Let’s face it, very unfortunately, most people don’t care about the rape of black women and girls, and therefore we’re concerned that there won’t be many viewers who will tune in.”
+[Sign up here for this newsletter, In Her Words, about women, gender and society.]
+“Playing sex for laughs.”
+In an essay this week, my colleague Aisha Harris, a television editor, examined how “two cultural touchstones” helped keep people laughing at Mr. Kelly, thus helping to shape the public’s perception of the accusations.
+The first was a 2003 sketch from “Chappelle’s Show” called “(I Wanna) Pee on You,” which parodied a widely distributed sex tape that appeared to show Mr. Kelly urinating on a 14-year-old girl. The second was a 2005 episode of the animated series “The Boondocks” titled “The Trial of R. Kelly,” in which a main character, a boy named Riley, defends Mr. Kelly, saying: “I’ve seen that girl! She ain’t little. I’m little.”
+Mr. Kelly had no part in those shows, but in 2005 he began to release “Trapped in the Closet,” an episodic, bizarre and often comical operetta. “I think at some point he probably figured out that playing sex for laughs was a way that he could continue to avoid absolute condemnation for what he might have been doing behind the scenes,” Ms. Powers said.
+“The black community rallied around him.”
+The way that Mr. Kelly managed to stay in the public’s good graces was a remarkable balancing act, but perhaps it was not so surprising given his hero status and the blind adoration of millions of his fans.
+Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, who was interviewed for the documentary, said that his songs were the soundtrack to the lives of many black Americans — played at weddings, graduations, birthdays — and people were not ready to give that up. “The black community rallied around him,” Burke said. “They believed he was innocent.”Hundreds of years before John Wayne and Gary Cooper gave us a Hollywood version of the American West, with men as the brute, weather-beaten stewards of the land, female ranchers roamed the frontier. They were the indigenous, Navajo, Cheyenne and other tribes, and Spanish-Mexican rancheras, who tended and tamed vast fields, traversed rugged landscapes with their dogs, hunted, and raised livestock.
+The descendants of European settlers brought with them ideas about the roles of men and women, and for decades, family farms and ranches were handed down to men. Now, as mechanization and technology transform the ranching industry, making the job of cowboy less about physical strength — though female ranchers have that in spades — and more about business, animal husbandry and the environment, women have reclaimed their connection to the land.Good morning. Brett Anderson has a great story in The Times this week about a new wave of gumbo cooking in New Orleans restaurants, one that’s stretching the boundaries of what constitutes the city’s signature dish and, in doing so, bringing it a fresh relevance. Brett’s is a marvelous yarn, rich with good reporting, and it may leave you wanting to book a flight to Louisiana right away. It certainly left me with the desire to cook gumbo this weekend. I hope you’ll do the same.
+Brett came through with receipts. He got Arvinder Vilkhu, the chef and owner of Saffron Nola on Magazine Street, to give up his recipe for curried shrimp and crab gumbo (above). It’s a dish Vilkhu has developed over the course of his 30 years in the city, and it incorporates curry leaves, fresh ginger and other ingredients and flavors you’re more likely to see in the cooking of his native India than in the gumbo pots of south Louisiana.
+The Cajun-ish pork and black-eyed pea gumbo that Donald Link and Stephen Stryjewski serve regularly at their Cochon in the Warehouse district is also well worth making, with its once-radical-in-New-Orleans use of pork, legumes and greens, against the roux.
+Looking for a shortcut or two? You might try the inky brown duck and Andouille gumbo that’s served Uptown, at Upperline — you can use chicken stock in place of duck, and you can use roast duck from a Chinese restaurant in place of one of your own.“Hi. I’m Mimi Leder. I’m the director of “On the Basis of Sex.” This is RBG’s first day at Harvard Law School. And it’s the first day of shooting of the film.” “I am Professor Brown. This is Introduction to Contracts.” “And I put her right in the center of the frame, sitting in a sea of men. She was one of nine women entering Harvard this year. And all the men are raising their hands. And Professor Brown purposefully doesn’t call on her because this was awkward for the professors as well as it was for all the men there. And this is called the “Hairy Hand Case.” And it’s an homage to “Paper Chase,” which features the same case. And it’s about a doctor who promised a burn victim a 100% good hand and then grafted skin from the dude’s chest, and he ended up with a hairy hand. And so he was entitled to payment for breach of contract. So that’s what the case is about. And I really wanted to focus on that RBG was the smartest person in the room. It was a culture of discrimination. It was a patriarchal society. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a woman who changed that culture. And in this scene, she has to work her way through these slights.” “Question already, Mrs. — Ginsburg?” “Correction, Professor Brown. McGee did not simply promise to fix George Hawkins” hand. He promised, quote, “a 100% good hand.’” “That’s the same thing.” “Is it? What say you, Mrs. Ginsburg?” “It is not. Words matter. McGee grafted skin from Hawkins’ chest. Not only did this fail to fix the scarring, he had chest hair growing on his palm.” “Proving that a hand with a burn is worth two with a bush.” [laughter] “The young man makes a sexist joke. And facing this patriarchal society was very difficult. You just had to plow through. And you had to show your smarts.” “The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled he was entitled to damages only based on the contract being fulfilled. So if Dr. McGee had set realistic expectations instead of making grand promises, Hawkins’ award likely would have been less.” “Was that an answer, Mrs. Ginsburg, or a filibuster?” [laughter]“Hi. I’m Mimi Leder. I’m the director of “On the Basis of Sex.” This is RBG’s first day at Harvard Law School. And it’s the first day of shooting of the film.” “I am Professor Brown. This is Introduction to Contracts.” “And I put her right in the center of the frame, sitting in a sea of men. She was one of nine women entering Harvard this year. And all the men are raising their hands. And Professor Brown purposefully doesn’t call on her because this was awkward for the professors as well as it was for all the men there. And this is called the “Hairy Hand Case.” And it’s an homage to “Paper Chase,” which features the same case. And it’s about a doctor who promised a burn victim a 100% good hand and then grafted skin from the dude’s chest, and he ended up with a hairy hand. And so he was entitled to payment for breach of contract. So that’s what the case is about. And I really wanted to focus on that RBG was the smartest person in the room. It was a culture of discrimination. It was a patriarchal society. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is a woman who changed that culture. And in this scene, she has to work her way through these slights.” “Question already, Mrs. — Ginsburg?” “Correction, Professor Brown. McGee did not simply promise to fix George Hawkins” hand. He promised, quote, “a 100% good hand.’” “That’s the same thing.” “Is it? What say you, Mrs. Ginsburg?” “It is not. Words matter. McGee grafted skin from Hawkins’ chest. Not only did this fail to fix the scarring, he had chest hair growing on his palm.” “Proving that a hand with a burn is worth two with a bush.” [laughter] “The young man makes a sexist joke. And facing this patriarchal society was very difficult. You just had to plow through. And you had to show your smarts.” “The New Hampshire Supreme Court ruled he was entitled to damages only based on the contract being fulfilled. So if Dr. McGee had set realistic expectations instead of making grand promises, Hawkins’ award likely would have been less.” “Was that an answer, Mrs. Ginsburg, or a filibuster?” [laughter]Marvel billed this 90-second ad, which premiered during the College Football Playoff championship game, as a “special look,” but much of the footage has already been seen in the film’s first two trailers. The new scenes feature banter about wardrobe between Brie Larson’s titular superheroine and “Avengers” series staple Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). “Grunge is a good look for you,” he tells her — the film is set in 1995 — and she questions the wisdom of putting the S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on a hat: “Does announcing your identity on clothing help with the covert part of your job?” It’s a good thing nobody goes to these movies for the dialogue.If you’re like a lot of the people watching the new Netflix show, “Tidying Up with Marie Kondo,” you have already looked around your home for things you want to get rid of. If you’ve already done the hard work of sorting through your belongings and culling what you do not need, great work!
+If you want to give your home an organizational makeover, but aren’t sure how to start, consider signing up for our Tidy Home Challenge, which will walk you through each room of your home and give step-by-step instructions on how to neaten any space. (You will need to be an NYTimes.com subscriber to sign up.)
+If you already have bags of stuff that you do not want in your house any more, don’t succumb to the urge to take all the junk to the dump or leave it on the curb. Many items can be sold, donated or recycled, giving them another life that will be better for the environment and perhaps your pocketbook, too. Below are some options for how to dispense with the excess.“Purpose just means you know why you are getting out of bed each morning or what you want your life to add up to ultimately,” she says.
+But how are you going to be able to fund that purpose? That brings us to the flaws in the book.
+My biggest objection is Ms. Hester makes the ability to retire early sound too easy, and one of the reasons it does is she repeatedly draws from her experience with the implicit message: “If I can do it, anyone can.”
+But her situation is not representative.
+She doesn’t provide specific numbers from her life — which feels like a cheat — but we learn a few important facts. She and her husband had each been earning more than $100,000 annually for several years when they retired; had bought a home in Lake Tahoe, Calif., at the bottom of the real estate market, giving them a substantial equity cushion; and had acquired a rental property as well. In addition, they have no children — kids are expensive (duh) and hinder your ability to save for an early retirement. And, oh, yes, while they were working, their investments were growing during the longest bull market in history, so last year’s decline probably didn’t hurt too much.
+Not everyone thinking of retiring early will have those advantages.
+Then there is her limited financial advice. Ms. Hester devotes only about a third of her 260 pages to the financing of an early retirement. And while she provides ideas — such as overachieve at work to save whatever raises you get before you quit — she doesn’t go into any great depth.
+Two quick examples show the problem.
+A novice, she says, might be “uncomfortable” investing heavily in stocks, so that person should consider an initial mix of 33 percent cash, 33 percent bonds and 34 percent stocks.With politically charged movies like “Vice” and “BlacKkKlansman” expected to be contenders, the 2019 Academy Awards could prove provocative. But it’s unlikely any ceremony will ever inspire more heated division than the Oscars a little over 40 years ago, when the best supporting actress winner, Vanessa Redgrave, was burned in effigy outside the theater, booed by some audience members during her acceptance speech and rebuked by a presenter later in the evening.
+“It was startling to watch,” Tom O’Neil, editor and founder of the awards-themed goldderby.com, said in a phone interview. “It was open combat among the Hollywood elite.”
+Redgrave had played the title role in “Julia,” about an anti-Nazi operative during World War II and her friendship with the liberal writer Lillian Hellman (Jane Fonda). “It was perfect symmetry,” the film’s producer, Richard Roth, said. “The two most famous left-wing women of the ’70s playing two left-wing women of the ’30s.”
+While she was shooting the movie in Paris, Redgrave lived with a couple of Palestinian students who inspired her to produce and narrate a documentary called “The Palestinian.” It was perceived by some as promoting Yasir Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization.MILAN — The current give and take between the worlds of men’s and women’s wear does not work in only one direction. In Milan, Lorenzi Milano is about to open its first store — with a mission to not only preserve an Old World culture and civility but to cater to women.
+It should be welcome news for fans who include Johann Rupert, chairman of the luxury group Richemont; the designer Marc Newson ; Prince Philip; and Silvio Berlusconi, the former Italian prime minister, all of whom were fervent collectors of the knives, gentleman’s grooming tools and esoteric cutlery of G. Lorenzi , and most of whom went into a kind of mourning when the brand shuttered in 2014.
+“G. Lorenzi was a completely masculine store,” said Serena Lorenzi, 30, one of the family members behind the rebirth of the business as Lorenzi Milano. “Its owners were male, as were the sales staff. My grandmother would assist at Christmas but there was no space for women. They were supposed to be at home, making dinner.”The flu season is going strong.
+About six million to seven million people in the United States have come down with the illness so far, with half of them sick enough to have seen doctors, according to estimates released on Friday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
+Some 69,000 to 84,000 ended up in the hospital during the period from Oct. 1, 2018 through Jan. 5.
+“Flu activity is widespread in many states,” Dr. Alicia Fry, from the C.D.C.’s influenza division, said in an interview. “We expect several more weeks of flu season.”
+The C.D.C. is not affected by the government shutdown.
+The last flu season, from 2017 to 2018, was particularly deadly, with the most cases reported since 2009, and the illness considered severe across all age groups. Nearly 80,000 people died in the United States.
+The number of deaths from flu this season has not yet been determined. But Dr. Fry said the flu was widespread in 30 states, especially in the Southeast, and is moving northward. Levels are also high in New York City and New Jersey.NARVA, Estonia — The conversion of factories into cultural venues rarely raises eyebrows these days, but the Kreenholm complex here is not just any relic of industry. Once the world’s largest cotton mill and a poster child of Soviet might, it stands on an island in the river that now makes up the European Union’s eastern border. Russia is just a stone’s throw away, leaving Narva — where nearly 90 percent of the population is ethnic Russian — caught between two worlds.
+Kreenholm’s imposing atmosphere appealed to Jarmo Reha, 27, a theater director from Tallinn, the Estonian capital. He recently commandeered the site for his production “Oomen,” which saluted the ghosts of industry with actors hammering on iron while the Narva Boy’s Choir sang the socialist anthem “The Internationale.”
+The performance was well received by visiting critics, but some condemned the use of Kreenholm as “blasphemy,” Mr. Reha said in an interview. The factory’s former workers complained that events were being imported from the capital, yet no one was reaching out to the local population. Thousands in the city lost their jobs after the mill was privatized, and it closed for good in 2010. “It’s an open wound,” Mr. Reha said.Ms. Alqunun’s original destination had been Australia, where she hoped to join other women who have fled Saudi Arabia, a patriarchal society where male family members can control even the smallest details of a woman’s life.
+Both Canada and Australia interviewed Ms. Alqunun as part of the refugee placement process, she said. The final decision on where to send her was up to the United Nations refugee agency, which granted her refugee status earlier in the week.
+But General Surachate said she preferred Canada over Australia for personal reasons.
+“She wishes to go to Canada,” he said, “so we respect her wishes.”
+Both Thailand and Canada were commended for their handling of the case by Filippo Grandi, the top refugee official at the United Nations.
+“Refugee protection today is often under threat and cannot always be assured, but in this instance international refugee law and overriding values of humanity have prevailed,” he said in a statement.
+Canada’s decision is likely to aggravate already tense relations with Saudi Arabia. In August the kingdom expelled the Canadian ambassador to Riyadh, recalled the Saudi ambassador to Ottawa and froze all new trade and investment deals with Canada after Canada’s Foreign Ministry posted two Twitter messages calling on Saudi Arabia to release imprisoned rights activists, including two who have family in Canada.
+The kingdom also retaliated against Canada with a series of other measures that included suspending flights by Saudia, the national carrier, to Canadian airports, and ordering the transfer of thousands of Saudi students studying in Canada elsewhere.The day after Shapiro’s speech, I watched the transgender women engage in a lengthy discussion with several young men, including Ben Holden and another conservative gay college student. In what occasionally felt like a debate, Williams tried to get them to understand that transgender people face many of the same smears — that they’re mentally unstable and a threat to children in restrooms — that were aimed at gay men not long ago. Their conversation was momentarily interrupted when a young white nationalist walked between them, handing out his business card and suggesting that his organization “is going to be the future, because we have stuff like this” — meaning transgender people — “we have to deal with.” Though jarring, the disruption offered Williams and the students something they could agree on: White nationalism is bad.
+I could think of few lonelier identities than that of transgender conservative activist, and I wondered whether Williams considered leaving the party after she transitioned in 2015. She had, she said, but she decided against it partly because “I was a Republican long before I was transgender,” adding that her politics — including limited government, a strong military and free-market policies — still align her more closely with Republicans.
+Like many L.G.B.T. conservatives, she also held out hope that her party might change. Jimmy LaSalvia, the longtime gay conservative who left the party in 2014, told me that he had watched several waves of gay conservatives have similar hopes dashed over the decades: “I’ve seen so many fight the good fight, then become disillusioned that the party isn’t changing and become independents or Democrats,” he said. “Then a new group of young gay conservatives appears, and they know almost nothing of this history, and they again insist that the party will change.”
+Williams’s initial optimism in 2016 was shared by many L.G.B.T. conservatives, who watched as candidate Trump “made rather unprecedented public moves for a Republican to declare himself on the side of L.G.B.T. voters,” recalls Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at N.Y.U. who researches L.G.B.T. voting behavior. Trump hawked “LGBTQ for Trump” T-shirts on his campaign website, held up a pride flag during a campaign event and presided over what Angelo, the former Log Cabin president, called “the most gay-friendly convention in G.O.P. history.” That’s a low bar, to be sure, but for some Log Cabin members who witnessed Pat Buchanan’s virulently anti-gay speech at the 1992 Republican convention, Trump’s willingness to say the term “L.G.B.T.Q.” from the stage and to offer the PayPal co-founder and openly gay conservative Peter Thiel a prime speaking slot was “deeply meaningful,” Angelo said.
+But it wasn’t meaningful enough to earn Williams’s support — or that of many L.G.B.T. people. Trump received just 14 percent of the community’s vote, according to exit polling, significantly less than the 22 percent who backed Mitt Romney in 2012. One reason, Williams said, was Trump’s selection of Mike Pence, who has a long history of opposing L.G.B.T. rights, including suggesting that same-sex marriage might cause “societal collapse,” as his running mate.
+Still, Trump’s announcement as president that he would block transgender people from serving in the military came as a surprise to Williams. “It felt like somebody sucker-punched me,” she said. But many gay conservatives I spent time with played down the importance of Trump’s record on transgender rights. “I think the trans issue gets more attention than it warrants,” says Jamie Kirchick, a center-right gay writer and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution who opposed Trump’s military ban but who believes “the gay movement has been overtaken by transgender issues affecting a minuscule percentage of the population.” Rob Smith, the Iraq veteran, channeled the feelings of many gay conservatives I spoke to about transgender rights when he tweeted: “A ‘good’ gay in 2018 must: Diffuse his masculinity at all costs. Never question a trans person. Ever.”
+The unwillingness of many gay conservatives to prioritize the struggle of transgender people comes as little surprise to Richard Goldstein, a gay former executive editor for The Village Voice who published “Homocons,” a scathing book about gay conservatives, 17 years ago. Though Goldstein doesn’t view them with the same scorn he once did (he sees their ability to live openly gay lives as proof of “the gay left’s success making it possible for every gay person to be themselves”), he remains disappointed by what he sees as their inability to empathize with marginalized communities. “These are mostly white gay men who are pretty comfortable and who can’t seem to understand that many in the L.G.B.T. community are still not safe and need protection,” Goldstein said.“I feel like I’m doing something illegal, and I like it,” Danielle Macdonald said.
+It was a shivery Monday morning, and Ms. Macdonald shook a spray can and hissed an arc of orange paint.
+After starring in the recent Netflix movies “Dumplin’” and “Bird Box,” Ms. Macdonald, 27, was receiving a master class in graffiti writing from an artist who calls herself Anjl. The classroom was a semi-vacant lot in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, ringed by a chain-link fence and barbed wire. Even though the class broke no laws, it still felt just a little criminal.
+For Ms. Macdonald, learning to write graffiti is a yearslong dream (she once tried to find every Banksy in London). Knowing the dream was a messy one, she had dressed down, wearing a black puffer jacket, bright bluejeans and old sneakers.
+Her hair, the color of raw honey, twirled in the wind. She was kitted out in plastic gloves and a plastic apron, which gave her the look of an extremely chilly food service worker. This was not the apocalyptic world of “Bird Box”; no blindfold required.Nick Vallelonga, one of the writers of the film “Green Book,” apologized on Thursday for a 2015 Twitter post in which he agreed with then-candidate Donald J. Trump’s false claim about Muslims, that “thousands of people were cheering” on rooftops in Jersey City following the September 11 terrorist attacks.
+“I want to apologize,” Vallelonga said in a statement. “I spent my life trying to bring this story of overcoming differences and finding common ground to the screen, and I am incredibly sorry to everyone associated with ‘Green Book.’”
+He went on: “I especially deeply apologize to the brilliant and kind Mahershala Ali, and all members of the Muslim faith, for the hurt I have caused. I am also sorry to my late father who changed so much from Dr. Shirley’s friendship and I promise this lesson is not lost on me. ‘Green Book’ is a story about love, acceptance and overcoming barriers, and I will do better.”
+President Trump initially made the statement at a campaign rally in Birmingham, Ala., when he said: “I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down. And I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” He kept defending the claim for several days after, even though officials and factcheckers repeatedly debunked the assertion.At 3 a.m. on Jan. 10, bleary-eyed Congolese sat stunned in front on their TVs and radios. The preliminary results of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s presidential elections were announced, and it was not, as many had feared, the anointed successor of President Joseph Kabila. Nor was it the opposition leader Martin Fayulu, whom the respected Catholic Church had projected to win. Instead, it was Felix Tshisekedi — the son of the opposition leader Etienne Tshisekedi — who could be seen on Twitter and Facebook streams, hugging his wife and proclaiming victory.
+These election results are extraordinary, in two very different ways. First, the president appears to have rigged the polls, not in favor of his preferred candidate but in favor of an opponent. In addition to the tallies of the Catholic Church, which deployed some 40,000 election observers, two polls commissioned just days ahead of the elections by the Congo Research Group also pointed to a Fayulu victory. According to our numbers, a Tshisekedi win would have been statistically impossible. He was 23 percent behind Mr. Fayulu, which would have translated into around 4.5 million votes. There are persistent reports — indignantly denied by Mr. Tshisekedi — that he has struck a deal with Mr. Kabila to guarantee the incumbent’s interests in exchange for the presidency.
+But the results also underscore the Congolese people’s commitment to building a democracy. Whatever the true vote count may have been, it is clear that this is not the outcome that Mr. Kabila initially wanted. Faced with constitutional term limits, he was widely reported to have first considered changing the Constitution, then delayed elections for two years. In addition, he excluded key opponents from the race and brutally suppressed protests and opposition rallies, killing hundreds of people. In response, Congolese youth groups mobilized, many of them facing arrest, torture and worse. Inspired by these actions and an activist clergy, Catholics took to the streets by the thousands, prompting scenes of police beating up priests and tear-gassing churchgoers in the pews. It was these patient, courageous actions that hemmed in Mr. Kabila at every turn and pushed him to this current compromise.
+In the end, however, these protesters did not risk their lives, nor did 19 million voters trek to the polls for a small group of politicians to concoct fake results and share power among themselves. A Tshisekedi victory is at risk of being regarded as illegitimate by many Congolese unless there is a transparent accounting of the results. The election commission must publish the breakdown of its results by polling station, so that independent observers can assess their credibility. Foreign diplomats should refrain from recognizing Mr. Tshisekedi’s victory until this has been done.Kamala Harris’s new memoir, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” begins with a prologue set on Nov. 8, 2016, the night Harris was elected a United States senator from California. The rest of the book addresses the urgent political matters that have risen in the wake of that night, but it also goes back to cover, among other things, Harris’s tenure as California’s attorney general and her childhood in Oakland as the daughter of immigrant parents: her father an economist from Jamaica and her mother a cancer researcher from India. Though rumors of Harris gearing up for a presidential run in 2020 are becoming noisier by the minute (when Stephen Colbert asked her on Thursday if she would run, Harris coyly said, “I might”), she told me the memoir is not meant to help lay the groundwork for such a campaign. “At the expense of sounding immodest,” she said, the book is “really about the work I’ve done already that’s had national impact, and what I hope to come from it.” Below, Harris talks about how she connects personal experiences to her professional life, the breakneck speed of the news cycle, the inspiration she takes from Bob Marley and more.
+When did you first get the idea to write this book?
+Election night, 2016. I sat on our couch at home after my night at the election party with a family-size bag of Doritos, which I ate by myself, one after the other, in awe and in shock about what I was watching on TV. It was a night that was bittersweet for my campaign, for all of us. None of us saw it coming.
+After that night, I really felt a more urgent need to tell people what we’re fighting for. When we talk about a fight, it’s born out of optimism; and it’s not a fight against something, but it’s a fight for something. It was that emotion that led me to speak the words I spoke that night, about the need to fight; and that, by extension, led to the book.If three consecutive years of doing something constitutes a tradition, then the “Super Mega” crossword contest in The Times’s 2018 “Puzzle Mania” section is now officially a tradition.
+The object this year was to solve the giant 50x50-square crossword on pages 6-7 and 13, then find the eight answers that had something in common. We said these answers would point to eight squares in the puzzle. The letters in those would spell a familiar phrase — which was the answer to the contest.
+The eight related answers in the puzzle, straightforwardly enough, were spelled-out numbers:
+TEN (clue: "Great-looking sort")
+EIGHTY-SIX ("Toss")
+ONE-EIGHTY ("U-turn")
+TWO ONE TWO ("Original area code for New York City")
+THREE HUNDRED ("2007 epic film set during the Persian Wars")
+FOUR TEN ("Year the Visigoths sacked Rome")
+FOUR NINETY-FIVE ("Interstate highway also known as the Capital Beltway")
+FIVE THIRTY-EIGHT ("Nate Silver's website")
+The letters in the numbered squares so named, taken in order, spelled GO FIGURE.
+By the contest deadline, we had received exactly 4,499 entries, of which 4,422 were correct. From this group, one solver was chosen at random. That person is Lauren O'Connor, of Arlington, Va. Lauren will receive a grand-prize check for $1,000 from The Times.
+The following 25 runners-up will each receive copies of "The New York Times Super Sunday Crosswords, Vol. 4" (St. Martin's Press):
+Mary Ann Brewster, Bridgeport, Conn.
+Peter and Fran Brooks, Highland, N.Y.
+Erica Chang, Davis, Calif.
+Lucie Cissell, Memphis, Ind.
+Ann Diamond, New York
+Kaz Frankiewicz, Chicago
+Lynn Goldschmidt, Rancho Mirage, Calif.
+Eylul Harputlugli, New York
+Philip Henson, Norwalk, Conn.
+Jay Kasofsky, Surprise, Ariz.
+Leslie Kautz, Los Angeles
+Karin Langbehn-Pecaut, Chapel Hill, N.C.
+Daniel Lawler, Brooklyn, N.Y.
+John MacGaffey, Newton, Mass.
+Vilas Menon, New York
+Phillip Pittore, Lambertville, N.J.
+Jeremiah Scharf, Newton, Mass.
+Dianna Scott, Mahwah, N.J.
+Mark Shannon, Scarsdale, N.Y.
+Sandra Shapiro, Princeton Junction, N.J.
+Tanushree Shivaswamy, Richardson, Tex.
+David Singer, Chesterland, Ohio
+David Stanley, Salt Lake City
+George Steel, New York
+Jane Townsend, Yorktown Heights, N.Y.
+Congratulations to the winners. Congratulations to everyone who found the answer. And thanks to Brendan Emmett Quigley for the gorgeous puzzle, which took him weeks of anguished work to make!Because Bumblebee isn’t able to speak (his voice box was removed by a Decepticon ), Knight saw the eyes as the place where the character could be the most revealing. So they are larger and brighter and tell more of a story on their own than in the Michael Bay films. (Think Brad Bird’s animated fable “The Iron Giant” with a little “E.T.” mixed in.)
+The mechanics of the character were streamlined as well, rounding his edges more and reducing the parts to fewer, but still transformable, segments.
+“Instead of the upper arm being made out of 50 small pieces, it might be made out of three large panels supported by small parts,” said the visual effects supervisor, Jason Smith, of Industrial Light and Magic. He has worked on four “Transformers” films , beginning with the 2007 installment.
+Did this simplification of the design make it easier for the artists? Not exactly.
+“It’s not much of a savings in terms of effort,” Smith said. “Because when you replace these multiple pieces with a large panel, you have to make that panel really read as something physical and real.” So more effort is put into how the paint and the metal look and what it takes to make Bumblebee feel like he’s moving in more emotional ways.When Ayanna Pressley, a new representative from Massachusetts, took up residence in Shirley Chisholm’s former office, she framed it not as a goal achieved but as one marker on a long trajectory toward equality.
+Rashida Tlaib, a new representative from Michigan and one of two Muslim women now serving in Congress, showed up to her swearing-in in a thobe, a traditional Palestinian robe, asserting that her story is not one of American Horatio Alger achievement but of a particular, and particularly marginalized, place in the world.
+Ilhan Omar, the other Muslim woman now in Congress, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York wore suffragist white on the day of the swearing-in because, Ms. Omar tweeted, it “was a small way we could honor those that paved the way for us.” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez posted an Instagram photo of her swearing-in with a caption detailing all of the ways she and her family had struggled. Noting she is the youngest congresswoman in history, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made explicit the fact that her success is not a story of bootstraps but of a web of support. “Darkness taught me transformation cannot solely be an individual pursuit, but also a community trust,” she wrote. “We must lean on others to strive on our own.”
+From these women, the message is clear: Their strength comes from collaborative, generational efforts to move toward the good. The promise of America is not the possibility of individuals going at it alone and achieving in a high-profile way as a result, and the purpose of politics is not personal empowerment. The gift of power requires the responsibility of appreciating who came before you and how you might do your part to push forward. Powerful men have always considered their individual legacies. These powerful women seem more interested in their role in improving an evolving and complex ecosystem.
+In some ways, this refusal to take full individual credit for professional success is a very female thing, and perhaps itself springs from sexism: Women who are seen as individually ambitious or self-glorifying pay a price — unlikability — that men do not. It may be safer for powerful women to make clear that they got to where they are because of significant support from those around them, and to focus their origin stories on home and community.
+But the fact that this version of a hero’s journey grows partly out of sexism doesn’t make it any less true. If voters can see the group effort that enables power and achievement, it could diminish the collective discomfort with powerful women. It can also help illustrate the unearned advantages that put some people in power. Women shouldn’t adapt to the existing lie; men in the political realm should be more honest.
+The lines we have drawn around power, and the stories we tell about it, have kept many people from seeing themselves in their political leaders. Changing the way we tell the stories of how people achieve political power is much bigger than just more honest candidate autobiographies or triumphant Instagram captions. It has the power to change the outcome of what those in power do.
+Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) is the author of “The H Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness” and a contributing opinion writer.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.On page 2 of “Puzzle Mania” we said: “Somewhere in this issue … a secret word is hidden. Can you find it?” We added: “When you’ve found it, you’ll know it. In fact, you might say you will have seen the light.”
+The answer was hidden in the “Find Your Way” mazes, #1 and #2, by Rick Jaspers, which were printed on back-to-back pages (9 and 10).
+The solution to the first maze was this:What Mr. Trump Said
+“When — during the campaign, I would say, “Mexico is going to pay for it.” Obviously, I never said this and I never meant they’re going to write out a check. I said, “They’re going to pay for it.” They are. They are paying for it with the incredible deal we made, called the United States, Mexico, and Canada USMCA deal.”
+— in remarks to reporters on Thursday
+False.
+Mr. Trump is rewriting the premise of his central campaign promise, a pledge that he has repeated hundreds of times and has said would be “so easy” to fulfill.
+Though he is often vague about how Mexico would foot the bill, Mr. Trump has offered occasional specifics, including compelling Mexico to make a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion.
+Before he officially declared his candidacy, Mr. Trump proposed to “deduct costs from Mexican foreign aid” in an April 2015 Twitter post.
+As early as August 2015, his campaign website stated: “Mexico must pay for the wall and, until they do, the United States will, among other things: impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages; increase fees on all temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats (and if necessary cancel them); increase fees on all border crossing cards — of which we issue about 1 million to Mexican nationals each year (a major source of visa overstays); increase fees on all NAFTA worker visas from Mexico (another major source of overstays); and increase fees at ports of entry to the United States from Mexico [Tariffs and foreign aid cuts are also options].”“He spread his arms and told me about everything that would happen in this empty space,” Professor Espada added, mentioning classes in English as a second language and karate. “I thought he was crazy. It became El Puente.”
+More recently, El Puente created the Latino Climate Action Network in Puerto Rico to “reclaim and restore the environment.” El Puente has won numerous awards for community building and youth development.
+Still, the group’s Academy for Peace and Justice has come under some criticism.
+“El Puente’s teachers and administrators are clearly well-meaning,” the lawyer and commentator Heather Mac Donald wrote in 1998 in City Journal, published by the conservative Manhattan Institute. But she found fault with its curriculum, which offered, she wrote, “courses in ghetto culture — of which Hip-Hop 101 is an extreme example — that reinforce the parochialism of inner-city kids rather than open their minds to broader intellectual worlds.”
+This week, Representative Nydia Velázquez, Democrat of New York, described Mr. Garden Acosta on Twitter as “a strong advocate of civil rights, education, our youth and the importance of advocating” for measures to counter climate change.
+Luis Patrick Garden Acosta was born on March 17, 1945, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. His father, Luis A. Garden, was Dominican. His mother, Maximina Garden Acosta, was born in Puerto Rico. She became a social activist herself after a fiancé was killed in a police massacre of peaceful Puerto Rican nationalist marchers in Ponce in 1937. She later helped smuggle undocumented immigrants from the Dominican Republic to New York, where she found them jobs in the factory where she worked.
+One of Mr. Garden Acosta’s first encounters with racism was when he was 9. Accompanying a black friend visiting the friend’s grandmother in Virginia, Luis was thrilled to discover that a science fiction film they had missed in Brooklyn was playing at a local theater. The friend warned him away, however, because the theater was racially segregated.
+“How could it be true that I was brown and couldn’t go somewhere?” he said in an interview with The Daily News in New York in 1999. “I was so hurt. I can still feel it. I was angry. I was sad. Something pierced my soul.”Hi, it’s Emily with Five Weeknight Dishes. I got a note from my dear friend Katy this week, a writer I worked with years ago at Jane magazine, telling me that she embraced the message of last week’s newsletter, to eat what you crave, and that to her it meant “broth during the day and TEX-MEX FOR DINNER.” (The all-caps are hers.) This, of course, immediately made me crave Tex-Mex, saucy and bubbly with a thick cap of golden cheese, or a halo of pickled red onions.
+And so we have both enchiladas and vegetarian chili below, because that’s what I want to eat, along with a pasta that I made on Saturday night and loved, the eggs Kejriwal I would eat every night, the salmon I’ll probably make on Sunday. Tell me what you all-caps crave, and it may appear in next week’s lineup: dearemily@nytimes.com.
+[Sign up here to receive the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter in your inbox every Friday.]
+Here are five dishes for the week:Two low-volatility E.T.F.s that outperformed the S&P 500 in 2018 were: Hartford Multifactor Low Volatility US Equity E.T.F., which was basically flat, and Invesco S&P 500 Low Volatility E.T.F., which lost just over 2 percent. The S&P 500 was down 6.2 percent last year.
+Investors may also be wondering what to do about tech stocks, especially the Faangs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google), which have been losing altitude rapidly after a seemingly endless ascent.
+Through December, Facebook and Netflix were both down over 35 percent from their highs of last year. Apple and Amazon were each off more than 25 percent from their 2018 highs.
+Although Kevin Landis is portfolio manager of the tech-focused Firsthand Technology Opportunities fund, he said he is wary of the big tech stocks. “When companies get bigger, they start looking more and more like government agencies,” he said. “Even the biggest opportunities are at the saturation point. There’s only so many iPhones you can sell.”
+With evidence of rising public concern about consumer privacy, Mr. Landis said, he expects to see greater regulation. “I spent the last 15 to 20 years being appalled at how readily people surrendered their own privacy,” he said. “I welcome the idea that they’ve become more aware.”
+Mr. Landis said there were still good values in smaller tech companies. One major holding is Roku, which hopes to lure consumers who subscribe to cable. He contrasted its market cap of under $4 billion with Netflix’s $111 billion market cap and said Roku was a better value.
+But many advisers say investors should simply hold tight. Brian McMahon, manager of the Thornburg Investment Income Builder mutual fund, said that in many ways, the recent downturn “is pretty normal. This is not something to panic about.” He said his largest investment, the CME Group, benefits from an active market. It makes good profits when people trade on options and futures contracts made on its platforms, he said. “CME Group benefits from volatility,” he said.Madison Keys
+Keys, a 23-year-old American who was the runner-up to Sloane Stephens in singles at the 2017 United States Open, last year reached the quarterfinals of the Australian Open, as well as the semifinals of the French Open and the United States Open. But her other results were somewhat lackluster, and she enters this week ranked 17th. Keys struggled to find a coach to replace Lindsay Davenport, who stopped traveling to spend more time with her family. In December, Keys hired Jim Madrigal, who guided Tennys Sandgren on his run to the quarterfinals in Melbourne a year ago. At 5-10, Keys has one of the game’s best first serves, and she generates astonishing pace with her ground strokes. But she ranks only 27th on tour in second serve points won, at just over 47 percent. An improvement in this area could pay off for Keys.Kassa Overall’s new album — the irreverently titled “Go Get Ice Cream and Listen to Jazz” — attests to the diverse musical identity of this drummer, producer and rapper. It’s one of the few genuine-sounding, full-scope amalgams of contemporary hip-hop and jazz to surface in recent years. On “Who’s on the Playlist,” as the pianist Sullivan Fortner traces the chords to Miles Davis and Bill Evans’s “Blue in Green,” Overall, 36, daubs his snare drum with brushes, then adds a splatter of electronic percussion. He starts the track with a mumbly, ironic Master P quote before cracking a window into his heart on a verse that grows tensile and urgent before stopping up short. Judi Jackson, a young British jazz singer, shows that the interdisciplinary spirit is contagious — or at least, generational: She sings in an Erykah Badu purr for most of the song, then rattles off a cold rap verse. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
+Tomas Nordmark, ‘Human’The two most popular book candles at Strand, Ms. Altshuler said , are Old Books, which smells like a used bookstore with a hint of cinnamon, and Lost in the Stacks (both $32.95), reminiscent of a fancy library that uses leather armchairs — the dreamy one complete with the library ladder reaching to the top shelves. Both are made by Forage Candle Company, which is based in Roan Mountain, Tenn.
+“I think they use them in the same way people have used books and stories since the beginning of time: as a means to escape to another place and time,” said Lisa Smith, the owner of Forage Candle, adding that Old Books is the most popular book-related scent, of which they carry 25 at a time. “When it comes specifically to book-scented candles, what better place to escape to than within the pages of a treasured story?”
+Ms. Smith began making her book-scented candles after leaving her job as a high school science teacher when she went blind a few years ago from complications of rheumatoid arthritis. Before losing her eyesight, books were Ms. Smith’s favorite escape from reality, and she would devour a novel daily.
+“After losing my sight, reading became very difficult, but my love for literature was still very much alive,” Ms. Smith said. “Making literary-inspired candles became a way for me to keep that love alive.”
+She harvests wild local botanicals, compounding them into unique fragrances to match the smells she associates with old books. Ms. Smith also has candles to match books, like Pride and Prejudice, $18 on Etsy (smells like roses drifting from the garden and ivy from the garden’s gates); and Gatsby, $22, (hints of juniper and wild florals that’s supposed to take you back to the jazz and gin era of the ’20s).
+While some people prefer to be transported into an old library or bookstore when they read, others like to pair their candles with their books, like wine with food.In Saudi Arabia, all women are required to have a male guardian, whose permission they need to get married, travel and undergo some medical procedures. The guardian is often a father or husband, but can be a brother or even a son.
+The kingdom’s day-to-day ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has vowed to make life better for Saudi women. He defanged the once-feared religious police, who harassed women deemed inappropriately dressed, and last year he lifted the ban on women driving. Saudi women can now attend mixed concerts and pursue careers off limits to their mothers.
+[Read about the challenges that remained for Saudi women after the driving ban was lifted.]
+When asked about guardianship laws last year, the prince said that Saudi Arabia had to “figure out a way to treat this that doesn’t harm families and doesn’t harm the culture.”
+Those moves have increased his popularity among Saudi women, many of whom say guardianship is not a burden because their male relatives take good care of them. Others escape the rules by seeking jobs in neighboring countries like the United Arab Emirates, where social rules are more lax.
+But the system’s critics say it gives no recourse to women with controlling or abusive guardians.
+That’s what sent Nourah, 20, fleeing for Australia. Her father had divorced her mother before Nourah was born, and she was raised mostly by her uncles, she said. Her father sometimes abused her, but her efforts to get help fell on deaf ears.
+Last year, her boyfriend wanted to marry her, but her family refused because they perceived him as coming from a lower social class, said Nourah, who spoke on the condition that only her first name be used for her safety. Her father began to arrange her marriage to a man she did not know and who wanted to bar her from working. In October, a day before her prospective groom arrived, she ran away.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”“I mean, I do have some very special ones, some sentimental feelings, personal tastes, I do have,” he continued in broken English. “But in general, all of them, they are the same.” He added that he would keep his personal favorites to himself.
+Sheikh Hamad asserted that Mr. Ahmed had initially told him the private meetings would cost around $50,000, but that after introducing him to several Bollywood celebrities he started to make “unwarranted demands for very large sums of money.”
+After meeting four Bollywood stars and paying $3 million in fees, he felt that he was being taken advantage of and said that he had informed Mr. Ahmed he should not arrange any further meetings.
+According to Mr. Ahmed’s account, the sheikh told him that his family had taken over his funds because they did not approve of his expensive Bollywood passion, but that he went on to meet 15 other Bollywood stars through another agent.
+“Mr. Saffy, the sheikh’s assistant, menacingly said that I would be in ‘big trouble’ if I did not leave the sheikh alone after it became clear he would not pay,” Mr. Ahmed said, adding that he had faced threats and intimidation since his lawyers sent their first letter to the sheikh.
+The sheikh robustly denied Mr. Ahmed’s allegations, calling them “entirely false and unfounded.”
+Sheikh Hamad said in a statement after Friday’s judgment, “It was with a heavy heart that I was forced to defend myself against this claim, since I had considered Mr. Ahmed to be a friend whom I trusted, and had always treated him with generosity and kindness.”
+“After my dad passed away, he was an element in my life,” he said, in reference to Mr. Ahmed. “I wanted to get to know him as a brother, as a new friend in my life. So, we started like this. And he was very much aware of this matter.”“It’s like, where do you begin the end,” she said.
+Near Gordon, a town that had not known that it had any connection to the case, residents were shaken as they learned that Jayme — the missing girl they had read about — had been among them all along. The home where the authorities said she had been held was in a wooded cul-de-sac known as Eau Claire Acres. Some residents said the beloved seclusion of this part of northwestern Wisconsin, known for its lakeside cabins and ATV trails, was also probably what kept Jayme out of sight for so long.
+“What bothers me the most is that we didn’t know,” said Dolly McNamara, 66, who owns a nearby bar. “We watch over each other’s cabins when they’re gone. We see tracks going to someone’s cabin that we know is not there, we go and check.
+“Everyone keeps an eye out,” she said. “I guess it’s just never enough.”
+Residents said they were unaware of Mr. Patterson; they had never met or seen him, many said, even though the authorities said he had lived in the area for years. Mr. Patterson, who was unemployed, graduated from the Northwood School District in nearby Minong, Wis., in May 2015, according to a school official, Jean Serum. “He was a quiet but good student,” Ms. Serum said. He had been a member of the quiz bowl team.
+“We never lock the door up here, and we did lock the door last night,” said Jill Logghe, 63, a teacher who has a cabin in the area. “The restlessness last night was, ‘How could he have acted alone?’”
+A neighbor, Daphne Ronning, told The Chicago Sun-Times that Mr. Patterson and a brother grew up in the house that the authorities say Jayme was held in, and that at some point their parents had moved out, but the two sons continued to live in the home. “We had some problems with them when they were teenagers — we caught them siphoning gas,” Ms. Ronning said.But, he added, “with regards to the top of this free agent market, you can’t control when these guys become free agents.
+“We went into this with the thought of being opportunistic, that if things were able to line up in a way that we were able to further cement this rebuild and put ourselves in a stronger position for the long term, we were going to try to do everything in our power to advance that opportunity.”
+The richest offer usually wins in free agency, of course, and the backdrop of Machado’s saga is that of Bryce Harper, the other elite player on the market. Their powerful agents — Dan Lozano for Machado and Scott Boras for Harper — naturally want to emerge from the winter with the largest haul.
+The Yankees entertained Machado in New York last month, but they seem bound for the postseason with or without him and reached a two-year, $24 million contract agreement (pending a physical) with another infielder, D.J. LeMahieu, on Friday.
+The Phillies, who reportedly will meet with Harper this weekend, lurk in both discussions. Their owner, John Middleton, has vowed to spend aggressively, and they are eager to end their own streak of six consecutive losing seasons.
+Machado is familiar with the Phillies executives Andy MacPhail and Matt Klentak, who worked for the Baltimore Orioles in Machado’s early years there, and MASN reported on Thursday that the Phillies have hired the former Orioles coach Bobby Dickerson as their infield coach. But Machado’s ties to Alonso and Jay are much stronger. In February 2017, the players collaborated on a photo essay for The Players’ Tribune called “The Miami Baseball Brotherhood,” detailing their hometown workouts and their kinship.
+“As a kid coming up, I’d see Jon and Yonder out there making their mark, and it gave me something to shoot for,” Machado wrote then. “They set the example. I looked up to those guys.”WASHINGTON — Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is cancer free and on the mend after her recent surgery for the disease, a Supreme Court spokeswoman said on Friday.
+“Her recovery from surgery is on track,” the spokeswoman, Kathleen Arberg, said in a statement. “Post-surgery evaluation indicates no evidence of remaining disease, and no further treatment is required.”
+Justice Ginsburg, 85, underwent surgery in late December to remove two nodules from her left lung. She missed this week’s arguments, and will be absent from the bench next week, too, Ms. Arberg said.
+“Justice Ginsburg will continue to work from home next week and will participate in the consideration and decision of the cases on the basis of the briefs and the transcripts of oral arguments,” Ms. Arberg said.Abby Ellin also visits this week, to discuss her new book, “Duped: Double Lives, False Identities, and the Con Man I Almost Married.” “When somebody is lying to you about being in the C.I.A. and being a Navy Seal and being responsible for this secret operation and that secret operation, you can’t verify it,” Ellin says. “Even if I wanted to, it would have been hard. And also, I didn’t think that was a loving way to kick off a relationship.”
+Also on this week’s episode, Alexandra Alter has news from the publishing world; and Gregory Cowles, Tina Jordan and John Williams talk about what people are reading. Pamela Paul is the host.NEW DELHI — India has nine of the world’s 10 most polluted cities, according to one World Health Organization measure, with choking urban smog that researchers estimate killed 1.24 million people in 2017.
+But until this week, it did not have nationally set targets for reducing hazardous air pollution.
+That changed this week, when the government’s National Clean Air Program unveiled a five-year plan that environmentalists welcomed as long overdue but criticized as lacking clear mechanisms or robust funding to achieve its aims, which include reducing air pollution in 102 cities by up to 30 percent from 2017 levels.
+Some observers questioned the timing of the initiative: Delayed by a year because of bureaucratic hurdles, it arrives as the central government faces elections in May. It also comes alongside other crowd-pleasing measures such as a promise to reserve 10 percent of government jobs for those earning less than 800,000 rupees annually, or about $11,300.
+“This is an important step forward, setting a reduction target,” said Anumita Roychowdhury, a director at the Center for Science and Environment, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization in New Delhi.Harp seals spend winters in the waters off Newfoundland, and it is common for them to go ashore at times, and to swim into bays like the long, narrow ocean inlet that borders Roddickton-Bide Arm, said Garry Stenson, head of the marine mammal section at Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
+“Then if the ice freezes up behind them, they have a harder time getting access to water,” he told the Canadian broadcaster, CBC. “It’s almost like they get going in a direction and just keep going, hoping that they’re going to eventually find water that way.”
+At first the seals in Roddickton-Bide Arm, each one about five feet long and weighing about 300 pounds, crowded around the town’s two brooks that do not freeze over in the winter. Then they spread out, rolling around in the deep snow and barking like dogs. Residents began to worry that the seals were there to stay through the winter — or might starve.
+“They’re very cute little creatures,” Ms. Fitzgerald in a telephone interview. “They look so calm when you just look at them, they look so cute but they’re still wild animals.”But if you haven’t experienced this French-Norwegian company before — and I have seen only one other of its works, the exquisite arson tale “Cendres,” in 2017 — you don’t yet know how viscerally haunting its puppetry can be. These ugly-beautiful full-size human stand-ins aren’t just lifelike; they can insinuate their way right to your core.
+Young Valerie, a pigtailed little girl in a dress, is the first one who will get you. She clings to her mother, Dorothy, played by the extraordinary Yngvild Aspeli, who is the show’s sole actor, and puppeteer. As Dorothy tries to get out of the house, leaving Valerie in her father’s care, the child whispers in her ear.
+“Don’t be silly,” her mother soothes. “He’s your daddy!”
+For all the sordid tragedy that marked Solanas’s life, it seems to have started at the hands of her father, who she said sexually abused her. At the Public Theater, “Chambre Noire,” directed by Ms. Aspeli and Paola Rizza, depicts this in such devastatingly poetic imagery — a child dissociating from her body to endure a trauma — that it made me clap a hand to my mouth. It’s not the only staggering moment in this show.
+But “Chambre Noire” spends most of its time with two adult versions of Valerie, both also puppets (designed by Ms. Aspeli, Pascale Blaison and Polina Borisova): one angry, outrageous and amusingly self-aware in late-1960s New York; the other skinny, grimy and pitiable in 1988 San Francisco, hallucinating alone in a cheap hotel room and nearing death at 52.
+With powerful live percussion by the hardworking Ane Marthe Sorlien Holen, and duly dim lighting by Xavier Lescat, the show includes plentiful video (by David Lejard-Ruffet) projected on black-string curtains that sometimes obscure more than they should. This is nonetheless a stunning work of art — a deeply compassionate remembrance of a furious, unbalanced woman who took aim at a Great Man.In the Dvorak concerto, the cellist Gautier Capuçon battled valiantly to assert himself against an ensemble that seemed intent on belittling him. His tone sounded tight and strained at first, but over the course of the first movement began to glow; his playing became eloquently assured.
+This is heroic music that builds pathos and excitement from the contrast of solo cello and large orchestra playing, yes, fortissimo. But while that Italian term translates as “loudest,” brawn should be matched by character. Dvorak marks these moments “grandioso.” They should be an exhilarating amplification of the cello-protagonist. Here, the ensemble obliterated him.
+In the hard-driving “Danse Générale” that concludes Ravel’s suite, there were more sledgehammer moments in which volume swallowed up color and complexity. (A shame, since the light-dappled opening “Daybreak” movement held glimpses of the Philharmonic’s playing at its most beguiling.) And in the start of the Rimsky-Korsakov on Thursday — this movement marked “maestoso,” or majestically — the huge brass statements burst out with saber-rattling strength but little majesty.
+The most satisfying part of that evening was the Prokofiev concerto with the ebullient pianist Simon Trpceski, who gave a performance that encompassed cartoonish humor and hushed lyricism. Mr. Hrusa is a charismatic conductor with a particular knack, evident in “Scheherazade,” for minutely shaping a string melody so that an entire section appears to play with the same effortless freedom as a soloist. Mr. Hrusa also managed to husband the dynamic forces in the Rimsky-Korsakov so that the most voluminous louds came near the end. But there, once again, the sound lacked the necessary roundness and texture to support the decibel burn.‘The information-gleaners know that what they do is wrong.’
+— From the short story “The Ones Who Stay and Fight,” in the collection “How Long ’Til Black Future Month?” (Orbit, 2018, Page 9), by the Hugo Award-winning writer N.K. Jemisin.
+To “glean” means to pick grain out of a threshed field. It is annoying, demanding, laborious, finicky farm work — a treasure hunt, through stiff weeds, for specks of value so small you need thousands to produce a single loaf of bread. Gleaning often carries connotations of poverty. From biblical times on, farmers have allowed peasants to pick over their fields for sustenance.
+Today we tend to use the word “gleaning” differently, metaphorically. The seed of its meaning has been threshed away from the stalk of its origin. What we glean today is not grain but information.
+Info-gleaning is more virtual than physical. We do it through our computers and phones. And yet, like its agricultural forebear, it is laborious and repetitive and annoying and demanding. It leaves us with sore backs and strained eyes. Still, we choose to do it. There is something compulsive about it — the way we voluntarily peck through the mess of our social-media feeds, discussion forums and search results looking for minuscule grains of reward.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”The 2018 college football season is over. Clemson is the champion. There are a few milestones to tide us over — national signing day (which is not what it used to be), spring games, summer media days — but the cold reality is, we are about eight months from the next game.
+Even college football addicts are likely to need a break after this whirlwind season, which began with coaching turmoil and ended with a surprise bludgeoning of Alabama. Along the way, Central Florida nearly got to claim another share of the national title before it lost the Fiesta Bowl to No. 11 Louisiana State — albeit by a mere 8 points while playing without their starting quarterback.
+Alas, as we while away our time with work, family and worrying about where Bryce Harper will sign, here are seven observations and thoughts inspired by the 2018 season to guide us to the 2019 season’s kickoff.
+College football is now college basketball. O.K., not quite. Veterans still matter and improve year-to-year — no coach brags about having a young defense — and, of course, N.F.L. rules still effectively keep underclassmen in the college game. But more than ever, and particularly at the most important position, it seems you are only as good as your latest recruiting class. The top five Heisman Trophy vote-getters were quarterbacks who were either transfers or in their first season as the starter, or both, and four of the five are entering the N.F.L. draft. And none of them was the Clemson freshman Trevor Lawrence, who on Monday night proved to be perhaps the most valuable quarterback of all.Perplexed? You’re not alone. Several people contacted The New York Times about the change. Notices emailed to Equifax subscribers do explain the lock issue, if readers click through to a question-and-answer page. But some subscribers and consumer advocates worry that people may not absorb the details and remain unaware that they have to relock their Equifax credit report. Credit locks are marketed by credit bureaus as a convenient way to prevent lenders and others from obtaining your credit report without your knowledge.
+“There’s an opportunity for consumers to be confused,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy with Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group. If consumers don’t relock their files — and if they haven’t used another option, known as a security freeze — “they’re still going to be very vulnerable,” he said.
+Christina Tetreault, a staff attorney at Consumers Union who specializes in financial services, said the situation illustrated why the best way to guard against account fraud is to place a security freeze — not a lock — on your files at all three credit bureaus.
+Federal law now requires credit bureaus to offer security freezes free of charge, and they’re much simpler to set up than in the past, Ms. Tetreault said. A freeze accomplishes the same thing as a lock, she said, but with a freeze, your rights are defined by law. With credit locks, she said, the bureaus set the rules.
+“With a freeze,” she said, “the power belongs to the consumer.”
+Equifax initially told at least some subscribers that it would extend free credit monitoring through TrustedID Premier, according to emails shared with The Times. But later, it switched to an offer of a second year through the credit bureau Experian, a competitor. Some subscribers may already have switched, but the deadline to enroll for the free extra year is Jan. 31, according to a notice Equifax sent to subscribers. (Experian normally charges a monthly fee for its service, called IDnotify.)[Get a weekly roundup of Times coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.]
+But that’s not to say this is not a big deal for the Marine Corps. It’s an organization steeped in old habits and tradition and surrounded by a rampant group of veterans who are quick to criticize any change to their “old corps.” The corps has the lowest percentage of women of any military branch and for years has resisted integration of its fighting forces.
+In the winter of 2007, at age 19, I was in Platoon 3028, India Company, Third Recruit Training Battalion, the same company and battalion that this female platoon will soon join. Back then, Third Battalion was located on the other side of the base, far away from the other two male battalions. There were rows of barracks that housed each company of recruits — India, Kilo, Mike and, later that year, Lima — with an old parade ground, built in the middle of the 20th century, surrounded by tree lines. On Parris Island, we felt isolated from the rest of the world and at Third Battalion even more so.
+Our interaction with female recruits was not just limited but was explicitly forbidden by our drill instructors. On Sundays, we would see them at church, assigned to their own rows of seats in the auditorium. One story circulated that a male recruit was passing notes to a female recruit in church, and his drill instructors found out. We all pictured him getting hazed until 2 in the morning and to within an inch of his death. Who knows what really happened, and who knows if that’s really changed.
+Elsewhere in the Marine Corps, women have slowly started to appear in the combat jobs that the Obama administration opened in 2015 — a change the Marine Corps leadership strongly opposed at the time. Of the roughly 15,000 women in the Marines (less than 10 percent of the force), around 100 are serving in the once-restricted roles, and only one has led an infantry platoon. In 2018, I profiled First Lt. Marina A. Hierl, who is the first woman in the Marine Corps to lead an infantry platoon. In the beginning, she faced skepticism from her superiors, but months later, she was seen no differently than anyone else in her 1,000-strong battalion.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”“My name is George Tillman Jr., and I am the director of “The Hate U Give.” We always called this scene “the talk.” The scene was actually in the middle of the book, but we decided very early on to move it at the top of the film. What I love about this scene is, outside, you see a normal neighborhood, with a lot of playing. It feels like a Saturday afternoon. But I cinematically wanted to move slowly towards this house, to really show that, while everyone is having a good time playing, there’s important business being done with the Carter family. The first guy we see is Mav Carter. You see a guy who got braids, and he got a tattoo, so your assumption is that this guy is a gang member and he’s up to no good. But as the scene sort of progressed, I love turning the scene on its head and seeing that he’s not who you think he is.” “Now, one day, you’re all going to be with me, and you best bet we gonna get pulled over.” He’s a guy who’s a father, a husband, and he’s talking about something that’s a very serious issue, that he’s telling them to put their hands on the table. “You’re going to see me with my hands like this.” What I love about this scene is that this feels like a normal conversation like somebody would have about the birds and the bees with their children. But this is a scene that’s very normal in a lot of African-American families across the country, which is, how you keep your kids safe. How do you get them to understand how to act around police officers? It’s all about a father protecting his family. “It can get real dangerous, so don’t argue with them. But keep — “ The rehearsal for the scene was very important. It started off by rehearsing a scene with Lamar Johnson, who plays Seven, and Amandla Stenberg, who plays Starr. They rehearsed the scene, but they are not actually in the scene, but I only rehearsed it with them so they could have it as a backstory for them, moving forward, for the rest of the film. “Now, just because we got to deal with this mess, don’t you ever forget that being black is an honor, because you come from greatness.” But the young kids who played the scene in the film, I didn’t rehearse with them. I wanted them to be on camera for the first time experiencing that. So what we do — we’re seeing three different kinds of dynamics in this scene, is understanding the subtext of what an African-American family go through in the inner city. We’re seeing a father figure who is very present in the household. And we’re seeing a relationship that shows a loving relationship between a husband and wife. Even though they have disagreements, we still see a love. “You understand?”To the Editor:
+A Dec. 31 editorial about whaling didn’t mention critical facts.
+First , Japan is committed to the conservation of whales. It sets strict catch limits based on scientific methodology established by the International Whaling Commission. This ensures the sustainability of all whale species Japan will catch for hundreds of years. As you recognized, not all whale species are endangered. Japan prohibits the hunting of those that are.
+Second, Japan’s actions fully comply with international law. Whaling is limited to Japan’s 200-mile exclusive economic zone, where it has the sovereign right to use the living resources. There is no general international prohibition on whaling .
+Japan respected the whaling commission’s 1986 “moratorium” on whaling for over 30 years, before exercising its legal right to withdraw from the I.W.C. at the end of 2018. It did so reluctantly, after concluding that the moratorium, which was adopted as a temporary measure, had become permanent mainly because of the politically motivated objection not based on scientific facts by some member states rather than legitimate environmental concerns.
+Third, whaling has been a part of Japanese culture for centuries, just as it has been in Norway, Iceland and Denmark, and among indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, who continue to engage in it .To the Editor:
+Re “China’s Slump Leads to Drop in Apple Sales” (front page, Jan. 3):
+A $50 Huawei smartphone does — pretty much — what an $800 iPhone does. So, yes, we can come up with all sort of theories why Apple is not raking it in as it used to. We can blame China. We can blame the millennials, not being as gullible as before and having less disposable income since their student loans are in the tens of thousands.
+We can blame President Trump, of course. We can blame Qualcomm, for its patent battle. We can blame the fluctuating stock market, as if that were a new thing. We can blame Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, for not being innovative enough.
+Or we can try to accept that things change and that what was “cool” and made sense yesterday might not be so today. This constant demand for the future to be predictable and advantageous is absurd, or maybe just a thing of the past.
+Michele Castagnetti
+Los AngelesWhen Sam Fender, 22, a British singer-songwriter, released “Dead Boys” four months ago, a song about the suicide of a close male friend, he had no idea that so dour a subject would resonate so deeply.
+The song, which exorcised his grief in a torrent of fidgety guitars, frantic beats and haunted vocals, has been streamed more than 3.5 million times on Spotify, and its video has about 850,000 views on YouTube. In December, he won the Critics’ Choice 2019 Brit Award (Britain’s equivalent to the Grammys).
+While writing the song, Mr. Fender learned that 84 British men commit suicide each week; another friend killed himself after he finished recording the song. Mr. Fender blames those losses, in part, on “a world where men don’t feel they can talk about their problems, no matter how bad they are,” he said. “I started to question all the archaic ideas of what a bloke is supposed to be.”If you complain to Netflix, the streaming giant listens. At least it does if you’re Alfonso Cuarón, the Golden Globe-winning director of “Roma.”
+In the film, set in Mexico City in the 1970s, the actors speak Mexican Spanish and the indigenous Mixtec language. For that Spanish, Netflix added subtitles in Castilian, Spain’s main dialect, for the release in that country. On Wednesday, Netflix removed those Castilian subtitles after Cuarón told El País, a Spanish newspaper, that they were “parochial, ignorant and offensive to Spaniards themselves.”
+Even commonly understood words like “mamá,” for mother, had been translated (in that case to “madre”) as were the words for “get angry” and “you.”
+“Gansito,” the name of a Mexican chocolate snack, was perhaps more accidentally changed to “ganchitos,” a cheese puff.To the Editor:
+Re “White House Sees Storm Aid as Way to Pay for Wall” (front page, Jan. 11):
+You have to give President Trump credit for creativity. Having devastated the lives of thousands of government employees who live on the financial edge in the best of times, he now wants to take relief funds away from victims of hurricanes and forest fires to pay for his medieval border wall.
+Given his apparent lack of empathy and his instinct for cruelty, what can we expect next? Charging the parents of children taken into custody at the border for their cage and board?
+William Baker
+Stamford, Conn.
+To the Editor:
+Re “Ocean Temperatures Rising Faster, as Are Fears” and “White House Sees Storm Aid as Way to Pay for Wall”:
+What a frightening juxtaposition of two articles on Friday’s front page. The first is about a real catastrophe ignored, even exacerbated, by President Trump. The second is about a completely unnecessary crisis manufactured by Mr. Trump.
+Jack Holtzman
+San Diego
+To the Editor:
+Re “An Emergency Offers an End, at Some Peril” (news analysis, front page, Jan. 10):
+I continue to be amazed by the hypocrisy of the Republican Party. In 2014, when President Obama stated he would take executive action to protect four to five million immigrants from deportation, the House speaker, John Boehner, referred to the president as “an emperor” who had exceeded his constitutional authority. The point was amplified by Senator Ted Cruz, who described the president as a “monarch” whose actions were unlawful and unconstitutional.A Russian artist granted political asylum in France was sentenced to three years in prison by a Paris court on Thursday for an art performance that involved setting fire to a bank.
+Pyotr Pavlensky, 34, has become notorious in Europe for his dramatic acts of protest. In 2012, he sewed his lips shut in response to the jailing of the feminist punk collective Pussy Riot. The following year, he nailed his scrotum to the pavement of Red Square in Moscow. He said he was making a statement about political apathy in Russia.
+The conviction on Thursday related to a 2017 performance called “Lighting,” in which Mr. Pavlensky and his then partner, Oksana Shalygina, set fire to a building of the Banque de France, the country’s central bank, on the Place de la Bastille square in central Paris.
+“The Banque de France has taken the place of the Bastille, and bankers have taken the place of monarchs,” he said at the time. The Bastille prison, which the square is named after, was stormed by rebels in a key moment in the French Revolution of 1789.To the Editor:
+Re “Older and in Power, Unwilling to Remain Unseen” (front page, Jan. 9):
+We are successful women who worked for four decades as corporate lawyers. The day we retired we became invisible, hidden behind dismal images of aging women. That made no sense to us. Our cohort had come out vividly as women when we started our careers. We changed the working world. Now, we are coming out again, older women with experience, health, style and resources.
+We are a new breed, with much to give and much to do.
+We were thrilled to read your article. The fabulous women you profiled are just the tip of the iceberg. Most of us are not in the public eye, as they are. But there are millions of us, and we have just begun to roar.
+Count on us. We will change the world again.
+Karen E. Wagner
+Erica Baird
+New York
+The writers are co-founders of Lustre, a website devoted to changing the images of retired career women.“We believe that the ban has had its intended effect of promoting freedom of artistic expression at the national level,” Joel Wachs, the foundation’s president, said in the statement announcing the repeal. “The Smithsonian has also demonstrated a strong track record of highlighting underrepresented artists over the past eight years, which aligns well with the Foundation’s core values.”
+Mr. Wachs said that the Foundation has reviewed its decision every year, but until now hadn’t been comfortable reversing it. “We thought that a period of time has to go by before you know whether someone has really changed,” he said in an interview on Friday. The Oscar Howe show, he added, came along and seemed like a perfect example of what the foundation wants to support.
+Wojnarowicz’s video came under fire from the Catholic League and members of the House of Representatives for its perceived disrespect to Christianity. One image — of ants crawling on a crucifix — was singled out for criticism. At the time, Martin E. Sullivan, the director of the National Portrait Gallery, said that the aim of the work was to articulate “the reality of the suffering of the AIDS epidemic in Latin American culture,” not to criticize or demean Christianity. Nevertheless, the piece was removed from the exhibition. (Wojnarowicz died at age 37 of AIDS-related complications in 1992.)
+The Oscar Howe retrospective will include approximately 75 of his paintings, some of which have never been publicly exhibited. Mr. Howe, who died in 1983, was a pioneer of contemporary Native American art whose style combines abstraction with passionate, expressive dynamism. The remainder of the Warhol Foundation’s fall 2018 grants will be announced next week.Name: Kit Clementine Keenan
+Age: 19
+Hometown: New York
+Now Lives: She splits her time between a studio loft in Downtown Los Angeles and her parents’ townhouse in the West Village.
+Claim to Fame: Ms. Keenan is the daughter of Cynthia Rowley, the fashion designer. And although she is still in college (she is a second-year film student at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles), she is already following in her mother’s footsteps. Last year, Ms. Keenan started a youth-centric clothing brand called KIT. The line, which is sold exclusively through the company’s website, includes a mishmash of styles including graphic hoodies and white prairie dresses (prices range from $45 to $220). The randomness is by design. “What I want to do with the brand is have every drop be a complete reinvention, so it’s not like having to stick to one image of the brand,” Ms. Keenan said.
+Big Break: Ms. Keenan got the idea for her clothing label during her freshman year of college and used savings from modeling gigs to start the line. Having family connections certainly didn’t hurt. Her mother advised her on production and which factories to use. And when the site went live last June, it was covered by Elle and Women’s Wear Daily. KIT also had a pop-up shop last summer at the Surf Lodge in Montauk, where her parents have a home. “I didn’t have a business plan or fancy investors,” Ms. Keenan said. “I had a few thousand dollars and some good advice.”Federal prosecutors are recommending that Mary Boone, the veteran art dealer, be sent to prison for as much as three years, saying she deliberately defrauded the government by filing false tax returns and evading $3 million in taxes.
+Ms. Boone, who is to be sentenced on Jan. 18, pleaded guilty last year to two counts of filing false returns, a charge that carries a maximum three-year prison sentence. Her lawyers had asked Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan to spare her any prison time, writing that her offenses were the product of depression and anxiety brought on by childhood trauma rather than greed.
+Prosecutors rejected that argument in court papers this week, arguing that Ms. Boone had achieved a measure of financial stability and comfort that “most people can only dream about” and should serve 30 to 37 months in prison.
+“Boone was the sole architect and beneficiary of this tax fraud scheme and, contrary to her assertions now, engaged in it out of pure greed — to line her own pockets by cheating the system,” the prosecutors wrote.The government shutdown and partisan wrangling over a wall at the southern border have produced high political drama in Washington, where President Trump has sought to portray the impasse as a national emergency.
+And as the shutdown reached a record 22nd day on Saturday, Americans following local and national media coverage would be forgiven for thinking they had fallen into a parallel universe — with the episode being presented both as a moment of crisis and hardship, and a curiosity that mostly registered as a politically motivated annoyance.
+Early in the week, the historically conservative Cincinnati Enquirer labeled the paralysis a “buzzkill,” warning readers that the lag in government approval of new beer labels could reduce the output from local breweries. Several days later it reported on 40 Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky government employees protesting outside a local I.R.S. processing center, focusing on the financial difficulties furloughed employees face, like day care expenses and rent payments.
+Polls show that more Americans blame the president for the shutdown than blame congressional Democrats. But there is a very stark partisan divide, with a large majority of Republicans supporting Mr. Trump.For one, spending influences the amount of wealth someone has. That seems obvious, but to make the consequences apparent, the guide asks people to think about what they want to happen to the money they’ve accumulated. There are only four choices: Spend it down, keep it at the current level, preserve its buying power by having its value keep up with inflation, or spend or invest it to grow as much as possible.
+Ms. Allred said few very wealthy people chose to spend their wealth down to zero — though she worked with one client who would be fine if that happened. But increasing wealth while spending heavily is difficult without additional sources of income. If a portfolio grows at 5 percent a year, for example, but inflation is 3 percent and taxes are 2 percent, there isn’t a lot of room for spending if you want your net worth to grow.
+The guide also recommends thinking proactively, not reactively, with spending. This works easily for family spending on philanthropy (and, less enjoyably, property taxes). The family can plan out the charities it wants to donate to and not worry about arguments afterward.
+Still, thinking proactively isn’t what you always want to do, particularly with lifestyle purchases. It may be wiser to consider if you really need that new golf club or pair of shoes that caught your eye.
+In these instances, the guide advises employing a technique called “prospective hindsight,” which pushes people to imagine how they would feel if their action turned out positively versus how they would feel if the same act had negative consequences.
+“You’re trying to bring the future to the present,” Ms. Allred said. “We tend to be overly optimistic and suffer from confirmation bias,” a term from behavioral economics that means we tend to believe what happens more if it matches a previous belief.
+Arguments about spending, particularly within families, are sure to arise. Setting out guidelines on how people in a family can spend money can keep any fallout from devolving into recriminations.While that investigation continues, detectives with the Phoenix Police Department recently opened a criminal investigation at a nursing home operated by Hacienda HealthCare after a 29-year-old woman who has been in a coma nearly her entire life gave birth to a boy there on Dec. 29. The two investigations have brought intense national scrutiny on Hacienda, Arizona’s largest privately operated long-term nursing company for people with developmental disabilities. People in its care have a range of intellectual and physical disabilities.
+In recent years, Hacienda has also been investigated by the Arizona Department of Health Services over the treatment of its patients. In 2013, the agency found that a male employee at the nursing home being investigated, the Hacienda Skilled Nursing Facility, had made sexually explicit remarks to patients, including telling a resident that his penis was erect. In 2017, investigators reported that employees freely walked in on patients while they were naked and showering.
+The woman at the center of the police investigation has been at Hacienda since she was 3. She cannot move on her own, cannot communicate and requires total supervision, according to health records obtained by The New York Times.
+The San Carlos Apache Tribe, whose reservation is about 100 miles east of Phoenix, said the woman was an “enrolled member” of the tribe. The tribe’s chairman and her mother, who was granted permanent guardianship in 2009, have not returned calls seeking comment.
+On Friday, the police released a frantic 911 call from the Hacienda nursing center when the woman went into labor on Dec. 29. The caller said no one knew that the woman had been pregnant. Both the mother and the baby were recovering at a Phoenix hospital, the police said this week.
+“She was not in a position to give consent to any of this,” Sgt. Tommy Thompson, a police spokesman, said on Wednesday. “This was a helpless victim who was sexually assaulted.”
+Since the Phoenix police announced their investigation a week ago, detectives have collected the DNA of male employees at Hacienda; the state dispatched health inspectors to check on the other patients there; and the company’s longtime chief executive, Bill Timmons, resigned. Over nearly three decades, Mr. Timmons had built Hacienda into a major player in long-term health care in Arizona.It says something that a song cycle of despair, heartbreak, alienation and yearning for death has become an anthem of our unsettled times. Schubert’s mournful “Winterreise,” which he worked on up to his death at 31, has been a regular feature of recent New York seasons, sung by some of the world’s greatest singers.
+I have seen stagings of the cycle, but I have never seen a performance more theatrical than the one the German baritone Benjamin Appl gave, without any props at all, on Thursday in the Park Avenue Armory’s intimate Board of Officers Room.
+It was the kind of vocal acting — fearlessly physical, with a broad palette of tones and styles, and a willingness to go for the occasional unbeautiful moment when called for by the text — that could devolve into histrionics. But Mr. Appl was utterly convincing.
+He made a vivid miniature of each song. For “Frühlingstraum,” Mr. Appl brought out the Jekyll-and-Hyde contrast terrifyingly. After singing the sweet opening passage, a vision of merry birds in a May meadow, he seemed to turn on a dime, changing his voice and bearing to deliver the shock of the next section: a bitter waking nightmare of crowing roosters, shrieking ravens and loneliness.
+It was only in those ferocious moments that you realized his foreshadowing: How, even in the loveliest passages of the song’s opening, there had been something unhinged in his voice, and his eyes. MICHAEL COOPERRick Nash, a No. 1 overall N.H.L. draft pick and a star for the Columbus Blue Jackets and the Rangers, has retired because of concussion-related symptoms, his agent said Friday.
+Nash, 34, trailed only Alex Ovechkin and Patrick Marleau in career goals among active players with 437. He also had 368 assists in 1,060 career games.
+“Due to unresolved issues/symptoms from the concussion sustained last March, Rick Nash will be forced to retire from the game of hockey,” his agent, Joe Resnick, said in a statement. “Under the advice of his medical team, the risk of further brain injury is far too great if Rick returns to play.”
+The Columbus Blue Jackets selected Nash, from Brampton, Ontario, in the 2002 draft. He entered the league at 18 and spent the first nine seasons with Columbus. He remains the franchise’s career leader in goals and points. In 2012, the Blue Jackets traded him to the Rangers, with whom he spent six seasons, and he also played 11 games with the Boston Bruins in 2018 after being traded there in February.BUCHAREST, Romania — Eugeniu Iordachescu, a Romanian civil engineer who helped save some of Bucharest’s most emblematic churches from destruction in the 1980s by literally rolling them to safety, died on Jan. 4 at his home in Bucharest. He was 89.
+The cause was a heart attack, his son Nicholas said.
+Over a six-year period, Mr. Iordachescu (his full name is pronounced ayoo-JAY-nyu yor-da-KES-cue) and his colleagues were able to save a dozen churches, as well as other buildings that were earmarked for destruction by the Communist regime; they often moved them hundreds of yards on the equivalent of railway tracks.
+The churches still stand, though few visitors to the Romanian capital are aware of their unusual history.“The wall or the steel barrier. They can have any name they want. But we have to have it.” President Trump often repeats the same things when talking about why he wants a southern border wall. “The crime.” “Drugs.” “American jobs.” While there is little evidence these problems are caused by unauthorized immigration or that any of this will be helped by a wall, he has remained steadfast. “I will build a great, great wall.” “You need that wall.” “We can do without a wall.” But as the fight over border security has dragged on, here’s how he’s expanded his argument. He’s always said it was about securing the border. But recently, Trump has emphasized that he believes building the wall is the moral and compassionate thing to do. “This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end. ” And he says a wall will benefit people on both sides of the border, addressing what he is calling — “This is a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” But Democrats say the current situation at the border was escalated by Trump’s policies. “A challenge that President Trump’s own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened.” So who does Trump think will benefit? Over time, Trump has named many groups that he says will benefit from a wall. It started as the — “American worker.” And then expanded to — “Legal residents.” And — “And our vets.” “Our immigrant communities.” “Asian-Americans.” “Hispanic-American communities.” “African-American workers.” “It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need.” How will Trump pay for the wall? After some discrepancies regarding the wall’s price tag — “$6 billion.” “Probably $8 billion.” “Maybe $10 or $12 billion.” “$18 billion.” “$5.7 billion for a physical barrier.” Trump has modified his claim that Mexico is going to pay for the wall. “Mexico —” “will pay —” “for the wall. 100 percent.” It’s gone from — “They don’t know it yet, but they’re paying for it.” To — “It may be through reimbursement, but one way or the other Mexico will pay for the wall.” And — “The border wall would very quickly pay for itself.” And finally, what will Trump’s wall look like? Trump’s vision for the wall itself has also changed over time. Early on, Trump said the wall would be — “It’s going to be a Trump wall. It’s going to be a real wall.” “An impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful —” “A serious wall.” “This is a wall that’s a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling.” “It’s going to be made of hardened concrete and it’s going to be made out of rebar and steel.” Now, it’s sounding more like this: “I never said I’m going to build a concrete — I said I’m going to build a wall. Just so you know, because I know you’re not into the construction business.” “Steel is stronger than concrete.” “It’s a new design, highest technology.” “Walls that you can see through.” “It will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.” So, will his latest push end with a wall? There’s still a tough political fight ahead.Andy Murray is not the youngest of the tennis supergroup known as the Big Four. Novak Djokovic was born a week later than Murray was.
+But it is still quite an unpleasant surprise to realize that Murray, 31, very likely will be the first of the remarkable quartet to retire.
+Roger Federer is somehow still gliding at 37. Rafael Nadal is somehow still persevering at 32.
+But Murray has been in too much pain for too long with no relief in view, and on Friday in Melbourne, Australia, all of those who have followed his career from up close or a great distance could share some of his pain, too.
+It was not what he said. It was what he couldn’t say.
+Murray, like all tennis stars of his stature, has spent as much time in news conferences as most of us have spent at the coffee shop. They are an artificial construct that has become a natural habitat for Murray, a droll, strong-minded Scotsman with the voice that sounds like a low-flying drone — a voice he once called “my least favorite thing about me.”With the third season already receiving positive buzz, Season 2 of “True Detective” is likely to disappear into the history books of prestige TV. But it doesn’t deserve that fate. It was ambitious, complex television, anchored by strong performances and expert direction. (You heard right.) And its tableau of political corruption feels even more relevant today than it did in 2015.
+[Read the review of Season 3 by our TV critic James Poniewozik.]
+Season 2 stars Colin Farrell as Ray Velcoro, a cop in a fictional California city named Vinci (modeled after Vernon). Ray has close ties to the career criminal Frank Semyon (Vince Vaughn), and their lives are upended by the murder of a double-dealing city manager named Ben Caspere — a case that also ensnares the highway patrol officer Paul Woodrugh (Taylor Kitsch) and criminal investigator Antigone Bezzerides (Rachel McAdams) within a tangled web that also involved a high-speed rail boondoggle, a deadly shootout at a meth lab and secret sex parties of the political elite.
+Assessing the show’s second season is easier if you put aside the expectations set by the first. It is, first of all, wildly, ambitiously different: While it once again explores the failures of modern masculinity, it does so through a different lens, de-emphasizing the murder-mystery conventions in favor of a multicharacter urban drama.
+The first season is driven by two strong protagonists — a pair of unforgettable detectives obsessed with the same case. Season 2 supplants that relationship with a broader portrait of a corrupted city, as seen through the eyes of four characters who in some cases barely interact. By the time Caspere’s murder was solved, most viewers had lost the plot and no longer cared, unwilling to accept that the season was never really about who killed Ben Caspere.
+But in hindsight, it is clear that the central mystery in Season 2 was always just a backdrop for the show’s thematic undercurrents.Dr. Atiyah’s early work was in topology, a field of mathematics that studies shape, including that of mathematical objects with many more than three dimensions. Though such objects can’t be visualized, topology provides tools to figure out how many holes they have and how different parts of an object are connected to one another. Topology considers shapes to be elastic and malleable — able to be stretched or squished without their fundamental nature being changed, as long as no new holes are punched and no pieces are newly joined together. Working with the German mathematician Friedrich Hirzebruch, Dr. Atiyah developed a topological tool called K-theory.
+Dr. Atiyah teamed up with Dr. Singer in the early 1960s. Dr. Singer is a specialist in mathematical analysis, the study of differential equations, which are used to describe physical phenomena in the language of calculus.
+The equations are extremely useful for describing real-world situations, but they have a wicked problem: No one knows how to solve them precisely. Dr. Atiyah and Dr. Singer set out to see if Dr. Atiyah’s topological tools might help find the solutions.
+Although they couldn’t find the exact solutions to any differential equation, they did manage to use topology to reveal the number of solutions such an equation has. This became their famous Atiyah-Singer Index Theorem, which they developed into an entire field, called index theory.
+“It’s a bit of black magic,” Dr. Atiyah said in 2015, “to figure things out about differential equations even though you can’t solve them.”
+But that was just the beginning of the connections that the index theory would make. In the mid-1970s, in the middle of this work, Dr. Atiyah learned something surprising: Physicists had been creating their own, less formal version of index theory in parallel with the mathematicians. They were using it to try to understand quantum field theory.
+Dr. Atiyah and Dr. Singer teamed up with the mathematician Raoul Bott and Dr. Witten, who was then barely out of graduate school. The team (and soon many others) used index theory to see how discoveries in mathematics revealed truths about physics, and how physical facts revealed mathematical insights. In the process, they transformed both fields.Sally Gall’s “Heavenly Creatures”
+The photographer’s images of clothes billowing in the wind are currently on view at Julie Saul Gallery.The Many Faces of James Baldwin
+In February 1998, the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and curator Hilton Als published a provocative profile of the great American writer James Baldwin in The New Yorker. Every few years since, Als has returned to Baldwin on the page and in art to reveal that there was not one Baldwin but Baldwins — political philosopher, international flâneur, screenwriter. Amid the intense contemporary interest in Baldwin’s life and legacy comes Als’s latest exhibition, “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” now on view at David Zwirner Gallery. In it, Als has curated what he calls “a composite” sketch of the celebrated novelist and essayist with video, photography and painting by artists including Ja’tovia Gary, Kara Walker, Glenn Ligon, Alice Neel, Peter Hujar and Richard Avedon.
+Divided into two parts — “A Walker in the City” and “Colonialism” — the show visualizes aspects of the literature that took Baldwin from a Harlem boy preacher to a lion of letters who disabused America of the notion that it was living its ideals. It tackles his resulting isolation, balancing heavily discussed themes in his writing like race with threads “still not explored in contemporary literature as a possibility,” says Als, such as the fact “that there can be black men who love one another.” But it’s Baldwin’s penchant for art that carries the show: A 1941 nude, titled “Dark Rapture (James Baldwin),” is an oil portrait of the writer at age 15 made by his friend, the gay Modernist painter Beauford Delaney. That work is on view alongside ephemera, such as Baldwin’s personal letters and pencil drawings, that Als describes as “new treasures.” They show that Baldwin knew, and knew how to render in more than just words, the often overpowering dynamic of desire. “I think that this show,” notes Als, “is a way of giving him just due as a significant queer artist.” Through Feb. 16 at David Zwirner Gallery, 525 & 533 West 19th Street, New York, davidzwirner.com — ANTWAUN SARGENTLONDON — Some car manufacturers will idle their factories. The police are advising store owners to hire more security guards. Trucks have been sent to the coast to practice with artificial traffic jams. And exasperated business lobbyists are warning of supply-chain calamities.
+Britain remains politically paralyzed ahead of a contentious vote in Parliament next week on a plan to withdraw from the European Union, or Brexit. But businesses are plowing ahead and preparing for the possibility that the country crashes out of the bloc without an agreement at the end of March — a no-deal Brexit.
+Honda, the Japanese auto company, which produces about 150,000 cars a year in its factory in Swindon, in southwest England, said on Friday that it would stop production for six days in April to assess its supply chain and possible disruptions from border delays after Brexit. The company said its 4,000 employees would go to work but would be training or handling maintenance.
+BMW has already said it will shut its Mini factory in Oxford for maintenance for a month beginning April 1, in case a no-deal outcome disrupts its production.Lamin Sanneh, who was born into poverty in a tiny river town in Gambia and became a world-renowned scholar of Christianity and Islam, providing key insights into how each religion took hold in West Africa, died on Jan. 6 in New Haven. He was 76.
+His son, Kelefa, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
+Dr. Sanneh was born a Muslim but converted to Christianity as a teenager and became a practicing Roman Catholic, giving him experience in both Islam and Christianity and an unusual perspective for a scholar of religion.
+Even more striking, he alone of his large rural family managed to migrate across continents and attend prominent universities. He ended up as a professor at Yale University, where he taught for 30 years. He was the D. Willis James professor of missions and world Christianity at Yale Divinity School and a professor of history at Yale.
+His memoir, “Summoned From the Margin: Homecoming of an African” (2012), relates how, even as a youth, he was consumed with theological questions about the nature of God and human suffering; that passion led to his religious conversion and academic career.Hooray! You got engaged over the holidays! But now the reality of what your wedding will cost is beginning to sink in. You’ll have to take out a second mortgage for fondant, but hey, the cement-like coating is très French. At the bridal store, you’ll max out your credit card for a gossamer veil that looks remarkably like the doily on your grandmother’s end table. When your planner mentions favors, run, or you could end up pawning your new ring to buy each of your guests a personalized platinum bottle opener.
+Not everyone breaks the bank for a wedding, though. Frugal couples go to great lengths to cut costs, marrying in tree houses or in caves. But if neither of those venues appeal to you, consider these alternatives. Word of warning: They’re cheap for a reason.This is Charlie. He was just born. These are his parents Jenny and Greg. In 20 years, Greg will be dead. But Charlie doesn’t know that yet. Charlie doesn’t know anything yet. He’s just a baby. This is where Charlie grew up, his brother Geoff, sister Meg, their dog Louie, and the TV room where his dad hid these, some of the tackiest video pornography of the 1980s had to offer. Greg will be dead in 10 years. But Charlie still doesn’t know that yet. This is Charlie’s first project from film school. Evidently, he loaded the camera wrong, so the footage came out like this. So he never showed his dad. Greg will be dead in one year, but Charlie still doesn’t know. Charlie has a ticket to see his favorite band. It’s the same day that his dad tells him he’s gotten a diagnosis. But he insists that Charlie go to the concert and not to worry. So Charlie isn’t worried. He doesn’t even know what malignant means. Then just before Greg’s 52nd birthday — [ring] Charlie’s mom calls to tell him that his dad has been hospitalized and is basically comatose. She explains, as delicately as she can … “This is to the end.” At his hospital bed, Charlie thinks his dad gives him a smile. Greg can’t speak anymore. So they sit in silence. In truth, this is not so different from when Greg was healthy. They didn’t agree on much and so they never really spent time together. But Charlie was waiting for the moment when they could see each other as adults. He knew that was when the strange distance he felt between them would finally close. But then — [beep] This is Charlie’s dad today. He’s been dead for nine years. In the aftermath, a life’s worth of weird stuff is left behind, stuff that Charlie hoped might explain why his dad was the way he was. Like maybe if Charlie looked hard enough, he could bring him back from the dead, at least long enough to understand who he really was. So it’s a pretty stupid plan, but this is him trying anyway. [music] Gregory Allen Tyrell was born November 14th, 1956, in Hamilton, Ontario. Parents, Dale and Stan. Along with Greg, they’d all die within a year of each other. Dale was the last holdout. Greg was a police officer. He’d work long shifts an hour from home. But it was a job he kept pretty tight-lipped about. OK. Being a cop just paid the bills. So what did Greg choose to do? Well he flew airplanes in his spare time. He’d often drag Charlie to airstrips on weekends, but always ended up chatting with the other pilots for hours while Charlie, bored out of his mind, would leave to wait in the car. He fixed planes too. He loved fixing things. He left behind a junkyard of tools. And their house was in a constant state of renovation, right up until his death. But what did any of this mean? Greg: “So this is our — [chuckles] not done yet kitchen, 12 years in the making, this. This is our front hallway. What a vast improvement. It’s actually quite nice.” “Well, I do nice trim work, don’t I?” He was pathologically protective of his stuff. Anything misused, misplaced, or presumably used in a movie would make him erupt. So far this is going very badly. It looks like everything in this pile is just as elusive as Greg was. It’s just trivia. Greg was hard to live with. Greg had a volatile temper. So what? Unexamined for all these years, this stuff could have hidden anything — revelations, answers, catharsis. Examined, it’s looking more and more like a big pile of nothing. And he’s gone all the way from birth certificate to cancer diagnosis. The doctors told Greg that the most common causes of this kind of cancer were smoking, drinking, and stress. Greg didn’t smoke and he didn’t drink. They nicknamed the tumor Dale. So maybe Charlie’s been looking in the wrong place. Dale threw cocktail parties. Stan was a pilot. On the surface, they looked like a pretty typical well-adjusted family. This was their house, a monument to a respectable brand of normalcy. Dale’s cocktail parties were showcases. Her kids were props. On Christmas mornings, she would march them downstairs in matching uniforms and make them write long thank-you cards immediately after every gift was unwrapped to Santa, every single time. Greg had a speech impediment back then. Dale would reluctantly drive him to corrective lessons, bullying him the whole time about what a burden he was on her. Decades later, nothing had changed. Charlie remembers how reticent his dad got every time they went to her house for the mandatory holiday visits. And then Charlie found this. No, it’s something we have to be aware of. Every time you try to — For a split second, it’s like Charlie has his answer. But all he’s really done is move the question back a generation. If she made him this way, what made her? A pattern starts to emerge. But rather than see how far back it goes, Charlie focuses back on himself. When Charlie was a kid, he wasn’t living in an abusive household. He was just trying to avoid another visit to the airstrip with his dad, his dad who was only trying in his own naive and awkward way to just spend time with his son. This wasn’t Greg failing. This was Greg trying. He just kind of sucked at it. A cycle of abuse, echoing from Dale’s father to her, to him, left Greg hard and bitter. But at some point, he made a decision. He was going to stop it from going any further. I’m dressing up for my daughter’s birthday. Get the wide angle going to get this shape. [chuckling] Funny… You wanna watch me brush my teeth? “Sure.” And after all those years Charlie spent avoiding him, Greg still supported Charlie’s filmmaking ambitions. And Charlie wasted all that time at the airfield hiding out in the car, like he wasted so much time combing through his dad’s crap, clinging onto VHS porno tapes like they were part of this puzzle. But Greg was never defined by what he carried with him. He was defined by what, after multiple generations, he was finally able to let go. His loving and devoted wife who would have happily spent the rest of her life with him — His son Geoff, now a father to his own perfect impossible kids. His daughter Meg, who shares his stubbornness, if nothing else. And his youngest son Charlie, the one who thought his dad could be a dick sometimes, who felt like there always was, and now always will be, a distance between them. But he still ends every single movie he makes the same way, even though his dad will never see it, a single credit all by itself that reads —Her joy in exploring her subjects was evident in a question she posed in an article for the American Society of Botanical Artists in 2014.
+Image Ms. Tcherepnine in 2013. “What could be more wonderfully weird, or more weirdly wonderful,” she wrote, “than the seed pod of the Strelitzia nicolai?” Credit... The Horticultural Society of New York
+“What could be more wonderfully weird, or more weirdly wonderful, than the seed pod of the Strelitzia nicolai?” Ms. Tcherepnine wrote about the tropical plant better known as the white bird of paradise, which has banana-like leaves and clumping stalks. “I have painted these seed pods several times. Each time I see new and exciting details of the shapes and colors.”
+She recalled searching in Florida for the group of black seeds that would provide the ideal finishing touch to one of her bird of paradise watercolors.
+Ms. Tcherepnine was a star of her corner of the art world. She won two gold medals from the Royal Horticultural Society, the British gardening charity. She was also invited to paint the beet (beta vulgaris) for “The Highgrove Florilegium,” a 2008 book that records all the plants in Prince Charles’s garden in Gloucestershire, England.
+Her paintings are in the collections of the state Peterhof Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Natural History Museum in London, among other places. Some of her artwork is also in the expansive private collection of Shirley Sherwood, a British botanist, writer and philanthropist.Four black men who were accused of raping a white woman in Florida in 1949 were pardoned on Friday by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who called their case a “miscarriage of justice.”
+The so-called Groveland Four — Charles Greenlee, Ernest Thomas, Walter Irvin and Samuel Shepherd — were accused of the rape in 1949 near the city of Groveland in Lake County, Fla. Mr. Thomas was killed shortly thereafter, and the other three were taken into custody, beaten, and eventually convicted. Mr. Shepherd was later shot and killed by the county sheriff.
+Mr. Greenlee and Mr. Irvin were each imprisoned for more than a decade and released on parole. Both have since died, but for years, their families have insisted on their innocence and fought for their pardons.
+“I wanted two things to happen,” said Carol Greenlee, Mr. Greenlee’s daughter, in an interview on Friday. “I wanted the world to know the truth, and I wanted my daddy’s name cleared.”When the girl was 5, she was brought to the United States on a tourist visa and was almost immediately put to work, according to the filing. She said she spoke no English at the time.
+She would start working at 6:30 a.m. or 7 a.m. every day, cleaning, making beds, vacuuming, cooking and gardening, among other chores, and would continue until the Toure children went to bed, she told the authorities. Several unidentified witnesses confirmed seeing her perform such chores at various points from 2000 to 2016.
+The authorities accused Mr. Toure and Ms. Cros-Toure of denying the girl the schooling, medical care and other opportunities they afforded their five children, some of whom were older than her. When asked about the girl, the couple would say that she was a niece and had finished high school, according to the filing.
+Mr. Wyatt, the lawyer for Mr. Toure, and Scott Palmer, a lawyer for Ms. Cros-Toure, said that the family had good intentions, but that their efforts to help the woman were frustrated by her status as an undocumented immigrant.
+“The intentions were to actually get her in school and to educate her, but then, once she was here, they needed the documentation to get her into school that they didn’t have,” Mr. Palmer said.
+But the federal authorities painted a darker picture.
+According to the April filing, Ms. Cros-Toure would physically abuse the girl, who had scars consistent with stories she told of being whipped with an electrical cord and having an earring ripped from her ear. The girl also said that she had visited a doctor only once and had slept on a floor for years, upgrading to a twin bed only when one of the children left for college.
+In June 2016, she got into a fight with the couple and ran away, according to the filing. She spent a night with one of the unidentified witnesses, for whom she had previously worked as a babysitter. The witness called a friend who let the young woman stay with her for a week, but she then returned to the Toure household. She was forbidden to leave and considered suicide, she said.Like many Rockies, LeMahieu has hit much better in Denver, with its thin air and its vast open spaces in the outfield. The right-handed LeMahieu is a .329 career hitter at Coors Field, compared with .266 on the road. The split was more pronounced last season, when LeMahieu hit .317 in Denver and .229 elsewhere.
+Even so, he should help the Yankees reduce their strikeouts — only two American League teams, the Texas Rangers and Chicago White Sox, were fanned more times last season — while bolstering their infield defense. LeMahieu has played only second base over the last four seasons, but he has also played 41 games in the majors at third base and four at first.
+The Yankees will probably use LeMahieu at all of those spots, but he has excelled at second. Fangraphs ranked LeMahieu as the best defender among 16 qualified major league second basemen last season, and his presence complicates the position of Gleyber Torres, who ranked as the worst defensive second baseman.
+Last week, with shortstop Didi Gregorius recovering from Tommy John surgery, the Yankees signed the veteran shortstop Troy Tulowitzki, who missed last season with bone spurs in his heels, to a one-year, minimum-salary contract. But they could also use Torres at short, his regular position in the minors.
+Torres also made seven starts at third base in the minors last season and 15 in 2017. Fangraphs ranked the Yankees’ Miguel Andujar last on defense among 19 qualifiers at third base, and the Yankees seemed to agree in October: They removed him for defense in both of their playoff victories and benched him for their elimination game against Boston.He then offered another qualification, about forthcoming corporate earnings reports: “We still have to curb our enthusiasm because we can’t get too excited about the earnings outlook.”
+The tax cuts that took effect in 2018 sent earnings up so much for the year — the latest estimate for the S&P 500 was 20.2 percent, according to FactSet Research — that a 5 percent rise in earnings in 2019, aided by corporate buybacks, is about as much as Wall Street can expect, Mr. Yardeni said. FactSet’s latest forecast is for a 7.3 percent increase.
+Despite some good days for the market in January that may have been prompted by signs of flexibility from the Federal Reserve, the way stocks tumbled late in the year hardly inspires confidence. With anything like a repeat performance, investors will have to hope that other assets provide better protection than in 2018, when there were few places to hide.
+“Cash was the only major asset class that posted positive returns in ’18,” according to a Bank of America report. Even the reed-thin 1.9 percent return on cash in money market funds was less than the 2.2 percent consumer inflation rate, the report said, but at least it was a positive number. Long-term government bonds, corporate bonds and gold all lost ground, although they beat the return of the S&P 500. Oil and foreign stocks were among the investments that did worse.
+The average domestic stock fund lost 14.2 percent in the fourth quarter, with specialists in natural resources, technology and financial services leading the way down. These funds dropped 6.8 percent during the year, according to Morningstar. International stock funds outperformed during the quarter, losing 10.9 percent, but trailed badly for the full year, down 13.2 percent.
+Bond funds lost 0.9 percent in the quarter and 1 percent for all of 2018. High-yield portfolios were particularly weak, off 4.6 percent for the quarter and 2.8 percent for the year.
+Such across-the-board weakness is rare “because what tends to be bad for one asset tends to be good for some other asset somewhere,” said Ben Inker, head of asset allocation for the investment firm GMO. “The basic exception is when there is a combination of rising rates and slowing growth. Risky assets don’t like slowing growth, and fixed income doesn’t like rising rates.”After spending 2018 rapidly ascending the global tennis ranks, Aryna Sabalenka decided to spend some of her brief off-season in free fall. So during a winter visit to Dubai, Sabalenka said, she took the opportunity to bungee jump from 41 floors up.
+“These three seconds before you jump, it’s like something unbelievable,” Sabalenka, a 20-year-old Belarusian, said in a recent telephone interview. “You want to cry, smile and laugh.”
+The daring off-season activity underscored the intensity and cheerfulness that came to define Sabalenka as she burst onto the scene last year, winning her first two WTA titles.
+“She’s always very friendly,” said her coach, Dmitry Tursunov. “She likes to be in a good mood.”
+She also likes to win, and she has started where she left off after her breakthrough campaign, becoming the first WTA titlist of 2019 by defeating Alison Riske, 4-6, 7-6 (2), 6-3, in the final of the tournament in Shenzhen, China, on Saturday.Indeed, at a moment when the bloc of nations is facing a raft of challenges, Friday night’s vote was viewed as a rare bit of good news and a triumph of diligent diplomacy. But there is still more work to be done.
+Even before the vote in Skopje, a rift seemed to be growing over the issue between Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras of Greece and his right-wing coalition partner, Panos Kammenos.
+Mr. Kammenos has threatened to leave the government, a move that could potentially force early elections.
+While he has grown increasingly vocal, it is unclear if he will make good on his threat.
+If Mr. Kammenos were to walk away, he would abandon his current job as defense minister with no guarantee that he would be able to prevent the name change from going through.
+In a television interview on Wednesday, Mr. Tsipras said he was confident that Mr. Kammenos would continue to back the government, but he added that he would seek a vote of confidence in case his right-wing partner withdraws, saying he was certain he could secure the support needed to stay in power.
+Mr. Tsipras also suggested that, should Mr. Kammenos withdraw, he would call snap elections rather than lead a minority government. He said that although the Greek Constitution would allow him to continue to rule with a minority government, “politically” there would be a problem.
+In any case, he said, a snap election would take place after the Macedonia deal is ratified in the Greek Parliament and following the completion of some pending issues.Gavin Newsom dived into the highly charged debate over prescription drug prices in his first week as California’s governor, vowing action on a topic that has enraged the public but has proved resistant to easy fixes.
+His idea: Find strength in numbers. Within hours of taking office on Monday, Mr. Newsom signed an executive order proposing a plan that would allow California to directly negotiate with drug manufacturers.
+The state would bring to the bargaining table not just the 13 million beneficiaries of Medi-Cal (California’s version of Medicaid), but also other state agencies that purchase drugs, including coverage for state workers and prisoners. Down the road, the plan could possibly allow private insurers and employers to join in the savings.
+“We think this is a significant step forward,” Mr. Newsom said in a video address. “It’s the right thing to do, and I recognize deeply the anxiety so many of you feel around the issues related to the cost of prescription drugs, and I hope California’s efforts here can lead the way for other states to consider the same.”[Read our predictions for the divisional round.]
+The Chiefs’ defense finished last or second-to-last in passing yards (4,374), total yards (6,488) and yards per rush (5.0). The Chiefs gave up the most first downs ever, with 419. And though they ranked 24th in points ceded, with 421, only three other teams since 1990, when the playoffs expanded to include six teams from each conference, gave up that many and still advanced to the postseason.
+According to Pro Football Reference, only 13 of the other 173 teams to reach the playoffs since 1990 have fared worse than the Chiefs in at least one of those statistical categories, including Green’s group from the 2003 season, which allowed 5.2 yards per carry. Aside from Kansas City, the only others to earn a No. 1 seed were Green Bay and New England in 2011, and neither won the Super Bowl. In fact, only one of the 13 — excluding the 2018 Rams, who allowed the most yards per rush this season — won a championship: the 2006 Colts, whose strong pass defense offset their generosity against the run.
+Plus, they had that Manning guy.
+The Chiefs have a guy, too — Patrick Mahomes — and that’s a pretty strong counterargument. But it’s not an impenetrable one, as losses to the Chargers (Kansas City led by 14 with less than nine minutes left) and the Seahawks (Seattle ran for 210 yards) proved.
+It’s difficult identifying a historical analogue to the 2018 Chiefs, a team of such extremes. The closest might be the 2011 Packers, whose leading receiver, Greg Jennings, recognized the similarities at once. Like the Chiefs, Green Bay created a load of turnovers — a league-high 38 — while also scoring the most points. The Packers also gave up more passing yards and total yards than Kansas City did this season.
+“The defense recognized it more than even we did as an offense,” Jennings, now an analyst for Fox, said of the imbalance. “What needed to be done was what we did. We recognized it and we had to make up for it.”Joseph Jarman, a saxophonist, flutist, woodwind player and percussionist who helped expand the parameters of performance in avant-garde jazz, especially as a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, died on Wednesday at the Lillian Booth Actors Home in Englewood, N.J. He was 81.
+His former wife, the writer and scholar Thulani Davis, said the cause was cardiac arrest as a result of respiratory failure.
+Over the last two decades Mr. Jarman was less active in music than in other pursuits, notably his ministrations as a Buddhist priest and aikido instructor. With Ms. Davis, he founded the Brooklyn Buddhist Association in 1990. And his students at the Jikishinkan Aikido Dojo, which he established in Brooklyn, typically did not enroll there because of his jazz career; some may not have known much about it.
+But Mr. Jarman was revered for his tenure in the Art Ensemble, from its inception in the late 1960s, through his departure in the early 1990s and again early in this century.An Alabama woman has become the first known transgender person killed this year in the United States.
+Dana Martin, 31, identified by advocacy groups as a black transgender woman, was found shot to death in a vehicle in Montgomery, Ala., on Sunday.
+Ms. Martin, who lived in Hope Hull, Ala., about nine miles southwest of Montgomery, was well-known in the transgender community of Birmingham and Montgomery, said Meta Ellis, the director of Montgomery Pride United, an L.G.B.T. advocacy organization in Alabama.
+“Our community is devastated because the murders going on — especially of trans people of color — are just happening more and more often and very little is being done about it,” she said. “And here in Alabama we don’t have laws that support hate crimes against people of other genders.”They were sad to see her go, she said, and they sent her to Albany with a bevy of gifts, including one representing her penchant for high heels: a tape dispenser in the shape of a stiletto. She also received a glass nameplate reading, “Anna M. Kaplan, New York State Senate.”
+Ms. Kaplan’s rise to senator caps a personal saga, which includes fleeing her native Iran as a Jewish teenager during a repressive time. Considering that back story, and her surprising win in November, Ms. Kaplan was emotional on Tuesday.
+“I think back to that 13-year-old girl, who came here on a very cold night, without my parents and with 40 other kids ,” she said, pausing to gather herself. “And now I’m elected to the New York State Senate. I’m one of 63. Really? How amazing.”
+Ms. Kaplan said that she said a prayer when she entered her office Tuesday and promptly filled shelves with photographs of her husband and two college-age daughters, one of whom is set to graduate from nearby Union College in Schenectady.
+Like other newly empowered Democrats, Ms. Kaplan has an ambitious agenda that includes gun control and more funding for public schools. But on Tuesday, at least, Ms. Kaplan was giving herself a moment or two to reminisce.
+“I look around at all of these pictures,” she said, “and really see how far I’ve come.”
+5 p.m.
+The Capitol is full of historical treasures, from the imposing grandeur of its architecture to artifacts stashed, half in shadow, in the corners of the legislative galleries.
+Ms. May and her husband, as well as her brother and sister-in-law, took advantage of the mostly empty Capitol to play tourist, admiring an old desk near the entrance to the Senate chambers — “doesn’t look very comfortable” — and strolling the steps of the so-called Million Dollar Staircase, the reddish-gold opulence of which can inspire even seasoned legislators to stop in awe.Q. Years ago, hydrogen fusion was promised as the answer to all our energy problems. Are we any closer to using it?
+A. There is a famous joke among scientists: The practical use of the fusion of hydrogen atoms to produce energy is only 20 or 30 years in the future — and always will be.
+But it does seem progress is being made. The largest and most expensive research effort is the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. A multinational effort headquartered in France, ITER has a doughnut-shaped chamber called a tokamak that will eventually hold a plasma of hot ionized atoms constrained by very strong magnetic fields.
+The next major step will be the arrival in 2019 of the first of the project’s huge magnets, now being fabricated in Japan . The magnets are needed to generate and contain the extreme temperatures necessary to fuse atomic nuclei and to produce energy without the harmful environmental effects of today’s technologies.
+A smaller fusion experiment, called Sparc, is being designed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It will rely on smaller, stronger magnets, which in theory will reduce the amount of energy needed to produce short but powerful bursts of heat.The way most economists “score” a tax proposal is to ask how it would change revenue levels compared to what you would expect the government to collect if the tax cut had not passed — what economists call a “baseline.”
+In the summer of 2017, for example, the budget office projected that the economy would grow by 2 percent in the 2018 fiscal year, and that personal, corporate and payroll taxes would add up to $3.24 trillion. Then the tax cuts passed, growth accelerated and, for the 2018 fiscal year, tax revenues fell $183 billion — or 5.6 percent — short of that projection.
+Republicans, particularly in the Trump administration, sold the tax law on claims that it would pay for itself — even when economists outside the administration, like the congressional Joint Committee on Taxation, released models contradicting them. As corporate tax receipts fell significantly last year, some Republicans began to insist that, in fact, the bill was paying for itself, because total tax revenues were very slightly up.
+The 2018 figures contradict that argument, too.
+The uncomfortable truth for the bill’s supporters is that the tax cuts are substantially contributing to a widening federal budget deficit, which now appears on track to top $1 trillion this year. If growth fades in the coming years — as many economists believe it will — the cuts could exacerbate the deficit even more .
+The best-case scenario for proponents is that the cuts spur a sustained increase in productivity and growth, which in turn produces increasingly higher revenues several years down the road — enough to reduce the “cost” of the bill to the budget deficit.
+The 2018 results are, oddly enough, what a lot of economists predicted would happen with Mr. Trump’s cuts, including ones who generally favor tax cuts. Total federal revenues in 2018 came in roughly where the Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank that typically projects large growth boosts from tax cuts, had forecast — which is to say, well below the budget office’s baseline.Pemex, the state-run energy company, said the new transportation methods had caused delays in the delivery of gasoline to service stations. The long lines, it said, did not result from actual fuel shortages.
+“Pemex appeals to the general public’s support and understanding,” the company said in a statement. “These operations will undoubtedly translate into benefits for all Mexicans.”
+Mr. López Obrador said Friday that 4,000 military and police personnel had been deployed to secure strategically important portions of pipeline, which stretch out some 375 miles and ordinarily transport around 400,000 barrels of gasoline per day.
+He did not say when fuel would resume flowing through the closed sections, but vowed to continue with his efforts to stem the thefts. The thefts have been a result in part of the “incompetence or complacency” of local authorities, he said.
+“That is what we are fighting against,” Mr. López Obrador said, “because corruption cannot be allowed.” He, too, said there was enough fuel in the country: “It is a matter of distribution only.”
+Despite the long lines at the pumps, Mr. López Obrador showed no sign of changing his approach. He said the amount of stolen fuel had dropped significantly as a result of his tactics.John Falsey, who with his writing and producing partner, Joshua Brand, created some of the most innovative and acclaimed television series of the 1980s and ’90s, including “St. Elsewhere” and “Northern Exposure,” died on Jan. 3 in Iowa City. He was 67.
+His brother, James, said the cause was complications of a head injury sustained in a fall in his home.
+Mr. Falsey and Mr. Brand won two Emmy Awards in 1992: one for “Northern Exposure,” which was named outstanding dramatic series, and one for writing for the pilot episode of the series “I’ll Fly Away.” They had also won in 1987 for “A Year in the Life,” which was named outstanding mini-series.
+The two met when they were working on “The White Shadow,” a CBS drama that ran from 1978 to 1981 about a white former professional basketball player (played by Ken Howard) who takes a job coaching a racially mixed team at an urban high school.WASHINGTON — The State Department plans to fly all of its ambassadors and other top diplomatic envoys from around the world into Washington next week for a two-day conference, even if the continuing partial government shutdown continues.
+Most State Department employees have been furloughed or are working without pay since the shutdown began on Dec. 22. But the department will pay for travel expenses and other costs related to the forum, called the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference.
+The conference is scheduled to take place on Jan. 16 and 17, and embassy leaders from around the world are expected to be absent for about one week from the countries in which they work. The conference was first held in 2011, when Hillary Clinton was secretary of state, and has been held twice since.
+Asked for comment on Friday, the State Department issued a statement that said officials had decided to continue with the conference because “it is essential to the conduct of foreign affairs essential to national security.”KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The opposition presidential candidate who says he was cheated from victory in this vast country’s long-delayed election said Friday that he would petition the Constitutional Court for a recount.
+The announcement by the candidate, Martin Fayulu, who had been shown by polls to be heavily favored in the race, came as questions about the fairness of the vote intensified. The United Nations Security Council held a meeting to air concerns with Congolese officials, including the leader of the country’s Electoral Commission.
+The Dec. 30 election had raised hopes for the first peaceful and democratic transfer of power in the Democratic Republic of Congo since independence in 1960.In an interview at the team’s training facility this week, Spanos said that the Chargers’ success was helping generate interest in the team, but that winning over fans in Los Angeles was a long-term project.
+On the team’s decision to play temporarily in a 27,000-seat soccer stadium
+“Just being able to get around the stadium, the amenities, all the game-day experience is important, and I think it’s appreciated.”
+On the sale of seat licenses for season tickets in the new stadium
+“We’re probably where we thought we would be, and playing well really helps. Timing is everything. It kind of jumps every time [we win]. Monday mornings are great when you win in the playoffs.”
+On the decision to price seat licenses as low as $100
+“We gave up a little, but enough to make it more affordable. Once we get them there, it’s more important than trying to make another 25 or 30 bucks a ticket. And that really helps you establish yourself in the market.”
+On the Chargers’ commitment to the market
+“There’s no doubt we’re the Los Angeles Chargers. Los Angeles is our home.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Steven H. Pollard was supposed to receive the official order confirming his promotion to a full-fledged New York City firefighter this week.
+After a year and a half as a probationary firefighter, the orange patch of a novice would have been replaced on his helmet with a crimson patch bearing his ladder company. A small change, perhaps, but a signifier that Mr. Pollard fully belonged to the ranks of New York’s Bravest.
+Instead Mr. Pollard, who died Sunday at age 30 after falling 50 feet from a Brooklyn overpass, was buried Friday afternoon. His helmet, with the patch he never got to wear, was prominently displayed at his funeral. It was a potent symbol of a young firefighter at the start of a promising career when his life was cut tragically short.SANTA ANA, Calif. — For its members, a motorcycle club’s logo is both sacred and hard-earned, the banner under which its brand of rugged brotherhood and individualism exist.
+But in a setback to the future of one of the country’s most notorious biker groups, a federal jury in California on Friday found that the Mongols motorcycle club must forfeit its rights to the trademarked Genghis Khan-style emblem that identifies the organization.
+The jury’s verdict — which concluded the second phase of a wide-ranging eight-week racketeering trial in which jurors also branded the Mongols a criminal enterprise — was not the final word. The group’s lawyers have filed a motion for acquittal and the presiding judge, who in the past has ruled in favor of the Mongols, said he would not immediately order the club to forfeit the logo until he has a chance to review the club’s arguments and consider their free speech rights.
+Going after their trademark, which prosecutors have sought for a decade, was an innovative approach intended to break the Mongols by striking at its visual identity, a patch that has been linked to the organization’s culture of violence and intimidation and appears on the vests, T-shirts, caps, mouse pads and motorcycles of hundreds of its members, many of whom also have tattoos of the image.“The president is the chief executive who is going to be a part of solving this problem,” said Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, “so I must trust him.”
+But hours later, the president contradicted Mr. Pence, saying in McAllen, Tex., that he would be open to a “broader” immigration deal that would “simultaneously” deal with the Dreamers and a wall — if senators would bring him one they could agree on.
+Again, Republicans were left baffled by a president who has pitched himself as an expert in the art of the deal.
+“I wouldn’t want to comment on his unique style of negotiation and communications,” Mr. Rooney said. “Sometimes it’s worked very effectively for him, and sometimes it has confused a lot of people.”
+The concern goes beyond Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence. Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, has also been asked to help resolve the wall impasse, but Mr. Kushner has no experience in crisis negotiations on Capitol Hill, and his attempts at intervention have borne little fruit. The day before Mr. Trump’s prime-time Oval Office address to the nation, Mr. Kushner called Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, a centrist known for his enthusiasm for bipartisan deals, and said the president was firmly committed to his position on the wall and did not plan to budge, according to two people familiar with the conversation, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the call was private.
+Mr. Kushner has little relationship with Mr. Manchin, but he left the senator with the impression that the White House believed public opinion would be on the president’s side after the speech, and that Democrats would simply have to relent. That did not go over well.1. The F.B.I. opened an inquiry into whether President Trump was secretly working with Russia after he fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, according to former law enforcement officials and others familiar with the investigation.
+The inquiry carried explosive implications. Counterintelligence investigators had to consider whether the president’s own actions constituted a possible threat to national security.
+The special counsel, Robert Mueller, took over the inquiry when he was appointed days after F.B.I. officials opened it. The investigation also had a criminal aspect, which has long been publicly known: whether Mr. Trump’s firing of Mr. Comey constituted obstruction of justice.This season showed early promise for the young, rebuilding Rangers and their rookie coach, David Quinn, reaching a high point when they scorched the Islanders, 5-0, at Madison Square Garden the night before Thanksgiving.
+But that victory has proved an exception in the Rangers’ season and in the recent trend of rivalry games between the teams. The Rangers are 5-11-5 since then, including Thursday’s heartbreaking 4-3 loss to the Islanders on a late goal by Josh Bailey at the Garden. That gave the Islanders wins in 13 of their last 15 games against the Rangers.
+The teams meet again on Saturday afternoon at Barclays Center, an arena just a short subway ride from the Garden but one where the Rangers have never won in seven tries since the Islanders began playing home games there in the 2015-16 season.
+“There is so much parity in the league, for there to be a streak like that is kind of rare,” the Islanders’ captain, Anders Lee, said.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.“This is highly significant, especially at such a high-profile academic center,” Dr. Gellad said in an email. “Leadership matters, and the institution has decided that their leaders should not also be concurrently leading for-profit health companies.”
+When doctors enter into financial relationships with companies, the concern is that these ties can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, potentially allowing bias to influence medical practice. A 2014 study in JAMA found that about 40 percent of the largest publicly traded drug companies had a leader of an academic medical center on their boards.
+Ms. Berns said the Memorial Sloan Kettering board’s policy decision was intended to emphasize the hospital’s focus on education, research and treatment of patients. Dr. Nadeem R. Abu-Rustum, who is president of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s medical staff, said the policy changes were “well-received” by employees.
+Memorial Sloan Kettering has been shaken by the unfolding series of conflicts of interest since September, when The Times and ProPublica reported that its chief medical officer, Dr. José Baselga, had failed to disclose millions of dollars in payments from drug and health care companies in dozens of articles in medical journals.
+Dr. Baselga resigned days later, and he also stepped down from the boards of the drugmaker Bristol-Myers Squibb and Varian Medical Systems, a radiation equipment manufacturer. Earlier this month, AstraZeneca announced that it had hired Dr. Baselga to run its new oncology unit.
+Additional reports detailed how other top officials had cultivated lucrative relationships with for-profit companies, including an artificial intelligence start-up, Paige.AI, that was founded by a member of Memorial Sloan Kettering’s executive board, the chair of the pathology department and the head of a research lab. The hospital struck an exclusive deal with the company to license images of 25 million patient tissue slides that had been collected over decades.
+Another article detailed how a hospital vice president was given a stake of nearly $1.4 million in a newly public company as compensation for representing Memorial Sloan Kettering on its board.A 16-year-old boy who was captured on the battlefield in Syria this week with fighters for the Islamic State is not American, but is instead from Trinidad and Tobago, according to American officials and the boy’s sister.
+The teenager was taken from the Caribbean nation to the war zone when he was 12 by his mother, who converted to Islam after becoming romantically involved with a radicalized man, Sarah Lee Su, the boy’s older sister, said in a phone interview.
+After a four-year silence, she heard from them for the first time last month, when her mother contacted her on Facebook Messenger and sent a series of audio recordings that said the two were alive and pleading for help. She said they were hiding somewhere in Syria.
+“I need money to help us get out of here,” Gailon Su, the mother, said in one of the recordings she sent to her daughter, which was shared with The New York Times. “If not me, your brother. He is innocent.”The Turks, meanwhile, are NATO allies, bound to Washington in a formal defense pact. Incirlik Air Base, a major staging point for American military operations throughout the Middle East, is in southern Turkey.
+Mr. Bolton, a conservative hard-liner with considerable self-regard, can be a hard person to feel sympathy toward. He has made his own serious errors, not least his aggressive support for the 2003 Iraq War, which destabilized the Middle East, and, more recently, his creation of a White House decision-making system that limits robust discussion.
+He certainly knew before taking the position as Mr. Trump’s national security adviser that he would be serving a chaos-driven and temperamental master. Still, Mr. Bolton faces the unenviable challenge of regularly having to defend the indefensible or make corrections after the fact. In October, he flew to Moscow to explain to President Vladimir Putin Mr. Trump’s sudden and ill-advised decision to begin pulling out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, negotiated by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.
+Mr. Bolton’s latest Middle East visit was intended to reassure anxious regional leaders that the American withdrawal from Syria would be orderly. But the mission ran aground after Mr. Bolton demanded that Turkey protect Washington’s Kurdish allies and pledged that American forces would remain in Syria until the Islamic State was defeated, which could take months or years. That seemed to contradict Mr. Trump’s pronouncement in December that the Islamic State had been defeated and all 2,000 American troops would be out of Syria within 30 days.
+Cue Mr. Erdogan, who dismissed Mr. Bolton’s remarks as a “grave mistake” and said, “It is not possible for us to swallow the message Bolton gave from Israel.” A pro-government newspaper went so far as to accuse Mr. Bolton of being part of a “soft coup against Trump.”But for some scholars of the region, the concrete benefits of all that engagement pale in comparison to the size of the American efforts.
+“When you look at the cost-benefit analysis, there is a limited payoff, and the United States is going to reduce its footprint over time because there are so many other things to deal with in the world,” said Gary Sick, a Middle East scholar at Columbia University who served on the National Security Council under three presidents.
+A similar view of the region has shaped the approach of both the Obama and Trump administrations. Despite the drastic differences in their words and style, both have viewed the Middle East primarily as a source of nuisance that siphoned resources from other American priorities. Both presidents called on regional powers to play a greater role in protecting and governing the region.
+The immediate desire to step back was driven by battle fatigue after years of deadly combat in Iraq, and a feeling that American military investment often did not make matters better. But scholars say that longer term shifts have made the region less central to America’s priorities.
+American protection is no longer necessary to ensure the free flow of oil from the Persian Gulf, for example, and a boom in domestic production has made the United States less dependent on Middle Eastern oil anyway. Israel now boasts the region’s most effective military and a strong economy while many of its neighbors are in shambles, making it less dependent on American protection.
+“The reality is that our direct interests in terms of protecting the American homeland are very few in the Middle East,” said Mr. Sick, adding that the record on American interventions doing more good than harm was at best mixed.TEL AVIV — “We struck thousands of targets without claiming responsibility or asking for credit.”
+So says Gadi Eisenkot about the Jewish state’s undeclared and unfinished military campaign against Iran and its proxies in Syria and Lebanon. For his final interview as chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces before he retires next week, the general has decided to claim responsibility and take at least some of the credit.
+Eisenkot’s central intellectual contribution in fighting that campaign is the concept of “the campaign between wars” — the idea that continuous, kinetic efforts to degrade the enemy’s capabilities both lengthens the time between wars and improves the chances of winning them when they come. He also believes that Israel needed to focus its efforts on its deadliest enemy, Iran, as opposed to secondary foes such as Hamas in Gaza.
+“When you fight for many years against a weak enemy,” he says, “it also weakens you.”
+This thinking is what led Eisenkot to become the first Israeli general to take Iran head on, in addition to fighting its proxies in Lebanon and elsewhere. And it’s how he succeeded in humbling, at least for the now, Qassim Suleimani, the wily commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force, which has spearheaded Tehran’s ambitions to make itself a regional hegemon.
+“We operated under a certain threshold until two-and-a-half years ago,” Eisenkot explains, referring to Israel’s initial policy of mainly striking weapons shipments destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. “And then we noticed a significant change in Iran’s strategy. Their vision was to have significant influence in Syria by building a force of up to 100,000 Shiite fighters from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. They built intelligence bases and an air force base within each Syrian air base. And they brought civilians in order to indoctrinate them.”WASHINGTON — Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chairman, says he still carries the scars of the Fed’s missteps in the spring of 2013.
+That June, Mr. Powell, then a relatively new member of the Fed’s board, joined colleagues in urging Chairman Ben S. Bernanke to announce that the Fed finally planned to gradually reduce its economic stimulus campaign.
+Mr. Powell anticipated that markets might not like Mr. Bernanke’s message, but he said he was even more worried about the consequences of extending the central bank’s monthly purchases of Treasury securities and mortgage-backed bonds. Mr. Powell said the Fed was stuck on the edge of a rooftop. “We’ve got to jump,” he told his colleagues, according to transcripts of the Fed’s 2013 meetings, which the central bank published Friday. “There is no risk-free path.”
+Mr. Bernanke’s comments at a news conference later that day, suggesting the economy was strong enough for the Fed to begin tapering its monthly purchases before the end of the year, triggered a minor panic in financial markets, dubbed the “taper tantrum.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A highly unusual public feud broke out between prosecutors and top police officials on Friday after the Manhattan district attorney’s decision to drop charges against one of the men pummeled by the police with batons during a chaotic arrest in Washington Heights.
+The office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., fielded angry phone calls from two of the Police Department’s senior officials — Terence Monahan, the chief of department, and Edward Delatorre, the chief of the transit bureau — over its handling of the matter.
+And in an uncharacteristically public salvo, the police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, took to Twitter to sharply criticize Mr. Vance’s decision not to charge one of the men, Sydney Williams, 37, and not to seek bail on the second, Aaron Grissom, 36.Verna Bloom, who in her first feature film, the semidocumentary “Medium Cool,” moved anxiously through the rioting in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and who a decade later played the lustful wife of the stiff-necked college dean in “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” died on Wednesday in Bar Harbor, Me. She was 80.
+Her husband, the critic and screenwriter Jay Cocks, said the cause was complications of dementia.
+While “Animal House” was probably her best-known role, “Medium Cool” offered Ms. Bloom an auspicious beginning.
+She had been acting mostly onstage when a small role in Studs Terkel’s play “Amazing Grace” led Mr. Turkel to recommend her for “Medium Cool” (1969), the cinematographer Haskell Wexler’s first feature as a director.
+Shot in cinéma vérité style, “Medium Cool” is the story of a local news cameraman (Robert Forster) who meets Eileen (Ms. Bloom), a poor woman from West Virginia raising her teenage son in Chicago, while covering the city’s social unrest.Reza Zarrab was a well-connected Turkish-Iranian gold trader known for throwing money around with abandon, paying tens of millions of dollars in bribes to Turkish officials.
+When he was arrested in 2016 and jailed at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, an ultrasecure federal lockup in Manhattan, one of the guards, Victor Casado, 36, of the Bronx, saw an opportunity and offered his services.
+Over a year, he smuggling in alcohol, cellphones and vitamin C packets, among other things, for Mr. Zarrab in exchange for at least $50,000 in bribes, the authorities said.
+Mr. Casado was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to federal bribery charges last summer. On Friday, Mr. Casado, a former New York City police officer who was forced to resign after he committed perjury in court, stood before a federal judge and was sentenced to three years in prison and three years supervised release.Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory revoked the honorary titles held by its longtime leader James D. Watson on Friday, describing as “unsubstantiated and reckless” his recent remarks about genetic differences in intelligence among racial groups.
+Dr. Watson, one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century, had apologized after making similar comments to a British newspaper in 2007. At the time, he was forced to retire from his job as chancellor at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, but he has retained his office there, as well as the titles of chancellor emeritus, Oliver R. Grace professor emeritus and honorary trustee. The graduate school of biological sciences at the research center is named for Dr. Watson, and the laboratory held a 90th birthday party for him last spring.
+For the past decade the laboratory, like much of the scientific community, has engaged in a delicate balancing act with regard to Dr. Watson: holding him at arm’s length for reinforcing unfounded racial stereotypes, while still honoring him for his contributions to science. Dr. Watson, with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, helped discover the double-helix structure of DNA in 1953, and he went on to help to shape the subsequent revolution in molecular biology.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+But his recent comments “effectively reverse the written apology and retraction Dr. Watson made in 2007,” and “require the severing of any remaining vestiges of his involvement,” Cold Spring Harbor’s chief executive, Bruce Stillman, and its board of trustees chairwoman, Marilyn Simons, said in a statement.The family of Michael R. White, a Navy veteran imprisoned in Iran half a year ago, said Friday that he had traveled there with a valid visa to visit a female friend, rejecting any suggestion that he might have been engaged in espionage.
+“We want to be very clear — Michael spent much of his time in the Navy as a cook and recently worked as a commercial janitor — he is not now, nor has he ever been a spy,” the family said in a statement.
+Mr. White, 46, also had been undergoing treatment for cancer and other “serious medical conditions that could be life-threatening without regular, specialized medical care,” the statement said.
+Image Michael R. White, an American Navy veteran, in an undated photograph provided by his family.
+Mr. White, a 13-year Navy veteran from Imperial Beach, Calif., is the first American known to be imprisoned by Iran since President Trump took office nearly two years ago. Why Iran has taken him into custody is unclear.In urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, Mr. Rehaif relied on a 2012 concurrence from Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who at the time was a federal appeals court judge in Denver. Judge Gorsuch wrote that logic and the rules of grammar required proof that every element of the crime in question had been committed knowingly. “It makes no sense,” he wrote, “to read the word ‘knowingly’ as so modest that it might blush in the face of the very first element only to regain its composure and reappear at the second.”
+The case on drawing blood from motorists, Mitchell v. Wisconsin, No. 18-6210, concerns Gerald P. Mitchell, a Wisconsin man arrested on suspicion of drunken driving. A police officer took him to a hospital, where he was slumped over and unresponsive. The officer instructed medical personnel to draw blood from Mr. Mitchell, and they found that his blood alcohol concentration was 0.22, which is above the legal limit for driving.
+It was Mr. Mitchell’s seventh offense for driving under the influence. He was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison, and he challenged his conviction on Fourth Amendment grounds.
+A splintered Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected that argument, relying on a state law that presumes drivers have consented to blood tests and punishes them if they decline to cooperate by revoking their driver’s licenses. The law says unconscious motorists are “presumed not to have withdrawn consent” to having their blood drawn.
+Twenty-eight states have similar laws, according to Mr. Mitchell’s petition seeking Supreme Court review, but some of them have been struck down after two recent Supreme Court decisions.
+In 2013, the court ruled that a warrant is ordinarily needed before drawing blood in drunken-driving investigations. In 2016, the court added that “motorists cannot be deemed to have consented to submit to a blood test on pain of committing a criminal offense.” In Mr. Mitchell’s case, the penalty of losing a driver’s license is a civil one.
+In urging the Supreme Court to deny review, lawyers for the state said Mr. Mitchell should not benefit because he “got so drunk that, after driving while under the influence, he passed out and became unconscious.”
+Mr. Mitchell should not, the state’s brief said, receive “the windfall of avoiding the lawful civil choice, which other drunk drivers must face, of having their blood drawn or losing their license.”The partial government shutdown, which deprived many federal employees of their first paycheck this week, has claimed some new victims: several of the signature spiky-leafed Joshua trees at Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California.
+A skeleton crew of workers has remained at the park, which is larger than Rhode Island, during the shutdown, but they have struggled to maintain order among its otherworldly rock formations and vast stretches of desert.
+Park officials issued a statement on Tuesday that said the park had suffered “sanitation, safety, and resource protection issues” since the shutdown began on Dec. 22. That included the destruction of an unspecified number of the Dr. Seuss-ian Joshua trees that are frequently photographed (and Instagrammed) by its visitors.OTTAWA — An afternoon commute in Canada’s capital turned to horror after a double-decker city bus became impaled on a passenger shelter, leaving three people dead and 25 injured, officials said.
+Jim Watson, the mayor of Ottawa, said that one victim was standing on the platform at the time of the collision, and the other two were aboard the bus.
+“Our hearts and condolences go out to all those who were injured,” Mr. Watson said at a news conference. “Our focus now must be to provide care and sympathy for those affected by the accident.”
+Of the injured, 14 arrived at hospitals in critical condition.
+It was the second deadly accident involving a double-decker bus in the city in less than six years.No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials. An F.B.I. spokeswoman and a spokesman for the special counsel’s office both declined to comment.
+Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer for the president, sought to play down the significance of the investigation. “The fact that it goes back a year and a half and nothing came of it that showed a breach of national security means they found nothing,” Mr. Giuliani said on Friday, though he acknowledged that he had no insight into the inquiry.
+The cloud of the Russia investigation has hung over Mr. Trump since even before he took office, though he has long vigorously denied any illicit connection to Moscow. The obstruction inquiry, revealed by The Washington Post a few weeks after Mr. Mueller was appointed, represented a direct threat that he was unable to simply brush off as an overzealous examination of a handful of advisers. But few details have been made public about the counterintelligence aspect of the investigation.
+The decision to investigate Mr. Trump himself was an aggressive move by F.B.I. officials who were confronting the chaotic aftermath of the firing of Mr. Comey and enduring the president’s verbal assaults on the Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.”
+A vigorous debate has taken shape among some former law enforcement officials outside the case over whether F.B.I. investigators overreacted in opening the counterintelligence inquiry during a tumultuous period at the Justice Department. Other former officials noted that those critics were not privy to all of the evidence and argued that sitting on it would have been an abdication of duty.
+The F.B.I. conducts two types of inquiries, criminal and counterintelligence investigations. Unlike criminal investigations, which are typically aimed at solving a crime and can result in arrests and convictions, counterintelligence inquiries are generally fact-finding missions to understand what a foreign power is doing and to stop any anti-American activity, like thefts of United States government secrets or covert efforts to influence policy. In most cases, the investigations are carried out quietly, sometimes for years. Often, they result in no arrests.The Trump Organization has hired a former White House lawyer to handle inquiries from the Democrat-led House, two people familiar with the situation said on Friday, part of the strategy by the White House and the company to counter an expected onslaught of requests and subpoenas.
+The lawyer, Stefan Passantino, was a White House deputy counsel in charge of ethics policy until last fall. His duties included handling issues related to the personal financial disclosure filings of Mr. Trump’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, Ivanka Trump.
+Mr. Passantino plans to recuse himself from any requests from congressional investigators that conflict with the duties he performed at the White House, the two people familiar with the situation said.
+Still, the hiring of Mr. Passantino, which was first reported by CNN, underscores the unusual dynamics at play with the Trump administration. The president has never divested from his private businesses, which are now run by his two oldest sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. And the question of possible overlap between the Trump Organization and decisions made by the White House is one that Democrats have made clear they plan to scrutinize.As for Canada, Amy said that she wants Travel to take its readers to the country’s less obvious destinations.
+“A lot of our Canadian travel has focused on either a handful of cities or natural beauty like Banff,” she said. “But we know there’s a lot to explore in Canada.”
+So here’s our challenge for Canada Letter leaders: If you have a favorite destination that you think has been generally overlooked, email us at nytcanada@nytimes.com, explaining why others should visit. Please include your name and where you live. A photo would be a welcome addition. We may use the contributions to create our own mini list of places to visit in Canada.
+Read more:
+[Read: 52 Places to Go in 2019]
+[Read: How We Pick the 52 Places]
+[Read: 1 Woman, 12 Months, 52 Places]
+Trans Canada
+—For the second time in less than six years, passengers aboard one of Ottawa’s double-decker buses have died in a collision.
+—Court documents detailed the final moments before a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos struck a transport truck in a deadly collision that shook all of Canada.
+—Rebecca Marino, who was born in Toronto and now lives in Vancouver, became burned out and quit professional tennis in 2013. She’s now in the midst of a comeback.
+—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that, at the request of the United Nations, Canada will take in an 18-year-old runaway from Saudi Arabia who fears for her life.
+—There are harp seals stranded seemingly everywhere in Roddickton-Bide Arm, Newfoundland. But there are no good answers about what can be done about it.
+—A group of Canadian scientists have found a signal from the stars.
+—This year marked the first time that Canada wasn’t on the podium while hosting the world junior hockey championship. But Carol Schram found that may be because of other countries getting better, rather than Canada falling behind.
+Around The Times
+— Apple’s new iPhone XR has been a sales disappointment. The tech columnist Kevin Roose writes that may be because many people are perfectly content with their aging iPhones.
+—A collaborative project involving the influential, Swiss-born photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank, who once lived in Cape Breton, has been rediscovered.
+—While the centuries-old tradition of the dancing girls of Lahore continues, their status in Pakistan has taken a decidedly downward turn.
+—Many people in Britain have developed a fondness for a car that was never formally exported from Japan. Unsurprisingly, it’s eccentric.Since then, she has earned a reputation for her opposition to American military intervention and “regime change” efforts abroad — and for sometimes breaking from the Democratic Party line. In 2015, she voted with Republicans to increase screening of Syrian refugees. Shortly thereafter, she startled the Democratic National Committee by calling for more presidential debates than the party wanted to hold.
+And just this week, she wrote an op-ed accusing fellow Democrats of “religious bigotry” for sharply questioning a judicial nominee, Brian Buescher, on his membership in the Knights of Columbus. (Though she did not name names, her targets were clear: Senator Kamala Harris of California, another likely presidential candidate, and Senator Mazie Hirono, who also represents Hawaii.)
+Ms. Gabbard also endorsed Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primaries — resigning as vice chairwoman of the D.N.C. to do so — when most party officials were circling the wagons around Hillary Clinton. That creates an interesting dynamic for the 2020 race because Mr. Sanders may run again.
+Experience could be a major vulnerability for Ms. Gabbard, who was re-elected in November. The only sitting representative elected president was James Garfield in 1880, and most presidents have previously been a senator or governor.
+She will be 39 on Inauguration Day in 2021, which would make her, if elected, the youngest president in American history. Only two presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, have taken office before age 45.Alas, that may have to wait.
+On Jan. 4, the observers sent out by the Catholic Church had identified a third candidate — Martin Fayulu, a respected businessman and veteran member of Parliament who had held a strong lead in pre-election polls — as the probable winner. And when the results showing Mr. Tshisekedi the winner were announced, the National Episcopal Conference of Congo, a Catholic bishops’ group, declared that the numbers did not match “the data collected by our observer mission.” Mr. Fayulu was not named, but the observers left no doubt that he should have won.
+The widespread suspicion is that when Mr. Kabila sensed that his man would be crushed, he cut a deal with Mr. Tshisekedi to ensure that the incumbent president, his family and his cronies would not be compelled to relinquish the fortunes and properties they reaped in the 18 years Mr. Kabila inhabited the presidential palace. Mr. Fayulu, the candidate of a broad coalition of opposition parties and figures, would not be likely to give the departing cabal a pass.
+And so what should have been a historic moment for the long-suffering nation took a dismally familiar turn. Mr. Fayulu denounced the results as an “electoral coup” and his appeal is now being heard by the Constitutional Court, though even he admitted he stood little chance of satisfaction in a court stacked with Kabila appointees. France openly declared that Mr. Fayulu should have won; Belgium, the former colonial master and exploiter, said it would raise the election results at the United Nations Security Council; the African Union called for any dispute to be resolved through “political dialogue”; the United Nations secretary general called on all sides to “refrain from violence.” There were reports of clashes in the southwestern city of Kikwit, but for now Congo remained relatively calm.
+And the Congolese were back to waiting. And suffering: Three-quarters of the country’s 80 million people subsist on less than $2 a day , thousands of civilians have been killed by security forces and various militias in the past two years and 4.5 million Congolese have been displaced by violence.
+Mr. Kabila is to blame for much of the misery, and however disappointed most people may be with the results of the election, the likelihood is that they are simply relieved he is on his way out. They may now prefer Mr. Tshisekedi — whose late father, Étienne Tshisekedi, was a widely admired opposition leader for decades — to a period of instability and political violence.WASHINGTON — President Trump has stepped back from declaring a national emergency to pay for a border wall, under pressure from congressional Republicans, his own lawyers and advisers, who say using it as a way out of the government shutdown does not justify the precedent it would set and the legal questions it could raise.
+“If today the national emergency is border security, tomorrow the national emergency might be climate change,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the idea’s critics, said this week. Another Republican, Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, told an interviewer that declaring a national emergency should be reserved for “the most extreme circumstances.”
+Mr. Trump, who according to aides has grown increasingly frustrated over the refusal of Democrats to bend and sees the shutdown as a road with no off-ramp in sight, hinted on Friday that the warnings were having an effect.
+“What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,” he told reporters gathered in the Cabinet Room as the shutdown approached its fourth week. Minutes later he contradicted himself, saying that he would declare a state of emergency if he had to.The network had revamped Studio 6A at its 30 Rockefeller Plaza headquarters, installing roughly 100 seats so that “Megyn Kelly Today” would have its own cheering squad. But with sharp questions and comments, Ms. Kelly offended celebrity guests like Debra Messing and Jane Fonda. Of more importance to network executives, she delivered middling ratings.
+By the time one of NBC’s biggest events came around — the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea — Ms. Kelly was not among the correspondents sent to cover it.
+In May 2018, during the network’s annual presentation to advertisers known as the upfronts, there was another sign that her stock was down at NBC. From the Radio City Music Hall stage, the late-night host Seth Meyers mentioned the network’s broadcast of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” with John Legend in the lead role, before remarking: “You know a network has some range when they have a black Jesus and Megyn Kelly.” The joke was a reference Ms. Kelly’s much-criticized statements, made during a 2013 segment on Fox News, that Santa Claus and Jesus were white.
+And then came the Oct. 23, 2018, episode of “Megyn Kelly Today.”
+‘I’m a Little Fired Up’
+Ms. Kelly opened the show by announcing: “I have to give you a fair warning. I’m a little fired up over Halloween costumes this morning.”
+What followed was a segment out of the Fox News playbook: a round-table discussion of how multiculturalism was supposedly affecting the celebration of a national holiday.
+“But what is racist?” Ms. Kelly said. “You do get in trouble if you are a white person who puts on blackface on Halloween, or a black person who puts on whiteface for Halloween. Back when I was a kid, that was O.K., as long as you were dressing up as a character.”
+Those remarks were the last straw for NBC.
+Ms. Kelly offered an on-air apology the next morning. She also hosted a segment featuring two black panelists, Roland Martin and Amy Holmes, who explained the history of blackface, a demeaning practice with a history going back to 19th-century minstrel shows.Watching the Trump show from the distance afforded by my brief leave of absence has been like watching a frenzy of ants. It’s hypnotic, in part because it appears devoid of meaning. Keep your eye on the bouncing ball, goes the adage. But what if the ball is a blur?
+When Trump was in business, his shtick was stiffing contractors. If confronted, he would try some bombast and storm out of meetings, as he did the other day with congressional leaders, ending talks on the partial government shutdown caused by a crisis he has manufactured. His shtick now is stiffing all Americans. The technique is the same: Keep reality at a distance through hyperactive fakery.
+I have been fascinated by Trump’s compulsion. Like birds feasting on mangled flesh in the middle of the road, he cannot help it. Like travelers beset with reflex gluttony in airline lounges, he cannot help it. Like the sulking child denied a video, he cannot help it.
+Like the dog that returns to its vomit, he cannot help it. Like a puppet on a string, he cannot help it. Like the scorpion that stings the frog ferrying it across the torrent, he cannot help it. It’s his nature, you see.SATURDAY PUZZLE — I’ll get to the clues quickly today because I thought there were so many sticklers, but this puzzle was very twinny, or crossy, for me — lots of paired entries. Some of them had something in common, some were nigh impossible to complete, some combined to aid me greatly, but this facet was one of the takeaways for me today.
+As always, I loved Sam Trabucco’s style and got a kick out of his cluing and most of today’s nine debuts. (The meh ones were I COULDN’T and HOME CARE, not that there’s anything wrong with either one, they just weren’t remarkable. Certainly not a constructor’s fault.)
+Tricky Clues
+The first clues that delighted me were VILA and VANILLI, which I would call a personal reverse Natick, since I was able to ink them in with total confidence. I misremembered Bob Vila as a character on a sitcom, “Home Improvement,” not an educational show, “Home Again,” but I’m still a little afraid to get on a ladder — no D.I.Y. expert here. I also misremembered the whole Milli Vanilli story, which turned very tragic, but their music is very embedded in my mind with my college experience, so any mention makes me pleasantly nostalgic (this is only the second time we’ve seen VANILLI, and it’s been more than 20 years). My college memories are free of PEP BANDS, by the way, which was also a debut .
+After picking through much of the upper right, my letters spread south and west, petering out at the lower left corner, which stumped me most. There was tough stuff, though, throughout this whole grid.EDITORS’ NOTE
+The Common Sense column on Dec. 19 about Les Moonves, the ousted chief executive of CBS, and his rights under his termination agreement to sue the broadcast company for breach of contract, included remarks from an interview published in December in Agenda, an industry publication, that were attributed to Mr. Moonves. The validity of the Agenda interview has since been called into question. On Thursday, Agenda removed Mr. Moonves’s comments and published an editor’s note that stated, in part, that a representative for Mr. Moonves issued a statement denying that Mr. Moonves spoke with reporters from Agenda. The thrust of the column — that CBS is obliged to pay Mr. Moonves’s legal bills should he decide to sue the company — is accurate and unchanged, but the excerpted comments from the Agenda article have been removed from the online version of the column and an accompanying picture caption.
+CORRECTIONS: January 12, 2019
+INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Thursday about a government crackdown on skin-bleaching products in Rwanda paraphrased incorrectly comments by Dr. Carlos Charles. While he said that hydroquinone can cause a rash or ochronosis when used in high concentrations, he did not say that hydroquinone can increase the risk of cancer. (Past studies have shown some evidence of carcinogenic activity in rodents exposed to hydroquinone, but the substance has not been proven to increase the risk of cancer in humans.)
+NATIONAL
+An article on Thursday about the E.P.A.’s shutdown furlough of most inspection personnel described incorrectly Angela McFadden’s role at the Environmental Protection Agency. She is an environmental engineer who works for an agency program that oversees state-issued permits for the discharge of pollution in rivers and streams; she is not an inspector of water sites. The article also misquoted Ms. McFadden in her comments about her work at the E.P.A. While Ms. McFadden said, “I always find violations,” she did not go on to say, “even if it’s not things that are illegal.” The article also suggested that problems with chlorine levels in water are especially common in rural West Virginia. That is not the case.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Friday about a settlement that could cost Fiat Chrysler more than $800 million referred incorrectly to the status of the company’s production of diesel-powered vehicles. After a halt in the 2017 model year for regulatory reasons, the company resumed making diesel versions of the Jeep Grand Cherokee and the Ram 1500 pickup; its diesel era has not ended. The error was repeated in a headline.It’s the late ’90s. You make some dumb choices. You get charged with robbing a Subway. You spend four years in prison. It’s 1995. Your friends rob a KFC. You drive the getaway car. Four years in jail. That was then. Now you’re a pastor at a church. Today, you run a successful flooring business. You’ve paid your dues. You’ve made amends. Now you want to have a voice in the world. But, you live in Florida. The Sunshine State is one of only four states that permanently bars felons from casting a ballot. And there are 1.7 estimated million people there who are disenfranchised due to a prior felony conviction. Over 10% of adults in the state cannot vote. Nearly one in four black adults is disenfranchised. The law does provide one way for former felons to get their voting rights back. But don’t get your hopes up. Then you have to wait another 10, 12 years. Why? Because there is a backlog of about 10,000 cases. Finally, as many as 20 years later, you get your big day in court. If your hearing was in front of Gov. Rick Scott, you almost certainly heard this: “I deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. At this point, I’m going to deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. I deny restoration of civil rights. So it’s all denied. Well, first off, thanks for your work for the state.” “Thank you.” “At this point, I don’t feel comfortable giving your restoration of civil rights. But congratulations on your work, and congratulations on your daughter.” “Thank you.” The law gives the governor and his cabinet members the power to decide our fate. And there’s no rules or guidelines. “There is no right to clemency. There’s no standards. The governor goes first. If I deny, then it’s over.” The governor can turn you away for any reason no matter how petty. “Just don’t get traffic tickets all the time. I mean, I mean it just says something. It says you don’t care about the law.” And it’s not just me. Governor Scott has denied way more people than his predecessors. In the last eight years, the number of disenfranchised citizens in Florida has increased by nearly 200,000 people. But wait, how did we even get here? The law is 150 years old and was designed to keep people that looked like me from voting. When the Civil War ended, freed slaves represented almost half of Florida’s population. The state’s all-white lawmakers came up with a racist plan to prevent blacks from gaining power. They created Black Codes, not-so-subtly named laws that subjected black people to harsh sentences for minor offenses. They then barred anyone with a conviction from voting. They didn’t even try to hide it. For the next 150 years, no one questioned the law. And now, here we are. “Florida voters will get to decide on a ballot referendum that would restore voting rights to felons who have done their time.” “Murderers and sex offenders are excluded.” “To pass Amendment 4, voters would need 60% or more in November.” Vote “Yes” in November to restore voting rights. Be our voice today so everyone invested in the future of Florida can help shape that future.If you had to pick the weirdest moment of the week, would it be:
+The Coast Guard tries to buck up its unpaid civilian employees by suggesting they consider becoming dog walkers or giving music lessons.
+In order to dramatize the dangers of life without a Mexico wall, Donald Trump goes to visit a Texas border city that just had its lowest crime rate in 34 years.
+The president rebuts critics who say walling off a country is sort of medieval by pointing out that all cars have wheels and “a wheel is older than a wall.”
+Multitudinous fact checkers point out that a wall is actually older than a wheel.
+Feel free to add your own. Whatever you say, I’ll probably believe you. It’s as if we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and landed in a Wonderland totally devoid of wonder.
+Even if you really, really want Donald Trump to be a total failure hurtling his way back toward civilian life, it’s not comforting to have a president who’s so out to lunch. Just think about that trip to Texas. McAllen, the city Trump chose to demonstrate the terror of wall-free borders, was recently listed by U.S. News & World Report as one of the best places to retire in the nation. But the president, who was making only his second trip to the border since he took office, assured the public he knew how terrible things are because “I have been there numerous times.”
+And that was just one tiny piece of his week! The big news, of course, was our catapult toward an all-time government shutdown record.
+Pop quiz: When Trump was invited to comment on the pain of the unpaid government workers, did he say:
+A) That it’s better than being killed by an illegal immigrant.
+B) That a lot of them think it’s worth missing their salaries to get a wall.President Trump has frequently called the situation at the southern border with Mexico a crisis and insists that building his long-promised border wall will fix it. Here are some of Mr. Trump’s most common assertions of a crisis, and the reality of what we know about immigrants and the border.
+“We can’t have people pouring into our country like they have over the last 10 years.”
+THE REALITY Illegal border crossings have been declining for nearly two decades. In 2017, border-crossing apprehensions were at their lowest point since 1971.
+Total number of arrests for illegally crossing the Mexican border George H.W. Bush Clinton George W. Bush Obama Trump 1.5 million 1.0 0.5 0 ’90 ’92 ’94 ’96 ’98 ’00 ’02 ’04 ’06 ’08 ’10 ’12 ’14 ’16 ’18 Fiscal year George H.W. Bush Clinton George W. Bush Obama 1.5 million Trump 1.0 0.5 0 ’90 ’00 ’10 Fiscal year Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
+Undetected illegal border crossings have dropped at an even faster rate, from 851,000 in 2006 to approximately 62,000 in 2016, according to estimates by the Department of Homeland Security.
+However, there is one group of migrants that is on the rise: families. A record number of families have tried to cross the border in recent months, overwhelming officials at the border and creating a new kind of humanitarian crisis.
+Number of arrests for illegally crossing the Mexican border 30,000 Nov. 2018 People with family: 25,172 Others: 21,401 20,000 10,000 Unaccompanied children: 5,283 Jan. 2016 July Jan. 2017 July Jan. 2018 July People traveling with family 30,000 Others 20,000 10,000 Unaccompanied children 2016 2017 2018 Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection
+Asylum claims have also jumped, with many migrant families telling officials that they fear returning to their home countries. Seeking asylum is one way to legally migrate to the United States, but only 21 percent of asylum claims were granted in 2018, and many cases can take years to be resolved.
+“Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border.”
+THE REALITY It is true that the majority of heroin enters the United States through the southern border, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. But the D.E.A. also says that most heroin is brought into the country in vehicles entering through legal border crossings, not through the areas where walls are proposed or already exist.
+Most drugs are seized at ports of entry, not along the open border DRUG SEIZURES: AT PORTS OF ENTRY BETWEEN PORTS OF ENTRY Heroin 90% 10% Cocaine 88% 12% Methamphetamine 87% 13% Fentanyl 80% 20% Marijuana 39% 61% DRUG SEIZURES: AT PORTS OF ENTRY BETWEEN PORTS OF ENTRY 90% 10% Heroin 88% 12% Cocaine 87% 13% Methamphetamine 80% 20% Fentanyl 39% 61% Marijuana Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection | Note: The chart shows drug seizures at all borders, not just the border with Mexico. The southern border is the primary entry point for cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
+There are more than two dozen ports of entry along the southern border. Barriers are already present in Border Patrol sectors with the highest volumes of heroin seizures.
+Heroin seizures in each Border Patrol sector, 2017 Weight in pounds 200 600 1,000 CALIF. U.S. Border Patrol sectors NEW MEXICO ARIZONA El Centro 275 TEXAS El Paso 93 Yuma 223 Tucson 979 San Diego 2,365 Rio Grande 432 Del Rio 154 Big Bend 18 Laredo 503 Ports of entry GULF OF MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN Existing barriers along the border MEXICO N U.S. Border Patrol sectors CALIF. NEW MEXICO El Centro 275 ARIZONA TEXAS El Paso 93 Yuma 223 Tucson 979 Rio Grande 432 San Diego 2,365 Del Rio 154 Laredo 503 Big Bend 18 Ports of entry GULF OF MEXICO Existing barriers along the border PACIFIC OCEAN MEXICO N U.S. Border Patrol sectors NEW MEXICO TEXAS CALIF. ARIZONA El Centro 275 El Paso 93 Yuma 223 Del Rio 154 Tucson 979 Laredo 503 Big Bend 18 San Diego 2,365 Ports of entry Existing barriers along the border N Rio Grande 432 MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN NEW MEXICO CALIF. ARIZONA TEXAS 2 5 3 1 4 7 6 8 Existing barriers along the border Ports of entry N 9 MEXICO PACIFIC OCEAN San Diego, 2,365 Big Bend, 18 1 6 El Centro, 275 Del Rio, 154 2 7 Yuma, 223 Laredo, 503 3 8 Tucson, 979 Rio Grande, 432 4 9 El Paso, 93 5 Source: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (seizures data); Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and OpenStreetMap contributors (border barriers)
+“Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country, and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now.”
+THE REALITY It is difficult to assess the president’s claims that illegal immigration leads to more crime because few law enforcement agencies release crime data that includes immigration status. However, several studies have found no link between immigration and crime, and some have found lower crime rates among immigrants.
+Texas, which has the longest border with Mexico and has one of the largest populations of undocumented immigrants of any state, keeps track of immigration status as part of its crime data. The Cato Institute, a libertarian research center, analyzed the Texas data for 2015 and found that the rate of crime among undocumented immigrants was generally lower than among native-born Americans.
+Conviction rates are lower for immigrant populations in Texas Number of convictions for every 100,000 residents in each group, 2015 All crime Homicide Sex crime Larceny Native born 1,797 3.1 28.6 267 Undocumented immigrants 899 2.6 26.4 62 Legal immigrants 611 1.0 8.9 74 All crime Homicide Native born 1,797 3.1 Undocumented immigrants 899 2.6 Legal immigrants 611 1.0 Sex crime Larceny Native born 28.6 267 Undocumented immigrants 26.4 62 Legal immigrants 8.9 74 Source: Cato Institute
+Some critics of the study argued that the reason undocumented immigrant conviction rates were low was because immigrants were deported after they served their sentences, which prevented them from committing another crime in the United States, reducing their rate of crime relative to native-born Americans.
+Alex Nowrasteh, senior immigration policy analyst at the institute, addressed the complaint by comparing first-time criminal conviction rates among undocumented immigrants in Texas and native-born Americans in Texas. He found that undocumented immigrants still committed crimes at a rate “32 percent below that of native-born Americans.”“It’s very frustrating. That wall is going straight through the country, not between us and Mexico.”
+JESSICA RASMUSSEN, whose best friend is a furloughed microbiologist for the Food and Drug Administration, on the strain of going without a paycheck because of the partial government shutdown.The Department of Homeland Security and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment on Friday evening on the possibility of a privately funded effort to build the wall.
+Typically, GoFundMe campaigns can still collect money even if they do not meet their goal.
+But Bobby Whithorne, a spokesman for GoFundMe, said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Kolfage’s original campaign page had said “If we don’t reach our goal or come significantly close we will refund every single penny” and that “100% of your donations will go to the Trump Wall. If for ANY reason we don’t reach our goal we will refund your donation.”
+Mr. Whithorne said that since the campaign was not going to reach the $1 billion goal, and that both GoFundMe and Mr. Kolfage had determined the money raised could not be given to the federal government, GoFundMe had contacted all donors to the original campaign about the refund.
+Donors can ask for a refund immediately, Mr. Whithorne said, but if they do not choose to redirect their money to the nonprofit, they will automatically receive a refund in 90 days.
+Immigration advocacy groups had condemned the GoFundMe campaign as a xenophobic result of fearmongering about immigrants. Some had started competing fund-raising campaigns to raise money for Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, a Texas nonprofit known as Raices.
+Jonathan Ryan, president and chief executive of Raices, said that despite the change in Mr. Kolfage’s campaign, the original critiques of it still stand.
+“It’s a difference without a change,” Mr. Ryan said. “The wall remains the wrong direction for us as a country, something that will not help advance any of our national interests and that would only serve to further harm vulnerable refugees and immigrants seeking protection in our country.”From the ongoing government shutdown to foreign policy changes in the Middle East, it’s been a busy week in American politics. Here are some of the biggest stories you might have missed (and some links if you’d like to read further).
+___________________
+The shutdown is now the longest in U.S. history.
+The partial government shutdown has entered its 22nd day, making it the longest in American history.
+Privately, many Republicans say the stalemate over the border wall has been made exponentially worse by White House ineptitude on Capitol Hill. On Friday, the president stepped back from declaring a national emergency under pressure from congressional Republicans, but there is still no end in sight.
+On Tuesday night, President Trump used his first prime-time Oval Office address — one that was filled with misleading assertions — to pressure Congress into paying for his long-promised border wall.Watch an “Ocean’s” installment with a feminist twist on HBO. Or stream an action flick starring a formidable Dave Bautista on Amazon.
+What’s on TV
+OCEAN’S 8 (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO Go or HBO Now; rent on Amazon, Google Play or YouTube. When this female-driven spinoff of the “Ocean’s” trilogy hit theaters, most critics agreed that the A-list ensemble cast gave the movie its oomph, but that it should have stayed in the hands of the original “Ocean’s” director, Steven Soderbergh. Here, Gary Ross delivers a lukewarm caper starring Sandra Bullock as Debbie Ocean, the equally criminal sister of Danny Ocean. Fresh out of prison, Debbie hatches a monumental heist: snatching a $150 million dollar Cartier necklace off the neck of an actress (Anne Hathaway) during the annual Met Gala. Cate Blanchett, Mindy Kaling and Sarah Paulson — to name a few — play her co-conspirators. In her review, Manohla Dargis said a subplot involving guy troubles proves “needless.” She adds: “The movie sounds and narratively unwinds like the previous installments, but without the same easy snap or visual allure.”
+PLANET EARTH 6 a.m. on BBC America. More than a decade ago, “Planet Earth” dazzled viewers and set the benchmark for nature series with its gripping overview of wildlife across habitats. This weeklong marathon features episodes from that landmark series, as well as similar programs like “The Blue Planet” and “Africa.” It begins with a behind-the-scenes episode on the making of “The Hunt.”The nation’s favorite son, he still looms large in Polish life more than 40 years after he was named Bishop of Rome.
+From a towering 45-foot-tall statue depicting the pope with outstretched hands that overlooks the city of Czestochowa, to the relics distributed to churches throughout the country — including drops of his blood in more than 100 parishes — Poland is awash in tributes to the man commonly referred to as “Our Pope.”
+But at a moment when the country finds itself torn by political conflicts that are cast by all sides as an existential battle for the nation’s soul, the legacy of John Paul II — a champion for both Poland and an integrated Europe — is the subject of dispute.
+“For everyone, he remains a positive point of reference,” said Michal Luczewski, the program director for the Center on the Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw. “But there is a struggle over his legacy, with each side wanting to claim him as their own.”PARIS — A powerful explosion tore through a bakery in central Paris early on Saturday, killing at least four people, including two firefighters, and leaving smoke, flames and scattered debris in its wake, the authorities said.
+Police and city officials said the blast, which occurred on Rue de Trévise, was believed to have been caused by a gas leak.
+The Paris prosecutor’s office said that 47 people had been injured by the explosion, 10 of them critically. Emergency medical workers used helicopters to help evacuate some of the injured, picking them on the square in front of the Paris Opera house and taking them to hospitals.
+Spain’s Foreign Ministry said that a Spanish woman had also been killed in the blast, and that a Spanish couple were being treated in the hospital. Christophe Castaner, the French interior minister, said two Paris firefighters were among the dead.After the wrenching swings of late 2018 and early January, it was difficult to harbor many illusions about the stock market.
+It became clear that investing in stocks wasn’t easy, predictable or safe, at least in the short run . If you weren’t a risk taker or deeply committed for the long term, it was difficult to look at the market closely and remain calm.
+In fact, the long bull market had a near-death experience in December. Based on intraday trading, stocks descended just below the 20 percent-loss threshold that customarily denotes the birth of a bear market.
+Counting only prices at the market close, however, the Dow Jones industrial average didn’t quite fall into that dismal territory. Still, despite a market rise in January, losses have been severe, especially in sectors that had been highfliers, like technology.“I have to say, I haven’t heard a new question about ‘The Sopranos’ in a long time. I’m sorry.” “What do I think about ‘The Sopranos?’” “Yes.” “Cold. Being out on set in the cold.” “I still have people asking me, ‘What the hell was that last episode?’” “Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show?” [ominous music] [gunshot] “It so doesn’t feel like it’s 20 years, I have to say. I mean — ” “Somebody said it’s the 20th anniversary, and I was just shocked.” “‘Sopranos’ was the beginning of a particular genre, you know?” “And you can see the influence of ‘The Sopranos’ certainly in all the antihero shows that came afterward.” “People seemed hungry to have a lead character that was perhaps as complicated as they are.” “Tony Soprano is more like me than a doctor, or a cop, or a judge.” “But the idea that a bad person can also be lovable, and that you can care about his family, how do I feel about this?” “Every once in a while, he’d make Tony do something truly awful just to remind us that we are rooting for a monster. Before ‘The Sopranos,’ TV was largely about providing answers. Think about the setup, punch line of a sitcom. Or think about cases that get solved before the last commercial break in a cop show. There’s certainly been good and ambitious shows on television before, but what ‘The Sopranos’ did is it showed that pondering questions that don’t have any answers can be satisfying too.” “You know I’ve been working with the government, right, Ton?” “‘Sopranos’ trained viewers in a way to learn to be O.K. with being a little confused.” “It was a fish that talked, for God’s sake. I’m just saying. You can walk a very tricky line when you start to do things like hallucinations, things that appear that don’t really exist. That can be a ‘jumping the shark’ situation. And rather than taking you out of the show, it just sort of added another dimension.” “A lot of people hated those dreams sequences. There were people who just wanted a mob show. And their motto was, less yakking, more whacking. So when I would read things like that, it would only make me do more yakking, so.” “Well, I think what we learned is that people want to be challenged in that way. I don’t know. I think people are smarter than we give them credit for.” “I didn’t want to change things. This Elvis Costello song where he says, ‘I want to bite the hand that feeds me. I want to bite that hand so badly.’ That’s the way I always felt about working at the network. And I think I bit it.” “Now, the script, the pilot script, David Chase had been shopping it around for a long time, and nobody wanted it.” “David Chase didn’t ever expect it really to go anywhere. Not only did it go somewhere, it became suddenly the thing that everybody wanted to talk about.” “All the reviews were extremely positive except for one. And I thought, what is this?” “We started to get this feeling like, I think people are responding to this.” “Well, I remember when the show was on the air, you couldn’t pick up The New York Times, for example, without a mention of it. There was just constant, constant, constant. And it’s still happening.” “But back then, people would say, ‘Oh, Sunday night in my house, people knew they couldn’t call, and we’d have these big meals.’” “When I heard that people had parties around it, that was the best thing I heard. And still is, in a way.” “There was something also about having to wait. Like wondering what might happen next, and then the next day, people would talk about it. We’re in a different time now. If you have five hours, you could sit and watch a majority of a series now. And here it is, a million years after we finished it, and I still can’t quite fathom the experience of that of a viewer, or of a fan of the show. I feel like, oh, I wish I’d gotten to see that.” “I don’t rewatch the episodes unless there’s something I need for research or something.” “Me and Aida Turturro, who’s a dear friend of mine, and who played Janice on the show — a couple of summers ago, we decided to sit down and watch the series, because there are many we both hadn’t seen. And we got four episodes in, and we couldn’t do it. It’s just too evocative. First of all, because Jim is gone. And we were all so young when we first started it. And the kids were, I think, 11 and 14. And we worked on it for 10 years, and they were so little. And it was so emotionally turbulent, I thought, I can’t do this.” [laughs] “We gave up.” “Which, of course, brings us to the ending of “The Sopranos,’ which is arguably the most famous thing about the show, still.” “I remember when I first read the script, I thought I was missing pages, just like people thought their TVs had broken. I’ve met so many people say to me about the ending, ‘So what the hell was that?’ And I’m like, ‘I know pretty much what you do.’ And they’re like, ‘Come on, I get it. But what really happened?’ I was like — “ [chuckling] [Music — Journey, “Don’t Stop Believin’”] “They yelled cut and we all went home. That’s what happened.” “Made a lot of people angry. And sometimes, I couldn’t believe that it was that important to people. Would I have done anything differently with the ending of the show? I don’t think so.” “There was no way to make everybody happy with the end of that show. No way. And I loved that people were left with their own uncomfortability about this. They weren’t being force fed. That’s not always easy.”That’s actually a relatively healthy number for the president compared with his national approval rating (around 41 percent), but it could be a conservative estimate, and voters’ views might be unusually entrenched, given the stability of his ratings.
+Many presidents have won re-election after a midterm drubbing, and Mr. Trump’s approval rating isn’t particularly far from what he may wind up needing, given the G.O.P.’s current advantage in the Electoral College. But the wall has not helped so far.
+Data from the Fox News Voter Analysis of the midterms, a new competitor to the traditional exit polls, indicated that a majority of voters opposed the wall in states worth nearly 400 electoral votes, including in several states where the president’s approval rating was above water in the poll, like Ohio and Florida.
+There is tentative evidence in the Fox data that the wall is particularly unpopular in the relatively white and rural West, but somewhat more popular, at least with respect to the president’s approval rating, in the Northeast and inland South. This would follow a familiar pattern in American politics: It mirrors the president’s support in the presidential primary and tracks with longstanding measures of racial resentment.
+Even so, the wall still isn’t popular in Michigan or Pennsylvania, important battleground states. And voters in Ohio, a politically similar state, opposed the wall.
+None of these polls account for the government shutdown, but attitudes about it are unlikely to be fluid given the lack of movement on the wall during the Trump presidency. Tying the issue to an unpopular shutdown seems particularly unlikely to help and, historically, voters tend to drift against the policy preferences of the president’s party. That’s already evident on immigration more generally: Polls show voters more supportive of immigration than ever before.
+For all of the focus on the president’s base over the last two years, there is not much reason to think that the base, alone, is enough for the president to win re-election in a one-on-one race against a viable Democratic candidate. This could change. It has before. But with the midterms over, this is now the central political challenge facing the president. By that measure, it’s hard to see where a shutdown over the wall fits in.Difficult as it might be to remember at this time-is-money stage in tennis, the sport once had no tiebreakers.
+Long ago, every set had to be won by a two-game margin and theoretically had no finish line. Which meant that at Wimbledon in the first round of the men’s singles in 1969, the great but aging Pancho Gonzales defeated Charlie Pasarell by the score of 22-24, 1-6, 16-14, 6-3, 11-9 in a two-day match that lasted five hours and 12 minutes.
+The tiebreaker was introduced to Grand Slam tennis the following year at the 1970 United States Open, with red flags being flown courtside whenever a set reached 6-6.
+It has taken 49 more years for the major tournaments to reach the awkward phase where all four use different methods to resolve deciding sets in singles.“She’s my first choice to be my first choice,” said Betsy Kagen, a 33-year-old film editor who attended the talk.
+The themes of Ms. Harris’s new book, “The Truths We Hold: An American Journey,” could help her stand out in a crowded Democratic presidential primary. More than a dozen candidates are expected to join the presidential race in the coming months, and as the party searches for its next iteration after two decades of dominance by the Clintons and Barack Obama, questions of policy, identity and tone in the campaign will be paramount.
+Longtime strategists and admirers of Ms. Harris believe she is well positioned to create electoral coalitions among Democrats desperate to beat Mr. Trump, partly because she is not tethered to any one of the divergent and sometimes warring factions of the party. On MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday morning, Ms. Harris was asked, “Why would you want to be president?” and responded by citing the need for leaders who have a “vision of our country in which everyone can see themselves.”
+“Her message of unity, that’s the key,” said Valoree Celona, a 50-year-old insurance executive who came to the 92nd Street Y with friends. “If she can get people to have that hope again, that’s what’s important. That’s what President Obama did.”
+But Ms. Harris would also need to grapple with Democratic rivals who are more ideologically liberal and may try to move the debate to the left in ways that could force difficult choices for her.
+Mr. Sanders, the Vermont senator and 2016 presidential candidate who is considering running again, has demonstrated an ability to shift conversation toward more populist themes like free public colleges and campaign finance reform. Ms. Warren, the Massachusetts senator who became the first major candidate to announce presidential intentions and head to Iowa, has drawn attention for challenging Democratic candidates to propose a more broad restructuring of American society that would address economic inequality. Ms. Warren rarely mentioned Mr. Trump on the campaign trail, and is pushing primary candidates to have a more policy-driven discussion.
+“We need change,” Ms. Warren said at multiple stops during her Iowa trip. “And not just one statute here or one law there. We need big structural change.”Pharaoh, left, and Phallon Waterman playing at a program for children with autism and other developmental disabilities at the Shorefront YM-YWHA of Brighton-Manhattan Beach.
+Credit... Victor J. Blue for The New York TimesThe police and pro-government mobs responded with deadly force, even against unarmed protesters, according to human-rights observers, shooting and killing people across the nation.
+Ms. Valdivia said she wondered why nobody helped them. First one fell in her neighborhood, then a second. After the third was shot, she hopped on her new moped and came to their assistance herself.
+Ms. Valdivia spent two months running what she considered a humanitarian command post, administering first aid and providing lunch to protesters who were snarling traffic with improvised road blocks. She learned how to use homemade mortars, she said, although she mostly left the weaponry to the men.
+Then a relative phoned with a warning: “Don’t even think of coming here. There are about 25 police officers in your house, and they are destroying it.”
+She fled and never looked back, leaving behind three shuttered businesses, a house, a car, the scooter — and, for his own safety, her 7-year-old son, put in the care of his father, who has sided with the government and sometimes sends Ms. Valdivia angry text messages about her allegiances.
+“For now, I have to be with my people,” she said, referring to her fellow fugitives. “In the future, when Nicaragua is free, my son is going to enjoy all of that.”When Christopher Fuller and his research team received a “stop work order” on New Year’s Eve, they had four hours to shut down their lab, making sure their chemical and biological samples were securely stored in refrigerators that would keep running if the electricity was shut off.
+Mr. Fuller had spent the previous few months with the Environmental Protection Agency in Durham, N.C., studying approaches to decontamination after a biological weapons attack. He is one of legions of contractors hired by the federal government who are suddenly out of work because of the shutdown.
+As the shutdown has dragged on to become the longest in American history, these contractors have found themselves in the same predicament as the roughly 800,000 federal employees who are not being paid — except the outcome may be worse. Many contract workers, unlike federal employees, do not expect to be reimbursed for unpaid wages once President Trump and Congress agree to reopen the government.
+“We are the ones that do the research and gather the data alongside federal workers,” Mr. Fuller said, “yet we don’t have the same safety net or same visibility.”There was one small rally outside the show’s opening Friday night: About a dozen advocates of statehood for Puerto Rico gathered behind a banner, holding signs and shouting slogans. The protesters said they had no issues with “Hamilton” but were using the occasion to call attention to their concerns.
+The production is a fund-raiser, expected to generate about $15 million for the Flamboyan Arts Fund, a Miranda family effort to support Puerto Rican artists. The money is being raised in part through the sale of several thousand tickets for $5,000 each; about a quarter of all the tickets are being sold for $10 each.
+At the Friday night opening, there were a few boldfaced names from the mainland, including the television producer Shonda Rhimes, the musician Questlove and the television host Jimmy Fallon; a number of Puerto Rican celebrities, including the singer Lucecita Benítez, the comedian Raymond Arrieta, and the former Miss Universe Denise Quiñones; and the Spanish chef José Andrés, who was active in relief efforts here after the 2017 hurricane.
+There were “Hamilton” alumni, including Leslie Odom Jr., who won a Tony as the original Aaron Burr, and a lot of people who played some part in the creation of the show, including Ron Chernow, the historian whose biography inspired it.
+There were also a lot of people who just wanted to see “Hamilton.”
+“The fact that Lin-Manuel is Puerto Rican makes us all here so proud,” said Melissa González, a lawyer who got tickets just two days ago. She attended with her husband, Carlos Surillo, also a lawyer, who cited the importance of celebrities to Puerto Rico’s cause. “Figures like Roberto Clemente, Raul Juliá and now Lin-Manuel have moved Puerto Rico forward,” he said.The reasons for writing these Notes notes vary, but oftentimes they are mea culpas for public errors. Armie Hammer apologized with a Notes app note for criticizing his peers for posting grief selfies after Stan Lee’s death (“I want to apologize from the bottom of my heart and will be working on my Twitter impulse control”). Kendall Jenner apologized for her clothing line’s insensitive use of the Notorious B.I.G.’s and Tupac Shakur’s likenesses (“we are huge fans of their music”). Logan Paul apologized for videotaping a dead body in Japan (“I intended to raise awareness for suicide and suicide prevention”). Cardi B notably did not apologize for secretly marrying Offset (“at least ya can stop saying i had a baby out of wedlock”). Ariana Grande once apologized for licking a doughnut (“I will strive to be better”).
+Other public figures who have used Notes to make statements include Taylor Swift, Lena Dunham, Drake, Pete Davidson and Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
+Part of the medium’s appeal is the ease with which its contents may be shared. Notes app apologies are screenshotted and dispersed, first on Twitter and Instagram, and then in entertainment news reporting. They are embedded into tabloid websites and quoted by magazines, as polished statements coming directly from publicists might be.
+Zara Rahim, who handled publicity for Vogue before joining The Wing, a women’s co-working space, as its communications director, said that the efficacy of these statements lies not only in their speed but also their appearance. “I can just write this quick note on my Notes app, because it looks like I did it on my phone, have my publicist take a quick glance at it, if I’m smart,” she said, “and then post it directly on my Instagram.”
+Sometimes statements include grammatical and spelling errors, or profanity, which function (perhaps unwittingly) as rhetorical devices, making the authors seem not only unpretentious but fallibly human. Their notes also frequently employ clichés of spoken apologies: “from the bottom of my heart,” “profoundly,” “I wish I knew then what I know now,” and so on. These tics foster the false sense of intimacy that most social media encourages.In her telling, Mr. Mugrabi casually proposed to her at the apartment in 2004, after his mother was nudging him on the phone about wanting to throw an engagement party. “He didn’t have a ring, but I said, ‘You don’t need a ring to propose,’” Ms. Mugrabi said. So he popped the question (she said yes) and called his mother right back. “His mother said, ‘I’m throwing you a party tomorrow.’”
+The five-carat diamond ring would come later.
+The couple wed in 2005 at an extravagant ceremony at the Pierre hotel that featured orchids dripping from the ceilings and a performance by Ishtar, the Arab-Israeli chanteuse. Ms. Mugrabi wore a custom white-lace gown by Victorio y Lucchino, which required her to visit its atelier in Seville, Spain, for fittings.
+“It was way over even what I wanted,” she said. “I knew about 30 people at my wedding. It had about 500 or 600.”
+Guests included a who’s who of art-world machers, including Peter Brant, the paper magnate, and his wife, Stephanie Seymour; Aby Rosen, the real estate developer; Larry Gagosian, the high-powered gallery owner; and Steven A. Cohen, the financier who last year bought a prized Roy Lichtenstein painting from Agnes Gund for $165 million.
+The newly wed Ms. Mugrabi quickly learned her role in the family empire.
+“I just copied his mother, and she told me what to do,” she said. “She’s like, ‘Well, you just do the home part with the entertaining. The way we run our business is mostly through the home, because we don’t have a gallery.’”
+For more than a decade, the couple enjoyed the perks of a billionaire lifestyle.
+“Every summer we went to Sardinia, to Italy, to Portofino,” Ms. Mugrabi said. “We went on lots of different yachts. Aspen. Miami. We went to St. Barts three times minimum, a year.”In her 25 years of marriage to Jeff Bezos, MacKenzie Bezos has been a loyal ambassador for Amazon, the company that made her and her husband the richest couple in the world.
+She was an integral part of its origin story, driving to Seattle in 1994 while Mr. Bezos sat in the passenger seat, working on the nascent company’s business plan. She was Amazon’s first accountant and was involved in its transformation from a small online bookseller to the e-commerce behemoth it is today, the second company in American history to be valued at over a trillion dollars.
+Ms. Bezos, 48, is a novelist. But Amazon has defined her public image almost wholly. The announcement this week that she and her husband would be getting a divorce may soon change that. A statement signed “Jeff & MacKenzie,” which was first posted to Mr. Bezos’s Twitter account, read: “After a period of loving exploration and trial separation, we have decided to divorce and continue our shared lives as friends.”
+The couple, who have four children, wrote that they see “wonderful futures ahead, as parents, friends, partners in ventures and projects, and as individuals pursuing ventures and adventures.”“I’ve done training across the country,” Tom Buckley, the town’s deputy fire chief, said. “When I’m asked where I live, I never mention the Patriots. I just say Foxborough. And instantly, everyone starts talking to me about the Patriots and how they always win there.
+“Does that happen with any other N.F.L. team? I mean, I don’t know where the Miami Dolphins play, even though I know it’s not Miami.”
+The Patriots, unbeaten in their last eight home playoff games, will put that streak on the line Sunday afternoon against the Los Angeles Chargers in an A.F.C. divisional playoff game. The Patriots, who have won five Super Bowls since the 2001 season, have had, for them, an uneven season, losing five of eight away games. But they were the only N.F.L. team to be 8-0 at home, a substantial source of pride in Foxborough.
+“In the town, we feel like we bring a different type of energy at those home games,” David Tynan, a longtime Foxborough resident, said on Wednesday outside the town’s primary grocery store. “Game days are like holidays. By kickoff, the streets are quiet — you’re either at the stadium or inside watching the game.”
+Because there are few hills, trees or other buildings near Gillette Stadium, the landscape is windswept in January and bracing, with temperatures typically in the 20s. The Patriots intentionally built their practice facility adjacent to the stadium, and they almost always practice outside, acclimating to the elements in a way that their playoff opponents — from mostly warmer regions — cannot. The atmosphere in Gillette Stadium is also especially hostile to visiting teams, as Patriots home crowds are considered among the most vociferous in the N.F.L.
+Rich Noonan, a lieutenant in the Police Department and a fifth-generation native of Foxborough, recalled the town’s blue-collar origins and said area fans “were protecting their home turf.”Please sign up here to have the Race/Related newsletter delivered weekly to your inbox.
+Three months ago, a couple from rural Wisconsin, James and Denise Closs, were found shot dead in their home. That same night, their 13-year-old daughter, Jayme Closs, disappeared.
+Jayme, thankfully, was found alive on Thursday night. Her reappearance was one of the biggest news stories of the week, trending on Twitter, and even outperforming some of our coverage of the government shutdown.
+That outsize attention became a racial flash point on social media.
+Why, some readers asked, is Jayme Closs getting so much national attention when black girls and Latina girls and Native American girls who go missing often receive so little? What makes the story of a missing white girl so newsworthy and engrossing to so many Americans?
+These are questions that I, as the editor of this newsletter and a black woman, am always asking.
+In 2017, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, a New York Times correspondent based in Washington, wrote about how at-risk youths, who are disproportionately black and brown, “are often ignored by public officials and the news media,” even though roughly 35 percent of missing children in the United States are black, and about 20 percent are Latino.The Washington State Department of Transportation has a problem that just won’t go away.
+For years, people have persistently stolen those green and white mile markers posted along the highway. The most popular signs to pilfer are Mile 420, a popular number among marijuana enthusiasts, and Mile, ahem, 69. (If you don’t know that one by now, we can’t help you.)
+“They will typically go and take those more than anything,” said Trevor McCain, who specializes in driver information signs at the Transportation Department. “They have special meanings to some people.”
+So the sign aficionados in Washington had to get creative. In hot spots for sign theft, they’ve simply moved the highway marker back one-tenth of a mile and tweaked the sign to say Mile 419.9. Or Mile 68.9.Don’t become the story.
+That’s an adage in the news business that most journalists try to live by, even in a time that rewards self-promotion. And it’s a rule that Megyn Kelly flouted again and again.
+While this tendency was not much of a factor in her previous job, as a prime-time anchor at Fox News, it created complications during her 18-month stint at NBC.
+The network canceled her show, “Megyn Kelly Today,” days after she suggested on air that dressing up in blackface for Halloween was appropriate for white people. Ms. Kelly’s comments, and the uproar that followed, felt familiar to many fans and critics.
+[NBC and Megyn Kelly part ways with the full $69 million from her contract.]
+Those who become stars at major broadcast networks have a rare talent for being interesting and innocuous at the same time. Ms. Kelly, a former corporate lawyer who made her name as a sometimes confrontational interviewer, struggled to walk that line.LABUAPI, Indonesia — The high school bookkeeper, Nuril Maknun, faced constant harassment from her boss, the principal.
+At school, he often described his sex life and pressured her to have an affair. After work, he would call her and continue his obscene monologues.
+“That kind of conversation happened so often I couldn’t even count,” Ms. Nuril said in a recent interview. “I told him, ‘You need to go to a psychiatrist.’ ”
+After months of this, she recorded one of the calls so she would have evidence of his behavior.
+The result: She lost her job and went to jail. Meanwhile, his career has flourished.Huawei’s equipment is used in mobile phone and internet networks around the world. But American officials have for years considered the company to be vulnerable to efforts by Beijing to spy on Americans or sabotage their communication systems.
+Huawei denies that it operates as an extension of Beijing. Still, as the company has grown to become the world’s top supplier of telecommunications gear, the United States government has worked to discourage American mobile carriers and consumers from buying its equipment. Washington has shared its security concerns with allied governments in Europe and elsewhere.
+On Dec. 1, Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer, was arrested in Canada at the request of the United States. American investigators have accused her of deceiving financial institutions about Huawei’s business in Iran, causing them to inadvertently violate United States sanctions. The Canadian legal authorities have not yet decided whether Ms. Meng will be extradited to the United States.
+Diplomatic tensions between China and Canada jumped after Ms. Meng’s arrest, with Beijing detaining several Canadians in what were seen as tit-for-tat arrests. Among those still being held in China are Michael Kovrig, an experienced diplomat and Sinophile who had spent years investigating sensitive subjects like the human rights of minority groups in China; and Michael Spavor, an entrepreneur with high-level contacts in North Korea.
+The second person arrested by the Polish authorities this past week was an employee of Orange, the French telecommunications company. Orange’s office was raided, and the employee’s belongings were seized. Polish officials did not offer more details about what the two men were accused of, but said that they would be held for three months while the investigation continued.Q: A rent-stabilized tenant in my co-op building is a hoarder. My apartment is near hers and now, for the first time in 15 years, I have mice and roaches. The board said that the sponsor of the hoarder’s apartment isn’t doing what he should, but if I report the situation to the health department, the building will just get more fines. The mice freak out my wife, the roaches freak me out, and the exterminator says the hoarder is the source of our problems. What can and should we do?
+A: You and your wife are entitled to live in a sanitary home not overrun with pests. An apartment packed with belongings could pose health and safety hazards for the tenant, the co-op and you. If your neighbor’s hygiene creates a fire hazard or causes foul odors, leaks or vermin infestations, she may be in violation of her lease and could potentially face eviction.
+Hoarding is a mental disorder, one that often progresses or worsens with time, which might explain why you’re only seeing the mice and roaches now. Because this is a mental-health problem, any solution will include a measure of patience and compassion.
+“There are city agencies that could be called. There are social services agencies. Sometimes when you employ multiple different remedies at once, all of those things would put pressure on the party to clean up their act,” said Barry G. Margolis, a litigator in the Manhattan office of the law firm Abrams Garfinkel Margolis Bergson. “It’s not a helpless or hopeless situation.”The college became a pathway to the middle class, a respected place to get a bachelor’s degree without spending too much money or moving too far from home. By the 1970s, it had strengthened its liberal arts programs and joined the state university system.
+But in recent decades, troubling signs cropped up. Young families left rural Wisconsin for Madison and Milwaukee, which had their own University of Wisconsin campuses. Fewer students graduated from high school in the area around Stevens Point, including a 14 percent drop in its home county from 2012 to 2016. And under former Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican whose term ended Monday, state funding declined and a mandatory tuition freeze made it hard for the college to make up the difference.
+By last spring, the university, which has about 7,700 students, was looking at a two-year deficit of about $4.5 million. The state, which had provided half the university’s budget in the 1970s, was now covering only 17 percent of it.
+“Sometimes, I liken it to climate change,” said Greg Summers, the provost, who helped come up with the plan to remake Stevens Point. “The higher-ed climate has changed profoundly and it’s not going back to the old normal.”
+The turmoil is not unique to Stevens Point, where nearly half the students are the first generation in their family to attend college. In large parts of the Midwest and Northeast, public universities far from urban centers are hurting for students and money. And they are facing painful choices.
+Almost four hours from Chicago, Western Illinois University eliminated dozens of vacant faculty positions last year and announced it would lay off 24 professors, including some with tenure.Alison Roman’s stew remained at the top this week, along with dijon and cognac stew (above), Melissa Clark’s farro broccoli bowl and more in the collection below.WASHINGTON — The Department of Veterans Affairs is preparing to shift billions of dollars from government-run veterans’ hospitals to private health care providers, setting the stage for the biggest transformation of the veterans’ medical system in a generation.
+Under proposed guidelines, it would be easier for veterans to receive care in privately run hospitals and have the government pay for it. Veterans would also be allowed access to a system of proposed walk-in clinics, which would serve as a bridge between V.A. emergency rooms and private providers, and would require co-pays for treatment.
+Veterans’ hospitals, which treat seven million patients annually, have struggled to see patients on time in recent years, hit by a double crush of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and aging Vietnam veterans. A scandal over hidden waiting lists in 2014 sent Congress searching for fixes, and in the years since, Republicans have pushed to send veterans to the private sector, while Democrats have favored increasing the number of doctors in the V.A.
+If put into effect, the proposed rules — many of whose details remain unclear as they are negotiated within the Trump administration — would be a win for the once-obscure Concerned Veterans for America, an advocacy group funded by the network founded by the billionaire industrialists Charles G. and David H. Koch, which has long championed increasing the use of private sector health care for veterans.10 a.m.
+A few of my neighbors ask if I’m affected by the shutdown. I say not yet. I’m off work, but my pockets are O.K. for now. Most of the museum staff is furloughed like me. But skeleton crews are still at work, some unpaid.
+The Matisse cutouts still have to be rotated in and out of light; the Van Gogh has to be guarded.
+We call the people doing this work “the Essentials.” That would be a great name for a band, I think. I imagine seeing that on iTunes. Then I think that if this goes on for much longer, I’ll cancel my Apple Music subscription.
+The first week of the shutdown, when we were still open, the museum got a call from someone who had tickets to the National Museum of African-American History and Culture that had been bought months in advance. The caller had Grandma come up from Georgia to see it, but the museum was closed when they arrived. The caller was glad that the National Gallery was open and had an exhibition of photographs by Gordon Parks to enjoy.
+The gallery was closed the next day.
+10:30 p.m.
+President Trump gave a speech on television saying that the shutdown is all about the “wall.” I remember that last month he tweeted that “most of the people not getting paid are Democrats.” When I heard that, I thought about how many of the federal workers in Washington are African-American, which I think might be how the president meant it to sound. Funny, we tend to see ourselves as American citizens who have a right to pursue happiness — which is kind of hard to do without a steady income.
+Wednesday, Jan. 9
+6:30 a.m.
+My wife, Tracie, is getting ready to go to her job as a massage therapist. She started her business during the recession, when I was laid off from a nongovernment job. She usually works four days a week, but is adding extra hours during the furlough and thinking about adding an extra day.
+11 a.m.
+I pick up my mom and take her to get some medication. Her senior center had a field trip to the National Gallery scheduled for Monday. Now, of course, it’s canceled. Since there are no other free museums open, the whole outing is off. It’s probably for the best, my mom says. Another trip to the casino instead isn’t great for the group’s savings.57A was of this ilk as well — “Are you dense?” anagrammed to END USER, which worked once you substituted the letters “r” and “u” for the first two words of the clue.
+14D, 42D and 59A all used this tactic in slightly simpler fashion. The frequency of these clues, which used short word homonyms or symbolism for letter entries to add a wrinkle, was a distinctive feature today.
+40A and 44D used a gimmick that I’ve quickly grown to really enjoy, where a clue is missing a series of letters that, when correctly figured, both complete the clue and spell its punny solution. So “O_d st_ _i_s” solves to LORE — which, when entered in order, creates a clue of “Old stories.” 44D, which takes the letters needed to make the clue “Stampeders,” was very clever.
+45A: I filled these four spaces in via crosses, and I figure that the answer, NEXT (meaning “What follows”), contains “10 + 10,” albeit a bit mashed up: You have T-E-N, and then you have X, the Roman numeral for 10, of course.
+47A: This is easy if you know Hagar the Horrible comics. If not, thank you, crosses!
+4D: A little nothing clue, I held onto “aga” here, after seeing “Amana,” and it still makes sense to me, even though AGE, or A GE range, is the answer. Perhaps this mistake came from a heart pining for an incredible Aga range.
+13D was a favorite today. The phrase didn’t flow at first — I thought a braggadocious TV personality would ask “Haven’t you seen me on TV?” — but “seen I’m on” works as well, which, as Mr. Backward would have it, would be NOMINEES. Does that make sense? This clue instantly brought to mind this odd little spot that I remembered seeing on a morning show once and, of course, YouTube had it. I saw this and tried to follow suit for about five minutes; it is a strange and esoteric skill!“The wall or the steel barrier. They can have any name they want. But we have to have it.” President Trump often repeats the same things when talking about why he wants a southern border wall. “The crime.” “Drugs.” “American jobs.” While there is little evidence these problems are caused by unauthorized immigration or that any of this will be helped by a wall, he has remained steadfast. “I will build a great, great wall.” “You need that wall.” “We can do without a wall.” But as the fight over border security has dragged on, here’s how he’s expanded his argument. He’s always said it was about securing the border. But recently, Trump has emphasized that he believes building the wall is the moral and compassionate thing to do. “This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end. ” And he says a wall will benefit people on both sides of the border, addressing what he is calling — “This is a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” But Democrats say the current situation at the border was escalated by Trump’s policies. “A challenge that President Trump’s own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened.” So who does Trump think will benefit? Over time, Trump has named many groups that he says will benefit from a wall. It started as the — “American worker.” And then expanded to — “Legal residents.” And — “And our vets.” “Our immigrant communities.” “Asian-Americans.” “Hispanic-American communities.” “African-American workers.” “It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need.” How will Trump pay for the wall? After some discrepancies regarding the wall’s price tag — “$6 billion.” “Probably $8 billion.” “Maybe $10 or $12 billion.” “$18 billion.” “$5.7 billion for a physical barrier.” Trump has modified his claim that Mexico is going to pay for the wall. “Mexico —” “will pay —” “for the wall. 100 percent.” It’s gone from — “They don’t know it yet, but they’re paying for it.” To — “It may be through reimbursement, but one way or the other Mexico will pay for the wall.” And — “The border wall would very quickly pay for itself.” And finally, what will Trump’s wall look like? Trump’s vision for the wall itself has also changed over time. Early on, Trump said the wall would be — “It’s going to be a Trump wall. It’s going to be a real wall.” “An impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful —” “A serious wall.” “This is a wall that’s a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling.” “It’s going to be made of hardened concrete and it’s going to be made out of rebar and steel.” Now, it’s sounding more like this: “I never said I’m going to build a concrete — I said I’m going to build a wall. Just so you know, because I know you’re not into the construction business.” “Steel is stronger than concrete.” “It’s a new design, highest technology.” “Walls that you can see through.” “It will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.” So, will his latest push end with a wall? There’s still a tough political fight ahead.SAN DIEGO
+A question of unrivaled consequence has descended on this picturesque seaside city: Should the good citizens root for or against the Chargers, the football team that abandoned them a season ago but didn’t go really all that far.
+In years past, the team’s surprising success would be cause for widespread celebration. Fans would proudly wear team jerseys and caps, bars would overflow with viewing parties, and the team would dominate water-cooler talk. The Chargers went 12-4 in the regular season, beat the Baltimore Ravens on the road in an A.F.C. wild-card game, and now have a chance to topple the New England Patriots in Foxborough, Mass., on Sunday in the divisional round.
+But ambivalence has dominated San Diego’s cool ocean breeze of late. After a long, messy fight over funding for a new stadium in San Diego that was never built, the Chargers left for Los Angeles in 2017, forcing legions of jilted fans to decide whether to follow the team north, or wash their hands of the beloved Bolts.
+Last year, the team began with four losses and missed the playoffs by a game, which made it easier for bereft fans to move on. Talk radio hosts trashed the team, an angry fan flew scathing banners over the team’s new home in Carson, about a 45-minute drive south of Los Angeles (without traffic), and one restaurant owner gave out free tacos after every Chargers loss.With both countries also turning away from multilateral trade agreements, China has the opportunity to step in and play an even bigger role in the global economy. And Russia has seen an opening to expand its influence in Europe, where rising nationalism has threatened to fracture the European Union.
+Mr. Trump and the Brexiteers have ridden a nationalist tide in their countries as well, using a potent anti-immigration message to appeal to mostly white voters who yearn for a more homogeneous society that no longer exists.
+In Britain, immigration has provided an electric current to conservative politics since at least 1968, when the lawmaker Enoch Powell delivered a seminal speech calling for immigrants to be repatriated. Quoting a Greek prophecy of “the river Tiber foaming with much blood,” Mr. Powell’s speech is credited with propelling the Conservative Party to victory in the general election of 1970, though it also turned Mr. Powell into a political pariah.
+Opposition to immigration spiked over the last two decades as Britain was hit with a series of terrorist attacks by Islamist militants and watched as migrants from Syria, Libya and other war-torn countries flooded across Europe.
+In the United States, where the right was once preoccupied by social issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, immigration surged as an issue because of the changes wrought by globalization. Manufacturing jobs moved overseas, where labor was cheaper, while immigrants took both unskilled and high-tech jobs previously held by Americans.
+By 2008, the financial crisis had wiped out millions of jobs, keeping people out of work for years and deepening the sense of grievance among many Trump supporters that immigrants were working for less and robbing them of their livelihoods.Julián Castro, the former housing secretary and former mayor of San Antonio, announced on Saturday that he would run for president, one of the most high-profile Latino Democrats ever to seek the party’s nomination.
+His first campaign stop will be in Puerto Rico, where he will speak on Monday at the Latino Victory Fund’s annual summit and meet with residents still struggling to recover from Hurricane Maria. Later in the week, his campaign said, he will go to New Hampshire.
+“When my grandmother got here almost a hundred years ago,” Mr. Castro said at the Plaza Guadalupe amphitheater in San Antonio, in the neighborhood where he was raised. “I’m sure that she never could have imagined that just two generations later, one of her grandsons would be serving as a member of the United States Congress and the other would be standing with you here today to say these words: I am a candidate for president of the United States of America.”
+Mr. Castro’s announcement had been expected for several weeks. He established an exploratory committee in December, two months after publishing a memoir, “An Unlikely Journey” — a familiar path for presidential candidates who want to play up their life stories and qualifications and, perhaps, get ahead of their biggest vulnerabilities. This month he also visited two of the early caucus and primary states, Iowa and Nevada.Those who have shut their eyes, turned their backs and held their noses for the past two years will not go easily into battle with Mr. Trump. No matter the damage he has done to party or country, they have shown no discernible backbone. While Mr. Leonhardt’s heart is in the right place, I fear that his head may unfortunately be in the clouds.
+Robert S. Nussbaum
+Fort Lee, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+David Leonhardt has written the most articulate, well-documented and soundly crafted argument for the removal of Donald Trump from the presidency. This article should be printed and mass distributed all over America, much as Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” once was. I wasted no time sending it to my members of Congress.
+Joyce Grater
+Pittsburgh
+To the Editor:
+Should David Leonhardt’s powerful, comprehensive indictment of President Trump not be enough to persuade Republicans in Congress that he must be removed from office, I suggest they ask themselves these questions. Would they ever put their children on a plane piloted by someone with little previous flight experience, someone who had refused to read the plane’s instruction manuals, someone who had just locked his co-pilots out of the cockpit?
+Would they be comfortable if he had said in recent weeks that he felt at “war every day,” had seemed to be more and more suspicious of those around him, including, perhaps, even members of his own family, and had a history of hair-trigger rage against those who defied him? And how would they feel if he had begun to make increasingly rash and dangerous decisions?
+The terrifying truth is that all of our children, and all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, are already on that plane. And as Mr. Leonhardt urgently warns, Republicans had better figure out soon what they are going to do about it.
+Eric Chivian
+Boston
+The writer, a physician, is a former assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
+To the Editor:
+While I agreed with much of David Leonhardt’s article, it saddened me to read this part: “The biggest risk may be that an external emergency — a war, a terrorist attack, a financial crisis, an immense natural disaster — will arise. By then, it will be too late to pretend that he is anything other than manifestly unfit to lead .”Let me give three examples. Modern conservatism was forged in the crucible of the 1970s inflation crisis, and in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crash many conservatives were convinced that there was nothing the Federal Reserve could do about the vast army of the unemployed without touching off a similar inflationary spiral.
+But in hindsight this was wrong, the feared inflation never came, and the economic recovery was slowed because of the Republican fixation on tight money. Of course, in the Trump era some Republicans have conveniently become dovish on inflation. But in the preceding eight years, wage-earning Americans suffered unnecessarily because of a wrongheaded right-wing counsel of despair.
+A second example: While it’s true that family breakdown has deep and tangled roots, it’s also true that in the 1940s and 1950s, a mix of government policy, union strength and conservative gender norms established a “family wage” — an income level that enabled a single breadwinner to support a family.
+Maybe it isn’t possible to recreate a family wage for a less unionized and more feminist age — but are we sure? Is there really nothing conservatives can do to address the costs of child care, the unfulfilled parental desire to shift to part-time work, the problem that a slightly more reactionary iteration of Elizabeth Warren once dubbed “the two-income trap”? If marriages and intact families and birthrates declined as the family wage crumbled, perhaps we should try rebuilding that economic foundation before we declare the crisis of the family a wound that policy can’t heal.
+A final example: Historically conservatism has been proudly paternalist, favorable to forms of censorship and prohibition for the sake of protecting precisely the private virtues that Carlson’s critics think government can’t cultivate. But in recent decades, the right’s elites have despaired of censoring pornography, acquiesced to the spread of casino gambling, made peace with the creeping commercialization of marijuana, and accepted the internet’s conquest of childhood and adolescence.
+Yet none of these trends actually seem entirely beyond the influence of regulation. It’s just that conservatism has given up — once again, in unwarranted despair — on earlier assumptions about how public paternalism can encourage private virtue.
+The deeper point here is that public policy is rarely a cure-all, but it can often be a corrective. And the part of Carlson’s monologue his critics should especially ponder is the end, when he suggests that absent a corrective that "protects normal families," even the normal will eventually turn to socialism — choosing a left-wing overcorrection over a right that just says, Well, you see, we already cut corporate taxes, so there's nothing we can do.I’m 47 years old. Two days ago, you sent me an email, which I did not answer. I didn’t answer it, in part, because I am 47 years old.
+I appreciated your email. You are a person, who has written an email, and I am a person, who should reply to that email. However, your email arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and just as I opened it, my 16-year-old son came in. He wanted to describe to me an app he is in the process of developing. Then he showed me a funny article someone had sent him, and I showed him a funny article someone had sent me, and then I explained that I had work to do, that I needed, in fact, to respond to your email, and also to write 3,000 words in the next 36 hours. “I’ve only written 300,” I said.
+“Then you just have to do that again," he said, “10 times.”
+This seemed to me very encouraging. I reapplied myself to my computer, where your email was open on the screen, and he left, and then he returned.It’s Earnings Season
+The six largest banks in the United States will report their fourth-quarter results this week. If they report lower than expected numbers, the news could be read as another canary in the coal mine for a potential economic slowdown. Most banks have booked record returns for almost a year, thanks to tax cuts and a humming economy, but volatile markets at the end of 2018 could have put an end to this streak. Citigroup will release its earnings on Monday, followed by JPMorgan and Wells Fargo on Tuesday and Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America on Wednesday.
+More Bad Blood
+We haven’t heard much recently about Theranos, the seemingly miraculous blood-testing start-up that last year turned out to a giant fraud. But that may change on Monday, when a federal court in California holds a hearing on criminal charges against Theranos’s former chief executive, Elizabeth Holmes, and its former president, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani (also Ms. Holmes’s erstwhile boyfriend). Indicted on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud last summer, they could each face prison sentences of up to 20 years.
+What Else?
+Lots of car news these days. The North American International Auto Show, one of the world’s biggest, hits Detroit on Monday; electric cars are expected to be a hot topic. Fiat Chrysler agreed on Wednesday to pay nearly $650 million to settle lawsuits over its use of illegal software on diesel vehicles to produce false results on emissions tests. Tangentially related: The Chrysler building — once New York City’s tallest structure — is for sale.
+What Counts
+$137 billion: The net worth of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and the world’s richest man. But that number may soon change, as Mr. Bezos and his wife of 25 years, MacKenzie Bezos, announced their divorce last Wednesday. Ms. Bezos, a novelist, may be entitled to a sizable stake in Amazon as well as half of all those billions, which would make her — you guessed it — the world’s richest woman.A constant stream of strangers lined up at their house in Baltimore’s Little Italy, seeking food and help. One of Pelosi’s most arresting memories, she told CNN’s Dana Bash, was giving immigrants who came to the door advice on how to get into the projects or to the hospital.
+Alexandra, Pelosi’s documentarian daughter, recounts this anecdote: Her son, Thomas — who was named after Big Tommy and who stood at the speaker’s side as she reclaimed her gavel — wanted an Xbox in 2017, so he set up a lemonade stand in Manhattan and raked in $1,000.
+His grandmother sat him down and asked, “That’s going to the victims of Hurricane Harvey, right?”
+He set up the stand again the next year and was once more schooled by his grandmother asking, “That’s going to the victims of the California wildfires, right?”
+Contrast that with Don Jr.’s uncharitable message on Instagram on Tuesday: “You know why you can enjoy a day at the zoo? Because walls work.”
+Where the D’Alesandros saw the downtrodden and immigrants as people to weave into the American dream, the Trumps saw suckers to squeeze.
+According to The Times’s blockbuster tax investigation, Fred lavished Donald with three trust funds and $10,000 Christmas checks. When Donald was 8, he was already a millionaire, thanks to his tax-scamming father. Fred Trump was hauled before a congressional panel investigating whether he had looted government money through fraud. (One congressman said the patriarch’s chicanery made him “nauseous.”)She stood out for her deep, strong, caramelly voice and her aversion to appearing in her reports. “She was famous,” the correspondent Rita Braver recalled, “for not wanting to be on camera.” Sylvia, Rita said, was the only correspondent she knew, “who had to be coaxed to do an on-cam.”
+At lunch one day in New York, Sylvia and I talked about our lives, about how we both married young and divorced young. She told me she had nothing like the easy early life I had. She’d had to get herself to and put herself through college, at U.C.L.A. She was also more of a free spirit than the rest of us. With her boyfriend Stanhope Gould, a CBS News producer who was a “hippie” with a ponytail and sandaled feet, she organized a wild annual dinner that was called “Wretched Excess!”
+We women were in the door, but still clawing our way into the club. “Do it the way the men do it” was the motto. So we lowered our voices, and wore brown, boxy jackets to shroud all curves and protrusions. As one of my friends back then said, “I adopted the affect of a librarian.” Fearing that it would remind our bosses that we were of a different gender, almost none of us breast-fed our babies.
+There was a presumption that we few women competed with one another, that we were, as they’d say, cat fighters. But we became pals and supported one another in our shared attempts to prove that women could cover any kind of story as well as, if not better than, the men.
+Sylvia left CBS in 1977 to work at ABC News and was among the first anchors of its new magazine show “20/20,” where she continued to distinguish herself with award-winning, crusading investigations like reports on exploding gas tanks in cars, and was named by TV Guide as “the most trusted woman on TV.” Toward the end of her career, she worked at PBS with Bill Moyers.
+When Sylvia and I started out, there was no “Me Too” movement. We simply endured the pawing, convinced it was “just the way things are.” Our generation was able to change a lot of the way things were, but obviously not enough. Sylvia must’ve been as stunned as I am that many young working mothers today, for instance, are still afraid to ask for time off to attend their kids’ soccer games, lest they be seen as “less available” than the young fathers who are their colleagues.
+Nearly 50 years ago, when Sylvia and I were hired at CBS, there was only one female chief executive in the Fortune 500 (Katharine Graham at The Washington Post). In 2018, there were 24, just 5 percent, and down from 32 the year before. With an electorate that’s around 53 percent female , we hold 23 percent of the seats in Congress. But there are now more women than ever — over 100, and a Madam Speaker. We still have never had a female president, but Susan Zirinsky was just named president of CBS News. A first, and a triumph.
+I wish I could pick up the phone right now and talk to my friend Sylvia Chase about it.
+Lesley Stahl is a correspondent for the CBS program “60 Minutes” and the author of “Becoming Grandma: The Joys and Science of the New Grandparenting.”I’d like to apologize to all the “banana republics” I’ve offended over the decades with snarky references to their dysfunction. This is karma: I now live in a nation where a petulant president has shut down much of the most powerful government in the world — so the White House isn’t even paying its water bills.
+The government has shut down before, under presidents of both parties. But this shutdown is particularly childish and unnecessary; to revise Churchill, rarely have so many suffered so much at the hands of so few.
+It’s difficult to pick the craziest of the arguments that President Trump is making about the shutdown — there’s a vast buffet of imbecility to choose from — but here’s my good-faith effort.
+1. This is a crisis! Terrorists are crossing the border! Rapists!
+This is more like a lull than a crisis. The number of people apprehended at the border remains near a 45-year low. From 1972 on, there were more apprehensions every single year than there were in 2017.After her decade at home, she went back to work, initially part time. She jointly wrote a book about bail in the United States and served on several commissions to improve legal services and juvenile justice. In the beginning of that period, her youngest child was not yet in school, and she worked during his nap times and late at night. On weekends, she recalled, her husband took full responsibility for the children so that she could work without interruption.
+She became a trial lawyer for the Legal Services Corporation and, after holding several other posts, was named assistant attorney general for legislative affairs by President Jimmy Carter, who later nominated her to the appeals court.
+Harold Hongju Koh, a professor and former dean of Yale Law School, described Judge Wald as a vital figure in American law. “It’s hard to think of a more exuberant pioneer in this arena,” he said. She excelled as a judge both in the United States and abroad, he said, and “fought for human rights and civil liberties everywhere long after many activists would have laid down their pens.”
+Patricia Ann McGowan was born on Sept. 16, 1928, in Torrington, Conn., the only child of Margaret O’Keefe and Joseph McGowan. In describing her childhood for oral history projects, she said she grew up in a crowded Irish-American household with an extended family of mostly women after her father left home when she was 2. While her mother and an aunt often worked as secretaries, the rest of the household revolved around episodic factory work at the Torrington Company, which manufactured sewing machine needles, among other things.
+Her family, she said, took great pride in her academic success and made it clear that they did not expect her to end up on the factory floor. She went away to Connecticut College — it had offered her the greatest financial aid — but spent her summers on the assembly line back in Torrington greasing ball bearings and fabricating sewing needles. The workers were on strike during her last summer there, so she worked for the union.
+Everyone at home would chip in, she said, to see that she had decent clothes for school. “At one point we had eight people in the house and only two were working, my grandfather and an aunt, and they were carrying the rest of us, as a family does,” Judge Wald said.A Nicaraguan Supreme Court justice who was President Daniel Ortega’s closest legal adviser before he resigned this week accused the president and his wife of running a brutal government that tramples on civil rights and is driving the nation to the brink of civil war.
+The justice, Rafael Solis, was speaking in an interview with The New York Times after his resignation on Thursday, which marked the highest-profile defection yet in the country’s nine-month-old political crisis. Government critics said it signaled a possible weakening of the political apparatus that has helped keep Mr. Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, in power long after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets demanding their ouster.
+Mr. Solis was unsparing in his criticism of Mr. Ortega, who he had been allied with since the 1970s.
+“The separation of powers in Nicaragua is over,” he said. “The concentration of power is in them, those two people.”TORONTO — It was another proud moment for Canada: a Saudi teenager who had just been granted asylum walking through the arrivals gate at Toronto airport embraced by the country’s popular foreign minister.
+Wearing a gray sweatshirt emblazoned with the word “Canada,” 18-year-old Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun smiled at the throng of cameras that greeted her. But she left it to Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland to do the talking.
+The minister presented her as a “very brave new Canadian,” adding that the young woman — who spent the last week in a Bangkok airport hotel lobbying for her freedom — was tired and just wanted to “go to her new home.”
+“Where we can save a single person, where we can save a single woman, that is a good thing to do,” said Ms. Freeland, who refused to answer repeated questions about how this decision will affect Canada’s already strained relationship with Saudi Arabia. “And I’d like to also emphasize, this is part of a broader Canadian policy of supporting women and girls in Canada and around the world.”I’m not sure whether this woman knew how much time she had left to live, but if she did, she never told me. She hired me to do extra work, beyond what she had contracted with the cleaning service, during July. That was how Mia and I survived some unexpected moving expenses and a $300 car repair that would otherwise have sent me spiraling. I picked her weeds, sorted piles and deep-cleaned areas of her house to save her family from having to do it all after her death.
+She couldn’t have known how much I needed the additional income and that by hiring me to help end her life she gave me a way to survive mine. My work schedule was so unpredictable that I couldn’t apply for a second job, even though I badly needed more income. I had to scramble for ways to supplement it on my own.
+After I did extra work for the woman who was ill, I started asking a few other clients if they needed some, too, noticing unkempt areas of their house or yards that weren’t on my list. Some offered to pay me for additional work during those months, and there was steady interest in an ad that I’d posted on Craigslist:
+I work 25 hours a week as a professional cleaner, but it’s not enough to pay the bills.
+Most of the other housecleaning ads seemed to be husband-and-wife teams who had trucks for clearing out clutter to take to the dump. A few were full-fledged businesses: licensed and insured, and with employees to juggle bigger jobs. I didn’t think my ad would stand out, but I got a half-dozen calls every time I posted a new variation.
+One woman hired me to clean out her rental property before the next tenant moved in. The apartment was grimy but not horrible, and during the walk-through she admitted that she’d never hired a cleaner before. She wanted me to clean out the oven and fridge but not the blinds. I tried to estimate how long it would take me, but I had come to the walk-through with Mia balanced on my hip, and it was hard to get a good look at the space.
+“Four or five hours?” I guessed.
+“Oh, I just figured I’d give you a hundred dollars,” she said as we stood in the hallway. Then she handed me a wad of cash. I looked at her for a second, unsure of what to do. It was more than I had been paid for any individual cleaning job. She motioned for me to take the money. “I liked your ad,” she said. “I remember what it’s like, to struggle when you have someone who depends on you.” She looked at Mia, who, growing timid from the eye contact, pressed her head into my shoulder.
+“Thank you,” I said, trying to suppress the feeling that I was getting away with something. “You won’t be disappointed.”
+After I strapped Mia into her car seat, I sat behind the wheel, staring at the dashboard. I’m doing it, I thought to myself. I’m really doing it! I turned around to look at my daughter. It had been a long time since she’d had a special dinner. “Do you want a Happy Meal?” I asked. The wad of cash bulged in my pocket. Pride swelled in my chest. Mia’s face lit up, and she threw up her arms. “Yay! ” she yelled from the back seat. I laughed, blinking back a few tears, and yelled out for joy, too.
+Stephanie Land (@stepville) is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Maid,” from which this essay was adapted.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.WASHINGTON — President Trump on Saturday unleashed an extended assault on the F.B.I. and the special counsel’s investigation, knitting together a comprehensive alternative story in which he had been framed by disgraced “losers” at the bureau’s highest levels.
+In a two-hour span starting at 7 a.m., the president made a series of false claims on Twitter about his adversaries and the events surrounding the inquiry. He was responding to a report in The New York Times that, after he fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director in 2017, the bureau began investigating whether the president had acted on behalf of Russia.
+In his tweets, the president accused Hillary Clinton, without evidence, of breaking the law by lying to the F.B.I. He claimed that Mr. Comey was corrupt and best friends with the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. He said Mr. Mueller was employing a team of Democrats — another misleading assertion — bent on taking him down.
+Individually, the president’s claims were familiar. But as the special counsel’s inquiry edges ever closer to him, Democrats vow a blizzard of investigations of their own and the government shutdown reaches record lengths, Mr. Trump compiled all the threads of the conspiracy theory he has pushed for many months in an effort to discredit the investigation.Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devastation wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s background, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heartfelt , but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother.
+Thus, when the actress Sandra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans was when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immigrant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the difficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the garbled expression of love.
+So many of our Asian parents have struggled, suffered and endured in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This struggle and sacrifice was how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are expected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for how we should live our lives.
+Our parents, for the most part, told us to get a good education, get a good job and not speak up, things they had to do to survive. They have encouraged, or forced, many of us to become doctors, lawyers and engineers, and to feel ashamed if we do not. What these parents did not do was tell us we could become artists, actors or storytellers, people engaged in seemingly trivial, unsafe and unstable professions. This is why it has been so rare for me, as I give talks in different places around the country, to encounter Asian parents who embrace their children who do not become the “model minority.”The first full-length album from the Puerto Rican new-pop superstar Bad Bunny, “X 100PRE,” was released just before Christmas, at the end of a chaotic year in which he was already the signature voice thanks to countless one-off singles and guest verses.
+On “X 100PRE,” he extended his narrative, starting with Latin trap and reggaeton and exploring dembow, pop-punk and synth-pop. It showed an artist not content with sticking strictly to the sounds that be built his success on.
+What’s next for Bad Bunny? And what were the sounds and movements that set the table for his rapid rise?
+On this week’s Popcast:SpaceX, the private rocket company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, is laying off about 10 percent of its work force in what it framed as a necessary cutback to position the company for an unchartered future.
+The company will have about 6,000 employees remaining after the layoffs, which will take place companywide.
+“To continue delivering for our customers and to succeed in developing interplanetary spacecraft and a global space-based internet, SpaceX must become a leaner company,” the company said in a statement. “Either of these developments, even when attempted separately, have bankrupted other organizations. This means we must part ways with some talented and hardworking members of our team.”
+The Los Angeles Times first reported the cuts, citing an email sent to employees by the company’s president, Gwynne Shotwell. SpaceX was offering at least eight weeks of pay and other benefits to those who were being laid off, the newspaper reported.Which leads us to the next question: If the planned new repairs would be as safe and durable without requiring closing the line, why didn’t anyone think of them before? Shouldn't someone downstream of the governor have thought to bring in outside experts for a fresh look, given the disruptive stakes?
+Some people are skeptical about this new plan, in fact, precisely because it was driven by Governor Cuomo. That’s good. Without skepticism, society collapses. But this entire episode illustrates a failure to be skeptical. And it shows us the risks of ignoring what it means to fail, at scale, in a booming city that grows every month. It didn’t have to be the governor asking for a better way. But no one else did.
+Until then, the new array of repairs had not been considered by the in-house engineers at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the WSP consultants or others involved in the project. Andy Byford, the president of New York City Transit, said he was conducting an independent review of the plan and would not sign on unless he was convinced of its safety and durability. That said, he is enthusiastic about its prospects. “I own the risk,” Mr. Byford said. “I am the president, the accountable person. This is my job.”
+Anyone on the M.T.A. board could have demanded alternatives. Mr. Cuomo appoints six of the 14 voting members, and by force of personality, he has driven a number of projects, including this one — at the last minute — and pushing construction of the Second Avenue line.
+You can find representatives of eight other public officials on the authority’s board, including the mayor of New York. Even more power is held by a virtually unknown committee of four, any one of whom can veto the entire capital budget. On this committee are the speaker of the State Assembly, the State Senate majority leader, the mayor and the governor.We may not have control, but we have choices. With intention and focused attention, we can always find a forward path. We discover what we are looking for. If we look for evidence of love in the universe, we will find it. If we seek beauty, it will spill into our lives any moment we wish. If we search for events to appreciate, we discover them to be abundant.
+There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.”
+Older women have learned the importance of reasonable expectations. We know that all our desires will not be fulfilled, that the world isn’t organized around pleasing us and that others, especially our children, are not waiting for our opinions and judgments. We know that the joys and sorrows of life are as mixed together as salt and water in the sea. We don’t expect perfection or even relief from suffering. A good book, a piece of homemade pie or a call from a friend can make us happy. As my aunt Grace, who lived in the Ozarks, put it, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.”
+We can be kinder to ourselves as well as more honest and authentic. Our people-pleasing selves soften their voices and our true selves speak more loudly and more often. We don’t need to pretend to ourselves and others that we don’t have needs. We can say no to anything we don’t want to do. We can listen to our hearts and act in our own best interest. We are less angst-filled and more content, less driven and more able to live in the moment with all its lovely possibilities.
+Many of us have a shelterbelt of good friends and long-term partners. There is a sweetness to 50-year-old friendships and marriages that can’t be described in language. We know each other’s vulnerabilities, flaws and gifts; we’ve had our battles royal and yet are grateful to be together. A word or a look can signal so much meaning. Lucky women are connected to a rich web of women friends. Those friends can be our emotional health insurance policies.
+[Read more: I Am (an Older) Woman. Hear Me Roar.]
+The only constant in our lives is change. But if we are growing in wisdom and empathy, we can take the long view. We’ve lived through seven decades of our country’s history, from Truman to Trump. I knew my great-grandmother, and if I live long enough, will meet my great-grandchildren. I will have known seven generations of family. I see where I belong in a long line of Scotch-Irish ancestors. I am alive today only because thousands of generations of resilient homo sapiens managed to procreate and raise their children. I come from, we all come from, resilient stock, or we wouldn’t be here.
+By the time we are 70, we have all had more tragedy and more bliss in our lives than we could have foreseen. If we are wise, we realize that we are but one drop in the great river we call life and that it has been a miracle and a privilege to be alive.
+Mary Pipher is a clinical psychologist in Lincoln, Neb., and the author of the forthcoming “Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Talk about a master class in “How They Do Things in Albany.”
+To keep a legislative pay increase but lose new restrictions on lawmakers’ outside income, Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie is piggybacking onto a lawsuit by a conservative legal group that is seeking to overturn the raise.
+In case you haven’t been following at home: During budget negotiations last year, the New York Legislature created a committee composed of current and former state and New York City comptrollers to determine whether members of the Assembly and State Senate deserved a raise, their first in 21 years. In December, the committee recommended a $50,500 raise, to $130,000 by 2021, along with a provision that lawmakers’ outside income could not exceed 15 percent of their pay — an important ethical reform to avoid conflicts of interest.
+Mr. Heastie, and other legislators who objected to the outside income limits, immediately said the committee — whose recommendations automatically became law on Jan. 1 — had no legal right to do anything but decide on pay.
+Within days of the committee’s decision, the Government Justice Center, an Albany-based nonprofit, sued to overturn it, saying that only the Legislature could set pay, and that the panel had overstepped its statutory mandate by imposing outside pay limits .Crises offer these would-be authoritarians an escape from constitutional shackles. National emergencies — especially wars or major terrorist attacks — do three things for such leaders. First, they build public support. Security crises typically produce a rally-round-the-flag effect in which presidential approval soars. Citizens are more likely to tolerate — and even support — authoritarian power grabs when they fear for their safety. Second, security crises silence opponents, since criticism can be viewed as disloyal or unpatriotic. Finally, security crises loosen normal constitutional constraints. Fearful of putting national security at risk, judges and legislative leaders generally defer to the executive.
+National emergencies can threaten the constitutional balance even under democratically minded presidents like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. But they can be fatal under would-be autocrats, for they provide a seemingly legitimate (and often popular) justification for concentrating power and eviscerating rights. Hitler’s authoritarian response to the 1933 Reichstag fire is the most prominent example, but there are many others. In Peru, a Maoist insurgency and economic crisis enabled Mr. Fujimori to dissolve the Constitution and Congress in 1992 ; in Russia, a series of deadly apartment bombings in 1999 — allegedly by Chechen terrorists — triggered a surge of public support for Mr. Putin, who was then the prime minister, which allowed him to crack down on critics and consolidate his power; and in Turkey, a series of terrorist attacks in 2015, along with a failed 2016 coup attempt, allowed Mr. Erdogan to tighten his grip via a two-year state of emergency.
+Crises present such great opportunities for concentrating power that would-be autocrats often manufacture them. In 1937, President Vargas of Brazil, resisting term limits that would force him to leave office the next year, used the “discovery” of a communist plot (the so-called Cohen Plan, later revealed to be a fabrication) to dissolve the Constitution and establish a dictatorship.
+Similarly, President Marcos of the Philippines did not want to step aside when his second term expired in 1973. But he needed a reason to subvert constitutional checks. An opportunity arrived in 1972 , when a series of explosions rocked Manila. Following an apparent assassination attempt on his defense secretary, Marcos, blaming communist terrorists, declared martial law and established a dictatorship. This crisis, too, was largely fabricated: The bombings are believed to have been carried out by government forces and the assassination attempt was staged. The “communist menace” that Marcos used to justify martial law amounted to several dozen insurgents.
+Although President Trump operates in a different political environment, his behavior, particularly since the November midterm elections, betrays similar autocratic instincts. The president manifestly lacks the patience or negotiating skills needed to deal with divided government. His response to Democratic control of the House of Representatives has been a refusal to compromise and, more dangerously, a refusal to lose. Unlike Presidents Clinton and Bush, who conceded defeat when it became clear that their initiatives lacked legislative support, Mr. Trump has refused to accept the failure of his border wall project. Unable to obtain the necessary votes in Congress, the president recklessly forced a government shutdown. When that didn’t get him his wall, he moved to circumvent Congress altogether by inventing — if not yet declaring — a national emergency. In his Oval Office speech on Tuesday, he used the word “crisis” six times in eight minutes. That is how autocrats respond to legislative opposition. Following in the tradition of Vargas and Marcos, Mr. Trump fabricated a security threat to make the case for bypassing Congress.I called my mom again.
+“I’m not making a revenge movie. I want to make a movie about my feelings.”
+“Oh,” she said. “Hmm.”
+Feelings have never been my mom’s thing. She’d rather clean the bathroom than talk about feelings. When my dad died and the coroner came, I could see two rooms from where I stood; One was the bedroom, where my dad lay dead, the other was the family room, where my mom tidied. My nephew Jacob pulled out his phone and read the mourner’s Kaddish while we watched the coroner put a toe tag on my dad and wheel him out on a cart. As they did that, my mom straightened pictures on the wall and moved a coffee table a few feet to the right.
+I stood by the front door and waited for the elevator to come to take my dad away. When he was gone, my mom asked if we could help her clean up the bedroom. We said yes, of course. But, I said, first we need to have a drink and a chat about our feelings. It’s what my dad would have done.
+When I was a kid, it was my dad who’d sit up with me in the middle of the night to talk. According to my dad, who was a psychotherapist, feelings were complicated and sometimes they were elliptical, meaning they didn’t always make sense.
+Five months after my dad died, I started shooting the movie. I decided I’d use old footage that I had of him interwoven with new footage of me grieving in myriad ways. I was grieving at a dinner party, in the woods, in a loft, in a pickup truck, in bed. My mom was in the movie, too. I felt good when I was shooting. Productive! Like my grief was useful.
+At one point I lay splat on the kitchen floor moaning, while I instructed my mom to cut mushrooms. From the cold kitchen floor, I directed my mom to do less.
+“Do less?” she asked. “If I do any less, I’ll be dead.”
+“Let me see what that looks like,” I said.
+So she did. She hung over the kitchen counter like a wilting plant, barely alert, chopping mushrooms. I turned to look up at her. “Perfect,” I said.The Senate has some tough questions to ask of William Barr this week before voting on confirming him as the next attorney general.
+Not only has Mr. Barr already come perilously close to reassuring Mr. Trump that the president did not obstruct justice by trying to derail the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Russia to corrupt the 2016 election, and that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, was overreaching, but he also has a long history of advancing an aggressive, expansive conception of presidential power.
+He has made the case that a president can resist congressional oversight — a convenient position for Mr. Trump, but a concerning one for the country, now that Democrats are in charge of the House. He’s even seen no problem with the president investigating a political opponent, saying there would be more validity in investigating Hillary Clinton for a uranium deal the government approved while she was secretary of state — which she had nothing to do with — than there was in investigating whether Mr. Trump conspired with Russia.
+This theory of executive power has long been prized in conservative legal circles. But it will only empower a chief executive who has fought oversight since his first days in office and has rued the day that the special counsel was appointed after his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation.But boy, I can’t see anything right now. I’m not patting myself or our team on the back, but they worked hard day and night. They left their families. They worked weekends. They wanted to do it to bring Jayme home.
+Was there an earlier moment in the investigation when you thought the end was here — the case was solved?
+There were a lot of days. I was hesitant when we got the call that they had Jayme. Because we’ve had those calls before: “This is definitely Jayme at the Subway in Michigan.” Or, “She’s at the park in Los Angeles.” So even when we got the call that it was Jayme Closs, I said, “No, don’t react yet.” And when my detective was standing in my office and he said, “We got her,” then it was like — wow! Go there. Get there. It’s 60 miles away. Go and get her and never let her go.
+You have two kids — a 13-year-old and a 16-year-old. How has this case affected you personally and your family?
+I just think about it all the time. You go to bed and you’re thinking about it. You’re like — did I do everything we could have done today? I talked to many of our detectives about that and they felt the same way. They’d wake up at 2 in the morning and take notes about something — did I miss that word? Is there a text message I’m missing? Is there a phone call? Is there a friend we didn’t interview? This case was like nothing anyone has ever seen around here. Personally this case, it took its toll on me and my family.
+We live nine miles from the sheriff’s department but they were always in bed and I was always leaving before the sun came up.
+When you thought about what the outcome of this could be, how does the real outcome compare?
+This is something I dreamed about — being able to bring her back to Barron County. We were able to do that last night. It was something that we had to hope for and never gave up hope on, but after 88 days of this, hope was dwindling.
+Did Jayme know that so many people were searching for her?
+I don’t know. I don’t think we pressed that. We’re letting Jayme go at her pace now. When she wants information, we’re giving it to her. When she wants to give information, we’re taking it from her. Hopefully, we’ll be able to shield her as much as we can and let her work at her own pace to get back to the normalcy that she can get to.This needs context.
+Twenty-two days into the longest government shutdown ever, President Trump continued to press his case for a border wall. His tweet on Saturday was crammed with statistics that were either exaggerated or omitted important context.
+Immigrant prison population
+Mr. Trump’s figure for the percentage of unauthorized immigrants in federal prisons is exaggerated.
+Out of the Bureau of Prisons’ total inmate population of 183,058 in the first quarter of the 2018 fiscal year, 21 percent were immigrants, both legal and undocumented, according to a government report. At least 13 percent of the total population, or 23,826 inmates, were in the country unlawfully. The immigration status of another 11,698 inmates was under investigation, while 2,608 inmates were lawful immigrants or had received relief from deportation.
+The most common crimes committed by these immigrants were drug-related offenses (46 percent) and immigration offenses (29 percent).Today’s Theme
+There are eight across clues — at 23, 39, 42, 67, 70, 92, 97 and 115 — that are solved by common two-word phrases. The second words of all these phrases can be found in a common location, which is referred to in the puzzle’s title, “Parlor Tricks.” Lest one go immediately goth and think, “Oh, funerals! Finally, a sepulchral theme on Sunday,” Mr. Kravis specifies “at the ice cream parlor” in that first theme clue at 23A. Hopefully, much as we all must die, everyone also gets to at least try ice cream once in their lives.
+The first entry I got, because of the pattern of my solve, was a little bit misleading — 39A, “The confirmed bachelor ordered a …” which, on the crosses, became SINGLE MALT, and made me go immediately something and think, “Oh, a hard liquor Sunday! I feel you, Mr. Kravis.” But a few more entries straightened me out.
+At 23A, “The grand marshal ordered a …” made me think of a PARADE right away — what else would a grand marshal want? The full answer, PARADE FLOAT, soon followed (crossed with CALORIC, which was really brutal, Mr. Kravis; why are you doing this to us).
+At 42A, “The crossing guard ordered a …” TRAFFIC CONE.
+In case you grew up sugar-free (or are the most self-disciplined person I’ve ever encountered), we are looking at words that go with ice cream.
+The only one that didn’t zing and sing for me right away was 70A, “The dental hygienist ordered a …” SUCTION CUP, probably because dentistry gets me a little squeamish. Not that I don’t have the utmost respect and admiration for dentists, and honestly it’s a perfectly decent way to get the requisite CUP in here.
+After looking around a bit online, I’ve come to realize that ice cream parlors are still a huge thing in the world (for some reason, every search I ran finds a thousand results in India; there are a lot of extremely wild spots elsewhere in Asia that specialize in enormous multi-scoop creations). But I still imagine a very specific location and era when I think of a “soda shop.”A winter storm pummeled parts of the Midwest on Saturday, turning roads into a snowy and slushy mess that has contributed to the deaths of at least nine people, including a state trooper in Illinois, the authorities said.
+The storm was expected to head toward the Mid-Atlantic States, with several inches of snow forecast for Washington, D.C., and much of Virginia. In Missouri, up to 17 inches of snow had fallen in the central part of the state, the National Weather Service said.
+Winter storm warnings extended across a widespread portion of the United States: from central Kansas, across areas of the Midwest and into southwestern Ohio, the Weather Service said. The warnings also stretched from the central and southern Appalachians to eastern Virginia. As the storm moved east, some in Washington sought to stock their shelves in preparation for its arrival.
+As of Saturday afternoon, the Missouri State Highway Patrol reported more than 800 vehicle crashes and four fatalities. It also responded to almost 1,800 stranded drivers. Officials warned drivers to stay off the road, citing heavy snowfall and freezing rain in some places.The families of victims in the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School must receive access to internal documents at Infowars, the internet and radio show whose host, Alex Jones, has spread the false claim that the shooting was an elaborate hoax, a judge ruled on Friday.
+The ruling was a legal victory for the families, which filed a defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones, who traffics in conspiracy theories, and Infowars last year. The suit argued that peddling bogus stories was essential to the business model of Infowars, which sells products including survivalist gear, gun paraphernalia and dietary supplements.
+A gunman killed 20 children and six adults in the Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Conn., just over six years ago, and Mr. Jones helped to spread the idea that grieving relatives of those victims were paid “crisis actors.”
+The plaintiffs in the lawsuit are relatives of five children and three adults who were killed, and one F.B.I. agent who responded to the shooting. Their complaint said the families have faced “physical confrontation and harassment, death threats, and a sustained barrage of harassment and verbal assault on social media.”WASHINGTON — Senate Democrats intend to force a vote this coming week on the Trump administration’s move to lift sanctions against companies controlled by an influential Russian oligarch, intensifying a new line of scrutiny of the administration’s handling of Russia policy.
+Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, said on Saturday that the sanctions on the business empire of the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, should remain in place, and that a deal negotiated by the Treasury Department to remove them was “flawed and fails to sufficiently limit” Mr. Deripaska’s “control and influence of these companies.”
+Mr. Schumer announced that he intended to use a provision in a 2017 sanctions law to prompt a full Senate vote as soon as Tuesday on a resolution to block the Treasury Department’s deal with Mr. Deripaska’s companies. But to approve the measure, Democrats would need the support of several Republicans, which would require them to split with President Trump on the issue. The Democratic-controlled House would also have to pass it.KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The stories passed down about the Kansas City Chiefs’ playoff malfunctions might sound apocryphal, as if embellished over a game of telephone, but they’re not. Really.
+The fans who jammed Arrowhead Stadium on Saturday can recite detail after grisly detail. So can those who roamed Kansas City’s sideline: Many of them added to the misery last year, two years ago, three years ago, five.
+One player changed the calculus. His ascension terminated an era of despair. His quarterbacking brilliance inoculated the fan base. In his grand playoff unveiling, Patrick Lavon Mahomes II purged a quarter-century of Arrowhead futility.
+After every first down, every score, every defensive stop, fans in the upper deck flung snowballs in glee. They kept coming, much like the top-seeded Chiefs, who blitzed their postseason nemesis, the Indianapolis Colts, 31-13, and advanced to host the A.F.C. Championship next Sunday against the Los Angeles Chargers or the New England Patriots.“Brexit and the border wall are driven by the same impulse. Both reflect the island nation approach to the world, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just cut ourselves off from everybody else?’”
+ROBERT KAGAN, a foreign policy theorist at the Brookings Institution.SUNDAY BUSINESS
+A headline with the Corner Office column last Sunday, about Julie Sweet of Accenture, referred imprecisely to her title with the company. She is the chief executive for North America, not the company’s overall chief executive. A subheading misstated the number of employees she oversees. It is 57,000, not 500,000, which is the number of employees in the entire company.
+SUNDAY STYLES
+An article last Sunday about people referring to pit bulls as “pibbles” misstated the year Rebecca Corry organized the One Million Pibble March. It was 2013, not 2015.
+•
+Picture captions with the Look column last Sunday, about a skating program for girls in Harlem, misstated the surname of two students. They are Jade Lawrence, not Alexander, and Ariyana Peal, not Pearl.
+•
+The Vows column last Sunday, about several weddings that took place one day last month at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, misspelled the surname of one of the brides in some instances. As noted elsewhere in the article, she is Beatriz Hernandez, not Hernanadez.Cassandra Leigh Siegel and Alex Harrison Neubauer were married Jan. 12 at the Pierre Hotel in New York. Rabbi Peter J. Rubinstein, a friend of the bride's family, officiated.
+Mrs. Neubauer, 29, is finishing her final year at N.Y.U. School of Law, and has accepted an offer to work in the real estate transactional group at Kasowitz Benson Torres, a law firm in New York, following graduation and the bar examination. She graduated from Dartmouth.
+She is the daughter of Wendy M. Siegel and Stephen B. Siegel of New York. The bride’s father is a partner in Fairstead, a real estate investment and development firm in New York. He also works in New York as the chairman of global brokerage at CBRE, a commercial real estate services and investment firm based in Los Angeles. Her mother volunteers for Gift of Life Marrow Registry and the bride’s parents are chairs for the national board of trustees for National Jewish Health.
+Mr. Neubauer, 28, is an associate in the underwriting group at Ladder Capital, a real estate finance and investment firm in New York. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.Rebekah Anne Brown and Thomas Jacob Kostelak were married Jan. 12 at 501 Union, an events space in Brooklyn. The Rev. Richard Acosta, a friend of the couple who was ordained through the Christian Fellowship Center, officiated.
+Mrs. Kostelak, 28, is a law clerk at Sullivan & Cromwell, the Manhattan law firm. She graduated cum laude from Rice University and received a law degree from Columbia.
+She is the daughter of Mary E. Brown of Houston and Michael D. Brown of Henderson, Nev. The bride’s father is a renewable energy consultant based in Las Vegas.
+Mr. Kostelak, 25, is a structural engineer in the Manhattan office of Dewberry, an engineering firm based in Fairfax, Md. He is also studying for a master's degree in structural engineering at N.Y.U. He graduated cum laude from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.Ilana Sari Glusband and Isaac Joseph Gruber were married Jan. 12 at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Rabbi Daniel Alder officiated.
+Mrs. Gruber, 34, works in Jersey City as a director in the compliance department of RBC Capital Markets, a division of the Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin and received a law degree from Brooklyn Law School.
+She is the daughter of Roberta J. Glusband and Steven J. Glusband of Manhattan. The bride's mother retired as a literacy instructor at Public School 316 in Brooklyn. Her father is a partner in the Manhattan law firm Carter Ledyard & Milburn, where he is the chairman of its corporate department.
+Mr. Gruber, 36, is the general counsel at Eden Capital, an investment management firm in Manhattan. He graduated from Emory University and received a law degree with honors from the University of Chicago.Jaimie Nicole Shepard and Brett Evan Scheiner were married Jan. 12 at the Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach, Fla. Rabbi Rachel Greengrass officiated.
+Ms. Shepard, 32, is the owner and a jewelry designer for Jaimie Nicole Jewelry in Miami. She graduated from the University of Miami.
+She is a daughter of Donna B. Shepard and John S. Shepard of Coral Gables, Fla.
+Mr. Scheiner, 40, works in New York for the hedge fund Point72, which is based in Stamford, Conn. He works with fund managers as the head of corporate access. He graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received an M.B.A. from Columbia.
+He is a son of Joan B. Scheiner and J. David Scheiner of Coral Gables.
+The couple met in 2015 through the groom’s father who was also the bride’s business mentor.Chandrika Srivastava and Nikhil Basu Trivedi were married Jan. 11 in San Francisco. John Pleskach, a deputy marriage commissioner at San Francisco City Hall, officiated.
+The bride, 28, is a staff product manager at Tesla, a sustainable energy and automotive company in Fremont, Calif. She graduated from Yale and received a master’s degree in civil and environmental engineering from Stanford.
+She is a daughter of Sangita Srivastava and Rakesh Chandra Srivastava of New Delhi. The bride’s father is the chief pilot for standards, quality assurance and operations safety at IndiGo Airline in New Delhi; he retired, having achieved the rank of wing commander with the Indian Air Force. The bride’s mother retired as a geography teacher at Delhi Public School - Dwarka, a high school in New Delhi.
+The groom, 29, is a managing director at Shasta Ventures, a venture capital investment firm in Menlo Park, Calif. He graduated from Princeton.Rebekah Anne Brown and Thomas Jacob Kostelak were married Jan. 12 at 501 Union, an events space in Brooklyn. The Rev. Richard Acosta, a friend of the couple who was ordained through the Christian Fellowship Center, officiated.
+Mrs. Kostelak, 28, is a law clerk at Sullivan & Cromwell, the Manhattan law firm. She graduated cum laude from Rice University and received a law degree from Columbia.
+She is the daughter of Mary E. Brown of Houston and Michael D. Brown of Henderson, Nev. The bride’s father is a renewable energy consultant based in Las Vegas.
+Mr. Kostelak, 25, is a structural engineer in the Manhattan office of Dewberry, an engineering firm based in Fairfax, Md. He is also studying for a master’s degree in structural engineering at N.Y.U. He graduated cum laude from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.“True Detective” returns to HBO, this time with Mahershala Ali. And revolution brews in PBS’s “Victoria.”
+What’s on TV
+TRUE DETECTIVE 9 p.m. on HBO. Fresh off his Golden Globe win for “Green Book,” Mahershala Ali leads the third season of HBO’s time-jumping crime drama, which returns after a less-than-beloved second season. The locale this time is the Ozarks; the time periods are the 1980s, 1990s and 2010s; and the crime is a gruesome one involving children. As a level-headed detective, Ali (along with his partner, played by Stephen Dorff) investigates, while viewers are ping-ponged between decades — and see Ali’s character afflicted with dementia, struggling to explain the details of the case in a movie-within-a-show documentary. In his review of the season for The New York Times, James Poniewozik wrote that the season treads a lot of familiar ground, writing that “if you score ‘True Detective’ Season 3 on originality, it fails.” But he also noted: “If you treat it as a do-over — if the series, like one of its haunted antiheroes, is retracing its steps to try to get things right — then it’s fine. Often quite good. Far more consistent.”
+AMERICAN STYLE 9 p.m. on CNN. One of the pleasures of a decade-hopping show like “True Detective” is watching the costumes change to reflect the time periods, the way suits and hair are cut providing an indication of which one is being explored. For those wanting to give more thought to these nuances, this documentary series looks at American fashion during several windows of time in the nation’s history: The first episode, “War Boots to Work Suits,” covers the 1940s and ’50s, and the ways in which things like bikinis and Katharine Hepburn’s pants reflected the sensibilities of the time. The second episode, airing directly after, covers the 1960s and ’70s.But Loujain was not released. I remained silent, hoping my silence might protect her. Around that time, I was struck by a dark trend emerging on social media in Saudi Arabia. Anyone who criticized or made a remark on anything related to Saudi Arabia was labeled a traitor. Saudi Arabia has never been a democracy, but it hadn’t been a police state either.
+I kept my thoughts and my grief private. Between May and September, Loujain was held in solitary confinement. In brief phone calls that she was allowed to make she told us that she was being held in a hotel. “Are you at the Ritz-Carlton?” I asked. “I don’t have the Ritz status, but it is a hotel,” she laughed.
+In mid-August, Loujain was transferred to Dhaban prison in Jeddah and my parents were allowed to visit her once a month. My parents saw that she was shaking uncontrollably, unable to hold her grip, to walk or sit normally. My strong, resilient sister blamed it on the air-conditioning and tried to assure my parents that she would be fine.
+After the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in October, I read reports claiming that several people detained by the Saudi government at the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh had been tortured.
+I started getting phone calls and messages from friends and relatives asking if Loujain too had been tortured. I was shocked by the suggestion. I wondered how people could think a woman could be tortured in Saudi Arabia. I believed that social codes of the Saudi society would not allow it.
+But by late November, several newspapers, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reported that both male and female political and human rights activists in Saudi prisons had been tortured. Some reports mentioned sexual assaults.
+My parents visited Loujain at the Dhaban prison in December. They asked her about the torture reports and she collapsed in tears. She said she had been tortured between May and August, when she was not allowed any visitors.Matt Kuchar shot a bogey-free six-under-par 66 to extend his lead in the Sony Open on Saturday at Waialae Country Club in Honolulu.
+He’ll go into Sunday’s final round at 18-under 192 with a two-shot edge over Andrew Putnam, whose strong start allowed him to tie for the lead early in the third round.
+The 40-year-old Kuchar was three-under on the front side and regained the top spot. He ended the round with six consecutive pars.
+Kuchar will aim for his second championship in about two months after winning the Mayakoba Golf Classic in November in Mexico.The idea is to challenge China’s infrastructure program while also pushing back against its trade practices, cybertheft and expanding military facilities and presence in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. But the threat posed by the Belt and Road Initiative to American interests is debatable, and it is unclear how far the United States should — or can — go to compete. The funds set aside by the Trump administration amount to just a fraction of Beijing’s commitment.
+In Africa, American businesses have been largely absent while Chinese companies have put down roots, nurturing powerful allies through both legitimate and illegal means. Some target individual African officials and their family members with cash bribes or deals for services, like legal representation or insurance.
+Ms. Jandhyala’s bid for the $4 billion refinery project was a case study in the long odds the United States faces as it tries to go head-to-head against China in infrastructure development — and in the conditions under which American companies could prevail.
+The competition came to a head early last year, when Ms. Jandhyala and other consortium executives faced off in a conference room above Lake Victoria against Ugandan officials backing the Chinese companies. Uganda’s strongman president for the past 33 years, Yoweri Museveni, had called the meeting in his compound to try to resolve the bitter dispute.
+In a sign of the intense infighting, Uganda’s domestic intelligence agency investigated three officials believed to favor the American consortium and questioned its ability to finance the project, according to a copy of the agency’s report reviewed by The New York Times.
+In an April speech, Mr. Museveni praised Western companies for finally “waking up” to Africa. But he also noted that “the Chinese have already woken up — they are really, really, really very active and fast.”
+“So why not take advantage of both?” he asked.
+Scramble for a Prize
+The African Great Lakes have long tempted outsiders seeking riches, including the European nations that began plundering the continent in the 19th century. But in 2006, four decades after the end of British rule in Uganda, a prize untapped by the colonialists was discovered: oil deposits by Lake Albert that are among the largest in East Africa, enough to transform parts of impoverished Uganda.Each week, our survey of recent residential sales in New York City and the surrounding region focuses on homes that sold around a certain price point, allowing you to compare single-family homes, condos and co-ops in different locales.
+The “list price” is the asking price when the property came on the market with the most recent broker. The time on the market is measured from the most recent listing to the closing date of the sale.
+Manhattan | 1 bedroom, 1 bath
+$840,000[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+First there was “Jersey Shore” on MTV, and then “Mob Wives” on VH1.
+Now another reality television series, set to debut on Monday, features a blend of both — and like its predecessors, it is drawing criticism that it stereotypes Italian-Americans.
+“Bosses aren’t born, they’re ‘Made in Staten Island,’” MTV said in promotional materials for the show, “Made in Staten Island,” which the network described as “grittier and edgier” than its other reality shows.
+“Made in Staten Island,” which tracks young adults trying to avoid mob lifestyles, has drawn the ire of city officials and thousands of people who signed an online petition calling for it to be canceled. The show perpetuates the notion that Staten Island is “a cesspool of gangsters, meatheads and low lives” and is premised on the idea that “kids from Staten Island all grow up surrounded by the mafia,” the petition said.MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — From a couch on the back deck of a dockside restaurant, the Beatles playing in the background and a breeze blowing off the water, Joe Cunningham gestured to Shem Creek.
+“This could be the reality here, of oil rigs and oil spills off the beach,” Mr. Cunningham said. “An oil spill could just decimate the area, and all of a sudden instead of people coming to Charleston, South Carolina, they high-tail it down to Florida or somewhere else.”
+Offshore drilling might not captivate voters in most parts of the country, but it did here. For months, Mr. Cunningham called for the restoration of a federal ban as his Republican opponent, Katie Arrington, talked about immigration and warned that a vote for him would be a vote for Nancy Pelosi’s “San Francisco values.” And in November, Mr. Cunningham, 36, defeated Ms. Arrington in a House district that last elected a Democrat four years before he was born.
+It was one of the biggest upsets of the midterms, and it turned on an ideal issue for a candidate who, before he became a lawyer, was an ocean engineer.The question of free will looms large
+The more recent allegations against Kelly, many previously outlined by the music journalist Jim DeRogatis on BuzzFeed News, revolve around what has been described as a sex cult. Kelly is said to have exhibited almost total control over women who lived or traveled with him, dictating their movements, when they could eat and when they could go to the bathroom.
+Kelly’s lawyer told CBS that the women who lived with him were attracted to a “rock ’n’ roll life” and did so voluntarily.
+“They were perfectly consensual relationships,” Greenberg said. “Whatever occurred, I’m not someone who should be judging, nor should any of us be judging, someone’s personal relationships, what goes on in their bedrooms.”
+He called those who appeared on the documentary “a bunch of disgruntled people who are looking for their 15 minutes of TMZ fame.”
+Kelly’s accusers say he brainwashes the women into submission, but cases that involve psychological control can be exceptionally difficult to prove, lawyers say. Alan W. Scheflin, a professor emeritus at Santa Clara University School of Law, recalled a case in which someone was found to have been falsely imprisoned because their clothing was taken away and they would have had to flee naked. But he said that duress is usually considered to be something physical, like being locked in a basement.
+“It’s so horrible and so frustrating because there aren’t remedies focused specifically on this issue,” he said.1. The government shutdown is now the longest in history.
+At midnight on Saturday, the partial shutdown reached 22 days, surpassing the previous record of 21 under the Clinton administration in 1995.
+President Trump, above, used an Oval Office address and a visit to Texas to push for his long-promised border wall, the central issue of the shutdown. Under pressure from his own party and advisers, the president has backed away from declaring a national emergency to pay for the wall.
+His aides said they expected the stalemate to be resolved by the time Mr. Trump delivers the State of the Union address on Jan. 29.ATHENS — Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called on Sunday for a vote of confidence in the Greek government, hours after a junior coalition partner announced that he would quit in protest of a deal to end a dispute with Macedonia over its name.
+The move threw the country into new political turmoil, fueling speculation about possible snap elections, although Mr. Tsipras said his government aimed to complete its term into October.
+The coalition partner, Defense Minister Panos Kammenos, who is also the leader of the right-wing Independent Greeks party, announced his resignation following talks at the prime minister’s residence.
+“The Macedonia name issue does not allow me not to sacrifice my post,” the minister told reporters afterward. “ANEL is leaving the government,” he said, using the Greek acronym for his party.JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel acknowledged on Sunday that Israeli forces had attacked Iranian weapons warehouses in Syria, after years of ambiguity over involvement in specific attacks on the country.
+“We worked with impressive success to block Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, adding that the Israeli military had struck Iranian and Hezbollah targets “hundreds of times.”
+“Just in the last 36 hours, the air force attacked Iranian warehouses with Iranian weapons at the international airport in Damascus,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “The accumulation of recent attacks proves that we are determined more than ever to take action against Iran in Syria, just as we promised.”
+The rare admission came hours after the Israeli military announced that it had exposed the sixth and final tunnel under its border with Lebanon, which it says the Iranian-backed organization Hezbollah dug, wrapping up a six-week operation to seal the cross-border tunnels.When she was a teenager, Rosaura Romero watched her mother juggle classes and a full-time job while raising her alone.
+“She could have very easily told me to go find a job,” said Ms. Romero, 21. “She always said, ‘Don’t stress yourself with work. This is your time to just learn.’”
+So Ms. Romero did just that.
+Now Ms. Romero is a senior at the University at Buffalo, majoring in psychology and health and human services. She does not have a clear-cut post-graduation plan, but she knows she wants to give back, “putting good out into the world,” she said in an interview last month at her family’s apartment in Harlem.
+Her vision for the future was inspired in large part by the example that her mother set and by the guidance of a local nonprofit organization.But Mr. Trump’s inner circle has shrunk, and he has fewer advisers around him whom he trusts. His White House chief of staff is still serving in an acting capacity, and the West Wing is depleted by the shutdown. As he himself wrote on Twitter this weekend, “There’s almost nobody in the W.H. but me.”
+Mr. Surabian said the rest of the party must recognize the threat and rally behind the president. “Republicans need to understand that Democrats in Congress, beholden to the ‘resistance,’ aren’t interested in bipartisanship, they’re out for blood,” he said. “It’s a war we can win,” he added, “but only with fortitude, unity, coherent messaging and a willingness to fight back.”
+Democrats, for their part, say they are out for accountability, not blood, intent on forcing a president who went largely unchecked by a Republican Congress during his first two years in office to come clean on the many scandals that have erupted involving his business, taxes, campaign and administration.
+They plan to get started in the coming days. On Tuesday, they will grill former Attorney General William P. Barr, who has been nominated by Mr. Trump to assume his old office again, about his approach to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. Mr. Barr wrote a private memo last year criticizing Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and Democrats will use his confirmation hearings to press him on whether the special counsel will be allowed to finish his work and report it to Congress.
+Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, also plans to force a vote in the Senate this week on the Trump administration’s plans to lifts sanctions on the companies of Oleg V. Deripaska, a Russian oligarch close to Mr. Putin’s government, if he reduces his ownership stakes. Democrats plan to use the issue to argue that Mr. Trump has been soft on Russia.
+Even committees that are not usually in the investigation business are jumping into the fray. Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the new chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told The New Yorker last week that he was eliminating the subcommittee on terrorism in favor of a subcommittee aimed at investigating Mr. Trump’s foreign policy.
+Lost in all this may be any chance of bipartisan policymaking. At stake in the current fight is just $5.7 billion for Mr. Trump’s promised border wall, roughly one-eighth of one percent of the total federal budget. If one-eighth of one percent of the total budget can prompt the longest government shutdown in American history, then the potential for further clashes over the remaining 99.87 percent seems considerable. On issues like health care, taxes, climate change, guns and national security, the two sides start this era of divided government far apart.Good morning. Everybody has a plan, Mike Tyson famously said, until they get punched in the mouth. I wanted to cook the California chef Cal Peternell’s recipe for braised chicken legs (above) for dinner this evening, alongside the California chef Travis Lett’s recipe for roasted yams. This was to set off a discussion of Bay Area vs. Los Angeles cooking: that mellow Peternell indica sensibility set up against Lett’s animated sativa vibe. Talk about it!
+Except the chicken braises in the oven for 40 minutes at 325; the yams roast for 35 minutes at 425. What to do? I’m not a mathlete. I do understand braising, though. You can do it on the stove-top, cooking the chicken gently over medium low heat for about the same time as you’d need in the oven. Just finish the dish with the yams at the end, maybe under the broiler, to crisp the chicken’s skin. Add a salad and pose the question: Would you rather live in Berkeley or Santa Monica?
+For dinner on Monday night, I like these cold noodles with chile oil and citrus-zipped cabbage from the irrepressible Alison Roman, in part because the leftovers make for a really good lunch the next day.
+Have you seen Ali Slagle’s recipe for split-pea soup? It doesn’t seem like a midweek recipe, but you could put all the ingredients into an electric pressure cooker with around 6 cups of stock, cook it on high pressure for 20 minutes, use a manual release of the steam to blitz the peas, and have it for dinner on Tuesday night in under an hour. Really good.LOS ANGELES — C.J. Anderson has accomplished a good deal as a running back in the N.F.L. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards last season. He was a Pro Bowl selection in 2014, and a Super Bowl champion with the Denver Broncos. But the past nine months have been a different experience for him altogether.
+Since April, three teams have released him: the Broncos, the Carolina Panthers and the Oakland Raiders, who waived him in December without giving him a single carry. The Raiders, it should be noted, were atrocious this season.
+“It’s how you handle things,” Anderson said. “I always just kept my head down and kept pushing.”
+A new opportunity for him materialized last month when the Rams signed him as something of a stopgap measure. Todd Gurley II, their star running back, was sidelined with a knee injury, and Anderson suddenly found himself on the field for one of the best teams in the league. So he took the ball and rumbled with it, and he has been bulldozing defenders ever since.
+On Saturday night, Anderson paired with Gurley to form a punishing one-two running attack as the Rams advanced to the N.F.C. Championship Game with a 30-22 victory over the Dallas Cowboys. Anderson rushed for 123 yards on 23 carries, and Gurley finished with 115 yards on 16 carries. They also combined for three touchdowns, and whomever the Rams face next weekend — the Philadelphia Eagles or the New Orleans Saints — will need to concoct some sort of recipe to neutralize two runners with different styles.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+WASHINGTON — Not so long ago, left-wing activists were dismissed as fringe or even kooky when they pressed for proposals to tax the superrich at 70 percent, to produce all of America’s power through renewable resources or to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
+Then along came Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and her social-media megaphone.
+In the two months since her election, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has had the uncanny ability for a first-term member of Congress to push the debate inside the Democratic Party sharply to the left, forcing party leaders and 2020 presidential candidates to grapple with issues that some might otherwise prefer to avoid.
+The potential Democratic field in 2020 is already being quizzed about her (Senator Kamala Harris praised her on “The View”), emulating her digital tactics (Senator Elizabeth Warren held an Instagram chat in her kitchen that looked much like one of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s sessions) and embracing some of her causes.
+Ms. Warren and Senator Cory Booker, among others, have recently endorsed the idea of a “Green New Deal,” a call to reimagine an environment-first economy that would phase out fossil fuels. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez thrust that issue into the national dialogue after she joined a sit-in protest in the office of then-incoming House speaker, Representative Nancy Pelosi, in one of her first, rebellious acts in Washington.The East Bay Express, an alternative weekly newspaper in the Bay Area that gained national acclaim for its 2016 exposé of a police sex scandal in Oakland, Calif., laid off almost its entire editorial staff on Friday, the newspaper’s publisher said.
+The newspaper plans to rely on freelance writers for the foreseeable future, the publisher, Stephen Buel, said in an interview on Saturday. Six employees were laid off, including five in the editorial department.
+In addition to its coverage of arts and culture, the newspaper was known for local accountability journalism. Three police chiefs were fired within a week when it published its series on the Oakland Police Department, which won a George Polk Award for local reporting.
+Like weekly newspapers across the country, The Express, which has existed for more than 40 years, had recently been running a deficit as print advertising revenue declined, Robert Gammon, the paper’s editor, said.From the start, it has seemed like the federal government shutdown with no end in sight. More than three weeks later, with Washington still gridlocked over President Trump’s demand for a wall along the southwestern border, that is still true.
+But the sharpest effects of the longest shutdown in the nation’s 242-year history are only beginning to emerge across the country. In many parts of the United States, the shutdown has underscored how deeply the federal government is connected to everyday life, and the spending standoff has created cascading crises far from the border.
+About 800,000 federal workers are going without pay — and a growing number of them, worrying about missing mortgage and credit card payments, are filing for unemployment benefits. Thousands more federal contractors are off the job and will most likely not be able to recoup their missed paychecks. Restaurants and shops near major federal offices, especially in Washington, have emptied out.KABUL, Afghanistan — The 14-year-old boy squatted on his haunches on the floor of the prison and, unbidden, began to chant the verses of a Pashto poem in a high, beautiful voice. It was an a cappella elegy in which a prisoner implores his family not to visit him on the Muslim holiday of Eid.
+And do not come to us for Eid, for we are not free to welcome you.
+I don’t want you to look at my chest, for there are no buttons on my shirt.
+Don’t come to this asylum, for we are all lunatics in here.
+The boy’s name was Muslim, and he was among 47 boys being held in the Badam Bagh juvenile detention center in Kabul as national security threats. Most were charged with planting, carrying or wearing bombs, and many of them, like Muslim, were accused of trying to become suicide bombers.
+None of Muslim’s family visited him during Eid last summer. “They are angry with me,” he said. “I don’t blame them.”To the Editor:
+“Mug Shots Often Lead to Arrests. But Not Always of the Offender” (front page, Jan. 6) provides a glimpse into police procedure that many outside of policing will find highly objectionable.
+But for those who have worked in policing, the article provided no surprise at all. Many police practices have been developed over decades, but often and typically in the absence of science. Even when adopting practices informed by science, older or dated science is sometimes used.
+An example is eyewitness identification, where many policies now rely on science that is well over a decade old. More recent science is not informing practice as it should. We must not blame those who do what they know or have been taught. Instead, we must do more to encourage the proper translation of scientific evidence in policing.
+What’s needed is the systematic support and funding for more rigorous research, testing and translation. Otherwise, we cannot guarantee anything but continued injustices.To the Editor:
+“Mr. Trump’s King Minus Touch,” by Bill Saporito (Editorial Observer, Dec. 27), tries to denigrate President Trump by painting him as a person who lacks the golden touch. But upon taking a closer look, and an honest one, that premise is faulty.
+Mr. Trump has reached the pinnacle of success in multiple fields. First, he immersed himself in the sharp-elbowed world of New York and international real estate development, building a global brand and becoming a multibillionaire in the process. The Times likes to discredit his wealth by repeatedly stating that his father, Fred, left him just over $400 million in today’s dollars. But according to Forbes, Mr. Trump is today worth around $3.1 billion. That’s a difference of some $2.7 billion, making Mr. Trump, you guessed it, a self-made billionaire.
+Next, Mr. Trump entered the equally sharp-elbowed world of entertainment, where he once again ascended to the pinnacle of success, becoming the star of a top-rated television show.
+Finally, Mr. Trump entered perhaps the sharpest elbowed world of them all, Washington politics. And once again, Mr. Trump ascended to the zenith.To the Editor:
+“A Forest of Ancient Trees, Poisoned by Rising Seas,” by Nathaniel Popkin (Op-Ed, Dec. 27), provided a litany of reasons to be pessimistic about our planet’s future. Among them: World Wildlife Fund’s 2018 Living Planet Report, which found a staggering decline in wildlife populations since 1970.
+At World Wildlife Fund, we agree that this report and others listed by Mr. Popkin point toward a profound global emergency. But the Living Planet Report also comes to an additional conclusion: While time is increasingly short, we can still change course.
+As we begin a new year, let’s all commit to balancing the needs of humanity with the needs of nature. It’s an ambitious idea, but one that we can achieve if we set bold goals and deliver on bold solutions, like conserving half of our planet, and changing how we produce and consume the food and energy we need.
+Carter Roberts
+Washington
+The writer is president and chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund in the United States.To the Editor:
+Re “‘I Love My Skin!’ Black Parents Find Alternatives to Integration” (front page, Jan. 8):
+Critics of the charter school movement often deride it as racist, because it deprives traditional public schools of resources and pulls minority students away from their local communities. But some Afrocentric educators beg to differ, embracing charters as a route to racial community and progress.
+That’s why we need high-quality research about the new Afrocentric charter schools (along with Afrocentric public and private schools). If the schools benefit students of color, charter opponents will need to rethink their position. And so will those of us who have imagined racial integration as the key to American justice and equality.
+Jonathan Zimmerman
+Philadelphia
+The writer teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.MONTREAL — The World Anti-Doping Association’s compliance review committee will meet in Montreal, the organization’s home city, on Monday and Tuesday to discuss a problem that will not go away — Russia’s antidoping laboratories, and what to do about the country missing a key end-of-year deadline.
+No matter what the committee recommends, and the possibilities range from competition bans to mere slaps on the wrist to nothing, the long-running story of Russia’s antidoping laboratories is bound to continue.
+Hanging in the balance is the credibility of the world’s foremost antidoping watchdog, which has endured withering criticism from athletes in recent months who say the organization has allowed a rogue nation to run roughshod over its attempts at enforcement.
+In an open letter last week to Jonathan Taylor, the chairman of the compliance review committee, the Swedish biathlete Sebastian Samuelsson wrote, “Given that this doping crisis involving Russia is the biggest in history, and the fact that many athletes have so shamefully been cheated out of podium positions not to mention financial rewards by the state-sponsored doping system, this issue requires proper leadership and good, honest communication — two things that have been very neglected by the current WADA Leadership.”To the Editor:
+Re “Don’t Ignore the Risks of Pot,” by Alex Berenson (Op-Ed, Jan. 5):
+Any potential harm caused by marijuana is far outweighed by the harms of prohibition, stigmatization and criminalization. Instead, a system of robust regulation allows for product safety testing, the enforcement of age limits for purchase and the peaceful resolution of disputes among market participants.
+Decriminalization — turning marijuana possession into a violation, which Mr. Berenson proposes as an alternative to legalization — does not do enough to ensure the end of racially biased searches and arrests. More important, decriminalization does not address restitution toward the black and brown communities disproportionately harmed by the war on drugs.
+Marijuana has been used by various cultures across the globe for millenniums. It was criminalized in the United States not because of public health concerns, but to advance a racist agenda.
+It is my mandate, as a member of the Massachusetts Cannabis Control Commission, to oversee the responsible transition of cannabis-related activity into a legal and regulated industry. As a woman of color, I consider it my duty to make sure that the racist origins of marijuana prohibition are not forgotten.The story of the sisters Procne and Philomela is one of the truly gruesome Greek myths, full of rape and murder and bloody mutilation — but also, and this is rather nice, tremendous sibling devotion. For “Weightless,” a smart retelling of it as an indie-rock opera by the Bay Area band the Kilbanes, that love is the core of the legend.
+“Weightless,” at BRIC House in Brooklyn though Sunday as part of the Under the Radar festival, feels only about a half step into myth from our world, and that’s a good thing. It’s just far enough to accommodate a sardonic god (Julia Brothers) who amuses herself by taking an interest in Procne (Kate Kilbane, also the band’s bassist) and Philomela (Lila Blue, appealingly sultry).
+“One day Procne’s father told her that he was going to marry her off to some local half-wit,” the god tells us, and in the Kilbanes’ version of the story, Procne and Philomela flee to a cabin on the ocean, where they build a happy, self-sufficient life. Until, that is, a hunter named Tereus (Josh Pollock, who doubles as the guitarist) happens along.
+He’s creepy, but Procne is too curious about him to hear any blaring alarm bells. She accompanies him to his island and is soon pregnant. When she’s ready to give birth, Philomela flies to her side. Tragedy ensues.For Republicans, Florida stands out as the best political news from an otherwise grim year, a show of strength in a state that has voted for every presidential winner since 1992 and seems to be growing more favorable to their party at a moment when demographic changes are lifting Democrats elsewhere. The successful courting of up-for-grabs Hispanics, the surge of transplanted senior voters, the solidifying support in conservative North Florida: All illustrate why this prized battleground state is tilting to the right.
+As for Democrats, they remain just as shellshocked as they were after Election Day, when it became clear that Bill Nelson, the state’s longtime senator, and Andrew Gillum, the electrifying young mayor of Tallahassee, had lost by exceedingly close margins. As of Tuesday, there was still only one Democrat in statewide office.
+“We just live in a red state here,” said Alex Sink, a former Democratic state official who once narrowly lost a bid for governor. “I think it’s just tilted toward the Republicans now, and I hate to say that.”
+The question looming over the state going into 2020 is the same one Democrats are wrestling with elsewhere: How can the party narrow its losses with voters who are older — and in many cases white — without alienating younger, nonwhite voters?
+What is so agonizing for Democrats is that 2018 did little to clarify the best path. The party put forward Mr. Gillum, a 39-year-old black progressive, and Mr. Nelson, a 76-year-old white moderate who had been in elected office for nearly half a century. Mr. Nelson lost by about 10,000 votes and Mr. Gillum didn’t fare much worse, losing by about 32,000 votes.If a potential constructor has “patience, tenacity and [an aptitude for] lateral thinking,” they have what they need to become a good puzzle maker, says Mr. Nediger. And, Mr. Agard chimes in, “a love for solving puzzles. That’s all constructing is, in my opinion: a slightly different puzzle, with room for individuality.”
+Now, aspiring puzzle makers who are not on Facebook can access the mentors. Mr. Agard granted me permission to reproduce the list on Wordplay. If you have questions or would like support while learning, however, I highly recommend joining the group. (Mr. Nediger, Mr. Agard and I will not be answering construction questions here.)
+Mr. Nediger and Mr. Agard added: “If you’re a person from an underrepresented group and would like us to match you up with a potential collaborator or mentor from this list, send an email to Erik or Will with whatever details you think might be relevant (For example, your information, types of puzzles you’re looking to make, areas of construction you’re looking to improve) and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can with an option or three. Don’t feel obliged to go the matchmaking route, but it’s there for you if you have a hard time choosing from the list.”
+If you would like to be matched with a mentor, please read and fill out this Google form.
+So what are you waiting for? I can’t wait to write about your puzzles. Find a teacher and get started.Missy Elliott will be inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, making her the first female hip-hop artist to receive the honor. The tribute makes Elliott the third rapper to ever be honored by the organization, following Jay-Z’s induction in 2017 and Jermaine Dupri’s last year.
+The list of this year’s inductees was announced on Saturday’s episode of “CBS This Morning,” and featured an appearance by the Hall of Fame chairman and musician Nile Rodgers, who called Elliott “one of my favorite writers of all time.”
+Not only is Elliott, a Grammy Award-winning artist, responsible for monumental hits from the early 2000s like “Get Ur Freak On” and “Work It,” but she’s also the only female rapper to have six studio albums certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America. Over the course of her three-decade career, she’s written for some of the music industry’s most talented female artists, including Beyoncé (“Signs”), Whitney Houston (“In My Business”), Aaliyah (“If Your Girl Only Knew”), Mary J. Blige (“Never Been”) and Ciara (“One Two Step”).
+In its announcement, the Hall of Fame recognized Elliott as “a groundbreaking solo superstar, pioneering songwriter-producer and across-the-board cultural icon.”Perils mount for the Trump presidency.
+The shift of power in Congress and news reports are combining to confront President Trump with the prospect of a protracted and intense political war for survival “that may make the still-unresolved partial government shutdown pale by comparison,” writes our chief White House correspondent.
+News reports: A Times report detailed how, after Mr. Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, the bureau became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they took the aggressive step of opening a counterintelligence inquiry into whether he had been working on behalf of Russia.
+And The Washington Post reported that the president had taken extensive steps to conceal his conversations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin over the past two years.BULGER, Pa. — About 150 Jersey cows in the rolling terrain at Rivendale Farms in Bulger, some 25 miles west of Pittsburgh, wear Fitbit-like collars that monitor their movement, eating and rumination patterns. They are milked not by humans but by robotic machines.
+A nearby greenhouse, about a quarter-acre in size and filled with salad-bowl crops like kale, arugula and baby carrots, is automated. The temperature, humidity and sunlight are controlled by sensors and retractable metallic screens. And soon, small robots may roam the farm’s eight acres of vegetable crops outdoors to spot disease and pluck weeds.
+Farming in America is increasingly a high-tech endeavor. Combines guided by GPS, drones, satellite imagery, soil sensors and supercomputers all help the nation’s food production. Yet that technology is mainly tailored for big industrial farms, where fields stretch as far as the eye can see.
+Rivendale Farms, which has just completed its first year of full operations, offers a glimpse of technology coming available for smaller farms.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The 15 or 20 minutes before the performance ticked by the same way they do on nights when Rome Neal presides over jazz at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But this time Mr. Neal was directing a reading of a play. It takes aim at the sensation that is the theatrical juggernaut “Hamilton” and its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
+So this was different from the jazz nights. There was no music, in contrast to the rap-infused lyrics of “Hamilton,” one of the biggest critical and commercial successes in Broadway history.
+The play, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda,” was written by Ishmael Reed, 80, a prolific and often satirical writer who, as a critic reviewing one of his books once said, “has made members of every constituency angry” during his long career.
+Mr. Reed’s most recent work should prove to be no exception.
+“The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” targets “Hamilton,” the play, and “Hamilton,” the best-selling biography by Ron Chernow, which inspired Mr. Miranda. The program handed out at the reading said, “The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda” was “about a playwright who is misled by a historian of white history into believing that Alexander Hamilton was an abolitionist.”WASHINGTON — It was a picture-perfect moment. As the Senate convened for the start of the 116th Congress, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, fellow progressives and potential rivals for the presidency, shared a brief hug on the Senate floor just minutes after they were both sworn in for their new terms.
+Then there was Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential nominee, striding across the floor as a proud new member from Utah. Smiling new and old senators lined up alphabetically to take the oath of office from Vice President Mike Pence as their colleagues applauded on the floor in the midst of a government shutdown. It was a lot to take in.
+But this being the stodgy Senate, there were no photographers on hand to capture the scene, since they are banned from the chamber. While accredited photographers were granted special access to the House gallery to take colorful shots of Nancy Pelosi returning as speaker, youngsters roaming the floor and the diverse freshman class settling in, the Senate remained a shutter-free zone, as it has been for virtually its entire history.
+What a loss, thought Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, as he surveyed the festivities.
+“I was thinking none of this becomes part of the pictorial history of the country,” Mr. Blunt said.LONDON — Ever since European apothecaries began distilling gin and selling it as a cure-all in the 16th century, the juniper-flavored liquor has been revered as a medicine, vilified for fueling public disorder and consumed in a multitude of every-season cocktails.
+Now, it is stirring up a specialized tourist trade in the homeland of London dry gin thanks in part to entrepreneurial bottling and branding.
+After surging for a decade, gin sales in Britain reached nearly 2 billion pounds, or about $2.6 billion, through last fall, compared with £1.26 billion for the same period in 2017, according to the Wine and Spirit Trade Association . Drinkers of pink and flavored versions have helped make it the country’s second-most-popular spirit, ahead of whiskeys and behind only vodka, the group said.
+Gin has become so popular in Britain that the Office for National Statistics added it back to the basket of goods it uses to measure inflation, after a 13-year absence.But as the book progresses, Julius doesn’t come to subsequent meals because he is riding a camel up a pyramid in Egypt or climbing a mountain in Tibet.
+In “Courtney” (1994), parents reluctantly allow their children to go to the pound to adopt a dog but are dismayed when the youngsters return with Courtney, an unloved mongrel, rather than a pedigreed animal. Yet Courtney turns out to be an excellent cook, butler, juggler and violinist.
+That might have made a decent children’s book, yet Mr. Burningham took the story further. Courtney inexplicably disappears one day, and the family adjusts to life without him. But when, on summer vacation, a boat the children are playing in breaks away from its mooring and drifts out to sea, endangering them, a mysterious something tows them to safety.
+“They never did find out who or what it was that had pulled their boat back to shore,” the book concludes. “I wonder what it could have been.”
+Leaving such holes for his young readers to fill in on their own was classic Burningham.
+Vicki Weissman, reviewing another of his books, “John Patrick Norman McHennessy: The Boy Who Was Always Late,” in 1988 in The New York Times, praised its economy of words. “Mr. Burningham,” she wrote, “has long since grasped that all children need is a trigger and their imaginations will do the rest.”
+John Burningham was born on April 27, 1936, in Farnham, Surrey, southwest of London. He attended various progressive schools, among them Summerhill. In 1954 he registered as a conscientious objector and did two years’ worth of alternative military service before enrolling in a course in design and illustration at the Central School of Art in London. There he met Helen Oxenbury, whom he would marry. She, too, became a noted writer and illustrator of children’s books. (They did not collaborate on a book until “There’s Going to Be a Baby” in 2010.)
+Mr. Burningham designed posters for the transit authority London Transport and other agencies before the publication of his first book. Another early achievement was illustrating the first edition of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang: The Magical Car,” the Ian Fleming book, in 1964.He’s still not hosting the Academy Awards, but Kevin Hart has a No. 1 movie to celebrate.
+Only days after quashing the idea that he would return as host of the Oscars, the actor and comedian is back at the top of the box office in STX’s “The Upside,” a dramedy starring Hart as a black parolee who becomes the caregiver and pal of a wealthy, white quadriplegic man played by Bryan Cranston. Despite an unenthusiastic reception from critics (the film has a 40 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes), the film exceeded most analysts’ expectations, selling $19.6 million in tickets during its first weekend in theaters.
+The movie’s performance is especially notable given the controversy that has embroiled Hart while he’s been trying to promote it. In December, shortly after Hart was announced as the Oscar host, he dropped out when several tweets and comments that were deemed homophobic resurfaced from his past. Since then, his appearances to talk about “The Upside” have also involved discussions about the controversy, as was the case with a spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” at the beginning of the month that briefly stoked rumors that Hart could be reinstated as host (he has since definitively ruled it out).
+But audiences didn’t seem to want to punish Hart: They bought enough tickets to allow “The Upside” to beat out the titanic “Aquaman” and claim the top spot at the box office.
+[Read the New York Times review of “The Upside.”]
+Not that Warner Bros., the studio behind “Aquaman,” has much to complain about. The superhero movie led by Jason Momoa brought in $17.3 million domestically this weekend and about $27.9 million overseas, bringing its cumulative global ticket sales to $1.02 billion, according to the studio. The film had spent three straight weeks atop the domestic box office, and its strong international turnout has cemented Momoa — a “Game of Thrones” alumnus — as a moneymaking leading man.The first episode of “The Passage,” a new horror-thriller beginning Monday on Fox, offers a helpful one-sentence villain bio and mission statement. “He’s immune to disease, but he’s also a lethal bloodsucking monster who we are all very careful not to call a vampire,” announces a scientist (who seems unlikely to survive past mid-season). So: Battle lines drawn.
+That note of satirical self-awareness pops up now and then in what’s otherwise an earnest genre jambalaya: a medical-supernatural-conspiracy shoot ’em up. Based on a trilogy of novels by Justin Cronin, “The Passage” posits a scientific cause — experimentation with a rare virus from the Bolivian jungle — for a paranormal consequence, the creation of beasts (don’t call them vampires!) who, if the series lasts and hews to the books, will ravage the planet.
+Through three episodes, though, the show’s main interest doesn’t lie in the ghoulish, dream-invading creatures, former death-row inmates who, for now, are safely locked up in a Colorado compound. Nor is it in the variously concerned or hubristic doctors, who were trying to develop a bird-flu vaccine and got something else. (Even though one of them is played by Henry Ian Cusick, always welcome and always the guy who played Desmond in “Lost.”)A winter storm that slammed some parts of the Midwest and that officials say contributed to the deaths of at least nine people moved east on Sunday, causing travel disruptions and power failures.
+Much of the snow was winding down in the Midwest, Dan Pydynowski, a meteorologist with AccuWeather, said. “There is still some light lingering snow around St. Louis and parts of central Illinois,” he said, adding that it was expected to stop by late Sunday evening.
+But as the Midwest dug itself out, the storm continued east on Sunday. The system delivered snow to Baltimore; Washington, D.C.; Delaware; parts of New Jersey; and the mountains in Virginia. Mr. Pydynowski said the snow would continue across southern New Jersey until very early Monday morning before ending.
+As of early Sunday afternoon, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago reported 35 delayed flights and four cancellations, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.com. But the airport showed signs on Monday morning of returning to normal operations: Only one flight had been canceled so far, according to the site.FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — The essence of the New England Patriots’ reign as this century’s most successful N.F.L. team has been their peculiar capacity to feel smug and belittled at the same time.
+It is a paradox the Patriots have put to good use at pivotal times on the way to five Super Bowl victories, winning some games because of unbridled confidence and others because they believed they were being unfairly disparaged.
+Sunday’s 41-28 thrashing of the Los Angeles Chargers in an A.F.C. divisional round playoff game — the Patriots led by 28 points at halftime — was conspicuously in the latter category. After an uneven season in which New England stumbled through the final quarter of its schedule and many in the N.F.L. community prepared an obituary for this dynasty, the Patriots had built up a fair amount of righteous indignation.
+The result Sunday was a furious ambushing of the visiting Chargers, a talented team largely relegated to being bystanders as New England scored 28 unanswered points before halftime to put the game virtually out of reach. Proof of the Patriots’ mind-set for the afternoon came minutes after the final whistle when quarterback Tom Brady stared into a television camera during an on-field interview.Updated: Jan. 17, 2019
+Students
+1. After looking closely at the image above (or at the full-size image), think about these three questions:
+• What is going on in this picture?
+• What do you see that makes you say that?
+• What more can you find?
+2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
+3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
+Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern Time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.“I can’t imagine how I would go about making this useful,” Ms. Stovall said on Sunday. “I wouldn’t know how to find my procedure. I wouldn’t know what services might be rolled up with my procedure. And I would not know the price to me after health insurance.”
+By most accounts, the Trump administration is pursuing a worthy goal, but the execution of its plans leaves much to be desired.
+After the administration proposed the price-disclosure requirement in April 2018, many hospitals warned of the shortcomings that are now evident.
+But federal health officials, accustomed to debating issues inside the Washington policy bubble, have still been surprised at the reaction around the country as consumers and local news media try to decipher the data. The administration says it is open to suggestions for 2020 and beyond.
+The price-disclosure requirement, issued by the Department of Health and Human Services, grows out of one sentence in the Affordable Care Act, which says, “Each hospital operating within the United States shall for each year establish (and update) and make public (in accordance with guidelines developed by the secretary) a list of the hospital’s standard charges for items and services provided by the hospital.”
+The idea languished for eight years. Under prior guidance from the government, hospitals could meet their obligations by providing charges to patients on request. But the Trump administration wanted to go further.
+“We’ve updated our guidelines to specifically require hospitals to post price information on the internet in a machine-readable format,” Seema Verma, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said last week. “This is a historic change from what’s been required in the past.”By the time the Internal Revenue Service caught up to Mr. Rodriguez, he owed $35,000. So far he’s paid $10,000 of that, paying a comfortable $250 per month.
+Grammar quiz
+As the defense has repeatedly pointed out, Mr. Guzmán’s formal education did not extend past the second grade, “and in fact he has a fair amount of difficulty writing,” one of his attorneys, Eduardo Balarezo, told the jury last week.
+Still, Mr. Guzmán is often scrawling notes on a yellow legal pad and providing them to his attorneys. His handwriting is atrocious, according to one member of the defense team.
+Mr. Rodriguez also had a hard time believing it. “He used to read the reports directly in the past, so I don’t think he had any problems reading,” Mr. Rodriguez said of the spyware reports frequently produced for Mr. Guzmán.
+Mr. Rodriguez added that Mr. Guzmán spent “a fair amount of time reading those reports.” (Then again, Mr. Rodriguez testified that during their first face-to-face encounter, Mr. Guzmán told him that “he didn’t like to write on the computer. He preferred to talk.”)
+The Million-Dollar Gift
+Anyone who has ever recalled a story among family knows the phenomenon: Someone across the table immediately corrects you and tells it completely differently. The jury was treated to just such a comparison last week. Two brothers have testified in the trial: the elder sibling Jorge Cifuentes Villa testified in December, and Alex Cifuentes Villa began testifying on Thursday. (He will continue Monday.) They told some of the same stories — albeit a little differently.
+Jorge Cifuentes’s version: Around 2003, he flew to the mountains of Mexico for his first-ever meeting with El Chapo — to celebrate the second anniversary of the drug kingpin’s escape from jail (the first time). The final flight, aboard a rickety airplane (Mr. Guzmán was known for using outdated Cessnas), took about 30 to 45 minutes. The flight made Mr. Cifuentes feel “awful,” he said. “I actually had to pray three Our Fathers,” he said. Then they landed on an ascending airstrip.But the exchange also highlighted the financial pressures facing local newspapers, which have been hit hard by cuts.
+The number of newspaper journalists across the country dropped by nearly half from 2008 to 2017, according to the Pew Research Center. Last week, The Dallas Morning News laid off 20 journalists, and The East Bay Express, an alternative weekly newspaper in the Bay Area that gained national acclaim for its 2016 exposé of a police sex scandal, laid off almost its entire editorial staff.
+As The Press Herald assessed its finances for 2019, an editor sent a notice to freelance writers who wrote the regional book reviews, informing them that the newspaper could no longer fund their work. “Like many newspapers, we had to make some tough decisions on what we could continue to support,” Ms. DeSisto said.
+But local writers immediately — and vocally — lamented the decision.
+“Local coverage in the largest circulation newspaper in the state is crucial to them and their publishers,” said Joshua Bodwell, executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. His organization started a petition asking the newspaper to reconsider its decision and also contacted Mr. King, who could not be reached for comment on Sunday.
+Members of the staff at The Press Herald spotted Mr. King’s Twitter post within minutes, Ms. DeSisto said, and quickly put together a promotional deal that offered a 12-week subscription for just $15. The promotion codes — “King” and “Carrie” — were an ode to the author and his breakthrough horror novel.
+“This deal is scary good,” Ms. DeSisto wrote on Twitter.
+While some criticized the newspaper for offering to reinstate the book reviews only in exchange for subscriptions — “The word ‘blackmail’ was used,” Mr. Bodwell said — Ms. DeSisto credited her employees for asking the community to pay for the journalism they want.
+“Look, we didn’t want to cut it either,” she said. “We needed to be more direct about the challenges we’re having and we needed their support.”MONDAY PUZZLE — To paraphrase Joe Pesci in the movie “Goodfellas,” what exactly is Craig Stowe trying to say to us? Do we make him recoil? Are we horrible people? Do we smell?
+I won’t end this the way Mr. Pesci did, and I’m not really offended. But it’s an interesting theme Mr. Stowe is offering. I also believe this is his first New York Times puzzle, so let’s welcome him. Even if he is calling us names.
+Tricky Clues
+65A: I’ve always loved “guess the word” games, so the NOOSE that is the “Hangman’s loop” was nothing grisly to me because it reminded me of the many hours spent playing Hangman. I played on paper with my parents, and I always won, especially near the sixth consecutive hour, when they would start to whimper and plead with me to go do something else, like read comic books.
+1D: I didn’t get through all of the Japanese clutter expert Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up,” but I have recently started watching her Netflix program called — wait for it — “Tidying Up With Marie Kondo.” I have to say that it is a very satisfying show, especially when you are lying on the couch, nodding at the advice she is giving to others and not tidying up on your own.Automakers are preparing to introduce dozens of fully electric cars and plug-in hybrid vehicles over the next three years, and Hyundai, Kia, Mini, Nissan and Audi will display electric models due in the United States this year. It is a gambit based on the idea that many mainstream car owners will rush to make the leap from gasoline.
+But to sell all those cars, the manufacturers have to attract a new class of customer.
+Mainstream consumers may be harder to win over than the wealthy luxury car buyers, hard-core environmentalists and early adopters who have flocked to buy Model 3s and delivered Tesla’s rapid sales growth. That may be especially true in the middle of the country, because charging stations are more sparse there than on the coasts, where most Tesla models are sold.
+Mr. Westerman, for example, said he’d like an electric car with a range of 600 miles — about as far as his Prius takes him on a full tank of gas.
+Manufacturers are developing so many electrified models primarily to compete in China and Europe, where government subsidies and stringent environmental laws are spurring sales of zero-emission vehicles, said Mark Wakefield, a managing director at AlixPartners, a consulting firm. The sales pace is less certain in the United States, in part because gasoline remains cheap and the Trump administration has pulled back on emissions regulations.
+“In the U.S., you can’t assume you’re going to be selling 100,000 of one model,” Mr. Wakefield said. “You don’t want to dedicate an entire factory to E.V.s” — as Tesla has done.Mr. Maduro was sworn in for a second term as president on Thursday, after an election that was widely denounced by other countries as fraudulent. During his six years in office, the country’s economy has unraveled, leading to widespread hunger and violence. An estimated three million people have fled Venezuela since the crisis took hold.
+On Friday, Mr. Guaidó, 35, called for Venezuelans to take the streets in protest against Mr. Maduro’s continuing rule, and asked the armed forces to support his becoming interim president while new elections are held.
+Mr. Guaidó argued that the Constitution gave him “the legitimacy to carry out the charge of the presidency over the country to call elections,” adding: “But I need backing from the citizens to make it a reality.”
+Mr. Maduro accused the opposition leader of trying to stir dissent.
+The National Assembly, which Mr. Guaidó leads and which is controlled by lawmakers who oppose Mr. Maduro, was essentially nullified in 2017 when the president created a new Constituent Assembly. That body, which was given broad powers to write and pass legislation, is controlled by supporters of Mr. Maduro.SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Liz G. Rodríguez Quiñonez grew up schooled in being able to throw her body to the floor in the middle of the night, in the event that stray bullets from a nearby shootout came crashing through her window.
+But it was only this past fall when Ms. Rodríguez, who operates a food truck in a town just east of the Puerto Rican capital, experienced her first murder: Standing by the stove in her truck one morning in September, she heard a series of pops, then screaming, and realized that the man who was the intended target of the gunfire was standing right behind her truck. She ducked — thanks to the training from her youth — but there was no hope for the man, who died only a few feet away.
+It was not yet noon.
+“I saw the dead body. He was around 30 years old. It was horrible,” Ms. Rodríguez, 30, said with a shudder.
+Puerto Rico has long had one of the highest murder rates in the country, almost all of it attributable to gang violence. But a recent spree of brazen daylight killings, some of which were captured on video and widely shared on social media, have shaken the population and worried local and federal law enforcement officials who thought they had seen everything in the roiling, populous city of San Juan.Which brings me to the much-debated potential candidacy of Biden this time around. I have a piece of advice for the former vice president:
+Run, Joe, run.
+Run because you have strengths that no other Democratic candidate does, including your depth of experience and connection to the Obama presidency. Run because your populist image fits the Democrats’ most successful political strategy of the past generation. Run because you will never have another chance — and because you are not afraid of losing.
+I get the case against Biden. My colleague Frank Bruni has made it and made it well, as have Vox’s Matthew Yglesias and others. At 76 years old, Biden does not represent an exciting new era. He is an old white guy who, over the years, has tacked right on criminal justice, bungled the Anita Hill hearings and failed twice at presidential campaigning. If Biden runs now, I’m not sure whether I’ll be rooting for him to win.
+But I am rooting for him to run because the country needs to maximize the chances that Trump’s presidency ends as soon as possible, certainly by Jan. 20, 2021. A Biden run helps that cause. It does so by broadening the Democrats’ options. It creates a stronger field, from which the strongest nominee can emerge. (The downsides of a big field are often exaggerated: A divisive primary didn’t undermine Barack Obama in 2008. It helped him.) If Biden is as flawed as his critics think, he won’t win the nomination.
+Above all, a Biden run avoids repeating the mistake of 2016 — the hubris of imperfect foresight.
+For the same reason, I am glad Warren is running. She combines progressive passion with serious policy chops. I’m rooting for Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke, who do seem fresh and exciting, to run. I hope Sherrod Brown and Amy Klobuchar, two populist Midwesterners, run. I hope the uncommonly charismatic Mitch Landrieu does, too. This group, with Biden, is my A-list. And I wouldn’t be shocked to see another candidate do well enough to jump into the A-list.
+Yet Biden is unique among all of them. For starters, he would bring strengths to the actual job of president that the others would not. He has an intimate sense of the modern presidency. He has spent decades — literally, as he likes to say — doing battle with a radicalized Republican Party.The N.F.L. on Sunday ended months of uncertainty by officially announcing Maroon 5 and the rappers Travis Scott and Big Boi as the lineup for this year’s Super Bowl halftime show.
+In an indication of how fraught the debate around the high-profile performance has become, Scott released a statement on Sunday announcing that he and the N.F.L. will partner on a $500,000 donation to the social justice group Dream Corps — a move that seemed to be aimed at stemming a backlash from groups that have criticized the football league’s policies.
+Sources familiar with the N.F.L.’s Super Bowl plans had confirmed the rock band Maroon 5 as the headliner as long ago as September, and Scott emerged last month as a reported addition to the Feb. 3 halftime performance at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. Big Boi, the newest name on the bill, is a member of the Atlanta rap group Outkast.
+But the run-up to this year’s halftime announcement had turned into a skirmish over sports and politics, as artists and others criticized the N.F.L. over its treatment of Colin Kaepernick and other players who have taken a knee during the national anthem in protest of racial injustice.But whether they would or would not, many would argue that Democrats would still have a constitutional responsibility to exercise. Impeachment is the only remedy the founders provided for removing from office someone who is clearly unfit to hold it.
+If all of what I stipulated above happens and the Democrats don’t act, aren’t they saying the Constitution is meaningless? If you can’t impeach a president whose very election is found to have been illegitimate, then whom can you impeach? And how do you recover, as a country, from such a bitterly partisan episode?
+The Trump Impeachment › Answers to your questions about the impeachment process: The current impeachment proceedings are testing the bounds of the process, raising questions never contemplated before. Here’s what we know. How does the impeachment process work? Members of the House consider whether to impeach the president — the equivalent of an indictment in a criminal case — and members of the Senate consider whether to remove him, holding a trial in which senators act as the jury. The test, as set by the Constitution, is whether the president has committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” The House vote required only a simple majority of lawmakers to agree that the president has, in fact, committed high crimes and misdemeanors; the Senate vote requires a two-thirds majority. Does impeaching Trump disqualify him from holding office again? Conviction in an impeachment trial does not automatically disqualify Mr. Trump from future public office. But if the Senate were to convict him, the Constitution allows a subsequent vote to bar an official from holding “any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.” That vote would require only a simple majority of senators. There is no precedent, however, for disqualifying a president from future office, and the issue could end up before the Supreme Court. Can the Senate hold a trial after Biden becomes president? The Senate could hold a trial for Mr. Trump even after he has left office, though there is no precedent for it. Democrats who control the House can choose when to send their article of impeachment to the Senate, at which point that chamber would have to immediately move to begin the trial. But even if the House immediately transmitted the charge to the other side of the Capitol, an agreement between Republican and Democratic leaders in the Senate would be needed to take it up before Jan. 19, a day before Mr. Biden is inaugurated. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said on Wednesday that he would not agree to such an agreement. Given that timetable, the trial probably will not start until after Mr. Biden is president.
+Those are good questions. But they have an obvious answer. While impeachment is clearly a valid exercise of power, so is another method of removal, also prescribed by the Constitution: an election. This is how Americans like to ditch presidents and parties they don’t like — presidential power has changed hands 44 times in this country’s history.
+In addition, nine incumbent presidents have lost re-election, including three in the last half- century , and all have peacefully (if not always gracefully) yielded power. In contrast, only two presidents, Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, have been impeached by the House, though both were acquitted in the Senate. Richard Nixon, facing certain and imminent impeachment, resigned.
+That’s a historical record that suggests that an electoral outcome will be much more widely accepted. Mr. Trump’s partisans will whine about the unfairness of it all in either case — they’ll blame “voter fraud,” or George Soros, or the “fake news media.” But if the voters have rebuffed the president, the whining will sound to most Americans like just that.
+There’s one more reason I’d prefer to see Mr. Trump laid low via the ballot. It will do more long-term damage to the Republican Party.
+If Mr. Trump is removed via impeachment and conviction — that is, with those 20 Republican votes — Republicans can say, “See, we’ve come to our senses; got that out of our system.” But if they renominate Mr. Trump and stick with him through November 2020 and the voters clearly say no, not again, Republicans are left sitting in the wreckage. They will be trying to air out the Trump stench for a generation, maybe two, which is precisely the fate they deserve.WASHINGTON — President Trump’s efforts to hide his conversations with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and new details about the F.B.I. inquiry into his ties to Moscow have intensified debate over his relationship with Russia, adding fuel to Democrats’ budding investigations of his presidency and potentially setting up a clash between the White House and Congress.
+Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, who now leads the Intelligence Committee as part of the new Democratic House majority, implored his Republican colleagues Sunday to support his effort to obtain notes or testimony from the interpreter in one of the private meetings between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin.
+“Will they join us now?” Mr. Schiff wrote on Twitter. “Shouldn’t we find out whether our president is really putting ‘America first?’”
+The administration appears unlikely to acquiesce to such a demand without a fight.
+Mr. Trump has repeatedly withheld details of his conversations with Mr. Putin, according to current and former American officials, a practice that has left officials blind to the dynamic between the two leaders and intensified questions within the administration over the president’s actions.Lindsey Jarratt’s son, Brayden, was a year old when the Child Protective Services of Dinwiddie, Va., took him to live with strangers. There are things about the months surrounding that moment that Ms. Jarratt can’t remember — heroin has a way of erasing time. But this much is still etched in her mind: how he screamed and sobbed, the way his baby fists clutched at the nape of her shirt, the feel of his tiny body pressed so desperately against hers that the two had to be pried apart.
+She sobbed, too, she says. She begged the social workers to let her mother take custody. Or her cousin. Or her best friend. Someone she knew. Someone he knew. Please. But by then, there were too many strikes against her and the baby’s father, Aaron Jarrell: shoplifting charges, jail time, an overdose (Mr. Jarrell’s) in the baby’s presence. Their urine was “dirty,” their arms lined with track marks. And so their little boy would have to go into foster care .
+Their little boy. Both parents had ached to know him from the moment they discovered Ms. Jarratt was pregnant. She was not one of those young women for whom motherhood hung like a question mark. She adored children; she had studied to be a teacher and had always known that one day she would have a family of her own. If that day had come sooner than anticipated — she was 24 — it was still a cause for joy and hope.Sputnik and RT were keying off two articles in The New York Times, which broke the news of the Alabama efforts. The first, by Scott Shane and Alan Blinder in late December, detailed an operation that included the creation of fake Russian Twitter accounts, as well as a phony Facebook page purportedly set up by conservative Alabamians opposed to Mr. Moore, who ended up losing to his Democratic opponent, Doug Jones.
+One of the people behind that effort, Jonathon Morgan, of the cyber security firm New Knowledge, minimized the effort by saying it was only an experiment to observe how such Russian-style tactics work in real time (though an internal report said the project was seeking to depress turnout for Mr. Moore).
+The main financial backer of that project, the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, disavowed it, saying he did not know the money he had donated to groups affiliated with Democrats would finance such a thing. “I want to be unequivocal,” he wrote on Medium. “There is absolutely no place in our democracy for manipulating facts or using falsehoods to gain political power.”
+Mr. Jones, the politician who benefited from the operation, angrily denounced it and called for a federal investigation. So maybe there was reason to think it was all just a blip.
+Then came the second Times article, last week, on another shady tactic used against Mr. Moore. This one involved a Facebook page for a fake group of Baptists supporting Mr. Moore as a potential ally in their bid to ban alcohol in Alabama — a surefire way to alienate voters if ever there was one.
+The phony teetotaling campaign was the work of another group of liberal activists with different financiers, whose identities remain unknown. And it came with an implicit warning: Get used to it.In November, 17 Iranians made off with the Epervier, taking it from the docks of Boulogne and sailing to Dover, where they were arrested.
+And on a dark night just before Christmas, 14 migrants, including several children, made it seven miles off the coast on a boat stolen from the inner harbor at Boulogne, the St. Catherine, before the motor gave out. The thieves had forgotten to open the cooling valves.
+“They completely fried the motor,” said Quentin Gillon, who was sorting a tangled mass of ropes on the deck of the Saint Catherine, his cousin’s boat. “And then the boat got stuck.”
+On New Year’s Eve, it was the turn of the Caprice des Temps: The police, making the rounds on the quay, arrested 17 people, including a mother and two children, before the boat was able to depart.
+On Christmas Day, the dashboard of the Don Lubi, the boat belonging to Mr. Pinto, the regional fishing official, was ripped out. The thieves were trying to connect wires underneath to start the engine. They failed, but ruined the motor in the process. That same day, around 40 migrants made it across the Channel.
+Mr. Pinto said he was not unsympathetic to the plight of the migrants, but he was concerned both for their safety and his livelihood.
+“These nonprofits that are supposed to be helping the migrants, they should come down here on the quays and warn them not to risk their lives,” he said.Mr. Trump’s comments about Mr. Cohen on Saturday, made during a friendly interview with Jeanine Pirro of Fox News, were his first extended remarks on the matter since Mr. Cohen’s congressional testimony was announced. Asked by Ms. Pirro if he was “worried” about the testimony, Mr. Trump called Mr. Cohen “weak” and asserted — in contradiction to filings by federal prosecutors in Manhattan — that Mr. Cohen had “no information” on him.
+“He’s in trouble on some loans and fraud and taxicabs and stuff that I know nothing about,” Mr. Trump said. “And in order to get his sentence reduced, he says, I have an idea, I’ll tell — I’ll give you some information on the president.”
+Mr. Trump then implied that Mr. Cohen ought to be sharing information instead on his father-in-law, whose name he said he did not know.
+“But he should give information maybe on his father-in-law, because that’s the one that people want to look at,” he said, adding, “That’s the money in the family.” Pressed by Ms. Pirro for more details, Mr. Trump said, “I don’t know, but you’ll find out, and you’ll look into it because nobody knows what’s going on over there.”
+Mr. Cohen’s father-in-law, Fima Shusterman, emigrated from Ukraine in 1975. The year before his daughter’s marriage to Mr. Cohen, he pleaded guilty to evading federal reporting requirements for large cash transactions, admitting that he had cashed $5.5 million worth of checks to evade disclosure laws. He was sentenced to probation after cooperating with prosecutors in a related case.
+Saturday was not the first time Mr. Trump has targeted Mr. Cohen’s family. After Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty to his crimes, the president said Mr. Cohen had done so only to save his wife and his father-in-law.
+As they prepared to indict him, prosecutors had signaled to Mr. Cohen that his wife could be implicated, since she had also signed his tax returns. That threat helped push Mr. Cohen to plead guilty to the charges, according to a person familiar with the events.SAN PEDRO SULA, Honduras — A new caravan of migrants is forming in Honduras, and even ahead of its scheduled departure at dawn on Tuesday, battle lines were being drawn to the north, with some vowing to help them on their journey north, and others to block them.
+For President Trump, the timing of the caravan offered fresh ammunition in his fight with Congress over the $5.7 billion he wants for an enhanced border wall between Mexico and the United States. The dispute has led to a partial shutdown of the federal government.
+As he did last fall, when another caravan made the same trek, Mr. Trump portrayed the migrants — who say they are trying to escape poverty and violence, and who in seeking asylum are exercising a legal right — in an ominous light.
+“There is another major caravan forming right now in Honduras, and so far we’re trying to break it up, but so far it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen,” Mr. Trump said on Thursday. “And a drone isn’t going to stop it and a sensor isn’t going to stop it, but you know what’s going to stop it in its tracks? A nice, powerful wall.”NEW ORLEANS — New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees shared a curious statistic after his team defeated the defending champion Philadelphia Eagles on Sunday: In the third quarter, with the Eagles ahead by 4 points, the Saints put together a 23-play, 117-yard touchdown drive.
+Yes, 117, if you include the penalties that forced the Saints to backtrack and regain lost yardage.
+The long march down the field — which officially was listed as an 18-play, 92-yard drive — paid off when Brees hit wide receiver Michael Thomas for a 2-yard receiving touchdown that put the Saints ahead for good.
+“That just was the tipping point, it turned the tide of the whole game,” Brees said of the 11-minute-29-second drive. “We knew everything after that was building a lead.”
+The top-seeded Saints held on to win, 20-14, overcoming a slow start and a bundle of errors in their divisional-round game to set up a rematch against the second-seeded Los Angeles Rams next Sunday here in New Orleans.Mr. Bolton, 70, is not the only Iran hawk in Mr. Trump’s circle of top advisers. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared in a speech at the American University in Cairo last week that “countries increasingly understand that we must confront the ayatollahs, not coddle them.”
+Earlier this month, he warned Iran against launching three spacecraft, describing them as a pretext for testing missile technology that is necessary to carry a warhead to the United States and other nations. His statement appeared aimed at building a legal case for diplomatic, military or covert action against the Iranian missile program.
+It was surprising because Iran has used these modest space missions, mostly to deploy satellites, since 2005. The senior American official said that the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies disagreed with Mr. Pompeo’s interpretation of the threat posed by the satellite launches.
+Speaking on Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation” during a visit to Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Pompeo discounted the argument that Mr. Trump’s decision to withdraw 2,000 American troops from Syria in the coming months undercuts Washington’s ability to achieve its other goals in the region.
+“That certainly includes in Syria,” he said. “It certainly includes into Iran, if need be.”
+But Mr. Pompeo also opposed the idea of an airstrike on Iran after its attack on the embassy, according to a former senior administration official. On Sunday, he declined to comment about The Journal’s report. On each stop of his Middle East trip, Mr. Pompeo, a former Army officer, has spoken of the need to counter Iran, but has not talked of military action.
+When Mr. McMaster, then a three-star Army general, took over as national security adviser in early 2017, he ordered a new overall war plan for Iran. Mr. Mattis, who is himself an Iran hawk from his days as a Marine Corps commander in the region, delivered options. But those plans were not for the kind of pinpoint strikes that Mr. Bolton envisioned after the attack on the American Embassy on Sept. 6.In the moment, Claire and Jamie’s heart-to-heart about Brianna and the ghost of Frank is honest and intimate, and Jamie’s choked-up apology feels cathartic. It is certainly good work by Sam Heughan and Caitriona Balfe. But it feels odd that this comes only after Claire practically begs Jamie for forgiveness for … keeping her daughter’s confidence when she asked. (It doesn’t help that Ian also implored her to forgive Jamie but never asked Jamie to, say, apologize. It seems Jamie’s feelings are once again paramount.)
+At River Run, even Lizzie takes a break from begging Brianna’s forgiveness to beg Brianna to forgive Jamie, too. But Brianna isn’t having it. She hasn’t forgotten what Jamie said to her, and she isn’t ready to forgive.
+She is also not ready to go to a dinner party, but Aunt Jocasta didn’t summon all these guest stars for nothing.
+The objective of the dinner, technically, is for Jocasta to find an eligible bachelor for Brianna, one who might not care she’s a few months along. The actual objective is to make the most of those guest stars. Maria Doyle Kennedy is in fine form as the original cotillion wine mom. And the jostling suitors are delightfully wretched, particularly Gerald Forbes, into whom Billy Boyd has the time of his life pouring Pepe le Pew energy.
+We also get to see how Brianna handles her first big occasion. Sophie Skelton makes the most of Brianna’s discomfort with unfamiliar manners and with her changing body. And there are echoes of Claire in her attempts to pleasantly redirect attention without giving herself away or falling into anyone’s agenda. It makes me wish we’d gotten a better sense of Brianna before her trauma so we would know how much of this she has learned on the fly in the 18th century, but it still works.To the dismay of some, the town has long been tethered to its English cousins.
+In 1927, the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, England, visited the Connecticut town in a gesture of “friendship between one of England’s old historical, towns associated with the name of its greatest poet, William Shakespeare, and the town of its namesake in the new world,” according to a letter from the English town to its American counterpart.
+The idea for an American Shakespeare theater was credited to the playwright and producer Lawrence Langner, who enlisted the help of Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, and the philanthropist Joseph Verner Reed.
+The theater was barely completed in time for its first performances of “Julius Caesar” in 1955. Christopher Plummer, Raymond Massey and Jack Palance (who later became host of the television show “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and an Academy Award winner for the 1991 movie “City Slickers”) took the stage for performances that The New York Times called “routine and uneven.”
+Nevertheless, the theater became central to the production of Shakespearean plays in America.
+By 1982, the theater had run out of money and benefactors, and the state took ownership. In 2005, the town reclaimed the deed and struggled to figure out what to do with it.
+“You’ve got half the townspeople thinking it’s our legacy, it’s our heritage, it’s our privilege and responsibility to maintain this,” said Wendy Canfield, whose grandmother ran the theater’s costume museum and whose mother and two aunts had summer jobs there, told The Times in 2009. “And you’ve got a lot of other people who think of it as an arsonist’s dream, an albatross. It had its time, it had its place. All great things come to an end.”
+A “ShakesBeer Festival” fund-raiser was organized as part of an effort to revive the theater. In 2017, Ms. Deponte’s group hired an architectural firm to mothball the site — which required cleaning out layers of mold and trash, and protecting it from squatters, including raccoons — so that a plan could be created for its future use. Supporters unsuccessfully sought state funding to install a fire suppression system.PG&E, the state’s largest investor-owned utility, faces an estimated $30 billion exposure to liability for damages from the 2017 and 2018 wildfires that killed scores in Northern California. The sum would exceed its insurance and assets, raising concern in the state capital about the utility’s future.
+The billions in potential costs have prompted a series of downgrades in PG&E’s ratings, including decisions last week by Moody’s Investors Service and S&P Global Ratings to downgrade the utility’s bonds to junk.
+The “action is driven entirely by the further weakening of Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s credit quality,” Moody’s stated in its decision.
+Gov. Gavin Newsom has said that responding to the utility and wildfire issues are among his top priorities after taking office last week.
+Fire investigators determined that PG&E’s equipment was responsible for at least 18 of 21 major fires in 2017 as well as fires in 2018. Some of the fires have been attributed to power lines’ coming into contact with trees, which critics have said is a result of the utility’s failure to trim the trees.Two men sit in darkness, remembering the light. Images flare, flicker and disappear, like matches struck and snuffed, as these residents of a Dublin prison recall life before incarceration. Could it really have been that glorious?
+Probably not. But the past they summon — a time when, as one of them puts it, they existed at the very “bull’s-eye of life” without knowing it — almost blinds in its radiance before being swallowed by night. There’s nothing like regret and Gaelic retrospect to find the poetry in the prose of the everyday.
+That, more or less, describes the ravishing first third of Sebastian Barry’s “On Blueberry Hill,” the seriously imbalanced new play about love, hatred and redemption that opened on Sunday night at 59E59 Theaters as part of Origin’s 1st Irish Festival. It is a common point of view in Irish literature, this transformation of nostalgia into a sacred elegy.
+But Mr. Barry, whose works include the acclaimed novels “The Secret Scripture” (2005) and “Days Without End” (2016) and the excellent play “The Steward of Christendom” (1995), has an uncommon gift for finding hypnotic music in this perspective. And when his language is delivered by consummate Irish actors like Niall Buggy and David Ganly, the entire cast of “On Blueberry Hill,” it’s hard not to sink into a state of contented sadness that you half wish would go on forever.Leader Kim Jong-un of North Korea has met for a fourth time with China’s president, Xi Jinping. He’s still waiting for a second coveted summit with President Trump. With Beijing seemingly in his corner, and few words from the White House, Mr. Kim has mused about possibly finding “a new way” forward on denuclearization.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, speaking with unusual candor, said Sunday that the United States had tried but failed to end a Saudi Arabia-led blockade of Qatar, a crucial military partner in the Middle East.
+He also said Saudi leaders needed to ensure that they would take full responsibility for the death last fall of Jamal Khashoggi, an outspoken dissident who lived in Virginia and who was killed on a visit to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
+Mr. Pompeo made his remarks in Doha, Qatar, just before flying to Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where he is scheduled to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s most powerful figure, on Monday.
+Taken together, the comments underscored the challenges faced by the Trump administration as it tries to maintain its relationship with Saudi Arabia and build a coalition against Iran, while mitigating the fallout from a range of actions undertaken by the kingdom and Prince Mohammed, its de facto day-to-day ruler.CN: Every time you switch your attention from one target to another and then back again, there’s a cost. This switching creates an effect that psychologists call attention residue, which can reduce your cognitive capacity for a non-trivial amount of time before it clears. If you constantly make “quick checks” of various devices and inboxes, you essentially keep yourself in a state of persistent attention residue, which is a terrible idea if you’re someone who uses your brain to make a living.
+[Like what you’re reading? Sign up here for the Smarter Living newsletter to get stories like this (and much more!) delivered straight to your inbox every Monday morning.]
+TH: You outline the four rules of deep work in your book, which I think is a great place to start for someone who’s just learning about these ideas. Let’s go through them. What is the first rule of deep work, and how do I apply it to my life?
+CN: The first rule is to “work deeply.” The idea here is that if you want to successfully integrate more deep work into your professional life, you cannot just wait until you find yourself with lots of free time and in the mood to concentrate. You have to actively fight to incorporate this into your schedule. It helps, for example, to include deep work blocks on my calendar like meetings or appointments and then protect them as you would a meeting or appointment.
+TH: And that has a lot to do with habit formation vs. willpower, too, right?
+CN: Right. Deep work is demanding, and our brains, which are evolved to avoid unnecessary energy expenditure, therefore try to avoid it if possible. We’re simply not evolved to give concentration the same priority that we might give to evading a charging lion. Therefore, you cannot rely on willpower alone. You need all the help you can get to trick yourself into getting started with this activity.
+TH: So, great, we’ve got a strategy to build habits around deep work and to actually do it. What’s rule two?
+CN: The second rule is to “embrace boredom.” The broader point here is that the ability to concentrate is a skill that you have to train if you expect to do it well. A simple way to get started training this ability is to frequently expose yourself to boredom. If you instead always whip out your phone and bathe yourself in novel stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom, your brain will build a Pavlovian connection between boredom and stimuli, which means that when it comes time to think deeply about something (a boring task, at least in the sense that it lacks moment-to-moment novelty), your brain won’t tolerate it.[Season 2 of ‘True Detective’ wasn’t as bad as you think. A writer explains why.]
+As it did with Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle and his “time is a flat circle” philosophizing in the first season, a chunk of this information unfolds through a deposition long after the fact — in this case, 10 years — and the show adds a third timeline, 25 years after that, when the elderly Hays has acquiesced to an interview for a true crime show. (Old-age makeup is notoriously difficult to get right, so it should be said that Ali’s transformation is exceptionally good here.) Other major characters get a toehold on the first episode, too, including Stephen Dorff as Hays’s partner, Roland West, and Carmen Ejogo as Amelia Reardon, an English teacher who will eventually become Hays’s wife and write a book about the case.
+Pizzolatto’s script goes easy on the hard-boiled Pizzolatto-isms for the time being, which allows his strengths for baroque plotting to shine through more clearly. Time will tell whether the unsavory aspects of the story — child murder and abduction, a peephole into the little girl’s room — will drag it down or if Pizzolatto will lose the plot as much as he did in the second season. But the two big twists in “The Great War and Modern Memory” — that Amelia married Hays and wrote about the case, and that the little girl is still alive in 1990 and apparently burglarizing pharmacies in Oklahoma — are expertly handled, and the various suspects and witnesses are laid out clearly and carefully.
+Getting those establishing details right is no small feat, especially after a second season that sowed confusion and contempt from the opening hour. The third season of “True Detective” may be scaled-back in ambition, but Saulnier and Pizzolatto get the hooks in deep through evocative scene-setting and the bread-crumb-by-bread-crumb storytelling of a classic procedural. As Hays steels himself to explore the darkness at the edge of town, it’s easy enough to follow for now.
+Flat Circles:
+• That last exchange between Hays and West (“It’s too dark, man.” “I don’t care.”) feels like an I-yam-what-I-yam moment from Pizzolatto, who might feel inclined to wink at his critics after last season.
+• Race will surely become a factor as the season moves along. The initial meeting between Hays and Amelia leaves the question hanging — “How is it here … you know?” — for now.
+• Devil’s Den joins Cape Fear in the annals of prophetically named public spaces.
+• The peephole in the boy’s room, most likely carved out by Lucy’s cousin, is the first big lead in the case, especially when the boy turns up dead and not his sister. It is also a Pizzolatto — and noir — convention to have this secret space in the back of a closet, undercurrents of unfathomable evil coursing through everyday life.
+• Fans of the eclectic music supervisor T-Bone Burnett may chuckle at the Mickey Newbury version of “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In” that closes the episode. Burnett also produced the eclectic soundtrack for “The Big Lebowski,” which used Kenny Rogers and the First Edition’s single for the surreal, Busby Berkeley-esque dream sequence at the bowling alley.In December, President Trump made an extraordinary declaration about U.S. involvement in Syria: “We have won against ISIS. Now, it’s time for our troops to come back home.” Ignoring advice from his generals and advisers, Trump said that the U.S. would leave Syria. Defense Department officials said that they were ordered to do it within 30 days. [explosion] Then came a flurry of criticism, even from inside his own party. “I believe it is a catastrophic mistake.” “This is very disappointing.” “It needs to be reconsidered.” Then, the resignations. First, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit. And America’s chief diplomat in the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, soon followed. Now, the timeline for a full withdrawal is unclear. “I never said we’re doing it that quickly.” He went on to say that the U.S. will leave at a proper pace while continuing to fight ISIS, a shift from — “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The nearly eight-year-long war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. [explosion] So, how did we get here and what are U.S. forces doing in Syria? In 2011, uprisings rippled through the Middle East. Leaders fell in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. And after months of anti-government protests in Syria, the U.S. had a message for President Bashar al-Assad: “This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.” He didn’t and the conflict escalated. In 2012, Obama warned Assad against using Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons against his own people. “That’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing the use of chemical weapons.” A year later, Assad’s army launched a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, killing 1,400 people. [screaming] In response, the U.S. debated airstrikes, but they were avoided when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. But a new threat was also emerging — ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. began supporting rebel groups to fight extremists, while also conducting airstrikes as part of an international coalition. These efforts expanded and the U.S. troop numbers grew from hundreds to the low thousands. In 2016, U.S.-supported fighters took control of the ISIS stronghold of Manbij — and in 2017 their de facto capital, Raqqa. There are now around 2,000 American forces in Syria who are largely fighting alongside the Kurdish groups. This has been a problem for America’s ally Turkey, which has a long-standing conflict with the Kurds. U.S. troops have had run-ins with Assad’s forces as well as groups backed by Russia and Iran. Since taking office, Trump has ordered two strikes on areas controlled by Assad in response to chemical weapons attacks. “We are prepared to sustain this response, until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.” U.S. officials and allies dispute the claim that ISIS has been defeated. They warn that an American departure will weaken U.S. influence in the region and may embolden Russia, Iran and Turkey, who are also on the ground. The other worry? The move may inspire some ISIS fighters to return to Syria.No corrections appeared in print on Monday, January 14, 2019
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).
+Comments on editorials may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com or faxed to (212) 556-3622.
+For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.“If you can’t do Government 101, what makes you think you’re going to do Advanced Placement Government like finding the money for an infrastructure bill?”
+RAHM EMANUEL, the Democratic mayor of Chicago and a former chief of staff for President Barack Obama, describing the obstacles to bipartisan policymaking under a bitterly divided government.Mr. Adamowicz, 53, has been mayor of Gdansk since 1998 and was re-elected as an independent in November elections that underscored a deep divide between Poland’s liberal cities and conservative countryside. He has advocated gay rights and tolerance for minorities, and expressed solidarity with the city’s Jewish community last year when a synagogue’s windows were broken.
+The A.P. quoted the police as saying the suspect in the knife attack was a 27-year-old with apparent mental problems who had previously carried out bank robberies, and that he had gained access to the area where Mr. Adamowicz was speaking with a media badge.
+Mr. Adamowicz was brought to the Medical University of Gdansk for surgery after the attack. The A.P. quoted Dr. Tomasz Stefaniak, a doctor at the hospital, as saying early on Monday morning that Mr. Adamowicz was alive but remained “in a very serious condition.”
+In a Twitter post on Sunday night, Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, condemned the attack on Mr. Adamowicz and expressed solidarity “with the city he leads, his family and supporters.”The plane was a brand-new Boeing 737 Max 8, the latest model of Boeing’s workhorse 737 fleet. Its so-called black box, which records flight data, was recovered in early November.
+The pilots fought to save the plane almost from the moment it took off, as its nose was repeatedly forced down. They managed to pull the nose back up over and over until finally losing control, leaving the plane to plummet into the ocean at 450 miles per hour.
+Data from the plane’s flight data recorder appears to support a theory among investigators that a computerized system Boeing installed on its latest generation of 737 jets to prevent them from stalling instead forced the nose down. The aircraft was recording errant data from one of the two angle-of-attack sensors on its nose, which are designed to record the pitch at which a plane is climbing or descending.
+Yet the precise cause of the crash remains unknown, and a preliminary report on the accident released by Indonesian crash investigators in November was notably lacking in significant details. Among other questions, it is still not clear whether the errant data, which was on the pilot’s side of the plane, was attributable to a problem with the angle-of-attack sensor or with the computer that processes the sensor’s information.
+The plane’s cockpit voice recorder, known as a C.V.R., could provide further insight into specific steps that the pilots took as the jet’s course became violently erratic. The flight crew requested permission to return to the Jakarta airport but never turned around.Hays isn’t the type to entertain academic theses, but some of those words do seem to apply here. He’s a marginalized figure within an authoritarian and systemic racist structure. And practically speaking, it keeps him from doing his job.
+Back in the 1980 timeline, for example, Hays and West get their first huge break in the case when one of the victims’ classmates recognizes the dolls that were found in the forest near Will Purcell’s body. The boy tells them that Will and Julie found similar-looking dolls in their trick-or-treat bags on Halloween, and he outlines the neighborhood that they walked that night. Hays and West come together on a plan to surveil the neighborhood for a couple of days, search the homes of those willing to comply and see if anything shakes loose.
+[Read our recap of the Season 3 premiere.]
+The trouble with the plan, from a political standpoint, is that Arkansans don’t like having their privacy and property rights infringed upon. Any evidence gleaned from these searches, the detectives are told, won’t hold up in court. Hays makes the argument that winning a court case isn’t as important as finding the missing girl.
+He loses that argument. The one card in their hand is revealed in a news conference that succeeds mostly in alarming the community. Knowing that a potential killer may lurk in any one of the 114 households outlined by the victims’ friend, parents simply stop sending their kids to school. The morning bus travels down the usual stops, but no kids are aboard. (Shades of the Zodiac Killer, who terrorized the Bay Area with a letter stating: “School children make nice targets, I think I shall wipe out a school bus some morning. Just shoot out the front tire + then pick off the kiddies as they come bouncing out.”) For Hays and West, the decision is deeply unhelpful, potentially alerting the perpetrator and sowing fear and suspicion among the people of West Finger.
+Hays lashes out at his partner for failing to be more persuasive. “I knew they wouldn’t listen to me but you should have stopped that,” he says, adding: “They ain’t my tribe, man.”Perils mount for the Trump presidency.
+The shift of power in Congress and news reports are combining to confront President Trump with the prospect of a political war for survival “that may make the still-unresolved partial government shutdown pale by comparison,” our chief White House correspondent writes.
+News reports: A Times report detailed how, after Mr. Trump fired James Comey as F.B.I. director, the bureau became so concerned by the president’s behavior that investigators took the aggressive step of opening a counterintelligence inquiry into whether he had been working on behalf of Russia. That inquiry was taken over by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, when he was appointed.
+And The Washington Post first reported that the president had gone to great lengths to conceal his conversations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia over the past two years. Current and former officials told our reporters that this practice has caused anxiety within Mr. Trump’s own administration .We do not yet know who posted the egg on Jan. 4, why it was posted, or why this attempt to set a record actually worked.
+Nor do we offer grand perspective on why this happened. Sometimes, the will of the internet just bends in peculiar ways, and in this case, the internet decided it was into that egg.
+Still, you would scoff at the cultural significance of the egg at your own peril. For perspective: Last year’s top television show in the United States, “Roseanne,” averaged 20 million viewers per week, and about 27 million watched the Oscars. If everyone who liked the photo created a new city, it would be the world’s largest by several million. The egg’s fans have passed the population of Canada.
+At that scale, internet frivolity starts to look a little less frivolous.
+It’s not the first time that internet users, showing a thirst for chaos, have displaced meaningful record holders in favor of a lighthearted gag. In 2017, the internet coalesced behind Carter Wilkerson, a 16-year-old high school student who set a Twitter record for retweets after asking Wendy’s for free chicken nuggets. (He was recently dethroned by a Japanese businessman, under the handle @yousuck2020, who got more than five million retweets when he offered about $9,250 to 100 random people who retweeted him.)
+The comments on Ms. Jenner’s birth announcement, now Instagram’s second-most liked post with about 18.3 million likes, were covered in egg. The egg’s supporters taunted her, often using the egg emoji or simply the word “Egg.”HAPPY TOGETHER 8:30 p.m. on CBS. The first season of this sitcom about Jake (Damon Wayans Jr.) and Claire (Amber Stevens West), who host a pop star (Felix Mallard) in their suburban home, wraps up with an intimate concert that gives the couple of homebodies a reason to enjoy a night out. Writing in The Times, Mike Hale called the premise “this season’s most artificial situation.” “It’s not a bad idea,” he said, “but the writing tends toward the bland and sentimental.”
+DAUGHTERS OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE DALLAS COWBOYS CHEERLEADERS (2018) 9 p.m. on Starz. The documentarian Dana Adam Shapiro charts the creation of the new-and-improved Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader squad that made its debut in 1972. Original members look back at their time on the sidelines with nostalgia, while the squad’s former director, Suzanne Mitchell, recalls the high-stakes nature of her job. The movie suggests that the cheerleaders’ highly sexualized and demanding roles may have, at once, liberated and exploited them during a time when American women were increasingly demanding control of their bodies.
+LAST CALL 9 p.m. on Bounce TV. After his manager drains his bank account, a former N.F.L. player (Charles Malik Whitfield) opens a comedy club in the back room of his last remaining asset: a bar in his hometown called Last Call.The University of Michigan athletics department said Sunday that it would end its contract with a former U.S.A. Gymnastics executive connected to the Lawrence G. Nassar sexual abuse scandal, just days after the university hired her as a coaching consultant for its women’s gymnastics team.
+The university’s decision to move on from the former executive, Rhonda Faehn, is the latest fallout from the scandal, in which Nassar, a former doctor for the United States women’s gymnastics team and Michigan State University, was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison for sex crimes against female athletes.
+Ms. Faehn, who was fired in May after serving as senior vice president of U.S.A. Gymnastics for three years, had not been charged with a crime in the scandal, the University of Michigan noted when it hired her. She voluntarily testified before Congress in June that she had passed reports about Nassar’s abuse to her boss, the federation’s president, and believed he had promptly acted on them.
+But outcry built after she was hired on Thursday, with some university regents and members of the public demanding an end to the contract with Ms. Faehn, The Detroit News reported Sunday.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners, one of which is shown above.
+peregrination \ˈper-ə-grə-ˌnāt \ noun
+: traveling or wandering around
+_________
+The word peregrination has appeared in 13 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 9 in the book review “In His Last Years, Oscar Wilde Is Far From ‘The Happy Prince’” by Jeannette Catsoulis:
+A mopey yet gorgeous-looking wallow in the final years of the literary giant Oscar Wilde, “The Happy Prince” staggers around Europe with one eye on the grave and the other on the kinds of sorry mischief an unrepentant hedonist like Wilde could get up to. Happiness, however, proves elusive. Opening in 1897 as Wilde is sprung from a British prison after serving two years for gross indecency, the movie watches him wander, exiled and frequently penniless, through Dieppe and Naples before expiring in Paris of meningitis three years later. Brief flashbacks to the humiliations of his trial and the balm of opening-night adulation — represented by a sea of ecstatically applauding Victorian toffs — interrupt these peregrinations and underline the tragedy of his fall.A federal judge on Sunday granted a request by more than a dozen states to temporarily block the Trump administration from putting into effect new rules that would make it easier for employers to deny women health insurance coverage for contraceptives.
+Contraception is covered by the Affordable Care Act as a preventive health service, something employers and insurers are generally required to provide at no charge. But the Trump administration developed rules to allow employers to opt out of the mandate if they had religious or moral objections.
+A version of those rules was stymied by the courts in 2017, so the administration issued a new set of rules in November, which had been scheduled to take effect on Monday.
+However, the judge, Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. of the United States District Court in Oakland, Calif., granted a request by 13 states and the District of Columbia for a preliminary injunction, writing that the new rules “are nearly identical to” the ones that he had previously blocked.BEIJING — China’s diplomatic clash with Canada escalated sharply on Monday, when a Chinese court sentenced a Canadian to death for drug smuggling at a one-day retrial ordered weeks after a Chinese executive’s arrest in Canada.
+In announcing the death penalty against the Canadian, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, the court, in the northeast city of Dalian, gave no indication that his sentence might be reduced to prison time.
+Mr. Schellenberg’s fate could become a volatile factor in diplomacy between Beijing and Ottawa in the aftermath of the arrest by Canadian authorities of a Chinese technology executive in British Columbia last month — a move that incensed the Chinese government.
+Mr. Schellenberg had appealed a 15-year prison sentence for smuggling methamphetamines. But during his retrial, against the backdrop of sharply increased tensions between China and Canada, the court sided with prosecutors who called for capital punishment.BEIJING — Local officials in eastern China are investigating complaints that more than 100 children received expired polio vaccines after aggrieved parents protested violently over the weekend, the latest in a string of such vaccine scandals that have provoked anger nationwide.
+The government of Jinhu County in Jiangsu Province said on Friday that 145 children had received oral polio vaccines after their December expiration date. The children were between the ages of 3 months and 4 years, according to the state news media.
+In a statement on its website, the Jinhu government said that the incident exposed “the negligence and supervision failure of the relevant departments.”
+The county discipline commission is investigating senior local officials, including the deputy county head, according to the statement.The last time she played the Australian Open, she was pregnant. Eight months later, she nearly died during childbirth. She named her baby girl Alexis Olympia. Months afterward, she married her daughter’s father, Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of the popular website Reddit.
+Williams, same as ever, did not shy from attention — or from making a point. She shared her story publicly and said she was experiencing the same troubles faced by many other mothers. In her first Grand Slam tournament after childbirth, the 2018 French Open, she was not in shape, and she withdrew with an injury in the fourth round. She wore a sleek, black, full-body tennis suit. It was part fashion statement, part medical necessity — it reduced the chances of a recurrence of blood clots she experienced during childbirth.
+But the “cat suit,” as it came to be called, was so controversial that French tennis officials discussed banning outfits like it from Roland Garros in the future. (As a countermove, the WTA, which governs the women’s tour apart from the Grand Slams, clarified its rules to allow compression garments to be worn without skirts or dresses over them.)
+Undeterred, Williams spoke pointedly at Wimbledon about protecting rights of new mothers — on the tour and in the workplace. She marched through the draw. But, still out of shape, she lost in the final. A few weeks later, she withdrew from the Rogers Cup in Montreal, eventually citing postpartum depression, a condition that afflicts about 15 percent of all mothers but is often dogged by stigma.
+Then came the United States Open.
+Nobody here in Melbourne has forgotten what happened during the women’s singles final. Carlos Ramos, the umpire, spotted Williams’s coach motioning at her to be more aggressive. Ramos warned about a coaching infraction. Williams shouted with an angry, unyielding insistence that she had done nothing wrong, that she would never cheat.
+Nobody has forgotten the smashed racket, the point deducted as a penalty, her continued shouting: “You’re a thief,” she defiantly yelled at Ramos.At Times Square Station
+Dear Diary:
+I was wandering through the Times Square subway station at rush hour when I noticed a blind woman walking perilously close to the tracks.
+I approached her and offered my assistance. She took my arm with her left hand and held her walking stick in her right.
+She said she was on her way to catch a No. 1 train. I said it would be my pleasure to walk her there.
+As I led her along, following the clearly marked signs toward her destination, we started to talk. I was recounting the story of my life when she stopped me short.14. Los Angeles Clippers (24-18)
+I fear they are at high risk to slip out of the West’s top eight, but the Clippers would certainly slot in right at the top of the play-hard rankings if there were such an industry. The feisty likes of Montrezl Harrell and Patrick Beverley, flanking a better-than-ever Tobias Harris, continue to make the Clippers more bizarrely competitive than anyone imagined heading into a summer in which they appear well positioned to make the loudest free-agent noise in franchise history.
+15. Sacramento Kings (22-21)
+A Bogdan Bogdanovic buzzer-beater to topple the Lakers on Dec. 27 hiked the fast-paced Kings’ record to 19-16 and seemed to announce the blossoming tandem of De’Aaron Fox and Buddy Hield as certifiable playoff material after a league-high 12 consecutive seasons of missing out. Sacramento then unraveled, enduring a 1-5 funk which included an embarrassing fall-from-ahead loss at Phoenix when the Suns were without Devin Booker. You cannot afford funks in the West.
+16. Miami Heat (21-20)
+Little emanating from South Beach makes sense, whether it is Miami’s ability to play .500 basketball despite missing out on Butler via trade and having Goran Dragic healthy for just 14 games — or the fact this team is 0-3 against Atlanta. It is unclear how long it will take Miami to get back into the trade mix for a player of Butler’s caliber, but the retiring Dwyane Wade should have an opportunity to bid the game farewell from the playoff stage.
+17. Brooklyn Nets (21-23)
+The drop-off from the East’s top five to teams trying to secure the last three playoff stops is as steep as pessimists feared. Not that the Nets intend to apologize after the barren half-decade they endured in the wake of their disastrous 2014 trade with Boston. While the Knicks tank their way to a shot at Zion Williamson, New Yorkers may get postseason games after all, thanks to success stories like Spencer Dinwiddie, D’Angelo Russell, Joe Harris and Jarrett Allen.
+18. New Orleans Pelicans (20-23)
+It is a misnomer to say Anthony Davis has no help; Jrue Holiday, Nikola Mirotic and Julius Randle are all accomplished players. The Pelicans’ problems have been health (most notably injuries for Mirotic and the point guard Elfrid Payton) and difficulties in playing Davis, Mirotic and Randle together even when they are all available. New Orleans, as a result, is facing the biggest possible issue: Scenarios that force them to trade The Brow grow more plausible by the day.
+19. Washington Wizards (18-25)
+Indiana has crashed the East’s upper crust to give the conference its own Fab Five, but we were not exaggerating the drop-off to the chasing pack. Look no further than the nation’s capital for proof, with the Wizards still firmly in the playoff chase despite losing John Wall to season-ending heel surgery. Recent wins over Oklahoma City, Philadelphia and Milwaukee should tell you that the Wiz are not heeding some fans’ calls to tank.
+20. Dallas Mavericks (20-22)
+Luka Doncic has a real shot to become the first rookie to achieve All-Star status since Blake Griffin in 2011, which already makes this a more successful season in Dallas than many forecast. But the huge disparity between the Mavericks’ play at home (16-4) and on the road (4-18), Dirk Nowitzki’s health woes in what they hoped would be a heartwarming final season and J.J. Barea’s season-ending Achilles tear, have combined to snuff out some of the joy.TEHRAN — A 39-year-old cargo plane operated by the Iranian Army crashed into a residential area near the capital, Tehran, on Monday, killing 15 of the people onboard, state news media reported. One crew member survived and was hospitalized.
+State television said the plane struck an area neighboring the Fath airfield, northwest of Tehran, and burst into flames. It was not clear whether there were any casualties among people on the ground.
+The plane, a Boeing 707 passenger jet outfitted for cargo, was transporting lamb meat to Iran from Kyrgyzstan, the semiofficial news agency Mehr reported.
+Iran is one of the last countries to fly the 707, which was produced between 1957 and 1979. Many airplanes in the country are old: United States sanctions prevent the military and civilian carriers in Iran from buying new airplanes, and make it very difficult to obtain parts for those they already have.Before reading the article:
+The headline of the article you are about to read raises a question about a particular course of study at a public university. What is your reaction to the idea that a university may no longer offer history as a major? How do you think the university’s leaders determined this might be a good course of action?
+Now, read the article, “Students in Rural America Ask, ‘What Is a University Without a History Major?’” Then answer the following questions:
+1. What financial challenges does the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point face? How, according to Bernie Patterson, its chancellor, will the university respond?
+2. How have critics of the plan responded? What questions do they raise?
+3. In the article, Greg Summers, the university’s provost, compares changes in Wisconsin and in the university’s funding with climate change. How does he explain this comparison?
+4. Where else in the United States are public universities facing similar difficulties? How have they responded?When he looked back on himself in those earliest broadcasts, O’Brien told me on Friday, he said he saw a performer attempting to fulfill competing desires. “We’re trying to be anarchists, but I’m trying to be a good boy and do a good job for the network,” he said. What he’s engaged in now, he said, “is this gradual progression toward me making the job fit me more — what do I like?”
+Over breakfast in Los Angeles, O’Brien talked about the decision to restart “Conan,” the changes to the show and what might come next for him in his evolving TV career. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.
+How does it feel to be so near to resuming the show, after being away for a few months?
+My analogy is, in surgery, when they have to stop your heart so they can operate on you, there’s that weird moment when the doctor must be like, all right, time to start the heart up again! What if it doesn’t start? What if I walked out on the first test show and just started openly weeping? But we’ve done two test shows so far and it feels really good.
+When did you first have the idea to take a break from the show and reconceive it?
+Last year, I was coming up on 25 years as a late-night host. It made me realize, wait a minute, really? I remember when Johnny Carson retired, it was 30. At the time, that was such a big part of the story, that someone had had a television show for 30 years. It just struck me that the miles do add up. The repetition can get to you after a while. I was the new guy for so long, and then that card flips overnight — you go from the inexperienced, nervous punk to the old dean emeritus. I started to think, does it have to be that way? Let’s say I’ve got a couple years left in me. What if I tried to, in the most selfish way possible, alter this so that I have a maximum amount of fun? I decided to scare myself.
+What led you to these other activities — the live tour, the podcast, the travel shows?
+I had done a tour before, but this was no bells and whistles. I started out thinking, I need like 10 minutes up front. Then that became 15, then that became 20, then that become half an hour. By the end it was 40 minutes. It was really liberating.LOS ANGELES — When Sara Gilbert started her working day here one rainy December morning, her dressing room at “The Talk” was dimly lit by a few scented candles. “I feel like I’m safe if it’s dark,” she said with a gentle laugh.
+A short while earlier she’d kissed her three children goodbye and come to the Studio City offices of this CBS daytime show she developed, executive produces and co-hosts. Soon she and her fellow panelists, including Sharon Osbourne, Eve and Sheryl Underwood, would be trading thoughts and quips on issues of the day and interviewing celebrity guests like Dolly Parton and Keanu Reeves.
+Then Gilbert would drive to the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank and spend the evening playing Darlene, the middle sibling turned reluctant matriarch of “The Conners” — that’s the ABC sitcom previously known as “Roseanne,” until its former title star nearly brought it crashing down around her.
+This show, where Gilbert is now an executive producer, is also where she grew up before viewers’ eyes, portraying the caustically sarcastic Darlene over the original run of “Roseanne” from 1988 to 1997.Mr. Pompeo said he had spoken to Prince Mohammed about concerns over the imprisonment of women’s rights activists. “Their commitment was that the process, the lawful judicial process here, would take place,” he said. “They understand the concerns that some have.”
+But many of the most prominent activists being held have not been charged with any crimes, making it unclear what process Mr. Pompeo was referring to. Critics also question the independence of the judiciary in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s few absolute monarchies, where few trials are open to the public or the news media.
+Amid the growing criticism of Saudi Arabia, Mr. Trump has voiced his backing of Prince Mohammed, 33, who has secured power in the kingdom by ousting his rivals, including detaining other members of the royal family in the Ritz-Carlton in Riyadh.
+But many other American officials, including in the State Department, Pentagon, C.I.A. and Congress, have been more circumspect and increasingly view the prince as an unreliable partner.
+The visit with Prince Mohammed on Monday was the first for Mr. Pompeo since an emergency trip in October, as the diplomatic crisis over the murder of Mr. Khashoggi was ballooning. In his previous visit, Mr. Pompeo flew to Riyadh and posed for photographs in which he shook hands with the prince and smiled, drawing intense criticism for the images of bonhomie.
+Since then, Mr. Pompeo has had regular calls with the prince, said a former American official.
+Mr. Khashoggi was killed and dismembered by a Saudi hit team while visiting the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2, Turkish officials have said. The C.I.A. assessed that Prince Mohammed had ordered the killing.
+President Trump has declined to endorse that finding and has said the United States would continue its relationship with Saudi Arabia and with the prince, who is close to Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and main Middle East adviser.What do your favorite musicians or songs either state directly or suggest about gender identity? Or is this a topic they do not take on?
+Today’s article is about musicians who are challenging norms that they see as products of toxic masculinity. Why do you think they choose to write songs about this?
+In “The New Angry Young Men: Rockers Who Rail Against ‘Toxic Masculinity,’” Jim Farber writes:
+In recent months, a number of male rock musicians and hip-hop artists have released songs that rail against the most suffocating notions of what it can mean to be a man. And they’re finding a significant audience by doing so. The new album by the brutalist British band Idles, “Joy as an Act of Resistance,” uses toxic masculinity as a sustained theme. It was a top 5 hit in Britain and has garnered some of the most awed reviews of the year. The Guardian ranked it No. 6 on its list of best 50 albums of 2018, writing that listening to it “often feels like purging yourself of the year’s toxicity in one pent-up blizzard of drums and guitars.” As It Is, a neo-emo band from Brighton, England, released a single last June, “The Stigma (Boys Don’t Cry),” that attacks traditional male restrictions. The band’s current album, “The Great Depression,” has been streamed more than 13 million times on Spotify. American artists have tackled the issue as well, including Tiny Moving Parts, an emo group from Minnesota, who released the album “Swell” last year. And Henry Jamison, 30, a singer-songwriter in Vermont, addresses what Rolling Stone magazine calls “violent interpretations of masculinity” in “Gloria Duplex,” an album due out next month. The men, who all identify as heterosexual, say their writing is a direct result of the #MeToo movement and the dialogue about gender identity. “All these norms that we see aren’t normal at all,” said Joe Talbot, the lead singer and writer of Idles. “It’s a giant lie.”
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— What messages about gender have you gotten from music? Are those the messages you want to receive?
+— Are you familiar with any of the bands, artists or songs mentioned in the article? If so, what is your opinion of the music and message behind it? If not, listen to one of the songs mentioned, such as “Dead Boys” by Sam Fender, and then answer this question.
+— Are there other artists that you think should have been included in this article? Which musicians, and what messages are they conveying about gender identity in their songs?
+— In the article, Patty Walters, the lead singer of As It Is, is quoted as saying, “I don’t want to in any way belittle the struggles of other people while talking about the struggles of a straight man.” What is your response to this statement?
+— Are you generally interested in the message, if there is one, in the music you like? Explain.The tests we use for measuring the presence of THC, though, do not measure the level of impairment. They measure whether someone has used marijuana recently. If we legalize the drug, and more people use it, more people will register its recent use even when they are not impaired. So it should be expected that more people involved in car crashes will test positive even if no one is driving while high.
+Using a synthetic control approach, Mr. Hansen and colleagues showed that marijuana-related fatality rates did not increase more after legalization than what you would expect from trends and other states.
+The Concerns About Schizophrenia
+Dr. Ziva Cooper is one of the authors of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s comprehensive report on cannabis.
+She says some have misinterpreted the report to state that the report’s committee concluded that cannabis causes schizophrenia. It did not.
+“This was stated as an association, not causation,” she said. “We do not yet have the supporting evidence to state the direction of this association.”
+Dr. Cooper, research director of the U.C.L.A. Cannabis Research Initiative, went further: “We as a committee also concluded that a history of cannabis use is associated with better cognitive outcomes in people diagnosed with psychotic disorders. The blatant omission of this conclusion exemplifies the one-sided nature of some articles. Nonetheless, the strong association between cannabis use and schizophrenia means that people with predisposing risk factors for schizophrenia should most certainly abstain from using cannabis.”Forget fitness, 2019 may be the year you finally sleep well on the road. Hotels, cruise lines, airports and even airlines are devoting more attention in the coming year to helping travelers get better rest when away from the comfort of their own bed.
+Beating jet lag
+Six Senses, with 14 properties globally, is rolling out a jet lag recovery program during the first few months of 2019 that it developed in consultation Dr. Steven W. Lockley, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School who is an expert on circadian rhythms. The program is free, but guests must enroll in it before their arrival. Dr. Lockley helped create a jet lag recovery app called Timeshifter, which tells users what to do to overcome their jet lag based on where they are in the world. For example, the app indicates when to nap, sleep for the night and drink caffeine .
+In 2019, Westin Hotels & Resorts, with more than 250 properties worldwide, will redesign guest rooms with sleep in mind. New rooms will include special lighting with soothing illuminated patterns of light and shadow on the walls, like reflections on water, instead of the usual lamps and overhead lights.
+Similarly, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts offers free sleep-oriented amenities at all of its hotels. Guests can choose among mattress toppers and pillows, each with different firmness levels. Other amenities include lavender bath salts, pillow mists and eye masks.A 2016 study in Michigan of 377 bereaved women whose babies were stillborn or died soon after birth found that they were four times more likely to be depressed and seven times more likely to experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress than were 232 mothers with live babies. High levels of psychological distress persisted for at least nine months among the women whose babies had died.
+In the Michigan study, directed by Dr. Katherine J. Gold and colleagues at the University of Michigan, 18 women whose babies had died reported that they didn’t get to see them, 36 did not get to hold their infants, and 34 reported that they were told they could not hold them.
+In an interview, Mr. Fricker said that thanks to the CuddleCot, “Brittany, our labor and delivery nurse, told us we could spend as much time as we wanted with our babies,” who were born just shy of 23 weeks gestation weighing 1 pound, 1 ounce each. “We held them, told them how much we loved them and had them baptized. We got to choose when to say goodbye to them, about 12 hours later.”
+In deciding on a CuddleCot donation, Mr. Fricker said, “We tried to think of a way to memorialize our babies. What better way than to provide other parents the gift of time to spend with babies they lost.”
+The Frickers have already raised money to make a second and possibly a third donation of a CuddleCot, this time to “a hospital in an underserved community where it can make an impact on a big group of people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to something like this,” Mr. Fricker said. “A loss is a loss regardless of who experiences it.”Video arcades — those recreational arenas of illuminated screens and 8-bit soundtracks — have been fading from the cultural landscape since the end of the Donkey Kong ’80s. The advent of home video game consoles, hand-held gaming devices and smartphones has all but rendered them relics of a Gen X childhood.
+Yet somehow, Chinatown Fair Family Fun Center lives on. The cramped downtown institution is among the last of the city’s old-school arcades, often filled with gamers too young to remember Street Fighter IV a decade ago, let alone Missile Command in the Reagan years.
+“Chinatown Fair should have closed years ago, along with all the other arcades in the city, due to rising rent and the shift to online gaming,” said Kurt Vincent, who directed “The Lost Arcade,” a 2016 documentary about the arcade’s enduring legacy in the city. “But it’s still there on Mott Street after all these years because young people need a place to come together.”If these measures are not enough for some procedures, Dr. Friedrichsdorf said, “the answer is nitrous gas” and, rarely, when necessary, forms of deeper sedation.
+[Sign up for the Well Family newsletter.]
+Dr. Chambers leads the “It Doesn’t Have to Hurt” initiative in Canada, which provides parents with evidence about children’s pain control so they can advocate for their children. An article she wrote in September in the journal Pain Reports summarizes developments in the field of pediatric pain research.
+She told a story of one mother who took her baby to the emergency department and asked if she could breast-feed while the baby was having a procedure done. The initial response was no; “there’s a lot of misconceptions, the baby will associate pain with feeding, or the baby will choke,” Dr. Chambers said. But the mother persisted and finally prevailed, and “eventually the resident said, go ahead, and then said, this was one of the best procedures I’ve ever done.”
+Pediatric pain specialists speak with real passion about their ability to shield kids from even the “routine” pain of shots and blood draws. But they acknowledge that change in medical practice can be slow, and that parents are their most important partners in advocacy. “Simply asking the question, ‘What can be done to manage my child’s pain,’ just bringing that possibility up,” often starts doctors and nurses thinking about better pain management, Dr. Chambers said.
+And of course, children are not the only ones out there who are frightened. “We don’t talk about how many adults are afraid of needles or avoid getting needles,” Dr. Chambers said. “We’ve had many parents in our initiative say, these strategies have worked not only for my kids but for me.”
+So what gets in the way? Dr. Friedrichsdorf points out that veterinary medicine requires much more training in how to handle pain “before you can operate on a hamster” than is required of pediatricians and even of surgeons. And the logistics of providing this kind of pain management for routine shots and blood draws can be very daunting for institutions or busy practices: all those topical anesthetics to be applied, all those distraction techniques to be taught and practiced.
+An international initiative, ChildKind, certifies hospitals that meet standards for pediatric pain control, attempting to build in both standards and a strong incentive for the best evidence-based practices. And Minnesota is working with five other children’s hospitals in the United States and Canada to replicate its comfort promise initiative, while others are implementing these changes independently.One hundred and two years later, one has become 131 — the number of women serving in both chambers of the 116th Congress as of this month.
+Just over a century ago, Jeannette Rankin of Montana won a seat in the House of Representatives, becoming the first woman ever elected to federal office. In 1917, 128 years after the first United States Congress convened, she was sworn into its 65th session.
+“It gives me pride to be the woman Speaker of the House of this Congress, which marks 100 years since women won the right to vote, and as we serve with more than 100 women.”
+“It gives me pride to be the woman Speaker of the House of this Congress, which marks 100 years since women won the right to vote, and as we serve with more than 100 women.” Nancy Pelosi D, Calif.
+“Congress has never heard a voice like mine. After years of seeing my community at the whim of national politics while organizing in Indian Country, it was time for me to take the lead.”
+“Congress has never heard a voice like mine. After years of seeing my community at the whim of national politics while organizing in Indian Country, it was time for me to take the lead.” Deb Haaland D, N.M.
+Many of these women, spanning generations, serve as firsts in Congress: the first women representing their states, the first female combat veteran, the first Native American women, the first Muslim women, the first openly gay member of the Senate, the first woman Speaker of the House — the list goes on.
+Viewed together, these portraits demonstrate the scale of the number of women in both the House and Senate. But, when seen as singular portraits, each image represents an individual with her own perspective — in political beliefs, personal goals and histories.
+This portraits series documents the women of the 116th Congress in their totality. Like the work of Kehinde Wiley , who painted Barack Obama’s official presidential portrait, these photographs evoke the imagery we are used to seeing in the halls of power, but place people not previously seen as powerful starkly in the frames.
+The 2018 midterm elections ushered in a change in representation; for the first time, more than 100 women serve in the House of Representatives — out of 435 seats — and members of color were elected in more states than ever before .
+For most of recorded American history, political power has looked a certain way. Portraits of power call certain images to mind — those of older, white men, dressed in suits and depicted in formal settings.
+“The disconnect between the America I heard about in the refugee camp, a land of opportunity where everyone had an equal shot at a better life, compared to the one I found has motivated me since the first day I arrived.”
+“The disconnect between the America I heard about in the refugee camp, a land of opportunity where everyone had an equal shot at a better life, compared to the one I found has motivated me since the first day I arrived.” Ilhan Omar D, Minn.
+“I’m a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a business owner and a bison farmer. I don’t think my gender defines who I am, but it does add value and perspective to the decisions I make.”
+“I’m a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a business owner and a bison farmer. I don’t think my gender defines who I am, but it does add value and perspective to the decisions I make.” Carol Miller R, W.Va.
+“To truly represent the American people, Congress needs more women and moms. I’m expecting my third baby since I was elected to serve, and it is a privilege to offer my unique perspective as we shape policy for all American families.”
+“To truly represent the American people, Congress needs more women and moms. I’m expecting my third baby since I was elected to serve, and it is a privilege to offer my unique perspective as we shape policy for all American families.” Jaime Herrera Beutler R, Wash.
+Though women’s numbers in Congress have, on average, risen over the years, growth has been neither linear nor steady. And while white women have served in Congress since 1917, and in the Senate since 1922 (though at the time only for one day), it wasn’t until 1964 that a woman of color was elected, when Patsy Takemoto Mink was voted into the House. The Senate did not have its first woman of color until Illinois elected Carol Moseley Braun in 1992.
+Recent gains in women’s representation have been unevenly split across the political aisle. While in the 1980s, Democrats and Republicans had roughly the same number of women serving, about 80 percent of the women in Congress now are Democrats.
+What it means to be a woman in power varies significantly, even among this class of 131 women. For some, their identity as women is an integral aspect of their life experiences and thus their legislative approach. Others say they are not defined by their gender and should be seen as politicians that happen to be women, rather than women politicians.
+More women holding elected office is significant not only in that it brings Congress closer to looking like the American population. It also expands the collective imagination about what power can and should look like.
+Portraits of these women of the 116th Congress are a testament to what power looks like in 2019 — and the possibilities of what it may look like in the years to come.My friend Paul O’Neill knew I loved history, and he gave me this Abe Lincoln letter when we were performing together in Cleveland for New Year’s Eve in 2016. Paul was like my brother. He was the lead singer of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, but we first met when he started out as a tour manager at the beginning of the Blackhearts. He helped do whatever we needed to do when we were on the road and struggling. Once we weren’t struggling anymore, he left to make his own music. My partner, Kenny Laguna, and I sort of gave him seed money to start his own music projects and what became TSO. We were very connected.
+He had something to do with my success, and I had something to do with his, and this gift was his way of saying thank you. He would get me crazy, over-the-top gifts like this or like a $10,000 guitar. He was always trying to show that he recognized that Kenny and I had something to do with him having success, and he just wanted to give back. Plus, he was just a loving guy. Paul passed away in April 2017. The last time he was on stage was that New Year’s Eve when we were together, so this piece carries extra weight.
+This interview has been edited and condensed.LOS ANGELES — More than 30,000 Los Angeles public-school teachers began a strike on Monday, the first in three decades in the district. Holding plastic-covered signs on rain-drenched picket lines across the city, they demanded higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff in schools.
+The strike effectively shut down learning for roughly 500,000 students at 900 schools in the district, the second-largest public school system in the nation. The schools remained open, staffed by substitutes hired by the city, but many parents chose to keep their children at home, either out of support for the strike or because they did not want them inside schools with a skeletal staff.
+With negotiations apparently at a standstill, the strike could last days or even weeks.
+The decision to walk off the job came after months of negotiations between the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, and the Los Angeles Unified School District. Although educators on all sides agree California should spend more money on education, the union and the district are locked in a bitter feud about how Los Angeles should use the money it already gets.
+Although district officials have agreed to come closer to meeting some of the union’s demands, they say fulfilling all of them would bankrupt the system, which is already strained by rising health care and pension costs.The Rev. Al Sharpton, who was heavyset when he ran for president in 2004, said he has noticed both Ms. Gillibrand and Mr. Booker’s thinning profiles.
+Recently, Mr. Sharpton, the civil rights leader who lost about 175 pounds, met privately with Ms. Gillibrand before a joint news conference. She marveled at his ability to keep the weight off. He returned the compliment, telling her she was “looking even sharper” of late, Mr. Sharpton recalled.
+“And she says, ‘Well, reverend, you’ve got to always watch what you do.’ So I was saying, ‘Yes, especially if you have other plans.’ She said, ‘We’ll talk about that another time,’” Mr. Sharpton said of their exchange. “I was trying to bait her into telling me if she was going to run. But she did not give that away.”
+All jokes aside, he said that a candidate’s weight can shape voter perception.
+“Optics are important in politics,” Mr. Sharpton said. “And I think it does not hurt to look fit, because people want people that they feel take themselves seriously if they’re going to put the affairs of the state in their hands.”
+In the past, Ms. Gillibrand has been open about her weight. In 2012 she detailed her hour-by-hour daily diet for Self magazine (“Snack: 10 almonds”), after losing 40 pounds after the birth of her second child.
+She devoted a chapter about her body and gender expectations in her book, including sexist commentary congressional colleagues said to her (“You know, Kirsten, you’re even pretty when you’re fat” and “Don’t lose too much weight now. I like my girls chubby”).
+“I don’t like being judged on my looks and, frankly, I’d like to spend less time thinking about my appearance, but there it is,” she wrote. But she came to see the benefit of opening up about her weight battles. “I’d always wanted voters to know that I’m a tenacious person, and what finally convinced them was that I’d possessed the determination to lose 50 pounds.”Democrats have demanded that Mr. Barr protect Mr. Mueller as he completes the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, including whether Mr. Trump sought to obstruct the inquiry on behalf of Moscow. Democrats have also focused on whether Mr. Barr would turn over to Congress any report Mr. Mueller compiles .
+Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the new Judiciary Committee chairman, told reporters after meeting with Mr. Barr last week that the nominee had said he saw no reason to fire Mr. Mueller and had pledged to “err on the side of transparency” about any report. But neither statement addressed what he would do if Mr. Trump ordered him to act otherwise.
+Mr. Barr is likely to be confirmed because Republicans control the Senate and because defeating him would leave in place the acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, a Trump loyalist whose installation in that role Democrats see as illegitimate and a threat to Mr. Mueller. Ethics officials advised Mr. Whitaker to recuse himself from the Russia case, but he refused.
+But Mr. Barr has already drawn scrutiny over the revelation last month that he sent an apparently unsolicited 19-page memo to the Trump legal team in June arguing that Mr. Mueller should not be permitted to investigate Mr. Trump for criminal obstruction of justice.
+Mr. Barr’s argument derived from his broad view of executive power: The Constitution, he claimed, does not permit Congress to make it a crime for the president to exercise his executive powers corruptly — even if he were to fire a subordinate, pardon someone or use what Mr. Barr termed his “complete authority to start or stop a law enforcement proceeding” to cover up crimes by himself or his associates.
+The claim that the framers of the Constitution empowered presidents to impede investigations for corrupt ends goes too far, many legal scholars say. But Supreme Court precedents offer few definitive guideposts, giving the attorney general broad latitude.
+“The interpretive approach of Justice Department lawyers to the Constitution is very important because many separation-of-powers issues never wind up in court,” said Peter Shane, an Ohio State University law professor. “Barr’s method is not uniquely his, but it does represent a particularly aggressive school of executive power thought.”LATE IN THE DAY
+By Tessa Hadley
+273 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99.
+Midway through Tessa Hadley’s brilliant and upsetting new novel, Isobel Klimec attempts to explain to her endlessly patient date who Zachary Samuels was. “He was my dad’s best friend, my best friend’s father, Mum’s best friend’s husband.” The date responds that “it sounds like one of those puzzles. … You know: ‘Who is my father’s brother’s mother’s husband’s grandson,’ that kind of thing.” In fact, it’s splendidly more complicated than that. In the hands of a lesser novelist, the intricate tangle of lives at the center of “Late in the Day” might feel like just such a self-satisfied riddle or, at best, like sly narrative machinations. Because this is Tessa Hadley, it instead feels earned and real and, even in its smallest nuances, important.
+The longer version, with which Isobel does not belabor her date: Lydia Smith and Christine Drinkwater first met the married Alexandr Klimec (a sardonic Czech-born erstwhile poet) as their French instructor. Lydia, a hungry and capricious schemer, decided she must have him and insinuated herself into his life, babysitting for his son and setting up Christine with Alex’s friend Zachary. Before long, though, Alex had chosen Christine, and Zach had chosen Lydia. Marriages and babies ensued. Each woman would likely have picked the other man, and in each case it might have been a better match. But the men do the choosing here, as so often in life, and the result is a tenuous decades-long balance, a wobbly but serviceable four-legged table.
+This is all past and prologue, though. By the start of the novel, these characters are in their 50s, the babies are grown (one, of course, is Isobel), and Zachary has just dropped dead of a heart attack.
+Image Tessa Hadley Credit... Mark Vessey
+Hadley is adept at fluid omniscience, at storytelling that skims through the years as easily as it weaves through various points of view, and as the days of funeral and mourning and aftermath progress we take great gulps of the past, of the 30 years between the formation of this quartet and its dissolution. We learn that these four were even more enmeshed than we’ve imagined, which explains the chaos the survivors have been thrown into by Zach’s death, the way “the shape of all their lives was shaken loose now.”WASHINGTON — Medicare for All. A federal jobs guarantee. The “Green New Deal.” No Super PAC money. No mass deportations.
+And, of course, a candidate who can beat President Trump — right?
+After a 2018 midterm election that energized the left, perhaps the most consequential political question facing the Democratic Party is whether liberals will insist on imposing policy litmus tests on 2020 presidential hopefuls, or whether voters will rally behind the candidate most capable of defeating the president even if that Democrat is imperfect on some issues.
+These dual priorities — and which one is emphasized more in the coming primary races — will help determine how the party approaches 2020. Will candidates sprint to the left on issues and risk hurting themselves with intraparty policy fights and in the general election? Or will they keep the focus squarely on Mr. Trump and possibly disappoint liberals by not being bolder on policy?
+The two paths may help determine the electoral fortunes of potential left-wing candidates like Senator Bernie Sanders and more moderate ones like former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., as well as Democrats like Senator Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke who have a history of appealing to both liberals and moderates and drawing ire from some leftists for not being aggressive enough on policy.I hadn’t seen any other foreigners, so when I heard an American accent down the hallway, I was curious. I wandered through the lodge, pushed open a door and found three rugged, sun-tanned guys sitting on cushions in a cozy, wood-paneled room heated by wood-burning stoves.
+“What do you guys do here?”
+“We’re the ski patrol,” said one.
+His name was Luke. He was 39 years old. He grew up in Alaska, became an avalanche forecaster and a paramedic and came to Gulmarg seven years ago to run the ski patrol.
+“It’s the warmth of the people,” he said. “That’s what drew me here.”
+He explained that Gulmarg has 17 ski patrollers with snowmobiles to rescue injured skiers. Avalanches were always a risk but only in the off-piste areas, he said, like where the Russian tourist was skiing on the day we arrived.
+After lunch, I watched my sons ski. Eeesh had taught them well. Asa turned back and forth, carving large S’s and ending with a confident snowplow. Apollo was less orthodox. He shot down the bunny hill like a bullet.
+“Stop! Stop!” Courtenay yelled as he approached the bottom.
+I doubt he heard but somehow, right before he was about to crash into us, he stopped.
+The next morning was sadly our last. I persuaded Wali to take me higher on the mountain. When we got off the chair lift, we were by ourselves. The views were breathtaking. It was so bright, so clear, so crisp, so still. I just wanted to stay up there and stare at the jagged white mountains and etch those images into my brain.
+I was reminded of a Persian couplet inscribed long ago on a pavilion in one of Srinagar’s majestic gardens: “If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here.”SAN DIEGO — Migrants who are allowed to remain in the United States to pursue asylum are usually given a choice when they are released from detention in San Diego: Go to the Greyhound bus station and fend for themselves, or try to find a cot and a shower at a local shelter.
+One way or another, once the migrants have been dropped off by discreet white Immigration and Customs Enforcement vans in border towns across the Southwest, they are no longer the federal government’s problem.
+President Trump has tried and failed to end a practice he derisively calls “catch and release,” and thousands of undocumented migrants apprehended at the border every month are still being granted routine entry to the United States while their cases are processed by immigration courts.
+But as the number of migrant families in recent months has overwhelmed the government’s detention facilities, the Trump administration has drastically reduced its efforts to ensure the migrants’ safety after they are released. People working along the border say an ever larger number of families are being released with nowhere to stay, no money, no food and no means of getting to friends and relatives who may be hundreds or thousands of miles away.Bhutan’s Constitution, which went into effect in 2008 with the transition to democracy, directs the kingdom’s leaders to consult the four pillars of when considering legislation.At Mr. Bolton’s request, the National Security Council asked the Pentagon last year to offer military options to strike Iran, Defense Department and senior American officials said on Sunday.
+The background: The request came after Iranian-backed militants fired three mortars or rockets onto the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Military officials at the time chose not to retaliate.
+Another angle: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, today to discuss several issues that have weakened the U.S.-Saudi alliance, including the war in Yemen.
+News analysis: The void left by America’s growing disengagement in the Middle East is being filled by Russia and Iran, our bureau chief in Beirut, Lebanon, writes.SEOUL, South Korea — When the #MeToo movement started gaining traction in South Korea last year, many people looked to the country’s sports communities, which have long been dogged by allegations of corruption and physical abuse. But few victims spoke out.
+That changed this month, when Shim Suk-hee, 21, a member of South Korea’s national short-track speedskating team and a two-time Olympic gold medalist, said she had been repeatedly raped by her former coach, Cho Jae-beom, since she was 17.
+Mr. Cho, 38, was fired as national team coach shortly before the start of the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, last year on allegations of violent abuse against athletes. In September, he was sentenced to 10 months in prison for physically assaulting four athletes, including Ms. Shim, between 2011 and the preparations for the Pyeongchang Games.
+If Ms. Shim’s accusation of sexual assault is corroborated, it would add more weight to the long-held allegation among sports analysts that South Korea’s glory in short-track speedskating has been built on a brutal training regimen that included beatings and other forms of violence.Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:
+Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher
+As the shutdown continues over the president’s demand for a border wall, Annie Brown from “The Daily” joined Azam Ahmed, a New York Times reporter, and Meridith Kohut, a photojournalist, on their endeavor to drive the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border. Here’s what they saw on the first part of that journey.
+Listen to Part 2 of this series here.
+On today’s episode:NASHVILLE — In 2004, Johnny Allen, a real estate broker in his 40s, picked up a 16-year-old girl named Cyntoia Brown at a drive-in restaurant here. Mr. Allen bought her some food and then took her to his house, agreeing to pay her $150 for sex. Ms. Brown shot him to death as he slept, taking his money and two of his handguns with her when she fled in his truck.
+It’s easy to understand why prosecutors at Cyntoia Brown’s trial in 2006 saw this as a slam-dunk case. A prostitute, a robbery, the coldblooded murder of a sleeping man: How much nuance can there be in such a scenario? The jury apparently agreed, finding Ms. Brown guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery. She was sentenced to life in prison. In 2012, the United States Supreme Court ruled against sentencing juveniles to life without parole, but last month the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld Ms. Brown’s sentence on the grounds that she would be eligible for parole when she is 69 years old.
+But in the case of teenage criminals, even teenagers guilty of the most hideous crimes, there are no slam-dunk cases. Ms. Brown’s attorneys argued that she had killed Mr. Allen in self-defense, fearing for her life, and that she had taken his guns and his money out of fear of her pimp. (A 2011 documentary, “Me Facing Life: Cyntoia’s Story,” details her enslavement to the pimp, who was known as Cut Throat.)
+[Want to join the debate? Follow us on Instagram at @nytopinion.]
+“If you look at Cyntoia’s original transcripts, they are peppered with the phrase ‘teen prostitute,’” Derri Smith, founder and chief executive of the nonprofit End Slavery Tennessee, told CNN. “We know today there’s no such thing as a teen prostitute … because this teen may think that she decided this was her idea to be raped multiple times a day and give money to someone else, it’s pretty clear there’s an adult behind that who’s manipulating and exploiting her.”In many of the subsequent accounts of her life, Weil has been labeled an anorexic, like St. Catherine of Siena, the 14th-century nun who was also convinced that she could reach God through her empty stomach. This was not the fate of Chavez, who is today still admired for carrying out a centuries-old ascetic practice, nor of Mohandas Gandhi — nor for that matter, Jesus Christ, who in the Bible is said to have fasted for 40 days and nights in the desert.
+Today, even though one-third of diagnosed eating disorders are found in men, we overwhelmingly associate the medical diagnosis of anorexia nervosa with women (a more obscure term, anorexia mirabilis, denotes undereating as a form of religious asceticism, and is not listed as a medical condition in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). All this suggests that in society when a woman intentionally fasts, we are more likely to see her as sick; and when a man does it, we consider him spiritual. It’s certainly possible that Weil hid a case of anorexia nervosa behind a mask of spirituality. By that logic, though, Chavez might have done the same thing.
+The same double standard applies outside of a religious context. Just like yoga, meditation, and other spiritual practices that get popular when they jettison their religious trappings, fasting has become a health practice in recent years, often in male circles. Some research now supports the idea that the body does well when it gets deprived of food for certain lengths of time, from 12 hours to three days, a concept known as Intermittent Fasting. Like the Paleo movement (a diet often marketed to men), I.F. remembers us as Paleolithic humans in the wild, with days of plenty sandwiched by days of nothing. Today, magazines and podcasts aimed at men promote the idea that I.F. is good for a man’s physique. Notably absent is public worry that these men will develop eating disorders. In contrast, when a female student in my class announced that she was going to start practicing I.F., other students quickly warned her to “be careful.”
+To point out this gender disparity around fasting is not to ignore the very real problem of eating disorders. In an age where anorexia nervosa and bulimia are prevalent among both men and women, there is sufficient reason to be cautious in branding any fast as “spiritual” — doing so might give cover by offering a religious justification in cases that may very well be psychological and physical in nature. The American cultural obsession with thinness and the demonization of body fat that magnify critical self-image and the psychological aspects of eating disorders should not be taken lightly. But that does not negate the misunderstanding and gender stereotyping that often surrounds intentional fasting for spiritual or political purposes.
+My own one-day fast confirmed that I love food, but also that I am capable of systematically denying it to myself for a higher cause. Like Weil, I had hoped the pain in my stomach would serve as a reminder of the emotional pain of the children who lacked not food but mothers. It did: Every time my stomach groaned I imagined temporarily orphaned children. Privation joined me to them, even if mine was self-imposed and temporary. Like Chavez I felt repentant, as in, turned back toward the good, toward justice, toward God. Fasting made me feel utterly connected to these children, and thoroughly Catholic. By fasting I was tapping into my own religious, ascetic history, and I had triumphantly joined Weil and Chavez in their quest to share in the suffering of others.
+Something telling also happened that day. I kept wondering if my desire to not eat was indicative of a latent eating disorder. In eating (and other areas), women are taught to doubt themselves. Perhaps the power radiating from the sickly bodies of Gandhi and Chavez contrasts too sharply with the medical diagnoses of bodies like Weil’s, leading women to believe that deep inside, our souls are sick. I doubt that the men I fasted with that day in Texas heard a critical voice in their head, incessantly pressing them to examine their motives.
+As a philosopher, I am in no position to make diagnoses for either of these historical figures, but I can insist that their actions — and ours — be viewed in the same light, with the same kind of scrutiny.
+Mariana Alessandri is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley.
+Now in print: “Modern Ethics in 77 Arguments,” and “The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments,” with essays from the series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.The issue over the mercury rule has focused on costs and benefits. Mr. Wheeler’s E.P.A. argues that the Obama administration was wrong to include “co-benefits” that would result from the rule. The scrubbers that remove mercury from coal plant emissions also reduce other pollutants, especially particulates, which are deadly, so this co-benefit keeps lethal pollution out of the air.
+Reductions in heart and lung disease from particulates prevent up to an estimated 11,000 premature deaths a year. And those other hazardous air toxics coming from industrial coal stacks? As someone who has survived kidney cancer — my oncologist vaguely explained it was “one of those environmental cancers” — I can promise you these aren’t things we want to breathe: probable carcinogens like cadmium, arsenic, benzene and formaldehyde, among others. The cost associated with harm from these was not even monetized by the E.P.A. Keeping them out of our air is a “freebie.”
+If anything, the benefits of reducing mercury have been vastly understated. Since the rule was finalized, the science documenting the severe health impacts of mercury has become even stronger. New studies show that the quantified benefits of reducing mercury are now in the billions of dollars; a study published in the journal Environmental Health in 2017 estimated that the societal costs associated with the neurocognitive deficits from methylmercury exposure in the United States that year was $4.8 billion .
+Among those urging the E.P.A. to leave the mercury standards alone was, surprisingly, the nation’s electric utility industry, which found that implementation cost far less than they had anticipated. Power industry experts indicate the true costs of the standards are $2 billion — or less than a quarter of what the agency originally estimated. Mr. Wheeler ignored the industry’s request that the standards be left in place. As the Rev. Mitch Hescox, president of the Evangelical Environmental Network, wrote in The Christian Post, addressing Mr. Wheeler’s legalistic cover of not overturning the rule but making it vulnerable to legal attack: “God is not fooled — and neither are we.” He added, “ We’ll never give up on protecting children and the unborn from mercury pollution. Never.”
+President Trump’s pro-polluter agenda is profoundly radical — and immoral. We are in danger of normalizing the president’s ruthless disregard for health- and science-based protections. Mr. Wheeler’s cynical ploy to upend the mercury regulations is emblematic of his agenda. His fingerprints are all over proposed rollbacks of environmental regulations covering cars, carbon emissions from power plants, coal ash and more. For this destructiveness, Mr. Trump praised him in November, saying he had “done a fantastic job and I want to congratulate him.”
+Mr. Wheeler’s E.P.A. is also weakening implementation of a bipartisan law passed in 2016 protecting the public from toxic chemicals; people with chemical industry résumés dominate his staff. And Mr. Wheeler has sought to roll back an Obama-era rule requiring energy companies to monitor and repair leaks of methane; these leaks can occur from the moment a well is fracked until the gas gets to your home. Methane is an extremely powerful and swift contributor to global warming. Rather than move the country onto a path toward climate safety, Mr. Trump and Mr. Wheeler are leading us — and the world — closer to mutually assured destruction.
+Mr. Wheeler is more media savvy than Mr. Pruitt ever was, and that makes him more dangerous. His nomination to run the E.P.A. is among the most consequential and cynical of all the cabinet appointments that Mr. Trump has proposed. Mr. Wheeler’s disregard for the agency’s core mission — to protect public health and the environment — is brazen. But what else should we expect from a former coal industry lobbyist?
+Andrew Wheeler has demonstrated over and over again why he should not be entrusted with protecting us from harm. If his failure to do one single thing to address the global warming catastrophe isn’t bad enough to stop this nomination, perhaps his decision to upend the mercury rule, which could threaten the brains of tiny babies, will wake up senators. No one voted to make America dirty again .
+Dominique Browning is the senior director and a co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.To be clear, ginning up a nude photo that purports to be someone it isn’t is gross and terrible behavior. Yet in our rush to defend the congresswoman’s honor, we may be doing more harm than good. While this particular nude photo was just a nasty hoax, we live in a time when snapping a naked selfie has effectively become a rite of passage. There are certainly other, genuine naked photos somewhere out there — if not of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, then of other politically ambitious young women. So the question shouldn’t be whether young women who are talking or thinking about running for office have snapped naked pictures — at least some of them almost certainly have — but why these images should be discussed at all.
+In recent years, as smartphones have made high-quality digital photography a standard feature in most of our lives, posing for naked portraiture — and sharing the results with others — has become common behavior. A 2014 survey conducted by Cosmopolitian.com found that 89 percent of the survey respondents had snapped a naked selfie; the previous year, a study out of Purdue University reported that 46 percent of its college age participants had sent someone a naked photo of themselves.
+Although naked photos are a gender neutral pursuit, it’s women who are primarily the targets of shaming campaigns around sexting. When nearly 500 nude celebrity photos surfaced on the message board 4chan in 2014, just a handful of men were included in the collection; it is women, not men, who are the most common victims of the nonconsensual sharing of nude images (a crime commonly known as “revenge porn”). And while the most notorious sexting politician is a man, it took multiple explicit ph otos, including allegations of sexting with a teenager, for Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner’s political ambitions to get completely derailed. By contrast, congressional candidate Krystal Ball became the subject of scandal after appearing, fully clothed, in a photo from a costume party in which a dildo was involved as a jokey prop in her husband’s attire.
+And so, tempting and justified though it may be to cry foul over Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s fake photo, a better use of this moment would be to forcefully affirm the idea that these photos — be they real or fake, consensually distributed or stolen and posted online without consent — don’t matter. That the surfacing of a nude photo says nothing about a young woman’s talent, skills, or her commitment to public service — and volumes about those who would attempt to shame her through an extreme violation of her privacy.
+To the best of my knowledge, none of the women I knew from my nude modeling days have any aspirations to run for president. But I hope that one day we’ll discover that the aphorism we tossed about with abandon has finally been proven false: that our country is, in fact, ready to elect a president who has posed naked, because our country has finally accepted that the division between competent women and sexual women is one that does not exist.
+Lux Alptraum is the author of “Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And The Truths They Reveal.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.These empty storefronts are representative of businesses that disappear as a result of rising rents and the popularity of online retailers.
+It’s a troubling trend we looked at in September, and it seems to be getting worse.
+Recently, Cornelia Street Café in the West Village closed after four decades, thanks to a rent increase, the owners said.
+In some neighborhoods it can feel like every street has vacancies.
+“I just walked by a restaurant on Ninth Street” that recently closed, State Senator Brad Hoylman said on the phone as he walked in his Manhattan district yesterday. A block later: “Now, I’m opposite a vacant storefront.”
+In 2017, Mr. Hoylman released a report on the “high-rent blight” on Bleecker Street.
+Now he and his fellow Democrats control the State Legislature. But he seemed less than enthused by Mayor Bill de Blasio’s recent proposal to tax landlords who leave storefronts vacant.
+Supporters say a vacancy tax would push landlords to fill empty spaces or work with their tenants so they don’t leave in the first place. Landlords, not surprisingly, think it’s a bad idea.Accused of helping to carry out an international multibillion-dollar fraud, Goldman Sachs has tried to pin the blame on a few rogue bankers.
+It is an argument that the government of Malaysia, where the fraud was carried out, is not buying.
+“We have suffered extremely large losses, and you were the financial adviser,” said Lim Guan Eng, the finance minister of Malaysia, referring to Goldman Sachs.
+“Now how do you account for that? And don’t tell me you don’t know where the money went,” Mr. Lim said in an interview in Hong Kong on Monday. “Goldman Sachs needs to come to terms with the facts.”
+Malaysia is gearing up for a fight with an institution that was once synonymous with power and influence around the world. The government is seeking $7.5 billion in compensation from Goldman Sachs, adding to a mounting pile of penalties against the bank and deepening one of the most serious crises in its 149-year history.Good Monday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+A battle brews for Gannett
+MNG Enterprises, the owner of one of the largest newspaper businesses in the country, made a $12-per-share offer today for Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and dozens of other publications.
+The news: The proposal from MNG, which owns 200 publications, to buy Gannett represents a 41 percent premium over the company’s closing price at the end of last year. MNG, which has a history of acquiring struggling local papers and cutting costs, has a 7.5 percent stake in Gannett, making it Gannett’s largest active shareholder. Gannett’s stock price surged in premarket trading after the bid.
+The back story: Over the past few years, MNG has made several approaches about a deal, only to be rebuffed, the WSJ reported. Gannett, whose shares have dropped in recent years, has been seeking to remake itself. In 2016, it backed off a bid to acquire Tronc, the media company now known as Tribune Publishing.
+The backlash: MNG, one of the largest newspaper chains in the country, owns about 200 newspapers and publications including The Denver Post and The Orange County Register. Last year, frustrated journalists at The Denver paper criticized its owner, making the case for its survival.Mr. Newsom said Monday that he had been “in constant contact throughout the week and over the weekend” with the company and regulators. “Everyone’s immediate focus is, rightfully, on ensuring Californians have continuous, reliable and safe electric and gas service,” he said.
+Fire investigators determined PG&E to be the cause of at least 17 of 21 major Northern California fires in 2017. It is also suspected in some of the 2018 wildfires that have been described as the worst in state history, including one that killed at least 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise.
+PG&E said it faced an estimated $30 billion liability for damages from the two years of wildfires, a sum that would exceed its insurance and assets. The bankruptcy announcement, in a filing with federal regulators, led the company’s shares to plunge more than 50 percent.
+The shares had already lost almost two-thirds of their value since a wave of wildfires in early November, and its bond rating had been downgraded to junk status by two rating agencies.
+California’s utilities have been seeking favorable regulatory and legislative support to guard themselves against wildfire liability — but none more than PG&E, the primary gas and electricity supplier to the northern half of California, serving about 16 million customers over 70,000 square miles.The divisional round of the N.F.L. playoffs has come and gone, confirming some things we knew — the Patriots are devastatingly good at home, the Chiefs play football like it’s a video game, etc. — while revealing some new wrinkles for both the four losing teams and the victors headed to the conference championship games.
+As we look ahead to next weekend, we can look back at what we learned from this week’s games.
+Winner’s BracketA New York hedge fund known for gutting newsrooms is backing a hostile takeover bid for Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and 100 other newspapers. The unsolicited offer, worth over $1.3 billion, would create the largest newspaper company in the United States and further consolidate a struggling industry.
+In an open letter to the Gannett board, MNG Enterprises, which is owned by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital, offered on Monday to pay $12 cash per Gannett share, a 23 percent premium on the company’s closing price on Friday. Gannett shares were trading about 19 percent higher around midday.
+MNG said in its letter that Gannett, which owns The Detroit Free Press, The Tennessean in Nashville and other newspapers in nearly three dozen states, had “suffered from a series of value-destroying decisions made by an unfocused leadership team.”
+Operating under the name Digital First Media, MNG owns around 200 publications, including The Denver Post and The San Jose Mercury News in California. It said it was Gannett’s largest shareholder, with a 7.5 percent stake.MELBOURNE, Australia — With the end in sight, the capacity crowd inside Melbourne Arena rose to its feet. Andy Murray soaked in their ovation, and their emotions, and then began to let his out.
+As his first-round match at the Australian Open reached the four-hour mark Monday evening, Murray was trailing his Spanish opponent, Roberto Bautista Agut, by 1-5 in the fifth. His time, he knew, was almost up.
+Murray had battled valiantly to force that final set, coming back after losing the first two to level the match. He even had looked — briefly — as if he might take command of the fifth set as well before Bautista Agut reeled off five straight games, putting a comeback well out of Murray’s reach.
+So when the crowd rose to salute him, Murray, tears visible in his eyes, raised his right arm to acknowledge the applause, seeming to accept the fond farewell and his fate. But he was not quite done: He saved one match point and held serve, delaying the inevitable by one game, buying himself a fragment of time.For the case against Biden, see my colleague Frank Bruni’s recent column, as well as my future colleague Jamelle Bouie, writing in Slate, and Matthew Yglesias in Vox. For the pro-Biden side, see Jared Bernstein in The Washington Post and Matt Lewis in The Daily Beast. Also in The Post, Jennifer Rubin explains why Biden’s decision matters so much to the race.
+The Trump 50
+As regular readers know, I find lists to be a useful way to describe the Trump presidency. They can capture the extent of the chaos in a way that paragraphs full of fulminations don’t always do.
+The Atlantic is marking the halfway point of Trump’s term by publishing a list of what Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazine’s editor, calls “50 of the most improbable, norm-bending, and destructive incidents of this presidency.” Each item is accompanied by a short essay, including Annie Lowrey on Trump’s business, Franklin Foer on Russian collusion , Jemele Hill on black athletes, Natasha Bertrand on the Justice Department, Ed Yong on science and George Packer on Wikileaks.
+The essays are another reminder that Trump has broken the law, violated his constitutional oath and is unfit to be president. Related: The Times published a collection of reader letters this weekend in response to my recent column arguing that Trump should be removed from office as soon as possible.
+Russia
+In Politico, Strobe Talbott, the former deputy secretary of state, puts into context the two big scoops of the weekend: The Times report that the F.B.I. investigated whether Trump is a Russian asset and The Post report that Trump has hidden transcripts of his conversations with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. “Whether he knows it or not, Trump is integral to Putin’s strategy to strengthen authoritarian regimes and undermine democracies around the world,” Talbott writes.
+If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.But taken as a whole, this swarm of cultural mayflies represents a meaningful shift in our culture. Joke-making, a sometimes cruel enterprise, has been mechanized and democratized. Humor now emerges from the ether, authorless or, more accurate, authored and improved upon by everyone. Jokes are communal now, and constant. Online, everything that happens all day — in politics, in culture, in the news — is rapidly repurposed for laughs, by everyone, all at once.
+For the most part, this is harmless. After all, what could possibly go wrong in a culture where all anyone wants is to be perpetually amused?
+Before Trump’s border wall was the cause of a government shutdown, it was a mnemonic device — less a policy proposal than a string tied around the finger. According to a recent article in The Times, the wall was a “memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.” Trump’s advisers Sam Nunberg and Roger Stone knew that getting tough on immigration would play well to a right-wing audience, but they also knew the man they were dealing with. He has a mind for the tactile, so they gave him something gigantic to hang onto: an 1,800-mile-long slab of concrete.
+But Trump’s talking points were never just talking points. They were more like bits. His campaign rallies were rambling, unscripted affairs, almost like an open-mic comedy set: Not a fearsome Nuremberg rally, but an aging showman road-testing material, seeing what caught the audience’s attention. Early on, his speeches were “all over the place,” the NBC reporter Katy Tur told “Frontline,” but as time passed, “he started to really hone his message, and he started to remember what lines worked.” In the same episode, the writer Marc Fisher said Trump told him that he would simply wait to see the red lights on the TV cameras in the press box turn on, indicating he was live, and then he would say “whatever it took to keep the red light on.”
+The border wall kept the lights on. At a 2016 rally in Burlington, Vt., Trump mentioned the wall to tremendous, wonderful applause, then paused and asked his audience, “And who’s gonna pay for the wall?” The crowd roared back, “MEXICO!” They — he and his crowd — did this two more times together, then Trump laughed. “I’ve never done it before, I swear,” he said, throwing his arms up as if surprised it had worked. “That was pretty cool. We’re gonna have to use that.”
+This incentive structure, in which an easily distracted person says a bunch of stuff he kind of means to an assembled audience, slowly learning what generates a reaction and what doesn’t, is familiar: It’s like posting online. This is the process that nudged the wall ever closer to reality, despite the fact that it was only ever supposed to be a metaphor, a shorthand, a catchphrase. It is an idea with no real owner or creator, passed from person to person, from lectern to grandstand to TV and Twitter and back again, copying itself and growing and mutating until it became big, beautiful and tipped with spikes forged from American steel. The border wall is, in the truest sense, a meme: an idea that persists not because it will benefit us but simply because it thrives in our environment. It was so effective at doing whatever it did that it couldn’t be contained, spilling out of the president’s brain and spreading throughout our entire body politic, cooling and hardening like bacon grease, until it finally brought everything to a standstill. And I hate to admit it, but that is a little funny.His Friday news conference announcing his retirement, he added, “was kind of the first time I kind of came out and let everyone know how bad it’s been and tough.”
+Wozniacki was the same way. She knew before last year’s United States Open that the flulike symptoms that had plagued her all summer were, in fact, signs of something more serious. But she said nothing about her condition for two months, waiting until the news conference after her final match of the season, in Singapore in October, to reveal the diagnosis.
+“I didn’t want to give anyone the edge,” Wozniacki said.
+She rejected the notion that a full disclosure of her health woes would have benefited her by moderating external expectations.
+“I think because I’m such a competitor, I don’t want anything to be an excuse,” Wozniacki said, adding: “I know myself and what I’ve done out there. I’m either proud of myself for giving it my all, or I can be disappointed because I thought I could do better, but I don’t really need the sympathy.”
+Wozniacki followed her Australian Open title with two more victories, in a pre-Wimbledon tuneup at Eastbourne in June and a Premier Mandatory event in Beijing in October — both, she said, while exhibiting one or more of the textbook symptoms of rheumatoid arthritis. The Beijing win was especially satisfying, Wozniacki said, “because I didn’t know, will I ever be able to play six matches in a row? That really gave me the confidence, you know, if I can do this I can do anything.”
+After Wimbledon, where Wozniacki lost in the second round, the rest of her summer passed in a fog of inconclusive doctor visits and inexplicable early-round losses. Wozniacki withdrew from the tournament in Washington because of pain in her knees. In her next tournament, in Montreal, she lost to Aryna Sabalenka in her first match and awoke the next morning unable to lift her arms to brush her teeth. From there, it was on to Cincinnati, where she retired after the first set of her first match because she couldn’t find the energy to soldier on.
+Everywhere Wozniacki went, she saw doctors, she said, who proclaimed her fit and sent her away with medication for a head cold or influenza.WARSAW — The mayor of Gdansk, Poland, a leading liberal critic of the populist, right-wing national government, died on Monday after being stabbed at a public charity concert Sunday night, the minister of health told reporters.
+Mayor Pawel Adamowicz, 53, the mayor of the northern port city since 1998, was known as a supporter of gay rights, and he had campaigned for the rights of immigrants in a country whose governing party has leaned heavily on anti-immigrant rhetoric.
+“It was impossible to win against everything that had happened to him,” Lukasz Szumowski, the health minister, said of the stabbing. “God rest his soul.”
+The attack stunned a nation that is increasingly divided politically. Tens of thousands of Poles joined rallies all over the country on Monday evening to condemn violence and hate speech.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+The last couple of weeks have been a roller coaster for Los Angeles public schoolteachers, parents and students.
+After months of tense back-and-forth, more than 30,000 teachers were set to walk off the job on Thursday. But on Wednesday, legal questions prompted union leaders to postpone the strike until today.
+And as the two sides didn’t renew negotiations over the weekend, pickets are set to begin at 7 a.m. My colleagues, like Jennifer Medina, will be covering the action today, but in the meantime, here’s what you need to know:
+Why are the teachers striking?
+Teachers and employees of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest school system, say that working conditions have become untenable. Despite California’s reputation as a progressive bastion, the state still spends relatively little on public education — about half as much as New York spends on the average child.
+Now, educators are demanding higher pay, smaller class sizes and the hiring of more support staff like counselors and librarians.He has long been ranked in the top 20 on the ATP Tour. Last season was his best. He won his first World Tour Masters 1000 at the Miami Open, made the semifinals at Wimbledon and, as one of the top players of the year, appeared in the elite tour finals in London.
+But last season also started poorly, punctuated with a loss that was in some ways similar to the one against Opelka: a first-round defeat at the Australian Open at the hands of a little known, albeit much smaller opponent, Matthew Ebden, an Australian who stands a tour-typical 6-2.
+Isner vowed to lean on the fact that he had begun last season in such bad shape — not only being upset in Melbourne but posting an early record of two wins and six losses — before breaking through and winning Miami.
+“I was off and running from there,” he said. “Just got to get one under my belt and see what happens.”
+Though hardly one for long answers, Opelka appeared relaxed and casual as he spoke in the wake of the most significant victory of his young career. He spoke of the main difference between him and Isner. In the early stages of his career, Opelka, who is listed as 6-11 but has acknowledged that he is even taller, does not have a deeply successful professional past to hark back to.
+Hence, even after Monday, his primary motive remains clear: Keep playing well enough that he never again has to compete in tennis’s often brutal minor leagues, where he won two titles at the end of last season to break into the top 100.
+“That,” he said, “is the immediate goal.”
+More than making a long run in Melbourne?
+Yes, he replied, saying he could only allow himself to think of his next match, against Thomas Fabbiano, an Italian who is ranked No. 102 and, compared to Isner, is a relative munchkin.
+“One guy is 5-10,” Opelka said, referring to Fabbiano. “The other guy,” he added, referring to Isner not by name but with a pregnant pause, “is not.”Fumito Ganryu , who rose through the ranks of Comme des Garçons until he had his own Ganryu label there, left the company in 2017 and has since begun a line under his own name. His first Paris show is scheduled Tuesday afternoon.
+Takahiro Miyashita, who was a hero to men’s wear fanatics for his psychedelic-surrealist Number (N)ine label (1997-2009) , returned to fashion with a label called The Soloist, whose exquisite oddity was presented simply in showroom settings in its early seasons. His first Paris show, “Nocturne of Emotions,” is scheduled Tuesday night: “His take,” according to a statement, “on survival clothing to get through today’s reality.”
+Joining these newcomers will be one of Japan’s most beloved masters, Issey Miyake, whose Homme Plissé line — for men who want Pleats, Please — is to stage its first presentation later in the week.
+Jonathan Anderson has moved his show from London to Paris for the first time, with his J.W. Anderson label scheduled on Wednesday. A few women’s looks will be in the mix, a representative for Mr. Anderson said, but declined to share any further hints or details.The 2019 PEN America Literary Service Award will be given to Bob Woodward, The Washington Post editor known most recently for “Fear: Trump in the White House,” one of the biggest political books of 2018 with nearly two million copies sold.
+“Woodward has set the standard for dogged and objective reporting and gripping storytelling,” said Suzanne Nossel, the chief executive officer of PEN America, in a statement. “His work has helped fortify American democracy for decades.”
+Woodward played a central role in bringing to light Richard Nixon’s role during the Watergate scandal through his reporting for The Washington Post and wrote a number of books on the subject, including “All the President’s Men,” written with Carl Bernstein. He pioneered in the use of anonymous sources, which allowed him to report on details that might not otherwise have become public. He has also tackled a number of other presidents including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.
+The PEN America Literary Gala, which will be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on May 21, will also recognize Scholastic chief executive officer Richard Robinson, who has led the company for more than 40 years. “Scholastic has informed the next generation and inspired them to be empathetic, engaged citizens,” read PEN America’s statement.“What the Constitution Means to Me,” Heidi Schreck’s autobiographical play that uses a childhood speech and debate competition to explore the treatment of gender in American legal history, will transfer to Broadway this spring.
+Ms. Schreck, a writer and performer in television as well as theater, has been working on the play for years, and stars in it. Clubbed Thumb staged a production during its Summerworks festival in 2017; that was followed by Berkeley Repertory Theater last spring, New York Theater Workshop last fall, and then an extension of that production at the Greenwich House Theater.
+The show, which also features another actor (Mike Iveson) and a New York City high school student debater (Rosdely Ciprian and Thursday Williams, alternating), will play at the Helen Hayes Theater, Broadway’s smallest house (the theater is owned by a nonprofit, Second Stage, which is renting the building to this play’s commercial producers for the run). It is scheduled to begin previews March 14, to open March 31 and to close June 9.
+[Check out our Culture Calendar here.]
+The play, based on Ms. Schreck’s experience as a high school student giving speeches about the Constitution to earn tuition money for college, is directed by Oliver Butler, and the Broadway run is being produced by Diana DiMenna, Aaron Glick and Matt Ross.The hunt for the millions of books stolen by the Nazis during World War II has been pursued quietly and diligently for decades, but it has been largely ignored, even as the search for lost art drew headlines. The plundered volumes seldom carried the same glamour as the looted paintings, which were often masterpieces worth millions of dollars.
+But recently, with little fanfare, the search for the books has intensified, driven by researchers in America and Europe who have developed a road map of sorts to track the stolen books, many of which are still hiding in plain sight on library shelves throughout Europe.
+Their work has been aided by newly opened archives, the internet, and the growing number of European librarians who have made such searches a priority, researchers say.
+“People have looked away for so long,” said Anders Rydell, author of “The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance,” “but I don’t think they can anymore.”Good morning. When the children were little and the dog was barky and the nights seemed to last forever in fits of colic and long walks down chilly streets to calm them, the closest thing to respite we had was Peruvian chicken from the place two blocks away, rotisserie-cooked birds perfumed with wood smoke and sent home with small tubs of spicy cilantro sauce. We’d eat standing in a tiny kitchen or sitting on a couch, thrilling to the flavor, fingers stained with grease, as Dan Zanes kept everyone tiny copacetic for the moment, as the song went, from Albany to Buffalo.
+I miss those days and that restaurant, but I can bring them back soon enough by cooking Melissa Clark’s recipe for Peruvian roasted chicken with spicy cilantro sauce (above) and flipping through old photographs, from when we still printed photographs. You don’t need to join me in my nostalgia trip, my dad-life sentimentality, but you ought to cook that chicken. Because that is one seriously delicious dish, and three cheers to Melissa for it. (I like these baked sweet potato fries on the side.)
+But perhaps you’d prefer slow cooker creamy kale with fontina and bread crumbs? It’s like millennial Moosewood cookery, the sort of thing you’d serve in a yurt and be happy you did, before reading the internet before bed. Or pasta with green beans and almond gremolata? It relies on celery leaves as a secret ingredient! Or cold kimchi noodles? It’s a Monday in January. You don’t need to eat meat.
+Thousands and thousands and thousands of other recipes you could cook tonight or this week or whenever you like are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. (Why, here’s a collection of casseroles to cook on cold nights now!) Go browse among them and see what strikes your fancy. (If you’re a subscriber, that is. Here’s how to become one if you’re not.) You can also find pictures of our food and musings about it on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. And do write us for help if you run into trouble with the site or your cooking: cookingcare@nytimes.com.MILAN — Like Dynamation characters from a Ray Harryhausen movie, where the stop-motion models of clashing titans abruptly join forces to save the world, the behemoths of Italian fashion put on a show of might over the weekend, as if to prove that Milan’s struggling industry can still be saved. Three of the largest names — Zegna, Versace, Prada — took on the shape of real colossi amid the landscape of a greatly reduced show calendar, each cranking up effects to rival Mr. Harryhausen’s famous battle of the seven skeletons.
+To the best of anyone’s recollection, no one had ever utilized the vast marble pile of Milan’s central rail station as a backdrop for a fashion presentation before Ermenegildo Zegna cordoned its vaulted atrium on Friday to show a collection of just 44 looks. Interviewed before the show, the label’s designer Alessandro Sartori spoke urgently about diversity: “We feel a need now of openness and inclusivity.”
+Was the cautious Mr. Sartori referring to the political situation in an Italy under the control of right-wing isolationists bent on closing its borders or to a corporate hunger for a piece of emerging markets? It’s hard to know. But model castings are often a good gauge of designer message and, where even five years ago an observer might have developed snow-blindness amid the blizzard of white faces stalking a typical Ermenegildo Zegna catwalk, what you now see is closer to something the writer Grace Paley once termed a “gorgeous chromatic dispersion.”WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court declined on Monday to decide whether President Trump acted lawfully in appointing Matthew G. Whitaker to be the acting attorney general, denying an unusual motion asking the justices to address that question in the context of a case about a different issue. The court also turned down the case itself.
+The court’s order was two sentences long and gave no reasons. There were no noted dissents.
+The case, Michaels v. Whitaker, No. 18-496, concerned Barry Michaels, who was convicted of securities fraud in 1998 and wanted to buy a gun. He challenged a federal law banning gun ownership by people convicted of felonies on Second Amendment grounds.
+The request for a ruling on Mr. Whitaker’s appointment came in the form of a motion to change the name of the case to Michaels v. Rosenstein, on the theory that Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein is the rightful acting attorney general because Mr. Whitaker’s appointment violated federal statutes and the Constitution.
+Legal scholars are divided on whether Mr. Whitaker’s appointment was lawful.
+The answer to the question could figure in the fate of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. The investigation had been supervised by Mr. Rosenstein and has passed to Mr. Whitaker, who has been critical of it.With its promise of gentle movement and relaxation, a well-designed rocking chair can be a source of comfort in trying times.
+“Rocking chairs have always offered a way to be soothed,” said Susan Ferrier, an interior designer based in Atlanta. “They function almost as stress relief.”
+Because of their laid-back appeal, rocking chairs usually work best in casual spaces rather than formal ones. “We usually have them in family rooms, dens, lounges,” Ms. Ferrier said. “Anyplace where you’re watching television or reading.” (Or in nurseries, of course.)
+And as most rocking chairs are fairly light — both visually and physically — they are also very versatile.The flutist and composer Nicole Mitchell will lead the University of Pittsburgh’s storied jazz studies program, the school announced Monday, a move that quietly affirms the ascent of the improvising avant-garde in the jazz academy.
+The position was vacant since the unexpected death in 2017 of Geri Allen, a groundbreaking pianist and esteemed educator. In succeeding Allen, Ms. Mitchell takes up the William S. Dietrich II Endowed Chair in Jazz Studies, a new position. She will be a tenured professor in the music department.
+Though she is leaving a professorship at the University of California, Irvine, Ms. Mitchell received most of her training not through academia but amid the outsider-run creative economy of Chicago’s improvised music scene.
+Ms. Mitchell’s work — particularly with her two-decade-old Black Earth Ensemble — often brings together instruments and musicians from across the globe to create a sound that’s as rooted as it is futuristic. In its simultaneous celebration of collectivity and compositional vision, it represents an extension of precepts espoused by the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Ten years ago, Ms. Mitchell became the first female chair of that South Side-based collective, which has a 54-year history of activism, education and vanguard composing.Any farmers who have a loan with the Farm Service Agency will have the agency’s name on any checks they get in the mail for sales of grain or cattle. Now no one at the agency can sign their name on those checks, and they can’t be deposited until that happens. Those farmers can’t get money to pay bills.
+Farmers who are in financial straits can’t apply for a guaranteed loan from their local bank, because they have to look for F.S.A. concurrence when decisions are made on one. When banks can’t get the confirmation, farmers can’t get loans.
+Money isn’t moving, and when farmers aren’t moving their money, whole towns suffer. Thousands of towns. All across America.
+Mark White has been farming for 40 years. His farm, which his brother rents and operates, is just south of the county line, near Williamson, Iowa, population of approximately 150. Mr. White works with Smith Fertilizer and Grain, a full-service fertilizer, feed supplier and grain-receiving facility.
+“The biggest problem is immediate cash flow,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they are broke — or headed out of business — but they are having to use some equity that they have built up over the years to survive a downturn like we are in.” Using equity, he said, means putting land or equipment up as collateral against operating notes, or past operating notes they can’t pay off. He says this can be risky and is “taking a step backward.” Younger farmers and farmers who rent and don’t own land are more at risk.
+These less secure farmers with cash flow problems are the ones most at risk during the shutdown because they can’t cash F.S.A. checks or get loans. Farming for most is a losing proposition already because of low commodity prices — the tariffs and shutdown hurt even more. Many Americans can’t afford to lose their monthly paychecks — and that includes farmers. My banker friend tells me we lost a generation of farmers because of the farm crisis of the 1980s, and if it gets much worse, she fears we could see it again.
+Most rural American farms are not big corporate operations. The most recent available farm census data, from 2012, shows that Iowa has nearly 89,000 farms, and 57 percent are small farms under 180 acres. Generally, to make a living on farm income, operations of at least 225 to 750 acres or more are needed. Of the farmers that Mr. Trump’s tariffs and shutdown are hurting, about 80 percent are family businesses.Last week, in a meeting with Democratic leaders, President Trump called the government shutdown a “strike.” This was an enigmatic use of a hallowed term, although it might have simply been Mr. Trump’s confusion about the “blue flu” epidemic afflicting employees of the Transportation Security Administration, who are working without pay and registering their protest by calling in sick, and in some cases quitting outright.
+Last Saturday, about 5.6 percent of the roughly 51,000 T.S.A. officers stayed home sick, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.
+In contrast to a strike, blue flu — a condition that has also been known to afflict police officers — is a quiet form of protest, with no stated principles or claim for public attention or sympathy. At the end of the day, each worker goes home and calculates his or her ability to go another week or two — or months or years, as the president has threatened — without a paycheck and acts accordingly.
+Since T.S.A. agents, who are among the most visible of the affected workers, make do on a starting wage of about $23,000 a year (with the possibility of going up to about $43,000), these can be hair-raising calculations: Skip the children’s dentist appointments and pay the electric company? Or try to get an extension on the utility bill and go without getting the car fixed?A slow, gentle poach in an oven isn’t as sexy as a fast cook over the jumping flames of a burner or grill. There’s no caramelization, no glistening black at the edges, no siren song of sizzling. But for perfectly silky chicken breasts, cooked without drying out or turning rubbery, a placid poaching is the most reliable way to go.
+Most poached chicken recipes are done on the stovetop, turning the heat to its lowest setting, and letting the liquid in the pan gently firm up the fowl’s flesh.
+This technique is different. It’s done in the oven, where the heat is even and lower than the wispiest burner flames. It does take around an hour to fully cook, but it’s a hands-off, stress-free hour: You can leave the kitchen should you desire, and not worry about whether your dinner will overcook.WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Monday that he has rejected a proposal by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to temporarily reopen the government in an effort to jump-start talks with Democratic lawmakers on funding a border wall.
+“I did reject it,” Mr. Trump said of the proposal, speaking to reporters as he boarded Marine One outside of the White House, en route to delivering a speech to a farm convention in New Orleans.
+In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Mr. Graham, a close ally of the president, pitched Mr. Trump on a plan for the president to agree to a vote by Congress to reopen the government for about three weeks “before he pulls the plug on the legislative option.” If there was no progress made during that time, Mr. Graham said, the president could then declare a national emergency as a way to obtain funding for a border wall without congressional action.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Over the years, tenants of a red brick residence in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan had begun noticing a growing number of people with suitcases cycling in and out of their 18-story building every weekend.
+Many residents said they often heard the sound of luggage being rolled down the hallways of the 126-unit building.
+The most observant tenants speculated as to whether some of the people they had seen in the building were tourists who had booked apartments through Airbnb.
+“I kind of figured there were Airbnb’s here,” said Kristi Muniz, 26, a consultant who lives in the building on 230 East 30th Street. “I always see families with suitcases, but most residents in this building are post-college or in nursing programs. I even recently told my neighbor ‘I think our neighbors are an Airbnb.’”Before there was Pokémon Go, there was a game that children obsessed over called milk caps, better known as POGs.
+While most people who grew up in the 1990s remember POGs as collectible cardboard disks with fun pictures on them, the game POGs was most likely inspired by a centuries-old Japanese card game called menko. “In menko, one player lays their card down on a hard surface, and another player throws their card down in an attempt to flip the first card. If they succeed, they get to keep both cards, and whoever collects the most cards wins,” said Amanda Pillon of the website Sweetyhigh.com.
+In the 1930s, Hawaiian children used the caps off bottles of a local dairy’s passion fruit, orange and guava drink (hence the name POG) to play a similar version of the game. It wasn’t until 1991 that a teacher named Blossom Galbiso taught her students to play the game, and within a few years, it became an international craze.
+The obsession was not just about playing the game. It scratched the “collector’s itch” as well. “I have a distinct memory of sitting on my living room floor with my POGs. I had a binder with plastic pages that held them and I would sit for hours reorganizing them, practicing on the ledge of the fireplace, and playing against friends,” said Kelle Leonard, a 27-year-old film post-production associate who lives in Brooklyn.Unfortunately, far too often, the opposite is true. I’ve heard and seen horror stories from the front lines: the guy who retires a couple of years after acquiring your business and hands you off to his son-in-law or a junior broker who just left business school. The mansplainer who takes only the husband seriously and barely lets a widow get a word in as he rejiggers her estate. Or the one who scales back his hours to two days a week but doesn’t bother to tell you because he has collected enough clients to fund a perpetual state of semiretirement — logging enough days with his second wife down in Florida to claim residency and avoid state income tax.
+While gendering any ability or trait can make people uncomfortable in these forward-thinking times, which sex seems better equipped to help families nurture and protect their nest egg?
+The gender gap in finance looks increasingly like not only an ethical quandary but also a financial blow to millions of households. And its persistence stems from both explicit historical exclusion and a self-selecting process, in which the crowd most attracted to finance’s clubby reputation pushes hardest to get in, then feels most at ease once there, perpetuating the reality.
+Two generations ago, when newspapers still ran gender-segregated ads, there were virtually no women on Wall Street aside from the secretaries. But once women were grudgingly welcomed to the business world, Wall Street was not their first choice. Male brokers largely worked for commissions alone — an “eat what you kill” mentality that did not appeal to women. Instead, professional women gravitated to stable sources of income in fields like law, education or medicine.
+Those divides have a way of calcifying. The Chartered Financial Analyst Institute — the premier global association for investment professionals — surveyed its members in 2016 and found that 83 percent of women and 80 percent of men chose their career before age 25. Only 18 percent of its members are women.
+The public doesn’t perceive brokers as loyal stewards of their clients and neither do enough young women considering career options. First, they’ll need to see it to believe it.
+Informal mentorship is great, but women need institutional advocacy, not just someone who is willing to grab a cup of coffee and chat. Firms should also take a look at their investment committee members and client-facing advisers. If they’re mainly men, there’s a problem.Thousands of craft beer brewers across the country have a problem: Sales are slowing, tastes are changing and stiff competition is coming from new directions. Wine and spirits have cut into market share. Cannabis deregulation looms.
+Despite a dozen years of growth in the industry, some people in the business are wondering aloud if the “post-craft” era is nigh, and some are embracing the opportunity to broaden their appeal. From niche beers to inviting taprooms and branding, the business is formally investing in its cultural diversity as never before. Not just because brewers think it’s the right move — because it’s a smart move, too.
+“If you are going to grow, you cannot simply sell beer to young white dudes with beards,” J. Nikol Jackson-Beckham said in May, in her opening address as the first diversity ambassador for the Brewers Association, craft brewing’s largest trade group, which represents nearly 7,000 small, independent brewers.
+Over the last year, she has traveled to brewers’ guilds and industry conferences, and developed guidelines and resources to help brewers make their workplaces, customers and brands more inclusive. She also worked with organizers of the inaugural Fresh Fest, an event in Pittsburgh last August that billed itself as the country’s first for African-American beer enthusiasts, in what she called a “pilot case” that will inform how the association can best support more events like it.WASHINGTON — William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general, promised on Monday that he would allow the special counsel to continue his investigation, seeking to allay Democrats’ fears that he might shut down the inquiry.
+“It is in the best interest of everyone — the president, Congress, and, most importantly, the American people — that this matter be resolved by allowing the special counsel to complete his work,” Mr. Barr said in written testimony that he plans to deliver on Tuesday at the start of his two-day confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
+“The country needs a credible resolution of these issues,” he added. “If confirmed, I will not permit partisan politics, personal interests, or any other improper consideration to interfere with this or any other investigation.”
+But Mr. Barr’s written statement also included a subtle caveat, limiting his assurances about the investigation to issues under his control: “I can assure you that, where judgments are to be made by me, I will make those judgments based solely on the law and will let no personal, political, or other improper interests influence my decision,” he wrote.So she enrolled in Parsons School of Design part-time in 2010.
+But by 2014, finances became too strained as she and her family faced eviction from their Bushwick apartment when the landlord wanted to sell and housing court costs added up, Ms. Fleming said.
+“It was a do-or-die situation,” said Ms. Fleming, who attended Parsons while raising her daughter, Symarrah, 10. Ms. Fleming decided she had to drop out of school, just one semester short of finishing. “It was devastating. I moved to New York, to be the first one graduating from college, and I’m right here — that was my dream, it’s still my dream. But now I need work.”
+Today, Ms. Fleming has $70,000 in student loans and still owes Parsons $8,000. Because she could not work while taking care of her daughter and attending school part-time, Ms. Fleming has been unemployed since 2009.
+But she said she has never given up hope.
+“I realize I’m a person who never gives up. I never quit,” Ms. Fleming, 46, said in her apartment in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx, where she moved in 2016. “I’m very resilient.”To the Editor:
+Re “Balancing Animal Welfare and Religious Rites” (editorial, Jan. 9):
+The Belgian Council for Animal Welfare reviewed international research on the topic of animal slaughter. The result is remarkable: For sheep it takes 14 seconds to 5 minutes before spontaneous brain activity stops. For cattle it takes between 19 seconds and 11 minutes. Several audits of Belgian slaughterhouses showed that ritually killed animals were still conscious up to several minutes.
+There are two options for politicians: ignore or act. I chose to act and submitted a law proposal that led to the ban against slaughter without stunning. All members of Parliament (except one who abstained) voted for the ban, including politicians from the left and with Islamic belief s.
+The Belgian law is not inspired by anti-Semitic feelings or hate against Muslims. To the contrary, the government funded research to fine-tune the halal stunning method that is already in use in Islamic countries.
+Religious freedom is an important value of the Enlightenment. But it cannot be a free guide to animal suffering.The economic uncertainty that roiled the stock market at the end of 2018 hurt Citigroup’s trading business, the bank said on Monday, as a busy week of quarterly earnings reports by the country’s largest banks got off to a shaky start.
+Citi said it had almost a half-billion dollars less in revenue in the year’s fourth quarter than analysts had expected. The cause of the drop, the bank said, was an unexpectedly sharp decline in revenue from trading in government bonds, foreign currencies and other fixed income products as falling stock prices spooked investors.
+Investors have fretted for the past several months over the Federal Reserve’s next moves and President Trump’s unpredictable trade tariff announcements. Those concerns are not likely to dissipate, and Citi’s chief executive, Michael Corbat, said they could eventually be more of a drag on the economy than actual policy changes.
+“Right now, we see the biggest risk in the global economy as one of talking ourselves into a recession,” Mr. Corbat said in a conference call with analysts.A Delta Air Lines passenger carried a loaded gun by accident through airport security in Atlanta earlier this month and took it on a flight to Japan, officials with the Transportation Security Administration said.
+The passenger later discovered the firearm and alerted the authorities, who met the plane when it landed on Jan. 3 in Tokyo, officials said. The gun was taken through a T.S.A. checkpoint at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta on Jan. 2, the 11th day of the partial federal government shutdown, as concerns were growing that security agents, who are working without pay, might not show up.
+But a T.S.A. spokesman, Michael Bilello, insisted on Monday that the shutdown was not to blame for the security breach and that the gun was undetected because “standard procedures were not followed.” About five percent of T.S.A. employees nationwide did not report to work on the day of the flight, Wednesday, Jan. 2, which was the identical rate of unscheduled absences on Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2018, Mr. Bilello said.
+He said the agency did not release staffing rates for individual airports and would not specify what “standard procedures” were not observed. There are 51,000 airport security agents nationwide.The brain-eating monsters are real enough — they lurk in freshwater ponds in much of the United States. Now scientists may have discovered a new way to kill them.
+Minuscule silver particles coated with anti-seizure drugs one day may be adapted to halt Naegleria fowleri, an exceptionally lethal microbe that invades through the sinuses and feeds on human brain tissue.
+The research, published in the journal Chemical Neuroscience, showed that repurposing seizure medicines and binding them to silver might kill the amoebae while sparing human cells. Scientists hope the findings will lay an early foundation for a quick cure.
+“Here is a nasty, often devastating infection that we don’t have great treatments for,” said Dr. Edward T. Ryan, the director of the global infectious diseases division of Massachusetts General Hospital, who was not involved in the research. “This work is clearly in the early stages, but it’s an interesting take.”Image Lamalera Beach Credit... Doug Bock Clark
+Clark’s writing is supple but unshowy. Here’s an account of one harpooner’s encounter with a whale:
+“Ignatius’s ship approached near enough to the closest fleeing whale that he could read the history of the animal’s victories inscribed in its gray hide — ellipses of Os dimpled across its snout, stamped there by the suckers of giant squids it devoured a mile below the surface. He leapt onto the whale’s back with a practiced determination, driving his harpoon precisely into the soft flesh two feet below the dorsal hump.”
+You learn many things while reading “The Last Whalers”: how to make rope and wooden ships; how to track a whale that has submerged; how pods of whales form walls with their tails to protect themselves from hunters.
+One thing you learn, in squeamish detail, is how to carve up a dead beached whale. “By the end,” Clark writes, “only the flippers retained their skin, so that they rested against the flesh like mittened hands trying to cover a naked torso.”
+The piles of whale meat are divided almost equally among the population. Anthropologists have called Lamaleran culture, Clark writes, “one of the world’s most cooperative and generous, a necessity when it comes to coordinating dozens of men to defeat colossal whales and then equitably share the bounty.”
+Modernity, in the form of capitalism and new ways to sell their catch, threatens this cooperative culture. And what of threatening the whales themselves? Clark notes that several hundred thousand sperm whales exist in the wild, and suggests that “the tribe has little impact on the animal’s global population.”
+Writing about Joseph Conrad, George Orwell said that his “most colorful passages may have dealt with the sea, but he is at his most grown-up when he touches dry land.” It’s possible to say something similar about Clark, who has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic, among other publications.KINSHASA, Democratic Republic of Congo — The blaze that consumed the headquarters of the main opposition party of the Democratic Republic of Congo was so devastating that the bodies of several men were charred beyond recognition. The men were among dozens killed protesting the rule of President Joseph Kabila.
+“We’re dealing with a rogue state,” said the opposition leader, Félix Tshisekedi.
+That was a little over two years ago.
+Last week, shortly after he was anointed president-elect, Mr. Tshisekedi “paid tribute” to Mr. Kabila, describing him as “a partner for change, not an enemy.”
+While the situation in Congo remains fluid after an election that most independent observers, including the Roman Catholic Church, consider to be illegitimate, one thing does seem certain: In the absence of intense international pressure or a determined domestic uprising, the Kabila government seems likely to continue running the country in everything but name.The Paul Taylor Dance Company, now without its founder, will move into the future by honoring its past. The company plans to celebrate the legacy of Taylor, who died in August at 88, with a multiyear tour beginning in February, it announced on Monday.
+It also announced that Taylor’s final commission was a piece by Kyle Abraham, which is to have its premiere during the coming New York season at Lincoln Center.
+The tour, which is to begin at the Eisemann Center for the Performing Arts in Richardson, Tex., on Feb. 9, will continue throughout the year, with stops planned throughout the United States and Europe. Dates have been set only for this year, but Michael Novak, Mr. Taylor’s successor as the company’s artistic director, said the tour would continue into 2020 and, perhaps, into 2021.
+Mr. Novak, programming for the first time, has devised nine shows for the tour that include more than 20 works from Taylor’s seven-decade career. Each program has a particular focus — on classics or a phase of his career — and presenters will be able to choose which best suits their audiences. The program of early works, for example, features pieces from the early 1960s: “ Junction” (1961), “Tracer” (1962), “Fibers” (1961) and “Aureole” (1962).Senator Bernie Sanders, accelerating his efforts to contain the damage from reports of sexism and harassment during his 2016 presidential campaign, plans to meet on Wednesday with a group of former staff members seeking assurances of better practices if he runs again in 2020.
+As other potential presidential candidates prepare to roll out campaigns with forceful, positive messaging, Mr. Sanders and his supporters have instead been forced to play defense, addressing allegations during his last presidential bid.
+The meeting on Wednesday, which will be held in Washington, will focus on the treatment of women going forward, some invitees and people close to Mr. Sanders said Monday. Mr. Sanders’s campaign arm began reaching out to the former staff members to help make travel arrangements and intends to pay for air travel and hotel expenses, the people said.
+Mr. Sanders plans to attend a portion of the meeting.
+The steps Mr. Sanders and his supporters have taken over the last week underscore the sense of urgency the senator faces as he prepares for a likely 2020 campaign. Though he has not yet announced that he intends to run, he has told aides and advisers that a decision is coming soon.On a hill above Trieste, Italy, at the western edge of Slovenia, I heard the golden jackals howl.
+This was my second night out with Miha Krofel, a conservation biologist at the University of Ljubljana, driving rural roads through farmland and forests.
+The night before, along with two volunteer researchers — one a photographer who had become something of a jackal specialist — we had visited four locations where Dr. Krofel had heard jackals.
+Sunset came late , so we didn’t start until around 10 p.m. and finished close to 2 a.m. At each spot, we played a recording of a jackal pack howling and then waited about five minutes for a response. Played it again. Waited. We did this three or four times at each spot.
+Away from human habitation, the night soundscape is as rich as the night sky. We stood quietly, not speaking, and listened to insect songs, nightjars clapping their wings and roe deer barking. The small deer’s rough cough startled me when it came from a nearby thicket.Mel Stottlemyre, the Yankees’ pitching ace in their lean years of the late 1960s and early ’70s and later the longtime pitching coach for Mets and Yankees teams that won the World Series, died on Sunday in a Seattle hospital. He was 77.
+His wife, Jean Stottlemyre, said the cause was complications of multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer for which he had been treated for many years. At his death he also had the flu and pneumonia, she said. Stottlemyre, who grew up in Washington State, lived in the Seattle area.
+Stottlemyre made his last visit to Yankee Stadium in June 2015, when the Yankees surprised him by dedicating a Monument Park plaque in his honor when he attended their annual Old-Timers’ Day gathering. The tribute came after their former second baseman Willie Randolph received a plaque as scheduled.
+Stottlemyre, walking with the aid of a cane, told the crowd, “It’s been a thrill over the years for me to wear this uniform.” He said that if it was to be his last Old-Timers’ Day, he would “start another baseball club, coaching up there, whenever they need me.”PRISONER
+My 544 Days in an Iranian Prison — Solitary Confinement, a Sham Trial, High-Stakes Diplomacy, and the Extraordinary Efforts It Took to Get Me Out
+By Jason Rezaian
+311 pp. An Anthony Bourdain Book/Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $29.99.
+Before the Iranian government arrested him as a spy, Jason Rezaian made a terrific Tehran bureau chief for The Washington Post. No one in Iran was as qualified as he, and possibly nobody outside Iran could have gotten the requisite journalist visa. Rezaian was born and raised in Marin County, Calif., to an Iranian father and an American mother, his family maintained business as well as family ties to the old country and he’s a dual national Iranian-American citizen, as familiar with and connected to each country as almost anyone else in the world. He also has an Iranian wife. In an on-camera interview for CNN’s travel and food show, “Parts Unknown,” he told Anthony Bourdain that he both loved and hated Iran, “but it’s home.” The authorities tossed him into the notorious Evin Prison before the episode even aired.
+Fitting then that he is being published by Anthony Bourdain Books. “Prisoner” is more than just a memoir that reads like a thriller. It’s also an intimate family history, an anguished love letter to an ancient and broken homeland, and a spirited defense of journalism and truth at a time when both are under attack almost everywhere.
+Image
+Ostensibly, Rezaian’s crime was espionage, but the “evidence” against him didn’t even rise to the level of specious. He started a half-joking Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund an avocado farm in Iran, wrote a brief story about an Iranian-made video clip for Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy” and kept a messy inbox. Conspiracy theorists normally try to find better evidence, but his accusers, he writes, were “the most hardheaded and least sophisticated people I had ever encountered,” with the intellectual and emotional maturity of second graders.Meet the average American man. He weighs 198 pounds and stands 5 feet 9 inches tall. He has a 40-inch waist, and his body mass index is 29 , at the high end of the “overweight” category.
+The picture for the average woman? She is roughly 5 feet 4 inches tall, and weighs 171 pounds, with a 39-inch waist. Her B.M.I. is close to 30.
+That’s a not at all how Americans used to look. New data show that both men and women gained a whopping 24 pounds on average from 1960 to 2002; through 2016, men gained an additional eight pounds, and women another seven pounds.
+The new report, published by the National Center for Health Statistics, contains some remarkable insights into changes in the American body in recent decades.China sentences a Canadian to death
+A court in northeastern China sentenced Robert Lloyd Schellenberg to death for smuggling drugs in an unusually swift retrial that escalated China’s diplomatic conflict with Canada.
+The details: Mr. Schellenberg was arrested in 2014 and detained for 15 months before his first trial. It took another 32 months before he was declared guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison. He appealed his sentence, maintaining that he was framed. A court ordered his retrial last month.
+Why it matters: The retrial came just weeks after Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei. Mr. Schellenberg’s family had voiced fears that he would be used as a bargaining chip.Emphasis on “was.”
+In recent weeks, Mr. Pecker has emerged as a cooperating witness in the federal investigation that prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are pursuing into the schemes to pay six figures to Ms. McDougal and Stormy Daniels, another woman whose story of an affair with Mr. Trump was buried by the company.
+In the Sunday-night tweet, Mr. Trump was effectively vouching for the credibility of Mr. Pecker and his newspaper — whose name in the Trump era hasn’t exactly been equated with accuracy. To wit, Hillary Clinton is still alive, proving that The Enquirer’s campaign-year reports of her imminent death were a bit of an exaggeration.
+Mr. Pecker’s word is of high value to prosecutors — and highly dangerous to Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Pecker provided vital corroboration for the story told by Mr. Trump’s former lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, when he pleaded guilty last year to arranging the payments to Ms. Daniels and Ms. McDougal.
+Mr. Cohen said he had arranged them with the full knowledge that they were equivalent to illegal campaign disbursements, because they were intended to help Mr. Trump win the election. He also said he had made the payments at Mr. Trump’s direction, essentially accusing his former boss of being the driving force behind the whole thing.
+In December, Mr. Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison on those charges and others. In a court filing provided ahead of that sentencing, the New York prosecutors disclosed the extent of American Media’s cooperation. The company’s willingness to help is why there have been no charges against those involved with the running of the tabloid, prosecutors said.
+The cooperation of American Media officers was highly significant, because Mr. Cohen made for a flawed witness. His long track record of lies meant anything he said to law enforcement officials would require corroboration, if it were to be of any real value.
+After months of public denials that the payment to Ms. McDougal had been coordinated with Mr. Trump or Mr. Cohen, American Media flipped the script, telling prosecutors that it had coughed up the cash “in cooperation, consultation and concert with, and at the request and suggestion of, one or more members or agents of” Mr. Trump’s campaign. The publisher also explained why it had done so — so that Ms. McDougal “did not publicize damaging allegations” and “thereby influence that election.”The sommelier Daniel Johnnes — who for many years has run La Paulée, a multifaceted event covering Burgundy wines with tastings, seminars and meals — is doing much the same for Rhône wines with La Tablée. The event, from Jan. 30 to Feb. 2, includes a three-hour walk-around tasting (open to the public for $150) on Feb. 2. That evening, a dinner, $525, will be prepared by Daniel Boulud, Frank Castronovo and Frank Falcinelli, among others; glasses will be filled with Rhône wines, poured by winemakers, and also wines that participants bring to share .
+La Tablée New York, tasting Feb. 2 noon to 3 p.m., $150; Rhône wine dinner, Feb. 2 at 6:30 p.m., $525; both events are $525 in total for those under 40; 26Bridge, 26 Bridge Street (Plymouth Street), Vinegar Hill, Brooklyn; all tickets and programs, latableenyc.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Flavored butters present no real challenge for a home cook to make. But having several on hand is a convenience that Josh Green, who studied at the Institute of Culinary Education, understands. His company, Brooklyn Buttery, is the result. He uses butter from small farms upstate and in Vermont and seasons them with Sriracha, maple, lemon or sea salt from Long Island.
+Brooklyn Buttery, $6.99 for six ounces in stores including Whole Foods in Brooklyn and Eataly; $35 for four tubs, including shipping, brooklynbuttery.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.About five years ago, Hitoshi Sagaseki opened J+B Design, a store in a garagelike space that sold mostly Japanese goods for the home, some clothing, jewelry and personal care products, as well as food items. Several months ago, he expanded the food component. Now, there’s a wall of Japanese packaged snacks, soup mixes, teas, spices, condiments and other ingredients. Some refrigerated products like tofu, and frozen ones, including udon noodles, are also sold. A cafe selling teas, pastries and smoothies is at the entrance and along one side. The initials stand for Japan and Brooklyn.
+J+B Design, 300 Seventh Street (Fourth Avenue), Park Slope, Brooklyn, 347-987-3217, jplusbdesign.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.In Los Angeles, they have had more success. After his plan to move half of the Los Angeles district students into charter schools failed to get traction, the billionaire and charter school supporter Eli Broad and a group of allies spent almost $10 million in 2017 to win a majority on the school board. The board rammed through the appointment of a superintendent, Austin Beutner, with no educational background. Mr. Beutner, a former investment banker, is the seventh in 10 years and has proposed dividing the district into 32 “networks,” a so-called portfolio plan designed in part by the consultant who engineered the radical restructuring of Newark schools.
+“In my 17 years working with labor unions, I have been called on to help settle countless bargaining disputes in mediation,” wrote Vern Gates, the union-appointed member of the fact-finding panel called in to help mediate the Los Angeles stalemate last month. “I have never seen an employer that was intent on its own demise.”
+It’s a vicious cycle: The more overcrowded and burdened the regular schools, the easier for charters to recruit students. The more students the district loses, the less money, and the worse its finances. The more the district gives charters space in traditional schools, the more overcrowded the regular classrooms.
+Enrollment in the Los Angeles school district has declined consistently for 15 years, increasing the competition for students. It now educates just under a half-million students. More than 80 percent are poor, about three-quarters are Latino, and about one-quarter are English-language learners. On most state standardized tests, more than one-third fall below standards.
+For 20 years, Katie Safford has taught at Ivanhoe Elementary, a school so atypical and so desirable that it drives up real estate prices in the upscale Silver Lake neighborhood. Ivanhoe parents raise almost a half million a year so that their children can have sports, arts, music and supplies. But parents cannot buy smaller classes or a school nurse. Mrs. Safford’s second-grade classroom is a rickety bungalow slated for demolition. When the floor rotted, the district put carpet over the holes. When leaks caused mold on the walls, Mrs. Safford hung student art to cover stains. The clock always reads 4:20.
+“I was born to be a teacher,” Mrs. Safford said. “I have no interest in being an activist. None. But this is ridiculous.” For the first time in her life, she marched last month, one of more than 10,000 teachers and supporters in a sea of red.
+Monday she walked the picket line outside a school where just eight of the 456 students showed up. Now her second graders ask the questions no one can answer: When will you be back? How will it end?LONDON — Ahead of a vote on her Brexit plan that could go down to a humiliating defeat in Parliament, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain was fighting on Monday less to avert the loss than to limit its scale.
+In that vein, Mrs. May enlisted fresh promises from Europe’s most senior officials through an exchange of letters and warned supporters of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union that the whole project would be threatened if her deal was voted down as expected.
+Neither tactic looked likely to change the overall outcome, but if Mrs. May can curb the magnitude of any defeat to manageable proportions, she could avert an immediate political meltdown. That, given the precarious state of events, would be a victory of sorts.
+[What is Brexit? A simple guide to why it matters and what happens next.]
+Speaking in a ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent, an area that voted heavily to leave the European Union, Mrs. May warned that Britain’s failure to withdraw from the bloc would risk “a subversion of the democratic process” and do “catastrophic harm” to faith in politics.KABUL, Afghanistan — A bomb-laden vehicle detonated in a large explosion heard across Kabul late on Monday, and officials said the blast killed at least four people and wounded 90.
+The vehicle blew up in the eastern part of the Afghan capital, home to government offices, the country’s elections commission, housing for foreign security contractors and agencies of the large United Nations mission.
+The exact target was not clear. Witnesses and officials suggested the vehicle had detonated at a roundabout, an indication the blast occurred before the actual target had been reached.The first musical to reach the Great White Way partly on the strength of an active, passionate grass-roots following — “Be More Chill,” in case you’re over 30 — begins previews next month.
+No wonder, then, that the fourth edition of BroadwayCon — a three-day expo targeting hard-core Broadway fans — was as much about shill as chill.
+Spending Friday and Saturday at the New York Midtown Hilton, I saw dozens of teens and tweens in elaborate costumes from shows like “Angels in America,” “Mean Girls,” “Anastasia” and “Newsies.” Actors from “Be More Chill” rubbed elbows with fans portraying their characters.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Airports across the country were starting to buckle Monday under the strain of the partial government shutdown as a rising absentee rate among federal transportation security officers, who are not being paid, led to the closing of checkpoints and increased wait times for travelers.
+At George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, the checkpoint in Terminal B remained closed at midday because of a shortage of screening agents, Patrick Trahan, a spokesman for the Houston Airport System, said. On Sunday, Bush Intercontinental became the second big airport to close a main passenger screening portal because of abnormally high absenteeism since the shutdown began on Dec. 22.
+On Monday, about one of every 13 screeners nationwide failed to report for work, compared with about one out of 30 a year ago, said Michael Bilello, a spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration. Mr. Bilello said Washington-Dulles International and Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airports were “exercising contingency plans due to call-outs.”
+The T.S.A.’s 51,000 employees were ordered to work without pay during the shutdown. On Friday, they saw their first missed paycheck, a lapse that travel industry officials worried would cause more of them to stay home or quit their jobs, leading to more disruptions for travelers.When it comes to feel-good, classic games there are the old reliables: Operation, Twister and Monopoly, among others. Then there is Cut the Wire, a game that asks children to defuse a toy bomb before it “detonates.”
+The game, which was recommended for children ages 6 and up, sets a timer and players have to defuse the faux bomb before time runs out. If a player cuts the wrong wire with the toy wire cutter, the game, which resembles banded sticks of dynamite, sounds an alarm and an explosion noise as it lights up and vibrates.
+Parents expressed concern about the game, which comes packaged in a box with a background that looks like flames in an explosion. Critics said it was difficult to imagine promoting the game when there was so much real-life violence in the world involving bombs.
+“So, we’re going to give children toy bombs to defuse. Because apparently this is fun for the whole family. How about ‘Duck And Cover: the Biological Attack Version’ next?” a Twitter user, Michael Bouck, tweeted.The masterful tentacles of advertising and p ublic relations have manipulated the American table for more than a century. Christina Ward, the author of “American Advertising Cookbooks,” describes the promotional cookbooks of the 1930s to ’70s to tell the story, but she covers a longer timeline, giving the history of cookbooks, of branded food products and even of government involvement both beneficial (the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906) and underhanded (the role of the Dulles brothers in the banana business). A key player was Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, who in the 1920s helped pioneer the use of psychology to target women through advertising. A photograph of a luncheon-meat salad mold is scarcely more horrifying than the details that led to the creation of the dish. There is much to learn in this book.
+“American Advertising Cookbooks: How Corporations Taught Us to Love Spam, Bananas and Jell-O” by Christina Ward (Process Media, $22.95, paperback).
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Just a bit farther north are a few temples that embody Bangkok’s Hindu and Buddhist past and present. It is here where the biennale blends in most respectfully and gracefully. Most notably is the Thai artist Nino Sarabutra’s “What Will We Leave Behind,” more than 125,000 tea bag-size porcelain skulls that line the walkways of the Wat Prayurawongsawas temple. They massage the feet as you comb the temple. They glisten. They break. Life underfoot.
+Next door at Wat Arun, or the Temple of Dawn, the touristy Buddhist temple that was restored in 2017 with the finest of detail, several artists have immersed their pieces gently into this vast complex of radiant tiles and selfie-obsessed tourists. And at Wat Po, the reclining Buddha temple across the river, the artist Huang Yong Ping has installed “Zuo You He Che,” a pair of massive legs topped with animal heads carrying scriptures in their mouths. The pieces meld seamlessly into their surroundings to the point that hundreds, if not thousands of tourists, pass by daily, never aware of the modern art infusion.
+One of the Bangkok Biennale’s final acts is the performance artist Kawita Vatanajyankur’s “Knit,” a critique on how women are exploited in the work force. She weaves her body in and out of a loom of red yarn around 12 white poles in an oval shape, becoming knotted and contorted. This performance is not being performed in a museum or abandoned warehouse but in the soaring lobby of the posh Peninsula Hotel during afternoon tea — a new spin on how Bangkok’s engine of tourism and its women converge again.
+But a more potent depiction of this idea is on display at the Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, and it, like a few other pieces, has pushed the limits of censorship in Thailand. Chumpon Apisuk’s video installation “I Have Dreams,” shows sex workers from Chiang Mai directly addressing the viewer, giving a rare voice to the hundreds of thousands of women and men who the country — and its often careless tourists — mostly ignore.
+“I have a dream, to build a new house for my family,” one woman says. “Then I can open a small grocery shop.” It’s a simple and earnest aspiration, heartbreaking and heartfelt. Yet it roars from a small video room in a corner of an arts center. Bangkok’s biennale has set the stage for its return in 2020 with the simplest of words and yet the most profound statement of how art can define a city — and redefine what it means to be racy and taboo in Bangkok.According to S&P Global Platts, prices for American-made hot-rolled coil steel, the industry benchmark, jumped 41 percent in the first half of 2018 and then fell about 21 percent from that peak in the second half of the year. That trend is likely to continue this year.
+“Steel prices remain under pressure to begin 2019,” said Michael Fitzgerald, a metals pricing specialist at S&P Global Platts. “Typical seasonal improvements following the slower holiday period are yet to take hold as domestic steel buyers no longer fear a supply crunch.”
+American businesses and trade groups have repeatedly urged the Trump administration to remove the tariffs, arguing they hurt domestic companies, not competitors, and will ultimately undercut economic growth.
+“Tariffs are taxes paid for by American families and American businesses — not foreigners,” said Thomas J. Donohue, the president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
+American steel makers are feeling the pressure. Despite strong earnings in 2018, the stock prices of steel companies have been in a deep slump as investors fret that they are being propped up by government support that will be temporary. In the last year, shares of AK Steel are down 56 percent, US Steel is down 46 percent, Steel Dynamics is down 29 percent and Nucor’s stock is down 18 percent.
+John J. Ferriola, the chief executive of Nucor, said that the falling stock price is head-scratching because he believes that the industry is on solid footing. While Mr. Trump’s tariffs have provided a “tailwind,” a strong economy, tax cuts and anti-dumping measures put in place by the Obama administration have revived the steel industry, Mr. Ferriola said.
+“There’s a lot of doomsday talk about the tariffs and a lot of misinformation,” Mr. Ferriola said in an interview. “I keep hearing about how it is driving down demand and putting our customers out of business. We had a record year last year, and many of our customers also had a record year.”BARRON, Wis. — The crime began with a chance encounter: From the moment Jake Patterson spotted a 13-year-old girl boarding a school bus last fall, he “knew that was the girl he was going to take,” Wisconsin investigators said in court documents released on Monday.
+In the days that followed, Mr. Patterson, 21, mapped out his plot to abduct Jayme Closs, a middle-school student whom he had never met before, the investigators said. He took a shotgun from his father, switched out his car’s license plate and bought a mask from Walmart. He shaved his head and face — to leave no traces — and wiped clean his shotgun shells. He twice drove out to Jayme’s house in the small town of Barron, but saw cars in the driveway or people awake inside, the report says.
+Then, late on an October night, Mr. Patterson pulled up again to the home of the Closs family — people he had never met — and killed Jayme’s father, James Closs, with a single blast of the shotgun. He then forced his way into a bathroom where Jayme and her mother, Denise, were hiding in a bathtub, the investigators said. He ordered Denise Closs to cover her daughter’s mouth with black tape, then killed Denise. Then he tied up Jayme and forced the teenager into the trunk of his car — all of it in a matter of four minutes.
+The details of Jayme’s abduction and captivity, outlined in documents released as Mr. Patterson was formally charged in the kidnapping and killings, were elaborately planned, gruesome and terrifying. They told the story of a girl who was forced to spend three months held against her will in the cabin of a volatile stranger after having witnessed the deaths of her parents. It was the situation every parent fears — and one that experts say is exceedingly rare: a targeted attack on a child by a total stranger.Wölffer Estate Vineyard has gradually broadened its portfolio beyond wine to include other alcoholic drinks , like distilled spirits. It has a gin on the roster, and now, the winemaker and partner, Roman Roth, has created a brandy for Wölffer, something he has wanted to do for years. The spirit is made in a traditional copper pot still, with the winery’s top-of-the-line Perle chardonnay, then aged for three years in Hungarian oak barrels. The amber-toned brandy has a floral, grapy aroma and a light smoothness, hinting of toffee and orange, on the palate.
+Wölffer Brandy, $75 for 375 milliliters at Wölffer Estate Vineyards, 139 Sagg Road, Sagaponack, N.Y., 631-537-5106, wolffer.com; $65.99 at Domaine Franey, 459 Pantigo Road, East Hampton, N.Y., 631-324-0906, domainefraney.com, shipping only within New York State.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.So here we are, on a rainy day in the richest country in the world, in the richest state in the country, in a state as blue as it can be, and in a city rife with millionaires, where teachers have to go on strike to get the basics for our students. And they need to know that we’re on their side, and that we want them to have a better pay and just better conditions.On most afternoons, people arrive from across New York City with backpacks and plastic bags filled with boxes of small plastic strips, forming a line on the sidewalk outside a Harlem storefront.
+Hanging from the awning, a banner reads: “Get cash with your extra diabetic test strips.”
+Each strip is a laminate of plastic and chemicals little bigger than a fingernail, a single-use diagnostic test for measuring blood sugar. More than 30 million Americans have Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes, and most use several test strips daily to monitor their condition.
+But at this store on W. 116th Street, each strip is also a lucrative commodity, part of an informal economy in unused strips nationwide. Often the sellers are insured and paid little out of pocket for the strips; the buyers may be underinsured or uninsured, and unable to pay retail prices , which can run well over $100 for a box of 100 strips.
+Some clinicians are surprised to learn of this vast resale market, but it has existed for decades, an unusual example of the vagaries of American health care. Unlike the resale of prescription drugs, which is prohibited by law, it is generally legal to resell unused test strips.How many albums do you need to sell to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s chart? This week, the number is 823 — along with 83 million streams, that is.
+Those are the numbers for “Hoodie SZN” (Highbridge/Atlantic), by the New York rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, the latest and most extreme example of the disparity that now exists in the music industry between the still-rapid growth of streaming and the cratering business of old-fashioned album sales.
+Billboard and Nielsen credit “Hoodie SZN” with the equivalent of 58,000 sales in the United States last week, a number that incorporates streams and downloads of individual tracks, as well as sales of the full album. But the vast majority of that composite number is from streaming — so much so that the sales number represents a new low on the chart.
+The 823 copies of “Hoodie SZN” that were sold last week — all as downloads, since that title has not been released on any physical formats — is the least number of copies that any album has sold in the week it went to No. 1. It tops a record set just the week before by 21 Savage’s “I Am > I Was,” which sold 3,481 copies and had 84 million streams.Lester Wunderman, the advertising executive credited with pioneering the hugely successful modern techniques of direct marketing, with sales pitches aimed at targeted prospective customers in their homes and geared to their interests or characteristics, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 98.
+A spokeswoman for his agency, the Wunderman Group, confirmed the death on Monday.
+The chairman emeritus and co-founder of what became the world’s largest direct-marketing ad agency, Mr. Wunderman never graduated from college, had no formal training in advertising and got into the mail-order business on a two-for-one offer: one salary split between him and his brother. It proved to be a big bargain for Madison Avenue.
+Long before anyone had ever heard of internet sales or interactive communications, Mr. Wunderman was widely credited with coining the term “direct marketing.” For decades he championed an industry that sent personalized ads to preselected people for products and services that they might actually want to buy, as opposed to the scattershot approach of general advertising for the mass audiences of printed publications and broadcast media.
+Using ZIP codes and research databases to identify likely customers, Wunderman teams reached them at home with mailings, promotional letters, phone calls, and newspaper and magazine inserts. Sales rose dramatically with his inducements: toll-free telephone numbers for ordering, postage-paid subscription cards, buy-one-get-one-free offers, “loyalty reward” programs for brand buyers who came back.To the Editor:
+Re “F.B.I. Investigated if Trump Worked for the Russians” (front page, Jan. 12):
+The F.B.I. had enough evidence to open up a counterintelligence investigation of the president of the United States. This is a mind-boggling pronouncement. That the investigators considered the president a possible “threat to national security” is in and of itself a startling proposition.
+We should all take stock of the state of our nation. The American people need to know whether their president is a Russian asset. We need to know that our nation is secure. We need to know if the president, whether wittingly or unwittingly, is acting against American interests and in the national interests of Russia. Did he conspire with a foreign entity to manipulate our electorate?
+We need answers, and we need them now. Our nation is in peril, and we cannot wait patiently for investigations to play out. Therefore, it is incumbent upon the special counsel, Robert Mueller, to assuage our fears, or confirm them, by giving us a clear conclusion to his investigations in the very near future.
+Ellen Silverman Popper
+Whitestone, Queens
+To the Editor:
+Why are people surprised that the F.B.I. investigated whether President Trump was working for the Russians? Of course the agency would be suspicious, and it is its job to investigate when suspicious.MONTREAL — Being nice in Canada can sometimes feel like a full-time job.
+There was that time Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cuddled with two baby pandas.
+Over the weekend, Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland welcomed a Saudi teenager at Toronto airport with a warm embrace after she had fled abusive members of her family and been granted asylum in Canada.
+Now, Canadian air traffic controllers have helped burnish the country’s image as the do-gooder of the world by sending hundreds of pizzas to their American counterparts, who have been working without pay since a government shutdown began on Dec. 22.
+And, yes, some were apparently garnished with Canadian bacon.
+Peter Duffey, president of the Canadian Air Traffic Control Association, said the show of cheesy support began last week when employees at an air traffic control center in Edmonton, Alberta, decided to buy pizzas for their colleagues at an office in Anchorage, Alaska. Soon, dozens of other Canadian traffic control centers joined in.One September evening in 1994, Nicholas Heyward Jr., 13, was playing cops and robbers with friends on a rooftop at the Gowanus Houses, the Brooklyn housing project where he lived. The boys, carrying toy guns, decided to go back inside and rushed down the stairs, jostling one another.
+At the same time, Brian George, a 23-year-old police officer on patrol, was responding to a report of a man with a gun and possibly shots having been fired at the project. Housing police said that people had sometimes fired actual firearms for “target practice” on the roofs.
+Officer George went to the building where the boys were and was heading to the staircase when he encountered the boys. Nicholas was holding an 18-inch toy rifle.
+“We’re playing,” Nicholas told the officer, according to his friends.
+But in seconds Officer George shot him in the stomach with his .38-caliber service revolver.Image
+The New York Times podcast “The Daily” is starting a weekly newsletter that’ll be delivered to your inbox on Fridays. The host, Michael Barbaro, and the team behind the show give an exclusive look at how one of the week’s most talked-about stories on “The Daily” came together.
+What’s in the newsletter?
+You’ll get letters from Michael (like this one) that take you behind the scenes of “The Daily,” with a view into how stories are chosen, what happens when there’s late-breaking news and what gets left on the cutting-room floor. You’ll hear from the reporters and audio producers who bring these stories to life, and you’ll also have a voice in the newsletter, which will regularly feature comments and critiques from our listeners. There will be podcast recommendations and — just maybe — the occasional team photo.
+When will I get it?
+Every Friday afternoon.
+Where can I sign up?
+Right here.
+What’s “The Daily”?
+Twenty minutes a day, five days a week, “The Daily” draws on the power of the New York Times newsroom to tell the biggest stories of our time, in sound. Listen to the latest episode at nytimes.com/thedaily, or wherever you get your podcasts.Late last year, Murray and his baseball agent, Scott Boras, insisted that the plan was for Murray to play one season as Oklahoma’s starter and then report to spring training for the Athletics. Such a deal was apparently part of the negotiating process that led to Murray’s baseball contract, and was outlined in a news conference last spring with A’s executives.
+Still, that Murray would even entertain the possibility of playing both big league baseball and quarterback on Sundays — or would be so self-assured of his talents as to make leveraging one against the other a plausible ploy — is something new in American sports.
+When Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were two-sport stars two decades ago, they were a running back and a cornerback. Those are difference-making positions, but quarterback they are not.
+And in 1994, after Charlie Ward won the Heisman playing quarterback at Florida State, he said he would turn to basketball unless he was picked in the N.F.L. draft’s first round. When he was not, he embarked on a decade-long career in the N.B.A., mostly with the Knicks.
+The differences between the two pastimes must have seemed blurrier then. Free agency was only dawning in the N.F.L. Many revelations concerning the toll of repeated hits to the head were still years into the future.I cook a lot of chicken, beans and fish on weeknights, for the same reasons a lot of busy people do: They’re fast and rich in protein. The challenge is transforming these humble yet mighty ingredients into something not at all boring, week after week. That’s when my pantry comes into play. A few boldly flavored staples, combined in the right way, have the power to change everything.
+Most people don’t think of miso paste and maple syrup as a flavor combination that works well, but they should. It’s salty, sweet and earthy, with umami that makes everything bold. In this recipe, I whisk the two together with tangy rice wine vinegar, garlic and soy sauce to make a brightly flavored marinade for rich and fatty salmon, a dish that’s elegant enough for entertaining but fast enough to make anytime.
+The fish marinates as the oven heats up, which makes it a brilliant weeknight move. Ten minutes is plenty of time for the salmon to absorb the flavors, but if you would prefer to let yours hang out a bit longer, you can — just be sure to pull it at an hour. Any longer and the acidity in the vinegar will start to break down the delicate texture of the fish, and you don’t want that.
+Vibrant green beans, tossed with a bit of sesame oil and chile flakes, are cooked on the same pan, providing a pop of color and a built-in side dish. (It also means you spend less time cleaning up.) A showering of chopped cilantro and a good squeeze of lime brings all the flavors together while also making it easy on the eyes.The man who fatally shot Hadiya Pendleton, whose death six years ago became a tragic national symbol of gun violence, was sentenced Monday to 84 years in prison.
+Hadiya, 15, performed at President Barack Obama’s second inauguration one week before Mickiael Ward shot her in Chicago after mistaking the group she was with for members of a rival gang. Mr. Obama mentioned her during his State of the Union address weeks later and hosted her parents at that event, and the first lady, Michelle Obama, attended her funeral.
+On Monday, Judge Nicholas Ford of Cook County Circuit Court described Hadiya’s murder as “highly premeditated” and accused Mr. Ward, 24, of showing little remorse in court.On a recent afternoon, Mr. Feingold mournfully walked through the empty restaurant, which looked as if it could spring into action at any moment. There was still wine in the refrigerator and liquor at the bar; a prep list was scribbled on a whiteboard in the kitchen; menus were propped up in a wooden box near the entrance. The early-evening light reflected off the steel shark sculpture that hung from the ceiling, made by a seasonal resident, Kitty Wales.
+Mr. Feingold, who has listed the space with a broker, has received some inquiries from locals and from restaurateurs elsewhere in Maine. He said he is rooting for the locals, but nothing has been decided.
+“If someone is willing to take the restaurant now and be open when the leaves are off the trees and the winds are howling,” Mr. Feingold said, “that suggests the kind of love and concern that is attractive to me.”
+That night, as the sun set over the harbor, Mr. Feingold and Mr. Carlsen, the lobsterman, headed to the Sand Bar, where wood-paneled walls are covered in dartboards and beer signs. The specials included a burger topped with Velveeta cheese. Some patrons — many of them former Salt regulars, Mr. Feingold said — were doing shots and singing loudly to 1990s pop songs. “There is just nothing else open,” Mr. Carlsen muttered.
+But Ms. Clapham, the former Salt manager, believes in the resiliency of the islanders. Some people have started supper clubs in their houses, she said, and she just created a service that makes and delivers meals. After all, this is a population that has adapted to an unpredictable ferry service, a lone A.T.M. and bitterly cold weather.
+Sure, they are sad about Salt, Ms. Clapham said. “But I think that Vinalhaven is going to survive.”Mr. Tepper said that for many travelers, general-use credit cards like the American Express Platinum or Chase Sapphire Reserve were much better options. While their annual fees are high — $550 for the American Express card and $450 for the Chase card — they provide hefty credits that can be used with any airline to cover expenses like checked bags and in-flight purchases, along with other benefits like access to airport lounges.
+Travelers must ultimately consider which benefits matter most to them. An airline-specific credit card could be the right choice if priority boarding and a free checked bag are primary concerns. But Mr. Tepper cautioned not to expect much else, even from a top-tier airline card.
+“When it comes to getting elite status, you’re not really going to get that with a credit card,” he said. “If you are on an American flight three times a week and you’re going all over the place, you’re probably getting that elite status all by yourself.”
+And elite frequent fliers will usually get access to airline lounges and free checked bags whether or not they have the airline’s credit card. It is possible to get elite status with some airline cards if you spend enough money, but the threshold is high — $25,000 a year on Delta and United Airlines, for example. Otherwise, airlines require a minimum amount of flying each year to achieve frequent-flier status.
+Most travelers will have to pay for a top-tier credit card if they want to maximize their benefits. Like the American Express and Chase Sapphire cards, the airlines’ top cards usually cost at least $450 annually, and even the most expensive cards are rarely enough to bolster frequent-flier standing by themselves. So don’t expect free upgrades to first class. Without frequent-flier status, you’ll still have to use miles or pay cash for that bigger, more comfortable seat.MOSCOW — Security forces in the Russian region of Chechnya have again cracked down on gay people, killing two and applying tactics once used against Islamist terrorists to find and arrest dozens of others, a Russian rights group said in a report issued on Monday.
+Since late last year, two gay men have been killed and about 40 men and women who are either homosexual or suspected of being homosexual have been detained in a makeshift prison, according to the rights group, the Russian LGBT Network.
+Though Russia decriminalized homosexuality during the breakup of the Soviet Union, the police in Chechnya have periodically detained gay people in extrajudicial arrests without repercussions from the federal authorities.
+The region’s leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, was the beneficiary of an arrangement with the Kremlin to keep the peace in the aftermath of two wars by Chechen rebels for independence in the late 1990s and early 2000s: In exchange for his loyalty to Moscow, Mr. Kadyrov was granted wide leeway to rule as he wished at home.[Alfonso Cuarón takes us around Mexico City.]
+All this might be for naught if it weren’t for Netflix’s deep-pocketed awards bid. Foreign-language Oscar contenders usually merit a scant few tastemaker parties if they’re lucky, but Netflix has mounted a “Roma” campaign more akin to what you’d give a Marvel movie. Hollywood is blanketed in billboards bearing Aparicio’s face, “Roma” events are thrown nearly round the clock, and many industry figures received a heavy $175 book about the film published by Assouline. Rival publicists estimate that Netflix is spending $10 million to $20 million on award-season promotion, though some put that figure even higher.
+It’s an unprecedented campaign for a black-and-white foreign film, but then, a best picture win for Netflix would be unprecedented, too. The streaming service has never so much as fielded a best-picture nominee, and the company is gunning for the win.
+Still, strains of anti-Netflix sentiment remain, and that’s one of the headwinds facing “Roma.” Many in the industry fear that the theatrical component of moviegoing will be depreciated as Netflix continues to gain ground, and though the streaming service tried to assuage those concerns by giving “Roma” a brief, exclusive theatrical window, the imminent arrival of Disney and Apple in the streaming space will only pull more focus from traditional distribution methods.
+There is also the fact that no foreign-language film has ever won best picture. The closest analog may be “The Artist,” another black-and-white movie that took the prize seven years ago, but though it was made by the French director Michel Hazanavicius and starred French leads, it was ultimately a Hollywood-set film made in English. In the academy’s yearslong bid to increase diversity, it has begun courting a far more international membership, but a foreign-language best picture win would still prove notable in a year with plenty of homegrown Hollywood product to choose from.
+I also wonder if Aparicio’s lack of best-actress traction may indicate that passion for “Roma” is high but not wide. Though she was nominated at the Critics’ Choice Awards (losing to Glenn Close and Lady Gaga, who tied), she was snubbed by the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild, and the latter is particularly concerning given that actors make up the academy’s biggest voting branch.
+Foreign-language performers like Isabelle Huppert (“Elle”) and Marion Cotillard (“Two Days, One Night”) have broken into the best-actress category without the benefit of Netflix’s marketing money or the heat of a major best-picture contender, so if she’s left out of the final five when Oscar nominations are announced next week, Netflix ought to be concerned: Only 11 films have gone on to win best picture without scoring any acting nominations.Who is your target audience?
+We’re looking to engage people who use these devices but might not yet be loyal consumers of The Times, while also offering something new and innovative tied to print in order to enhance our relationship with existing audiences. As the technology continues to be adopted, the demographics will change, but we’re most concerned with adapting our journalism into great voice-first experiences.
+What content are you most looking forward to hearing?
+I’m really proud of everything we’re offering, but I’m particularly excited about the news quiz and the 52 Places Traveler because they both take advantage of voice interactivity. The real potential of the technology is that content doesn’t have to be a fire hose. The listener becomes a participant, using voice commands to navigate and customize the experience. As people take our news quiz, they’ll get feedback and additional context based on whether they get questions right or wrong.
+So interactivity is the main advantage of using smart speakers for this content?
+Yes. Even when we’re not designing the audio to be interactive, we’re building experiences to respond to specific user requests, which makes it a natural home for short-form and service-oriented audio journalism.
+What other Times content would work via smart speaker?
+Any kind of journalism that could be translated to sound could work, but we’d really like to showcase a diverse array of voices, form more personal connections and tap into the things our newsroom already does really well that would make people’s lives better and more fulfilled.
+Will the audio dispatches from our 52 Places Traveler be filed directly from the road?
+Yes, Sebastian will be filing from each destination on the list. We want it to feel as if you’re catching up with a friend who is on an incredible journey. I’m hoping that listening to and interacting with Sebastian will help people form a more personal connection with him. We’ll be piecing together the dispatches as he goes, so at the end you should be able to listen to his whole journey from beginning to end.
+Will other Times journalists provide voice-only content?
+Definitely. We want to showcase a diverse array of voices from around the newsroom. There are so many unique experiences, beats and perspectives at The Times. We’ll use the news quiz in particular to leverage reporters and editors who know their beats as well as anyone in the world.
+Is this content exclusive to the Alexa platform?
+“The Daily" will still be available everywhere it had been previously (that is, wherever you get your podcasts), but these new experiences will be exclusive to voice platforms. We started with the Alexa platform, where we knew the majority of our audience was, and we hope to expand to others soon.The opioid crisis in the United States has become so grim that Americans are now likelier to die of an overdose than in a vehicle crash.
+That’s according to a new report by the National Safety Council that analyzed the causes of preventable deaths in the country in 2017. The probability of dying from an opioid overdose, according to the report, is one in 96. The chances of dying in a vehicle crash? One in 103.
+Most Americans are still most likely to die of natural causes, chiefly heart disease (a one in six chance) or cancer (one in seven). But the report shows, in stark numbers, that everyday events — such as falling down — might be effectively more dangerous than rare ones, such as getting hit by lightning.
+“Human beings, we just are not good at estimating our own risk,” said Ken Kolosh, manager of statistics at the National Safety Council, who oversaw the report. “We tend to fixate or focus on the rare, startling event, like a plane crash or a major flood or a natural disaster, but in reality, when you look at the numbers, the everyday risks that we face and have become so accustomed to form a much greater hazard.”She was equally unsparing in writing about her parents in “Them.”
+“Like any proper biographer,” Mrs. Gray wrote in the introduction, “I strove for a compassionate severity, for that balance of ruthlessness and tenderness that were at the heart of my mother’s own character and that she might have been the first to respect.”
+Francine du Plessix was born on Sept. 25, 1930, in Warsaw, where her father was the commercial attaché at the French Embassy. Domineering and contemptuous, he held his adoring daughter in thrall; she suffered from a bad stutter and desperately craved his approval.
+Her mother was an equally forceful presence, with a basilisk gaze that “had the psychic impact of a can of Mace,” Mrs. Gray wrote in her memoir. Ms. Yakovleva was emotionally distant. After Francine’s father died, the mother left it to friends to tell her daughter, a year after the fact.
+Before ascending to the top of Manhattan’s social pyramid, the family lived in genteel poverty. Francine won a scholarship to attend the Spence School. She enrolled at Bryn Mawr but after two years transferred to Barnard, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy in 1952, writing her senior thesis on Kierkegaard’s view of the death of Christianity. For two summers she studied at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where her mentor was the poet Charles Olson.
+After writing radio reports on the overnight shift at United Press for two years, Mrs. Gray moved to Paris to report on fashion for the French magazine Réalités, an experience that led to a nervous breakdown.
+She returned to the United States and in 1957 married the painter Cleve Gray, with whom she lived in Warren, Conn., in Litchfield County. For several years she applied herself to the easel, painting landscapes and still lifes.
+Image Mrs. Gray established herself as a novelist in the mid-1970s with “Lovers and Tyrants,” the semi-autobiographical story of a young French-American woman trying to understand herself and create a meaningful life.
+Mr. Gray died in 2004. In addition to her son Thaddeus, Mrs. Gray, who moved to Manhattan in 2014, is survived by another son, Luke, and five grandchildren.Elias M. Stein, a mathematician who pioneered work in a field that was originally devised to describe the vibrations of strings but that proved to have a wide range of applications, including charting the fluctuations of stock markets and gravitational waves, died on Dec. 23 at a hospital in Somerville, N.J. He was 87.
+The cause was complications of lymphoma, his daughter, Karen, said.
+Dr. Stein “had a knack of asking the right question,” said Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was a graduate student of his. “He had this great vision of where mathematics should go.”
+Dr. Stein’s specialty was harmonic analysis, which breaks mathematical functions into a spectrum of simple components. It has been known for a long time that a musical note, for example, is a combination of pure harmonic tones. The basic techniques of harmonic analysis, devised centuries ago, were used to compute phenomena like the orbits of planets, the vibrating of strings and the properties of radio signals.
+Dr. Stein showed how a similar approach could be applied to other problems and reveal hidden structures and patterns.PARKERSBURG, W.Va. — On Day 20 of the partial government shutdown last week, a small band of federal workers, shivering in 25-degree weather, staged a rally to send what their organizer, Eric Engle, said was a message to Senator Shelley Moore Capito: “We need to end this shutdown. If it takes overriding the president, that’s what it takes.”
+But here in the heart of Trump country, that message is decidedly muffled, even in Parkersburg, where the federal government is one of the two largest employers. So strong is support for President Trump, who remains dug in on his demand for $5.7 billion to build a border wall, that even some furloughed workers insist Ms. Capito must stick with him.
+“We need the wall,” Jessica Lemasters, 29, an accountant on furlough from the Treasury Department, said over lunch at the Corner Cafe, a few blocks from the rally. “I don’t like being furloughed, but it happens.”Castro: I have a track record of getting things done as mayor of San Antonio and as secretary of housing. I have a strong vision for the country’s future. And I’ve lived a life that I believe lets me understand people all along the scale of experience in our country. I had a modest upbringing and I can understand people that are striving to reach their dreams. I’ve also reached my dreams and can understand folks who have had a lot of success.
+You’re in Puerto Rico right now. That’s pretty far from Iowa. Why start your campaign there?
+I want everybody to understand that everybody counts in this country. The most basic tenet of government is protection. And this administration failed our fellow Americans in Puerto Rico by not protecting them after Hurricane Maria. I’m going to highlight that, and then we’ll let folks know that in the years to come everybody is going to count in this country, including the people of Puerto Rico.
+President Trump has said there’s a massive crisis on the border. Do you agree?
+Not at all. The crisis that exists is a crisis of leadership. This president has failed. He promised all of us that if Americans could just be cruel enough to separate babies from their parents at the border, that it would deter more families from coming over there. Now we’ve seen that more families are coming over. So he has failed with his policies, and he’s failed in trying to convince the American people that he’s not to blame for this shutdown. And the best thing that he can do now is to set aside his political ploy of the wall.
+You may be the only Latino in a crowded race. How do you think that will impact the contest?
+I’ve got to be myself, and I’m confident that I can appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans. At the same time, of course, there’s significance to the Latino community because I believe a lot of Latinos feel targeted right now by this administration. For me, personally, I can relate to many of today’s immigrants because my grandmother that I grew up with came over from Mexico, and I grew up in San Antonio, just a few hours away from the border. So I’ve seen the positive value that immigrants add to this country in a very direct way. And I know that these cities along the border are some of the safest cities in the United States.Mr. Shah will lead the Media Group, the press wing of Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with offices in Florida and Washington. He will work with Jamie Rubin, a Democrat who was a spokesman for Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state, officials said.
+Mr. Shah, a former researcher at the Republican National Committee, had been in the administration since Mr. Trump took office. His portfolio recently included helping prepare Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh for his Senate confirmation hearings to the Supreme Court.But first, he must navigate through a committee full of supporters of the law he has called “an abomination.”
+Besides Mr. Grassley, the whistle-blower law has been backed strongly by Senators Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, both Democrats. Another member of the panel, Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California, used her state’s False Claims Act to pursue fraud in Medicaid and the mortgage industry when she was attorney general of California.
+Mr. Barr’s objections to the False Claims Act were consistent with his expansive view of presidential power.
+“The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that the authority to enforce the laws is a core power vested in the Executive,” Mr. Barr wrote. “The False Claims Act effectively strips this power away from the Executive and vests it in private individuals, depriving the Executive of sufficient supervision and control over the exercise of these sovereign powers.”
+The False Claims Act, also known as Lincoln’s law, was adopted in 1863 in response to rampant fraud by contractors who cheated the government by selling the Union Army sick mules, lame horses and sawdust instead of gunpowder.
+In 1986, Congress strengthened the law by increasing incentives for whistle-blowers to file lawsuits alleging false claims. As a reward, a whistle-blower can receive up to 30 percent of any amounts recovered, with the balance going to the Treasury.
+In the three decades since adoption of that law, championed by Mr. Grassley, the government has recovered more than $59 billion. Last year, for example, the Justice Department obtained more than $2.8 billion in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving fraud and false claims against the government. Of that amount, $2.5 billion came from the health care industry, including drug and medical device manufacturers, hospitals, doctors and home health care companies.Rob Ford, a professor of political science at the University of Manchester, said the government warnings have fallen flat in part because early on, Mrs. May repeatedly declared, “no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain.” The government, Mr. Ford added, “isn’t regarded as a credible source.”
+“It’s way too little, and way too late,” he said, of the warnings in recent weeks. “Everyone’s identity on this stuff is way too entrenched. They should have been saying this in July 2016, and it should have been said on all sides in July 2016.”
+On highly technical issues like the effects of Brexit on trade policy, voters tend to adopt the views of sources they trust, Mr. Ford said, like those politicians, news outlets and affinity groups that mirror their worldview. Mr. Ford’s analysis of British views on a no-deal exit came to two conclusions: Experts took the risks more seriously than the general public, and opinion was polarized along party lines, suggesting it was rooted in “tribal allegiances.”
+“Once the tribal thinking has taken hold, I’m not sure that there is anybody that can significantly move the dial with the public,” he said. “That’s my big worry, that the only thing that can move the dial with people who don’t believe there will be nasty consequences to a no-deal Brexit is nasty consequences happening to them.”
+Britons may find it more difficult to envision collapse, Mr. Ford said, having escaped Nazi occupation in World War II and the kind of drastic change that swept through post-Communist Eastern Europe, he added.
+“The idea that everything could fall to bits, and basic things could just stop, it’s not really imaginable to us,” he said. “There’s an idea that we’ll all be all right in the end. Well, we may not.”
+But anxiety was low at the Hare and Hounds, a haunt for off-duty workers from Heathrow Airport, about 15 miles southwest of London. The town, home to many mechanics, technicians and airport workers, had voted to leave the European Union by a percentage of 60 to 40. At a bar in London frequented by finance workers, the answers likely would have been quite different.There have been many policy disasters over the course of U.S. history. It’s hard, however, to think of a calamity as gratuitous, an error as unforced, as the current federal shutdown.
+Nor can I think of another disaster as thoroughly personal, as completely owned by one man. When Donald Trump told Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, “I will be the one to shut it down,” he was being completely accurate — although he went on to promise that “I’m not going to blame you for it,” which was a lie.
+Still, no man is an island, although Trump comes closer than most. You can’t fully make sense of his policy pratfalls without acknowledging the extraordinary quality of the people with whom he has surrounded himself. And by “extraordinary,” of course, I mean extraordinarily low quality. Lincoln had a team of rivals; Trump has a team of morons.
+If this sounds too harsh, consider recent economic pronouncements by two members of his administration. Predictably, these pronouncements involve bad economics; that’s pretty much a given. What’s striking, instead, is the inability of either man to stay on script; they can’t even get their right-wing mendacity right.By Saturday, Aurélie Dupont, the artistic director of the Paris Opera Ballet announced that Mr. Polunin would not appear with the company. A press representative confirmed that Ms. Dupont had written in an internal email that while she “recognized Mr. Polunin’s talent, she had discovered public statements that had shocked her, and which didn’t correspond to her values or to those of the institution she represents.” In response to a request for further comment from Ms. Dupont, a Paris Opera Ballet press representative said she “has already responded and clearly stated her position.”
+Other social media commenters were critical of Ms. Dupont’s decision. “A renouncement that puts in question her authority and confirms political correctness,” wrote one, while another wrote on Facebook that Mr. Polunin merely expressed “things any rapper band has been bawling with impunity for decades.”
+Mr. Polunin’s public unraveling is dismaying to the many who consider him a huge talent whose best dance years have been largely lost to the ballet world. Many of his followers have expressed concern for his mental health; others have defended his right to hold whatever political views he pleases. Mr. Polunin did not respond to a request for comment.
+His story is well known to ballet fans, and was the subject of a 2016 documentary, “Dancer.” The film shows his passage from an impoverished childhood in Kherson, Ukraine, to his arrival at the Royal Ballet School, speaking no English, at 13, and on to his meteoric success at the Royal Ballet, where he became the company’s youngest-ever principal dancer at 19.
+Two years later, he abruptly resigned, declaring he was bored with ballet, its punishing physical regimen and meager financial rewards. He tweeted about taking drugs, drinking and going to parties, and about the tattoo parlor he co-owned. The British media wrote endlessly about him, calling him “the bad boy of ballet,” and bemoaning the loss of his talent.
+Mr. Polunin has since pursued a film career, appearing in small roles in “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Red Sparrow” and “The White Crow.” But his dance career has faltered. After leaving the Royal Ballet, he danced with the Stanislavsky Company in Moscow and he has been a “permanent guest artist” with the Bayerisches Staatsballett in Munich. (Igor Zelensky, the director of the Munich Ballet, was unavailable for comment.)
+But Mr. Polunin’s own venture, Project Polunin, and a joint program with his former girlfriend, the ballerina Natalia Osipova, have met with a tepid critical reception. He is currently scheduled to appear at the London Palladium at the end of May in what is described as “a new mixed program.”Clydie King, whose peppery but plain-spoken backing vocals helped define hits like the Rolling Stones’ “Tumbling Dice,” Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good” and — despite her reservations about it — Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama,” died on Jan. 7 in Monrovia, Calif. She was 75.
+Tony Collins, her former husband, said her death, at Monrovia Memorial Hospital, was caused by complications of a blood infection that she had acquired during dialysis treatment.
+Ms. King joined Bob Dylan’s band in 1980, when he was in the midst of his Christian-rock phase, beginning a long association with him. Mr. Dylan had recently converted to evangelical Christianity, and the two bonded over music and faith. She became a central part of his ensemble, and they started a romantic relationship that lasted through the mid-’80s.
+In a statement to the news media on the occasion of Ms. King’s death, Mr. Dylan said: “She was my ultimate singing partner. No one ever came close. We were two soul mates.”The Cleveland Cavaliers did not commit any rules violations with their recent signing and subsequent release of the restricted free agent Patrick McCaw, the N.B.A. announced Monday.
+The league opened an investigation last week at the behest of the Golden State Warriors, who had held McCaw’s rights, and said it found no evidence of wrongdoing after interviews with officials from both teams and McCaw’s representation. Penalties in such cases, at their most extreme, can include fines as high as $6 million or the loss of draft picks.
+“Based on the specific facts and circumstances of this matter, the N.B.A. found that there was no violation of the league’s collective bargaining agreement, including the anti-circumvention rules,” the league said in a statement.
+McCaw cleared waivers last week after Cleveland released him and signed a contract for the rest of the season with the Toronto Raptors.DETROIT — A decade ago, Chrysler was the weakest of the three Detroit automakers and staved off collapse with the help of a government-backed bankruptcy. Today, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles appears to be the sturdiest by many measures, in large part because it stopped making sedans well before its competitors.
+The company’s chief executive, Mike Manley, said Monday that Fiat Chrysler was strong enough that it no longer needed a merger or an alliance — options it was pursuing as recently as a year ago.
+“We went from survival mode in 2009 to a level of stability with a balance sheet and resources that we have never enjoyed in the past,” Mr. Manley told reporters at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. “We are now in a position where we can deliver on our next five years as an independent company.”
+By leaving the car business, where many companies are losing money, Fiat Chrysler was able to pour resources into higher-margin and better-selling sport utility vehicles and trucks. In 2018, Fiat Chrysler’s sales in the United States increased 9 percent, powered by its Jeep brand, while the overall market was flat and domestic sales fell at General Motors, Ford Motor, Toyota and other big producers.A number of months ago, I listened to a podcast that has haunted me since — because it captures something essential about our culture warrior moment. It was from NPR’s always excellent “Invisibilia” series and it was about a woman named Emily.
+Emily was a member of the hard-core punk music scene in Richmond, Va. One day, when she was nearly 30, she was in a van with her best friend, who was part of a prominent band. They were heading to a gig in Florida when the venue called to cancel their appearance. A woman had accused Emily’s best friend of sending her an unwelcome sexually explicit photograph.
+His bandmates immediately dismissed her allegations. But inwardly Emily seethed. Upon returning to Richmond, she wrote a Facebook post denouncing her best friend as an abuser. “I disown everything he has done. I do not think it’s O.K. … I believe women.”
+The post worked. He ended up leaving the band and disappeared from the punk scene. Emily heard rumors that he’d been fired from his job, kicked out of his apartment, had moved to a new city and was not doing well. Emily never spoke with him again.WASHINGTON — As he prepared to finally emerge from the White House on Monday morning, after days of complaining that he had been cooped up there waiting for Democrats to negotiate with him to end a 24-day government shutdown, President Trump momentarily seemed to forget where he was headed.
+“Getting ready to address the Farm Convention today in Nashville, Tennessee,” the president said in a Twitter message. “See you in a little while.”
+Farmers in Tennessee would have to wait: Mr. Trump was actually scheduled to visit an agricultural conference in Louisiana on Monday. And when he did, he was on the ground for little more than two hours before flying back to the White House.
+Mr. Trump has made it a repeated point of pride that he has been confined to the capital in recent weeks while waiting for his Democratic adversaries to give in and agree to spending $5.8 billion on his border wall, but he has actually been stuck in what his allies say is an uncomfortable limbo. It has made him wax wistfully about being unable to visit Mar-a-Lago, his gilded bunker by the sea where if members disagree with him on anything — from the firmness of the house meatloaf recipe to his isolationist approach to foreign allies — they tend to keep those opinions to themselves.“They treat our farmers terribly,” Mr. Trump said, trumpeting his lack of popularity in Europe. “They don’t want your product.”
+Yet despite the suggestion that his approach would secure more access to Europe for American farmers, Europe’s top trade negotiator, Cecilia Malmstrom, made clear to American officials last week on a visit to Washington that any trade agreement would be limited to industrial goods. The European Union’s member states have not given her the authority to negotiate new terms for agricultural products, a limitation that could prove to be a deal-breaker in any new trade treaty with the United States.
+The president is also facing resistance at home to the revised trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, which is critical to American farmers. Mr. Trump said that the deal, known as the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, was a boon for American dairy farmers, who would soon face fewer restrictions when selling products into Canada. But the agreement has yet to win congressional approval, and Democrats who now control the House have made clear they are not ready to rubber-stamp the agreement without significant changes.
+The government shutdown has only exacerbated anxiety among farmers. The trade war had already reduced American farmers’ access to China, a critical market for soybeans, farm equipment and other products, and the industry is struggling with retaliatory tariffs from Europe, Canada and Mexico.
+To help cushion the blow, Mr. Trump created a $12 billion bailout fund to compensate farmers hurt by the trade war. But that program is on hiatus and payouts are delayed because the Agriculture Department is not being funded during the shutdown.
+Mr. Trump blamed Democrats for the situation and defended his position that he should not approve funding for the government until lawmakers agree to build a wall along the southwestern border, which he said was essential for keeping the country safe. He did draw applause at one point for striking a softer tone on immigration and insisting that he wants to make it easier for farmers to hire and keep immigrant workers.
+Even though Mr. Trump professed his love for farmers, his urban roots were at times hard to conceal. The president acknowledged his ignorance about wheat policy when explaining that Canada would soon grade American wheat the same way it grades its own.The game of thrones at NBCUniversal has begun.
+The company on Monday announced a series of executive changes that could set the stage for the next generation of leaders at a media empire that includes the NBC broadcast network; Universal Film Studios; and cable channels such as Bravo and MSNBC, which has seen a ratings surge during the Trump administration.
+Stephen B. Burke, the chief executive, streamlined the management structure by putting Jeff Shell in charge of Hollywood operations, including the international business and Telemundo, and having Mark Lazarus oversee the broadcast network, the news division, the cable networks and the sports group.
+Bonnie Hammer, 68, the longtime head of the company’s profitable cable portfolio, has been put in charge of an advertising-supported streaming service that was announced Monday and is expected to debut early next year. It will compete with new stand-alone streaming products from the Walt Disney Company and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, as well as entrenched players like Netflix and Hulu. Disney’s and WarnerMedia’s products are expected to debut at the end of this year.
+Many in the industry interpreted the moves as Mr. Burke’s positioning a showdown between Mr. Lazarus and Mr. Shell to be his possible successor. Effectively, Mr. Burke, 60, has set up an East Coast and West Coast divide: Mr. Lazarus will control much of the company from NBC’s operations in New York and Stamford, Conn., and Mr. Shell will take over the Hollywood assets from Burbank, Calif.3. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to discuss several thorny issues that have weakened the U.S.-Saudi alliance, including the killing of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents.
+At the same time, Mr. Pompeo reaffirmed the two nations’ shared opposition to Iran.
+He also said he had raised concerns over the imprisonment of women’s rights activists. “Their commitment was that the process, the lawful judicial process here, would take place,” he said at a news conference.
+But many of the most prominent activists being held have not been charged with any crimes, making it unclear what process he was referring to.
+_____ALBANY — [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+After years of lagging behind other states, New York radically overhauled its system of voting and elections on Monday, passing several bills that would allow early voting, preregistration of minors, voting by mail and sharp limits on the influence of money.
+The bills, which were passed by the State Legislature on Monday evening, bring New York in line with policies in other liberal bastions like California and Washington, and they would quiet, at least for a day, complaints about the state’s antiquated approach to suffrage.
+Their swift passage marked a new era in the State Capitol. Democrats, who assumed full control this month after decades in which the Legislature was split, say they will soon push through more of their priorities, from strengthening abortion rights to approving the Child Victims Act, which would make it easier for victims of childhood sexual abuse to sue their assailants.
+“Today we are saying to New York that we are about tearing barriers down,” Senator Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the leader of the Senate Democrats, said earlier on Monday.Even uncoerced foreign investment in technology can strengthen the Chinese military-industrial complex, especially since the Communist Party has moved, since President Xi Jinping took office in 2012, to a defense industrial policy that translates in English to “civil-military fusion.” In practice, many Chinese and foreign “civilian” companies serve as de facto suppliers for the Chinese Army and its technological-industrial base. Residents and visitors are subject to constant visual surveillance, and a nascent “social credit program” in which disobedience to party dictates is reflected in credit scores, which could affect everything from home purchases to job opportunities . These forms of social control often use technology developed by Western companies.
+The United States should make major adjustments to its economic relationship with China. Comprehensive tariffs, which harm American consumers and workers unnecessarily, are not the right reaction. But neither are admonishments to “just let the market work.”
+The scale of China’s industrial-policy distortions, technology thievery and efforts to modernize its army are too significant for such superficial responses. The American government must intervene in the market when it comes to China, although that intervention should be limited to areas that are genuinely vital to national security, prosperity and democratic values.
+For example, the United States government should impose sanctions on the Chinese beneficiaries of intellectual property theft and coercion, in cooperation with our allies. This was the legitimate target of the United States trade representative’s original inquiry in August 2017 under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, but the policy steps chosen — tariffs — focus on the trade deficit instead of loss of intellectual property.
+Rather than across-the-board tariffs, Chinese companies receiving stolen or coerced intellectual property should not be allowed to do business with firms in America or, with our allies’ cooperation, in Europe and Japan. The United States should also intervene to halt foreign investment in any technology that assists the Chinese Army or contributes to internal repression and limit the access to global markets of any Chinese company that is tied to human rights abuses and army modernization.Sheikh Hasina has done marvels for Bangladesh over nearly 10 consecutive years as prime minister. Per-capita income in what was one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world has grown by nearly 150 percent, and the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has dropped from 19 percent to about 9 percent. All the greater the pity that her achievements have been offset by a precipitous slide toward authoritarianism and an election in which Mrs. Hasina’s party won 288 of the 300 contested seats in Parliament, a preposterous 96 percent rate of victory.
+In the weeks and months before the Dec. 30 vote, local and international human rights organizations chronicled a relentless campaign of intimidation, ranging from violence and arrests of opposition candidates and protesters to surveillance and a draconian digital security law that includes prison terms for posting “aggressive or frightening” content. At least 17 people died in campaign violence. A Human Rights Watch report described “a climate of fear extending from prominent voices in society to ordinary citizens,” without any interference by an intimidated judiciary or election commission.
+In an interview with The Times in December, the prime minister appeared to share the delusion of autocrats everywhere that human rights concerns were peripheral to a developing country’s economic growth. “If I can provide food, jobs and health care, that is human rights,” she said. “What the opposition is saying, or civil society or your NGO’s — I don’t bother with that. I know my country, and I know how to develop my country.”
+No one would question that Mrs. Hasina, who is 71, knows her country. Her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, was the first president of Bangladesh. She was abroad when he was assassinated in 1975, and she returned in 1981 to take over the leadership of the Awami League, which she has held ever since. Her party and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, led by another powerful woman, Khaleda Zia, took turns in power until the last election, in 2014, which the opposition party boycotted to protest changes to electoral procedures, giving Mrs. Hasina an uncontested new term . Mrs. Zia was jailed for corruption last year, and Mrs. Hasina is back for another term at the head of what has effectively become a one-party state, ready to further tighten control.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — In a barnstorming tour that took him to eight countries in one week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo burned with one central message: “The need to counter the greatest threat of all in the Middle East, the Iranian regime and its campaigns of terrorism and destruction,” as he put it in Cairo on Thursday.
+Jetting from capital to capital, meeting with kings, princes and presidents, his goal was to get Arab countries to work together to roll back Iranian influence in the region and take on the militias Iran is backing.
+But as the trip drew to a close on Monday, it was unclear whether he had made any notable progress on that front. The obstacles toward building such a coalition are formidable.
+In practice, it will be difficult for the Arab nations to work closely together on anti-Iran policies because of the complexity of relationships in the region, officials and analysts from those countries say. The Iranian-backed militias Mr. Pompeo wants to rein in vary widely and would resist a one-size-fits all solution: Hezbollah is a major force in the government of Lebanon, the groups in Syria work mostly apart from one another in the war zone, and those in Iraq have great influence in the oil-rich south.WASHINGTON — Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and senior adviser, will play a role in helping to select the next head of the World Bank, the White House said Monday.
+Ms. Trump, who had been rumored to be a contender for the position herself, will not be a candidate, a Trump administration official said. But she will assist the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, in choosing a successor to Jim Yong Kim, the current president of the World Bank who announced last week he would be stepping down.
+Mr. Mnuchin called Ms. Trump last week and asked her if she would be involved, an administration official said.
+Jessica Ditto, a White House spokeswoman, said Ms. Trump was asked because “she’s worked closely with the World Bank’s leadership for the past two years.”Congress apologized to the victims 100 years later in a resolution that expressed “deep regret” but did not provide any reparations to the descendants or declare the remote site a national monument.
+What was the Battle of Little Bighorn?
+Mr. Trump also referenced “Bighorn,” the Battle of Little Bighorn, which was fought on June 25, 1876, in what is now Montana. At the time, the federal government was forcing tribes to move to reservations. When several tribes did not leave their land, Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer and his troops were dispatched to attack. During the battle, General Custer’s troops were outnumbered by Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne warriors in what became known as Custer’s Last Stand.
+In the book “The Killing of Crazy Horse,” the reporter Thomas Powers wrote: “The fighting was intense, bloody, at times hand to hand. Men died by knife and club as well as by gunfire.” More than 200 of Custer’s troops died.
+Why is Ms. Warren’s ancestry in the news?
+Ms. Warren and Mr. Trump have a history of trading barbs, particularly during the 2016 election — but his references to her ethnic heritage, especially his taunts labeling her as “Pocahontas,” have drawn the most attention.
+Last year Ms. Warren released the results of a DNA test that she said provided proof of her ancestry. It found that she most likely had one Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago.
+Instead of neutralizing her critics, the test further inflamed criticism that she was trying to equate DNA results with cultural kinship.
+In October, a member of the Cherokee Nation condemned Ms. Warren’s analysis in a statement.
+But not all Native American leaders were upset about Ms. Warren’s DNA test.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The first time Vienna Rye noticed her cellphone acting up was at a 2014 protest march against the police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown. The device shut down abruptly as she was filming, even though the battery was fully charged.
+She and other activists who had similar experiences at subsequent Black Lives Matter protests — cellphones suddenly switching off or losing reception, messaging apps going haywire — began to suspect the police were monitoring their telephones with Stingrays, devices that mimic cell towers and intercept communications.
+Ms. Vienna and two other activists filed a public records request for information about police surveillance of the Millions March, a local group affiliated with the Movement for Black Lives. The Police Department rejected the request with a blanket statement that it “could neither confirm nor deny” whether the records existed, relying on what is known as the “Glomar response,” which is usually invoked only by defense or intelligence agencies in cases of national security. The activists sued the department with the help of the New York Civil Liberties Union.
+On Monday, a state judge ruled the police had to acknowledge whether or not they had used devices to monitor or interfere with the protesters’ cellphones, rejecting the Police Department’s argument that releasing the information would compromise its counterterrorism and criminal investigations.There’s no permanent attorney general or secretary of defense. (The acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, is alleged to have helped a company currently under federal investigation for fraud intimidate its critics.) The national security adviser is John Bolton, and he seems to be trying to provoke a war with Iran. An Associated Press story contains this deadpan line: “White House aides expressed regret that the president did not more clearly and forcefully deny being a Russian agent when asked by the usually friendly Fox News host.”
+To be clear, we’re very far from a worst-case scenario version of a Trump administration. Last year the president sent nearly 6,000 active-duty American troops to the border based on racist propaganda about a migrant caravan, but there haven’t been tanks in the streets. The administration winks at foreign governments who kill journalists, but its own threats against the media are mostly empty. I feared, at the beginning of this administration, that Trump would try to exploit American intelligence capabilities against his personal enemies, but instead he gets his intelligence from Fox News. The fact that so many high-level Trump associates have pleaded guilty to crimes is a sign of his corruption, but it also shows he hasn’t corrupted our entire system.
+Trump has turned out to be the Norma Desmond of authoritarians, a senescent has-been whose delusions are propped up by obsequious retainers. From his fantasy world in the White House, he barks dictatorial and often illegal orders, floats conspiracy theories, tweets insults and lies unceasingly. But much of the time he’s not fully in charge. He has the instincts of a fascist but lacks both the discipline and the loyal lieutenants he’d need to create true autocracy.
+That doesn’t mean, however, that the country isn’t coming undone. Trump’s bumbling incoherence, coupled with his declining political fortunes since the midterms, makes him seem less frightening than he once did. But, two years in, the jaded weariness many of us have developed might obscure how bad things are. We’re living through an unprecedented breakdown in America’s ability to function like a normal country.
+The shutdown throws our crisis into high relief. For the first two years, Trump destroyed American norms, standards and conventions. Now he’s cavalierly destroying American lives.Portly, bald and a recipient of a double corneal transplant, Mr. Cifuentes was so close to the kingpin, he testified last week, that Mr. Guzmán liked to call him both his “right-hand” and “left-hand” man. The two men lived together at several mountain hide-outs, conducting their business and playing cat and mouse with the Mexican army, from 2007 until Mr. Cifuentes was arrested in 2013.
+Though Mr. Guzmán lived and worked in several different cities at the start of his career, he fled to the mountains outside Culiacán in 2002 or so after he escaped from prison (the first time) in the bottom of a laundry cart. For more than a decade, Mr. Cifuentes said, Mr. Guzmán shuttled back and forth between seven different properties, all of them in a rural region called the “Golden Triangle,” where most of Mexico’s pot and poppy plants are grown.
+The accommodations at the compounds were rustic, mostly composed of “humble pine huts,” Mr. Cifuentes said, with barracks for the drug lord’s 50-man security team. But behind their tinted windows, Mr. Guzmán’s personal houses had all of the amenities: a washer/drier, a satellite dish and a DVD player hooked up to a plasma-screen TV.
+Aside from his bodyguards, Mr. Guzmán was tended to in the mountains by a pair of maids and a small staff of assistants who would write down tasks in hand-held notebooks, Mr. Cifuentes said, and manage the accounts for the $200,000 the kingpin spent monthly on payroll, provisions and as petty cash. The assistants also kept track of Mr. Guzmán’s appointments, scheduling visits from his wife, his business partners and several of his mistresses.
+Mr. Cifuentes was working as one of these assistants in late 2007 when he received an unusual assignment: He was asked to help make a film about his boss. The idea, he said, had come from his own former wife, who thought it was unfair that the media was profiting from the kingpin’s cinematic story. The plan, Mr. Cifuentes said, was to have Mr. Guzmán write a book. This literary property would then be turned into a movie, he explained, so the crime lord “could make the money.”Food safety inspectors furloughed during the federal government shutdown will be returning to work beginning Tuesday — but still without pay — so that the Food and Drug Administration can begin to resume inspections of some high-risk foods at manufacturing and other processing plants, the agency’s commissioner said on Monday.
+Food inspections — about 160 of which are conducted a week — have been halted since the federal government shut down and about 40 percent of the F.D.A.’s work force was furloughed.
+But Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the agency’s commissioner, said that he was asking employees to return from furlough to conduct some of the inspections and other agency functions involving surveillance of certain drugs, devices and potential outbreaks of food-borne illnesses.
+About one-third of all food safety inspections are for high-risk foods, he said. It was unclear when more routine inspections would resume.FLORHAM PARK, N.J. — Shortly before he was fired by the Miami Dolphins, Adam Gase requested a favor from one of his former pupils. He knew he would need some help convincing another team to take a chance on him so quickly after a disappointing three years as head coach of the Dolphins. Fortunately, a powerful voice was willing to intercede: Peyton Manning.
+It has been five years since Manning and Gase first joined forces in Denver, setting records and bringing the Broncos to a Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium. But a phone call last week from Manning to the Jets’ chairman and chief executive, Christopher Johnson, went a long way for Gase, who will find himself back at MetLife in a different capacity this fall.
+On Monday, at Gase’s introductory news conference as the Jets’ new head coach, Johnson signaled a shift in the organization’s philosophy, which has centered on defense for the past two decades. With Gase, the Jets have finally stepped in line with the league’s curve.
+“To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky,” Johnson said, “he’s coaching to where football is going.”
+There was some inherent awkwardness as Gase arrived in front of a packed auditorium filled with team executives, former players, and fans. As coach of the Dolphins, he went 5-1 against the Jets, including two wins this season. And since the deal was announced last week, reports have surfaced indicating that talks had broken down between the Jets and another top candidate, Matt Rhule, over staffing issues, although Johnson denied on Monday that the team intended to dictate any staff hires.The government shutdown is causing turmoil at the high-security federal jail in Manhattan, where some prisoners went on a hunger strike on Monday after family visits were canceled for a second week because of staffing shortages, defense lawyers said.
+The jail, known as the Metropolitan Correctional Center or M.C.C., is one of the most important detention centers in the federal prison system, housing about 800 detainees. At times the inmates have included accused terrorists, prominent white-collar criminals and organized crime figures like the Mexican drug lord known as El Chapo. Still, the majority are anonymous defendants awaiting trial in obscure cases.
+“They have already refused a meal — I believe they refused breakfast and lunch,” said Sarah Baumgartel, a federal public defender, who said she learned of the hunger strike from a detained prisoner whom she represents. “My client is in the unit, he’s participating,” she added. She declined to identify the client, out of concern he would be singled out.
+The shutdown has also affected the dispensing of medication to some prisoners in the jail. Last week, a prosecutor said at a federal court hearing in Manhattan that his office had been “informed — we don’t have any reason to dispute this — that because of the shutdown, there are issues with prescribing medication.”“There are a lot of other problems than Iran, but they are obsessed with Iran. If two fish fight in the Tigris River, it is because of Iran.”
+MOWAFFAK AL-RUBAIE, a former Iraqi national security adviser, describing what he views as a weakness in United States policy.If, beleaguered or bemused by the onrush of scandal and political antics, you’re searching for some index of just how truly not-normal American governance has become, you might consider this: Standing on the White House lawn on Monday morning, his own government shut down around him, the president of the United States was asked by reporters if he was working for Russia.
+He said that he was not. “Not only did I never work for Russia, I think it's a disgrace that you even asked that question, because it's a whole big fat hoax,” President Trump said.
+Yet the reporters were right to ask, given Mr. Trump’s bizarre pattern of behavior t oward a Russian regime that the Republican Party quite recently regarded as America’s chief rival . Indeed, it’s unnerving that more people — particularly in the leadership of the Republican Party — aren’t alarmed by Mr. Trump’s secretive communications with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, and reliance on his word over the conclusions of American intelligence agencies.
+The Times reported last week that the F.B.I. started a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trump in 2017 after he fired James Comey, the bureau’s director, to determine whether Russia had influenced him. The Washington Post reported over the weekend that the president has concealed details about his meetings with Mr. Putin even from officials of his own administration — going so far, on at least one occasion, as to confiscate his interpreter's notes.TORONTO — She wants to go to college to study architecture. She would like to take English classes. She is wondering about how to harness her newfound media stardom.
+But mostly, the celebrated Saudi-turned-Canadian-refugee Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun just wants to experience what it is like to be a teenager, free to do what she wants and dress how she wants.
+“I want to do crazy things I’ve never done before,” she said in an interview Monday evening, sitting in a classroom at a refugee center in downtown Toronto.
+On just her third day in Canada, Ms. Alqunun, 18, seemed to be still a bit stunned.
+In less than two weeks, she has gone from the cloistered life of a Saudi woman in Hail, a city in the northwestern part of the country, to the life of an independent woman on the other side of the world.Greg Jenkins, the executive director of Mr. Bush’s second inaugural, said, “I have never heard anybody getting that kind of fee associated with any inaugural, ever.”
+Ms. Winston Wolkoff often fought with other top aides, according to people with direct knowledge of events. She was known to threaten to have senior officials fired, at times brandishing a cellphone and saying she would text Mrs. Trump or Ivanka Trump, the president’s elder daughter, conveying a sense of authority that people later came to realize she did not have, three people with direct knowledge of the events said.
+A lawyer for Ms. Winston Wolkoff declined to comment.
+A spokesman for WIS Media Partners said all of the firm’s charges “were vetted, authorized and signed off on” by the committee’s top officials, including Thomas J. Barrack Jr., the committee’s chairman; Rick Gates, the deputy chairman; and Sara Armstrong, the chief executive.
+He said the firm’s fees were “significantly below” the customary charges “for equivalent productions,” and that officials provided the inaugural committee with “all its audited records and receipts.” He said the company could not reveal more because it is legally barred by the inaugural committee from discussing its work on the inaugural events.
+In a statement, Mr. Barrack said he continues “to be proud of the incredible work of all those that were part of the committee” and that it “complied with all laws and regulations, and its finances were fully audited internally and independently. The donors were fully vetted and disclosed to the Federal Election Commission as required.”
+Mr. Trump’s inaugural committee has come under scrutiny in the past for its high administrative and logistical costs. The new details help flesh out how the inaugural spent the money. Among the payments was more than $2 million spent on the firm of the Trump campaign official Brad Parscale for online advertisements to drum up inaugural crowds.
+Another $2.7 million was spent on flying in a performance group working with Steve Wynn, the casino magnate and friend of Mr. Trump.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Saturday about the political stalemate over funding of a border wall misstated the amount of money in emergency aid the Army Corps of Engineers has been directed to study as a possible source of funding for a border barrier. It is $13.9 billion, not $13.9 million.
+•
+An article on Monday about President Trump’s continuing conflicts with Congress misstated Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s schedule during the weekend. Her staff said she was in Washington; she had not, as the article stated, left town.
+NATIONAL
+An article on Monday about statements from three Democratic House committee chairmen about Michael Cohen misstated Mr. Cohen’s business relationship with his father-in-law. They were never business partners; Mr. Shusterman owned seven taxi medallion corporations.
+NEW YORK
+An article on Saturday about new members of the New York State Senate, relying on information provided by the Senate Democrats’ press office, misstated Julia Salazar’s age. She is 28, not 27.WASHINGTON — A federal court issued a nationwide injunction on Monday that prevents the Trump administration from interfering with women’s access to free birth control guaranteed under the Affordable Care Act.
+The decision, by Judge Wendy Beetlestone of the Federal District Court in Philadelphia, extends a losing streak for President Trump, who has repeatedly been set back in his efforts to allow employers to deny insurance coverage of contraceptives to which the employers object on religious or moral grounds.
+The rules were scheduled to take effect on Monday. The states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey challenged the rules before Judge Beetlestone, saying they would have to shoulder much of the burden of providing contraceptives to women who lost coverage under the Trump administration’s rules.
+“The states’ harm is not merely speculative; it is actual and imminent,” Judge Beetlestone wrote. “The final rules estimate that at least 70,500 women will lose coverage.”The problem with plays based on the biographies of artists is that, with rare exceptions, the creation of art cannot be credibly dramatized. Instead, you get anecdotes.
+Since 2001, Ensemble for the Romantic Century has been exploring workarounds for the problem in a series that began as a way of innovating the presentation of chamber music. Over the years, as its offerings have evolved from theatrical concerts to plays with music, its subjects have branched out as well: from composers (“The Other Chopin”) to poets (“Because I Could Not Stop: An Encounter With Emily Dickinson”) to painters (“Van Gogh’s Ear”) to political figures (“The Dreyfus Affair”) — all of them romantic, if not exactly Romantic.
+Now, in “Maestro,” which opened on Monday at the Duke on 42nd Street, the company takes on a more difficult subject in Arturo Toscanini. The great Italian conductor is neither a Chopin, whose life can be illustrated, however contrivedly, by his own compositions, nor a Dickinson, whose cultural outlook can be suggested by the works of a contemporary (in her case, Amy Beach). Toscanini, an interpretive artist, is neither one nor the other and so “Maestro” lands with a thud in the gap.
+Not that Toscanini, as a person, wasn’t dramatic, especially in the slice of his life that the author, Eve Wolf, focuses on. From his long career, which encompassed the premiere of Verdi’s “Otello” in 1887 (he played cello in the pit) and the Golden Age of television (he conducted Gershwin on NBC), she has selected two decades and one theme.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.TUESDAY PUZZLE — Don’t mind if I do! Samuel Donaldson is a generous man. I’ve hung out with him at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, and the one thing he has never been accused of is being cheap or copping out on buying a round of drinks.
+Right, Mr. Donaldson? Make mine a martini. Wobbled, not stirred.
+Tricky Clues
+15A: The “Big farm workers” in this clue are not human farmhands; they’re OXEN.
+42A: Interesting historical side note: This is the first time the entry NCC has been clued to the Starship Enterprise from “Star Trek,” even though it was used twice before in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
+45A: “Speak, hands, for me!” And thus did CASCA stab Julius Caesar in Act III, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s play. And the first two words of the next line, spoken by Caesar, make up a frequent entry in crosswords: “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!”BEIJING — One of China’s most prominent human rights activists, the blogger Huang Qi, went on trial on Monday on charges of leaking state secrets, and American diplomats seeking to attend the proceedings said they had been denied access.
+The trial has drawn intense international attention, in part because Mr. Huang, 55, has nephritis, a potentially fatal kidney disease. In addition, Mr. Huang’s 85-year-old mother recently traveled from their home in Sichuan Province to Beijing to ask foreign embassies there for help in obtaining his release, but she was reportedly beaten and is now detained in a hospital.
+American diplomats seeking to attend the trial in the western Chinese city of Mianyang were “denied access to the courtroom,” a press officer for the United States Embassy said on Monday.
+Mr. Huang founded the website 64 Tianwang, which relied on a nationwide network of volunteers to report on land expropriations, corruption and labor disputes. The name refers to the June 4, 1989, crackdown on protesters around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The site’s core mission, it says, is to “stand in solidarity with those who have no power, no money and no influence.”The crime scene was grisly. Three people, tied up with plastic zip ties, were shot execution style and set on fire inside a barn in a small town in rural Pennsylvania on a summer day two and a half years ago. One clung to life, but died the next day.
+Now, the authorities say they have found the culprits behind the gangland-style killings.
+In an indictment unsealed last week, 11 people who federal prosecutors said were members of the Black Guerrilla Family, a nationwide gang active in drug trafficking, murder and other crimes, were indicted in connection with the killings.
+The authorities said the deaths began as part of a plot to silence a police informant that grew to include the killing of two others. The defendants have been charged with a range of crimes including murder, attempted murder, witness tampering, robbery, drug trafficking and illegal possession of a firearm by a felon.
+One of the defendants, Jerell Adgebesan, was tied up one year after the killings by several other defendants who wanted to kill him because they suspected he was cooperating with law enforcement, according to the indictment. He has been charged with murder, witness tampering and drug trafficking.But Mr. Trump upended the proceedings anyway. One meeting, on July 12, was ostensibly supposed to be about Ukraine and Georgia — two non-NATO members with aspirations to join the alliance.
+Accepted protocol dictates that alliance members do not discuss internal business in front of nonmembers. But as is frequently the case, Mr. Trump did not adhere to the established norms, according to several American and European officials who were in the room.
+He complained that European governments were not spending enough on the shared costs of defense, leaving the United States to carry an outsize burden. He expressed frustration that European leaders would not, on the spot, pledge to spend more. And he appeared not to grasp the details when several tried to explain to him that spending levels were set by parliaments in individual countries, the American and European officials said.
+Then, at another leaders gathering at the same summit meeting, Mr. Trump appeared to be taken by surprise by Jens Stoltenberg, the NATO secretary general.
+Backing Mr. Trump’s position, Mr. Stoltenberg pushed allies to increase their spending and praised the United States for leading by example — including by increasing its military spending in Europe. At that, according to one official who was in the room, Mr. Trump whipped his head around and glared at American officials behind him, surprised by Mr. Stoltenberg’s remarks and betraying ignorance of his administration’s own spending plans.
+Mr. Trump appeared especially annoyed, officials in the meeting said, with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and her country’s military spending of 1 percent of its gross domestic product.
+By comparison, the United States’ military spending is about 4 percent of G.D.P., and Mr. Trump has railed against allies for not meeting the NATO spending goal of 2 percent of economic output. At the summit meeting, he surprised the leaders by demanding 4 percent — a move that would essentially put the goal out of reach for many alliance members. He also threatened that the United States would “go its own way” in 2019 if military spending from other NATO countries did not rise.The deployment of active-duty United States troops at the border with Mexico will most likely be extended through September, the Pentagon said Monday.
+The Pentagon’s border mission had previously been scheduled to end on Dec. 15, and the Defense Department later extended the deployment into January. Then came Monday’s announcement.
+In a rare use of military force first announced in October, the Trump administration sent about 5,900 active-duty troops to join up with Border Patrol agents and National Guard members, as a caravan of Central American migrants made its way toward the United States.
+The move was viewed by many as unnecessary political fear-mongering as the midterm elections approached. Border and military officials insisted the caravan was a serious threat.President Trump discussed pulling the U.S. from NATO.
+On multiple occasions last year, the president said that he wanted to withdraw the U.S. from the 69-year-old North Atlantic Treaty Organization, senior administration officials told our reporters, revealing highly sensitive efforts to preserve the alliance.
+Such desires underline concerns about Mr. Trump’s secretive relationship with Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin. Withdrawing the U.S. from NATO would be a grand victory for Mr. Putin and effectively destroy a 29-country alliance that undergirds the E.U.’s security and the world order, and senior administration officials were at first unsure if Mr. Trump was serious. He was, and so his national security team scrambled to run interference and keep the U.S. in.
+Mr. Trump’s belief that NATO is a money-loser appears to be fundamental to his worldview, along with an often-stated desire to seize Iraq’s oil, officials said.No Chris Paul. No Eric Gordon. No Clint Capela. No problem. The Houston Rockets still have James Harden.
+In a mind-boggling performance, Harden and his supporting cast — if you can call it that — managed to beat the Memphis Grizzlies by 112-94 at Houston’s Toyota Center, with Harden scoring 57 points in 34 minutes.
+It was the 17th game in a row in which Harden scored at least 30 points — a feat previously accomplished in a single season by only Wilt Chamberlain — and it was Harden’s third game of 50 or more points this season. No other player has more than one.
+Coach Mike D’Antoni may have recorded the 600th win of his N.B.A. career in the game, but he was more interested in making sure people recognized the greatness of Harden’s feat.MELBOURNE, Australia — Serena Williams dressed for work on Tuesday as though she were intent on reminding people who she was before she became a wife and mother.
+The last time Williams graced Rod Laver Arena, in 2017, she dispatched her older sister Venus in the Australian Open women’s final while in the early stages of her pregnancy. She was unable to defend her title last year because she wasn’t ready to return to the tour after a harrowing medical ordeal during and after childbirth.
+In her return, 717 days later, Williams warmed up for her first-round match against Tatjana Maria wearing a short black trench coat. Once she got back to her chair, she peeled off the coat to reveal a muscle-hugging, bright green shorts-and-tank-top set that called to mind the black outfit that Williams wore 17 years ago in a first-round match at the United States Open.
+It was a bold fashion statement for the 37-year-old Williams, resurrecting the “Serena-tard,” as she called it, which she first made famous in 2002 when she had one of her most sublime seasons, with victories in the French Open, Wimbledon and U.S. Open, and a 56-5 match record.Good Tuesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• House Republican leaders removed Representative Steve King of Iowa from powerful committee posts on Monday, after Mitch McConnell suggested he find “another line of work” and Mitt Romney said he should resign. The punishment came after Mr. King, who has a long history of racist remarks, made comments to The Times last week questioning why white supremacy was considered offensive.
+• Several times last year, President Trump said privately that he wanted to withdraw from NATO, senior officials told The Times. A former under secretary of defense said an American pullout from NATO would be “the wildest success that Vladimir Putin could dream of.”
+• Mr. Trump rejected a proposal from the Republican senator Lindsey Graham to temporarily reopen the government in an effort to jump-start talks with Democrats on funding a border wall.All this would be bad enough if Brexit were the only problem facing the country. But it’s not. The effects of austerity have, in many parts of the country, been crippling; recent chaos produced by the rollout of a benefits plan called Universal Credit has been just one of the more obvious ill effects of a government that rules with an iron fist of maliciousness and a padded mitten of incompetence. In fact, one way of understanding the whole Brexit phenomenon would be precisely as a distraction from talking about any of Britain’s real problems — a result of a vote that went the way it did only because enough people felt they were being denied a say on anything that actually matters.
+And so, as she presses ahead with her terrible solution to a problem no one ever needed to have, Mrs. May has become a haunting figure. Like Odradek, there seems to be no point to her — and yet, in her very pointlessness, she can seem at times to form something like a coherent whole. Perhaps with Mrs. May, the role of prime minister has ceased to be that of the head of the legislative branch of British government. She has reinvented the office as a repository for the sins of a system too dysfunctional to even collapse, neutralizing the anger the public ought rightly to hold toward the government by seeming too useless even to warrant it.
+In the final paragraph of Kafka’s story, the narrator asks himself what is likely to happen to Odradek. “Can he possibly die?” or will he continue to haunt the narrator’s house — and that of his children, and his children’s children? “Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek,” the narrator says.
+Rumors of Mrs. May’s imminent demise continue to be reported with regularity. But if she were going to go, wouldn’t she have done so already? If Mrs. May really is Odradek, maybe Britain will be stuck with her forever.
+Luckily, there is another way of looking at the creature. For the philosopher Theodor Adorno, Odradek was also a symbol of hope — for him, the creature gives us, as though in negative, an image of a happiness that our present surroundings deny us. What we must then see in Odradek is the possibility of a world in which he does not stalk our halls.
+What Britain needs is genuine democracy, a politics genuinely receptive to the needs of its citizens. Theresa May’s intractability must be an occasion to demand her impossibility.
+Tom Whyman (@HealthUntoDeath) is a philosopher and freelance writer.Watch the new revival of “Roswell” on CW as the reboots keep on comin’. Or catch the Season 2 premiere of “Corporate” on Comedy Central.
+What’s on TV
+ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO 9 p.m. on CW. This sci-fi series based on the young adult book series “Roswell High” gets a revival 20 years after its debut. Jeanine Mason (“Grey’s Anatomy”) stars as Liz, a native of Roswell, N.M., who returns home 10 years after leaving and discovers that her old crush, Max (Nathan Dean Parsons), has supernatural powers — and he’s not the only alien around. The show sticks to the original’s main plot points, but retells them in the context of today’s politics.
+AMERICAN EXPERIENCE: THE SWAMP 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Not far from Miami lies Everglades National Park, a 1.5 million-acre wetland that is home to the American crocodile and the Florida panther. Today it is guarded as a mesmerizing tropical ecosystem, but more than a century ago entrepreneurs and politicians saw it as a useless swamp ripe for development. This documentary, loosely based on a book by the journalist Michael Grunwald, charts the disastrous consequences of repeated attempts to drain the Everglades and the work that led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorizing the park’s creation in 1934.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners. A runner-up from that competition is shown above.
+brook \ˈbru̇k\ noun and verb
+noun: a natural stream of water smaller than a river (and often a tributary of a river) verb: put up with something or somebody unpleasant
+_________
+The word brook has appeared 1,399 times on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Nov. 28 in the real estate article “Sherman, Conn.: A Quiet Town With a Medley of People” by Susan Hodara:
+Sherman’s southeastern corner is pierced by the northern tip of Squantz Pond and a northern finger of Candlewood Lake, creating nine miles of shoreline. Farther north, the Naromiyocknowhusunkatankshunk Brook meanders, its 29-character name recalling the native Algonquins who once lived in the area. .... Candlewood Lake offers year-round recreation, from swimming and boating to ice skating and ice-fishing. The Naromi Land Trust (which takes its name from the aforementioned brook) maintains 1,500 acres of open space.As is tradition, President Trump hosted the champions of college football, the Clemson Tigers, for a celebration of their athletic achievement at the White House on Monday.
+The food he offered them was far less traditional.
+Piles of burgers and fish sandwiches from McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Burger King, still in their boxes and wrappers, were served on trays in the candlelit dining room. Tubs of dipping sauces were stacked in silver gravy boats. On another table, heat lamps kept French fries and Domino’s pizzas warm. Salads were available, too.
+It was an opulent setting for fast-food fare. Visiting players are typically offered a meal from the White House kitchen, but Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Mr. Trump’s press secretary, said the government shutdown necessitated a new menu.
+“Because the Democrats refuse to negotiate on border security, much of the residence staff at the White House is furloughed — so the president is personally paying for the event to be catered with some of everyone’s favorite fast foods,” she said.WASHINGTON — Pound for pound, the deadliest arms of all time are not nuclear but biological. A single gallon of anthrax, if suitably distributed, could end human life on Earth.
+Even so, the Trump administration has given scant attention to North Korea’s pursuit of living weapons — a threat that analysts describe as more immediate than its nuclear arms, which Pyongyang and Washington have been discussing for more than six months.
+According to an analysis issued by the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey last month, North Korea is collaborating with foreign researchers to learn biotechnology skills and build machinery. As a result, the country’s capabilities are increasing rapidly.
+“North Korea is far more likely to use biological weapons than nuclear ones,” said Andrew C. Weber, a Pentagon official in charge of nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs under President Obama. “The program is advanced, underestimated and highly lethal.”TOKYO — A Tokyo court on Tuesday denied bail to Carlos Ghosn, the former Nissan chairman detained since November on allegations of financial misconduct. The embattled auto chief now faces two more months in a jail cell — and possibly longer — as his case heads to court.
+Mr. Ghosn, until recently the head of the carmaking alliance of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, is accused by Japanese prosecutors of understating his income for years and of improperly transferring personal losses to Nissan’s books in 2008. He has denied all charges.
+His lawyers said later Tuesday that they had appealed the court’s ruling.
+A top aide to Mr. Ghosn, Greg Kelly, was arrested on a related charge and released on bail on Christmas Day after more than a month in jail.
+Now that Mr. Ghosn’s application for bail has been rejected, he can legally be held until at least March 10, and prosecutors are entitled to request one-month extensions. Motonari Otsuru, Mr. Ghosn’s lead lawyer in Tokyo and a former top prosecutor, has speculated that the executive’s detention could stretch for many months.What do you think this image is saying? How does it relate to and comment on current events and our society? What is your opinion of its message?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related Opinion piece to find out what this illustration is all about.Like plastic straws, which have also come under scrutiny, the bags contribute to the massive quantity of plastics in the ocean.
+In 2016, a report by the World Economic Forum suggested that by 2050, the world’s oceans would contain more plastic by weight than fish. As the plastics break down, they release toxic chemicals, threatening marine life.
+Also, Mr. Goldstein said, the bags are generally not recycled. Even when they are sent to recycling facilities, they are so thin that they can jam equipment, slowing the recycling process and making recycling more expensive.
+In his statement, Mr. Cuomo said his proposal would “reduce litter in our communities, protect our water and create a cleaner and greener New York for all.”
+What about paper bags?
+In his statement, Mr. Cuomo did not address carryout paper bags, which he did not propose to regulate in his bill last year.
+Because of that, some lawmakers and environmental groups cautioned that this year’s measure may not go far enough to address waste and pollution problems.
+Lawmakers who suggest bag fees or bans are generally trying to steer consumers toward bringing reusable bags when they shop. But Jennie Romer, a lawyer and sustainability consultant who works with legislators on bag laws, said that when people were presented with paper as a no-cost alternative to plastic bags, they would generally take it.“The basic presence of the orchestral sound is not exactly what I imagine it can be,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin said, in his most detailed public comments yet about his intentions for the Met’s orchestra. “I think it’s a little too dry and lifeless in piano, and I think that in forte it’s just maybe unbalanced internally.”
+For the company’s recent new production of “La Traviata,” he said, he worked with the ensemble on “a much richer sound, resonant, pizzicato, bass-oriented. Cellos and basses: I’m a lot about what they need to do. Not because they’re not good, but because for years they’ve been asked to be as short and light as possible.”
+“That was the conception of sound of my predecessor,” he added. “I just have a totally different idea, and we miss very often the fundamental of the harmony. Whenever it’s a little bit longer and richer and with more vibrato, it changes completely the aural spectrum.”
+A wholly different kind of aural spectrum — and a spectacle that was queer even by opera standards — was on display in October, when Mr. Nézet-Séguin was featured on the Canadian national television show “En Direct de l’Univers,” a kind of “This Is Your Life” told through the people and music you love. His nieces and nephews were on, as were his parents and trainer. Rufus Wainwright sang a few songs.
+But the climax was a duet: the Jacques Brel number “Quand On N’a Que L’Amour” (“When Love Is All You Have”), with Mr. Tourville joined remotely by none other than Celine Dion. Mr. Nézet-Séguin cried — mostly, he said, “because I was watching Pierre sing a duet with his idol.”
+The couple is not married, but for a gay union, there could hardly have been a more sacred ceremony. “It made an impact,” Mr. Nézet-Séguin said. “We did not realize that, and yet it made an impact. Hey, two guys sang their love, with Celine blessing it.”3. What specific challenges did George’s species of snail, Achatinella apexfulva, face?
+4. How did George get his name? Michael G. Hadfield, who works to protect snail populations in Hawaii, said his name has helped to draw attention to his life and death: “You anthropomorphize it and people pay attention.” Do you agree? Why is it necessary to anthropomorphize in order to gain attention?
+5. Although described by caretakers at the Snail Extinction Prevention Program as “he,” what was George’s gender classification? Why was George not able to produce offspring?
+6. What will happen to George’s shell and his body? Why was a two-millimeter piece of his foot removed and preserved in a deep-freeze container in 2017? How might that be used to repopulate the species in the future?
+7. David R. Sischo, director of the Snail Extinction Prevention Program, said, “If anything good comes out of this extinction, it will be the recognition that we have a lot to lose, and we don’t have a lot of time.” Do you think any good will come from George’s death?
+Finally, tell us more about what you think:
+— What is your reaction to the death of George the Snail? The author writes, “It is said that artists are never fully appreciated until they die. The same goes for snails, apparently.” Do you think George the Snail will be properly appreciated?
+— Write a tombstone epitaph, eulogy or obituary for George the Snail. The author uses vivid language to describe George throughout the piece, such as “George himself was a thumbnail-size whorl of dark brown and tan. He looked like a swirled scoop of mocha fudge.” Be sure to choose imagery and language to convey the life and death of George vividly.
+— In a related Times article, the author posed the challenging question: Should some species be allowed to die out?
+More debatable is the degree to which extinctions are genuinely catastrophic. Do these disappearances represent the loss of rare, beloved plants and birds? Or are they simply the next evolutionary step in an ever-changing, increasingly global ecosystem? When I spoke with Thomas, he supported the idea that truly invasive species — the kind that transform the landscape — may need to be contained. But it’s also true that the early isolation of the Pacific islands was itself an artifact. “If you look at it cruelly and unemotionally, Hawaii has native birds and introduced birds,” he told me. “The native birds are dying out, and the introduced birds are malaria resistant. Are the introduced birds worse? Not necessarily. You could argue that this is simply a case where island species have lost out and continental species have won.”
+Do you believe some species should be allowed to die out? Or, do you think that each species, snail species included, should be protected? Should we try to save some species but not others? Where is the line?Over the course of six decades, Nathan Lyons’s innovations as a curator, teacher, collector, publisher and writer shaped the course of photography.
+He gave Lee Friedlander his first solo show in 1963, and was an early champion of work by Danny Lyon, Bruce Davidson, Duane Michals and Garry Winogrand in “Toward a Social Landscape,” the 1966 exhibit that underscored the “snapshot aesthetic” in contemporary photography. His book “Photographers on Photography: A Critical Anthology,” was one of the first collections of photographers’ writings. Dawoud Bey once wrote that he carried “a copy of this seminal book, reading and re-reading it, until it was dog-eared and the spine had to be taped together.”
+When Lyons died in 2016, his influence was so wide-ranging that it elicited a flood of grateful personal testimonies. “His love for us and the work we do was fierce and tender and wise,” wrote the curator and historian Alison Nordstrom. “His passion for his own work was irresistible. He did the right thing again and again. He fought: pomposity, jargon, smugness and abuse of power. I loved him with all my heart.” Looking at his wider impact and legacy, Generative Systems artist Sonia Sheridan said, “Nathan Lyons did not just influence individual people, he affected whole systems of action and thought.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Late Night Isn’t Surprised
+When President Trump fired James Comey in 2017, the F.B.I. was spooked enough that it opened an investigation to determine if the president was working on behalf of the Russian government, The New York Times reported on Friday. Late-night hosts have been wondering aloud about the same question for years.
+Stephen Colbert, for one, said on Monday that he doesn’t know what all the fuss was about this weekend. He introduced a new mock game show evaluating the president, called “Evil or Stupid?”Have you ever told another person “I love you”? Do you ever want to say those words but find it too hard to express?
+In “Why We Struggle to Say ‘I Love You,’” Viet Thanh Nguyen writes:
+Is it true that Asian-Americans cannot say “I love you?” The striking title of the writer Lac Su’s memoir is “I Love Yous Are for White People,” which explores the emotional devastation wreaked on one Vietnamese family by its refugee experiences. I share some of Lac Su’s background, and it has been a lifelong effort to learn how to say, without awkwardness, “I love you.” I can do this for my son, and it is heartfelt, but it comes with an effort born of the self-consciousness I still feel when I say it to my father or brother. Thus, when the actress Sandra Oh won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television drama, “Killing Eve,” perhaps the most powerful part of her acceptance speech for many of us who are Asian-Americans was when she thanked her parents. Gazing at them in the audience, she said, in Korean, “I love you.” She was emotional, her parents were proud, and I could not help but project onto them one of the central dramas of Asian immigrant and refugee life: the silent sacrifice of the parents, the difficult gratitude of the children, revolving around the garbled expression of love. So many of our Asian parents have struggled, suffered and endured in ways that are completely beyond the imaginations of their children born or raised in North American comfort. This struggle and sacrifice was how Asian parents say “I love you” without having to say it. And so many of us children are not expected to say it either, but instead are expected to express love through gratitude, which means obeying our parents and following their wishes for how we should live our lives.
+The article continues:
+When it came to mass media’s representations of us — film and television, morning radio disc jockey jokes, journalistic punditry — we got only the bad. We were collectively the villains, the servants, the enemies, the mistresses, the houseboys, the invaders. As a result, so many of us who watched these distorted images and heard the stupid jokes learned to be ashamed of ourselves. We learned to be ashamed of our parents. And the shame compounded the inability to say “I love you,” a phrase that belonged to the wonderful world of white people we saw in the movies and television. We had to learn better, but the truth is that Asian parents have to learn better, too. You cannot be proud of your artist and storyteller children only when they win Golden Globes. We honor your sacrifice for us, but you have to encourage your children to speak up as well, to claim their voices, to risk mediocrity and failure, to tell their stories and your stories. At the very least, you cannot stand in their way.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Do you find it hard to say “I love you”? If so, what makes it hard? Do you feel too self-conscious? Too vulnerable? Something else? Would you be willing to tell us about a specific time when you wanted to say those words, but struggled?
+— How important to you is it to say or hear the actual three words: I love you? Are there other — equally important — ways to express love?
+— What are some cultural factors that affect why some people feel it is hard to verbally express their love? Why was it so important for some Asians-Americans to hear Sandra Oh’s words at the Golden Globes? Do you think Ms. Oh’s public expression of love toward her parents will make it easier for some people to say those three words?Joan Steidinger, a sports psychologist based in the Bay Area and a former ultramarathon runner, told me to develop a mindfulness plan by identifying the extremely difficult moments in labor — the 45-minute cab ride to the hospital under the onslaught of contractions topped my list — and to design a predetermined meditation for each. She used this strategy when she prepared runners for the Western States 100-Mile Endurance Run, in which the track goes through canyons with stagnant 110-degree air. “You might visualize a cool waterfall, something to take your mind off the situation,” said Dr. Steidinger.
+I still wondered how athletes reframe their minds if something doesn’t go as planned mid-competition. How does a figure skater shift from aiming for gold to finishing her four-minute routine with dignity when she doesn’t land a jump that took months of practice? “What we usually do is create some kind of action they do to refocus because an action connects mind and body,” said Caroline Silby, a former figure skater turned sports psychologist. That could mean pushing down on the ice or drawing a deep breath to move beyond failure, Dr. Silby said.
+The physical cue I developed to help me reframe mid-labor started with clenched fists during an inhale and then opening them during an exhale, with my palms up in a surrender. I would surrender to the difficult moments or to whatever my body needed for a safe birth, whether that was every intervention under the sun or nothing at all.
+The idea of pain with a purpose is common in sports and labor. So are breathing techniques and visualizations to cope. Visualizations didn’t do it for me, but breathing did. During my birth class, I figured out what I liked — a long, loud exhale where I focused on the vibrating hum inside my mouth. I practiced this a few times each week while holding a piece of ice (it’s surprisingly painful). Dr. Silby added a tip: Stay present and enjoy the rest between contractions, much as a marathon runner turns a downhill section into active recovery. “If you’re anticipating the next painful push during recovery, that is a waste,” she said.
+After an anxious and tearful 13 days beyond my due date, contractions started on a Monday evening. Labor quickly became a familiar rhythm, not unlike my favorite workout of high-intensity interval training where, say, a minute of squats is followed by a 20-second break.
+By 3 a.m., my contractions were down to three minutes apart, our cue to head to the hospital. Excitement. Anticipation. And then my labor stalled. I used my physical cue — releasing clenched fists — again and again to move beyond the disappointment.
+My mind held it together until around midday. Why did my stupid body slow the contractions? At the same physical and mental crossroads in a soccer match, I would have raised my hand for a substitution so a more energized teammate could finish what I started. But this was labor. I was the only one who could birth this baby.I was impressed by how long Tarell Alvin McCraney was willing to sit in silence until I asked him something. When I first met him, on the campus of Yale University, where he is chairman of the playwriting program — one of the most exclusive in the country, admitting only three students each year — it struck me that he was, if not distant, then at the very least aloof. Small talk was made and pleasantries exchanged, but I couldn’t help noticing that there was not much eye contact. At first I attributed this to normal self-consciousness, but as the day progressed it occurred to me that it might be a kind of honesty: He wouldn’t do me or himself the disrespect of offering a charm performance. He simply said it was nice to meet me and suggested we get a bite at a nearby Cuban restaurant. Once there, he looked over the menu for not long at all before ordering the eggplant steak and then, as if on impulse, an empanada de guayaba and a cafe con leche. He would drink the coffee but would have the empanada boxed up to share, he said, with his students.
+Then came the silence. It seemed that he might have sat there all day had I let him, quietly content, thinking about various plays, or current events, or music, or film. Instead, I started to explain how much the film “Moonlight” — based on a script McCraney wrote in his early 20s, for which he would ultimately win an Oscar — meant to me. I told him that I grew up in circumstances that allowed me to relate to its central character. And it was here that McCraney began asking the questions, leaning slightly forward over the table, regarding me with patient but curious eyes: Where were my people from, what was their world like, how did my father fit in if at all, which plays did I perform in during high school, what did my mother think of my performances? He was a near balance of observer and observed, 60 percent admirer, 40 percent work of art.
+There were details he would recall and bring up long after this meeting. Three weeks later, he would make a joke that showed he remembered my birthday. This is normally the stuff of politicians — a parlor trick of remembering details, of making others feel as if they have your care and attention. But with McCraney it does not feel performative. He has a way of understanding and respecting the stories of anyone he chooses: my story, the stories of the characters in his scripts and plays, the stories of the graduate students he spends his days teaching. He asks questions that draw you into relief against your background and show you not only your own beauty but also his. This, it seems, is one of the ways he has learned to navigate a treacherous world and stay intact, or as intact as a queer black man can be in America.
+The McCraney Literary Universe is a large one: He is 38 and has seen eight plays produced, written two screenplays, won a MacArthur genius grant and adapted Shakespeare for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London. (When I asked what made him like theater when he first encountered it, he replied: “I don’t necessarily know if I like it now” — but “the drive to do it is innate.”) If you want to write about this universe, you must be comfortable using the word “beautiful.” In McCraney’s work, the beauty of blackness is a praxis unto itself, the method by which larger theories about life are made manifest. The full, original title of the screenplay that became “Moonlight” was “In the Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue.” The film, which won the Best Picture Oscar in 2017, wasn’t just about the beauty of its characters but about the way they fight a losing battle against that beauty — how they try to beat it out of themselves and one another. The central conflict is that of a character trying to find harmony between who he is and who he is expected to be, a struggle that is, for many black men, not a theoretical matter but a violent, corporeal one.The tennis player John Isner is tall. Very tall. 6 feet 10 inches, to be exact. Which means that traveling on a plane to tournaments around the world, which the Dallas resident does roughly 11 months a year, can be a daunting task. And the biggest annual challenge comes every January, when the Australian Open is played, requiring Mr. Isner, who lost in the first round this year, as well as many other American tennis players, to spend many hours in the air on their way to Melbourne.
+Ahead of the Open, Mr. Isner talked about his travel strategies. Over time he’s learned not only how to keep his legs stretched but also ensure his body is in top shape for the tournament ahead. The following is an edited version of the conversation.
+What kind of traveler are you? When you go on vacation, are you looking for adventure, relaxation, culture — all three?
+Usually I’m traveling for tennis, so the most important thing for me is to not get jet lag. Over the years it’s stopped being an issue. What I do, the first very thing once I’ve gotten settled in a hotel, is break a sweat. You have to sweat it out; the airplane is too gross. I’ll practice tennis or go to the gym. If I don’t have time I’ll use the sauna or steam room. I used to do the opposite. There was one time I flew back to Dallas from Asia, and I started partying a bit. I was so messed up with the time that I didn’t feel that tired. But it was the absolute worst thing I could have done. I felt awful for a week.[Read our piece about serial memoirists, including Shapiro, here]
+Shapiro had long known that she was conceived in Philadelphia, at a clinic for couples with fertility problems: “Not a pretty story,” in her mother’s words. The clinic was run by Edmond Farris, a doctor who had developed a new method for pinpointing when a woman ovulated. When the time was right, Shapiro’s mother had told her, her father would rush down from New York, where he worked on the stock exchange, and provide sperm for artificial insemination. Shapiro had heard rumors that such clinics used to “mix sperm” — that is, the semen of men with low sperm count would be combined with donor sperm to increase the chances of pregnancy — but she didn’t give it more thought. Now she learns that in those days, many sperm donors were medical students. A Twitter acquaintance who calls herself a “genealogy geek” needs only a family tree on Ancestry.com showing a first cousin previously unknown to Shapiro and a few web searches to locate the man who turns out to be Shapiro’s biological father — a decidedly non-Jewish doctor in Oregon who went to medical school at Penn.
+All this takes place within the first third of the book, so I’m not giving much away. At any rate, the true drama of “Inheritance” is not Shapiro’s discovery of her father’s identity but the meaning she makes of it. In many ways, the knowledge comes as a relief. Her parents’ relationship was fraught; her mother suffered from borderline personality disorder, and her father was depressive. She always felt out of place in her birth family, as if on some level she knew she didn’t belong. Relatives, friends and strangers commented that she didn’t look Jewish; once, when she was a child, a family friend (who will eventually be Jared Kushner’s grandmother) ran a hand through her platinum hair and remarked, chillingly: “We could have used you in the ghetto, little blondie. You could have gotten us bread from the Nazis.” When Shapiro comes upon a YouTube video of her biological father — a man with her features and coloring, who even gesticulates the same way she does — the resemblance is more than astonishing; it’s consoling. “I knew in a place beyond thought that I was seeing the truth — the answer to the unanswerable questions I had been exploring all my life,” she writes.
+Image
+The discovery that Shapiro carries a stranger’s genes has profound implications for every aspect of her life, from the photographs of supposed relatives that line the walls of her house to the need to revise her medical history. (“How could I explain that my father was no longer deceased?” she wonders at the doctor’s office.) It also leads her to investigate the early days of artificial insemination, in which she finds more than a tinge of eugenics. Farris is quoted in an interview as saying that he saw “nothing wrong in trying to bring children of fine quality into the world”; his donors were the “best material that Philadelphia medical schools can offer.” Couples who used donor sperm were advised to have sex before and after the insemination, to intentionally introduce an element of ambiguity. It was simply assumed that their children would never be told. No one seems to have worried about those children growing up with inaccurate medical histories, much less a pervasive sense of unease in their own skin.
+Shapiro’s account is beautifully written and deeply moving — it brought me to tears more than once. I couldn’t help feeling unnerved, though, by the strength of her conviction that blood will out, which leads her uncomfortably close to genetic determinism. “Our lifetime of disconnection, finally explained,” she writes of her lack of kinship with the woman she believed to be her half sister. Donating sperm, she believes, is “the passing along of an essence that was inseparable from personhood itself”; on a visit to the California Cryobank, the nation’s largest donor sperm repository, she wonders about the “millions of souls” within its vials. But by all accounts, many children of sperm (and egg) donors grow up fulfilled and content, nurtured by the love of the parents who raise them and uninterested in seeking out their biological relatives — who, when found, often turn out to be a disappointment. And for many children of unhappy families, genetic bonds aren’t sufficient to maintain connection to parents who are abusive or neglectful.How did I know my anxiety had gotten the better of me? When I found myself taking meticulous notes on a forthcoming book by Erica Feldmann called HAUSMAGICK: Transform Your Home With Witchcraft (HarperOne, $25.99, available in March). The year 2018 hadn’t been so great, what with the death of a husband and, possibly, a republic. Maybe 2019 would be better if I bought certain purifying elements for my home. The right crystals, sage sticks and — salt? Apparently, you can sprinkle salt around the house after a person with “toxic energy” visits. Attention future dates: If you see me reaching for the shaker as you’re leaving, you know things haven’t gone well.
+If my nerves are frayed, I take cold comfort in knowing I’m not alone. Whether it’s our political situation, the jangling distractions of everyday life or the not-irrational sense that mankind’s need to find another planet isn’t just a sci-fi plotline, we seem to be in the midst of one massive freakout. Kierkegaard argued that anxiety stemmed from the “dizziness of freedom,” the paralysis that comes from infinite choice and possibility. That was in 1844. Imagine what he would have thought about today.
+But here’s some good news: If we’re all a little tense, well, there’s a book for that. Many books, actually. Several of the ones I consulted were so wrongheaded or incomprehensible they made me more nervous. (“Motivation is a Unicorn Fart” almost made me hurl in a glittery rainbow arc.) Here are three that worked.
+Recently a friend told me that he had reached what he calls his vidpoint: the moment you realize you have more movie hours stored on your DVR than you have hours left to live. I thought about that friend while reading Matt Haig’s NOTES ON A NERVOUS PLANET (Penguin, paper, $16), a follow-up to his previous book “Reasons to Stay Alive,” which chronicled his struggles with anxiety and depression. The core of first-world malaise, he argues, can be summed up by something T. S. Eliot observed in “Four Quartets”: We are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Here, in clever chapterettes and listicles (he seems to assume we’re all too jumpy to read more than a few pages at a time), Haig muses about our anxieties: our fears of aging, of not being rich, of not being beautiful or successful enough. All while being massive consumers of everything. What really sells, he says, is not so much sex as fear. Every day, every minute, we’re deluged with images of people who are prettier, richer and having more fun than we are. And then there’s the bombardment of news, which is presented in a way to provide “more food for our nightmares.” Which is why we must take time to simply turn it all off and go outside. (I’m going to do this just as soon as the Mueller report is delivered.) This isn’t exactly a novel concept, and Haig mentions but doesn’t explore the science of, say, why staring at the sky or simply being out in nature helps our mental health. But he does have some memorable ways of telling us about it. (“Hello. I am the beach. … I have been around for millions of years. I was around at the dawn of life itself. And I have to tell you something. … I am entirely indifferent to your body mass index. … I am oblivious.”) And he has one terrific piece of advice that I’m thinking of sewing on a pillow sampler and giving to my teenage sons: “Never be cool. Never try to be cool. Never worry what the cool people think. Head for the warm people. Life is warmth. You’ll be cool when you’re dead.”One goal of a 1965 U.S. immigration law, which also abolished severe restrictions against immigration from regions such as Asia, was to give preference to professionals with specialized skills. Partly as a result, a little more than half of Chinese immigrants to the United States have a college degree or higher, versus less than 10 percent of adults in China in recent years, Ms. Lee said. They have tended to prioritize that their children earn straight As; attend a good college; and become a doctor, lawyer, scientist or engineer, the authors wrote. They have also shared information about things like SAT tutors and A.P. courses with their less educated Asian-American peers.
+Another factor is the so-called model minority stereotype — that Asians as a group are supposed to be smart, successful and hard-working. This image masks high poverty and dropout rates among some Asian ethnic groups, yet as with all stereotypes, it can lead people to act in biased ways. Teachers tend to give Asian-American students higher grades and funnel them into advanced programs, the researchers found. Often, lower-performing students have risen to meet these expectations of them, an effect social scientists refer to as stereotype promise.
+For Asian-American boys, these influences change in adolescence, Ms. Hsin found, a time when children become more aware of their gender identity and are more influenced by peers. They also have to fight a pernicious perception that they are not masculine enough.
+“The model minority myth frames Asian boys as being kind of nerdy, caring too much about doing well, so that may cause them to become less academically attached,” Ms. Hsin said. “It’s not as stigmatizing for Asian girls because if you’re good at school and you really care, that kind of plays along with what you should be doing as a girl anyway.”
+The new study offers a clue about how much school environments affect boys’ academic achievement. Ms. Hsin found that the gender gap for Asian-Americans in high school was smaller in schools that were less sports-focused, and where boys did better over all.
+Other studies have also pinpointed the importance of the school and social environments, especially for boys.
+One working paper found that the best-performing students had a combination of behaviors typically considered male and female. It used nationally representative survey data about gender norms for about 12,000 high school students, linked with their high school transcripts. The most traditionally feminine girls and the most masculine boys had the lowest grades.Stella Blaylock has not been sleeping well since before Christmas, when her father was furloughed in the partial government shutdown and unexpectedly extended his holiday vacation. Days later, her mother was laid off from her job as a federal contractor.
+A sixth grader at Williamsburg Middle School in Arlington, Va. — a Washington, D.C., suburb home to thousands of government workers — Stella now worries whether her parents will be able to scrape together enough money for her braces, or whether a planned overnight camp in June will have to be deleted from the family’s calendar.
+“The shutdown makes me nervous,” said Stella, 11, whose father, a foreign service officer, was furloughed for a week but is now working without pay.
+Now in its fourth week, the government impasse that has upended the daily lives of thousands of federal employees has also affected young people across America, from children who are agonizing alongside their parents over lost jobs and wages to college students unable to pay tuition or file financial aid forms.New this week:
+THE ANNOTATED MEMOIRS OF ULYSSES S. GRANT Edited by Elizabeth S. Samet. (Liveright, $45.) If you liked Ron Chernow’s recent biography of the 18th president, this annotated version of Grant’s memoirs provides the context necessary to appreciate one of the most celebrated pieces of presidential writing. TEAM HUMAN By Douglas Rushkoff. (Norton, $23.95.) A professor of media theory, Rushkoff files field notes from the war between man and machine, arguing gloomily that technology is currently winning, quickly chipping away at our humanity. BOOKENDS By Michael Chabon. (Harper Perennial, paper, $16.99.) Chabon offers a glimpse at his influences in this compilation of previously published odds and ends. Much of the book is made up of introductions to eclectic cult classics. THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS By Salka Viertel. (New York Review Books, paper, $17.95.) Born in a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Viertel made her way in the 1920s to Hollywood, where she had a career as a screenwriter and became a confidante of Greta Garbo. Her memoir captures both the intellectual world she had to leave behind — one peopled by the likes of Kafka, Musil and Einstein — and the home and refuge she made for herself in Los Angeles. DIDEROT AND THE ART OF THINKING FREELY By Andrew S. Curran. (Other Press, $26.95.) In this new biography, Curran looks to remind us just what a radical Diderot was in his time.
+& Noteworthy
+In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.
+“I read a lot of contemporary fiction, but the books I keep coming back to in recent months are American noir novels from the ’40s and ’50s. I’ve recently read more Raymond Chandler than I have at any time and can’t quite figure out why except that the dark underworld he brings to life, a boozy and beautiful Los Angeles, is one I can get completely lost in. The latest novel of his I can recommend is THE LADY IN THE LAKE, about two missing wives, one rich and one poor, and the men who want them back, and not always for the right reasons. People often forget how extremely funny Chandler is, particularly when it comes to painting a room: ‘The whole place was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles.’ And I especially enjoy how he describes female characters: She was ‘smart, smooth and no good. She had a way with men. She could make them crawl over her shoes.’ He also evokes California landscapes better than just about any writer, making it easy to smell the jasmine and feel the heat from the Santa Anas, air, he writes, ‘hot enough to blister my tongue.’”
+— Julie Bloom, Deputy Editor, National DeskSome board members have criticized Mr. Cuomo’s secrecy in announcing the new approach without their input. The board must eventually approve the new plan, though no vote was taken on Tuesday.
+A spokeswoman for the governor, Dani Lever, said in a statement: “The same consultant studied both options and said again today at a public hearing that this is a different design than the first option they studied, and hence they have a different opinion, just like an apple is not an orange.”
+At the board meeting, Polly Trottenberg, the city’s transportation commissioner, asked how the agency would handle silica dust and how long the construction work would last. Leaders on the project said efforts to contain the silica dust would depend on how much concrete is removed. The work could last 15 to 20 months, though the schedule is still being determined.
+Ms. Trottenberg, who is also a board member, criticized the agency’s decision to announce “shutdown averted” before talking to the board.
+“Is the decision made?” she asked. “Do we have any actual role here?”
+The authority’s chairman, Fernando Ferrer, dared board members to express support for a full shutdown — an option that has outraged L-train riders.
+“Look, if you’re for inconveniencing 275,000 people, say so!” Mr. Ferrer said.
+The M.T.A. has become a punching bag over the last two weeks. Mr. Cuomo, complaining of its stodgy bureaucracy, said he wanted to “blow up the M.T.A.” A piece on New York Magazine’s website asked: “Is the Metropolitan Transportation Authority staffed by idiots?”The idea of a sick day as a day of rest, recovery and no email has become increasingly alien.
+We reported last week that the phrase “sick day” is fast disappearing from the office vocabulary, as many workers fear making themselves unavailable, even to rest.
+Steven Kurutz, a reporter for the Style section, wrote that for remote workers and those in the gig economy, the shifting definition of the office “is also making the sick day somewhat passé.”
+Moreover, 45 percent of Americans have no paid sick leave at all, according to a 2016 study published in the journal Health Services Research.In the more than 100 comments on Mr. Kurutz’s article, readers talked about what it’s like to work while passing a kidney stone, undergoing cancer treatment and coping with other illnesses. Some managers described their insistence that sick employees stay home and rest.
+Here is a selection of readers’ responses. They have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
+Please use the comments to tell us what the sick policy is like at your job and how it affects your choices when you’re sick.“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Rahm Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s chief of staff, said in 2008, referring to Mr. Obama’s proposals for stricter regulations in response to the financial crisis. “This crisis provides the opportunity for us,” he said, “to do things that you could not before.”
+There is, of course, no central authority or accepted checklist for determining when a crisis is real, and severe enough to merit drastic action. It’s a matter of subjective public perception. But there is growing research into what leads people to support drastic steps from their leaders.
+Take Mr. Trump’s push for a border wall. Whatever his intentions — to win the wall, to rally the base, to distract from setbacks or merely out of impulse — during his election campaign, and again during the midterm elections, he has hit squarely on two psychological triggers that can make people want a strong leader to take control.
+The first is a sense of demographic and cultural change, particularly when that change feels uncontrolled. Among some white Americans, the growing prominence of minority groups in politics and popular culture has created a sense of demographic threat, according to researchers, leading those voters to desire a strong leader who would impose control.
+Mr. Trump used warnings about unauthorized immigration to cultivate a sense of crisis — though unauthorized immigration has been declining for a decade (and the migrants traveling to make asylum applications are exercising a basic legal right) — that hit on those fears. And he used promises of a border wall to reassure frightened voters that he would protect them.
+The second trigger is fear of a specific kind of violence. People feel a sense of acute crisis if they believe that they may be attacked for their membership in a demographic group, such as race or religion, according to research by Daphna Canetti-Nisim, a University of Maryland political psychologist. They become more supportive of harsh policies to control outsiders, such as torture or extrajudicial detention, and more supportive of a strong leader who will go outside the law.
+Mr. Trump tapped into this as well, warning that Hispanic and Muslim migrants posed a grave danger, though the threat was almost entirely invented. In Britain, proponents of withdrawal from the European Union, or Brexit, followed a similar playbook.James Syhabout, the chef of Commis in Oakland, often surprises customers with edible seaweeds, rather than big-ticket fish. Karen Leibowitz and Anthony Myint’s restaurant, the Perennial, serves farmed sturgeon and trout, raised on vegan feed. These efforts seem small, but they’re necessary: In a study published last week, researchers found that ocean temperatures had broken record highs for several years in a row, warming at a much faster rate than anticipated.
+Mr. Skenes, the chef and an owner of Angler, opened his first restaurant here, Saison, about a decade ago; it went on to win three Michelin stars. Back then, as a poster boy for the tasting-menu genre, he bought the best international seafood he could find on the market, shipping it in from Tokyo like so many other fine-dining chefs, regardless of the cost.
+But over the last few years, Mr. Skenes has built relationships with local fishermen and farmers, and now the bulk of his ingredients come directly from people who work along the California coastline. “I asked fishermen to bring me anything alive, anything sustainable, as long as the quality was really high,” he said.
+His menu is now a better reflection of his region, though he and his cooks find themselves with the kind of ingredients they might not have picked off an order form: sausage-shaped sea cucumbers and translucent bells of moon jellyfish.The late afternoon sunlight in Western Australia’s Margaret River region is deeply golden, casting its buttery hue across vineyards and filtering through the forests of giant karri trees. Sometimes the landscape looks almost European, with roads tunneled by groves of old trees next to fields of baled hay. Then you spot a herd of Western Gray kangaroos lounging beneath the trees, or turn a bend in the road and there it is: the shocking aqua blue of the Indian Ocean.
+It’s not hard to see the appeal. But given its remoteness, it is somewhat surprising that the area to the south of Perth, Western Australia’s capital city, has become a popular destination for food and wine tourists.
+There is no doubt that the region has all the elements needed to draw hungry (and thirsty) tourists. It is stunningly beautiful, and while it is one of the youngest established wine regions in the world (at around 50 years old) it is quite robust, with close to 100 wineries. But it is hardly the only naturally stunning wine-producing region in Australia, and many are older and easier to access. And yet tourism to Margaret River and the surrounding area has exploded, with the number of international visitors up by 37 percent in just the last three years.Trump’s Pick for Attorney General We look at whether the changing of the guard at the Justice Department could also alter its often-acrimonious relationship with the president.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Jessica Cheung and Theo Balcomb, and edited by Paige CowettRepresentative Steve King of Iowa, who was stripped of his House committee seats on Monday night after making remarks defending white supremacy, has a long history of racist comments and insults about immigrants.
+Republicans rarely rebuked him until recently, with some suggesting that Mr. King’s language and views were new to them.
+“This just popped up on Friday,” Representative Steve Scalise, the second-ranking House Republican, said on Sunday, when asked if the party would penalize Mr. King for saying, in an interview with The Times, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?”
+National Republicans courted his political support in Iowa: He was a national co-chairman of Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential effort and of Gov. Kim Reynolds’ 2018 election. House leadership appointed him chairman of the subcommittee on the Constitution and civil justice. And President Trump boasted in the Oval Office that he raised more money for Mr. King than for anyone else.Slide 1 of 15,
+Bob Boyce and Victor Ren bought a 1927 French Norman-style house in Seattle and gave it a makeover with a modernist metal-and-glass addition by Chadbourne + Doss Architects at the back.When Bob Boyce and Victor Ren first saw their home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, “it was not the kind of house we were looking for,” said Mr. Boyce, 48.
+“Our aesthetic is pretty modern and clean,” he said, while the French Norman-style house with a turret, built in 1927, was more like “ye olde countryside manor.”
+So when they bought it in 2014 for $2.4 million, they knew they would put their own stamp on it.
+At the time, they were living in Shanghai and planning a move to the United States. Mr. Boyce, who grew up in Montana, had moved to China in 1994 and founded Blue Horizon Hospitality Group, which owns Western-style restaurants there (he sold the business in 2017). That’s where he met Mr. Ren, who was born in Mongolia and worked in supply-chain logistics management before opening his own restaurant and bar.
+Image Bob Boyce, left, and Victor Ren renovated their 1927 house to reflect what Mr. Boyce called their “pretty modern and clean” aesthetic. Credit... Kevin Scott
+For many years, the couple spent summers at a vacation house in Montana, overlooking Flathead Lake. “At the time, it was the perfect antidote to a giant metropolis,” Mr. Boyce said. “Montana is the polar opposite of Shanghai.”TEHRAN — Iranian officials said on Tuesday that a satellite launch that had been condemned by the Trump administration failed when the carrier rocket could not reach orbit.
+“I would have liked to make you happy with some good news, but sometimes life does not go as expected,” Iran’s minister of telecommunications, Mohammad Javad Azari Jahromi, said in a Twitter post.
+He said the rocket, a Safir, long used for satellite launches, had failed in the final stage, falling short of placing its payload into the correct orbit. He did not offer any explanation.
+The United States, Israel and some European countries have criticized Iranian missile tests in the past, saying the launches pose a threat to the region. One reason President Trump gave for withdrawing from the 2015 nuclear deal was its failure to address the threat of Iran’s ballistic missiles.President Trump rejects a plan to pause the shutdown
+The president said on Monday that he had turned down a proposal by Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina to reopen the government for about three weeks to jump-start talks with Democrats.
+Mr. Trump also said he didn’t want the impasse over $5.7 billion that he has demanded for a wall on the southwestern border to continue, but it wasn’t clear what he saw as an alternative.The L train was supposed to shut down for repairs come April. The plan to move passengers around during that time took years to prepare, costing millions.
+But it would be worthwhile, transit officials said. All they needed was 15 months with no trains in the tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
+Then Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo stepped in.
+His new plan would allow trains in the tunnel during rush hour, and less frequently on nights and weekends. How? New technology never before used in America. Presto!
+Mr. Cuomo was praised by some as a subway savior. Others wondered why the eggheads running the trains didn’t think of this in the first place.
+But it turns out — they had!
+According to documents obtained by The Times, in 2014, transit officials rejected a similar idea — which involved mounting cables on the side of the tunnel walls — because of concerns about safety and reliability.Britain’s big vote finally arrived Tuesday, and as expected, Parliament handed Prime Minister Theresa May a crushing defeat, rejecting her deal for exiting the European Union by a vote of 432 to 202.
+[Read our full article on the vote and its consequences for Britain.]
+The opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, promptly made a motion of no confidence in Mrs. May, in the hope of forcing early parliamentary elections. The prime minister said the motion would be debated on Wednesday.
+After two and a half years of negotiation, argument, predictions and posturing, lawmakers at last cast what is likely to be one of the most important votes in their careers, throwing Brexit into limbo with just 73 days until it is scheduled to take effect.
+• No one knows what will come next, as Britain enters uncharted territory, and various factions make contradictory demands.America’s share of the foreign born ranks 34th among 50 wealthy countries with a per capita gross domestic product of over $20,000. The United States netted five new immigrants — authorized and unauthorized — per 1,000 people from 2015 to 2017, United Nations figures show. Compare that to the figures in two other English-speaking liberal democracies: Canada let in eight (and just announced that it’s going to admit over a million new immigrants over three years), and Australia 14. All in all, the foreign-born are now over 20 percent of Canada’s population and 28.2 percent of Australia’s (more than double America’s figure). And yet they haven’t inspired the sort of public condemnation of immigration that often occurs in the United States.
+America has also taken in a relatively modest numbers of immigrants over the last half-century. In 1965, when Congress got rid of national-origin quotas, America’s foreign-born made up around 5 percent of the population. Over two decades from 1980 to 2000, this proportion rose to 11.1 percent, from 6.2 percent, not insignificant but not particularly noteworthy.
+But then the rate of increase slowed to a crawl, rising from 11.1 percent in 2000 to 12.9 percent in 2010 and then barely inching to 13.5 percent in 2016. In other words, in six years, America’s foreign-born population inched up 0.6 percent. Yet the more America’s (modest) immigration decelerates, the more the mass immigration trope accelerates.
+A good yardstick for whether a country is admitting too many or too few immigrants — beyond the political mood of the moment — is its economic needs. If America were admitting too many immigrants, the economy would have trouble absorbing them. In fact, the unemployment rate among immigrants, including the 11 million undocumented, in 2016, when the economy was considered to be at full employment, was almost three-quarters of a point lower than that of natives. How can that be evidence of mass immigration?
+The truth is that America is a low-immigration nation. Demographic trends in America point to a severe labor crunch that’ll become a huge bottleneck for growth unless the country opens its doors wider.
+It has long been clear that the dropping fertility rates of native-born white Americans meant that the generations coming after the millennials were on track to be much smaller. From 2015 to 2035, the number of working-age Americans with domestic-born parents is expected to fall by eight million. Furthermore, the Census Bureau in 2017 quietly revised downward its population forecast for 2050 by a whopping 50 million people from its 2008 estimates, as Jack Goldstone, a political demographer at George Mason University, pointed out.
+Why? Because immigration from Mexico dwindled after the Great Recession at the same time that Hispanic fertility rates dropped by a quarter as well. At the current rate that America is admitting immigrants, this means that the total work force will grow only 0.3 percent per year.Gail: Since you’re presuming the president behaves irrationally, hard to say you’re wrong. My prediction would be that the whole thing winds up in court, creating endless litigation, screwing up the economy and making it impossible for Congress to do anything about anything else.
+One of the many, many problems here is that the Democrats are just at the beginning of their presidential selection process, so you’ve got around 20 people waving their hands, none of whom have the stature to speak as the opposition. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are both very good at their jobs, but the talents you need to get a bunch of legislators to work together on a party agenda are not the talents you need to rally the country.
+It’d be nice if we heard some Republicans speak out, but all we’re getting is Lindsey Graham scrambling to win the Best Boy award from the White House. Any signs of a more promising voice? I’m getting kinda tired of patting Jeff Flake on the back. Really, he’s gone.
+Bret: Our new junior senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, seemed like he might be volunteering for the post of semi-courageous Republican with that op-ed he wrote for The Washington Post. I’m somewhat allergic to Romney because he’s such a transparently calculating politician. But I think he deserves support. The healthiest thing that can happen in 2020 — other than Donald Trump losing the presidency — is a Republican primary challenge to the president from someone like Romney or John Kasich, if only to serve as a reminder that not everyone on the political right has lost his mind. And, of course, we shouldn’t discount the possibility that Trump won’t be on the ballot next year.
+Gail: Deeply, deeply cynical as I am about Mitt Romney, I would never argue that he wouldn’t be 10 times better a president. And while it’s true I once made fun of Romney’s dog, we have to remember that we now have the first president ever who has never had a pet in his entire life. That says something.
+You know, we’re agreeing way too much. Let me ask you something that might spark a divide. We just had a story about the veterans’ hospitals and the conservative desire to move all the veterans out of the old system and into private hospitals. What do you think?
+Bret: For it. The V.A. system has been a scandal-ridden mess for years, with endless stories about substandard medical and nursing care and scandals over hidden waiting lists. It’s one of the reasons Americans should be wary of ever embracing government-run health care as the norm. According to The Times’s own story, “private care could mean shorter waits, more choices and fewer requirements for co-pays.” The whole purpose of a V.A. system is to assure our vets the best possible care, not the worst.The crazy, agonized, hair-tearing saga of Brexit began nearly three years ago, when David Cameron, the prime minister at the time, called for a referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union. Shock waves rippled around the world in June 2016 after Britons defied pollsters and voted to leave the bloc.
+Since then, Britain and the world have been treated to a seemingly endless list of ideas and terminologies — backstops, hard Brexit, soft Brexit, blind Brexit, Canada-plus-plus, Norway-plus-plus, the Chequers plan, vassal state.
+But as anyone who has paid even remote attention knows, until now, at least, nothing has been decided. The only certainty, it seems, is that there is always a majority against any possible solutions, and never a majority in favor of them. Another way to put it is that Britain has become even more rived by divisions over Europe than it was before the referendum that was meant to end them once and for all.
+To help aficionados of the process, or even those with a passing interest, The New York Times has collected a pictorial history of Britain’s journey, as captured by Times photographers.Good Tuesday morning. Breaking: JPMorgan Chase reported profit of $7.1 billion, or $1.98 a share, for the fourth quarter, missing analysts’ expectations. (Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
+Global growth in 2019: ‘Less strong and less synchronized’
+This year’s economic indicators are not doing much to bolster confidence so far. The World Bank cut its growth forecast. China is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into its slowing economy. Apple’s downgraded sales forecast, which led to a market sell-off, was just one of several warnings from major companies.
+This week, several large banks announce their earnings, along with the likes of Netflix, UnitedHealth and Delta Air Lines. Yesterday, Citigroup reported quarterly revenue of almost half a billion dollars less than analysts had expected, saying economic uncertainty had hurt its trading business.
+“Almost all economists are forecasting a slowdown” for 2019, Janet Yellen, the former Federal Reserve chairwoman, said in New York yesterday. She added:
+“The global economy was firing on all cylinders in 2018 and now looks like we’ve got less strong and less synchronized global growth.”
+The China factor: Companies seen as particularly vulnerable to a Chinese slowdown include Starbucks and, after passenger vehicle sales fell there for the first time in 28 years, Ford and General Motors. Alibaba’s president, Michael Evans, told a retail industry gathering yesterday that “China has slowed down,” blaming “natural causes” and trade tensions with the U.S.DAKAR, Senegal — The International Criminal Court in The Hague said on Tuesday that it had acquitted the former president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, and one of his aides of crimes against humanity and a litany of other charges related to months of violence that followed the country’s presidential election in 2010.
+The decision was a severe blow to the prosecution in the case of the 73-year-old Mr. Gbagbo, the first former head of state to reach trial at the court, and raises new questions about the effectiveness of the court to pursue its mandate of dealing with war crimes and genocide, among other crimes.
+Prosecutors had built a largely circumstantial case against Mr. Gbagbo for charges stemming from the violence that followed his refusal to give up power after being ousted from office during a 2010 election. The events gave rise to a bloody civil war and left a nation deeply divided to this day.
+In The Hague on Tuesday, the public gallery erupted in loud cheers and screams as the presiding judge read out the decision acquitting Mr. Gbagbo and his aide, Charles Blé Goudé. Outside the court, supporters of Mr. Gbagbo gathered with Champagne. In Ivory Coast’s economic capital, Abidjan, shirtless men ran through the streets toasting the former president. But victims of the civil war who had testified against him were devastated.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+The “lede” is the first paragraph of a newspaper story. It can be ponderous and downright dull. Or it can grab you by the lapels, pull you close and scream into your face: Read this.
+On the National desk, we began a tradition recently of honoring the “lede of the week.” We scrawl a particularly graceful lede in longhand on a white board that is visible to those coming and going from the newsroom. And we post the winning ledes on Twitter, where they regularly get loads of retweets.
+The first winner was Tim Arango, a Los Angeles correspondent who wrote an article about how the images of the wildfires in California reminded him somewhat of his experiences covering war:
+MALIBU — A line of burned-out cars on the side of a road. The charred remains of an old pickup truck, brightened by a pristine American flag draped over the cab. Desperate residents fleeing, cars packed with people and family heirlooms, anything that could be frantically scooped up.And in the birthplace of democracy, Taylor traces how the debt crisis put Greece in a bind between the national will and the meta-democracy of the European Union, which itself, the movie suggests, was beholden to the decidedly undemocratic whims of finance.
+Some of the past-present dialectics bear fruit. It’s instructive to see the concept of oligarchy enshrined in a 14th-century fresco in Siena, Italy, or to learn how the Athenian reformer Cleisthenes’s ideas for the organization of civic space facilitated mingling that would foster a sense of the common good.
+Yet the movie has a tendency to take arguments to overbroad ends (should grade school be a democracy?) and is inevitably unwieldy. It’s easy to imagine a more cogent film that weighted either philosophy or reportage more heavily. But I’m willing to put it to a vote.key moment
+Barr pledged to allow Mueller to finish his work.
+Mr. Barr used his opening remarks to the committee to clarify that he has no intention of firing Mr. Mueller before his work is done and to indicate that he would provide “as much transparency as I can consistent with the law” around the investigation’s results. The rule of law, he insisted, should be above and outside of the politics that divide the nation.
+“It is in the best interest of everyone — the president, Congress and, most importantly, the American people — that this matter be resolved by allowing the special counsel to complete his work,” Mr. Barr said. He added: “I will follow the special counsel regulations scrupulously and in good faith, and on my watch, Bob will be allowed to finish.”
+Mr. Mueller is believed to be in the final stages of his inquiry, which he took over from the F.B.I. in May 2017 after agents opened it nearly two and a half years ago.
+“The country needs a credible resolution of these issues,” Mr. Barr said.
+The fate of Mr. Mueller’s findings — an expected report — was a recurring topic. Mr. Barr said that Mr. Mueller’s report to the attorney general will be “confidential,” but the attorney general will then produce his own report to Congress based on that material. He said that he intended to be as transparent as possible given grand-jury secrecy rules, but that he would not let the White House edit or change it, as the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, has suggested may happen.The generous mouth was put to amazing use in “Hello, Dolly!” In one scene she shoveled into it, with assembly-line speed, one potato puff after another. The stage puffs, made from Kleenex and tinted with powdered Sanka, were spit out into a napkin when the audience’s attention was directed elsewhere. As Ms. Channing told the story, her mouth held 22 puffs with ease, and 27 with no great difficulty; her standby could manage only three.
+Ms. Channing’s voice, gravel-toned and capable of sinking to subterranean levels, was as distinctive as her appearance. When she sang a song in her exaggerated growl, it belonged to her forever; only Louis Armstrong’s own growling rendition of “Hello, Dolly!” was a match for hers.
+Her speech in public, described as everything from a “raspy yawp” to a foghorn, was deceptive, friends said: When alone with them, she was perfectly capable of less stylized enunciation and enjoyed serious conversation.
+The critic Walter Kerr called her “maybe the only creature extant who can live up to a Hirschfeld,” explaining that the theatrical caricaturist Al Hirschfeld “always lives up to the people he draws, but the people he draws don’t always live up to him.” Mr. Kerr added, “Here’s the exception: mascara to swim in, nobly tragic mouth, the face of a great mystic about to make a terrible mistake.”
+‘A Nova Explodes’
+The tall, flamboyant Ms. Channing became a Broadway star at the Ziegfeld Theater on Dec. 8, 1949. That was the opening night of “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” a musical based on Anita Loos’s best seller of the 1920s, with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin and choreography by Agnes de Mille. Ms. Channing starred as the flapper Lorelei Lee, and her stardom was assured when she sang Lorelei’s anthem, “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend”:
+Time rolls on
+And youth is gone
+And you can’t straighten up when
+you bend.
+But stiff back or stiff knees,
+You stand straight at Tiff’ny’s,
+Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.
+Time magazine summed up her performance: “Perhaps once in a decade a nova explodes above the Great White Way with enough brilliance to reillumine the whole gaudy legend of show business.” Brooks Atkinson, the drama critic of The New York Times, hailed her Lorelei Lee as “the most fabulous comic creation of this dreary period in history.”Please note: Our next quiz will publish on Jan. 29, and it will include two weeks of news.
+Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed this past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you'll find the answer.
+Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.Last winter, as it became increasingly clear that my five-year relationship was about to implode, I began using errands with friends — groceries, bar, pool, gym — as excuses to avoid returning to my house and reckoning with the decay. I left New Orleans when everything spoiled, then flew back in the summer, fully unsure of why I had returned to the swamp at all. The relationship that took me there was done. I had no full-time job and no place to live. When I landed, the airport stank of chicory coffee and beer-soaked tourists, and the unflagging humidity greeted me like a backhand when I walked outside.
+But then my car was waiting for me in the pickup line. One of those friends I had driven on those errands had gone to my old house to pick up my Honda, my dog and a bag of my belongings, and was ready to drive me to wherever I needed. I knew the city was still home as long as I had someone to pick me up at the airport — and more important, as long as I had someone to drop off.
+In modern friendship, riding in a car with someone represents a significant form of intimacy, one almost equivalent to lying on the couch in contented silence. It’s an intimacy built through comfort, proximity and aimlessness. And the airport ride is the ultimate gesture of selflessness: an act of service with little reward for the giver. So that has always been my standard of knowing you have found a place in a new town: having someone whom you’d call to grab you from the airport with little promised in return, besides a beer or two.My sister divorced her husband years ago. Until recently, we remained on friendly terms with my former brother-in-law, socializing at family events he hosted and exchanging holiday gifts. Lately he has become so radical in his political and world views that I am no longer comfortable maintaining a relationship. He has a blog and is an occasional radio host, so his are very public opinions that are filled with hate and even calls to violent action. I find this horrifying, and I am firmly in the category of people he is calling for violence against, along with most of my family. This is more than simply differing ideologies. (I do not believe he is a physical danger. I believe he needs help, the way Alex Jones needs help.)
+My question is this: Do I tell him that his behavior offends me and I wish to cut off contact, or do I simply decline invitations and cease sending gifts? Is one behavior more ethical than the other? Name Withheld
+One reflection of our country’s toxic partisanship is that families may now find dinner-table conversations about politics impossible. Yet if people can’t talk about the things that divide us with their families — where there’s a background assumption that you should try to stick together even when you disagree — you’ve got to wonder where they can. So I’d be inclined to have a go at talking to this fellow about his noxious opinions, letting him know what you think. If most of his political discussions are in the echo chamber of social media and on a right-wing radio station, you and your family may be the only fellow citizens of his who have a chance to make him consider other points of view. Supposing that he doesn’t respond reasonably — the likeliest outcome, no doubt — you can tell him that you’re breaking off with him, and he’ll know your reasons. But at least you’ll have treated him respectfully, both as someone you had a family connection with and as a fellow American citizen.
+Seeing him as “needing help,” though, suggests that you think he’s mentally ill. Of course, it’s possible that he is. But his views may have just been heightened by the extreme rhetoric that circulates in social media nowadays. If that’s the case, it’s not him individually but our civic culture that’s in need of help. Casting a social phenomenon as an individual pathology is a perilous temptation. (You can see it in the movement now afoot to medicalize racism as a mental disorder.) In crazy times, you can have crazy views without being insane.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+Most explanations of Brexit don’t involve a lot of math (or maths, as the British say). But I think math troubles — in particular, the difficulty people have in understanding probabilities — have played an important role in creating the mess that is Brexit. Let me explain.
+In 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron was looking ahead to a re-election campaign and trying to avoid losing too many voters to an anti-European Union political party. So he promised, if re-elected, to hold a referendum on whether Britain would stay in the union or not. He said that the referendum would have only two options — in or out — and that it would be binding.
+When Cameron made the promise, he and his advisers believed it to be “a relatively low-risk ploy to deal with a short-term political problem,” as The Times later explained. Virtually all political analysts believed that the referendum’s chances of passing were below 50 percent. And Cameron, along with much of Britain’s Conservative Party, made a classic mistake of evaluating probabilities: They rounded down.parliament votes on May’s brexit deal Only 650 members— this should go well. PASS FAIL That was easy! Buckle up ... May throws Hail Mary May begs E.U. Parliament intervenes May wins No-deal exit Parliament tries to sabotage :( New concessions Postpone Brexit General election Second referendum No-confidence vote May works with Labour Lawmakers take over Second referendum What could go wrong? General election parliament votes on May’s brexit deal Only 650 members— this should go well. pass fail That was easy! Buckle up ... Parliament tries to sabotage May wins Parliament intervenes May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary No-deal exit :( New concessions Postpone Brexit General election Second referendum No- confidence vote Second referendum May works with Labour Lawmakers take over What could go wrong? General election
+Parliament voted to reject Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit deal just 10 weeks before Britain was scheduled to leave the European Union. Here’s what could happen next.
+PARLIAMENT INTERVENES
+Parliament could flex its muscles and intervene in the Brexit process in a variety of ways.
+FAIL Parliament intervenes May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary No-deal exit No-confidence vote Second referendum May works with Labour Lawmakers take over General election FAIL May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary Parliament intervenes No-deal exit No- confidence vote May works with Labour Second referendum Lawmakers take over General election
+No-confidence vote fails: In a 325-to-306 vote, Parliament rejected a motion brought by the opposition Labour Party to bring down Mrs. May's government.
+Labour Party calls for a second referendum: Support for this approach is growing, but still does not have a majority in Parliament. The party’s leader Jeremy Corbyn, has steadfastly resisted the idea. But if everything else fails, he could succumb to pressure and call for a “people’s vote.” Even with that, there would still be significant opposition in Parliament.
+May works with the Labour Party on a new Brexit deal: Mrs. May could try to embrace Labour’s plan for a permanent customs union with the European Union. But this would enrage members of her own Conservative Party and might not be enough to secure Labour’s support anyway.
+Lawmakers take over: A group of lawmakers is trying to secure the right to set the agenda and instruct the government what to do in the event of a complete deadlock. But how this would work remains vague and, though a clear majority wants to stop a no-deal Brexit, lawmakers cannot agree on an alternative plan.
+MAY BEGS E.U.
+Mrs. May could go back to the E.U. and try to sweeten her deal. If that doesn’t work, and the E.U. has given little or no reason to think it would, she may ask for an extension.
+FAIL Parliament intervenes May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary No-deal exit New concessions Postpone Brexit FAIL May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary Parliament intervenes No-deal exit New concessions Postpone Brexit
+May asks E.U. for new concessions: Mrs. May would be likely to seek more concessions from the European Union, then come back to Parliament and try to get her deal through. But the room for maneuver is limited in Brussels, and Europeans will want signs that, if they give more to Mrs. May, it will be enough to break the parliamentary deadlock.
+May asks E.U. to postpone Brexit: Under Article 50 of the European Union treaty, suspension of the two-year negotiating period needs the approval of all 27 member states. They would probably agree if Britain were to hold another election or referendum, or had a clear new plan. But not if the government simply wanted more time to argue or haggle further concessions from the bloc.
+MAY THROWS A HAIL MARY
+Mrs. May might have to consider a bold gesture in order to remain in power.
+FAIL Parliament intervenes May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary No-deal exit General election Second referendum FAIL May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary Parliament intervenes No-deal exit General election Second referendum
+May calls a general election: Mrs. May could try to increase her majority in Parliament to get her deal through. But she tried this last year and ended up worse off. An attempt now could weaken her further or even open the way for a Labour government under Mr. Corbyn.
+May seeks a second Brexit referendum: In this scenario, voters might be asked to choose between Mrs. May’s plan and remaining in the European Union. So far she has ruled this out, but if she has no Plan B it might be a possibility. This would require the consent of Parliament.
+NO-DEAL EXIT
+Parliament has found it impossible to assemble a majority for any outcome. If this persists the crisis could grow.
+FAIL No-deal exit Parliament intervenes May throws Hail Mary May begs E.U. FAIL Parliament intervenes May begs E.U. May throws Hail Mary No-deal exitSoon after Gillette’s ad appeared online, its rival Dollar Shave Club posted a message on Twitter that seemed to welcome new customers. The post was liked more than 4,500 times, compared with a few dozen likes on the company’s other posts.
+This is not the first time Procter & Gamble, which owns Gillette, has echoed progressive themes in its marketing.
+The company’s Pantene hair products line once ran a “Strong Is Beautiful” campaign, which featured football players from the New Orleans Saints, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Dallas Cowboys braiding their daughters’ hair. The #LikeAGirl campaign for the Always feminine hygiene products, which encourages girls to face the fear of failure, shows them playing chess, fencing and drumming.
+But in taking a position on the idea of toxic masculinity, Gillette and Procter & Gamble could be dealing with a “hot potato,” said Dean Crutchfield, the chief executive of the brand advisory firm Crutchfield & Partners.
+“If this is just a quick campaign to get some attention, not something they’re weaving into the fabric of their company going forward, it’s going to blow up in their face,” he said. “This is a huge topic and it’s highly sensitive, and I don’t think P. & G. had done anything as explosive as this could be.”
+Other companies have also inserted themselves into discussions about sexuality, race, culture and other contentious issues.
+Years ago, Old Spice wanted to convince men that shower gel was masculine while appealing to the women who were actually buying the product. The resulting “Smell like a man, man” campaign is now considered a marketing triumph.Ford Motor and Volkswagen have outlined what the companies hope will become a broad alliance — one that will hasten development of electric and self-driving cars and eventually cut costs.
+But the initial step announced Tuesday, a plan to cooperate on pickup trucks and delivery vans, will do little to address the troubles both automakers face now. It also falls short of the detailed restructuring plan from Ford that investors have been waiting to see for more than a year.
+On the fringes of the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, Ford said it would develop and manufacture a compact pickup truck that the two companies may sell under their own names in South America, Africa and Europe. The truck will be based on the new Ford Ranger, which goes on sale in the next few weeks. Ford will also produce a large delivery van and Volkswagen a compact van, both primarily for Europe.
+Ford expects those projects to save about $500 million a year, but not until after the vehicles are introduced in 2023.For most of its existence, Huawei was opaque to people in China, too.
+It was founded in 1987, but it did not begin publishing the names and biographies of its board members until its 2010 annual report. Mr. Ren spoke to the news media for the first time in 2013. The next year, he told The Independent of London that he had no hobbies, prompting a colleague to lean in and suggest that he enjoyed reading and drinking tea.
+Mr. Ren was born in 1944, in the mountainous southwestern province of Guizhou. His parents were teachers; he was one of seven children. His father, Ren Moxun, was the son of a master ham maker in Zhejiang Province. When he was growing up, Mr. Ren wrote in a 2001 article, the family was so poor that he did not own a proper shirt until after high school.
+According to an official company biography, he studied engineering in college and joined the Chinese military’s infrastructure engineering corps in 1974 to help build and run a factory manufacturing synthetic fibers for textiles. At a time when China had no private-sector economy to speak of, it was not unusual for college graduates to join the military.
+The infrastructure engineering corps was disbanded in 1983, according to the official biography. A few years later, Mr. Ren and business partners founded Huawei in what he called, in a 2016 interview with the official news agency Xinhua, a “run-down shack.” The company started as a reseller of telephone equipment imported from Hong Kong, but later started developing its own technology.
+As it expanded around China and then across the world, Huawei inculcated a die-hard competitive spirit in its employees, pushing them to work harder and move faster than the company’s rivals. Huawei still speaks proudly of its “wolf culture.”
+“We will always have wolf culture,” Mr. Ren said in an interview last year with Xinhua. “Catching prey might be difficult. But the wolf is unrelenting.”
+Mr. Ren has a reputation for being blunt in conversation. In 2010, Rick Perry, then the governor of Texas, spoke at the ribbon-cutting for Huawei’s new American headquarters in Plano.“I can now report that we have secured all the buildings that have been affected by these events,” Interior Minister Fred Matiang’i said in a statement broadcast on national television. “I can also now report that the country is now secure, that the nation remains calm and that Kenyans and all our visitors are safe and should feel free to continue going about their normal business.”
+Mr. Matiang’i also said “we are now in the final stages of mopping up the area and securing evidence and documenting the consequences of this unfortunate event,” but said nothing about fatalities or injuries.
+The assault by the Shabab, an Islamist extremist group with ties to Al Qaeda that has carried out many attacks in eastern Africa, came on the eve of a verdict in the trial of three men accused of helping the Shabab orchestrate a deadly assault on a the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi five years ago.“A lot of these companies roll into town, flout local regulations, see what they can get away with and how far they can push cities to accommodate them,” said Chloe Eudaly, a Portland city commissioner. “I feel like there is somewhat of a reversal of that trend among these companies and they are learning that’s not necessarily the best way to do business.”
+Other cities are establishing permit programs to limit the impact of unexpected scooter invasions. Washington, for example, said in November that companies could deploy no more than 600 scooters each, which Bird argued would make it “impossible” to provide full service.
+Bird, Lime and Skip received permits to operate in Portland. They handed over a wealth of data about scooter rides, giving city regulators access to information about where each trip started, the route it followed, where it ended and what time of day it occurred. Personal information on riders, such as payment data, was not shared.
+Portland capped the number of scooters at about 2,000, roughly divided among the three companies. Mr. Scheer, from Lime, said the cap system made it difficult to determine how many scooters a city actually needed.
+But he added that the limits forced scooter companies to hone their operations, offer scooters with smoother rides and ensure they were deployed in neighborhoods where they could draw the most riders. And the caps forced the start-ups to compete on how well they could comply with the city’s mandates rather than playing a numbers game.
+“We don’t think this is a land-grab type of business. This is one where you have to solve problems in a sustainable way,” said Sanjay Dastoor, the chief executive of Skip. “Having more vehicles on the road isn’t going to help if there aren’t places where people can ride them and feel safe.”
+The data that Portland collected allowed the city to assess whether e-scooters live up to their promises of reducing pollution and congestion. According to a citywide survey, 34 percent of residents who used the scooters and took a survey said they had used e-scooters to replace driving their own car or taking an Uber.$85/SQ. FT.
+$76,500 approximate annual rent
+497 Atlantic Avenue (between Nevins Street and Third Avenue)
+Boerum Hill, Brooklyn
+Kind of Soul, a Southern fusion restaurant with a menu including po’ boy sandwiches, jambalaya, chicken and waffles, and vegan and gluten-free dishes, has signed a 10-year lease for a 900-square-foot space in this four-story mixed-use building. The 30-seat restaurant, with full bar service, plans to open in April. The restaurant received a four-month rent concession for the build-out.
+Tenant: Absonian, doing business as Kind of Soul
+Landlord: 497 Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn Realty
+Broker: Alex Robayo, Ideal Properties GroupMr. Moss told Ms. Wasserstein in September that he would step down in six months. She declined to comment on the succession. Internal candidates could include Stella Bugbee, the editor in chief of The Cut, and Jared Hohlt, a senior Moss deputy who oversees the print magazine.
+“I don’t want to manage. I don’t want to be a boss,” Mr. Moss said. “My basic hope is that I can find creative projects where I don’t have to run anything.”
+Like the magazine auteurs who came before him, Mr. Moss was something of an outsider to New York. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Hewlett, N.Y., a town he called “‘Goodbye, Columbus’ nouveau riche.” His mother, a psychologist, tested Rorschach inkblots on Mr. Moss and his brother; the blots are now framed on the wall of the editor’s kitchen.
+Did that have an effect? “Oh, my God, yes,” Mr. Moss said, laughing. “But we won’t go into all that.”
+From age 12, he was spending weekend days in Manhattan, commuting 45 minutes by train. “I was in New York every single second I could,” he said.
+After graduating from Oberlin College, he landed a job as a copy boy at The Times, where he ran errands for the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal; a secretary instructed him to avoid eye contact. Determined to break into magazines, Mr. Moss took a night shift so that he could intern at Rolling Stone during the day. He would come home at 2 a.m.
+“I didn’t want to sleep,” he recalled. “I was so happy.”
+He became an editor at Esquire and was soon deemed a wunderkind, an image aided by his slight figure and long locks. Spy magazine would later call him “New York’s most huggable editor-for-hire.” In 1988, at age 30, he persuaded the owner of The Village Voice to hire him as the editor of a new weekly, 7 Days, where he published future stars like Joan Acocella, Jesse Green, Louis Menand and Peter Schjeldahl.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+If you’ve been following the saga of the state’s largest utility over the last few months — or even the last couple of years — then Monday’s news that Pacific Gas and Electric plans to file for bankruptcy protection might’ve felt like a long-anticipated endpoint.
+PG&E has faced mounting scrutiny over the role its equipment has played in sparking some of the state’s deadliest and most destructive blazes, which has, in turn, sent its finances plummeting.
+As my colleague Ivan Penn recently reported, the company has spent millions lobbying lawmakers to shield it from having to bear the cost of the fires — in part by arguing that if they didn’t, PG&E could face exactly the situation it finds itself in now. The company has said it faced an estimated $30 billion liability for damages from 2017 and 2018 wildfires.
+But as Ivan, along with our colleagues Thomas Fuller and Lisa Friedman, wrote: A bankruptcy filing, which is expected on Jan. 29, is more like a beginning.The 14th Amendment requires the House to be apportioned based on “the whole number of persons in each state,” and the Supreme Court has long ruled that the “whole number” includes noncitizens.
+“This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” said Dale Ho, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Voting Rights Project, adding that evidence at the trial “exposed how adding a citizenship question would wreck the once-in-a-decade count of the nation’s population.”
+Mr. Ross, whose department oversees the Census Bureau, stated initially that he first examined the need for the citizenship question after getting a request from the Justice Department. In a letter to the Commerce Department, a senior Justice Department official stated that census data on citizenship would help the agency more precisely determine whether the racial or ethnic composition of political districts met the mandates of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
+Mr. Ross said his review of whether to add the question did not support warnings that it would lead to an undercount of noncitizens and minorities who feared disclosing their citizenship status to the government.
+Judge Furman, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Barack Obama in 2011, all but demolished that explanation in his ruling.
+Mr. Ross “materially mischaracterized” a conversation with a polling expert to make it appear that she did not object to adding the question to the census, Judge Furman said, and he kept Census Bureau officials in the dark about his desire for a citizenship question for nearly a year, forgoing any chance for a detailed study of its ramifications. The judge also rejected a sworn deposition on aspects of the question by Mr. Ross’s chief aide, Earl Comstock, calling it “misleading, if not false.”
+But while Mr. Ross’s violations were “egregious,” Judge Furman said, there was not sufficient evidence to prove, as plaintiffs in the lawsuit had claimed, that he had deliberately sought to discriminate against noncitizens and minorities who were most likely to be affected by the citizenship question. In part, he said, that was because the Supreme Court had blocked the plaintiffs from taking sworn testimony from Mr. Ross about his actions.LONDON — Contemporary art dealers, like pretty much everyone else involved in bricks and mortar retail, are struggling to attract customers through their doors. A collaborative event is one way of coaxing them back. It might not be the art world’s equivalent of Black Friday, but the Condo group exhibition, whose fourth London edition opened on Saturday, has given smaller dealerships a chance to see new faces in their galleries.
+It makes a change from seeing them at art fairs. In today’s “time poor,” digitally dominated world, convention centers and tents have increasingly become the places where collectors and the public directly engage with gallerists. This year, new “destination” fairs in Los Angeles, Taiwan and Singapore have been added to an ever more crowded calendar.
+“There are too many fairs. The ones that work are fantastic and we can’t do without them,” said Vanessa Carlos, co-founder of the east London gallery Carlos/Ishikawa, which in December sold out its booth at the Art Basel Miami Beach fair. But, Ms. Carlos added, the proliferation of art fairs “creates a culture of not going to galleries, of not seeing shows and having a higher quality interaction with gallerists and artists.”
+This is why Ms. Carlos came up with Condo. The idea (inspired by the multiple occupancy of a condominium) is simple: For a month, local dealers share their spaces — and, equally importantly, their client lists — with visiting international gallerists. Each guest dealer pays a flat fee of 650 pounds, or about $830.Netflix is raising prices.
+Given how much it has been spending on content, the move isn’t surprising, but the latest jump — anywhere from 13 to 18 percent depending on the subscription plan — is the biggest increase since Netflix started its streaming service a dozen years ago. That’s going to hurt some consumers.
+Many of its users pay for the service even if they don’t consistently watch its content, partly because of its attractive pricing. A bare-bones subscription, for instance, had cost $8 a month. But fee increases at Netflix are inevitable. One of reasons: Netflix burns a lot of cash.
+The company’s appetite for content means it has to spend big, resulting in what’s known as negative free cash flow. More money is going out the door than coming in, a difference that Netflix covers by borrowing even more.
+“We change pricing from time to time as we continue investing in great entertainment and improving the overall Netflix experience,” the company said in a statement announcing the changes, which apply just to United States customers.MELBOURNE, Australia — For Simona Halep, it was better to think that the United States Open wasn’t held last year.
+“Never happened,” Halep said, grinning. “That tournament didn’t exist.”
+Top-seeded Halep was ousted from that tournament within its opening hours, blasted off the court by Kaia Kanepi in a 6-2, 6-4 demolition that sent shock waves through the newly built Louis Armstrong Stadium.
+Five months and 10,000 miles removed from that scene on Tuesday evening at the Australian Open, Halep was able to build back her sturdy defenses, digging into a gritty first-round rematch and defeating Kanepi, 6-7 (2), 6-2, 6-4, in 2 hours 11 minutes.
+Halep, who has had a tendency to give into negativity when being outplayed, did not relent this time. She expressed frustration, exasperation and disbelief after Kanepi struck many of her 40 winners, but remained dialed in throughout.I’ve been eating at Souen since I moved to New York in 1992. My first husband, who was macrobiotic, introduced me to the humid, steamed-squash-and-seaweed-broth scent of Souen and Angelica Kitchen (R.I.P.) at the same time I was homing in on my favorite slice joint. With its seitan cutlets in beet sauce, non-yeasted spelt bread and sides of okabe sauce, the menu seemed to be written in another language.
+But I settled on a dinner order and stuck to it. For decades: Half-and-half soup (miso plus the soup of the day), a macrobiotic plate with extra carrot dressing, twig tea and, for dessert, a kanten parfait. When I worked in SoHo in the ’90s, my weekly splurge was the sautéed maze rice with salmon and a walnut cookie with a jam dot.
+Over the years, as I began writing about restaurants, Souen was where I recalibrated. After a long eating trip, I would go there or order in. (I went to the now-closed Union Square location for a stretch, but to me the food wasn’t as good.)
+I confess that I didn’t go as much while I was married to my second husband, an incredible cook who hated the place. How good could a plate of naked steamed vegetables, brown rice, seaweed and beans be, he wondered? And why would I pay $9.25 for it — $10.25 with the extra sauce? There are currently some hilarious tweets on the subject, and I agree: We should all know how to cook rice and steam vegetables. But at Souen, those simple elements have always been just so in a way that I’ve never been able to perfect. Nothing is ever mushy; it still has bite — vitality — to it.
+I came across video of a veteran Souen employee who misted up when she spoke of the care the kitchen takes: “Where else are you finding people making really natural food?” she asked. “These people soak the beans overnight, you know?“I wanted to feel alive with what I was doing,” she said. “I took a photography class in college to fulfill the arts requirement and fell in love with the creative process.” Two days after graduating she went to Atlanta to attend the Portfolio Center’s two-year photography program in advertising. The next six years were spent in New York working as a freelance assistant to fashion and commercial photographers until she shot her first wedding for her twin sister, Jackie, in 1996.
+Do you think coming from an advertising background was good training?
+Absolutely. Shooting a wedding is a bit of everything — architecture, fashion, documentary, products, portraits, action shots — all in one day. I love telling a story and being in charge of the image.
+Have you ever had a horror client?
+In 20 years I’ve had one. She took forever to get ready so we missed our window for family photos. When we had an opportunity to take them later in the evening, she wanted to dance. She was a true diva who had multiple hairdos and dresses. I never got the shots I needed.
+What equipment do you use?
+Two digital Nikon D810s. I wear one on each shoulder, and usually shoot with a long and wide lens. That way I have the important images captured on two different cameras with two different looks. Then I have four other lenses that I’m constantly using.
+What’s your process?
+I take about 5,000 photos. I edit them down to 1,200 to 1,500 shots, which can take 25 hours, and then give them to the couple. If you give people too much it dilutes the impact of the images. I also give the couple the thumb drive and present them with a physical album, which has about 200 photos. Everyone wants to post and fire off an image, but the process isn’t complete until you do an album. It’s important to have something to hold in your hand.The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $2.2 million to the Academy of American Poets.
+It is by far the largest donation the Mellon Foundation has ever made in honor of the art form, said Elizabeth Alexander, the president of the Mellon Foundation, who is a poet herself.
+“Philanthropy hasn’t done a lot for poetry,” she said. “But on the other hand, poetry survives no matter what.”
+The funds are divided into two grants. The first will help start a new fellowship program to support poets laureate of states, cities, United States territories or tribal nations across the country. (Applications open Jan. 15.) In April, the Academy of American Poets will bestow 10 to 20 fellowships that will range from $50,000 to $100,000 each.
+The United States has 45 state poets laureate and more than 40 in cities who are called on to promote the art form regionally and locally. Yet most of them receive modest compensation, if any.The whitewashed, warren-like interior of a former brewery in London now serves as the headquarters of Anya Hindmarch, the design force behind the global accessories and clothing company that bears her name. Around the space are reminders of the witticisms that have, over more than 30 years, secured her place as British fashion’s merrymaker. (This past fashion week, for example, instead of a runway show she created a colossal bean bag called the “chubby cloud,” where editors and customers lounged in white boiler suits.)
+Her top shelves are stacked with the giant cereal boxes that inspired her Corn Flake clutch bags and Tony the Tiger totes for fall 2014; on a table behind her desk is a giant glass vase filled with smiley balls that hark back to her perennially popular collection of emoji-shaped leather accessory stickers. “It’s creative clutter,” she says, smiling. “I like a bit of artful disarray.”
+[Sign up here for the T List newsletter, a weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting now.]
+Elsewhere, things are more pristine. What you won’t find anywhere in these offices are Post-it Notes (“they feel disorganized”), coats on the backs of chairs or stuff stacked up on the floors. “I’m a bit of a tidy freak,” says Hindmarch, who instigates regular “purge and pizza” days when her staff clear the chaos from their work spaces. “It’s when it all silts up that it gets disgusting. I’m not good at silt,” she says. With 280 personnel, some 30 stores worldwide, and five children at home, it’s no surprise that for Hindmarch, keeping her space spick-and-span is very much about maintaining control. “Brains are brilliant at having ideas but not holding them, so having systems in place is the key to creativity for me,” she says. “I have my best ideas at a clean table.”The threats began at the strike of noon, when Aleksey Krasovskiy, a Russian film director, started getting phone calls and messages about “Holiday,” a movie he was working on.
+“Some men were waiting in the entrance to my old apartment building,” he said in a telephone interview. “Luckily, I had moved. That saved me.”
+He said that one tidbit — that he was planning to make a comedy about the siege of Leningrad, a 900-day blockade of the city during World War II that led to the deaths of about one million civilians — was popping up repeatedly in calls and messages, as well as on blogs, in newspapers and on political television shows. Without having seen the movie, media outlets accused “Holiday” and Mr. Krasovskiy of mocking Russian history and dishonoring veterans.
+Mr. Krasovskiy expected the harassment, which began in mid-October, to last only a couple of days, but it continued for more than a month. One Russian lawmaker said on Twitter that he hoped the film would never see the light of day and that he would do everything in his power to shut it down. A top official in United Russia, the party of President Vladimir V. Putin, said he would ask the culture minister not to grant the film a distribution license, according to Tass, a state news agency.MELBOURNE, Australia — When Andy Murray announced that he planned to retire from tennis this year because of chronic hip pain, the news generated the expected plaudits and empathy from the rivals who had shared a locker room with him for years.
+The most distinct voices in the chorus of praise, however, were female. In interviews and news conferences and on social media over the years, Murray established himself as a champion for equality and for women’s tennis. In doing so, he became an ally to the WTA tour, whose players have long felt unappreciated and undervalued by many in the men’s side of the sport.
+“I’m really bummed for him, individually, but I’m also bummed for women’s tennis, because we just lost a huge spokesperson,” said Nicole Gibbs, a 25-year-old American pro. “Not that he’ll be silent in his retirement — I think he’ll remain really outspoken, and we’ll appreciate that. But it’s nice to see friendly male tennis player faces throughout the year, so that will be sorely missed for us.”“Access to dental service is our top need, the No. 1 service people call us for,” said Diane Spicer, supervising attorney of the Community Health Advocates program.
+Many health insurance policies in New York State do not cover a wide array of dental services, or they will cover services only if a patient is in extreme need. Benefits are often capped at $1,000 or $2,000 each year, but fairly common procedures, such as root canals, crowns and dental implants, cost upward of $5,000. So many people who cannot afford these costs neglect problems with their teeth, only to wind up in terrible pain or with missing teeth, leading to shame and stigma.
+“If you’re missing a tooth, it doesn’t even matter if your job is in the hospitality service industry,” Ms. Davis said. “If you’re working where you have to meet people or anything that has to do with presentation, you still have to have teeth.”
+Ms. Davis’s cancer has been in remission since 2016, and she has a new job in Atlanta.
+For Robert Walker, a retired truck driver in the Bronx, an urbane appearance was less important than pain relief once he began having an issue with his teeth. Mr. Walker, 73, has diabetes, asthma and a heart condition, and he is on Medicaid.Slide 1 of 9,
+Sea urchin and clams with spaghetti made from grano arso — literally burned grain, but it tastes more like toasted flour. The dish is a specialty of Benno, which is not entirely French or Italian, but a bit of each.Dated was the word one friend used after going to Benno, and if you’ve eaten there, too, you’ll know why. It’s as if the past 15 years in food never happened. The menu seems to be stuck in some time between 1994, when Thomas Keller bought the French Laundry, and 2004, when he opened Per Se with a young Jonathan Benno leading the kitchen.
+The restaurant will probably be a tough sell to those diners who expect all restaurants to fall on a continuum between Noma and the Salt Bae place. But I prefer it to any number of newer, self-consciously modern restaurants, some of which are so determined to be of the moment that they might as well have a time stamp. Benno is not trying to be contemporary. It’s trying to be delicious. And it is, from start to finish, almost without exception.
+Benno is the third of three dining operations that Mr. Benno opened last year in the Evelyn Hotel, on East 27th Street. It is the one where the prices, and presumably the stakes, are highest. We know it is a statement restaurant because Mr. Benno has put his name on it, for the first time in his career. Whatever the statement is, it is not forward-looking.
+Most of the statement is in French (barigoule, mousseline, tête de veau, béarnaise), a significant part is in Italian (carnaroli risotto, garganelli verde, pecorino ginepro) and not one word is in Danish or Mandarin. The statement has a lot to say on the topics of stocks and purées and accurate chopping and patient skimming; it is entirely silent on the subjects of fermented vegetables, or foraging, or immigration, or food deserts, or hashtags.WASHINGTON — The Federal Aviation Administration is bringing thousands of furloughed inspectors and other employees back to work as the partial government shutdown drags on, the agency said Tuesday.
+The F.A.A.’s announcement came after unions representing aviation safety inspectors and air traffic controllers raised concerns that the lengthy shutdown was eroding the safety of the United States’ air travel system.
+It is one of the largest changes made by a government agency to address the need to maintain an essential service since the shutdown began last month. The Internal Revenue Service is planning to bring back tens of thousands of furloughed workers for tax season, and the Food and Drug Administration has said it is bringing hundreds of workers back to step up food safety inspections.
+Under its revised shutdown plan, the F.A.A. will have 3,113 employees in its aviation safety organization who are considered essential to protect life and safety, and those employees will work without pay. Under its original shutdown plan, only 216 aviation safety positions were considered essential for life and safety.Image
+Most scientists agree that genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s, are safe to eat. But a new study suggests that the people who are most extremely opposed to them know the least about them.
+Researchers surveyed 501 randomly selected adults, testing their knowledge of G.M.O.s with a series of true/false questions — for example, the cloning of living things produces genetically identical copies (true), or it is not possible to transfer animal genes into plants (false).
+The study, in Nature Human Behaviour, also tested how strongly the participants opposed G.M.O.s by measuring on a seven-point scale the desire to regulate them, the willingness to eat them, and the inclination to actively oppose them by participating in protests or donating to anti-G.M.O. organizations.
+The researchers then had the participants rate their own knowledge of G.M.O.s, on a scale from very little understanding to detailed and deep knowledge.“There are lots of times that people are calling, and they’re dying and they need medication, and they can’t get it because their insurance company won’t pay for it,” he said. “And you got to go through doctors, getting the papers filled out, and the appeals. But when you get it done, yeah, it feels good.”
+The helpline assists about 250 callers each week and has saved consumers $12.1 million since it began. Mr. Singer comes in once a week, assisting roughly 10 callers every shift. In total, he estimates he has saved New Yorkers $443,000.
+Despite the challenges, Mr. Singer said the work is a joy, not drudgery, which inspired his wife to sign up for volunteer training after she retired in late 2013 as vice president of the Insurance Information Institute. It put her apprehension about retirement, which she likened to jumping off a cliff, at ease.[music] “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” first published in 1936, was a critical guide for African-Americans traveling during the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s. [music] It was created by a Harlem postal worker, Victor Green, and his colleagues, who gathered a listing of restaurants, bars, hotels and private homes that welcomed black travelers across the country. [music] In a time where Americans started hitting the road, African-Americans faced restrictions as they traveled. Although you could purchase a car, you couldn’t get gas, stay in hotels or eat in restaurants. Travel was difficult and dangerous. [music] Ben’s Chili Bowl, at 1213 U Street, Washington, D.C., was originally a silent movie theater called the Minnehaha. It was later featured in the “Green Book” as a pool hall. Since 1958, Ben’s Chili Bowl has continued the legacy of the “Green Book,” providing a refuge for the whole community. [music] I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1939 in a segregated hospital. I lived in a segregated neighborhood and I went to a segregated school. First, I didn’t realize any difference because all the people around me looked like me. And I was comfortable with that, until I realized that I was being discriminated against. [music] We couldn’t shop downtown at the major stores. You couldn’t try on clothes. You couldn’t try on hats. Because if you tried them on, they didn’t want you to get grease on the hats. You know, we oil our hair. And our makeup is dark, and so they didn’t want us to try on clothes because you might get makeup on the clothes. I remember being about 7, maybe 10 years old in Hecht’s department store when a little girl called me a nigger and spat on me. And I couldn’t retaliate. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything. I was so angry inside, but I couldn’t do anything about it because I knew that it would be blamed on me. [interposing voices] “The ‘Green Book’ was a guide for African-Americans to travel safely, to find shelter, food and gas in a time where these basic rights were not guaranteed.” [interposing voices] “Washington, D.C., had more listings in the ‘Green Book’ than any other city in this country. The 1213 U Street was listed in the ‘Green Book,’ and that’s why we’re sitting here in Ben’s Chili Bowl at 1213 U Street today. From the very day that we opened up to the current time, it’s still a safe haven for people.” [music] “And we invited the community in, and we started with the neighborhood young men that thought this was home for them. They always sat over there in that corner. There was always eight, six, eight, 10 of them every evening, from different walks of life in the community. When someone spilled something on the floor and the staff was busy, one of them took care of it — go in the back, get the mop. If we were running out of ice, they’d say, ‘Hey, Joe, go get some ice for me’ — kind of place. That was really the beginning of the building of the relationship with this community, these young guys that found this to be home. As soon as they started to broadcast professional basketball, they put the TV up for them to keep them here so they wouldn’t have to go see that game someplace else. We didn’t have TVs in Ben’s Chili Bowl, but that was for them. And that brought in that segment of our community. And then, of course, this being the strong close-knit community that it was, when you came here for a chili dog, you ran into a friend.” [music] Particularly in the early ‘50s, when we would leave Washington, D.C., on the train, we could sit anywhere on the train, until you got to the Virginia line. And when you get to the Virginia line, you had to go to the last train on the back. And I remember being so frustrated because we could not eat on the highway if the train stopped. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t relieve ourselves on the train. You either had to hold it or relieve yourself sitting there, and then you’re wet. When the train stopped, you would get off the train and you would relieve yourself outside, almost like you would if you were a dog. [music] And that’s the way basically I thought that white people felt about me as a black African-American — or Negro woman, or nigger woman, or whatever — that they felt like I was not human, not a human being, that I was less than a human being. I see people treat their dogs better now. Right now, they treat the dogs better than they treated us as black Americans. [interposing voices] “Well, one of the things that I remember was traveling from southwest Georgia down to Mississippi. And this was right after Miss Hamer had been beaten. I mean, they dragged her off the bus and beat her and crippled her. And one of the things that I remembered on that bus, I felt two things. First, I had to sit in the front of the bus, just like you. But second, I also was, in my head, saying, what am I going to do if these people come on the bus and try to treat me like Miss Hamer? And one of the things I was very clear about is that I was not getting off the bus and going to any of these places to try to use the bathroom. I was not going to get off the bus to try to get anything to eat. I knew enough to pack a lunch before I got on that bus. Now, it was a 10-hour ride from Albany, Ga., down to Jackson, Miss. But, I mean, it was really tough trying to not only deal with the question of where you’re going to go to the bathroom, where you’re going to go eat, but whether if you exercised your right under the law, whether somebody was going to come up there and try to assault you. That was a reality that we wanted to change. I mean, I remember I was maybe 14 years old when I started seeing the challenge, the real challenge, in Montgomery with the bus boycott, with Rosa Parks. Just in terms of local transportation and interstate transportation, we had to face people telling us, you’re not good as we are. And now because of people who got on the bus and challenged the institutions that were developed, you can dream big. You can dream bigger than we could dream. It was important. I mean, the biggest thing that we were able to do — and Frank can tell you this — the biggest thing we were able to do is we were able to say, you cannot block our dreams. Now we couldn’t say what our dreams were, but we could say, you can’t block our dreams. You can’t tell us what we can’t do. We’re going to kick down all these barriers.” [music] “Those barriers could be life threatening. Every trip through America for a black person during those times was potentially fatal. It seemed like many people were out to hurt us, or even kill us, just because we were black.” [thud] [grunt] [thud] [thud] [thud] [siren blaring] “The assumption is, at some time it stopped. And that’s not the case. It never stopped.” [shouting] “That’s a continuous thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning of the relationship that exists here between blacks and whites in the United States. It’s like a river that keeps flowing, and we don’t really see all of it. But at the end of the day, it’s something that started back in slavery and continues today. Young black people don’t have the ‘Green Book’ in front of them, but they have it in their head. We are no longer looking at ‘No Negroes Allowed’ and stuff like that, but you’re looking at the same thing, which says, these are barriers here. And then people feel that if you cross these barriers, they have a right to kill you.” [shouting] [music] “Tamir was such a energetic kid. At 12 years old, he would actually get up in my arms, as big as he was, and let me hold him and kiss him and squeeze all on him.” [music] “So that day when you got the knock on the door, what happened?” “So, I was actually coming from the store and putting groceries up, and a knock came at the door. Two little boys told me that my son was shot by the police. And I was like in denial. I’m like, ‘No, you’re not talking about my kids. My kids is at the rec playing.’ And my oldest son was laying on the couch. He wasn’t feeling well. But he ran out right past me. I guess he heard it in the little boy’s voice. And he ran out before me, and I’m still trying to get my coat and my shoes on, talking about, ‘No, my kids is playing.’ And surely enough, as I walk across the street around a little track where I could see the kids, my son is laying on the ground with 10 police officers surrounding him. And my daughter is screaming in the back of the police car. And they have my other son surrounded, and they put him in the back of the police car. So it was terrible. That’s how that day turned out. The police asked me — well they didn’t ask me, they told me to calm down or they were going to put me in the back of the police car. Because I was trying to get to my son. They never let me get to him. They also let me ride in the front seat as a passenger.” “Of the police car.” “Of the ambulance.” “Of the ambulance.” “So I never even got a chance to get back close to my son, to hold his hand, to kiss him and let him know that it was going to be all right. I don’t know what they were doing.” “So he was in the back of the ambulance, and you were in the front.” “Yeah, I was in the front, like a passenger.” “What kind of service were they giving Tamir at the scene?” “I don’t know because they were surrounding him.” “They were surrounding him.” “I couldn’t really see.” “What were the officers doing? They were just standing there?” “Well they were just blocking me, not letting me go towards him, and telling me to calm down. And I’m telling them, you need to let my kids out the car. They’re minors and stuff like that. And like I told you, they gave me an ultimatum to stay at the scene of the crime with the other two children or to go with Tamir. I chose to go with Tamir, and I had to leave two children at the scene of a crime.” [music] “Everybody see what happened to my son. They didn’t even want to release that tape. My attorney had to threaten them to release the tape. And after that tape was released, it just went worldwide.” “What did you see on that tape? What was your reaction to it?” “My son was scared when they rolled up. He was scared. And he shrugged his shoulders, like this. They tried to say he was reaching for his waistband. He wasn’t reaching for nothing. When you roll up fast like that, you scared him.” “Absolutely.” “And that’s what I see.” “He was just stuck. He was just like — “ “Yeah. Like, what did I do?” “Right.” “Yeah. So, yeah, I will never get that vision out my head. That’s devastating. I play it over and over again. Also, with the picture of him laying on a gurney, and they would not allow me to touch him because they said he was evidence. So I didn’t even get a chance to touch him or none of that. No kiss goodbye. No nothing. No feeling him or nothing. So they said he was evidence, so I couldn’t touch him. And I don’t really know how that works.” “What ultimately happened to Tamir’s body?” “So — I had to get Tamir — well I didn’t have to, I choose to get him cremated. I don’t really think I told anyone that. But I don’t want to leave my son in Cleveland when I leave Ohio, so I will be taking him and my mother with me and have them in urns in my house.” “So to take him everywhere that you go, every stage of the rest of your life.” “Yeah, he has to go with me. Yeah. Because he just has to go. I wasn’t finished raising him, you know? I wasn’t finished nourishing him. And America robbed me. Yep, they robbed me.” “So when people talk about the American dream, what do you call it?” “A nightmare, especially if you’re black. Yeah.” [music] Traveling while black means to me that discrimination, segregation is still alive and well. And that even though I don’t have to have the “Green Book” to guide me to a black person’s house and I can stay in any hotel I want, but just think about the people who have been killed while traveling black. A young man, who was involved in the schools in the area where he lived, killed in front of his fiancée and their child, traveling while black. Traveling while black, I’m driving down the highway and the police decide to stop me. Even though I’m an elderly black woman, I could be killed just because I’m black and don’t give them the answer that they want. Traveling while black in America is still happening. And I am really frightened for black men traveling while black. I wonder, when does it end? [music]That those past comments may hinder her chances are a reminder that Mr. Trump does not have a large circle of loyalists to choose from for top positions.
+Other candidates are also being considered, including David Malpass, the under secretary of the Treasury for international affairs, whose loyalty to the president runs deep: He served as an economic adviser on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. Another name in the mix is Ray Washburne, the president of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation. Mr. Washburne also served on Mr. Trump’s 2016 finance team and was seen as an early candidate for a cabinet position.
+The World Bank’s current president, Jim Yong Kim, said this month that he would step down in February to join a private infrastructure investment firm, an unexpected departure that comes nearly three years before the end of his term. Mr. Kim was first appointed by the Obama administration in 2012, on the recommendation of Hillary Clinton when she was secretary of state, and was reappointed by President Barack Obama in 2016 to serve a second five-year term.
+The process of choosing a successor is being overseen by Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary; Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff; and Ms. Trump, whose role in the process was announced by the White House on Monday.
+Ms. Trump’s role in the process drew some criticism from ethics watchdogs on Monday, who said that it could pose a conflict of interest for the president’s daughter to be involved in international economic matters when she has not completely divested from her assets.
+But Ms. Trump’s role is notable because of her unique sway over her father when it comes to personnel matters. The group was expected to begin the interview process on Tuesday in order to present Mr. Trump with recommendations for a nominee.
+A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment about the candidates.Companies use the Securities and Exchange Commission’s corporate filing system to share market-moving news with investors and the public. Getting an early peek at those filings would be very helpful to a thief.
+That was the motivation for two computer hackers who tried to penetrate the system, known as Edgar, according to an indictment unsealed on Tuesday by federal prosecutors in New Jersey.
+The authorities charged two men, both of whom are believed to be Ukrainian nationals, in a scheme to hack into the commission’s database and steal secret information that they could either trade on or sell to others.
+Prosecutors said that by hacking into the Edgar system, the men, Artem Radchenko and Oleksandr Ieremenko, had stolen “annual, quarterly and current reports of publicly traded companies before the reports were disseminated to the investing public.”The singer Alicia Keys will host the 61st annual Grammy Awards on Feb. 10, she announced on Tuesday in a nearly 10-minute celebratory video that emphasized the show as female-driven a year after the Grammys faced controversy over gender diversity.
+Keys succeeds the late-night host James Corden, who presided over the Grammys for the last two years and took over from LL Cool J, who hosted for five years beginning in 2012. Previous hosts include Queen Latifah, Rosie O’Donnell, Ellen DeGeneres and Garry Shandling.
+The Grammys host is traditionally onscreen for about 15 minutes of a nearly four-hour show. From 2006 to 2011, there was no host.
+A 15-time Grammy winner who has frequently performed on the show, Keys has also acted in films like “The Secret Life of Bees” and the show “Empire.” Though not known as a comedian, she represents a straightforward choice at a time when the Academy Awards has battled weeks of bad press over the selection and subsequent withdrawal of Kevin Hart because of his past homophobic comments.Most American New Year’s resolutions focus on how to eat less food. Mine are trained on ways to consume more.
+More dinner parties! More tackling of recipes that have been sitting in a manila folder since before my now college-age child was born! More late-to-the-party Instant Pot cooking! More fear-facing: I will master bone broth!
+Before embarking on new cooking odysseys, one must reckon with the spice drawer. It is hard to face faded dried herbs and spices, especially those you may have picked up during, say, a trip to Mexico, ones you wrapped in several pounds of dirty clothes with the hope of tricking the customs dog, which actually was not remotely interested in your oregano.
+Dead spices, unlike spoiled yogurt or moldy cheese, somehow feel like failures, a reminder of big culinary dreams that you failed to fulfill in the prior year. But sniff, accept and toss you must. Then you can reorganize, and assess what you have left.For cat owners, there’s iKuddle, a smart litter box priced at $299, which detects when the feline enters the box, deodorizes the air and packages waste into small bags for easy disposal. And it can all be tracked through an app.
+Out on the road, there’s EyeLights’ Eyedrive smart device, that allows a driver to see GPS directions, music playlists and incoming calls through a hologram that appears on the car’s window. A tablet-like device sits on the car’s dashboard, and, once connected to the phone’s GPS and music apps, will project the directions or music track onto the windshield — large enough that everyone in the car can see it. Since it’s activated by voice or gestures, the driver never has to look away from the road.
+Romain Duflot, chief executive and co-founder of EyeLights, dismisses suggestions that the hologram could be a distraction for drivers, saying that taking your eye off the road to check a phone is far riskier. “Phone distraction occurs in 52 percent of all trips that ended in a crash,” he said. EyeLights expects Eyedrive to be available in February and retail for $299 (though it may currently be pre-ordered via its Indiegogo campaign for $199).
+Then there’s Cupixel Art Box ($59.99), a smart device for the aspiring artist. The kit and app use augmented reality to scan a photo from the person’s iPad, and superimpose the image onto a canvas. The augmented realityimage provides an easy — almost paint-by-numbers — way to trace and paint the image. If you need help or inspiration, there’s a live chat with an artist on the app.
+“We give our users a foolproof way to create art,” said Elad Katav, co-founder of Cupixel.
+The choices of fun, cool, quirky smart devices is seemingly limitless — and continues expanding by the day. In the end, no single smart home will likely look the same. It will all come down to personal preferences.
+Added Mr. Gillett: “There’s no all-dancing home that you can set up and now your home is magic like the Jetsons.”WASHINGTON — Purse snatching and pickpocketing can amount to violent felonies for purposes of a federal law, the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in a 5-to-4 decision featuring unusual alliances.
+The case concerned the Armed Career Criminal Act, a federal law that is a kind of three-strikes statute. It requires mandatory 15-year sentences for people convicted of possessing firearms if they have earlier been found guilty of three violent felonies or serious drug charges.
+Figuring out what qualifies as one of those earlier offenses is not always easy. Tuesday’s decision considered a part of the law that defined violent felonies to include offenses involving the use or threat of physical force. The question in the case was whether minimal force, as in a purse snatching, is enough.
+In analyzing whether given crimes qualify as violent felonies under the federal law, the Supreme Court does not look to what the defendant actually did. Rather, it considers whether the crime — in this case, robbery under Florida law — covers conduct that does not qualify as a violent felony.1:13
+Gorillas Test Positive for Coronavirus at San Diego Zoo
+0:57
+Swans Find New Home in Florida
+1:25
+Hundreds of Whales Stranded in Australia
+0:23
+Video Shows Orcas Damaging a Boat in Spain
+0:58
+Washington National Zoo Could Gain a New Baby Panda
+1:11
+Black Cat Interrupts N.F.L. Game: ‘Go! Go! Go!’
+0:23
+Massive Shark Spotted in Cape Cod
+0:46
+Two Male Penguins Adopt an Egg in Berlin
+0:37
+Giant Swarm of Grasshoppers Takes Over Las Vegas
+0:48
+How ‘Chance the Snapper’ Was Caught in Chicago
+0:37
+Snowball the Cockatoo Shows Off His Dance Moves
+0:56SYDNEY, Australia — It was a young penguin colony, and all but one of the couples were pretty bad parents.
+They would get distracted from their nests, go for a swim or play, and so neglected eggs were getting cold, likely never to hatch. This was normal for inexperienced penguins, and the aquarium managers didn’t worry. Next mating season would be better.
+One couple, though, was extraordinary. Not because they were the colony’s only gay penguins, though they were, but because Sphen and Magic looked like they would make great, diligent, careful egg-warming parents. They made the biggest nest, and they sat on it constantly.
+Curious, the aquarium managers gave the two males a dummy egg. They took to it. And so then, when a particularly negligent heterosexual penguin couple looked to be leaving an egg exposed (females lay two, but usually only one survives), the aquarium workers figured they would give it to Sphen and Magic.When the choreographer George Balanchine created dances, he generally confined himself to matters of pure form: These steps go this way, with this rhythm, these dynamics. He allowed dancers and audiences to work out meanings, if any, for themselves.
+With one ballet alone Balanchine (1904-83) departed from this policy: “Apollo” (1928), and in particular its title role. This masterpiece, the oldest that Balanchine kept in repertory, returns to open New York City Ballet’s winter season on Jan. 22, with new Apollos. The role is a matchless adventure for any performer; but when Balanchine himself coached it, he moved and spoke as with no other role.
+Three leading interpreters — Jacques d’Amboise (who first danced the role for Balanchine in 1957), Edward Villella, (1960s), Ib Andersen (1980) — attended an “Apollo” seminar last summer at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Each had created roles in Balanchine premieres and had inherited other lead roles — but all recalled that, for Apollo, Balanchine brought a new kind of drama to his tuition. Though he never said so, he prompted others to believe that this was his most autobiographical role: a portrait of the artist as a young god.
+As with other roles, Balanchine demonstrated more than he spoke; and he moved with a skill every Apollo found brilliant. Mr. Villella had been taught the role by another ballet master; when he showed Balanchine what he had learned, Balanchine responded tartly “No poetry!” And part of the revelation that followed was the thrilling way that Balanchine — dressed that day in a suit — showed the role’s inner life. But all these Apollos also remember that the choreographer used words to open up “Apollo” as drama.The opening scenes of “The Heiresses,” Marcelo Martinessi’s debut feature, play a subtle game with the audience’s assumptions. At first, responding to hints in the composition of the shots and the demeanor of the performers, a viewer might deduce that this movie, set in Paraguay, is about a domestic worker in a wealthy household, something of a subgenre in recent Latin American cinema.
+The way the practical-minded Chiquita (Margarita Irún) deals with prospective buyers of inherited silver and crystal, and the way she caters to the needs of the flighty, aristocratic Chela (Ana Brun), reminded me, for example, of the central relationship in Jorge Gaggero’s “Live-In Maid.” It quickly becomes apparent, though, that Chela and Chiquita (also known as Chiqui) are longtime lovers and that the asymmetries in their relationship are the result of temperamental differences and deeply embedded habits.
+Later, on the way to and from a party, Chela and Chiqui wonder if members of their social circle are privy to information the two women would prefer to keep secret. This, too, turns out to be a sly misdirection on the part of the filmmaker. The secret is not that Chela and Chiqui are gay, but that they are broke. The grand house they share, inherited from Chela’s parents, shows signs of decrepitude. They are looking to sell the furniture and the finery, and possibly the Mercedes, which looks at least 20 years old.
+So before you quite have your bearings in the story — just as you are trying to absorb the basic facts about the characters — “The Heiresses” almost subliminally alerts you to complexities of sexuality and status that many films would prefer to simplify. It also draws you into a social milieu that is both highly specific and intuitively accessible. Chiqui and Chela belong to Paraguay’s privileged class, and the movie is about what happens when the privileges and comforts that Chela in particular has taken for granted begin to crumble. It’s also a vivid and affecting character study, anchored in Brun’s remarkably vivid and nuanced performance.“With greater attention on the part of the engineer to the needs of the musician,” Mr. Pearlman wrote in the accompanying paper, “the day may not be too remote when the electronic instrument may take its place as “a versatile, powerful and expressive instrument.”
+Mr. Pearlman, who lived in Newton, married Buena Alcalay in 1958. She and his daughter survive him.
+Mr. Pearlman worked for NASA designing amplifiers for Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, then helped found Nexus Research Laboratory, which built precision solid-state analog modules, including operational amplifiers.
+Nexus was sold to Teledyne in 1967, the year Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples of the Moon,” an album-length electronic composition made on a Buchla synthesizer, was released. Mr. Pearlman was impressed, and in 1968, after hearing “Switched-On Bach” by Wendy (known at the time as Walter) Carlos — a hit album of Bach pieces recorded on a Moog via overdubbing and editing — he decided to work again on electronic instruments.
+“I went into the basement and did some playing around,” Mr. Pearlman told Inc. magazine in 1982.
+Mr. Pearlman founded ARP, initially named Tonus Inc., in 1969. Early synthesizers tended to go rapidly out of tune. Mr. Pearlman solved that problem by placing two functions on the same chip, and that stability became a major selling point.
+The company’s first instrument was the ARP 2500, a large console-size synthesizer introduced in 1970; it was acquired by many universities for electronic-music laboratories. The 2500 used a matrix of switches to connect its modules instead of patch cords, which the Moog used. The slightly less bulky ARP 2600, using patch cords but also including built-in preset connections, arrived in 1971. Like other early synthesizers, they were monophonic, playing just one note at a time.Iowa’s other Republican senator, Joni Ernst, “ducked into an elevator as she was being asked” about what King had tweeted, saying that she wasn’t up to speed on the situation and “shrugging her shoulders as the elevator doors closed,” Stolberg wrote.
+Shrugging their shoulders: That sums it up. Republicans shrugged last autumn when King endorsed a white nationalist running for mayor of Toronto and also when he did an interview with a far-right Austrian website and said that America must “defend Western civilization” against immigrants or be “subjugated by the people who are the enemies of faith.”
+One of the few senior Republican officials who emphatically rebuked this behavior was Steve Stivers of Ohio, then the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee . “It could have been a pile-on moment when Republican leaders finally came out and denounced the guy,” Jonathan Weisman, who edits The Times’s congressional coverage, recalled. “But that didn’t happen. We were weeks before the election.”
+We’re now months after the election, and Republicans have already identified a primary challenger for King in 2020, someone who they believe can keep his seat in the party’s hands. Hence the blossoming of conscience in McConnell, McCarthy and others. I lied before. I do get it. Pragmatism, expedience and the maintenance of power are the real monarchs of politics — and not just among Republicans.
+But there’s even more than that behind the party’s sudden turn against King. As with most everything else in Washington at this cursed juncture, this is largely about Donald Trump.
+Trump’s own racist behavior and remarks — including, in the run-up to the midterm elections, his proud embrace of the term “nationalist” — have emboldened the Steve Kings of the world. Many Republicans recognize that. And despite all the pride that they have swallowed since Trump’s ascent and all the principles that they have betrayed, many of them yearn to make a stand or at least a statement against white nationalism, for the sake of their party’s long-term survival and, yes, for the country.
+They also want to say and do something right at a moment of so much wrong — wrong that they have abetted and must answer for. The government is shut down. The president fields understandable questions about whether he’s a Russian agent. With his ignorance and arrogance, he seems to be hauling the country to the brink of a disastrous international crisis. He degrades his office daily. And most of them mutely watch. They quiver in the face of the president’s wrath.Headliner
+Empellón Al Pastor
+There is a taco turnaround in the Pod 39 Hotel. What was Salvation Taco is now under the management of Alex Stupak of Empellón, Taqueria and Al Pastor. (Mr. Stupak took over Salvation Taco last year after April Bloomfield and Ken Friedman, who ran the restaurant, left amid a sexual harassment scandal over Mr. Friedman’s treatment of employees.) Though Mr. Stupak has a casual Al Pastor taqueria in the East Village, he says this latest restaurant is not merely a spinoff. “It’s an evolution,” he said. “It’s bar food inspired by Mexico and also by fun lowbrow American food like corn dogs. There’s also waiter service here.” Mr. Stupak said that he had resisted offers to turn Al Pastor into a fast-casual place in airports and food halls, and that he felt this project suited him better. The sprawling space, designed by Glen Coben in conjunction with Mr. Stupak, has a long bar, high-top tables and a pub atmosphere, with dark green walls, vintage photos and tufted leather in one area, with another bar and a game room beyond. “It’s now less fiesta and more tavern,” Mr. Stupak said. The menu will feature tacos, as well as fried-chicken sandwiches, broiled oysters with hoja santa and bacon, Chihuahua cheese sticks, pork fried rice and crunchy corn masa ice cream bars. Breakfast will be served. (Opens Friday)
+Pod 39 Hotel, 145 East 39th Street (Lexington Avenue), 212-865-5800, empellon.com.
+Opening
+Rodos
+What are friends for? Yiannis Chatiris and Eleni Vareli have called upon their buddy, the marquee New Orleans chef Emeril Lagasse, to lend a hand in their spacious Greek restaurant named for the island of Rhodes. (The name of their former restaurant in the same space, Mykonos Blue Grill, paid homage to a different island.) Mr. Lagasse, who does not have a New York restaurant, is helping to shape the menu and has his team in the kitchen. His take on Greek cuisine results in dishes like crisp duck wings, octopus beignets, New Orleans-style barbecued shrimp, clams stuffed with crawfish, and lacquered Long Island duck, all of which coexist with typical Greek dips like taramosalata, black linguine with seafood, a Greek salad, and grilled branzino.
+39 West 24th Street, 212-989-8811, rodosnyc.com.
+MAVSoho
+Mulino a Vino on West 14th Street, which closed in June, has been resurrected by the owner Paolo Meregalli and the chef Massimiliano Eandi, with similarly unusual, colorful food and a wine-oriented menu. Lasagna made from tomato-infused pasta and folded to resemble a rose, black spaghetti with sea urchin and a black carbonara sauce, and a blue risotto tinted with flowers and paired with caviar are some of the menu offerings. There are also Milanese-style short ribs, and roasted salmon wrapped in lemon leaves and served with a limoncello sauce. The wine list is categorized according to texture and flavor. Decorated in Art Deco style, the restaurant has a lounge and bar, with a salumeria station, in front and a dining room with splashes of color and brass accents. (Wednesday)
+Hotel Hugo, 525 Greenwich Street (Spring Street), 212-608-1211, mavsoho.com.
+Philippe Downtown
+The chef Philippe Chow has a following for the particular style of Chinese food at his Upper East Side flagship. Satays slathered in sauce are a signature, and he also specializes in Peking duck and Peking duck spring rolls. Now he’s serving them in a Chelsea version of his restaurant. There’s a D.J. booth in the rear, lending the space a nightlife atmosphere.
+Dream Hotel, 355 West 16th Street, 212-644-8203, philippechow.com.The other day I issued a warning about the Chinese economy. It is, I wrote, “emerging as a danger spot in a world economy that really, really doesn’t need this right now.”
+Unfortunately, the other day was more than 6 years ago. And it’s not just me. Many people have been predicting a China crisis for a long time, and it has kept on not happening.
+But now China seems to be stumbling again. Is this the moment when all the prophecies of big trouble in big China finally come true? Honestly, I have no idea.
+On one side, China’s problems are real. On the other, the Chinese government – hindered neither by rigid ideology nor by anything resembling a democratic political process – has repeatedly shown its ability and willingness to do whatever it takes to prop up its economy. It’s really anyone’s guess whether this time will be different, or whether Xi-who-must-be-obeyed can pull out another recovery.Slide 1 of 10,
+A book party for “Hollywood’s Eve,” a biography of Eve Babitz, was held at the Waverly Inn on Jan. 8. From left, Michael Rezendes; Lili Anolik, who wrote the biography; and Christie Brinkley.The era of the lavish book party, like the golden age of glossy magazines, is mostly in the past.
+Like fading neutron stars, both collided last week at the Waverly Inn, the clubby restaurant in the West Village. Graydon Carter, an owner of the Waverly and the former editor of Vanity Fair, hosted a cocktail party for Lili Anolik’s book “Hollywood’s Eve,” a biography of Eve Babitz, a keen observer and pop-culture tyro of 1960s and ’70s Los Angeles who is enjoying a publishing revival.
+The gathering looked like an early-bird special for aging bons vivants. In one corner were Debbie Harry, the Blondie singer; Victor Garber, the actor; Christie Brinkley, a former model; and “Baby” Jane Holzer, the onetime Warhol superstar.
+Also spotted were the writers Sloane Crosley and Brad Gooch, the journalists James Wolcott and Ken Auletta, and several recently dislodged editors, including Tonne Goodman of Vogue, Linda Wells of Allure and Robbie Myers of Elle.
+It soon became clear that the party was as much a boozy wake for bygone magazine jobs as it was a book celebration.Theo Adam, a German opera singer whose varied career spanned the second half of the last century and who made a particularly strong impression internationally with his Wagnerian roles, died on Thursday in Dresden, Germany. He was 92.
+The Wiener Staatsoper in Vienna, where Mr. Adam sang many times, posted the news of his death. Dominique Meyer, the opera’s director, called him “undoubtedly one of the most important interpreters of the 20th century.”
+Mr. Adam, a bass-baritone, was a regular at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany beginning in the early 1950s, and in February 1969 he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in one of his signature roles, Hans Sachs in Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger.”But the format is also restrictive. Alien came of age during the birth of the modern information security age, and at times I wished we could have stepped back a bit from her story to see the bigger picture. Instead, tethered to Alien, we can see only as far as she can in the moment.
+For instance, Alien experiences several gut-punch reminders that she is a woman in a male-dominated industry. She is saddled with administrative tasks. A male peer introduces her as a “junior consultant.” And a roomful of men eye her with curiosity at a conference. These moments cry out for a pause, some context, a bit of reflection on the security industry in the #MeToo moment. But instead we are whisked off to the next vignette.
+The story offers just enough technological details to establish its bona fides without slowing its pace. It is a difficult balance. Alien’s social-engineering techniques have been detailed in books by and about the hacker Kevin Mitnick and elsewhere, and will come as no surprise to tech-savvy or security-conscious readers. More casual readers will get an introduction to that world, but not a guide to help them understand it.
+Which is a shame, since the real Alien — she is easily identifiable if one is so inclined — has a well-earned reputation as an expert in her field. Her work is taught at universities, bar associations and the world’s top conferences. She is, as Smith set out to show, a security badass. Yet we hear very little from her in the present. The focus on how she got there is interesting, and at times quite fun, but it comes at the expense of the wisdom she acquired on the journey.
+If there’s one lesson to be learned from Alien’s story, it is this: As Russian hackers challenge democracies and criminal attacks turn our personal data into commodities, we cannot turn to technology to save us. Security is only as strong as the employee who tapes his passwords to his cubicle, the overworked guard at the front desk and, yes, the person on the other end of the line when you call the help desk.Here’s what else is happening
+El Chapo trial: In an incendiary accusation at the crime lord’s trial, a former cartel leader accused the former Mexican president President Peña Nieto of taking a $100 million bribe from drug traffickers.
+NATO: President Trump privately suggested several times last year that he wanted to withdraw the U.S. from the military alliance with Europe and Canada that has deterred Soviet and Russian aggression for 70 years.
+North Korea: The country is pursuing biological weapons that could present a more immediate threat to the world than its nuclear weapons program, according to new military analysis.
+Carlos Ghosn: The former Nissan chairman was denied bail in Tokyo and faces at least two more months in jail. His wife criticized Japan’s criminal justice system, writing that “no human being should be detained under conditions so harsh that their only plausible purpose is to coerce a confession.”
+Netflix: The company said it would raise prices by 13 to 18 percent for U.S. subscribers to help pay for original content, its biggest rate increase since it introduced streaming services 12 years ago.
+Saudi woman: Rahaf Mohammed Alqunun, who fled her home and was granted refugee status in Canada, is starting to adjust to her newfound freedom. “I want to do crazy things I’ve never done before,” she told us in an interview.Goldstein begins her “lively account of the history of teaching” (our reviewer’s words) in the 1820s, when early iterations of public schooling — “common schools” — were beginning to take form. She writes about how the field became dominated by women who received lower pay and explains that many of the solutions that have been put in place over the years, such as evaluating teachers based on student test scores or programs like Teach For America, have historical precedents.
+Image
+TOUGH LIBERAL
+Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race and Democracy
+By Richard D. Kahlenberg
+552 pp. Columbia University Press. (2007)
+This book highlights Albert Shanker, a union president who led teachers’ strikes in late 1960s New York City after 18 unionized white educators were fired as part of an initiative to create a black local school district in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville sector of Brooklyn. Though Shanker agreed that the teaching force needed to be diversified, he took a different approach, working to unionize teacher aides, who tended to be people of color, and negotiating a stipend for them to get their college degrees and become teachers. Shanker has since been viewed as a pioneer in teachers’ unions and educational reform.
+Image
+MOTHER ON FIRE
+By Sandra Tsing Loh
+298 pp. Crown Publishers. (2008)
+After Loh lost her job at a local NPR station, she realized she can no longer afford to send her daughter to private school. In this memoir, she recounts the year of motherhood in which she navigated public school bureaucracy in Los Angeles. Our reviewer wrote that Loh’s ability to upgrade such a book into a "galvanizing treatise on somber topics like public school education, class and midlife consumerism, all the while eliciting at least one snort of laughter per page, is no less than a feat of genius.”It turned out she was a natural. She appears in Mr. LaChapelle’s surreally kaleidoscopic image with arms outstretched, gazing skyward and floating against a backdrop of primordial looking greenery.
+Nor was her outfit, a vibrant mélange of pink, blue and green, much of a stretch. “As a young woman I would look at people in the street,” Ms. Leon said. “I was jealous of the way they dressed, but I never had money to buy, so I would make my own clothes. I liked wearing clashing colors.”
+For all of her initial misgivings, she has embraced the role of model, happy enough to join the meager ranks of women over 60, a stable that includes Isabella Rossellini, China Machado and Maye Musk, who have posed for a roster of high-fashion brands.
+“I want to see more people my age doing what I do,” Ms. Leon said. She is inclined, she added, to tell even her most skeptical friends: “Why not? You can do it.”
+Her bred-in-the-bone positivity has left its mark on her son. “She instilled in me a lot of ideas about how to express yourself and how not to be shy,” Mr. Leon said.
+“When I was 5, my feet were too small to fit into the boys’ dress shoes that I wanted to wear to school,” he said. Without thinking twice, his mother ushered him into a girls’ store to find him a suitable pair. “You want to wear dress shoes,” she told him briskly. “Well, this is a dress shoe.”“I think when I think about discovery, I think about unfairness.” “We are blind. We’re in the dark. We have no idea what the facts are.” “Witnesses disappear. Surveillance tape gets taped over. We don’t have the opportunity as the defense to learn the truth.” “People’s lives are affected.” [music] “So what is discovery? Discovery is evidence. What is evidence? Evidence is police reports.” “Witness statements, photos, videotape, a little slip of paper with what might seem like a note that isn’t relevant but can be.” “Discovery is really the heart and soul of a case. It’s the meat of a case.” “It’s all the evidence that the prosecution has relating to a criminal case. And they have an obligation to turn it over to the defense attorney.” “It’s just, when are we going to get it?” “The prosecutor does not have to give you that information until the eve of trial, the day of trial.” “That’s too late. You head into a trial representing someone, and you don’t have any evidence.” “A case file that, for a year, was this thick suddenly now becomes this thick. And unfortunately, sometimes the piece of paper that may convince a prosecutor to drop a case isn’t revealed until 12 or 14 months down the road.” “Our client was charged with having committed an armed robbery. This was an innocent person that was held for 18 months before his trial. We didn’t have any of those police reports earlier on, and that’s because New York State law says that the D.A.’s office doesn’t need to turn that over. And so they’re not going to.” “They claim that there was a gun in the bag. When they tested the bag for fingerprints, there were 13 fingerprints on that bag, none of which matched my client’s. We ultimately won this trial, but my client was this close to going to prison. Had we gotten this evidence before — “ “Had the prosecutors disclosed that information — “ “We might have been able to negotiate something where my client didn’t have to go through the stress and the emotional turmoil of trial.” “We could have made an application for release of our client pending the outcome of the case.” “It could have saved an innocent person from being held for 18 months on Rikers Island.” “It’s a tragedy because it happens every day across New York State.” “Most cases end up as some type of plea bargain or some type of resolution short of trial.” “The vast majority of what we’re talking about with discovery reform is allowing individuals to make informed decisions. You want them to understand what is the evidence before them. You want them to understand what the consequences are.” “And I think it’s really difficult for them to understand why the system is set up this way. And oftentimes, I’ll have clients say, well, that doesn’t seem right. What do they have on me? I want to know. Or, I didn’t do it. I want to see that video, because it’s not me.” “If they had the strong evidence against him, why not show it?” “The lawyer response is, well, that’s what the law says. And the client response, understandably, says, well, then the law is unfair.” “When you’re actually able to present this evidence — good, bad or indifferent — to our clients, it really just changes the whole trajectory of the case.” “You really realize how arcane our system is when you go to a national conference or you speak to the lawyers of other jurisdictions, and you tell them about your discovery laws, and they look at you like you have three heads.” “I guess we’re a progressive state as New York. You would be shocked to know that almost every state has better discovery laws than us.” “States in the South — Texas is number one with discovery. Texas. I think New York state, if we’re going to be the progressive state, we ought to be No.1. We should probably have a discovery law that just says, the district attorney shall, within five days of arrest, turn over everything. And anything that comes in after that, they’ll turn over.” “All they have to do is walk to a copy machine, make a copy and hand it over.” “If we create a system whereby everyone is forced to get the discovery early — “ “It would help both sides, really.” “Overall, everyone gets to learn more about the case.” “Early discovery is about fundamental fairness. And I think that is something that, as New Yorkers, as public defenders, as prosecutors, we could all come together and agree that fundamental fairness should drive our criminal justice system.” [music]“Unfortunately, no Democrats will attend,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement about the lunch. She added, “It’s time for the Democrats to come to the table and make a deal.”
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, have refused to negotiate over border security until the government reopens, but Mr. Trump has ruled out separating the two issues. While the Democratic-led House has passed several bills to end the shutdown, Mr. McConnell has said he will not advance the legislation knowing that the president will not sign it.
+“In a situation like this, where the president, in my view, is in the right place, trying to get the right outcome, as all of us have expressed, with regard to border security, of course not,” Mr. McConnell said.
+Ms. Slotkin would not say whether she agreed with Ms. Pelosi’s stance that no negotiation was possible until the government reopened, citing a confidentiality pledge she said members of the group had taken about their discussion. But she said she and her colleagues were walking around with copies of legislation co-written by Representative Will Hurd, Republican of Texas, and Representative Pete Aguilar, Democrat of California, that drew bipartisan support last year. The measure paired border security improvements with legal status for some undocumented immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, sometimes called “Dreamers.”
+“There’s a lot of people who believe it’s important to work across the aisle, that we need a practical way forward, and they believe in figuring out practical solutions,” Ms. Slotkin said. “We know we’re not in charge, but we want to get caught trying to help.”
+She said she had called Ms. Pelosi on Monday to relay complaints by her constituents over the weekend about the shutdown, and has also been talking quietly with Republicans — whom she would not name — about how to find a way out of the stalemate.
+Yet Democratic leaders expressed confidence that their members would not break from their leaders’ strategy, notwithstanding Mr. Trump’s attempts to entice them.To the Editor:
+Re “China’s Edge Over U.S. Contractors in Africa: Truckloads of Loans” (front page, Jan. 13 ):
+What’s missing? The Export-Import Bank of the United States. Ex-Im, as it is known , founded in 1934 , is the federal agency empowered to support United States exporters who face foreign competition backed by their own governments.
+The Republican-controlled Senate, and in particular Senators Pat Toomey and Richard Shelby , have blocked confirmation votes on Trump administration nominees for chairman, board and inspector general . Without those confirmations, the agency lacks a quorum to support financing for United States exports and jobs.
+We have a remedy; the Senate needs to vote to confirm the board.
+Fred P. Hochberg
+Washington
+The writer was chairman of the Export-Import Bank of the United States, 2009-17.The NYC Winter Jazzfest is 15 years old, which is apparently enough time to develop its own version of “the old days.” This year it stretched on for nine days, with concert marathons on consecutive weekends and marquee concerts sandwiched in between. Of all this, the best part might have been the evening most reminiscent of what the festival had been like five or 10 years ago.
+It was the Half Marathon on the event’s first Saturday, an extra night of shows organizers added to stay aligned with the Association of Performing Arts Presenters convention, using just six clubs across Lower Manhattan. (The following weekend, a more typical, two-day Marathon took over 11 spaces each night.) Fewer people came, so lines were shorter, and rooms were full but not crammed. Almost all the venues were easily walkable from each other, and it felt less like an opportunity to harvest information and more like a chance to sit with the music.
+In improvised music there’s hardly the risk of repeating oneself, and one of the best things about Winter Jazzfest is running across the same artist in multiple contexts in a given night. During the Half Marathon, Joel Ross led a quintet at Subculture, perhaps the festival’s finest listening venue, a small underground theater with good sound and plenty of room to move around. Mr. Ross, 23, is the player to watch in New York this year: a vibraphonist who unites a lot of the instrument’s jazz history — from Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and New York — and understands the vibes as a possible connector between hip-hop and West African music.The family members never fully adapt to their new circumstances. But things do change: David eventually opens a skin care and lifestyle shop, Alexis graduates from a certification program, Moira joins a women’s singing group among other civic organizations and Johnny and Stevie eventually run the motel together. The more enmeshed the Roses have become in their Schitt’s Creek community, the more the show has blossomed.
+Learning to trust that and to rely on the foundational gentleness of its world is how “Schitt’s Creek” has improved steadily since Season 1, which was often glib and noisy. Things picked up in Season 2; by Season 3, the show found its groove, with story lines arising more organically. Some of the contentiousness waned, especially between Alexis and David. While the siblings rarely get earnest with each other, they often make the exact same expression: a half-cringe, half-pout, while they look up and away, typically while complaining or avoiding something. The shouting among characters is now less chaotic and more direct.
+The show also gave in to its romantic inclinations, and it’s all the better for it. Part of why “Schitt’s Creek” can get away with its zanier stories is that it is anchored by the unshakable love between Johnny and Moira, the realest thing in the show’s universe. In one episode in Season 4, while Alexis is pining for an ex, Moira comforts her by recounting when she herself pined for Johnny before they got together. Even though Alexis and her mother have a strained relationship — Moira has always favored David — it’s clear that Alexis knows, completely and firmly, that her parents’ love for one another is as solid as solid gets.
+Of course Alexis’s path to love doesn’t run smooth, nor does David’s. David’s pansexuality isn’t ever a problem; it’s his issues with closeness that get him in trouble. His aversion to and awkwardness around intimacy — he’s only ever said “I love you” twice to his parents, “and once at a Mariah Carey concert” — keep things from getting too sappy. David’s burgeoning relationship with his business partner, Patrick (Noah Reid), moves from cute to #goals when Patrick serenades David with an acoustic cover of “The Best.”
+“Schitt’s Creek” doesn’t have any real villains, and the biggest obstacles are only ever hubris or funding. No one’s truly against anyone else, and that underlying sense of collaboration creates a sense of peace when you watch the show. We’re all on the same team. The same ridiculous, over-the-top team.To the Editor:
+I thought that I knew the narrative of my middle-class life, and so was surprised to recognize myself in Alissa Quart ’s article “The Power of the Middle-Class Shame Vote” (Sunday Review, Jan. 6).
+In my 30s, I had excellent health insurance through my union. When I changed professions and became self-employed, I had to buy a family policy from the open market. I’ve felt ashamed for not knowing that premiums would eat a quarter, then a third, of my gross income.
+Company-paid insurance was once standard in collective bargaining agreements, with many nonunion companies forced to follow suit. With the shrinking of unions, the middle class lost paid health coverage, eventually plunging many people into medical debt.
+We also lost a powerful political force that educated millions of working people to vote for candidates who would represent their interests. Otherwise, Donald Trump could not have been elected.To the Editor:
+Re “Saudi Teenager Who Fled Home Embraces Canada” (news article, Jan. 15):
+The story of the Saudi teenager granted asylum in Canada was a refreshing bit of good news in a sea of international meanness. Thank you, Canada, for yet again (remember its granting asylum to Vietnam draft dodgers) providing a moral compass for your southern neighbor.
+Anthony D. Pellegrini
+Bloomington, Minn.When M. Night Shyamalan was asked what the biggest plot twist in his own life was, he paused and thought carefully.
+The answer, said Shyamalan, whose name has been synonymous with twists since his 1999 breakthrough, “The Sixth Sense,” was having come full circle: back to making films in his native Philadelphia, back to the kinds of thrillers that in 2002 led Newsweek to label him “the Next Spielberg.”
+“All I want to do is make thrillers,” Shyamalan, 48, said in a phone interview last week. After years spent making other kinds of films, he added, coming back to what he loved most had prompted a realization: “Wow, I had everything I wanted in the first place.”
+It’s appropriate, then, that “Glass,” which debuts this weekend, completes another kind of circle. Riding high on the success of its predecessor, “Split” (2017), the film concludes an original superhero trilogy that began in 2000 with “Unbreakable” — a grim and deliberate origin story that arrived, perhaps, just a little too soon.To the Editor:
+Re “As Russia Works to Weaken NATO, Trump Talks of a U.S. Withdrawal” (news article, Jan. 15):
+Whether or not President Trump is an agent of Russia (a knowing agent or what the Soviets used to call a “useful idiot” who unwittingly did their bidding), the president’s expressed desire to pull the United States out of NATO furthers Russia’s aims. More important, it lacks reason, knowledge or sense and would harm this country.
+No knowledgeable person in the United States believes it to be to our benefit to leave the alliance. Thus, whether or not the president is an agent of a foreign power, he is working against the interests of the nation he purports to lead. Short of handing over the nuclear codes, nothing could be worse.
+Jonathan J. Margolis
+Brookline, Mass.LONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May on Tuesday suffered a humiliating defeat over her plan to withdraw Britain from the European Union, thrusting the country further into political chaos with only 10 weeks to go until it is scheduled to leave the bloc.
+The 432-to-202 vote to reject her proposal was the biggest defeat in the House of Commons for a prime minister in recent British history. And it underscores how comprehensively Mrs. May has failed to build consensus behind any single vision of how to exit the European Union.
+Now factions in Parliament will offer their own proposals — setting off a new, unpredictable stage in Brexit, the process of withdrawing from the bloc.
+“She has completely lost control of the process, and her version of Brexit must now be dead, if she loses by 230 votes,” said John Springford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institute.WASHINGTON — William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general, assured senators at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he would permit the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, to complete the Russia investigation and said he was determined to resist any pressure from Mr. Trump to use law enforcement for political purposes.
+Mr. Barr, whose confirmation seems virtually assured, pointed to his age and background — he served as attorney general from 1991 to 1993 — as buffers to potential intrusions on the Justice Department’s traditional independence. He suggested he had no further political aspirations that might cloud his judgment, the way that future ambitions might give pause to a younger nominee, as well as the experience to fight political interference.
+“I am in a position in life where I can provide the leadership necessary to protect the independence and reputation of the department,” Mr. Barr, 68, told the Senate Judiciary Committee, adding that he would not hesitate to resign if Mr. Trump pushed him to act improperly.
+“I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong — by anybody, whether it be editorial boards or Congress or the president,” Mr. Barr said. “I’m going to do what I think is right.”To the Editor:
+Re “The War of Words on Abortion” (Op-Ed, Jan. 10):
+Charles C. Camosy is wrong in throwing up a smokescreen to pretend that the abortion debate is a struggle over lan guage.
+Pro-choice victories in Ireland, Chile and likely soon in Argentina clearly demonstrate that increasingly, on a global scale, people in Catholic-majority countries are taking a stand for the values, morals and ethics of defending a woman’s right to choose.
+Those who favor women’s rights are not running away from fundamental principles like conscience; they are embracing the reality that women’s rights are human rights. They understand the challenges to women’s health and well-being when we deny their right to make free choices over their bodies.
+In the United States, 6 in 10 Catholic voters say abortion can be a moral choice, and in my home country of Ireland 66 percent of voters said yes to legal abortion. In the face of an increasingly educated and sophisticated electorate, Mr. Camosy and other anti-abortion advocates are reduced to running away from ethical arguments they used in the past and relying on red-herring arguments as a fallback position.Most Important Photo Ever
+Neither of us wanted to be at our high school reunion. I was worried I would have to retell the story of my high school sweetheart’s death to pancreatic cancer over and over. He was recently separated after years of being in an unhappy marriage. We didn’t know each other in high school, but 30 years later there we were, two lonely souls circling each other in a crowded room for hours until he took a photograph of me. We talked for two minutes, and it turned into a second lifetime. “The most important photo I’ve ever taken,” he said. — Stacey Paterson-KorynkiewiczHow do you get from Carnegie Hall? You get an offer to run one of the most vibrant performing arts organizations on the West Coast.
+Jeremy Geffen, who has been an important tastemaker in New York during his dozen years on the artistic planning team at Carnegie Hall, is leaving to become the executive and artistic director of Cal Performances, the arts producer and presenter at the University of California, Berkeley.
+“What appeals to me about Cal Performances is that it’s the intersection of many strands of music, dance and drama, with the intellectual curiosity of one of the world’s top university environments,” Mr. Geffen, 44, said in a telephone interview about his new post, which was announced on Tuesday afternoon. He will start in Berkeley on April 1.
+The West Coast is increasingly the center of American musical experimentation, with the Los Angeles Philharmonic the most adventurous symphonic ensemble in the country and the San Francisco Symphony having recently named the composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen its next music director.DAKAR, Senegal — The 19th-century sword rests in a glass case alongside a frail Quran in a spacious gallery where scrolls hang from the wall and soft religious chanting is piped in. The saber’s etched copper handle is shaped like a swan’s beak, with a ring at the end. Its leather sheath rests nearby.
+The sword belonged to Omar Saidou Tall, a prominent Muslim spiritual leader in the 1800s in what is now modern-day Senegal. His quest to conquer nearby territories put him in armed conflict with France, which had its own takeover ambitions. The French colonialists eventually won and seized not just large swaths of West Africa but also the region’s treasures, including the sword. Like most artifacts from France’s African colonies, it wound up in a French museum.
+But the sword is now back in Senegal — and the Senegalese would like to keep it here. It is one of the most important pieces on display at Senegal’s new Museum of Black Civilizations, which has opened its doors amid a heated discussion about Africa reclaiming art that was looted during the colonial era.
+The scale of artifacts in question is staggering. Up to 95 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is held outside Africa by major museums. France alone holds 90,000 sub-Saharan African objects in its museums.At Samsung’s new North American headquarters, in San Jose, Calif., designed by the architecture firm NBBJ, every third floor of the 10-story building offers outdoor space. Some terraces are devoted to quiet contemplation and yoga, while others have active features such as a putting green where employees can practice their golf swing. On the ground level, the landscape architecture firm SWA laid out a series of spaces as varied as tennis courts and a “reflection garden.”
+Companies that hire SWA want to know what the competition is doing, in part because they are all angling for the same work force, said Gerdo P. Aquino, the firm’s chief executive.
+“Every time I start a program, they say, ‘Check out what Apple did, what Facebook did, what Google did,’” he said.
+Companies are also asking workers what they want in outdoor spaces.
+A survey commissioned by L. L. Bean found that 86 percent of indoor workers would like to spend more time outdoors during the workday. The retailer, based in Freeport, Me., teamed up with the co-working firm Industrious to create a pop-up outdoor office with individual and group work areas — and then took the show on the road. Started in New York’s Madison Square Park last summer, the “Be an Outsider at Work” demonstration project also traveled to Boston, Philadelphia and Madison, Wis.
+LinkedIn has a workplace design lab at the main campus of its headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., for tinkering with ideas for outfitting its 32 offices around the globe. Shade is essential for outdoor work spaces, the lab has found, in part to prevent glare on phone and laptop screens. The lab created a mobile meeting room that can be rolled out onto a terrace and is designing an in-place roofed space with desks and indoor-outdoor computer monitors, according to Brett Hautop, LinkedIn’s senior director for global design and build.
+Of course, it’s one thing to introduce an outdoor work space at a sprawling, low-rise campus; it’s another to squeeze it into a project in a built-up urban environment where every square foot, if not square inch, matters. And some parts of the country have to contend with inclement weather.ESTES PARK, Colo — The winter winds roar off the Continental Divide in Rocky Mountain National Park relent lessly, blasting our little town with such ferocity that sometimes I fear we might blow away. It’s as if the mountains are finally exhaling now that the peak of the tourist season has passed. For most of its history, Estes Park, the gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park, has been a ghost town in winter. Over the last several years, however, with the population boom along the Front Range of the Rockies and the growing popularity of our national parks, Estes has nudged itself toward a sustainable year-round economy. Barely. Precariously.
+But now, with so many locals having banked on a small but steady stream of income tied in various ways to the park — the fourth most visited national park in 2017, with 4.4 million visitors — the government shutdown has upended the economy of this town and created apprehension and uncertainty.
+“It’s crazy that one guy gets to do this to us all,” said Dustin Dyer, director and co-owner of Kent Mountain Adventure Center, a guide service that’s been here for decades, referring to President Trump.
+Although Rocky Mountain National Park officially remains open, its main roads had been closed until this week, because there wasn’t enough money to run the snowplows. Well over half of Mr. Dyer’s trips (he offers snowshoeing, backcountry ski touring, ice climbing and avalanche courses) had to be canceled, but he’s trying to be optimistic. “We will survive, but it is crazy to be hit by the noise on the TV,” he told me. “It is usually just noise.”In recent years, though, my enthusiasm has waned — with each revelation about sexual harassment (most recently by cheerleaders and office workers), domestic abuse and the effect of the sport on players’ brains.
+But long before these problems came to light, I found the lack of women in leadership roles in the sport irritating. We often discuss the need for more women in the boardroom, but what about in the locker room, a team’s back office and on the sidelines?
+So I was encouraged this weekend to see Sarah Thomas become the first woman to officiate an N.F.L. playoff game . Thomas, a Mississippi native and a mother of three, had already broken plenty of ground in the sport — becoming the first full-time female official in N.F.L. history in 2015. She was also the first woman to referee a major college football game, a bowl game and a game in a Big Ten stadium.
+Thomas wasn’t the only first over the weekend. In a playoff game on Saturday, Terri Valenti became the first female replay official .
+The news got me thinking about the women who had already changed football — the ones who have smashed through the gender wall without pads, a helmet or much fanfare. Here are three worth remembering.CARACAS, Venezuela — Leaders of Venezuela’s opposition on Tuesday set in motion a plan to try to oust President Nicolás Maduro and create a caretaker government until new elections can be held.
+The National Assembly, the opposition-controlled legislative body, declared Mr. Maduro illegitimate, hoping to trigger a constitutional mechanism that would allow the head of the assembly to take over the leadership.
+It was not immediately clear what effect the move would have or how Mr. Maduro’s government would react.
+Rafael Chavero, professor of constitutional law at the Central University of Venezuela, said the next steps were not clear. “You have to think outside the box,” he said. “There is no magic formula to get out of dictatorships.”The news was announced with great solemnity and pride. A never-before-published Sylvia Plath story would appear as a book this month: “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” an allegorical tale of a train journey into a kind of purgatory, written months before Plath’s first suicide attempt, at age 20.
+No news could be more disheartening to a true Plath fan.
+We already know. We suffered through “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” a posthumous collection of stories and juvenilia published in 1977. We know that the qualities that distinguish her poetry — the radiant contempt and nightmare imagery — stay leashed in her short fiction, a province of thudding symbolism and stagy morality.
+So, imagine my surprise. “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” is clumsy, no getting around that — Plath has a heavy hand, and the novice fiction writer’s conviction that elaborate description will render her world real. We learn the eye color of everyone on board the train; we have coffee explained to us: a “steaming brown liquid.” To drive home the sinister mood, she paints everything plush, bleeding red — the seats, the tickets, the lights, the skirts on passing women.
+And yet the story is stirring, in sneaky, unexpected ways. A girl is sent on a trip by her parents, destination unknown. She realizes she is in danger, and with the help of an older woman is able to flee the train on foot, running through dark tunnels and into the light, into a kind of rebirth or paradise. It’s unabashedly Freudian (and Plath herself seemed ambivalent about its merits), but look carefully and there’s a new angle here — on how, and why, we read Plath today.“The message was that Mr. Guzmán didn’t have to stay in hiding?” Mr. Lichtman asked.
+“Yes,” Mr. Cifuentes said, “that very thing is what Joaquin said to me.”
+Mr. Lichtman, quoting Mr. Cifuentes’s notes from an interview he gave to American authorities in 2016, asked whether Felipe Calderón, who preceded Mr. Peña Nieto as Mexico’s president, took a bribe in 2008 from one of Mr. Guzmán’s rivals, the Beltrán-Leyva brothers.
+“I don’t recall this incident very well,” Mr. Cifuentes answered. He added moments later, “Right now, I do not remember that.”
+Mr. Peña Nieto and Mr. Calderón could not yet be reached for comment.
+While other witnesses at Mr. Guzmán’s trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn have testified about huge payoffs from traffickers to the Mexican police and public officials, the testimony about Mr. Peña Nieto was the most egregious allegation yet. If true, it suggests that corruption by drug cartels had reached into the highest level of Mexico’s political establishment.
+After testifying about the two presidents, Mr. Cifuentes rattled off other bribes that Mr. Guzmán and his allies had paid to Mexican officials. On at least two occasions, he said, the kingpin gave the Mexican military between $10 million and $12 million to launch operations to “either kill or capture” associates of the Beltrán-Leyva brothers during his war with them.
+Mr. Cifuentes also said the Mexican federal police not only turned a blind eye to drug trafficking, but occasionally took part in it. Once, he told jurors, traffickers gave the police photographs of several suitcases packed with cocaine that were sent by the cartel on an airplane from Argentina to Mexico. The police picked up the suitcases from the baggage claim, Mr. Cifuentes said, and sold the drugs themselves.
+All of this came on Mr. Cifuentes’s exhausting second day as a witness at Mr. Guzmán’s trial. He has already confessed to a staggering array of crimes.Carol Channing, who died on Tuesday at 97, was a Broadway legend, an actress who toured well into her 70s and remained a cultural fixture long after that. Those who knew her remembered her as both a larger-than-life presence and a woman who was delightfully unpretentious, a tireless performer who would ignore doctor’s orders to go onstage and a tireless promoter of her shows, even in front of a crowd of Brownie scouts.
+A rave review was her best medicine
+Lee Roy Reams performed with Ms. Channing in several shows, including “Hello, Dolly!” Ms. Channing originated the role of Dolly Gallagher Levi on Broadway and reprised it several times. Mr. Reams said she was a performer who tried to never — never, ever — miss a show.
+When she injured her arm on a tour of “Dolly” in the 1990s, Mr. Reams said, she performed in a sling, switched out periodically to coordinate with her costume. When that tour went through Reno, Nev., he said, both of them lost their voices, so they went on anyway and talked through their songs. And when the show was in Denver, she hurt the ball of her right foot. A doctor said she could not go on for at least two to three weeks.
+That night, Ms. Channing went onstage in a pair of flats, which had been covered in spats to match her costume. No one seemed to mind: The reviews were raves.“Sex positivity is a scam,” Ms. Pham said. She said the movement tends to embrace people who are having sex, “whereas not being sexually active is considered not liberating.”
+As for me, I’m now in my sophomore year and I’m still not having sex, the way I define it. At this point in my life, the act of exposing my body in any way makes me feel vulnerable. My anxiety often stops me from continuing intimate conversations that might lead to sex, and like many students, my schedule makes me feel like I don’t have the time to work through these issues, either.
+I’m comfortable with my choice, but it’s still tough to see sex come so naturally to other people. I always want to ask how they do it. Obviously not how, but I want to know if they had to overcome the kind of barriers that are stopping me.
+Maybe I’ll understand it one day, maybe I won’t. For now, I’m cool with spending my nights alone.
+What We’re Reading
+How to Actually, Truly Focus on What You’re Doing Tired: Shallow work. Wired: Deep work.
+Why It Could Be Hard to Mute R. Kelly Many people have called for repercussions against the R&B star following a documentary about his treatment of women, but legal and commercial hurdles stand in the way.
+How We Apologize Now The iPhone app Notes has become the medium of choice for celebrity mea culpas.
+‘The Shutdown Makes Me Nervous’: Young People Caught in Cross Hairs of Impasse Now in its fourth week, the shutdown’s effects have cascaded across generations, from children worried about their parents to college students unable to pay tuition.
+52 Places to Go in 2019 A starter kit for escaping into the world.
+Redefining Representation: The Women of the 116th Congress Just over 100 years ago, the first woman was sworn into Congress. Now a record 131 women are serving in the Legislature.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.PARIS — After weeks of national turmoil spurred by the Yellow Vest protests, President Emmanuel Macron on Tuesday kicked off what he intended as a peacemaking exercise, and what the French government billed as the “Great National Debate.”
+In a sort of two-month talkfest, the French are supposed to air their grievances, all shepherded by the government and local mayors. A cultural fondness for talk, and more talk, will get its consecration, with the hope that calm will follow.
+For the moment, however, France is anything but calm.
+Apart from the random violence and vandalism in the streets of Paris and other French cities, there have also been less evident and more targeted threats, and violence, in an atmosphere of increasing menace.
+Mr. Macron’s deputies in parliament have become the front-line proxies for Yellow Vest hatred of the president. Dozens of parliamentarians representing his political movement La Republique en Marche, or Republic on the Move, have been threatened, their houses and offices vandalized, and anti-Semitic and racist insults hurled at them.To the Editor:
+Re “G.O.P. Leaders Condemn King Over Comment” (front page, Jan. 15):
+It appears that the leadership of the Republican Party is capable of condemning and punishing racist ideologues like Representative Steve King when safely distanced from any significant elections. More telling of the party’s true colors and beliefs was its tolerance of these same offensive ideas just a few months ago when Mr. King was in a closely contested election to hold his House seat. At that time the silence of these same leaders was deafening.
+Peter Schmidt
+Phillipsburg, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+It ’s an extraordinary event when a major party condemns one of its own leaders as Republicans did by removing Steve King from his House committee assignments over overt racist language. Do not be fooled by their damage control. Mr. King was not condemned for being racist but for not sufficiently concealing the underlying racism and xenophobia that are the foundation of today’s Republican Party. Mr. King used racist language that was too obvious to ignore.
+Walt Zlotow
+Glen Ellyn, Ill.With the ruling Conservatives so divided, Mr. Corbyn’s Labour is in a potentially powerful position. If it threw its votes behind the Tories backing Mrs. May’s agreement, or supported a second referendum, or decided to back a softer Brexit that retained much closer links with Europe — “Norway Plus,” as it’s known — that proposal would likely pass. But so far, the party has refused to commit itself to any such solutions because it, too, is split between those who want to leave the European Union and those who want to remain.
+So far it has suited Mr. Corbyn, a longtime Euroskeptic, to stay on the fence, loftily opposing all of the Tories’ proposals and declaring that if only Labour were in power, it could magically achieve a better Brexit deal. He’s reluctant to back anything that the Tories propose because he calculates that doing so will implicate him in Brexit’s inevitable economic damage. He doesn’t want a second referendum because he doesn’t know which side to back.
+This comfortable evasion cannot be sustained after Mrs. May’s crushing defeat on Tuesday. Labour will have to pick sides and live with the consequences. Members of Parliament and leaders in all parties will be faced with the starkest of choices: Britain’s future will be decided within the next month.
+Neither party has enough votes to make that choice on its own. The question now is whether the leadership on both sides has the will, imagination or character to reach out to the other and avoid a no-deal disaster. There’s nothing in their careers to suggest that is so.
+After her defeat, Mrs. May announced that she wanted to talk with the opposition to discover what compromise members of Parliament were prepared to support. An enraged Mr. Corbyn retorted that over the previous two years she had closed down every attempt at dialogue, and her only priority had been the Conservative Party.
+It is Britain’s misfortune that at this moment, when cooperation and statesmanship are needed to prevent political and economic disaster, both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition are known for being cautious, obstinate, unimaginative, tribal and charmless.LONDON — The Birmingham Royal Ballet is leaping into a new era. On Tuesday, the company announced that Carlos Acosta, the Cuban-born star who is generally considered one of the greatest male dancers of his generation, will be its next director. He succeeds David Bintley, who has led the company for 24 years, and who will step down at the end of this season, in July.
+“It’s a big challenge, but I like challenges,” Mr. Acosta, 45, said in a telephone interview. “I think I can bring innovation to the company, bring it in tune with our time. I want to send a message that Birmingham has a world-class classical ballet company.”
+His hiring is a coup for the company — and for Birmingham, which already boasts a bold-face name in the conductor Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and several important visual arts centers, including the Ikon Gallery and the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
+The appointment isn’t a huge surprise. Mr. Acosta has always been a charismatic, dynamic figure, staging his own seasons in Britain and abroad, choreographing and writing a memoir and a well-reviewed novel, even while he was a principal guest artist from 2003 to 2016 at the Royal Ballet in London, the sister company of the Birmingham troupe. Shortly before his retirement from the Royal Ballet, he founded the company Acosta Danza in Cuba and he has more recently opened a dance academy in Havana.One of the most closely watched parts of the governor’s speech was his plan to legalize recreational marijuana, a proposal that has taken on increased urgency as popular support has crescendoed.
+Mr. Cuomo offered scant details, but he indicated that New York’s law would likely be more restrictive than in other states that have legalized recreational marijuana.
+The drug would be available to adults 21 and older and subject to local veto, with counties and large cities able to opt out. Mr. Cuomo estimated that legalization would bring in $300 million each year in tax revenue by the time it was fully implemented. But that would not be until 2023, according to Mr. Cuomo’s budget director, Robert Mujica.
+The initial rollout would bring in much less revenue, projections show: Budget documents included no revenue from marijuana regulation and taxation for the 2020 fiscal year, and $83 million for 2021.
+Mr. Cuomo also provided little detail about how the state would spend that revenue — a topic that has inspired intense speculation, with proposals ranging from subway repairs to criminal justice rehabilitation to tax relief. In budget documents, the governor’s description of possible uses was just as far-flung, including beneficiaries such as small business development, substance abuse treatment and “any other identified purpose recommended” by a new cannabis office.
+Mr. Cuomo also said that the state would seal certain cannabis-related criminal records, though he did not specify which ones. Several legislators and advocacy groups have demanded a social justice component to any legalization bill.
+The embrace of marijuana marks a fast evolution in Mr. Cuomo’s thinking: Less than two years ago, he called it a “gateway drug.” But the political landscape has been upended since then, both in Albany — where a group of young insurgents helped take back the State Senate for Democrats — and the nation, where the Trump administration continues to act as both foil and punching bag for Mr. Cuomo.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+If you want official numbers on how 2018 ranks in the annals of recent record-breaking temperatures, you’ll have to wait.
+One result of the government shutdown, now in its fourth week, is that NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are unable to issue their annual temperature analysis. And, because that data is so widely used , neither can some other governments.
+For example, Britain’s national weather and climate monitoring service, the Met Office, publishes its own global temperature estimates that incorporate NOAA data but use a slightly different analytical method. That’s important because when many different analyses show the same trend — in this case, rising global temperatures — it helps give researchers confidence that their work is sound. But, the NOAA data that the Met Office needs is currently offline.
+“Usually, we would have received it by now,” said John Kennedy, a scientist at the Met Office Hadley Centre, which specializes in climate research. “But this month, we haven’t.”Senator, lawyer, mother, children’s book author and now, Democratic candidate for president. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is in. “I’m filing an exploratory committee for president of the United States tonight.” Hailing from President Trump’s home state of New York, she’s joining what will likely be a crowded 2020 field. “Which Democrats —” “Who will run for president in 2020?” “The list is growing. It ranges from —” Gillibrand is a former corporate lawyer and congresswoman. Growing up in a political family in Albany, She fell in love early on. “I was drawn into politics when I was a little girl. And it was really with my grandmother, who loved politics.” She was appointed to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in 2009. “Welcome, Senator.” Gillibrand went on to win the seat again in a 2010 special election and has held it ever since. Over time she has reversed her positions on immigration and gun control. “You start off in a different place on immigration and now you’re more progressive on that. On guns, you started off, you know, more kind of pro-Second Amendment. Now, you went from having an ‘A’ to an ‘F’ from the N.R.A.” “I recognize that there was a lot of things I didn’t know, and I should have been fighting for them before.” She’s now one of the party’s most reliably liberal voices. Some of her priorities: A populist economic agenda, women’s rights and gender equality and fighting for victims of sexual assault with a focus on the military. Who is being held accountable for doing nothing since 2013? Who? Which commander?” Gillibrand was the first senator in her party to call for the resignation of fellow Democrat Al Franken, following accusations of sexual misconduct. “Enough is enough.” Here she is during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “I want to really have Dr. Blasey Ford’s back tomorrow. So I’m going to sit behind her. Not only do I support her. But I believe her.” So what is her dynamic with President Trump? He said: “‘She’s just a puppet of Schumer. You know that. He put her there.” He’s also referred to her as a “lightweight” who would do anything for money. She responded this way. “It was a sexist smear. It’s part of the president’s effort at name calling and it’s not going to silence me.” Gillibrand has also voted against almost all of Trump’s major nominees. “I urge my colleagues. Reject this bad choice.” So what are her chances? Gillibrand is seen as a serious contender, but so far her poll numbers are low. Her next step? Building a national profile and campaign.Long before I saw Carol Channing in the flesh in the title role of “Hello, Dolly!,” I had already watched her performance many, many times in my mind’s eye — and in very specific detail. When Ms. Channing, who died on Tuesday at 97, first appeared in the part with which she would forever be identified, I was only 9 years old and living in Winston-Salem, N.C.
+But as a boy in thrall to all things New York, and especially all things Broadway, I monitored whatever was happening on its stages as closely as long distance allowed in the pre-internet age. My parents subscribed to The New Yorker, so that was a help, and I could go to the Wake Forest College library, just a bike ride away, and check out the arts pages of The Times.
+But even without such auxiliary aids, I have the feeling that Ms. Channing’s Dolly would have imprinted herself on my imagination. That show, and her performance, seemed to have infiltrated the oxygen of the entire United States in 1964, much as the musical “Hamilton” would half a century later. Its exuberance, as embodied by its title song, had a neon-bright kick that helped dispel the shadow of John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before.
+[Read the memories of Carol Channing from those who knew her]
+With my sister, who was seven years older but almost equally smitten with the romance of musical theater, I acquired the original cast recording (three sacred words to me at the time). I studied the photographs on the inside of the album cover, memorized the liner notes and, within at most 36 hours, knew every lyric to each of its songs.The last vestiges of the “Silent Sam” statue were removed from a park on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill early Tuesday morning at the direction of the school’s chancellor, prompting an apparent backlash from the university system’s top administrators.
+The chancellor, Carol L. Folt, said on Monday she had authorized the removal of the statue’s base, which bore plaques commemorating university students who fought for the Confederacy. She simultaneously made a surprise announcement that she would be resigning at the end of the academic year.
+But on Tuesday afternoon, her departure was hastened to the end of this month, after a vote by the board of governors, which oversees the statewide university system. Harry L. Smith Jr., the chairman of the board, called Dr. Folt’s action “stunning” and “draconian.”
+“It’s probably in the best interest to go ahead and allow a change in leadership so we can move to a healing process,” said Mr. Smith, who on Monday evening complained that the board had not been properly consulted.Greg Pritikin’s “The Last Laugh,” on Netflix, is a transparent attempt to do for Chevy Chase what “The Hero” did for Sam Elliott, or “The Last Movie Star” for Burt Reynolds, or “Hello My Name Is Doris” for Sally Field: It places an aging star at the center of a low-budget, character-driven indie and reminds us of his gifts.
+And Chase here works overtime: He does schtick, plays dramatic beats, romances Andie MacDowell, even sings and plays jazz piano.
+But he doesn’t really have the chops for this kind of showcase — his earlier vehicles, while funny, never required him to be much of an actor. As Al Hart, a retired agent for stand-up comics who takes his very first client (Richard Dreyfuss) on the road for one last tour, Chase mostly engages in his trademark mugging, while his earnest moments are smothered by the clumsiness of the filmmaking.Get the DealBook newsletter to make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them.
+__________
+The huge swings that defined stock trading in December have ended. That doesn’t mean investors think everything is fine.
+In the bond market, traders of government debt are still signaling concerns about the direction of the United States economy. Among the clearest of these signs is the yield curve.
+The yield curve essentially measures the difference between short-term and long-term government bonds. When investors are expecting economic growth, interest rates on long-term bonds like the 10-year Treasury note are usually higher than those on short-term debt. Why? Because under normal circumstances it is riskier to lend money out for 10 years than for, say, three months. (A lot can happen over the next decade that might keep your loan from being repaid, even by the government.)BERLIN — Germany’s domestic intelligence agency took a first step on Tuesday toward placing the far-right Alternative for Germany party under surveillance as a threat to the country’s democracy, announcing that it would formally observe its youth wing, which it called “extremist.”
+It was the first time in Germany’s postwar history that a party seated in parliament was put under such scrutiny, setting the stage for a looming battle between the state and a party whose strength has steadily grown even as its suspected associations with neo-Nazi groups have stirred concern.
+The leaders of Alternative for Germany, or AfD, as the party is known, routinely attack the press, accuse Muslim immigrants of being criminals, and question the principles of liberal democracy.
+[Read: Germany shooting is deadliest yet in upsurge of far-right attacks in the country.]
+The warning on Tuesday was issued by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, an agency whose founding mission when it was established after World War II was to protect against the rise of political forces — primarily another Nazi party — that could once again threaten Germany’s democracy.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The schools are among the most recognizable Catholic institutions in New York, with reputations extending far beyond the church’s followers and the city’s borders: Xavier, Regis, Brooklyn Prep, Fordham Prep. They educated many in the city’s Catholic elite, producing politicians, authors, academics and at least one Supreme Court justice. They regularly appear on lists of New York’s best Catholic schools.
+But on Tuesday, the schools’ names popped up again and again on a different kind of list: One naming Jesuit priests who were identified by the Society of Jesus as having a history of sexual abuse found to be “more likely true than not after investigation.”
+In some cases, the priests passed through the schools in careers that spanned as many as 30 years.
+The lists of accused priests were published by the Jesuit order one after the other in recent weeks, creating rosters of several hundred names. The Society of Jesus, as the Jesuit order is known, is an influential force in the global church; it has more than 16,000 members, including Pope Francis.
+The latest list names priests who served in the order’s province covering the Northeastern United States, most of whom served in Jesuit schools.1:09
+‘Look at That Thing’: Footage Shows Pilots Spotting Unknown Object
+10:46
+Why U.S. Weapons Sold to the Saudis Are Hitting Hospitals in Yemen
+1:35
+Biden Outlines $1.9 Trillion Economic Rescue Package
+1:28
+Officials Assure the Public That Inauguration Will Be Safe
+0:50
+Coronavirus Cases Surge in Arizona
+0:48
+U.S. Capitol Fills With National Guard Troops
+0:59
+Ocasio-Cortez Says She Feared for Her Life During Capitol Riot
+1:54
+House Calls on Pence to Remove Trump From Power
+0:52
+Schumer Wants Capitol Riot Participants Placed on No-Fly List
+1:18
+Prosecutors Expect to Arrest ‘Hundreds’ Tied to Capitol Riot
+1:13
+Gorillas Test Positive for Coronavirus at San Diego Zoo
+1:16SÃO PAULO, Brazil — President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil signed a decree on Tuesday making it easier to buy guns and signaling he will follow through on his campaign promise to tackle the country’s epidemic of violence by arming the “good guys” and crushing violent drug gangs.
+Mr. Bolsonaro was sworn in on Jan. 1 after a decisive electoral victory last year that was bolstered by his vows to combat crime with an iron fist and reduce Brazil’s record-high murder rate. Simulating guns with his fingers at campaign rallies, he pledged to make it easier for the police to shoot suspects and to relax the country’s restrictive firearms law.
+Two weeks into his term, he took what he called a “first step” to those ends, to be followed by further congressional measures.
+“I signed this decree, created by many upstanding people, so that at this first moment, upstanding citizens can have peace inside their homes,” Mr. Bolsonaro said at a signing ceremony in the capital, Brasília.SANTA ROSA DE COPAN, Honduras — Hundreds of Hondurans traveling in vehicles and on foot converged on the Guatemalan border on Tuesday, part of a new migrant caravan bound for the United States which President Trump has already used as fresh ammunition in his fight for border wall funding.
+The caravan began departing from the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula on Monday night. Others set off throughout the day on Tuesday. Honduran authorities estimated that between 800 and 1,000 people were in the caravan, while officials from Honduras’ National Human Rights Commission put the range between 1,500 and 2,000.
+Mr. Trump, whose dispute with Congress over his demand for $5.7 billion for a border wall between Mexico and the United States has led to a partial shutdown of the federal government since Dec. 22, warned on Twitter on Tuesday about the new mass migration.
+“A big new Caravan is heading up to our Southern Border from Honduras,” he wrote. “Only a Wall, or Steel Barrier, will keep our Country safe! Stop playing political games and end the Shutdown!”“We were trying to move out when the first explosion happened. So, by the time we reached the last entrance to come out, then the gunshots are being aimed at us. So we could not tell where they are coming from, who is shooting them. So we just retreated and went back to the offices.” “I can now confirm that as of about one hour ago, the security operation at Dusit complex is over and all the terrorists eliminated.”This article is no longer being updated. For the latest news on the government shutdown, click here.
+Day 29: What’s been happening?
+The country’s federal courts, which have been open and operating despite the shutdown, could be close to running out of money. Some courts have delayed civil cases, and court-appointed lawyers have not been paid at all. A crippled judiciary system could put enormous pressure on President Trump and Congress to make a deal.
+The Midwest and Northeast are bracing for a major winter storm this weekend. Employees at the National Weather Service are furloughed during the shutdown, but many forecasters there are considered essential and are working without pay.
+Veterans in emergency management are worried about longer-term trouble, though. Weather forecasters and emergency responders on the federal, state and local levels have fallen behind on critical preparation, research and analysis that typically takes place this time of the year ahead of the hurricane season.The percentage of minorities and women on the boards of the largest public companies in the United States has edged up in the last two years, but “advancement is still slow” and the bulk of corporate directors at such firms continue to be white men, a study released on Tuesday finds.
+The study, by the Alliance for Board Diversity, which advocates for broader demographic inclusion in boardrooms, and the professional services firm Deloitte, shows that women and minorities occupied 38.6 percent of board seats at Fortune 100 companies last year, compared with 35.9 percent in 2016.
+At Fortune 500 companies, the figure rose to 34 percent in 2018 from 30.8 percent two years earlier, the last time the study was done, but still fell short of the alliance’s target.
+“Our goal is to get to 40 percent diversity so we can have fair representation on Fortune 500 corporate boards,” said Linda Akutagawa, the group’s chairwoman. She added that “some of the largest companies in the world can find talented, diverse board members with the skills and experience to put on large corporate boards.”Scientists trying to solve this mystery recently grew mushrooms in the lab, unleashed fungi-eating nematodes on them and videotaped the aftermath. They found that the fungi somehow sensed the predators and sent signals to other parts of their bodies. Their findings, published recently in Current Biology, shed new light on how the many cells within even primitive organisms communicate like plants or animals.
+Image Coprinopsis cinerea, or the gray shag mushroom, growing in California. Credit... iStock/Getty Images
+“They may appear simple, but they share features that are also known for more complicated organisms,” said Markus Künzler, a microbiologist at ETH Zürich in Switzerland who led the study. “There is internal communication going on that we know very little about.”
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+What we do know is that fungi-loving nematodes ingest their dinner like creepy, syringe-wielding serial killers. The worm uses a needle on its head to puncture the mushroom’s hyphae — the stringy filaments that make up its mycelium, or vegetative body — and suck out its cellular content.
+Under attack, Coprinopsis cinerea, the mushroom commonly known as the “gray shag” or “inky cap” and often used in fungi research, puts up a slow, but steady fight.
+Dr. Künzler and his colleagues paired the fungi and nematodes in a lab setting, and also added a dye to the mushrooms that glows under a microscope. They watched the mushroom’s response travel in the form of genes activating, lighting up as its warning message propagated up and down the fungus’s fattest hyphae. It did so every few hours — and it switched directions. As they switched on in succession, the genes produced a nasty toxin the nematodes don’t like.Steven Daly, an expert in river ice hydraulics at the Army Corps of Engineers’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in Hanover, N.H., said his agency generally got just one or two reports of rotating ice disks in the United States each year.
+They’re not usually this big, though.
+Kenneth G. Libbrecht, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., who has studied ice physics, said that most ice disks he had seen were in the 20- to 30-foot range. Local officials estimated that the Westbrook ice disk was about 300 feet across.
+“It might be a world-record size, if anybody were keeping track,” Dr. Libbrecht said.
+Tina Radel, the marketing and communications manager for the city, filmed a drone video after Rob Mitchell, a local business owner, alerted her to the remarkable sight on Monday. After posting it, she spent Tuesday fielding calls from reporters around the country.
+“It’s been an overwhelming reaction,” she said. “People are loving it.”
+In fact, The Portland Press Herald noted the ice disk had Westbrook buzzing “almost as much as when city police spotted a giant snake eating a beaver in roughly the same location in June 2016.”1. British lawmakers dealt a crushing defeat to Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for leaving the European Union.
+The 432-to-202 vote was the biggest loss in the House of Commons in recent history for a prime minister. The turn of events thrusts Britain into further political chaos just 10 weeks before the country’s scheduled exit from the E.U. Mrs. May above center.
+The opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn put forward a motion of no confidence in Mrs. May, which Parliament will debate and vote on Wednesday. As things stand, the prime minister must return to Parliament by Monday to present a backup withdrawal plan.Contrary to movement myth, Buckley did not “purge” the Birchers from the movement in the 1960s. National Review articles in 1962 singled out the Birch Society’s founder, Robert Welch, for personal condemnation while sparing ordinary members of his organization. (A more full-throated attack on the group followed three years later, but only after Goldwater’s defeat.)
+Goldwater, too, criticized Welch personally — but went no further. His campaign was powered by best-selling tracts like Phyllis Schlafly’s “A Choice, Not an Echo,” steeped in the Birchers’ baroquely paranoid style. A who’s who of the hard right, including the anti-Semite Gerald L.K. Smith, enthusiastically supported his candidacy, and the campaign did little to disavow them.
+Even the party establishment that resisted Goldwater’s nomination blanched at calling out extremism. A proposed platform plank at the convention denouncing extremism and explicitly naming the Birch Society failed to find support even from Dwight Eisenhower and George Romney. By the early 1980s, long into the Birch Society’s decline, Republicans would feel less reason than ever to hide or apologize for engaging Birchers; the Society’s magazine, The Review of the News, featured interviews with the likes of Dick Cheney and Chuck Grassley.
+The next generation of conservative movement activists, including Paul Weyrich (a key mentor of Newt Gingrich), Morton Blackwell and Richard Viguerie, adopted a more pugilistic approach that brought together radical and mainstream elements on the right. In the 1970s, they avoided traditional Republican small-government political appeals in favor of mobilizations over busing, abortion and gay rights while courting the segregationist George Wallace’s followers and brokering a fateful alliance between Christian evangelicals and the Republican Party.
+The New Right formed think tanks, advocacy groups and political action committees to do the work they didn’t trust the formal party to do. Parties “are no more than instruments, temporary and disposable,” declared the Maryland congressman Bob Bauman at 1975’s Conservative Political Action Conference.
+This troublemaking activism irked party officials like Ronald Reagan’s first Republican National Committee chairman, Richard Richards, who called the outside groups “loose cannonballs on the deck of a ship.” But their approach eventually came to dominate, thanks to the expanding right-wing media ecosystem, primary voters, and direct-mail fund-raising dollars. The refusal to police boundaries evolved from an ethos to a structural feature of the political world built by the Long New Right.
+For decades, the Long New Right has depended on buy-in from moneyed interests within the Republican coalition. The grass-roots right may have disliked the plutocrats’ economic agenda, but they repeatedly accepted it to gain access to power. For their part, the plutocrats may have regarded the New Right as uncouth and their social agenda divisive, but they, too, preferred it to any available alternative.Mr. Orcel’s most famous — or infamous — deal was the 2007 sale of the Dutch bank ABN Amro to Royal Bank of Scotland and other banks. Mr. Orcel at the time was a senior investment banker at Merrill Lynch, and he helped shape the roughly $100 billion transaction on the eve of the financial crisis. It ended up saddling some of its acquirers with crippling losses that necessitated government bailouts. Among the only winners in that transaction was Santander, which bought ABN’s Italian operation for less than $10 billion and then, months later, sold it to another bank for more than $13 billion.
+In 2012, UBS hired Mr. Orcel to help overhaul its beleaguered investment bank. It was an expensive hire; the Swiss bank paid $26 million to make up for deferred compensation Mr. Orcel forfeited by leaving Merrill.
+At UBS, Mr. Orcel was greeted warily. Within months, he elbowed out his partner and became the sole head of investment banking. His colleagues at UBS were awe-struck by Mr. Orcel’s rainmaking but were less impressed with his sometimes-brusque management style.
+When Santander announced it was hiring Mr. Orcel last September, analysts said the move could augur another round of acquisitions by the Spanish bank.
+UBS, however, was not thrilled to lose a top executive. The Swiss bank enforced a provision in Mr. Orcel’s contract that required him to take a six-month break, known as gardening leave, before defecting to a rival business. The move angered Santander executives, who viewed the maneuver as a needless jab at a longtime client of UBS.
+But money turned out to be the bigger problem.
+During his seven years at UBS, Mr. Orcel racked up well over $50 million in deferred compensation, which the bank promised to pay him in the coming years.
+When Santander hired Mr. Orcel, it agreed to pay him whatever amount UBS didn’t. Santander executives and board members figured that UBS would pay most of the deferred compensation and that Santander’s share would be relatively small, according to people familiar with Santander’s deliberations.WASHINGTON — After an uproar, Alex Jones’s mass media revival proved short-lived.
+Last year, Mr. Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, was erased from virtually every major social media platform for violating standards against hate speech, among others. This week, it came to light that Mr. Jones had a new, free channel on the streaming service Roku, which brings online video content to users’ televisions, granting Mr. Jones access to Roku’s 27 million users.
+No more.
+News that Infowars was available on Roku ignited a social media fury, coming months after Apple, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and others banned Infowars content.
+“After the Infowars channel became available, we heard from concerned parties and have determined that the channel should be removed from our platform,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday evening. “Deletion from the channel store and platform has begun and will be completed shortly.”
+Among those expressing shock that Roku had added Infowars to its lineup were lawyers for the families of victims of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., who have been threatened and harassed by people who believe the bogus theory spread by Mr. Jones that the massacre was a hoax. The company’s announcement that it would yank the Infowars channel came hours after the lawyers publicly criticized Roku’s move.Senator, lawyer, mother, children’s book author and now, Democratic candidate for president. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is in. “I’m filing an exploratory committee for president of the United States tonight.” Hailing from President Trump’s home state of New York, she’s joining what will likely be a crowded 2020 field. “Which Democrats —” “Who will run for president in 2020?” “The list is growing. It ranges from —” Gillibrand is a former corporate lawyer and congresswoman. Growing up in a political family in Albany, She fell in love early on. “I was drawn into politics when I was a little girl. And it was really with my grandmother, who loved politics.” She was appointed to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in 2009. “Welcome, Senator.” Gillibrand went on to win the seat again in a 2010 special election and has held it ever since. Over time she has reversed her positions on immigration and gun control. “You start off in a different place on immigration and now you’re more progressive on that. On guns, you started off, you know, more kind of pro-Second Amendment. Now, you went from having an ‘A’ to an ‘F’ from the N.R.A.” “I recognize that there was a lot of things I didn’t know, and I should have been fighting for them before.” She’s now one of the party’s most reliably liberal voices. Some of her priorities: A populist economic agenda, women’s rights and gender equality and fighting for victims of sexual assault with a focus on the military. Who is being held accountable for doing nothing since 2013? Who? Which commander?” Gillibrand was the first senator in her party to call for the resignation of fellow Democrat Al Franken, following accusations of sexual misconduct. “Enough is enough.” Here she is during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “I want to really have Dr. Blasey Ford’s back tomorrow. So I’m going to sit behind her. Not only do I support her. But I believe her.” So what is her dynamic with President Trump? He said: “‘She’s just a puppet of Schumer. You know that. He put her there.” He’s also referred to her as a “lightweight” who would do anything for money. She responded this way. “It was a sexist smear. It’s part of the president’s effort at name calling and it’s not going to silence me.” Gillibrand has also voted against almost all of Trump’s major nominees. “I urge my colleagues. Reject this bad choice.” So what are her chances? Gillibrand is seen as a serious contender, but so far her poll numbers are low. Her next step? Building a national profile and campaign.I’ve spent four decades reporting from countries with weak institutions — like Russia, China, every Arab state, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela — where the arbitrary whims of the leader or his party are the basis of all decision-making, not the rule of law, built on independent institutions.
+But Trump appreciates none of this. It would be easy to attribute it all to malevolence. But I think a lot of it is sheer ignorance. I don’t think Trump ever took civics. I don’t think he ever understood the separation of powers or the meaning of independent agencies. That’s why the shutdown doesn’t bother him. His instincts are those of a banana republic dictator.
+That’s also why Trump is so comfortable with the likes of Vladimir Putin and so willing to damage the thing that makes America most special.
+And that’s why I so appreciate Roberts’s quiet pushback so much. It’s why I also appreciate those retired military officers who have been willing to call out Trump’s abuse of norms and his willingness to use the U.S. military as a prop for his political purposes.
+As CNN reported, Trump used a Thanksgiving Day call to U.S. service members abroad to “justify his controversial deployment of nearly 6,000 U.S. troops to the southern border. Without evidence, he painted Air Force Gen. David Lyons as a proponent of his hard-line immigration policies after Lyons said U.S. troops are fighting in Afghanistan to prevent terrorists from reaching ‘our shores again.’”
+On a post-Christmas visit to Iraq, CNN reported, Trump used his appearance before troops to hammer Democrats for not supporting his wall funding “and also posed for photographs with at least one service member who was holding a Trump-Pence campaign sign, and he autographed red ‘Make America Great Again' hats for troops in fatigues, despite military guidelines that prohibit active-duty troops from participating ‘in partisan political activities’ and the expectation that they keep their political views private while in uniform.”
+The Washington Post reported that on a tour of Border Patrol stations in McAllen, Tex., last week, “Trump gathered 15 agents, dressed in uniforms and tactical gear, to stand next to him as he filmed a minute-long video. ‘They have done an incredible job,’ said Trump, sporting a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. ‘But we all want to see a wall or a barrier because that will make your job even easier.’ … The agents remained silent, but the visual message was clear: Trump wanted viewers to believe Customs and Border Protection, an agency of 59,000 employees, is firmly behind him in a political skirmish that has resulted in a partial government shutdown.”Adam Moss’s decision to step down after 15 years as editor in chief of New York sent ripples through the magazine world. The New York Times spoke with peers and colleagues about his career and influence. Their remarks have been edited for length and clarity.
+Graydon Carter
+Former editor, Vanity Fair
+“Adam was, and is, one of the giants. He had the instincts for a good story. He found and kept a great staff. And he knew that magazines had to surprise you visually on top of everything else.”
+Janice Min
+Former editor, Us Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter
+“I found him to be a really good example of what an editor can be, which is to try not to turn into a celebrity himself. I had lunch with him and — I always laugh about this — we were talking about people who go out too much, and I said, ‘Do you just not go out?’ He said, very dryly: ‘The closer I get to death, the less I want to hang out with people I can’t stand.’ I just thought, ‘I’m adopting that for the rest of my life.’ Every time I turn down something, I think about that quote. Life becomes much clearer if you abide by that.”
+Frank Rich
+Writer at large, New York; former Op-Ed columnist and theater critic, The New York Times
+“I’m sitting in my office in the mid-1980s and someone who I didn’t know calls me, says: ‘I’m an editor at Esquire. I want to talk to you about a piece.’ He said, ‘Can I buy you a drink at Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle hotel?’ As I later learned from him, he’d never been there before in his life. He was 29. I was halfway into my 10 years as drama critic. I eventually wrote a 10,000-word piece for him when I had a full-time demanding job — that’s how persuasive he was and creative as an editor. It planted the idea at The Times of me becoming an Op-Ed columnist. It completely changed my career.”LONDON — The annals of British politics are filled with stories about the government’s iron-fisted, sometimes terrifying control of parliamentary affairs.
+One former Labour cabinet secretary, Jack Straw, recalled his first encounter as a young member of Parliament with his party’s enforcer, who stopped him in a corridor and grabbed him between the legs. When he asked the deputy chief whip what he had done wrong, the answer was nothing.
+Then the whip added, “But think what I’d do if you crossed me.”
+The many tales of British lawmakers once being kept ruthlessly in line stand in stark contrast to the events of the last week, as Prime Minister Theresa May and her lieutenants tried ineffectually to get her party members to support the government’s plan on withdrawing from the European Union, known as Brexit.
+Her ally Michael Gove, the environment minister, tried on Tuesday morning to scare some wayward lawmakers straight, using the foreboding terminology from “Game of Thrones” to warn them that “if we don’t vote for this deal tonight, in the words of Jon Snow, winter is coming.”He said no conclusions had been drawn, but played down any “conceivable threat” to the United States.
+Later that year, however, H. Marshall Chadwell, the assistant director of scientific intelligence for the C.I.A., concluded in a memo to the C.I.A. director, Walter Bedell Smith, that “sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at high speeds in the vicinity of major U.S. defense installations are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles.”
+By 1953, authorities were concerned that communication channels were becoming dangerously clogged by hundreds of U.F.O. reports. Even false alarms could be perilous, defense agencies worried, since the Soviets might take advantage of the situation by simulating or staging a U.F.O. wave and then attack.
+Documents show the C.I.A. then devised a plan for a “national policy,” as to “what should be told the public regarding the phenomenon, in order to minimize risk of panic.”
+After a closed-door session with a scientific advisory panel chaired by H.P. Robertson from the California Institute of Technology, the C.I.A. issued a secret report recommending a broad educational program for all intelligence agencies, with the aim of “training and debunking.”
+Training meant more public education on how to identify known objects in the sky. “The use of true cases showing first the ‘mystery’ and then the ‘explanation’ would be forceful,” the report said. Debunking “would be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.”Gymnastics aficionados may remember Ohashi, now 21, as a world-class gymnast not far off an Olympic berth. She won the American Cup in 2013, defeating none other than Simone Biles (who went on to be the 2016 Olympic champion).
+But injuries and unhappiness with gymnastics derailed Ohashi’s career. “I was broken,” she said in a Players Tribune video published this summer. Criticism that she was too heavy bothered her. “I hated myself,” she said in the video.
+But coming to U.C.L.A. and competing at a lower level has made all the difference. “My teammates and my coaches have all allowed me to step into my individuality,” she said Tuesday, “and not be defined by just being a gymnast.”
+Last season, U.C.L.A. won the N.C.A.A. gymnastics title, and Ohashi was co-champion in the floor exercise after finishing the regular season ranked No. 1 in that discipline.
+She devised this new floor routine for the new season with the help of her teammates and coach. Her primary inspiration, she said, was YouTube videos of Janet Jackson’s song “Rhythm Nation.”
+Ohashi’s routine has drawn praise from Senator Kamala Harris of California — “This is just fantastic” — and Jesse Jackson — “The ground is no place for a champion.”In 2007, the company and three of its top executives pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges that Purdue had misrepresented the dangers of OxyContin, and they paid $634.5 million in fines. The Sacklers were not accused of any wrongdoing and have not faced personal legal consequences over the drug.
+But last June, Maura Healey, the Massachusetts attorney general, sued eight members of the Sackler family, along with the company and numerous executives and directors, alleging that they had misled doctors and patients about OxyContin’s risks. The suit also claimed that the company aggressively promoted the drug to doctors who were big prescribers of opioids, including physicians who later lost their licenses.
+The court filing released on Tuesday also asserts that Sackler family members were aware that Purdue Pharma repeatedly failed to alert authorities to scores of reports the company had received that OxyContin was being abused and sold on the street. The company also used pharmacy discount cards to increase OxyContin’s sales and Richard Sackler, who served as Purdue Pharma’s president from 1999 to 2003, led a company strategy of blaming abuse of the drug on addicts, the suit claimed.
+In 1995, when the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin, it allowed Purdue Pharma to claim that the opioid’s long-acting formulation was “believed to reduce” its appeal to drug abusers compared with traditional painkillers such as Percocet and Vicodin.
+At a gathering shortly afterward to celebrate the drug’s launch, Mr. Sackler boasted that “the launch of OxyContin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense, and white,” according to a document cited in the legal complaint.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+Company sales representatives told doctors that OxyContin couldn’t be abused and were trained to say that the drug had an addiction risk for patients of “less than one percent,” a claim that had no scientific backing. Within a few years, Purdue Pharma was selling more than $1 billion worth of OxyContin annually.The number of minority coaches in the N.F.L. is likely to fall by half next season, suggesting that the league’s recent efforts to promote diversity in hiring are still a work in progress.
+Two weeks after the end of the regular season, nearly every new head coach hired has been white, which is certain to reignite the debate over whether a league in which roughly three-quarters of the players are black is doing enough to promote people of color into positions of power.
+This season, there were eight minority coaches, tied for the most ever. Yet among eight coaches who have lost their jobs, including those fired midseason, five were black, leaving just three minority coaches — two black and one Latino — among the 32 coaches in the league.
+Thus far, six out of the seven coaches hired by teams have been white.
+The sudden reversal of fortune for minority coaches comes after the 32 N.F.L. owners announced in December that they were strengthening rules that obligate teams to consider minority candidates when hiring coaches and executives.Children had little access to legal services. Instead of several hours of schooling a day, as is offered at licensed shelters for migrant children around the country, children at Tornillo were offered workbooks which they were under no obligation to complete, migrant advocates said.
+The Office of Inspector General in November criticized the facility’s failure to conduct F.B.I. fingerprint background checks on staff, and also said it had too few staff members to provide sufficient mental health care.
+Eventually, the private nonprofit operating the sprawling desert site informed the government that it did not wish to extend its management contract, setting it up to close.
+“This tent city should never have stood in the first place, but it is welcome news that it will be gone,” Will Hurd, the Republican congressman who represents the southwest Texas border region, wrote on Twitter.
+The number of migrant children under detention reached record numbers last year, an increase due to both the large numbers of children crossing the border and the roadblocks imposed by the Trump administration to releasing them to family members.
+The crunch has eased with the elimination of the policy requiring fingerprints of all adults in any household in which a migrant child is placed. Fingerprints are now only required of the adult who is sponsoring the minor.
+As of Jan. 13, about 10,500 migrant minors were held in more than 100 shelters across the country overseen by Health and Human Services, down from about 14,700 in December. Despite the recent decline, the number of children in federal custody remains substantially higher than a year ago, when about 7,550 were staying in shelters.WASHINGTON — The partial government shutdown is inflicting far greater damage on the United States economy than previously estimated, the White House acknowledged on Tuesday, as President Trump’s economists doubled projections of how much economic growth is being lost each week the standoff with Democrats continues.
+The revised estimates from the Council of Economic Advisers show that the shutdown, now in its fourth week, is beginning to have real economic consequences. The analysis, and other projections from outside the White House, suggests that the shutdown has already weighed significantly on growth and could ultimately push the United States economy into a contraction.
+While Vice President Mike Pence previously played down the shutdown’s effects amid a “roaring” economy, White House officials are now cautioning Mr. Trump about the toll it could take on a sustained economic expansion. Mr. Trump, who has hitched his political success to the economy, also faces other economic headwinds, including slowing global growth, a trade war with China and the waning effects of a $1.5 trillion tax cut.John Engler, the interim president of Michigan State University, has drawn fire in recent days for saying in an interview that some of the women abused by Lawrence G. Nassar, a former faculty member and the ex-doctor for the United States national gymnastics team, appeared to be enjoying the spotlight.
+The comments by Mr. Engler, 70, a former governor of Michigan who has been accused of antagonism toward Dr. Nassar’s hundreds of accusers, came during an interview with The Detroit News, which last Friday published an article based on the interview.
+His remarks received renewed focus this week and sparked outrage after they were widely shared online. A spokeswoman for the university did not respond to emails seeking comment on Tuesday.
+“There are a lot of people who are touched by this, survivors who haven’t been in the spotlight,” Mr. Engler said, according to The Detroit News. “In some ways they have been able to deal with this better than the ones who’ve been in the spotlight who are still enjoying that moment at times, you know, the awards and recognition. And it’s ending. It’s almost done.”The move prompted howls of protest from Democrats and some Russia hawks, who accused the administration of going soft on Russia in the midst of the special counsel’s investigation into whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia’s election meddling. Mr. Deripaska has emerged as a bit character in the story lines around the investigation as a result of his payments to Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, who has been convicted and pleaded guilty to charges brought by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
+Democrats urged the Treasury Department to postpone the final decision on sanctions relief for Mr. Deripaska’s companies until after Mr. Mueller’s investigation concludes.
+And the party’s congressional leaders began pushing resolutions in the Senate and the House this week to override the sanctions relief. The resolutions were introduced under a provision in a 2017 law that allows Congress to override certain sanctions-related decisions by the Treasury Department. Under the provision, both the House and the Senate would need to pass resolutions by a Thursday deadline to block the administration’s move to lift the sanctions. Failing congressional action, the sanctions would automatically be lifted.
+The Democrats’ efforts at first seemed to stand little chance, given efforts to stifle them by the administration and the Republicans who control the Senate.
+Mr. Mnuchin visited Republican senators on Tuesday before the vote to implore them to support the sanctions relief. The appearance followed a briefing to the House last week in which he argued that the deal his agency negotiated with Mr. Deripaska’s companies would punish the oligarch by separating him from the companies, without having economic ripple effects. The briefing left Democratic leaders unconvinced.
+And Tuesday’s Senate vote indicated that Mr. Mnuchin’s assurances did not assuage doubts among the party’s Russia skeptics that the deal with Mr. Deripaska’s companies sufficiently decreased his control.
+“I don’t like the way it’s structured,” said Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, who voted with Democrats and has been among the party’s leading critics of Russia.WASHINGTON — The first time they met was in Germany. President Trump took his interpreter’s notes afterward and ordered him not to disclose what he heard to anyone. Later that night, at a dinner, Mr. Trump pulled up a seat next to President Vladimir V. Putin to talk without any American witnesses at all.
+Their third encounter was in Vietnam when Mr. Trump seemed to take Mr. Putin’s word that he had not interfered in American elections. A formal summit meeting followed in Helsinki, Finland, where the two leaders kicked out everyone but the interpreters. Most recently, they chatted in Buenos Aires after Mr. Trump said they would not meet because of Russian aggression.
+Mr. Trump has adamantly insisted there was “no collusion” with Russia during his 2016 presidential campaign. But each of the five times he has met with Mr. Putin since taking office, he has fueled suspicions about their relationship. The unusually secretive way he has handled these meetings has left many in his own administration guessing what happened and piqued the interest of investigators.
+“What’s disconcerting is the desire to hide information from your own team,” said Andrew S. Weiss, who was a Russia adviser to President Bill Clinton. “The fact that Trump didn’t want the State Department or members of the White House team to know what he was talking with Putin about suggests it was not about advancing our country’s national interest but something more problematic.”Congratulatory Telegram After Trump’s Election Mr. Putin was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Mr. Trump on his victory in the 2016 election, with a note Mr. Trump later described as “beautiful.”
+First Phone Call Mr. Putin and Mr. Trump spoke for the first time, by phone. The two men agreed “on the absolutely unsatisfactory state of bilateral relations” between the United States and Russia, according to a statement from the Kremlin. Trump’s office said the president-elect “noted to President Putin that he is very much looking forward to having a strong and enduring relationship with Russia and the people of Russia.”
+Trump Releases Christmas Greetings From Putin Mr. Trump’s office released a translated holiday letter from Mr. Putin expressing a wish for cooperation and collaboration. “A very nice letter from Vladimir Putin; his thoughts are so correct,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.
+Congratulatory Call After Trump Takes Office Several of Mr. Trump’s senior advisers were present in the Oval Office for his first phone call with Mr. Putin as president. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters Mr. Trump received a congratulatory phone call from Mr. Putin that lasted about an hour.
+Phone Call After St. Petersburg Attack Mr. Trump called Mr. Putin to express his condolences for the victims of a terrorist attack on the subway in St. Petersburg.
+Phone Call on Syria The two presidents spoke by phone about the war in Syria, terrorism in the Middle East and North Korea.
+Private Discussion at G-20 Meeting in Hamburg, Germany Stephen Crowley/The New York Times Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin met face to face for the first time on the sidelines of the Group of 20 economic summit meeting, along with Rex W. Tillerson, the secretary of state at the time, and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. According to a former senior administration official, after the meeting Mr. Trump took away his interpreter’s notes and told the interpreter not to discuss the conversation.
+Second Discussion at G-20 Meeting in Hamburg It was later reported that Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin spoke again at a dinner for G-20 leaders, joined only by Mr. Putin’s translator. The dinner was closed to reporters, and the White House did not publicly disclose the conversation until it was reported more than a week later. There is no official United States government record of what was said.
+Brief Conversations at Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Meeting in Da Nang, Vietnam The White House said no formal meeting would occur between Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin at the forum, but video showed the two presidents shaking hands and chatting. Mr. Trump later said he asked Mr. Putin about Russian meddling in the 2016 election and that Mr. Putin denied it. “Every time he sees me he says, ‘I didn’t do that,’ and I really believe that when he tells me that, he means it,” Mr. Trump told reporters. “I think he is very insulted by it, which is not a good thing for our country.”
+Hourlong Phone Call The two presidents spoke on the phone about terrorism, Syria and Ukraine.
+Phone Call After Putin’s Annual News Conference Mr. Trump thanked Mr. Putin for acknowledging the United States’ strong economic performance. They also discussed North Korea, according to the White House.
+Phone Call on St. Petersburg Terrorist Plot Mr. Putin called Mr. Trump to thank United States intelligence agencies for providing information that he said helped to foil a terrorist plot in St. Petersburg, Russia.
+New Year’s Letter From Putin Mr. Putin sent Mr. Trump well wishes for the new year and called for “pragmatic cooperation” between their two countries.
+Phone Call After Moscow Plane Crash After a plane crash in Russia killed 71 people, Mr. Trump spoke to Mr. Putin to express his condolences.
+Phone Call After Putin’s Re-election Mr. Trump called Mr. Putin and congratulated the Russian president on his election victory, confounding aides who wrote clear instructions on briefing materials: “DO NOT CONGRATULATE.”
+Two-Hour Private Meeting in Helsinki, Finland Doug Mills/The New York Times After a preliminary meeting that included other American officials, Mr. Trump met with Mr. Putin privately in their first formal summit meeting, accompanied only by their interpreters. The White House provided scant information about what was said, leaving even some administration officials in the dark. At a joint news conference afterward, Mr. Trump avoided criticizing Mr. Putin and questioned his own intelligence agencies’ conclusion that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. Democrats have called on Mr. Trump’s interpreters to testify about this meeting and others.
+Informal Conversation at G-20 Meeting in Buenos Aires Juan Mabromata/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Mr. Trump abruptly canceled a planned meeting with Mr. Putin, citing concerns about Russian aggression toward Ukraine. Mr. Trump appeared to avoid Mr. Putin, even as they posed for a photograph together with other world leaders. But the two men eventually held a brief, “informal” conversation over dinner with other world leaders that evening, according to the White House. The dinner was closed to reporters.The British Parliament’s long-anticipated vote on a plan to withdraw from the European Union — also known as Brexit — came to its expected conclusion on Tuesday night when lawmakers weighed in on a deal proposed by Prime Minister Theresa May.
+No one really thought that at the last minute Mrs. May would be able to pull a rabbit out of her hat to secure approval for the plan. And she didn’t, with her Brexit deal rejected by a vote of 432 to 202. Now she has to go hat in hand to Brussels to see if she can work some magic there.
+Spoiler alert: She almost certainly cannot.
+Here’s what to know as Britain enters uncharted territory of the process that is Brexit.
+The opposition has called a vote of no confidence.
+On Tuesday night, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, called for a vote of no confidence in Mrs. May’s government, denouncing what he called its “sheer incompetence.”WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Quick one today, as the deadlines go whooshing by.
+Bruce Haight is back, and he’s playing around with his words again.
+Tricky Clues
+1A: It took me the longest time to stop thinking about can lids for the clue “Lid attachment.” We’re thinking about eyelids , and the attachment is a LASH.
+48A: Don’t panic, we’ve seen this before. “Mr. Rogers” as a clue suggests Fred Rogers, the cardigan-wearing television host everyone knew and loved. But not today. In this puzzle, the “Mr. Rogers” is the cowboy film and television (Hi, kids! Ask your folks) star ROY Rogers.
+10D: I wanted “molding” for “Windows strip,” but that’s because I didn’t read the clue closely, and let that be a lesson to you all. A singular window strip might be moldings, but the plural “Windows” hints at the software program. That strip is the TOOLBAR.NATIONAL
+An article on Tuesday about a teachers’ strike in Los Angeles overstated the scale of the demonstration. The strike was the largest in a single district in the past year, not the largest in the United States.
+SCIENCE TIMES
+Because of an editing error, an article on Tuesday about new biometric data on American men miscalculated the height of someone who is 69.4 inches tall. He is about 5 feet 9 inches, not 5 feet 8 inches. In addition, the article misstated the average height of Mexican-American men in 2016. The figure was 66.5 inches, not 61.5 inches.
+OBITUARIES
+An obituary on Sunday about Lamin Sanneh, a world-renowned scholar of Christianity and Islam, referred incorrectly to Rowan Williams, who was quoted as calling Dr. Sanneh “probably the most significant theologian of mission in the English-speaking world today.” While he was the archbishop of Canterbury when he made that statement, he has not held that position since 2012.
+•
+An obituary on Tuesday about the author Francine du Plessix Gray misspelled the surname of an author who reviewed her novel “Lovers and Tyrants” for The New York Times. He was Julian Moynahan, not Moynihan.The road from here to a second vote is no straight line but its trajectory is at least discernible.
+Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, has tabled a vote of no confidence in May’s government. If passed, this would almost certainly trigger a general election, but the Conservative majority is likely to rally around May to prevent that. Then, later this week, the parliamentary maneuvering will begin under a 10-week deadline to March 29.
+The backdrop to the maneuvering is this. The European Union has said the only deal is the one May tabled. That deal was a fudge in extremis leaving Britain inside the European single market until a new trade relationship is worked out; it reflected May’s recognition that a no-deal Brexit would be an economic disaster. This compromise, in turn, infuriated many in her Conservative Party. Two Brexit secretaries quit last year over the agreement negotiations.
+The bill for the divorce, which Britain agreed to under May’s rejected plan, would be about $50 billion, or about eight of Donald Trump’s walls.
+Corbyn’s Labour Party, but not Corbyn himself, favors staying in the European Union; presumably Corbyn will eventually come around, in the absence of any viable alternative.
+Britain is a parliamentary democracy. As Hugo Dixon, the deputy chair of the People’s Vote, a grass-roots movement for a second referendum, wrote in the French daily Le Monde: “Parliament will need to pass a new law to authorize this referendum. It can do this either the easy way, with prime minister’s support; or the hard way, by forcing it through against her wishes.”
+Dixon told me that a “Remain” campaign in a second referendum would need to focus on the real issues that caused the Brexit vote: immigration, the areas of Britain starved of investment and left behind, a deficient National Health Service. None of these problematic issues were caused by the European Union. “In fact,” he said, “they are best addressed in Europe, with an economy given a boost by a decision to remain and a political agenda no longer consumed by Brexit.”
+There are no good solutions to the current impasse but a second referendum is the least bad. All the debate has come up against a stubborn fact: Brexit is damaging to the British national interest. No deal can make it look good. May tried and failed. The British, and particularly British youth, deserve the right to determine their long-term future on the basis of reality.“It’s racist, we do not support it or agree with it, and I think he should find another line of work.”
+REPRESENTATIVE LIZ CHENEY, the House’s third-ranking Republican, on Representative Steve King of Iowa, whom the party removed from two committees over recent comments on white nationalism.In Central Asia, a warming climate is shrinking the Tuyuksu glacier. It’s losing ice every year. Around the world, vanishing glaciers will mean less water for people and crops in the future. Here, the people need to prepare sooner.
+On a summer day in the mountains high above Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, the Tuyuksu glacier is melting like mad. Rivulets of water stream down the glacier’s thin leading edge.
+As she has for nearly two decades, Maria Shahgedanova, a glaciologist at the University of Reading in England, has come here to check on the Tuyuksu. As one of the longest-studied glaciers anywhere, the Tuyuksu helps gauge the impact of climate change on the world’s ice.
+With colleagues from the Kazakhstan Institute of Geography, Dr. Shahgedanova has made the slow trip from Almaty, 15 miles to the north and nearly two miles below, lumbering up a steep, rutted mountain road in a giant Russian utility vehicle.
+At the road’s end sits a Soviet-era research station that, like the Tuyuksu itself, has seen better days.
+On the glacier, researchers maintain an array of measuring stakes planted in holes in the ice.
+Last year, at the end of the summer melting season, the team drew lines on the stakes marking the height of the ice, as researchers have done here for decades. Now, looking at a stake nearly a year later, Nikolay Kasatkin, one of the institute researchers, and Dr. Shahgedanova saw that more of the wood was visible. With the end of melting still a couple of months off, parts of the Tuyuksu were already about three feet thinner.
+Glaciers represent the snows of centuries, compressed over time into slowly flowing rivers of ice, up to about a thousand feet thick here in the Tien Shan range and even thicker in other parts of the world. They are never static, accumulating snow in winter and losing ice to melting in summer. But in a warming climate melting outstrips accumulation, resulting in a net loss of ice.
+The Tuyuksu, which is about a mile and a half long, is getting shorter as well as thinner. When the research station was built in 1957 it was just a few hundred yards from the Tuyuksu’s leading edge, or tongue. Now, reaching the ice requires scrambling on foot for the better part of an hour over piles of boulders and till left as the glacier retreated.
+In six decades, it has lost more than half a mile.
+What’s happening in the mountains of southeastern Kazakhstan is occurring all over the globe.
+The world’s roughly 150,000 glaciers, not including the large ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, cover about 200,000 square miles of the earth’s surface. Over the last four decades they’ve lost the equivalent of a layer of ice 70 feet thick.
+Most of them are getting shorter, too. Some have shrunk to nothing: Smaller glaciers in places like the Rockies and the Andes have disappeared. Even if greenhouse gas emissions were sharply curtailed immediately, there has already been enough warming to continue shrinking glaciers around the world.
+This great global melting contributes to sea level rise. It affects production of hydroelectricity. It leads to disasters like rapid, catastrophic floods and debris flows. It alters rivers and ecosystems, affecting the organisms that inhabit them.
+But here in the Tien Shan, the biggest impact may be on the supply of water for people and agriculture.
+As the Tuyuksu melts, the rivulets turn into torrents, carving channels in the surface. The flows merge, forming a stream that joins with those from other melting glaciers.
+Some of the water from these glaciers eventually becomes the Little Almaty River.
+The Little Almaty and several other glacier-fed rivers flow through and around the city. They supply some of the drinking water for the region’s two million people and irrigation water for fields of corn and other crops outside the city.
+Runoff from the mountains has not declined so far, Dr. Shahgedanova said. “We aren’t seeing problems yet,” she said, but some of her models suggest that is poised to change. “We’re talking the next 20 years or so.”
+In addition to measuring ice loss on the Tuyuksu, Dr. Shahgedanova and her colleagues study the water in the Little Almaty and other rivers. It doesn’t all come from melting glaciers; some comes from runoff of rain and melting snow, which some climate models predict may increase in the region. Other sources include thawing areas of frozen ground, or permafrost, and huge piles of rock fragments and ice that dominate the landscape below many glaciers.
+Dr. Shahgedanova and other researchers analyze water samples to determine the mix of sources.
+They take regular flow measurements to record how streams change.
+Determining the mix of water sources is important for forecasting how the rivers will fare over time. A melting glacier can at first increase stream flow, but eventually the glacier reaches a tipping point, called peak flow, and meltwater begins to taper.
+“At some point they cannot produce the water they are providing right now,” said Matthias Huss, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “It’s really important for water managers to know when this tipping point is reached.”
+Tuyuksu
+Glacier Kapchagay
+Reservoir Lake
+Issyk-Kul Almaty Lake Balkhash Russia Mongolia Kazakhstan Kazakhstan Iran Afghanistan Pakistan China China Kyrgyzstan India Arctic Ocean Arabian
+Sea Bay of
+Bengal Flows from Kazakhstan’s glaciers will eventually decline. Other glaciers in Central Asia will also be affected. But the biggest impact will be farther south. There, countless glaciers feed the great river basins of Asia.
+Across the Tibetan Plateau and in the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, the glaciers number in the thousands and the people who rely on them in the hundreds of millions, along rivers like the Indus in Pakistan, the Ganges and Brahmaputra in India, the Yellow and Yangtze in China and the Mekong in Southeast Asia.
+Eventually these rivers will be affected by glacial retreat, said Arthur Lutz, a hydrologist with FutureWater, a Dutch water-resources consulting firm. The timing may vary; the Indus, for example, is more dependent on glacial melt than the Ganges, which receives much of its water from the monsoon.
+Either way, Dr. Lutz said, “the total sum of water you get from the mountains is likely to increase until about the 2050s.”
+In the mountains of Kazakhstan, the decline may start sooner.
+That’s adding urgency to the researchers’ work.
+Much of the water from the Tuyuksu and other glaciers eventually reaches the lowlands north of Almaty where it irrigates crops.
+When flows in these rivers begin to decline, the region’s farmers could face a crisis.
+Most of the irrigation works in the region date from the Soviet era. They are old, run-down and inefficient.
+Many canals and ditches are lined with earth, not concrete, so water leaks from them. And the water is not managed well.
+Most farmers now take whatever water they need, without having to account for how much they use.
+There is not much incentive, or money, to install improvements like drip irrigation that would save water and improve productivity.
+But more efficient water management is what Kazakhstan needs to prepare for the days when the flow from glacier-fed rivers starts to drop off.
+Aleksi Gorbatuk is a farmer with 370 acres of corn in Karaoy, about 25 miles north of Almaty, and more acreage elsewhere. He’d like to install drip irrigation on some of his fields. He knows it would help conserve water, and the government tells him that is important in an era of climate change. It would also save him money in the long run by making his fields more productive. But it is expensive.
+“The government explains that in the near future there will be a shortage of water,” Mr. Gorbatuk said. “So every farmer needs to think about his money, so if tomorrow we don’t have this water, what will we do.”
+Mr. Gorbatuk’s situation is a reminder that, as Dr. Huss put it, “declining waters from glaciers or mountains in general do not necessarily need to be a problem.”
+“It’s rather a question of how we use the water,” Dr. Huss said. “And how we use the water is determined by society.”Parliament overwhelmingly rejects Brexit plan
+British lawmakers voted 432 to 202 against Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan to leave the E.U. It was the biggest defeat in the House of Commons for a prime minister in recent history, and it appeared to rip the mast off the ship of state.
+Impact: Much of Mrs. May’s own party deserted her, and her plan looks less likely than ever to be realized. With a historically straitjacketed Parliament now seizing control of the situation, a new kind of British governance is taking shape, with a diminished prime minister and a dynamic of gridlock reminiscent of America.
+What’s next? The opposition Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, put forward a motion of no confidence in Mrs. May, which Parliament will debate and vote on Wednesday. If the motion is successful, a new government will need to be formed in 14 days. But Mrs. May is seen as somewhat likely to survive that vote.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A man wielding a hammer entered a Brooklyn restaurant Tuesday evening and attacked three employees, fatally beating a chef and critically injuring two others, the police said.
+A 34-year-old Brighton Beach resident, Arthur Martunovich, was arrested within blocks of the restaurant and was expected to face charges of murder and attempted murder, the police said.
+It was unclear why Mr. Martunovich entered the Seaport Buffet on Emmons Avenue, just off the Belt Parkway near Sheepshead Bay, around 5 p.m. and attacked the restaurant’s employees, the police said.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Benjamin Brafman, the high-powered lawyer who was poised to defend the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein against rape and sexual assault allegations in New York, plans to withdraw from the case, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
+Mr. Brafman will inform the court of his decision to withdraw as counsel for Mr. Weinstein on Thursday, the person said. The move could potentially delay the trial, which was scheduled to begin in May in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.
+The two men, each with a big personality, were reportedly at odds recently after Mr. Weinstein began reaching out to other lawyers to beef up his defense team before the trial, angering Mr. Brafman.
+Losing Mr. Brafman could prove to be a major setback to Mr. Weinstein’s defense. Mr. Brafman, a former Manhattan prosecutor, is considered to be among the best trial lawyers in New York City. He is known for his disarming sense of humor, quick wit and skillful cross-examinations. His clients have included mobsters, drug dealers and celebrities like Jay-Z and Michael Jackson.“Schitt’s Creek” returns for its fifth season with a special two-episode premiere, and all 10 episodes of YouTube’s original series “Wayne” are available to stream.
+What’s on TV
+SCHITT’S CREEK 10 p.m. on Pop. When we last saw the Roses, they seemed to be actually liking Schitt’s Creek, the small town that the formerly wealthy family landed in after being defrauded by their business manager. They were still living in adjoining rooms at the Rosebud Motel, which the patriarch, Johnny, now co-owns with Stevie, and visiting Twyla at the Café Tropical, but over all, things were looking up. David and Alexis found love, and Moira even seems to have gotten her acting career somewhat back on track. On Wednesday, the comedy, created by the father-and-son team Eugene and Dan Levy, returns for its fifth season with a special two-episode premiere, reuniting fans with an uncharacteristically happy Rose clan.
+EQUUS: STORY OF THE HORSE 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Dogs might be considered man’s best friend, but horses and humans have a long and storied history. The anthropologist Niobe Thompson takes a deep dive into the species’ origins, emotional intelligence and connection with humans in this special two-part “Nature” series on PBS, which was filmed over 18 months across three continents.What do you think about the spread President Trump presented the college football champions, the Clemson Tigers, at the White House on Monday as a celebration of their athletic achievement? What’s your reaction to the image above of the fast-food buffet in such an opulent setting?
+Are you a fast-food fan? Is this the feast of your dreams or your nightmares?
+Tell us why in the comments, then read the related article to find out why these elite athletes dined on fast-food fare for their White House dinner.JERUSALEM — If you are reading this, you’ve most likely seen much about “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” in the pages of this newspaper and of every other important newspaper in the West. That phrase contains a few important assumptions. That the conflict is between two actors, Israelis and Palestinians. That it could be resolved by those two actors, and particularly by the stronger side, Israel. That it’s taking place in the corner of the Middle East under Israeli rule.
+Presented this way, the conflict has become an energizing issue on the international left and the subject of fascination of many governments, including the Trump administration, which has been working on a “deal of the century” to solve it. The previous administration’s secretary of state, John Kerry, committed so much time to Israeli-Palestinian peace that for a while he seemed to be here each weekend. If only the perfect wording and map could be found, according to this thinking, if only both sides could be given the right dose of carrots and sticks, peace could ensue.
+To someone here in Israel, all of this is harder and harder to understand. There isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many outsiders seem to think, and this perception gap is worth spelling out. It has nothing to do with being right-wing or left-wing in the American sense. To borrow a term from the world of photography, the problem is one of zoom. Simply put, outsiders are zoomed in, and people here in Israel are zoomed out. Understanding this will make events here easier to grasp.
+In the Israeli view, no peacemaker can bring the two sides together because there aren’t just two sides. There are many, many sides.Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• One day after House G.O.P. leaders stripped Representative Steve King of his committee assignments, Republicans began pushing him toward the exit and created a “super PAC” aimed at unseating him in 2020. The House also voted nearly unanimously to endorse a resolution that rejected white nationalism and white supremacy as “hateful expressions of intolerance that are contradictory to the values that define the people of the United States.”
+• William P. Barr, President Trump’s nominee for attorney general, assured senators at his confirmation hearing that he would permit Robert S. Mueller III to complete the Russia investigation and said he was determined to resist any pressure from Mr. Trump to use law enforcement for political purposes.
+• Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, an outspoken advocate of women’s causes, is entering the 2020 race for the White House. She announced her bid on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and will travel to Iowa this weekend to start campaigning.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge will run from Jan. 17 to Feb. 18. For more information, visit The Learning Network on Jan. 17 when we announce the rules and begin accepting submissions. In the meantime, you can check out last year’s rules and winners. A runner-up from that competition is shown above.
+congeal \kən-ˈjēl\ verb
+: become thick and almost solid
+_________
+The word congeal has appeared 37 times on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Aug. 17 in the T Magazine article “Reviving a Centuries-Old Japanese Confectionery Art” by Ligaya Mishan:
+First the fingers burn. Any apprentice in the centuries-old Japanese confectionery art of amezaiku must accept this as the price of beauty. Molten syrup, heated to a scalding 176 degrees Fahrenheit, is scooped up with bare hands. There’s no time to cry out; from the moment it touches the skin, you have about five minutes to pull and squeeze the hot ball, impale it on a stick and sculpt it — into a panda, a crane, a rhinoceros beetle — with nothing but singed fingers and tiny scissors for making swift cuts as the syrup congeals. The syrup, known as mizuame — “water candy” — is traditionally made from glutinous rice broken down into sugar by malt. It’s often found at street fairs, trapped between rice crackers or as a glossy coat around apricots...Cheryl Guerin, an executive vice president of Mastercard, said the company would use its marketing campaign to promote special offers in the city, such as dinners cooked by celebrated chefs like Marcus Samuelsson in iconic spots like Carnegie Hall or the baseball diamond in Yankee Stadium. The company’s two billion cardholders also will get early access to annual events in the city, including Restaurant Week and Broadway Week, she said.
+“We do have other tourism partnerships with other cities but this will be one of the biggest ones,” Ms. Guerin said.
+Mr. Dixon said he expected the arrangement to help drive “more and more visitation to the winter periods,” when travel to the city is the slowest. He said NYC & Company would promote the first few months of the year as “the optimal time to come to New York for value.”
+Mastercard publishes an annual list of the cities that are most popular with tourists; New York is currently ranked sixth, behind Bangkok, London, Paris, Dubai and Singapore. Among American cities, New York ranks second only to Orlando in the number of visitors it draws. Orlando claims to attract more than 70 million visitors a year.
+But Mr. Dixon said those are primarily domestic visitors who do not spend as much as foreign tourists — though anyone who has taken a family to Disney World lately might beg to differ. Foreign visitors typically spend about four times as much as domestic visitors, he said.
+Overall, tourists spent about $44 billion in the city last year, NYC & Company estimated. The agency extrapolates its tourist counts from tallies taken at popular attractions like the Empire State Building and from airport traffic and hotel occupancy data. NYC & Company counts anyone who stays overnight or travels from more than 50 miles away as a visitor.
+Last year, the city’s hotels sold 37.7 million overnight stays, the most ever, the agency said. Those stays generated more than $620 million in taxes for the city, it said.The rule can be more onerous for some players than for others. Take the heavily inked central defender Zhang Linpeng. Most of his body, including the entirety of both arms, is heavily tattooed. He has been playing with a compression shirt underneath his national team jersey at the Asian Cup, though he has avoided covering the markings on his right leg and his neck.
+Other players have less work to do; a tattooed back or calf is often covered by a player’s uniform, while a smaller bit of artwork can be hidden under athletic tape. (Zhang and others have managed to get some respite: Covering tattoos isn’t mandatory for training sessions.)
+The Chinese soccer federation and tournament organizers clearly do not want to talk about the issue, however. At a news conference before a game with South Korea this week that will decide top spot in Group C, a tournament official tried to shut down a question about the tattoos before the Chinese national team coach, Marcello Lippi of Italy, could answer it.
+After it was rephrased, Lippi gave a short, diplomatic response, saying he was not unduly concerned by the edict. The team’s captain, Zheng Zhi, sitting to Lippi’s right, stifled a laugh but declined to comment on the issue.
+“This is only a detail; I don’t really want to talk about this,” Lippi said through a translator.
+A few months before the ink ban was imposed on Chinese soccer players, television stars faced similar restrictions as part of government efforts to control what viewers were being exposed to in the media. The soccer rules were brought in so quickly, though, that some clubs simply chose to heavily bandage their players before they took the field.Abdalla Dahir and Feisal Ahmed were so close that they were almost always together. “If you couldn’t reach Abdalla, you called Feisal, and if you couldn’t reach Feisal, you called Abdalla,” said a mutual friend, Abdulahi Mohammed. “They even used to joke that they will one day die together.”
+That sentiment became a prophecy on Tuesday. The two men, who worked for a London-based development company with offices in Nairobi, Kenya, were killed while having lunch on a restaurant terrace in a luxury hotel and office complex stormed by Shabab militants.
+Kenya’s police chief, Joseph Boinnet, said Wednesday night that the fatalities had risen to 21 from 14, with six additional bodies retrieved from the attack site and the death of a police officer from injuries. The victims included an American and a British national.Andrew is so young — and so new to the rigors of Broadway — that he’s going to begin his run doing just five performances a week, while taking vocal lessons to shore up his stamina. This will be his first professional production, and the creative team, determined to protect him as well as their smash-hit show, has decided the reduced schedule is their way of investing in his long-term success; the show’s alternate, Michael Lee Brown, will do the other three performances as Andrew builds comfort and strength.
+“It’s a little scary for all of us — for him, for me, for his mom — because we’re asking a lot of him,” said Stacey Mindich, the show’s lead producer. “But in every single moment he has grown with us already — at every passage he has shown us he is uber-capable.”
+A fan of musicals and more
+This is not one of those stories about someone who happened into theater unwittingly. This is a story about an unabashed theater geek — a child who has adored Broadway since he saw “Beauty and the Beast” at age 3, who has been happily singing on stage since he landed the role of Mr. Bundles in a community theater production of “Annie” at age 8; who writes songs and plays the piano, guitar, drums, ukulele and bass; who has been to all four editions of BroadwayCon, including the one last year where he won a lip-syncing competition while performing as Angelica Schuyler from “Hamilton.”
+His passion for the imaginary goes way beyond musicals. He’s a huge fan of “Star Wars” — “We watched ‘A New Hope’ in English class to learn about archetypes, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is the coolest thing’” — and has dressed as General Grievous and Kylo Ren for Halloween. (It’s not that he’s drawn to the dark side; it’s just, he says, that those characters look cooler.)
+He’s an even huger fan of Disney (which now owns “Star Wars,” so maybe that’s redundant). He estimates that he’s been to Disney theme parks, including Disneyworld, Disneyland and Disneyland Paris, at least 20 times, starting when he was 6 months old. “Something draws me to the idea of being able to live in another world,” he said.
+And now he really, really loves “Dear Evan Hansen.” The first time he saw the musical, a couple of weeks after it opened on Broadway in 2016, he was so overcome he couldn’t find the words to talk about it when his mother came to pick him up.Before reading the article:
+What is the quality of life for teachers in your school? What do you think are the most challenging aspects of their job? Do you think your teachers are treated fairly?
+How would you feel if they went on strike for better working conditions?
+Then, watch the video above documenting the 30,000 Los Angeles public-school teachers who went on strike on Jan. 14, affecting 500,000 students in the second-largest district in the nation. What’s your reaction to the strike? What questions do you still have?
+Now, read the article, “Los Angeles Teachers Strike, Disrupting Classes for 500,000 Students,” and answer the following questions:
+1. Why are teachers on strike in the Los Angeles Unified School District?
+2. How are schools able to remain open despite their teachers being on strike? What are the learning conditions in the schools for students without their regular teachers? Do you think learning is possible in these circumstances?
+3. Why do district officials oppose the demands of the teachers’ union? How much of a pay raise have they said they are willing to offer?As live television productions of classic Broadway musicals turn to more contemporary fare, some original creators have the chance to get involved. So it will be with “Rent,” which airs on Jan. 27 on Fox and is co-directed by Michael Greif, who oversaw the pathbreaking show’s premiere at New York Theater Workshop, then on Broadway.
+Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical, about Lower East Side artists living in the shadow of AIDS, was immortalized when its creator died of an aortic aneurysm just before its opening night Off Broadway.
+Sara Krulwich, the theater photographer for The New York Times, had unusual access to the cast and creators in the wake of that tragedy, as well as in subsequent triumphs, following “Rent” to Broadway, a Pulitzer Prize and a national tour.
+In anticipation of the television version (which stars Tinashe, Vanessa Hudgens and Brandon Victor Dixon), The Times reached out to the subjects featured in Ms. Krulwich’s early photographs. Most of the images haven’t been published, and depicted in many of them are behind-the-scenes players, now-acclaimed Broadway stars and aspiring performers who never made it into the show.HONG KONG — A Canadian man sentenced to death in China for drug smuggling intends to appeal, one of his lawyers said Wednesday, as a diplomatic rift between Canada and China deepened and information emerged about the man’s past drug convictions.
+The man, Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, 36, was tried, convicted and sentenced on Monday in what one of his attorneys called a stunningly swift outcome. The hearing in Dalian, a port city in northeastern China, was a retrial ordered by an appeals court last month, after Beijing angrily denounced Canada for arresting a Chinese tech executive at the request of the United States.
+Zhang Dongshuo, one of Mr. Schellenberg’s two defense attorneys, said his client was relatively calm when they met on Tuesday, despite the death sentence and the possibility that a geopolitical conflict could decide his fate. Mr. Schellenberg said during that meeting that he would appeal, Mr. Zhang said by telephone.
+“His main point is that he is innocent, and he didn’t do what he’s been accused of doing,” Mr. Zhang said.The local police have said that they will use whatever force is necessary to fight the crime syndicates and that special forces are ready to assist. In the first days after the order took effect, police officers seized vehicles belonging to one of the country’s vice presidents as well as to powerful members of Parliament — moves that would have been unthinkable until recently.
+Such initiatives have created a rare sense of optimism in Kabul, leading some to hope that a police force many had given up on may somehow be reinvigorated and armed to stand up to the local mafia as much as to insurgents.
+General Roshandil, a 14-year veteran of the country’s special forces, was appointed to lead the Kabul police in September, when deadly attacks were frequent and the city had been turned into a front line of the country’s long war. Aided by a new intelligence chief for the city who had similar counterterrorism experience, and with the support of American advisers, local forces carried out raids to disrupt terrorist cells in Kabul and surrounding areas.
+Much of the recent optimism also stems from the appointment last month of Mr. Saleh as interior minister, and from his immediate push to bolster and uplift a national police force that lost about 19,000 men across the country in the past four years alone. A former intelligence chief, Mr. Saleh has vowed to minimize the influence of warlords and local elites over the police and to drive out corruption among its forces.
+While the measures he has introduced have been widely welcomed in Kabul, many observers and residents say that combating the rot will require far deeper changes.
+“Since last week, public opinion has changed. People are optimistic, and they believe that it is possible to change the situation,” said Wazhma Frogh, the executive director of the Women and Peace Studies Organization.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+How 300 Hamburgers Became ‘1000 Hamberders’
+As Melania Trump already knows, just because President Trump loves you doesn’t mean he can spell your name. Hamburgers just found that out the hard way.
+Trump hosted the Clemson football team at the White House on Tuesday, and he welcomed the players with a overflowing order of fast food. But when he tweeted about the experience — proudly declaring that he had paid for the meal himself — Trump misspelled “hamburgers.” Badly.HONG KONG — A Belarusian escort who has spent nearly a year behind bars in Thailand after claiming to have audio recordings linking Russia with President Trump’s election will be deported on Thursday, a Thai immigration official said.
+The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, and seven others arrested with her pleaded guilty to charges of solicitation and conspiracy on Tuesday in the Pattaya Provincial Court. The court sentenced them to three years in prison but reduced their sentences to time served.
+The defendants, five Russians and three Belarusians, had faced up to 10 years on charges of indecency, conspiracy and belonging to a secret society.
+It remains unclear whether the damaging information that Ms. Vashukevich claimed to possess actually exists.Last year, you opened a national lynching memorial. What were you hoping to achieve? What we haven’t done in this country is create cultural spaces that expose people to the history of enslavement and lynching and segregation and motivate them to say, “Never again.” And if we make that commitment, then we’re going to be required to be more responsive when people say, “Well, those immigrants of color are unacceptable” or “Those people over there are unacceptable.” When we hear the echo of that narrative, I hope it motivates us to respond differently.
+You live in Montgomery, Ala., where both Confederate Memorial Day and Jefferson Davis’s birthday are state holidays and Martin Luther King Day is celebrated along with Robert E. Lee Day. How do you reconcile all that? It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery. In Germany, there are no Adolf Hitler statues. They don’t want to embrace something so horrific. That’s not true in America. The landscape has become complicit in the way in which we have tolerated racial bias, so that has to change. There are things about which we can all feel proud. We can all honor, for example, the white people who were abolitionists in the 18th and the 19th centuries. And we can name some streets and schools and buildings after them, and all of us can celebrate those folks. That’s what we have to get to if we’re really serious about progressing past this history.
+What would the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. think about America if he was alive today? When he found out that one in three black male babies born in this country is expected to go to jail and prison, when he saw the level of poverty, when he heard some of the rhetoric that we frequently hear, I think he would be heartbroken. But I also think he would be excited that if he called a meeting, thousands would come. And that’s what has to happen, even without Dr. King — that we have to be willing to make that commitment so that we can create a world where if Dr. King emerged, he would be so proud to say his dream has finally been realized. We’re not in that world yet.“Whom are you hiding from?” is the question Guy Cramer, a camouflage designer, says you have to ask yourself. Research the optical capabilities of whatever it is you’re trying to elude. A duck, for example, can see ultraviolet light. Ungulates see in two colors, yellow and blue, so avoid those hues if you’re hoping to go unnoticed by a deer. Cramer worked with an ophthalmic researcher to design his hunting patterns. Because many animals are sensitive to ultraviolet light, avoid washing your camo in laundry detergent that contains UV brighteners, which will give you a sort of glow in their eyes.
+If you’re trying to conceal yourself from someone wearing night-vision goggles or a drone equipped with multispectral imaging sensors, opt for a get-up that at the very least won’t make you more visible under infrared. Many hunting patterns are printed using a type of dye that tends to disappear when seen through night-vision goggles, but if the underlying fabric is white, which it often is, “you’ll stand out like Casper the Friendly Ghost,” says Cramer, whose company, HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp., has developed more than 14,000 patterns for hunters, anglers and militaries all over the world, including the armies of Jordan, Chile and Mexico.
+Your camouflage colors should match the general palate of the landscape you’re trying to blend into. No forest greens in the arid deserts of Afghanistan during the day; no whites anywhere but in the snow. At a distance, the patterns and color should break up the outline of your human form and blend it into the environment. Avoid being overconfident just because you’re adorned head to toe in a sticks-and-twigs print. “Slapping camouflage on doesn’t make you invisible,” Cramer says. If possible, wear the same pattern on everything, even your shoes (go with neutral brown shoes if you can’t get camo ones). Wear long sleeves and pants and cover any exposed skin with makeup or gloves and a mask. If you’re carrying something like a backpack or a gun, it, too, should be camouflaged. And remember that movement will give you away no matter how shrublike you look when motionless.
+Maybe your aim is not to disappear at all, but to stand out. “In fashion, if you’re going to wear camouflage, don’t wear pants and a jacket — you’ll look like an idiot if you do,” Cramer says. “Pick the pants or the jacket.”“It’s less soupy than my mom’s,” he told me. He said he built his recipe out of memories of hers, though, along with a desire to ape the cooking of Korean barbecue restaurants in Los Angeles and New York and a chef’s need to balance textures and flavors, to make a dish larger than its components. “There are formulas to this stuff,” he said. “The fresh greens against the rich meat, for example. You do it long enough, and it begins to make sense.”
+With Cho’s help, I set out to make his galbijjim at home, for a family rather than a restaurant service, without access to a smoker or a deep-fryer, or to the quince paste he uses to sweeten the braise in place of honey. At his suggestion, I didn’t boil the meat but roasted it above a collection of root vegetables under aggressive sprays of kosher salt and black pepper, on sheet pans so that everything could be spread out wide. All that surface area led to a lot of caramelization, to a depth of flavor that held through as the stew matured. Then, for the braise, I combined Asian pears and red onion, chicken stock, honey, soy sauce, rice-wine vinegar and plenty of red-pepper flakes, cooked it all down, then blitzed the mixture in a food processor to make a smooth and flavorful sauce. The roasted meat went into this concoction for more than an hour, bubbling along until it was tender and starting to flake from the bone.
+The root vegetables followed. And then the rice cakes, hungry for sauce. And Cho was right about the greens, which I added at the very end. Barely softened by the heat, they served to offset the deep, unctuous quality of the short ribs, the chewiness of the rice cakes. They provided a perfect equilibrium.
+Of course Cho’s recipe had a secret ingredient. He is an exacting, technical chef, who trained under April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig in New York and ran the kitchen at the Breslin for her before moving home to Portland to be closer to family and finding fame at Han Oak. His cooking is precise and beautiful; he serves his poached cod with charred scallions and mushroom broth, with chanterelles, below dots of laboriously made herb oil. He has lots of secrets. Here is one of them. To the braising liquid for the short ribs, he told me early on, you want to add a can of Coke. He offered the advice to do that the way a mother might, with a shrug. It was not wrong. “I’m not sure you’ll even taste it,” Cho said, accurately. “But it’s kind of got to be in there.”What do you plan to do after high school? Do you plan to go to college, take a gap year, start a training program, begin working or something else?
+Do your parents, classmates and teachers support your plan? Have they helped guide you toward your post-high school goals? Or have you mostly had to figure them out on your own?
+In “The Misguided Priorities of Our Educational System,” Oren Cass writes that the United States spends a disproportionate amount on college-bound students and much less on those who seek an alternative path:
+Consider two high school seniors — one who exhibits strong academic talent and one who does not. For one, December marks the homestretch of a yearslong effort, intensively supported by his school, to prepare the perfect college application. For the other, December is just another month on the path to, well, whatever might come after graduation. The former will likely proceed steadily toward a bachelor’s degree; the latter is unlikely to finish college if he enrolls at all. To whom does our education system owe what? That second student, to be clear, has done nothing wrong. He probably clawed his way through his town’s standard college-oriented curriculum, though it neither targeted his interests and abilities nor prepared him for work force success. Looking ahead, he faces a labor market in which he may need to work harder than his college-bound counterpart for lower pay, with fewer options and slower advancement. Yet we celebrate the first student and lavish taxpayer funds on his education. To the second student, we offer little beyond a sympathetic “Sorry.” Our education system has become one of our nation’s most regressive institutions. After high school graduation, the first student can access more than $10,000 annually in public funds to support his college experience. Federal funding for higher education has grown by 133 percent in the past 30 years; combined with tax breaks, loan subsidies and state-level funding, the annual total exceeds $150 billion. That funding will cover not only genuine instructional costs, but also state-of-the-art gyms, psychiatric and career counseling services, and whatever social programming the student-life bureaucracy can conceive. At Ohio State, students living off campus get free fire alarms. The second graduate likely gets nothing. Annual federal funding for a non-college, vocational pathway, at both the high school and postsecondary levels, totals $1 billion. Certainly, he will need to buy his own fire alarm.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Do you think everyone should go to college? Or should our society offer students more alternatives to higher education? Why?
+— Is what Mr. Cass describes in this Op-Ed article true in your school? Is it mostly focused on preparing students for college — by, for example, emphasizing academic achievement, providing college counselors, offering trips to college campuses and giving application help? Is there any support for students who don’t plan to attend college? Or are they mostly on their own in figuring out what they will do after high school?
+— Mr. Cass writes, “We spend too much money on college students and not enough on everyone else.” Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
+— Mr. Cass offers one idea for a non-college pathway that includes a combination of traditional high school, a vocational program, a subsidized internship and paid work. What do you think of this model? If you were to design a high school that prepared students for the range of post-high school options, not just college, what would it look like? What classes, extracurricular activities, work opportunities and other resources would the school offer and why?
+— One reader wrote in a letter to the editor regarding this Op-Ed article:
+Few, if any, parents who send their children to elite private schools do so with the expectation that they will not go on to college. These parents fully understand the economic advantages that a college degree confers and the social capital that the college experience helps to build. Why should this be any different for students from less privileged backgrounds? We have an obligation to ensure that every one of our children has the very same opportunities. And our expectation should be that all students, regardless of background or circumstance, graduate from high school prepared for success in college and with at least one acceptance letter in hand so that college is a genuine option for them. This is an equity issue, even more than an economic or social one.
+Do you agree with this argument? Is a college degree a key to social mobility? If there were more alternatives to college, do you believe it would make society more or less equitable? Why?A hormone that is released during exercise may improve brain health and lessen the damage and memory loss that occur during dementia, a new study finds. The study, which was published this month in Nature Medicine, involved mice, but its findings could help to explain how, at a molecular level, exercise protects our brains and possibly preserves memory and thinking skills, even in people whose pasts are fading.
+Considerable scientific evidence already demonstrates that exercise remodels brains and affects thinking. Researchers have shown in rats and mice that running ramps up the creation of new brain cells in the hippocampus, a portion of the brain devoted to memory formation and storage. Exercise also can improve the health and function of the synapses between neurons there, allowing brain cells to better communicate.
+In people, epidemiological research indicates that being physically active reduces the risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias and may also slow disease progression.
+But many questions remain about just how exercise alters the inner workings of the brain and whether the effects are a result of changes elsewhere in the body that also happen to be good for the brain or whether the changes actually occur within the brain itself.Teach Healthy Conflict
+The range of human reaction when faced with conflict is a knotty topic, but I have heard teachers boil it down with the help of a few metaphors kids can readily picture. There are basically three unhealthy ways to participate in conflict: you can be a bulldozer, a doormat or a doormat with spikes. The first simply runs others over while the second agrees to be run over. The third seems to let itself be run over, but makes the aggressor pay a price on the back end by employing passive-aggressive tactics such as involving third parties in what should be a one-on-one dispute, using guilt as a weapon or playing the part of the victim.
+Another response that is far healthier — though it usually needs to be coached and practiced — is to be a pillar, to stand up for yourself while being respectful of others.
+When we, at any age, are upset with someone, most of us are naturally tempted toward an unhealthy, instinctive response. In advising adolescents on how they might handle a disagreement, I first teach them about reactions to conflict and allow them to daydream their way through a bulldozer, doormat or doormat-with-spikes response.
+For the girl who sees on Instagram that she was left out of a friend’s party, there might be some welcome pain relief in imagining her doormat-with-spikes revenge. Having had the chance to fantasize about the short-term gratification that would come with posting an unflattering image of the supposed friend usually helps clear the way toward formulating a pillar response. Might she ask — politely and in person — if she had done something to hurt her friend’s feelings?
+When addressing conflict with tweens and teenagers, I rush to point out that fights carried out online are inevitably doormat-with-spikes affairs. Social media recruits a giant audience into disputes that would have been best handled in private, and may leave a public record of emotional responses a cooler-headed teen might soon regret. And digital exchanges don’t allow for the tone control that pillar communications always require.
+“Kids may need to be reminded,” says Ms. Fagell, “to keep arguments offline. Because once they’ve waged war in a group chat at one in the morning, it becomes much harder to achieve a peaceful resolution.”
+Let Them Pick Their Battles
+When young people are at odds with one another, we can help them hold themselves to the pillar standard, but we can also give the option of choosing not to engage at all.The 800,000 federal workers who haven’t been paid during the government shutdown have each missed more than $5,000 in wages on average over the four weeks so far, according to a New York Times analysis. Combined, that’s more than $200 million per workday.
+While the median federal salary is $77,000, about one-fifth of workers make less than $50,000. Many have said they have less than a month of savings.
+So far, after 17 workdays, a typical worker hasn’t been paid …The arrival last year of Mr. Carter and 14 other newly elected Democrats made it possible for Democrats to expand Medicaid. Now the party is aiming to take control of the state legislature this coming November, a goal that once seemed out of reach.
+The upcoming election also sets the stage for a struggle over Virginia’s future between those who believe that prosperity lies in wooing more businesses and those like Mr. Carter, who believe it comes from making businesses share more of their wealth. While Virginia is the 12th largest economy in the country by gross domestic product, according to the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, it ranks 26th in income equality, according to the American Community Survey.
+Mr. Carter has been a vocal opponent of the incentive package, worth more than half a billion dollars, used to lure one of Amazon’s new headquarters to Crystal City, Va. And he fought against a bill overhauling the state’s energy grid, arguing that it gave away too much to Dominion, a powerful for-profit utility.
+In recent days, Mr. Carter filed a bill that would get rid of the union-weakening “right to work” statute that has been in place since 1947, as well as another bill that would give public employees, including teachers, the right to strike.
+He is the first to admit that these bills have little chance of passing this session, since Republicans hold a slim majority in both chambers of the state legislature, and even some Democrats oppose them.
+“One of the biggest things has been trying to keep in mind that by electing a socialist, my constituents have made the choice to reject the status quo,” he said. “They want someone to go and fight, even if that person is on the losing end.”
+But it is not clear how many of Mr. Carter’s constituents know that he is a socialist. More than a dozen voters on the streets of Manassas expressed surprise to learn that the district is represented by a lawmaker who embraces that label.In Dalston, a dynamic pocket of East London, an edgy arts scene blooms amid repurposed factories, side streets sprinkled with tiny shops, tucked-away public gardens and colorful outdoor markets catering to longtime Afro-Caribbean and Turkish communities. Cool kids and chess-playing old-timers commune over thick Ethiopian espresso at Kaffa Coffee, a neighborhood institution. Fashion statements abound: Men in cropped shirts and voluminous trousers. Women tattooed and accessorized to the nines. And inventively clad millennials, more than a few affiliated with the designer ateliers headquartered here. Indie artists are a buzzy fixture in Dalston, flowing in and out of a D.J. booth run by NTS, the influential internet radio station on lively Gillett Square.
+1. Hang-Up Gallery
+This 10-year-old gallery’s calling card is provocative artwork by the likes of Oddly Head, Nina Saunders, David Shrigley, Harland Miller and Banksy. (There is a dedicated downstairs “bunker” devoted to the elusive street artist.) In the evenings, compelling events have involved the unveiling of hip-hop icon Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniel s’s comic ar t (along with an intimate performance) and a collaboration between The Connor Brothers and Nadya Tolokonnikova of feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot in support of refugees.
+81 Stoke Newington Road; hanguppictures.comOn the internet, conspiracy theories, propaganda and plain old inaccuracies can stump even the most thoughtful readers, spreading faster than you can say “fake news.”
+A small start-up, NewsGuard, says it may have a solution. The effort is led by a pair of veteran news executives — Steven Brill, an author and the founder of the magazine The American Lawyer, and Gordon Crovitz, a former publisher of The Wall Street Journal. On Wednesday the company announced that it had signed Microsoft as its first major client.
+NewsGuard has created the equivalent of nutrition labels for news organizations, rating more than 2,000 news and information sites with tags: red for unreliable, green for trustworthy. A team of roughly 50 journalists and analysts is making the evaluations.
+NewsGuard has given its stamp of approval to established publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, as well as later entrants like BuzzFeed and Newsmax. FoxNews.com, The Hill, The Daily Beast and HuffPost have also gotten green lights.In the face of that ominous possibility, Czapski and his colleagues came up with the idea of delivering nightly lectures, with each officer agreeing to speak “about what he remembered best.” Father Kamil Kantak, a former Polish newspaper editor, lectured on the history of human migration; Lieutenant Ostrowski, an avid mountaineer, recounted his expeditions in South America. Professor Siennicki, of the Polytechnic School in Warsaw, talked about the history of architecture, and a Dr. Ehrlich discussed the history of the book.
+After first volunteering to speak on French painting, Czapski ultimately chose to lecture in French on Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” a text to which he felt “deeply indebted” and which he “was not sure of seeing again.” Miraculously, like Czapski himself, an abridged transcript of some of the lectures survived the war. He had dictated their content to two lieutenants, and the handwritten manuscripts, which have since been lost, somehow escaped the Soviet censor and were typeset. Shortly after the war, Czapski supervised a Polish translation. The lectures were not published in the original French until 1987 and not in English until last fall, when New York Review Books released a translation by Karpeles.
+Proust is, without doubt, an odd choice for the gulag, a fact of which Czapski was well aware: “I can still see my companions, worn out after having worked outdoors in temperatures dropping as low as minus 45 degrees, packed together underneath portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin, listening intently to lectures on themes very far removed from the reality we faced at that time.” Despite the poverty of their conditions, the assembled company was highly educated, which allowed Czapski to wander from Proust’s translations of Ruskin to the influence of Latin on his syntax. With no access to physical books in the camp, the lectures are naturally preoccupied with the almost Proustian exercise of remembering Proust’s text. At points, Czapski recalls long scenes with exacting precision, but he also cautions his audience that he may be jumbling things up. He calls the famous madeleine a brioche but at other times summons up details like an effortless juggler.
+The most surprising fact about the lectures, however, is how they conclude: with a meditation on death. This move spares Czapski the accusation that he was merely escaping into the sensory, bourgeois richness of Proust’s art. He is not afraid to confront the specter of his own death head-on, and to use literature to do so. He broaches the topic by evoking the death scene of the writer Bergotte, in a section of “Remembrance” that Proust was editing in the final weeks before he died. Bergotte, by this point in the novel an invalid and shut-in, steps out to see an exhibition that includes Vermeer’s “View of Delft,” which Czapski, borrowing from Proust, describes as embodying a “mysterious charm,” a “Chinese perfection and delicacy.” Having taken in that sight, Bergotte quickly suffers a fatal stroke and dies in the gallery, overwhelmed by his senses. Czapski notes that Bergotte’s last wish is to view the paintings “one more time … though he knows well enough that, given his health, it’s risky for him to go out to see the exhibition.” A good death becomes linked to the experience of good art.
+Czapski extends this observation about Bergotte’s death to what may have been on Proust’s mind in his final days: “It’s not possible that he did not understand, given the state of his health, that the enormous and feverish effort required to keep on with his work would precipitate his end. But he had made up his mind, he would not take care of himself, death had become truly a matter of indifference to him.” I am not sure if we ever truly achieve indifference toward death, but Czapski suggests that we can weaken its sting. That conviction is reminiscent of the thrust of the computer scientist Randy Pausch’s “The Last Lecture,” a talk he gave at Carnegie Mellon a month after receiving a terminal diagnosis. Explaining why he decided to deliver a lecture that required extensive preparation instead of spending every one of his last moments with his children, Pausch later wrote: “If I were a painter, I would have painted for them. If I were a musician, I would have composed music. But I am a lecturer. So I lectured.” Czapski, like Scheherazade, gave his nightly lectures in Gryazovets not knowing what the morning would bring.But, Ms. Sarsour said Ms. Siemionko refused to cooperate with the Women’s March group and that they were only trying to make the Alliance more inclusive to the city’s immigrant and minority communities.
+“It’s not representative of the larger city,” Ms. Sarsour said in an interview. She instead asked for help from the New York Immigration Coalition, which oversees more than 200 community immigrant groups and of which she is a former board member. The coalition provided the money, equipment and staff for the rally.
+In January, the Immigration Coalition also urged the Alliance to merge marches. By then, Ms. Siemionko said, it was too late.
+“Nobody who holds a counter women’s march supports women’s rights,” she said. “There’s no justification for that behavior. None.”
+[Read more about the accusations that have roiled the national women’s march movement.]
+How are New York City’s Jewish leaders responding?
+New York’s Jewish leaders, in particular, are conflicted because of the Women’s March NYC’s connections to the organization’s leaders in Washington. Ms. Sarsour’s resolute position defending the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in protest against Israel’s occupation of Palestine has proved problematic for some.
+But her co-leader, Tamika Mallory, helped push the divide as a result of her public support of Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, who has called Jews “termites.” Ms. Mallory has condemned bigotry and anti-Semitism but has not condemned Mr. Farrakhan personally.
+“If you are sympathetic to those who are prejudiced against Jews, we cannot stand with you,” Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch said in a sermon on Friday at Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side. The synagogue was disassociating from the Women’s March group and any events affiliated with it; on Thursday, it will hold a panel discussion sponsored by Zioness, a women’s organization.Lola Méndez is no stranger to new experiences. Ms. Méndez, 29, an American freelance travel writer, has explored 56 countries, documenting her adventures on her blog. She has visited ancient tombs in Vietnam and trekked across mountains in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
+While working as an English teacher in Spain in 2015, she had to embark on a new kind of undertaking: going to the gynecologist in a foreign country. Many women don’t look forward to their yearly exam, and language barriers made an awkward situation all the more unnerving for Ms. Méndez. But her appointment soon went from uncomfortable to degrading.
+When she asked for an S.T.I. (Sexually Transmitted Infection) screening — a routine request for yearly exams — the doctor told her that it wasn’t worth his time. If she had an S.T.I., he said, she’d just get another one. Ms. Méndez tried to insist, but he refused again and again, telling her only prostitutes contracted S.T.I.s. They went back and forth until she was in tears. “It was just so demeaning. I was doing something to check in on my health and he made feel like I was a prostitute,” Ms. Méndez said in an interview.
+Ms. Méndez then skipped future annual appointments for nearly two years, fearing she would be shamed by another doctor. Her experience is unfortunately common among women looking for reproductive care, both in the U.S. and abroad, as they cope with stigmas and laws that vary country to country and even city to city.Pouille’s choice of Mauresmo was the second high-profile hiring of a female coach in men’s tennis this decade. The first was in 2014, when Andy Murray also hired Mauresmo.
+Pouille’s decision generated far less second-guessing than Murray’s, which was met with skepticism from both the news media and fellow players.
+“The pressure with Andy was tremendous, and the criticism that went with it was huge,” Mauresmo said. “I knew I had a lot to prove, and I knew that every match he would play would be about the job I’d done, or not done, or could do better. That was making it pretty difficult, but pretty challenging as well, and I worked really, really hard.”
+Pouille said many of the queries that came with his choice were more inane than negative.
+“A lot of people have asked me: ‘Is it different that she’s a woman? What do you do — can she come in the locker room?’” he said. “But what is important is what’s happening on court, what’s happening to get ready for the match, and what happens after the match. I don’t care who is in the locker room.”
+Pouille said that, for now, he appreciated the lack of wasted time in his practice sessions with Mauresmo, and also her drive and willingness to join him in his various fitness and running drills.
+“You can see on the court that she’s a champion,” he said. “The way she is on the court, the way she’s committed to it, it’s just remarkable.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+On Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a third-term Democrat, presented his vision for the coming year, a spectacle accompanied by predictable standing ovations and a 353-page briefing book. It was the ninth such address for Mr. Cuomo, and as in every year before, it was chockablock with dozens of ideas, goals and proposals, ranging from making marijuana legal to banning revenge pornography to allowing people to place bets on sporting events in four casinos upstate.
+Unlike in past years, however, when the divided Statehouse made big chunks of the State of the State address a pipe dream, the newly elected Democratic-controlled State Legislature puts the governor’s agenda much closer to becoming reality.
+“It’s just us,” as the governor put it. “We are in control."
+What, exactly, will that control bring? That depends on whom you ask. Here’s a look at what 2019 in New York may look like, as told by the governor’s speech, his colleagues in the Legislature and history.
+When and where will marijuana be legal? (Asking for a friend.)
+Less than two years ago, Governor Cuomo was warning that marijuana was “a gateway drug,” a “Reefer Madness”-style condemnation that put him out of step with a national trend toward the acceptance of cannabis as both medicine and recreational hobby.“And it looked like this: 10 feet wide, 13 and 1/2 feet tall. It’d construct itself to be a 12-foot finished wall, just like that.” That’s Representative Steve King — “We do that with livestock all the time.” — pitching the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, more than a decade before it became President Donald Trump’s central immigration policy. “The wall’s going to get built folks, just in case anybody has any question. The wall’s going to get built.” King has been a Republican member of Congress from Iowa for the past 16 years. “The gentleman from Iowa is recognized.” He’s made a name for himself as a hard-line opponent of illegal immigration and for his inflammatory, sometimes racist, statements — “We are the immigrants!” — like when he disparaged so-called “Dreamers,” children brought by their parents as undocumented immigrants, in 2013. “For every one who’s a valedictorian, there’s another hundred out there that — they weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” King was an early and fervent supporter of Donald Trump. “He’s a quick study. He’s an astute study. And if you explain something to Donald Trump, he’s listening carefully, and you need to get it right.” And the feeling has been mutual. “He may be the world’s most conservative human being.” [cheering] Trump’s election in 2016 gave King a staunch ally in the White House. These days, the president’s statements sound like echoes of things King said years earlier. “It’s our job, here in this Congress, to decide who will be citizens, not someone in a foreign country that can sneak into the United States and have a baby and then go home with a birth certificate.” King’s ideas and public statements, which once seemed fringe, now appear in the national discourse. His views are central to the white identity politics that heavily influence the Trump administration. The Iowa congressman’s ultra-conservative ideas have been a long time in the making. “Preventing babies to be — from being born is not medicine. That’s not constructive to our culture and our civilization. If we let our birth rate get down below the replacement rate, we’re a dying civilization. And right now —” King has denied that his statements are racist and often invokes the idea of protecting our civilization. It’s a concept of national identity and racial superiority that’s a common talking point among white nationalists. In an interview on MSNBC, King himself explained. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?” “Than white people?” “Than Western civilization itself, that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity —” “What about Africa?” “— settled the world.” “What about Asia?” “That’s all of Western civilization.” “But what about Africa? And what about Asia?” He’s even gotten close to white nationalists outside of the U.S., appearing with far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders. King has also been to Austria several times since 2013, where he’s cozied up to the far-right Freedom Party. Back at home, King has been re-elected eight times and is considered a party kingmaker in Iowa. But the 2018 midterms were his toughest contest yet. He won by just three points. And days before the election, a member of his own party called King out as a white supremacist. After more than a decade in Congress, his rhetoric may be finally catching up with him.During the opening weekend of the Tamil-language movie “Chekka Chivantha Vaanam,” a hard-boiled action flick from one of India’s most popular directors, Mani Ratnam, the environment in the theater was more house party than movie screening. From my seat in the far front corner at Sathyam Cinemas (I had scooped up one of the last available tickets), I couldn’t see the film particularly well, but I certainly could hear the whooping and hollering from the packed house when Arvind Swamy, Aishwarya Rajesh or one of the other popular actors appeared on screen.
+There’s a lot to be excited about in Chennai, capital of the state of Tamil Nadu in South India (and still sometimes referred to by its former name, Madras). While certainly crazy for movies, the city has an electricity and exuberance that extends beyond the cinematic. Call it youthful energy — the history of what we know as present-day Chennai extends back merely to the 1600s, compared to ancient cities like Delhi, which have existed for thousands of years. During a four-day trip in September, I found jaw-droppingly good food, beautiful houses of worship and a fantastic day trip. And, as always, I set out with the goal to get the best value for my money.
+I booked my ticket from Kolkata to Chennai directly on Air India, paying slightly less than 4,500 rupees (about $61) for the one-way flight. A general note on buying air tickets: While booking on O.T.A.s (online travel agencies) like Expedia or Priceline has its advantages, I usually try to book flights directly with airlines — I rarely see significantly discounted flights on O.T.A.s, and in the event something goes amiss, it’s more efficient to deal directly with the airline.
+My room at the centrally located Courtyard Chennai in Teynampet area of town was ideal for exploring the city. At 5,100 rupees per night, about $70, it was a relatively luxurious splurge after having just spent four days in an inexpensive Airbnb in Kolkata, but I decided I’d earned a few nights of air-conditioning and fluffy pillows.Pizza can be a great divider in New York. In fact, one of the easiest ways to get into argument (without end) is to name a “best pizza in the city.” But at the same time, pizza — specifically the reheated, foldable, portable slice — is one of the city’s great uniters. There is no culinary experience that New Yorkers share more widely and more unanimously than the slice joint. Like catching a sunset over the skyline or stepping in an icy curbside puddle, the slice joint has, since its beginnings more than 50 years ago , become common currency.
+The price has changed over the decades, but the scene and staging remain much the same. Look at the crowd of New Yorkers and tourists alike bundled in winter coats on a recent Wednesday night at Joe’s Pizza on Carmine Street. The pies at Joe ’ s, which opened in 1975 , are considered among the city’s best. See how the customers rotate in a perfect line through the door and up to the glass case, their orders ready and their money in hand. “Three dollars,” the pizza man says briskly, after he has placed the requested slice into a decked oven . Out come the hot, bubbling triangles of cheese and sauce on thin, pliable crust. Once their slices are ready, the diners — if so formal a word even applies — grab a place at the counter in the window or push out the door, slice in hand, on to wherever the evening may take them . This is the “New York style.”Given all the pain points that make up plane travel — from delayed flights to cramped seats to what seems like an endless parade of new fees — it may be hard to believe that there are still customers passionate enough about an airline to want to eat off plates bearing its logo, or display its memorabilia around their homes.
+At December’s sale, Mark Caldwell was one of the earliest to arrive. Mr. Caldwell, a retired entrepreneur, flies so often on Delta that he has achieved two-million-miler status, a level of loyalty that confers special benefits and recognition, like free upgrades and the occasional shout-out over the flight intercom. Even when he’s not flying, he can sit in first-class seats he bought at an earlier sale that now live in his barn.
+“Chances are I sat in them when they were on the plane,” he said.Living In ... Dumbo
+The once-quiet Brooklyn neighborhood, one of the city’s most scenic, is now decidedly upscale — and a major tourist destination.New York City’s doorways, storefronts and cascading fire escapes were the grand backdrop to Helen Levitt’s photos. In the Lower East Side and Harlem, children pretended to be bride and groom, wore masks for Halloween or drew with chalk on the sidewalk. The lyricism of her work led her to be called the city’s visual poet laureate, supposedly an apolitical, black-and-white photographer of the everyday.
+“Helen Levitt is often described as a lyrical and poetic photographer and in my opinion, that is very often the description for female photographers or women artists,” said Walter Moser, the curator of a new retrospective at the Albertina in Vienna. The exhibit challenges the prevailing, romantic narrative found in essays and critiques done mostly by men. The first culprit — perhaps unintentionally — was the writer James Agee, whom Ms. Levitt met through her mentor, Walker Evans. In an essay that later became the introduction to her book “A Way of Seeing,” he wrote in 1946 that “at least a dozen of Helen Levitt’s photographs seem to me as beautiful, perceptive, satisfying, and enduring as any lyrical work I know.”Other arrivals have filled buildings that sat empty for decades. In 2016, after an elegant restoration, a coffee warehouse that had been vacant since the 1960s became Empire Stores, a shopping mall, though not the typical suburban variety. Metal shutters frame its arched windows, and nicked wood columns support the interior.
+“Man, has it changed a lot here,” said Lawson Harris, a Pilates instructor who lives in the neighborhood. Ms. Harris, 52, said she had to close her 11-year-old studio in 2017 because the rent had more than doubled.
+In 2005, in search of more space for her family, she relocated from neighboring Brooklyn Heights, buying a three-bedroom duplex in a onetime soap factory for $930,000. After a divorce in 2010, Ms. Harris left Dumbo for a few years, then made her way back in 2015, to a two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo in a 1908 building where teakettles once were manufactured. The apartment, which her partner, Ray Dorado, an attorney, bought in 2011 for about $1.5 million, might today fetch $2.2 million, based on local sales, she said.
+While Dumbo has a preserved-in-amber feeling — most buildings have landmark status, courtesy of two historic districts — what really helps set the place apart, Ms. Harris said, is something much newer: Brooklyn Bridge Park. The busy section that threads through Dumbo includes a salt marsh, pine trees, a pebbly beach, a playground and a climbing wall, and a 48-horse, two-chariot carousel that revolves to bouncy organ music (tickets: $2).
+“I’m nowhere near a car when I go running there,” said Ms. Harris of her regular three-mile jogs through the park, to Cobble Hill and back. “It’s just crazy beautiful.”The 432-to-202 vote on Tuesday was the biggest defeat in the House of Commons for a prime minister in modern history. Here are the key takeaways.
+What’s next: Mrs. May has until Monday to present a backup plan, but European Union officials had said the deal that Parliament rejected was the only one they would accept. We outline the possible outcomes, including a second referendum or a chaotic “no-deal” exit.
+News analysis: Much of Mrs. May’s Conservative Party voted against the deal. Her struggle may signal the end of Britain’s “elective dictatorship” and the start of a gridlock-prone system.
+Catch up: What is Brexit, and what does it all mean?“The ‘ayes’ to the right, 202. The ‘nos’ to the left, 432. So the ‘nos’ have it.” “The House has spoken, and the government will listen. It is clear that the House does not support this deal, but tonight’s vote tells us nothing about what it does support. Mr. Speaker, I want to end by offering two reassurances. The first is to those who fear that the government’s strategy is to run down the clock to the 29th of March. That is not our strategy. The second reassurance is to the British people who voted to leave the European Union in the referendum two and a half years ago. I became prime minister immediately after that referendum. I believe it’s my duty to deliver on their instruction, and I intend to do so.” “This is a catastrophic defeat for this government. After two years of failed negotiations, The House of Commons has delivered its verdict on her Brexit deal, and that verdict is absolutely decisive. Her governing principle of delay and denial has reached the end of the line. She cannot seriously believe that after two years of failure, she is capable of negotiating a good deal for the people of this country. The most important issue facing us is that the government has lost the confidence of this House and this country. I therefore, Mr. Speaker, inform you I have now tabled a motion of no confidence in this government, and I’m pleased — I’m pleased that motion will be debated tomorrow, so this House can give its verdict on the sheer incompetence of this government and pass that motion of no confidence in the government.”It’s a wall. It’s made of steel. It was built because immigrants kept coming.
+But it’s not the wall you’re thinking of.
+We’re talking about the American Immigrant Wall of Honor at Ellis Island: 770 stainless steel panels engraved with the names of about 775,000 immigrants.
+Each name on the wall was paid for by one of those immigrants’ family or friends.
+“They want to honor the people who came before them at the site of that person’s first steps in America,” said Stephen A. Briganti, president of the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation Inc.
+The monument serves as both tribute to immigrants and fund-raiser for the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration and the Statue of Liberty. In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan wanted to preserve the site, but without spending taxpayer money. The solution: build a wall and charge people to add names to it. It opened in 1990.
+It costs $150 to put one name on the wall and $225 for two names, with more expensive options as well (because this is, still, New York City). So far, the wall has raised more than $80 million.After years of playing with yard-sale toys, my brother and I had finally hit the jackpot: a Nintendo gaming system, set up on our living room television. We wedged in the cartridge, picked up the controllers and set it to two-player mode. The eight-bit music bleeped through its intro, and little Mario began his pixelated sidestep through the booby traps.
+This was a turning point in my relationship with my brother. He and I had always been a duo. “I’m Batman and you’re Robin!” he’d announce, rigging our bunk beds into a makeshift Bat Cave.
+Finding the Princess, Finding Myself
+This new game seemed much harder than saving Gotham. My brother’s character easily zipped through castle after castle, while my Mario died a hundred deaths on the first level. I was ready to swear off this “boy toy,” stomp off to my room and tea party like there was no tomorrow. But as he entered a water world, bobbing along to a carnival tune, I sank back into my seat, mesmerized. I didn’t play, but I didn’t leave. The princess might be on the next screen, and I wanted to help find her.
+I watched my brother for a while and then said, “If you just walk along the seafloor, the Bloopers can’t reach you.”In 1929, a young African-American artist named Elmer Simms Campbell arrived in New York to pursue his dream of becoming an illustrator. Armed with a degree from the Chicago Art Institute, he nevertheless faced a string of rejections because of his race. But a far more generous welcome awaited him uptown in Harlem.
+It was there that he became a friend of Cab Calloway’s, the famed bandleader of the Cotton Club; the two men became drinking buddies and regulars at the many speakeasies and jazz clubs that drew thousands of revelers to northern Manhattan during Prohibition.
+In 1932, Mr. Campbell drew an energetic road map of Harlem’s hot spots for Manhattan magazine, a portrait that directly conveys the limited reach of Prohibition on the eve of repeal. In fact, a closer look at the map captures the many complex and unintended consequences of the 18th Amendment.
+The emergence of American jazz itself owed much to the twin forces of migration and discrimination: More than a million African-Americans left the rural South in the 1910s, and the segregation they encountered in other parts of New York drove many to settle in Harlem.About 20 percent just made it paycheck to paycheck; they had less than a typical day’s worth of spending in their accounts on the day before payday. This is not unusual even for people like federal employees who hold steady jobs at steady pay.
+In this shutdown, however, it means that most affected workers will need to take multiple measures, sharply cutting discretionary spending and being late paying mortgages, rent and other bills.
+It gets worse. There are few signs that this shutdown will soon be resolved and uncertainty about whether the workers will get paid retroactively.
+Even if President Trump and Congress can’t reach an agreement to end the shutdown, they should, in the meantime, reduce the needless hardship to these workers and guarantee they will be paid when the shutdown is complete. On Monday, some progress was made on this front: Congress passed a bill under which all affected government workers would receive their lost pay as soon as the shutdown ends. Mr. Trump, whose executive order to freeze federal pay for 2019 signals little sympathy with the government’s work force, should sign the bill.The actions of the citizen Prohibition army in Williamson County, Ill., a hardscrabble rural mining region 300 miles south of Chicago, provides a striking example. The head of the Williamson County board of supervisors and a local Klan leader, Sam Stearns, and a Methodist pastor and Klan ally named Philip Glotfelty, along with members of the local Ministerial Association, had high hopes that Prohibition would usher in a new moral tenor in their community. Before Prohibition, the region’s largely native white Protestant miners might stop for a whiskey after a hard day’s work in the ramshackle bars that dotted the county, ignoring their pastors’ warnings against the “devil’s drink.” In Prohibition’s wake, drinking continued in new roadhouses and moonshine joints. Two rival criminal rings, the Birger and Shelton gangs, set up shop to supply the thriving black-market trade.
+Glotfelty and Stearns, backed by the county’s leading businessmen and Protestant pastors, mounted a law and order crusade. They held public meetings to raise the alarm. Italian and French immigrants, largely Catholic, had been drawn to Williamson County by opportunities to work in the coal industry, and Glotfelty blamed the men “imported from across the sea” for bootlegging. He confidently predicted that all members of the local Catholic church would be in jail before “the foundations of the new church were built.”
+Glotfelty’s words resonated among the region’s native white Protestant miners, whose tenuous hold on economic security was increasingly eroding. A strike to protest wage cuts had ended in open class warfare in 1922. Williamson County’s moral leaders focused native Protestant miners’ grievances on another threat: the immigrants who competed for mining jobs. The local Klan ranks swelled with the promise to “clean up” the community.
+Representing the Klan, Stearns traveled to Washington to plead for support for its local anti-liquor crusade. Commissioner Haynes agreed to supply federal agents to lead the raids if Stearns could provide the foot soldiers. On Dec. 22, 1923, the first raid, in the town of Herrin, got underway. Some 500 citizen volunteers deputized by Haynes’s agents stormed scores of roadhouses and homes. A second raid two weeks later overwhelmingly targeted Italian immigrants, who protested rough treatment, theft and planted evidence.
+The Italian vice-consul in Springfield, Ill., denounced the “terrorization of foreign residents of Herrin” to the State Department. National Guard troops were called in to stem the chaos and violence. Eventually, the federal government ended its authorization for the volunteer army, refusing “reinforcements from the Ku Klux Klan or any other volunteer organization.”
+But the citizen army was not easily deterred. Stearns gleefully declared, “We’ve got the bootleggers on the run now, but we want to give them their hats, so they can keep on running.” Over the following months several more raids, each increasingly reckless, targeted Williamson County’s immigrants. On Feb. 2, 1924, S. Glenn Young, a former Prohibition agent who had been recruited by the Klan, led more than 1,000 men in raids against roadhouses and homes, setting fire to some of them. This time the county’s French immigrant community joined the Italian immigrants pleading for help from their consul. With Klan and anti-Klan forces battling in the streets, the Illinois governor declared martial law.
+The orgy of violence resulted in 14 deaths, but it also eroded Klan support among the public. Klan candidates had swept into office in Herrin in 1924, but one year later they lost power. The newly elected mayor promised to bar Klan supporters from parading in masks. But before the collapse of its power, the local Klan had partially accomplished its goals: More than 50 roadhouses and illicit drink spaces had been shut, and many of Williamson County’s immigrants heeded the Klan’s call to leave the county. Of the 11,000 foreign born and their children in 1920 in Williamson County, only 8,174 remained a decade later.The last five years in Western politics has seen a repeated failure of “cordons sanitaires” — the barriers that political establishments have tried to throw up against both radical ideas and xenophobic sentiments. The rise of populism and the return of socialism have breached these cordons, and racism and Judeophobia have come through the breach with them — to the point where it’s entirely plausible that Britain will soon find itself with a prime minister, the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who has an anti-Semitism problem, even as the United States has already elected a birther to the presidency.
+This week we’re watching two interesting attempts to re-establish or shore up those old barriers. On the right, there’s the congressional Republican effort to isolate Steve King, the Iowa congressman whose racist comments and flirtations with white nationalism have become, at long last, a matter of severe embarrassment to his colleagues. On the left, there’s the mass exodus of corporate and political sponsors from this weekend’s Women’s March, which has fallen into controversy because of some of its leaders’ ties to Louis Farrakhan, and reports that anti-Semitic canards were aired at its organizing meetings.
+The two efforts are similar but not parallel. The push against King is an attempt to redraw a line effaced by Donald Trump’s race-baiting, and since as you may have noticed Trump is still the president, it matters only as a possible marker for a post-Trump Republican future, not a defining statement for the G.O.P. today. The exodus from the Women’s March, on the other hand, is an attempt to get out ahead of a problem before it becomes worse — before anti-Semitism migrates from the left-wing fringe to the center, before the party starts getting its own versions of Jeremy Corbyn in positions of real influence.
+This is not to say that anti-Semitism or other paranoid worldviews are a new problem on the left, or that the Democratic Party has always handled them effectively. The permanent prominence of Al Sharpton and the eternal return of Michael Moore testify to certain unsuccessful reckonings, and the grass-roots left can be as amenable to conspiracy theories as the grass-roots right. But the fact that Trump is in the White House while the Democratic National Committee bails on the Women’s March illustrates a fundamental difference; if the Democrats struggle with the tiger, the Republicans have let it leap the cage.Impartiality, in which a clear distinction is drawn between the editorial section and the news report, is a cornerstone of newspapers today. But in the late 19th century, it was somewhat unusual. Papers openly aligned with political parties, and journalists often wove their opinions into their articles. New York tabloids known as penny presses thrived in such an environment; during the Spanish-American War, for example, William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World made a killing providing so-called “yellow journalism” to readers — exaggerated and sometimes fantastical accounts of the war, available for just 1 cent.
+Mr. Ochs had faced a similar situation in Chattanooga. The population there, torn apart in previous decades by the Civil War, was mistrustful; he revitalized the declining and mismanaged paper by developing its reputation for reliable and dispassionate coverage.
+In 1896, The Times was the fourth-largest of the serious newspapers in New York City. There was The New York Sun, which, in Mr. Ochs’s opinion, was weak in reporting; The New York Herald, which catered to high society; and The New York Tribune, which made no secret of its Republican leanings. (The Times itself had demonstrated both Republican and Democratic political biases at different times over its five-decade existence, and leaned Democrat since the election of Grover Cleveland in 1884.) In other words, there was room in the market for a paper readers could trust.
+The Times needed some fixing up in other ways as well. The paper was difficult to read and lacked the necessary funds to produce regular photography, which Mr. Ochs immediately addressed by changing the type and improving the presses. Cuts were made — including serial fiction — as well as additions, some of which remain to this day: Mr. Ochs’s wife, Effie Wise Ochs, loved literature and persuaded him to add a book review.
+Under new management, advertisers called more, and The Times earned back much of its former respect from readers. But by the beginning of the Spanish-American War in 1898, it was still in debt, and its long-term viability was still in doubt. While The New York Journal and The New York World were able to use the profits reaped from selling sensationalized reports to send boats full of correspondents to the conflict, The Times published Associated Press articles because of a lack of funds.SÃO PAULO, Brazil — “It’s a new era in Brazil: Boys wear blue and girls wear pink,” our new minister of women, family and human rights, Damares Alves, said this month in a video. And she didn’t stop there: Under the new government of President Jair Bolsonaro, she declared in her inaugural speech, “a girl will be a princess and a boy will be a prince.”
+Ms. Alves’s message was meant to be an attack on “gender ideology,” a concept created by conservatives to disparage the rhetoric of equal rights for women and L.G.B.T. people. The fight for gender equality and sexual and reproductive rights will lead to the collapse of the traditional family, Ms. Alves and others like her say. It will foster homosexuality and threaten Christian values. And so the correct response is moral panic: “Nobody will stop us from calling our girls princesses and our boys princes,” Ms. Alves fiercely proclaims.
+Except the conservatives have it backward: Not only is no one stopping them from making their children into gendered royalty, but in fact, their take on children and gender is already effectively a national obsession — if not a global one.
+I experienced this for the first time at the very beginning of my pregnancy, when I went shopping for tools for trimming the baby’s nails. “Is it a boy or a girl?” asked the saleswoman. I couldn’t possibly fathom what nails had to do with genitals, but I chose to be polite and said I didn’t know yet. The saleswoman seemed puzzled. She ran through a series of blue and pink cases, but finally announced she didn’t have anything neutral. When I decided to forge ahead and buy a pair of blue nail scissors anyway, she gave me a look of silent reproach. “Anarchist,” she practically whispered.Slight pause. Sly grin. “I’m just kidding!” she said.
+The members of her caucus cracked up, releasing years of frustration, their heads swinging back with joyous laughter. Ms. Stewart-Cousins threw up her hands like a champion, clapped and shouted, “Yay!”
+These heady times at the Capitol have some of New York’s liberals pinching themselves. Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a reform group, said she was recovering from shock after watching Democrats in the first hours of the new legislative session pass voting reforms that had been stymied for years. “It’s whiplash,” Ms. Lerner said. “Is there more to do? Yes. But today, we’re celebrating.”
+On an Amtrak train taking chattering lobbyists, aides, journalists and lawmakers to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s annual budget address on Tuesday, the progressives on board were giddy, a strange feeling for them on a trip to Albany in January. “I’m jazzed,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union’s executive president, Donna Lieberman. She joked that in previous years she’d often felt like she needed to take a shower after spending time in the State Capitol.
+Less jazzed were Senate Republicans, who after decades of uninterrupted power, now seemed vaguely lost. On Tuesday, for example, they suggested that if marijuana must be legalized, any revenue should go to a tax cut. Good luck with that.
+For some Republican lawmakers, a vote for a bill that would treat violence against transgender individuals as the hate crime that it is seemed particularly hard to take. From their seats in the back of the room, a couple of the Republicans rolled their eyes and snickered.
+At one point, State Senator Jessica Ramos, one of six members who won primaries against turncoat Democrats who had caucused with Republicans, said lawmakers should go even further to help transgender New Yorkers, leading State Senator Frederick Akshar, a Republican, to exclaim: “Jesus Christ! Further?”
+Even for Democrats, though, it hasn’t been all fun and reforms.
+In the Assembly, Speaker Carl Heastie marred an otherwise banner start to the new year by engaging in a legal maneuver to try to keep a $50,500 pay raise for lawmakers while eliminating limits on outside income set by a special committee that enacted the raise. No doubt he has better ways to spend his time.“What would be your breaking point? When would you pick up and leave? When is your Jim Mattis moment, when the president has asked you to do something which you think is inconsistent with your oath? Doesn’t that give you some pause as you embark on this journey?” “It might give me pause if I was 45 or 50 years old, but it doesn’t give me pause right now, because I had a very good life. I have a very good life. I love it, but I also want to help in this circumstance. And I am not going to do anything that I think is wrong. And I will not be bullied into doing anything I think is wrong by anybody, whether it be editorial boards or Congress or the president. I’m going to do what I think is right.”LONDON — Claudia Weber is a seasoned commuter, and she loves to knit.
+Over the past year, as her train journey from a town in the Bavarian countryside to Munich was replaced with a bus service during track repairs, stretching to two hours or more from a scheduled 40 minutes, she had a novel way of working out her frustrations.
+Others may roll their eyes, shrug or post complaints on social media. When she got home each evening, she simply added two rows of wool to a striped scarf she was knitting: gray for delays under five minutes, pink for up to 30 minutes and red for a delay of more than a half-hour or delays in both directions.
+The resulting four-foot “Bahn-Verspätungsschal,” or “rail delay scarf,” has become something of a social-media sensation. Put on eBay to raise money for a Germany charity that provides free assistance to people at train stations, it sold on Monday for 7,550 euros, or about $8,650, to an undisclosed buyer.
+“It’s not a statistic; it’s one year and how I felt about it,” Ms. Weber, 55, an office clerk at a travel agency, said in a phone interview on Tuesday.Good Wednesday morning. Breaking: Sears and Edward S. Lampert have reached $5.3 billion deal that would keep its stores open for now. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+An uncertain future for Britain after a staggering defeat
+Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain suffered a crushing defeat yesterday, after Parliament rejected her plan to withdraw the country from the European Union.
+The result thrusts the country further into political chaos 10 weeks before it is scheduled to leave the bloc, write Stephen Castle and Ellen Barry.
+The response: Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, called the defeat “catastrophic.” The European Union said it was stunned by the defeat but said there was no option to renegotiate. “Time is almost up,” said the European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker.Sears lives. For now.
+The bankrupt retailer and its chairman, Edward S. Lampert, have reached a $5.3 billion deal that would keep its 425 stores open and its 50,000 employees at work, according to a person familiar with the situation.
+In the deal, which was reached in the early hours on Wednesday, Mr. Lampert would acquire most of Sears’s assets, the person said. The final details of the sale still needed to be arranged, and negotiations continued through the day.
+Mr. Lampert, a hedge fund manager, was the only bidder at a closed-door auction this week who sought to keep the company operating. All of the competing bidders planned to liquidate the company’s real estate, inventory and brands.
+A federal bankruptcy judge must still approve Mr. Lampert’s bid, giving the company’s creditors a chance to derail the deal. Last week, the bankruptcy judge, Robert D. Drain, said Mr. Lampert’s bid was “a good development” because it offered Sears a shot at survival.DENVER — Moments after the Golden State Warriors finished obliterating the Denver Nuggets on Tuesday night, Draymond Green was asked about a teammate who did not even play — a teammate, in fact, who has yet to log a single minute this season but is nearing his much-anticipated debut.
+“Hopefully,” Green said, “it’s devastating for everybody else.”
+Let that soak in for a second. The Warriors, who have won three of the last four N.B.A. championships, are already good at basketball. All they did on Tuesday was set an N.B.A. record by scoring 51 points in the first quarter — the first quarter! — against a team that came into the game with the best record in the Western Conference.
+But now, after signing DeMarcus Cousins over the summer and spending recent months incorporating him into their dynastic fold as he recovered from Achilles’ tendon surgery, the Warriors expect him to be in their starting lineup when they visit the Los Angeles Clippers on Friday night. It is a grand experiment that will play out over the second half of the season.
+“More than anything, we’re just excited for DeMarcus,” Coach Steve Kerr said late Tuesday night, adding: “It’s going to take him some time to get his rhythm.”The comic Jaboukie Young-White has a bit examining which bugs are gay.
+Bees worship a queen, so of course. Ladybugs, he says, are clearly all lesbians. And when it comes to ants, he flashes a pensive look, his sleepy eyes opening wider as he asks, “You’re working so hard — what are you hiding?”
+Then Young-White, 24, pauses, waiting for the joke to sink in. Typically, he moves from punch line to punch line with pace, but the two times I have seen him tell this one, he went silent as the laughter built. It’s a veteran move from a relative newcomer: When a joke glances off its target, as opposed to thumping it, he holds the silence to let you know the laugh is there if you look for it.
+In the season premiere of the HBO series “Crashing,” on Sunday, Young-White plays a version of himself, a precocious comic with a herky-jerky delivery whom the star, Pete Holmes, persuades to come to New York, where he helps him gain entree to the club scene. But it’s a sign of how rapidly Young-White has risen that this plotline seems dated. Only a few months after he started work on “The Daily Show” in October, he headlined at Caroline’s, selling out five shows. It might not have seemed like it when “Crashing” hired him, but right now that series probably benefits from his glow more than the other way around.Los Angeles public school teachers are on the third day of their strike, with thousands of teachers showing up at school picket lines and massive rallies downtown. With some 30,000 teachers off the job, just a third of the district’s 500,000 students have showed up to school this week.
+The union’s anger has largely been directed at Austin Beutner, the superintendent who was appointed last year in large part because of his business background. Jennifer Medina spoke to Mr. Beutner as protesters gathered outside the district headquarters. He did not disguise his frustration and exasperation over the strike. Here is an excerpt from the interview, which has been condensed and lightly edited.
+JENNIFER MEDINA: What is this battle about right now?
+AUSTIN BEUTNER: The union’s desires are the same as mine. In concept we could agree with everything. But there’s limits on resources. The regulator on behalf of the state has told us we’re in dire financial straits. We cannot spend more than what we have.
+There are no negotiations scheduled between the district and the union, United Teachers Los Angeles. How long will the strike go on and how can it end?Slide 1 of 24,
+A converted cow barn in Weston, Conn., with three bedrooms, three and a half bathrooms and a swimming pool, is on the market for $699,000.Size: 5,829 square feet
+Price per square foot: $124
+Indoors: The house has had many improvements in the last 20 years. The floors have been lightly refinished, so as not to erase evidence of their age. The repaired windows retain their original wood and glass. All of the brass hardware has been refinished and lacquered. The tiled fireplaces on the first floor were restored by an artist and, in three cases, equipped with gas-fired “coal baskets.” The heating and cooling systems were updated with geothermal pumps and a gas heater.
+Double sets of doors with the original leaded glass (pierced by a bullet hole that has never been adequately explained) open to a paneled foyer with a tiger-oak fireplace. To the left, through pocket doors, is a formal living room with a fireplace and built-in wood-and-glass cabinets. A hallway leads to an office and half bathroom.
+On the other side of the foyer, to the right of the entrance, is a formal dining room with a fireplace and several large windows surrounding the seating area. Pocket doors lead to a large room with a cherry-and-granite kitchen upgraded in 2013 with new cabinet fronts, drawers and appliances. The space also has a family room that was Mr. Watts’s office; a mantel clock has been removed from the Craftsman-style fireplace, but could be reinstalled.
+Up the dramatic paneled staircase, past a stained-glass window, is a second-floor landing with exposed beams and a fireplace. Two large bedrooms are on this level: One has a fireplace, a dressing room and an en suite bathroom with a fireplace, an antique soaking tub, two showers and a closet with a washer and dryer; the other has a fireplace and is across the hall from a bathroom with a whirlpool tub and a walk-in shower. A nearby walk-in closet opens to a private balcony.
+The finished third level has two bedrooms, a sitting room and a full bathroom.
+Outdoor space: The house has an impressively wide and deep double-decker front porch supported by Ionic columns. The upstairs balcony is reached from the second-floor landing, and there is a long rear porch. The 0.6-acre property was extensively landscaped in 2001 and has been maintained. A carport was built behind the house to match the portico on the side.
+Taxes: $5,116 (2018)
+Contact: Joshua McGrath, Real Estate Central, 304-419-1750; realestatecentral.bizYet I was still more encouraged than alarmed by yesterday’s confirmation hearing. At this point, I have extremely low expectations for Cabinet officials selected by President Trump. Barr beat these expectations by saying he would allow Mueller to finish his investigation of Trump. He also came off as substantially more competent and professional than much of the Trump team.
+And once Mueller does finish his investigation, I think it’s unlikely that his findings will remain secret, regardless of what Barr tries to do. Mueller is a savvy political operator who understands how to use court filings and other means to inform the public of his work. Now that Democrats hold the House, they will also be able to help prevent the findings from remaining secret.
+“The idea an unclassified Mueller report won’t end up at least de facto public strikes me as totally ridiculous,” tweeted the Georgetown political scientist Matt Glassman yesterday. “To sit on this thing would be almost instantly unsustainable politically.”
+The crucial thing at this point is that Mueller be able to continue his work unimpeded. Given Barr’s past criticism of the investigation — which Andrew Cohen of the Brennan Center for Justice explains in Slate — he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But his remarks yesterday were somewhat better than I had feared.
+The Brexit mess
+A quick word on the big parliamentary defeat for Prime Minister Theresa May’s Brexit plan: Both the cancel-Brexit crowd and the Brexit-without-conditions crowd are feeling hopeful that they can prevail. This confidence has meant neither side has been willing to support May’s more moderate — but still radical — version of Brexit.
+Britain ’s political leaders are now sharply divided among these three broad camps, and none of them has a majority in Parliament. The next steps are uncertain. Any of the three sides could still prevail. If the Brexit-without-conditions side does, Britain could be in for a lot of pain.
+(And, yes, today’s newsletter is unusually long, because yesterday was unusually newsy.)
+If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Foreign auditors are to meet next week in Greece for a post-bailout review, with talks expected to focus on the enduring problems of Greek banks and their nonperforming loans, as well as taxation.
+The catalyst for the challenge to Mr. Tsipras’s government was a proposal to rename the neighboring nation of Macedonia. Greece had long blocked Macedonia from joining NATO, insisting that the country’s name implied territorial claims to the Greek region called Macedonia.
+Last year, the two nations signed an agreement for Macedonia to change its name to North Macedonia. The Macedonian Parliament approved the name change last week, and the Greek Parliament is to consider it in the coming days.
+But the proposed change does not go far enough for many, including the Independent Greeks, who cited it in quitting the government. Thousands took to the streets of Athens and other cities to protest the deal last year, and a rally is planned on Sunday.
+Some people have gone beyond protest. This week, a 63-year-old retired naval officer was arrested on charges of sending threatening messages to a government official over the Macedonia agreement.
+Over the weekend, a top prosecutor launched an investigation into reports that several lawmakers had received threats warning them not to back the deal. And the police in northern Greece said on Wednesday that they had arrested four people over “wanted” posters targeting Greek lawmakers who support the name change.
+Despite the upheaval, officials have expressed confidence that the Macedonia deal will pass with the support of opposition and independent lawmakers. But the outlook appeared unclear after the centrist party Potami, which had originally indicated it would back the pact, said it was reviewing its stance.A Retreat in the Colombian Andes
+This three-story house in the hills outside Bogotá, Colombia, is on the market for about $2.7 million.A Circular House in the Hills Outside Bogotá
+$2.7 MILLION (8.5 BILLION COLOMBIAN PESOS)
+This three-story, circular house is built into the hills outside La Calera, a small town in the eastern ranges of the Andes Mountains overlooking Bogotá, Colombia.
+Completed in 2012, the three-bedroom, five-bathroom house offers panoramic views of the San Rafael Reservoir, with a round bamboo roof designed by Simón Vélez, a renowned local architect who specializes in tropical architecture. With 8,600 square feet of living space, the home sits on a third of an acre in a subdivision of about 15 homes.
+Floors throughout are marble, ceramic and wood, and the furnishings, including the handwoven Colombian rugs, are included in the asking price, said Rosita Guzmán, the Colombia director of Latin Exclusive, which has the listing.
+Image The circular house is built into the hills outside La Calera, a small town in the eastern ranges of the Andes Mountains, overlooking Bogotá. Credit... Veronica Angulo for The New York Times
+“The owner is from Iran, so they have a mix between Middle East and Colombian style,” Ms. Guzmán said. “It’s in an area that’s hot in the day, but at night it gets a little bit cold, so it’s nice to use the fireplace and have some wine — that kind of atmosphere.”In a meeting with Mr. Trump in the Situation Room Wednesday morning, seven House Republicans and seven Democrats who are members of the Problem Solvers Caucus told Mr. Trump that they were eager to have a bipartisan discussion with him about border security, among other matters, but that he needed to first sign legislation to get government funding flowing again.
+“Both sides listened to each other, and believe that there’s a way forward,” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, who attended the session. He called it a “productive conversation,” but added, “It’s critical that we reopen the government first, for our safety, our security, our economy.”
+Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, called the meeting “constructive,” and said, “They listened to one another, and now both have a good understanding of what the other wants.”
+Another attendee who insisted on anonymity to describe the private discussion said neither side considered it a negotiating session, and Mr. Trump did not embrace the idea of reopening the government before the border barrier issue was settled. The president began the session with an extended talk about what he described as the crisis at the border, while lawmakers told him about the effects of the shutdown on their districts.
+In the Senate, a group of Republicans and Democrats was also working to persuade the president that no progress was possible as long as the government remained shuttered. It circulated a letter that called on Mr. Trump to drop his demand for wall funding as a condition of ending the shutdown, urging him to agree to sign a three-week stopgap government funding measure to allow time to forge a “broad bipartisan agreement” on border security spending.
+“We commit to working to advance legislation that can pass the Senate with substantial bipartisan support,” said the letter, which was spearheaded by Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware. “During those three weeks, we will make our best efforts following regular order in the appropriate committees and mark up bipartisan legislation relating to your request.”Over nine straight weekends, the antigovernment demonstrations against President Emmanuel Macron of France and his economic policies by members of the so-called Yellow Vest movement have caused some of the country’s worst civil unrest in more than a decade. The luxury goods industry, one of France’s top export categories and a major driver of tourism in Paris, has been especially hard hit, with scores of boutiques vandalized and poor sales during the all-important holiday season, when nervous shoppers stayed away.
+Now, the disruption has changed the fashion calendar.
+This week, as the season of Paris men’s shows began and a 10th Saturday of demonstrations was anticipated, the official schedule was turned upside down by brands trying to avoid the delays caused by blocked roads and police lines, or worse, violent skirmishes with protesters.
+The domino effect began with one of the biggest names on the lineup: Dior. The heritage fashion house, owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton , has become one of several luxury companies seized upon by protesters as a potent symbol of inequality and elitism. On Nov. 25, demonstrators ransacked the Dior store on the Champs-Élysées, stealing goods and causing damage reportedly worth €1 million ($1.14 million). Last week, Dior told guests via an email that it had rescheduled its men’s show — which will introduce the second men’s collection by Kim Jones — from Saturday at 5 p.m. to Friday at 6 p.m.The scrutiny of Facebook’s collection and use of consumer data in recent years has prompted the tech giant to repeatedly defend its efforts around transparency and privacy.
+But about three-fourths of Facebook users were unaware that the company lists their personal traits and interests for advertisers on its site, according to a study published by the Pew Research Center on Wednesday. Half of the users who looked at the Facebook page with that data — known as their “Ad Preferences” — said they were not comfortable with the company’s compiling that information. Pew conducted a nationally representative survey of 963 American adults with Facebook accounts between Sept. 4 and Oct. 1 of last year.
+While consumers have learned more in recent years about how they are targeted for online ads, the study suggests that many still do not know how much of their behavior is tracked, where it is compiled or even that Facebook has a page that lists all of that information. Pew focused on Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, because it “plays an incredibly important role in the media ecosystem of the world,” said Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of internet and technology research.
+“Privacy matters to Americans — it’s a classic American value — yet when they’re online and doing other things, they act as if their personal information is O.K. to harvest and analyze,” Mr. Rainie said in an interview. “One of the theories on this inconsistency is that Americans don’t really know what’s going on. The fact that 74 percent of Facebook users didn’t know that these lists were maintained on them cuts to the heart of that question of where Americans are, or are not, with these systems.”Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Trump on Wednesday suggesting that he delay his annual State of the Union address. Ms. Pelosi noted that both the Secret Service and Homeland Security Department have gone without funding in the government shutdown.
+[For more context and coverage of Ms. Pelosi’s letter, read here.]
+The following is the text of Ms. Pelosi’s letter, as released by her office.
+____________
+Dear Mr. President:
+On January 3rd, it was my privilege as Speaker to invite you to deliver the State of the Union address on January 29th. The Constitution calls for the President to “from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union.” During the 19th Century and up until the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, these annual State of the Union messages were delivered to Congress in writing. And since the start of modern budgeting in Fiscal Year 1977, a State of the Union address has never been delivered during a government shutdown.
+In September 2018, Secretary Nielsen designated State of the Union Addresses as National Special Security Events (NSSEs), recognizing the need for “the full resources of the Federal Government to be brought to bear” to ensure the security of these events. The extraordinary demands presented by NSSEs require weeks of detailed planning with dozens of agencies working together to prepare for the safety of all participants.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+WASHINGTON — When Andrew Wheeler, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, testified before Senators on Wednesday at his confirmation hearing, he found himself walking a tightrope on the issue of climate change.
+One of the most pointed moments came shortly after he told senators that climate change was not “the greatest crisis” facing our planet. Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, then asked Mr. Wheeler, a former coal-industry lobbyist, to rate his level of concern on a scale of one to 10.
+After a pause, Mr. Wheeler said, “about eight or nine.”
+“Really?” Mr. Merkley responded.
+Senator Merkley and other Democrats on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works took pains to focus in on Mr. Wheeler’s efforts to roll back environmental protections and undo Obama-era regulations designed to fight climate change as indicators that he is unsuitable to lead the E.P.A.
+President Trump formally nominated Mr. Wheeler last week to lead the agency but he has been on the job in an acting capacity since his predecessor, Scott Pruitt, resigned in July amid ethics scandals. If Mr. Wheeler is confirmed, a strong likelihood with Republicans holding a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate, he will formally become one of the top soldiers in Mr. Trump’s battle to undo regulations.In December, President Trump made an extraordinary declaration about U.S. involvement in Syria: “We have won against ISIS. Now, it’s time for our troops to come back home.” Ignoring advice from his generals and advisers, Trump said that the U.S. would leave Syria. Defense Department officials said that they were ordered to do it within 30 days. [explosion] Then came a flurry of criticism, even from inside his own party. “I believe it is a catastrophic mistake.” “This is very disappointing.” “It needs to be reconsidered.” Then, the resignations. First, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis quit. And America’s chief diplomat in the fight against ISIS, Brett McGurk, soon followed. Now, the timeline for a full withdrawal is unclear. “I never said we’re doing it that quickly.” He went on to say that the U.S. will leave at a proper pace while continuing to fight ISIS, a shift from — “They’re all coming back, and they’re coming back now.” The nearly eight-year-long war in Syria has left hundreds of thousands of people dead. [explosion] So, how did we get here and what are U.S. forces doing in Syria? In 2011, uprisings rippled through the Middle East. Leaders fell in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt. And after months of anti-government protests in Syria, the U.S. had a message for President Bashar al-Assad: “This morning, President Obama called on Assad to step aside.” He didn’t and the conflict escalated. In 2012, Obama warned Assad against using Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons against his own people. “That’s a red line for us, and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing the use of chemical weapons.” A year later, Assad’s army launched a chemical attack on a Damascus suburb, killing 1,400 people. [screaming] In response, the U.S. debated airstrikes, but they were avoided when Syria agreed to give up its chemical weapons. But a new threat was also emerging — ISIS. In 2014, the U.S. began supporting rebel groups to fight extremists, while also conducting airstrikes as part of an international coalition. These efforts expanded and the U.S. troop numbers grew from hundreds to the low thousands. In 2016, U.S.-supported fighters took control of the ISIS stronghold of Manbij — and in 2017 their de facto capital, Raqqa. There are now around 2,000 American forces in Syria who are largely fighting alongside the Kurdish groups. This has been a problem for America’s ally Turkey, which has a long-standing conflict with the Kurds. U.S. troops have had run-ins with Assad’s forces as well as groups backed by Russia and Iran. Since taking office, Trump has ordered two strikes on areas controlled by Assad in response to chemical weapons attacks. “We are prepared to sustain this response, until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents.” U.S. officials and allies dispute the claim that ISIS has been defeated. They warn that an American departure will weaken U.S. influence in the region and may embolden Russia, Iran and Turkey, who are also on the ground. The other worry? The move may inspire some ISIS fighters to return to Syria.There are so many cooks in our kitchen. And nearing 20,000 recipes in our database. But I’m here, like a court jester, to suggest that you don’t need to listen to any of them, that once in a while you can cook without a recipe, that on Wednesdays in this space I will always encourage you to do just that. I’ll offer a narrative prompt instead, and ask you to interpret it however you like.
+So, this week? Root vegetables roasted with olive oil, butter and thyme in a 425 degree oven, to serve with pork chops you’ll sear on the stove, the meat dusted in salt and pepper and rubbed with mustard, then finish alongside the vegetables for 10 or 12 minutes. Get on that, and you’ll be fine tonight, whatever hacks you add to the “recipe.”
+Or go find something else entirely on NYT Cooking. (Here’s how to become a subscriber.) There is further kitchen inspiration on our Instagram, Facebook and Twitter feeds. We are standing by to help should something go wrong with a recipe or with our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com.
+Now, it’s nothing to do with pellet ice and a morning Coca-Cola, but I like this “Get Shorty” series that’s emerged on Netflix, in part for the writing and totally for Chris O’Dowd.
+An office wag said Sally Rooney’s fiction was Y.A. for adults, but I ended up liking “Conversations With Friends” a fair amount, mostly because Sally Rooney is really smart. Next up: “Normal People,” which isn’t out in the United States yet. (I borrowed a copy of the British edition.) In the meantime, here’s her short story “Mr. Salary,” if you’d like a taste of her writing.MELBOURNE, Australia — Could the 2019 Australian Open be the Grand Slam tournament in which a budding cast of young American men breaks through?
+The odds remain against that happening — thanks in part to a guy named Roger Federer — and there remains much tennis to be played. But after a pair of second-round upsets by Frances Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz on Wednesday, the stage just might be set.
+The first surprise came when Tiafoe, who turns 21 on Sunday, finished off fifth-seeded Kevin Anderson behind powerful forehands and serves. It was the biggest win of Tiafoe’s young career and the biggest shock of the tournament so far.
+“C’mon!” he shouted, rolling up his right shirt sleeve, then thumping his right biceps repeatedly with his left hand, a move that seemed freighted with both bravado and relief. Tiafoe, the son of immigrants from Sierra Leone who learned the game at the Maryland tennis club where his father was a custodian, has long been touted as a prodigious talent. But he has also seemed burdened by the weight of expectations.Imperialism for the masses, the movie culture of the 1920s, purveyed romantic fantasies of an imaginary East. Theaters were designed to evoke the Alhambra. Rudolph Valentino rose to stardom as the Sheik; Douglas Fairbanks cavorted as the Thief of Bagdad. A Photoplay writer declared Scheherazade was the muse of cinema, and studio bosses were known as “movie moguls.”
+In contrast, the 1929 spectacle “Shiraz: A Romance of India” — at Metrograph in a fine 4K digital restoration by the British Film Institute — came by its heritage honestly. Based on Indian source material — albeit directed by a German national, Franz Osten, heading a mainly European crew — “Shiraz” was filmed on location in and around Jaipur with an all-Indian cast, including its producer and guiding light, Himansu Rai, in the title role as the man who designed the Taj Mahal.
+Less an exercise in outsider exoticism than a monument to national pride, “Shiraz” invents an imaginary back story for the 17th-century empress whose death inspired her husband to commission the world’s most celebrated mausoleum. The movie opens in grand fashion as brigands waylay a desert caravan carrying a toddler princess. Orphaned in the melee, the child is adopted by a village family that includes a ready-made older brother, Shiraz. Growing into a spirited young woman named Selima (Enakshi Rama Rau), she’s abducted by slave traders and purchased for the harem of a handsome crown prince (Charu Roy, an actor who went on to become a director). Complications ensue when the bereft Shiraz (Rai) sets off to rescue her.LONDON — Just minutes after Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan for leaving the European Union was resoundingly defeated on Tuesday night, the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, rose in Parliament and vowed in thunderous tones to unseat her.
+For Mr. Corbyn, a soft-spoken outsider who stormed to the top of the opposition party three years ago, the moment marked a crossroads. After years of lying low on the question of Brexit, he finally made his move, thrusting himself into the center of the debate. He demanded a no-confidence vote, considered the first step in having to choose a side in the Brexit debate.
+In the end, Mrs. May clung to power as lawmakers beat back the challenge against her. But Mr. Corbyn has still emerged with an enormous amount of influence to shape the Brexit battle moving forward.
+Not only did Mrs. May barely survive the no-confidence vote in the House of Commons, she also suffered the worst parliamentary defeat in Britain since the 19th century the day before, when her plan for carrying out Brexit failed 432 to 202, with more than 100 of her own party members deserting her.TEHRAN — A prominent American-born journalist working for an Iranian state-run satellite television channel has been arrested in the United States, the broadcaster said Wednesday.
+The reported action, which has not been confirmed by the American authorities, was condemned by Iranian officials. The journalist, Marzieh Hashemi, who has lived in Iran since 2009, is an anchor at the channel, Press TV.
+It said that Ms. Hashemi, 59, was arrested at the St. Louis airport on Sunday and transferred by the F.B.I. to Washington, where she remained in custody. No charges have been filed against her, the channel said.
+Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif of Iran was quick to denounce the reported arrest of Ms. Hashemi.The results echoed those of a 2015 national study by the Mellon Foundation, which found that people of color held 16 percent of leadership positions at art museums while 38 percent of Americans identified as Asian, black, Hispanic or multiracial at the time.
+“To make real and lasting change, work needs to be done at the top where the tone and priorities for each museum are established,” Laura Lott, the president and chief executive of the alliance, said in a statement. “Museum trustees and leaders can and must do more.”
+The alliance hopes to bring about systemic change by introducing diversity standards across the field, leadership development for 50 museums in five cities (which have not yet been named), an online resource center and a program that matches individuals with museum boards.
+“Facing Change” falls in line with other recent efforts to address racial disparity in the museum sector.
+After decades of exclusion, several prominent institutions have been hiring more minority staff members. In 2017, the Walton Family Foundation and the Ford Foundation donated $6 million over three years to support 20 programs that aim to help art museums nationwide with diversity among curators and top management.Do one thing, do it well and do it affordably. That seems to be the thought behind the boutique studio boom that has given us Drybar for hairstyling, SoulCycle for indoor cycling, Skin Laundry for laser treatments, MNDFL for meditation.
+And now we have WTHN — dropping vowels is not just for tech start-ups these days — which is trying to be the boutique studio version of acupuncture.
+Michelle Larivee and Shari Auth, the founders, are calling it a modern reimagining of acupuncture. Ms. Larivee is a former investment banker who dislocated vertebrae in a ski accident and was referred to Ms. Auth for acupuncture treatments for pain and, later, for fertility.
+The two women opened WTHN (pronounced “within”) in November in the Flatiron district of Manhattan, which may have the highest concentration of boutique concept studios anywhere on the planet. The modernization they’re going for comes partly in the form of the space itself. It’s a 2,200-square-foot retail-level space, which is unusual for acupuncturists, who more commonly practice out of small offices or clinics.TURNERS FALLS, Mass. — It seemed like the perfect setting for a shy, thoughtful 10-year-old boy’s first steps on stage: a kids’ Shakespeare program that doesn’t hold auditions, guarantees everyone a substantial speaking role, emphasizes community, and excludes no one.
+Unless, as Mason Wicks-Lim and his mother Ali discovered, you have a life-threatening nut allergy.
+The conflict that ensued over how the theater could accommodate Mason’s allergy eventually grew into a legal battle that created a rift in the community, highlighting the social struggles that people with food allergies often contend with, even as they fight for equal access.
+The turmoil began when the family tried to enroll Mason, now 14, in Young Shakespeare Players-East, a revered institution in this small historic town that takes pride in its arts community and progressive activism. The theater’s director, Suzanne Rubinstein, at first rebuffed efforts to register Mason, citing concerns that no one on staff could be trained to administer an EpiPen, a shot of epinephrine used to treat severe allergic reactions. Then, following months of negotiations, she threatened to close the program if he joined.
+As word got around that Mason was not welcome, some of his peers in the program urged Ms. Rubinstein to reconsider. Sam Picone-Louro, who was then 12 and had played a soldier and a senator in the spring production of “Julius Caesar,” accused Ms. Rubinstein of discrimination.The idea of the vampire as perfect lover is pretty old by now, but really, lovers don’t get much more perfect than the vampire aristocrat Matthew Clairmont in “A Discovery of Witches.” He listens so well he can hear your heartbeat rise, he’s so sensitive he can feel your heat and he’s so passionate he can just barely stop himself from ripping into your throat. That he’s played by that tall drink of plasma Matthew Goode (“The Crown”) is just overkill.
+“A Discovery of Witches,” which was made for Sky in Britain and begins streaming Thursday on both Sundance Now and Shudder, is an action fantasy in the multi-monster category of “Twilight” and “True Blood,” with a focus on Harlequin-style, time-jumping romance that may make it of interest to the “Outlander” audience. It should meet the requirements of those who like their high-class cheese fests wrapped in European accents and antique locations.
+Based on the novels in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls trilogy, the series imagines a triumvirate of nonhuman species — vampires, witches and demons — among whom peace is maintained by a centuries-old power-sharing arrangement. That détente is threatened when the historian Diana Bishop (Teresa Palmer), a daughter of witches who seems to have no significant powers herself, finds in the Bodleian Library a dusty volume that the supernatural elite has been seeking for, well, centuries. Matthew, who’s not just a fatally handsome 1,500-year-old French nobleman but an Oxford biochemist, is researching why magical creatures seem to be losing their powers.
+Of course, magic can’t go out of the world without a fight, or a series of them — vampires tearing into witches, witches conjuring fiery weapons with which to smite vampires. The demons, in this first season at least, don’t have much to do; they’re like one of the boring gangs in “The Warriors” that doesn’t make it out of the Bronx. And humans, while everywhere, are amusingly insignificant, with only a couple of minor speaking roles.After his time in the United States, Mr. Scott opened his first bar, Shady Pines, and stocked it with whiskey, beer and bowls of unshelled peanuts, and established a western, honky-tonk atmosphere. His next bar, the Baxter Inn, had even more whiskey and emulated an old East Coast tavern. His third, Frankie’s Pizza, was meant to mimic “an ’80s L.A. rock bar,” he said. (Mr. Scott recently sold his interest in all his Sydney properties.)
+All three bars are in subterranean spaces. Peppi’s is no different.
+[Check out Australia Fare: the dining column by our Australian restaurant critic, Besha Rodell.]
+“I always liked descending into a bar,” Mr. Scott said. “Something about it feels right. And I like having no windows in a bar. It feels like you’re tucked away from the world.” (He joked about his effect on Sydney: “One real-estate broker said I single-handedly, with my business partners, doubled the price of basement spots.”)
+Peppi’s also has a speakeasy entrance down a narrow, winding staircase at the back of the restaurant, and the interior features exposed brick and saloonlike clusters of tables and bentwood chairs.On Saturday, Henri Bendel, the department store whose brown and white stripes once defined the concept of the boutique as a carnival of gewgaws and glamour, will shut its doors for the last time. It has been a slow farewell, 24 stores blinking out like fireflies since the start of the year, culminating with the shuttering of the New York flagship this week. (The website will stay open until Jan. 28.)
+It comes two weeks after Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue held its last fire sale, leaving its echoing Italian Renaissance halls empty in order to make way for a new tenant. (Other Lord & Taylor stores, as well as its website, remain open.)
+Both events were signaled last fall (though at first Lord & Taylor said it was simply downsizing and would keep a presence on the ground floor of its famous building). As a result, locking the actual door was almost an afterthought. Most of us have already done our mourning and bemoaning, our breast-beating about the digital future.After the stormy tenure of Jeff Sessions as attorney general, the likely return of William Barr to the job — which he held with distinction under President George H.W. Bush — has been greeted with sighs of relief at the Justice Department. The reason is not hard to divine: Bill Barr is an accomplished lawyer with a deep respect for the law and for the integrity and independence of the department — something I know from having served under him. After his solid performance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, he seems almost certain to be approved by the full Senate.
+His critics have focused on a 19-page legal memorandum he sent over the summer to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein questioning whether the special counsel, Robert Mueller, could investigate the president for violating criminal obstruction-of-justice laws. Democrats have demanded that if confirmed, Mr. Barr should recuse himself from overseeing the Mueller inquiry. But that response to Mr. Barr’s meticulous legal analysis is wildly overwrought.
+A more dispassionate review of Mr. Barr’s memo shows that he was trying to prevent an unprecedented expansion of a federal criminal statute intended to prevent crimes such as destroying evidence, bribing prospective jurors, intimidating witnesses and the like. The memorandum expressly acknowledges that presidents, like other citizens, can run afoul of the criminal laws. But he questions whether a president can be investigated for actions that are expressly within his constitutional powers — such as firing an F.B.I. director. He is sounding a clear warning against prosecutorial overreach.
+Indeed, one of Mr. Mueller’s senior prosecutors was a primary architect o f a legal theory of obstruction that was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court, a rebuff delivered only after the prosecution caused the collapse of a major accounting firm, Arthur Andersen. That example does not stand alone. In case after case, a wary — and frequently unanimous — Supreme Court has knocked down legal theories drummed up by well-meaning but overly zealous federal prosecutors.For the mixed-media artist Xavier Veilhan, the studio is not only a place of work, it is also a place for living. While he notes that many of his peers in the visual-art world have rejected the convention of the studio to “work on airplanes and outsource their production,” he has adopted the opposite approach: “I do not have a fancy home or a beach house, I have this studio instead.” In 2007, he collaborated with the French architecture firm Bona-Lemercier to transform a ’60s-era storage hangar in Paris’s Bastille neighborhood into a space where he could produce and fabricate his work, which ranges from 3-D printed sculptures to ambitious installations like the recording studio he created in the French Pavilion at last year’s Venice Art Biennale. But he also wanted a place where he could cook intimate lunches and host the occasional party (every year, during Paris’s annual Fête de la Musique, he invites up to 500 of his friends into the studio to watch world-renowned D.J.s). The studio’s design, while delightfully unconventional — with its rounded blond-wood walls, nylon strap and net railings and floating portal-like doors — is precisely tailored to Veilhan’s needs.
+Image The interior of Veilhan’s Paris studio, designed by the French architecture firm Bona-Lemercier in 2007. Credit... Julia Sherman
+The custom kitchen is where his obsessions with design, art making and food converge. Boatlike in shape, with a curved cast-concrete ceiling and a striking economy of space, this is the heart of the building and as close as Veilhan comes to claiming an office of his own in the open-plan space. The walls are stacked with intriguing objects, including obscure nautical instruments and editioned artworks. Veilhan drinks from an unassuming institutional water fountain that is actually a sculpture by the American artist Marc Ganzglass, titled “Meteorite Inclusions (Fountain)”; the pipes are formed from fragments of an iron meteorite.Eddie Rodriguez approached his financial counselor, beaming in his new navy suit.
+“It’s a small office,” said Mr. Rodriguez, 42, “but magic comes out of there.”
+Early last year, Mr. Rodriguez could hardly afford to pay his basic living expenses, let alone buy new clothes. After defaulting another time on his student loans, his Social Security disability benefits were again garnished, leaving him with little. Knowing he needed help, he sought assistance in June from the Financial Coaching Corps, part of the Community Service Society.
+Mr. Rodriguez is not alone in his struggle with student debt: Federal statistics show that nearly a third of the people who take out student loans have serious trouble repaying them.
+“A lot of my clients never received good information at any sort of point along the student loan journey,” said Mr. Rodriguez’s financial counselor, Courtney Davis, the community development specialist at Financial Coaching Corps. She helped him rehabilitate his defaulted loans.“He was a problem solver unequaled,” Peter C. Sarnak, a colleague of Dr. Bourgain’s at the institute, said in an interview.
+Dr. Sarnak said that Bourgain started out in an esoteric corner of mathematics with extremely difficult problems. “He just came in and started solving one problem after the other in that subject,” he said. “So he made his name there, became very famous, winning all sorts of young-up-and-coming-star prizes. But then he broadened out.”
+Dr. Bourgain found that tools he had developed could also be applied to other fields of mathematics, including partial differential equations, computer science, quantum mechanics and dynamical systems, making progress on formidable problems that had stymied experts in those areas.
+“There would be some big mountain in front of you,” Dr. Sarnak said, “and he would ascend halfway up, occasionally all the way up. People couldn’t understand how he got all the way up. It would take often months or years for people to understand his proofs. He liked the idea that he was way ahead and people were catching up to him all the time. He would open these doors.”
+Some of Dr. Bourgain’s recent work included a “decoupling theorem” — a very abstract generalization of the Pythagorean theorem applied to oscillating waves, like light or radio waves. While Pythagoras merely showed how the length of the two shorter sides of a right triangle are related to the longer hypotenuse, the decoupling theorem proved by Dr. Bourgain and Ciprian Demeter, of Indiana University, showed similar relationships in the superposition of waves, when the individual oscillations are added together.2. Suited for Love
+Caitlin Elfring and Shamisa Zvoma in Bindle and Keep
+Caitlin Elfring (left) and Shamisa Zvoma both wanted to wear suits on their wedding day, but they also knew how difficult it could be to find something off the rack. Custom was the only option, and Bindle and Keep was the only company they considered. “We knew they would be the ones that would be able to create suits perfectly for us,” said Ms. Elfring. “And we knew we would have the nonjudgmental experience we were looking for. It was incredible to work with a small LGBTQ+ business that’s doing great things for the community,” Ms. Zvoma said. On their wedding day, both Ms. Elfring and Ms. Zvoma knew they had made the right choice. “Our suits were the best fitting and most well-constructed pieces of clothing we’ve ever worn in our entire lives. We’ve both never felt so beautiful and stunning,” Ms. Elfring said.We invited students to submit their original illustrations. Our panel of judges chose 8 winners, 13 runners up and 27 honorable mentions. Visit The Learning Network to learn more about our contests and other resources for teaching and learning.LONDON — Scenes of pranks ranging from silly to hazardous have long been among YouTube’s most popular offerings. Now, after multiple reports of people putting themselves or others at risk by copying some of those stunts, the video-sharing service is clamping down on content that, in its view, depicts “dangerous challenges and pranks.”
+On Tuesday, YouTube, a unit of Google, updated its policies “to make it clear” that challenges “that can cause death and/or have caused death in some instances,” pranks “with a perceived danger of serious physical injury” and anything that causes “children severe emotional distress” are not allowed on the site.
+In a statement, YouTube said the update — which cited pranks involving home invasions or drive-by shootings as unacceptable — was a result of a routine review of its longstanding enforcement guidelines and an effort to better define what it allows users to post. Users whose videos are taken down over the next two months for violating the standards can appeal the removals.
+“We heard feedback from creators that we could provide some clarity on certain community guidelines,” the statement said, “so we published materials detailing our policies against pranks that cause others to seriously fear for their safety or that cause serious emotional distress to children and vulnerable individuals.”In the 1950s , women across the country wore practical, button-down housedresses with tight waists and deep pockets. In the ’80s, shoulder pads were a symbol of power in the workplace, but also up and down supermarket aisles. In the aughts, moms (and their daughters) wore a whole lot of Juicy Couture velour sweatsuits.
+For years, black Lululemon yoga pants and Uggs were the axis of the mom uniform, until the media cruelly shamed women out of them. Then last year, a pair of deliberately beaten-up-looking $500 Golden Goose sneakers and what is known as simply the “Amazon jacket,” a $130 parka, was seen on moms in Chappaqua and Short Hills alike.
+But in Brooklyn recently, a decidedly more bohemian expression of middle-aged fashion has emerged.
+This ensemble is made up of two accessories: Part 1 is the No. 6 clog, which has become ubiquitous in upscale Brooklyn neighborhoods and on celebrities like Keri Russell, Julianne Moore and Claire Danes.
+Part 2 is the Salt strap, a thick, detachable handbag strap woven from bright colors, made to hook onto luxury bags, as Salt’s Instagram account promotes vividly, like the $2,500 Gucci, the $3,300 Hermès, a $2,600 Celine or a $1,700 Chloé.A friend of mine says that whenever he walks into someone’s home he’s tempted to yell out, “Hey, Alexa,” or “O.K., Google,” and order 50 pizzas, just to see if there’s a device listening in on whatever gossip he planned to dish out next.
+Shoshana Zuboff would undoubtedly get the joke, but she probably wouldn’t laugh. In “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” she warns against mistaking the soothing voice of a personal digital assistant for “anything other than the exploitation of your needs.” The cliché that “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product” isn’t alarming enough for her. She likens the big tech platforms to elephant poachers, and our personal data to ivory tusks. “You are not the product,” she says. “You are the abandoned carcass.”
+O.K., Zuboff, tell me more. It’s a testament to how extraordinarily intelligent her book is that by the time I was compared to an elephant carcass, I resisted the urge to toss it across the room. Zuboff, a professor emerita of Harvard Business School and the author of “In the Age of the Smart Machine” (1988), has a dramatic streak that could come off as simply grandiose if she didn’t so painstakingly make her case. She says we’re living through such “a bold and unprecedented shift in capitalist methods” that even as we encounter the occasional story about Facebook allowing its corporate clients to read users’ private messages or the software in Google’s Street View cars scraping unencrypted information from people’s homes, the American public doesn’t yet grasp the new dispensation in its entirety.
+So many people take care to calibrate their privacy settings just so, sharing certain things with friends and keeping other things hidden, while their data still gets collected and shared among apps for possible monetization now or later. Google and Facebook might not call to mind the belching smoke stacks and child laborers of the Industrial Revolution, but Zuboff argues that they’re run by people who have turned out to be just as ruthless and profit-seeking as any Gilded Age tycoon. Instead of mining the natural landscape, surveillance capitalists extract their raw material from human experience.In the “full frame” model, what might look to a traditional case worker as resistance or noncompliance or backsliding can be seen, by contrast, to result from a system that is forcing an unsustainable trade-off on a client who is already in a fragile situation, or even a compliance with a higher sense of self than the case worker imagines.
+For Lola, the benefits of having her own apartment were outweighed by the loss of the sense of belonging, purpose, stability and social connectedness that she had experienced at the Y.
+“Lola made it back into housing,” Ms. Smyth said. “But here’s what I wish we had done the first time: Celebrate the housing, but say, ‘Let’s think about what you’re going to have to leave behind and see if we can minimize that so that the change is actually worth it to you.’”
+What might that have meant in practice? Perhaps the Y could have offered to buy Lola a bus pass if she agreed to return a day or two each week to lead new groups. She would have stayed connected to her community and maintained that all-important sense of purpose, and she could have scheduled her medical appointments on days when she was in the area.
+What inhibits this kind of creative problem-solving from emerging more often in systems?
+One thing is a mental trap that psychologists call the “fundamental attribution error.” Stated simply, when strangers do things that we see as negative, we tend to attribute it to their characters rather than their circumstances. (By contrast, when we, or people we like, fall short, we tend to attribute it to circumstances.) People living in poverty or dealing with violence or addiction are often seen as “fundamentally different,” Ms. Smyth says, or as broken or deficient and therefore in need of being fixed.
+To work around the fundamental attribution error, it’s essential to get nuanced information about people’s situations. Next week’s article will examine how the Full Frame Initiative has helped the St. Louis County Family Court simplify its approach to assessment — focusing on the kind of information that is needed to recognize the role of circumstances, and understanding how court officers can avoid inadvertently forcing youths or families into unsustainable trade-offs.
+Another problem is that systems deal with problems in sequence, rather than in an integrated fashion. For instance, when a woman seeks assistance for domestic violence, the initial focus is usually entirely on safety for her and her children. “People experiencing domestic violence are often told by child welfare workers that they need to leave their partner or risk losing custody of their kids,” Ms. Smyth said.It’s January and you’ve gone and done it: You’ve resolved to keep better track of your personal finances. But deep down, you’re not sure where to start. Sure, you can buy accounting software, sign up for a service or poke around your bank’s online offerings for money management. But don’t overlook what is probably the best option of all: a simple and free spreadsheet you make yourself.
+Never used spreadsheet software before and not quite sure what it does? Relax, using it to make a budget is easy, because someone has already done most of the work. Here’s how to get started.
+Step 1: Pick Your Program
+First, select an application that can create and edit spreadsheet files. Microsoft Excel has long been a core component of the Microsoft Office suite for Mac and Windows ($70 a year). If you don’t have it already, you can also find versions for Android and iOS or the free basic version that runs in a web browser.0:47
+Military Must Take ‘Hard Look’ at Confederacy Symbols, Milley Says
+1:05
+Missing Fort Hood Soldier’s Remains May Have Been Found
+0:53
+Washington Mayor: ‘I Didn’t See Any Provocation’ to Warrant the Use of Munitions
+4:11
+‘It Has Made Chaos Everywhere’: Iranian Reactions to the U.S. Killing Suleimani
+1:36
+Video Shows Aftermath of U.S. Strike That Killed Top Iran Commander
+1:30
+Scenes From Attack on U.S. Embassy in Iraq
+19:11
+A.I. Is Making It Easier to Kill (You). Here’s How.
+0:35
+Armored Vehicles Arrive for Trump’s Fourth of July Festivities
+1:04
+Video Shows Russian and U.S. Ships Almost Collide
+5:39
+One Bomb. 11 Children Killed. And the Evidence That Implicates the U.S.
+0:55
+Votel: ‘I Was Not Consulted’ on Syria Withdrawal Announcement
+10:14What’s going to happen with Brexit? A second referendum? A disorderly hard exit? A new offer from the European Union that isn’t as offensive as the deal that just got rejected? God knows, and even He may be uncertain.
+Part of the problem is that there don’t seem to be many rational actors out there. Much has been written about the fantasies of many Brexiteers; I don’t have anything to add to all that. But we should also note the fantasies of the Eurocrats, who have behaved at every step of this process as if Britain were Greece, and could be bullied into capitulation. Minor gestures could have saved Remain in 2016; a bit of flexibility, a bit less determination to impose humiliating terms, might have led to a soft Brexit now. But it was arrogance all the way.
+Now we hear that E.U. officials are horrified by the scale of May’s defeat, and my sense is that European leaders are starting to realize that a disorderly break would do a lot of damage to a fragile eurozone too. No kidding.
+Anyway, let’s talk about where the economics of Brexit seem to stand now.
+The long-run economics of Brexit still look mostly the same way they did when I and others began analyzing the prospect back in 2016. Exit from Europe’s customs union would substantially raise transaction costs on roughly half of Britain’s trade. This would impose a cost on overall British real income that most estimates put at a low single-digit percentage of G.D.P. — say, 2 to 4 percent.Harold Haliday Costain
+Through Jan. 26. Keith de Lellis Gallery, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 703, Manhattan; 212-327-1482, keithdelellisgallery.com.
+These days, when an American brand wants to drum up publicity, it offers some free swag to Instagram micro-celebrities, happy to prettify their performed “real life” with whatever product comes their way. A century ago, it was safer to call up an artist. Harold Haliday Costain (1897—1994), trained as an illustrator, became one of the most adroit commercial photographers of the 1930s — providing American corporations with a bold, modern image that appeared nearly heroic in the years of the Depression.
+“Sugar & Salt: Vintage Industrial Photographs by Harold Haliday Costain,” at this photography space in the gallery-rich Fuller Building, includes two suites of his crisp, propulsive images of American industry. In 1934, he was commissioned by the International Salt Company to photograph its operations in Avery Island, La.; there Costain turned his camera on an angle to shoot vigorous views of a bare-armed laborer handling a hulking metal wheel, or a pristine metal helix grinding its way through evaporated salt. He also used lamps and spotlights to produce a dramatic view of a worker beneath a towering cliff of salt, so denuded and striated it appears almost like a lunar landscape. The photos of salt ran in the fledgling Fortune magazine; “a white thread through history’s tapestry,” wrote the magazine’s overawed reporter.
+Costain brought the same high-velocity modernism — skewed angles, high contrast, shifting depth of field — to photographs he took the next year of the facilities of the National Sugar Refining Company in New York and New Jersey. Hundreds of sacks of sugar tower over a worker, recalling levees or even sandbags fronting the trenches of the Great War. A woman on the assembly line looks on beneficently as boxes charge diagonally across the composition. Far from the cautious boosterism of contemporary annual reports, these sugar photos bear a strong resemblance to Soviet photography of the period, by the likes of Boris Ignatovich and Vsevolod Tarasevich. That such similar imagery could advertise such divergent economic systems attests to the slipperiness of photographic style — and to the importance of looking past surfaces, even on the feeds of buffed-to-shine Instagrammers. JASON FARAGOSometimes, the host makes the most of these additional moments, as Ellen DeGeneres did five years ago when she pulled nearly every celebrity in the front row into a selfie that went viral. Still, with many Oscar hosts, you can see the flop sweat as they try desperately to will a minor bit into something bigger. The less said about Jimmy Kimmel’s aimless foray into a packed movie theater, or Neil Patrick Harris’s recurring briefcase joke, the better.
+Mistakes like those won’t be missed, and those who tune into the Oscars simply to watch things go smoothly will no doubt be satisfied. And yet, even though it’s a gig packed with peril, I think we’re still underestimating the power a host has to shape the telecast in ways both noticeable and not.
+For one, the hosts serve as ratings-drivers: Not only are they expected to promote the show in interviews and commercials, but when the host is well matched to the material, audiences often tune in simply to see what he or she will say. With ratings dwindling for the telecast, this is a bad year to skimp on a host’s must-see appeal, and though Oscar producers hope to offset that loss by asking big names to present, that’s hardly a unique draw. Most Oscar telecasts are already packed with celebrity presenters.
+[The Carpetbagger on “Black Panther’s” prospects at this year’s ceremony.]
+ABC has been so desperate to increase Oscar ratings that executives pushed for a new category just to reward blockbuster films, and while it’s true that the 1998 telecast became the highest-rated Oscar show ever in part because the megahit “Titanic” was in contention, 2014’s edition was the most-watched of the last decade, and that wasn’t because best picture winner “12 Years a Slave” was some billion-grossing smash. It’s because DeGeneres, that year’s social-media-savvy host, ably plugged into the way many people like to watch the Oscars these days: with one eye on the TV, and the other on Twitter.With “Assume Form,” Blake wants to get closer. His previous albums were suffused with loneliness; this one, tentatively and almost incredulously, ponders intimacy. In the album’s title song, Blake sings about choosing to become embodied: “I’ll leave the ether/I will assume form,” he croons. “I will be touchable by her/I will be reachable.” The track fluctuates gorgeously, juxtaposing loops of piano that are soothing and vaguely ominous, and only settling into a beat about halfway through, like a ghost gradually solidifying.
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+The album is full of gratitude and affectionate apologies. “Into the Red” marvels at a woman’s financial generosity, over a track that dwindles from a string-ensemble arrangement to tiny, plinking tones. “Can’t Believe the Way We Flow,” built on a rapturous sample from the R&B vocal group the Manhattans and produced with Oneohtrix Point Never, revels in sensuality that makes the singer “waive my fear of self.” In “Power On,” he lists his delusions of separateness and self-sufficiency — “I thought you were second place to every song” — only to return to a refrain: “I was wrong.”
+Blake rarely lets his music feel too secure. He still makes pitches waver and rhythms dissolve; he switches texture with sudden, surreal edits. In two songs, he collaborates with the producer Metro Boomin and guest vocalists: Travis Scott in “Mile High” and Moses Sumney in “Tell Them.” But he calmly destabilizes Metro Boomin’s trap rhythms, entangling them with flute sounds in “Mile High” and fitfully swapping them for flamenco handclaps in “Tell Them.” Well aware of how widely imitated he is, Blake offers some other surprises; if it were in a different musical guise, the borderline stalker-ish “I’ll Come Too” could almost be a Tin Pan Alley ballad.
+Like the rest of Blake’s albums, “Assume Form” opens into haunted, rewarding depths. All that’s missing is one luminous, fully focused pop chorus, like “Retrograde” on Blake’s 2013 “Overgrown” or “My Willing Heart” on his 2016 “The Colour in Anything.” This album comes closest in “Barefoot in the Park,” a duet with the Spanish singer Rosalía that, despite its minor key and somber descending chords, celebrates togetherness and how “You start rubbing off on me.” Perhaps Blake couldn’t bring himself to write something as clichéd as a hit-seeking pop love song.To the Editor:
+Sixty-one years a Catholic priest, I am convinced that what my church desperately needs to do now is to seek justice for the victims of sexual abuse by priests and to build a new foundation for itself as quickly as possible.
+That foundation must include the welcoming of women into every level of church ministry and government; an end to the requirement of celibacy for priests; a scientific renovation of the screening process for seminary applicants; and steps toward ending the elevation of priests and bishops to the status of superiority and privilege.
+The life-threatening severity of the present sickness of the church does not allow the option of delayed healing; these radical foundational changes must be made now. Even if imperfect, they will give hope and the promise of new life.
+(Rev.) Richard G. Rento
+Lavallette, N.J.To the Editor:
+Re “Questions to Ask Before Booking a Wedding Site” (Sunday Styles, Jan. 13):
+Daniel Bortz presents some practical and wise questions to consider before booking a wedding venue. Here’s a little unsolicited advice from a friendly rabbi. If you have your heart set on having your childhood rabbi, priest, family friend or judge officiate on your special day, ask that person whether or not that date works for his or her schedule first.
+Seems like common sense, but you’d be shocked to know how frequently starry-eyed couples are deflated after they realize that their clergy person will not be able to officiate at their wedding. Oh, and mazel tov!
+Sharon G. Forman
+Scarsdale, N.Y.MADRID — The well is over 300 feet deep, but less than a foot wide. And somewhere in its depths a 2-year-old boy is believed to be trapped.
+Frantic efforts to rescue the toddler, Julen Roselló, have been underway in the countryside northeast of the port city of Málaga after he was said to have slipped down the well while his parents were preparing Sunday lunch.
+About 100 rescuers have been working at the site, covered round-the-clock by the Spanish news media, while Julen’s father has made repeated pleas on television for every effort to be made to find his son alive.
+On Wednesday, the authorities in southern Spain announced that according to a preliminary DNA test, hair found in mud excavated from the well was the boy’s, confirming his presence. He is believed to be more than 250 feet underground, beneath earth dislodged by his fall.Turkish prosecutors are seeking an international arrest warrant for Knicks center Enes Kanter, accusing him of membership in a terrorist organization.
+The Sabah newspaper said the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office had also prepared an extradition request for Kanter, a Turkish citizen who has been a vocal critic of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s president. Officials at the prosecutor’s office could not be reached by The Associated Press for comment.
+Kanter, who did not travel with the Knicks this week for their game in London after saying he feared he might be killed there over his opposition to Erdogan, responded on Twitter that the Turkish government could not present “any single piece of evidence of my wrongdoing.”Karen Pence, the second lady of the United States, returned to teaching art this week, accepting a part-time position at a private Christian school that does not allow gay students and requires employees to affirm that marriage should only be between a man and a woman.
+The website of the school, Immanuel Christian School, which enrolls kindergartners through eighth graders at its campus in Springfield, Va., details its religious beliefs and expectations of both students and their parents, as well as those who wish to work there. The school’s employment application requires candidates to describe their faith in Jesus Christ, affirm that they are a born-again Christian and vow to adhere to specific standards in their personal and professional lives.
+The eighth item on the application’s “Articles of Employment,” which requires applicants to sign their initials next to a list of beliefs, outlines Immanuel Christian’s definition of marriage and stances on sexual identity.
+“I understand that the term ‘marriage’ has only one meaning; the uniting of one man and one woman,” it reads, adding that certain “moral misconduct” would be disqualifying, such as “heterosexual activity outside of marriage (e.g., premarital sex, cohabitation, extramarital sex), homosexual or lesbian sexual activity, polygamy, transgender identity, any other violation of the unique roles of male and female.”Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter
+Aaron Davis, a British botanist, has spent 30 years trekking across forests and farms to chronicle the fate of one plant: coffee.
+He has recorded how a warming planet is making it harder to grow coffee in traditional coffee-producing regions, including Ethiopia, the birthplace of the world’s most popular bean, arabica. He has mapped where farmers can grow coffee next: basically upcountry, where it’s cooler. He has gone searching for rare varieties in the wild.
+Now, in what is perhaps his most disheartening research, Dr. Davis has found that wild coffee, the dozens of varieties that once occurred under forest canopies on at least three continents, is at risk of vanishing forever. Among the world’s 124 coffee species, he and a team of scientists have concluded, 60 percent are at risk of extinction in the wild. Climate change and deforestation are to blame.
+It matters because those wild varieties could be crucial for coffee’s survival in the era of global warming. In those plants could lie the genes that scientists need to develop new varieties that can grow on a hotter, drier planet.To the Editor:
+Re “Barr Makes Promise to Senate: He’ll Let Mueller Finish Inquiry” (front page, Jan. 16):
+Nothing less than the future well-being of the Republic lies in the balance as the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing on the nomination of William Barr for attorney general.
+It is evident that President Trump is acting in the interests of a foreign power and contrary to American interests. It is unthinkable to confirm a nominee for attorney general who equivocates about the release of the extensive investigative report by Robert Mueller that every member of Congress must be permitted to see in full.
+If Mr. Barr cannot straight out commit to the release of Mr. Mueller’s full report to Congress, with some possible redactions of the names of nongovernment individuals for reasons of their safety, then Mr. Barr must be unanimously voted down in committee. This is not the time to play with fire.
+Congress must have the information it needs to fully evaluate the role that Mr. Trump has played in what is the undeniable large-scale undermining of American security.Why it matters: Melting glaciers contribute to rising sea levels, can lead to disastrous floods and alter river ecosystems. On top of that, glaciers feed rivers, which in turn provide water for cities and farmers. Flows will eventually decline, affecting hundreds of millions of people in countries like India, Pakistan and China.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Kenya: The death toll in a terrorist attack by Shabab militants rose to 21 people, Kenya’s president said. All the assailants who stormed a luxury hotel and office complex in Nairobi had been “eliminated,” he added, but the country remained on the highest alert.
+Trump and Putin: Since 2016, President Trump has had at least five face-to-face meetings with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. What they said to each other is a mystery — one now drawing fresh scrutiny from Mr. Trump’s critics.
+China: A Canadian man sentenced to death by a Chinese court for smuggling drugs intends to appeal, one of his lawyers said. The move could buy time while Canada seeks to secure his clemency, but comes amid a widening diplomatic rift between the two countries.
+Afghanistan: New leadership in Kabul has been working to restore order and crack down on crime, bringing a rare sense of hope to the capital city.At the end of “The Pussy Grabber Plays,” a program of eight short works that made a raucous debut late Monday night at Joe’s Pub, six women who had been instrumental in their creation crowded onto the small stage at the Public Theater to take a bow with the actors.
+During the 2016 presidential campaign, each of them — Rachel Crooks, Tasha Dixon, Jill Harth, Sam Holvey, Natasha Stoynoff and Karena Virginia — publicly accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment or assault. Now each had allowed her story to be the basis for one of these plays, which collectively form an act of vehement feminist protest.
+The comedian Judy Gold, who was part of the cast, looked at them standing there. “Well, apparently,” she said, “the president likes tall women.” Except that instead of saying “president,” she used a vulgarity. Then she raised two middle fingers in the air and used another one, her anger on the women’s behalf perfectly in tune with the evening.
+Mr. Trump has denied their accounts. But these plays — even the funniest of them — vibrate with fury and disgust, and they’re poised to go wide. On Tuesday, in the lead-up to the second anniversary of Mr. Trump’s inauguration and the women’s marches that followed, the scripts became available royalty-free for production, as long as the proceeds benefit an organization that supports women.WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans on Wednesday narrowly staved off an effort by Democrats to deal the Trump administration’s Russia sanctions policy an embarrassing rebuke.
+Eleven Republicans joined Democrats in a vote to enforce sanctions against the corporate empire of an influential ally of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but the effort fell three votes short of the 60-vote threshold required to advance the measure. The vote was 57-42, with one Democratic senator not voting.
+The sanctions against companies controlled by the influential oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, now seem destined to be lifted this week as part of a deal negotiated by the Treasury Department to reduce Mr. Deripaska’s ownership and control of the aluminum giant Rusal and two linked companies.
+Sanctions against Mr. Deripaska personally, which had gone into effect last April, remain in force and would not have been affected by the Treasury Department decision or the Senate measure. Mr. Deripaska’s companies waged an aggressive lobbying and legal campaign against the sanctions last year. The administration first delayed putting sanctions on the companies into effect and then announced last month it would lift them entirely.Here are the reasons more federal workers are still showing up for work despite not getting paid.
+The law prohibits them from striking
+The National Labor Relations Act extends a right to strike to American workers — but it specifically does not give that right to government workers. A law passed during President Jimmy Carter’s administration bars federal workers from striking. When air traffic controllers walked off the job in 1981, demanding better pay and working conditions, President Ronald Reagan ordered them to return to work. When they did not, he fired them.
+For an employee deemed “excepted” from furlough during a shutdown — which is to say, forced to work without pay — walking off the job could carry a similar penalty. Guidance from the federal Office of Personnel Management prohibits excepted employees from taking any sort of leave, including vacation or sick days, during a shutdown.
+“If an excepted employee refuses to report for work after being ordered to do so,” the guidance says, “he or she will be considered to be absent without leave (AWOL) and will be subject to any consequences that may follow from being AWOL.”
+Employees believe in their mission
+Union leaders and federal workers frequently stress that furloughed employees want to be allowed to return to their jobs — and that employees working without pay are doing so largely because they care about their work, be it protecting public lands, inspecting food for safety or catching drug smugglers at the border.
+“It sounds corny, I know,” said Jacqueline Simon, the director of public policy for the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal workers’ union. But “federal employees are extremely devoted to the mission of their agencies,” she said. “They don’t just fall into these jobs. They believe in public service; they believe in what they do. They’re not just going to walk away. There may come a point when some of them have to, to feed their families, but no one wants to do that.”Bob Kuechenberg, a six-time Pro Bowl guard in the National Football League, two-time Super Bowl champion and member of the only N.F.L. team to achieve a perfect season, the 1972 Miami Dolphins, died on Saturday at his home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 71.
+His former wife, Marilyn Nix Kuechenberg, said the cause was a heart attack.
+Kuechenberg joined the Dolphins as a free agent in 1970, the future Hall of Fame coach Don Shula’s first season, and played for them until 1983. He was part of a daunting offensive line that included guard Larry Little and center Jim Langer, both enshrined in the Hall of Fame.
+The New York Times sportswriter Red Smith quoted Kuechenberg in 1975 on his strategy for neutralizing defenders, in this case the Chicago Bears tackle Wally Chambers. “I just fight him,” Kuechenberg said. “As long as he’s beating on my head and not the quarterback’s, it’s all right with me.”
+Kuechenberg (pronounced KOOCH-en-berg) started every game for the 1972 Dolphins, who went 17-0, beating the Washington Redskins, 14-7, in Super Bowl VII at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. He started 16 games during the 1973 season and playoffs when the Dolphins repeated as champions, blowing out the Minnesota Vikings, 24-7, in the Super Bowl at Rice Stadium in Houston.On Thursday, the board of trustees at Michigan State University named a top university administrator, Satish Udpa, as the new interim president, to replace John Engler, after roundly condemning Mr. Engler’s comments and accepting his resignation, effective immediately. Read more.
+John Engler will resign as the interim president of Michigan State University after his recent remarks that some victims of the former university and U.S.A. Gymnastics doctor Lawrence G. Nassar appeared to be enjoying “the spotlight.”
+In an 11-page letter to the chairwoman of the university’s board of trustees, Dianne Byrum, Mr. Engler said he would comply with her request for him to resign. He will officially step down on Jan. 23, according to the letter.
+Pressure mounted on Mr. Engler to resign as university administrators criticized his comments, which were reported by The Detroit News on Friday. The letter makes no mention of the remarks that ultimately cost Mr. Engler his job.You watch both movies in a kind of fascinated horror at how easy it was for McFarland to create a network of what appears to be unwitting co-conspirators to help him plan an experience that wound up losing $24 million. So many people mention how seductive and magnetic McFarland is that you also watch both movies expecting them to inspect his magnetism. To see him in Smith’s film, reveling in footage taken by other people — this chubby, gangly, awkward but not not handsome slouch who himself seems attracted to fame, power, wealth and sand — is to wonder whether those same people needed a magnet in their lives, especially one who could make them some money.
+“Fyre” needs another layer. You can locate in it this national moment of brashness and effrontery. (Even after McFarland has been arrested, as he was in June 2017, and released on bail, he cooks up another sham business. As you read this, he’s serving six years in prison after pleading guilty to wire fraud.) But the Hulu documentary, by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason, does more than locate. It unpacks, analyzes and jabs.
+“Fyre” is an ethics thriller. “Fyre Fraud” is a behavioral farce. It has arguments to make about the insecurities of millennials and the perniciousness of social media. And the arguments don’t feel like blather. The sharpest parts of Smith’s “Fyre,” which is a co-production of Vice Studios and, apparently, Jerry Media, the marketing bros who helped sell the festival in the first place, are throwaway observations, like the one someone makes about how a single tweet of a sad sandwich demolished the image of a hot event that it took an armada of supermodels to help sell.THE BIRTH OF LOUD
+Leo Fender, Les Paul, and the Guitar-Pioneering Rivalry That Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll
+By Ian S. Port
+Illustrated. 340 pp. Scribner. $28.
+Like a lot of paradigm-shifting inventions, the solid-body electric guitar seems inevitable in hindsight. Someone was bound to realize that a steel string could be hugely amplified by a magnetic pickup and an external speaker, blasting an electronic signal. Someone was bound to come up with a design that felt familiar and comfortable to a working musician. And someone would certainly figure out how to manufacture the instrument as an affordable mass-market commodity. But the actual advent of the solid-body electric guitar, sometime in the 1940s, was a tangled tale of tinkerers, craftsmen, musicians and businessmen who hardly realized what they had unleashed.
+In “The Birth of Loud,” Ian S. Port, a critic and guitarist who was the music editor for The San Francisco Weekly, has sorted out the facts of the electric guitar’s much-mythologized genesis and cultural conquest. He turns them into a hot-rod joy ride through mid-20th-century American history. With appropriately flashy prose, he dismantles some misconceptions and credits some nearly forgotten but key figures. He also summons, exuberantly and perceptively, the look, sound and sometimes smell of pivotal scenes and songs.
+Port frames his scrupulously sourced narrative with two thoroughly disparate characters who converged on the same idea and have archetypal guitars bearing their names: Les Paul and Leo Fender. “Their personalities and worlds were as far apart as any in music could be: One’s arena was primarily the stage, the other’s, the workbench,” Port writes.Senator Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, hasn’t made her big announcement yet, but over recent days, as she readied for it, she traced the same steps that Gillibrand subsequently would, also visiting “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” As part of that appearance, she released a “Mood Mix” video in which she ticks off favorite songs — including Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” Salt-N-Pepa’s “Push It” and Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove” — and sings snippets of some of them, cracking herself up.
+That was positively demure next to a video that Beto O’Rourke, another potential Democratic presidential candidate, disseminated recently. Beginning with a close-up of his open mouth, it documented a visit to the dentist — which was his prompt, to be fair, to interview the hygienist about her life near the border between Mexico and Texas.
+Image Beto O’Rourke documented his visit to the dentist on Instagram. Credit... Beto O’Rourke/Instagram
+The 2020 presidential race won’t be the first in which candidates twist themselves into questionable and sometimes mortifying knots to demonstrate how real, relatable, unpretentious or hip they can ostensibly be, but, Holy Mother of Oversharing, it promises to chart whole new frontiers in that regard.
+Give partial credit (or blame) to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the New York Democrat who has developed an enormous following on social media, where she documents even such humdrum moments as the making of her mac-and-cheese supper.Last week, California’s new governor, Gavin Newsom, promised to pursue a smorgasbord of changes to his state’s health care system: state negotiation of drug prices; a requirement that every Californian have health insurance; more assistance to help middle-class Californians afford it; and health care for undocumented immigrants up to age 26.
+The proposals fell short of the sweeping government-run single-payer plan Mr. Newsom had supported during his campaign — a system in which the state government would pay all the bills and effectively control the rates paid for services. (Many California politicians before him had flirted with such an idea, before backing off when it was estimated that it could cost $400 billion a year. ) But in firing off this opening salvo, Mr. Newsom has challenged the notion that states can’t meaningfully tackle health care on their own. And he’s not alone.
+A day later, Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington proposed that his state offer a public plan, with rates tied to those of Medicare, to compete with private offerings.
+New Mexico is considering a plan that would allow any resident to buy into the state’s Medicaid program. And this month, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York announced a plan to expand health care access to uninsured, low-income residents of the city, including undocumented immigrants.The Office of the United States Trade Representative, which has traditionally focused on promoting trade, has been toothless in response. It waited until 2016 to ask the Peruvian government to verify the legality of a timber shipment — and even then, did so only after the Department of Homeland Security, acting on information from Osinfor, had already impounded the timber in Houston. It was the first time the U.S.T.R. had ever issued an environmental verification request in any trade deal. When Osinfor inspectors subsequently demonstrated that 93 percent of the impounded timber was illegal, the U.S.T.R. responded by suspending a single Peruvian timber exporter from the United States market for up to three years. Peru’s response was to fire the head of Osinfor, who fled the country after death threats and a firebombing of one of Osinfor’s regional offices.
+The Peruvian government, which rates a 37 out of 100 on the Transparency International scale of perceived corruption (with 100 being “very clean”), has been maneuvering ever since to bring Osinfor under its thumb. In mid-December, when many people were distracted by pre-Christmas doings, the government’s council of ministers decided on short notice and without consulting the affected agencies to bury Osinfor within the environmental ministry.
+Representative Richard Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, as incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, fired off a letter to the U.S.T.R., angrily protesting this “brazen, bad faith decision” as “a flagrant attack on the heart of the forestry annex.” The surprise came when the trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, appointed by a Trump administration that is otherwise outspokenly contemptuous of environmental concerns, wrote back just two days later, “in complete agreement with you and your colleagues that this development is unacceptable.”
+One possible explanation is that the U.S.T.R. has finally become fed up after 10 years of being lied to and laughed off by Peru. Also possible: Mr. Lighthizer may simply be making a show of force on past environmental commitments to help ease the revised Nafta treaty — the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement — through forthcoming congressional hearings. (Happily for the U.S.T.R., the environmental provisions of the unpronounceable U.S.M.C.A. are largely too weak to require much enforcement.)
+For now, Mr. Lighthizer has “requested consultations with Peru under the Environment Chapter” of the trade agreement, another first for the U.S.T.R., with the possibility of sanctions still ahead. In Lima, government ministers are taking a this-too-will-pass attitude.To the Editor:
+Re “Plan to Summon Workers Back Without Pay as the Deadlock Drags On” (news article, Jan. 16):
+Why are people surprised when President Trump expects federal government employees and contractors to work, but stiffs ’em when it’s time to pay? That’s his business model.
+Jay Lynch
+Upper St. Clair, Pa.
+To the Editor:
+As a former federal employee, I have experienced furloughs and shutdowns. If President Trump believes that federal employees support shutting down the government and not receiving paychecks, he is delusional.
+Douglas R. Leander
+Tacoma, Wash.
+To the Editor:
+Re “It’ll Be Worth It, Trump Tells Farmers as His Policies Cause Them Pain” (news article, Jan. 15):
+Now that American farmers find themselves unable to obtain the Agriculture Department loans Congress has funded to enable them to contract for the equipment, seeds and fertilizers they will shortly need for spring planting, perhaps this government shutdown will remind Americans how much their government does for them. Maybe next election government will no longer be the enemy.
+Peter Flemming
+West Caldwell, N.J.How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Aisha Harris, assistant TV editor for The Times, discussed the tech she’s using.
+What’s your setup for watching the TV shows or movies you review? What could be better about it?
+Much of my TV and movie consumption for work involves screeners, which are sent out to the press ahead of release. For TV, these screeners are almost always in digital form, via the network’s press site or a link sent by email, so I usually watch those on my laptop. On the rare occasion I’m not feeling too lazy — or if it’s a show, like “Homecoming,” that really rewards viewing on a bigger screen — I’ll hook up my laptop to my TV. If I’m unable to attend a press screening in person for a movie I’m reviewing, I’ll review the DVD at home on my TV.
+My fiancé and I recently upgraded our home entertainment setup, with a 50-inch 4K Amazon Fire TV. We also own a Sonos soundbar and a two-room Sonos Play:1 wireless speaker set that sounds incredible.
+The only downside is that the wireless speakers have been cutting in and out for some time when paired with our TV. Troubleshooting on our own thus far hasn’t yielded great results, and the tech support hours coincide with when we’re at work. It’s a fairly common problem, according to the multiple message boards I’ve stumbled upon, so I’m hoping someone can help us find a quick, easy solution soon.To the Editor:
+Re “Will the Media Be Trump’s Accomplice Again?” (Sunday Review, Jan. 13):
+Bravo to Frank Bruni for his compelling column on the media’s complicity in the Trump phenomenon. If the media could focus more on policy and less on President Trump’s latest nonsense, perhaps the general electorate would do so as well.
+I would only ask that The Times apply this ethos across the board. A few suggestions:
+1) Tamp down the constant polling data and election prognostication. It is simply the sport of politics, which detracts from important policy conversation.
+2) Focus less on political theater. Case in point: the near obsessive reporting on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
+3) Less editorializing and more attention to the facts. I have lost count of the number of articles with shiny headlines about how Mr. Trump has finally met his demise or how the G.O.P. has finally begun turning on him. Please tell me what new information has come to light and let me draw my own conclusions.WASHINGTON — One hundred years to the day after the ratification of the 18th Amendment, leading to the nation’s 14-year experiment with Prohibition, the Supreme Court considered on Wednesday whether Tennessee may impose significant restriction on liquor sales.
+Several justices were deeply skeptical about the law at issue in the case, which says people who want to operate liquor stores in the state must first live there for two years. The law, they said, seemed to have no purpose beyond protecting local business interests from outside competition.
+Shay Dvoretzky, a lawyer for a trade association representing the state’s liquor retailers, said there were good reasons for the law.
+“Duration facilitates background checks,” he said. “It facilitates investigation and enforcement of the law because somebody who’s been there for a while is more likely to have substantial assets that can be seized, and is less likely to flee at the first sign of trouble.”In the weeks since President Trump unexpectedly announced that American troops would withdraw from Syria — “and they’re coming back now” — rejecting the counsel of generals and advisers, some administration officials stepped down and others tried to chart a path forward.
+If anyone had any illusions about just how complicated the withdrawal might be, they were unlikely to retain them after the latest bad news out of the war-torn country.
+On Wednesday, Americans troops were among the dead after a bombing attack in northern Syria that was claimed by the Islamic State. They were the latest deaths in a seemingly intractable conflict that began with a popular uprising in 2011 and grew into a complex entanglement of multiple foreign powers.
+President Barack Obama sent American troops to Syria in 2015 as part of a coalition against the Islamic State, or ISIS. But in announcing the withdrawal in December, Mr. Trump declared that “historic victories” over the militants meant the time had come for American forces to come home.Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the new music director of the Metropolitan Opera, may not have many appearances with the company this season. But conducting the opening of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” on Tuesday night, he seemed fully in charge.
+The 43-year-old conductor captured the hushed eeriness of the work’s first few measures, in which the orchestra suggests the somber, mysterious mood that pervades the entire opera. But that’s not all.
+What also came through immediately was that, still fresh in his new role at the Met, Mr. Nézet-Séguin has arrived with bold interpretive ideas and the determination to carry them out. He took a daringly slow tempo in this opening passage, a solemn, low theme in chords that hints at modal plainchant. The restrained sound of the strings was deep and dark, yet resonant and slightly tremulous. The theme that immediately follows — a nervous, oscillating two-note motif — was all the more ominous for his subdued, weighty rendering.Wednesday is the third day of a teachers’ strike in Los Angeles. More than 30,000 teachers from 900 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District are marching on picket lines.
+Among the demands of the teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, is smaller class sizes. Many middle and high school classes in Los Angeles have more than 40 children in them, according to the 2017-18 school district budget, with some teachers reporting over 50.
+We want to hear from teachers in the district who teach classes that exceed the caps of 32 to 39 students that the district proposed on Friday. Tell us how class size affects your teaching.Image
+Sleeping less than six hours a night, and sleeping poorly, are associated with hardening of the arteries, a new study has found.
+Researchers used accelerometers attached to the waists of 3,974 healthy men and women, average age 46, to monitor the duration and quality of their sleep over seven nights. All underwent physical exams and three-dimensional ultrasound, an imaging system that evaluates blood flow through the blood vessels. The study is in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
+After controlling for smoking, diabetes, fasting glucose, cholesterol and many other factors, they found that compared with people who slept seven to eight hours a night, those who slept less than six hours were 27 percent more likely to be in the highest one-third for the amount of plaque in their arteries. The scientists also found that various blood markers of inflammation were higher in those who got the least sleep.
+The people who moved the most during sleep also had higher accumulations of plaque than those who slept soundly.At the end of George Céspedes’s “El Último Recurso,” dancers stand and stare at the audience for the full duration of a song. That extended staring in stillness, with baleful or at least somber faces, is something they’ve done many times before in this 80-minute work, usually in silence. The song is “Feeling Good.” These dancers, clearly, aren’t.
+They are members of Los Hijos del Director, a Cuban company that made its United States debut at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday as part of the two-week Cuba Festival. The aggressive-depressive quality of their performance is one clear contrast with Malpaso Dance Company, an unfailingly open and generous crew that had the first week of the festival to itself. (Los Hijos shares its week with the flamenco group Compañía Irene Rodríguez.)
+But the aim expressed in the program for Los Hijos — “to develop a new dancing style created in Cuba and danced by Cubans” — is one that Malpaso shares. Both companies were founded recently, six or seven years ago, by renegades from the national modern dance troupe, Danza Contemporánea de Cuba (founded in 1959). Both face what could be called the central problem of Cuban modern dance: that the country consistently produces wonderful dancers but, as of yet, no great choreographers.
+Malpaso’s response is two-pronged. Company members create their own dances, but the troupe also performs pieces by outside choreographers. It’s a kind of apprenticeship repertory. The work of established artists serves as scaffolding, something solid for the dancers and their audiences, while the local talent develops.The Big Mac is probably as well known in Europe as it is in its native United States. It has been 25 years since Quentin Tarantino’s cult movie “Pulp Fiction” featured a discussion about hamburger nomenclature in France, where — thanks to the metric system — a Quarter Pounder is called a Royale With Cheese but “a Big Mac’s a Big Mac.”
+Supermac’s lawyers contested the process by which the brand had been legally trademarked, and the Intellectual Property Office ultimately agreed. It found that the documentation provided by McDonald’s was not sufficient to show that Big Mac had been “put to genuine use in the union for the goods or services for which it is registered” during the requisite previous five years.
+“If you have a registered trademark, you have to use it or lose it,” said Glen Gibbons, an Irish barrister and expert on intellectual property who was not involved in the case. “Your trademark can be challenged on grounds of lack of use. It is then incumbent on the trademark owner to show that they were really using the trademark and selling it in a substantive part of the E.U.”
+The proof furnished by McDonald’s included internally generated company material and a printout of a Wikipedia entry on the history of the Big Mac.
+“As far as the printout from en.wikipedia.org is concerned, it is noted that Wikipedia entries cannot be considered as a reliable source of information, as they can be amended by Wikipedia’s users,” the judgment noted.
+Having won his case, Mr. McDonagh plans to register the Supermac’s trademark Europewide and resume planning for an expansion into British cities with large Irish populations.So, did Facebook cause the gilets jaunes uprising in France? Maybe, interesting theory; meanwhile, though, I don’t even know why it’s recommending I friend someone I’ve never heard of. Did Facebook swing the 2016 election? Could have, as far as we know; anyway, I can’t even guess why Instagram started showing me a bunch of photos of a certain breed of dog or why it’s suddenly serving me ads for meal kits. I know how these things make me feel, but Facebook knows how they made me behave — knowledge it won’t soon share.
+It appears to be the tendency of the press, and of our imaginations in general, to extend these theories in a particular direction. After years of Facebook’s telling us how good it is at connecting people and influencing their decisions, it is tempting to say something like: Yes, O.K., then wouldn’t it have been easy to use these same tools to persuade people to vote for Donald Trump? Facebook has equivocated on this question in a telling way. It’s helpful to imagine what it would have to say to successfully combat claims Russia used its platform to swing the election: Sure, this many users saw propaganda but only for a moment; and besides, this content didn’t seem to affect their behavior in any way at all; sure, this amount of money was spent on ads, but those ads don’t appear to have done anything; yes, these Instagram accounts had that many followers, but more than half of them were bots themselves; O.K., 76 million people were exposed to this content in some way or another, but they mostly glossed over it, like spam.
+They’ve inched tellingly in this direction but going all the way would involve unflattering disclosure — the sort that would need to be legally compelled. Mainly, it would be tantamount to admitting that the systems we’re not allowed to know about — and the metrics we aren’t allowed to see — might not be quite as valuable, or as worthy of trade secrecy, as Facebook needs us to think they are. While it’s true that perceptions of the tech industry have shifted, they aren’t necessarily closer to reality. These companies mythologized their own omniscience when it was a boon to their business. Versions of these myths persist, but they’re no longer under their creator’s control — and they’re starting to bite back.Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
+Hi, everybody! Things have been heating up around here, especially in the ocean. A new study suggests the oceans have been warming more rapidly than scientists previously thought. Zeke Hausfather, an author of the study, told our colleague Kendra Pierre-Louis that 2018 would turn out to be “the warmest year on record for the Earth’s oceans, as 2017 was the warmest year, and 2016 was the warmest year.”
+The news about the oceans makes you wonder how high 2018 will rank among the hottest years in recorded history. We’d love to tell you, but we can’t: The government shutdown has stalled that data, and a lot of other important science besides. Kendra has that story, too.
+That’s just one of the effects of the shutdown. Coral Davenport wrote about furloughed pollution inspectors at the Environmental Protection Agency who would normally be checking up on chemical factories, power plants, oil refineries, water treatment plants and thousands of other industrial sites for pollution violations.
+Still, not everything is idle for the Trump administration. It is bringing back at least 40 federal employees to work on plans to sell oil and gas drilling leases off the United States coastline. And the hearing over the nomination of Andrew Wheeler to head the Environmental Protection Agency went on as scheduled.Chicago — The list of things born in this city includes the skyscraper, the Ferris wheel and (supposedly) brownies. And then there are its wonkier claims to fame.
+Chicago was the crucible of 20th-century urban sociology. It was also midwife to today’s boom in audio storytelling, thanks to “This American Life,” which originated here.
+Jeremy McCarter, the founder and executive producer of Make-Believe Association, a new nonprofit podcast production company, makes no claim to inventing anything. But he’s hoping that the company’s first season, which made its debut this week, might usefully combine those last two Chicago creations.
+Each episode in the season, titled “Grown Folks’ Fables,” features an audioplay based on a traditional folktale representing one strand of Chicago’s cultural diversity, reinterpreted by a homegrown writer. The plays are recorded live and presented along with excerpts from the post-show discussion among an audience carefully selected to reach beyond the usual theatergoers, who in this deeply divided city (as elsewhere) tend to run whiter, older and wealthier than the overall population.Image
+Low blood levels of vitamin D are tied to bone loss that can lead to falls and fractures. But taking vitamin D supplements in high doses showed no benefits over low-dose vitamin D, a randomized trial found.
+The study, in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, included 379 British men and women whose average age was 75. They were divided into three groups and given monthly doses of vitamin D, equivalent to 400, 800 and 1,600 IU a day; there was no placebo group. The groups were well matched at the start for vitamin D blood levels, bone mineral density, height, weight, blood pressure and other factors.
+Blood levels of vitamin D increased in all three groups in proportion to the dosage. But there was no difference between the groups in changes in bone mineral density, number of falls or number of fractures caused by osteoporosis. At the same time, there were no dose-related adverse events.
+It is possible that all three doses limited bone loss, but without a placebo group, that cannot be certain.When ethnically charged graffiti began appearing in her town of Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nikolina Kulidzan paid little attention. In 1992, she was a 12-year-old Serbian girl in love with a Croatian boy named Marko. She was unaware that her country, and her budding relationship with Marko, would be torn apart by a brutal civil war.
+On this week’s Modern Love podcast, the actor Joanna Kulig reads Ms. Kulidzan’s moving essay, “A Kiss Deferred by Civil War.”
+Ms. Kulig stars in the film “Cold War,” in theaters now. Ms. Kulidzan is a writer living in Alexandria, Va., with her husband. Stay tuned after the reading to hear from Ms. Kulidzan and the Modern Love editor Daniel Jones.
+To read past Modern Love columns, click here. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
+In the middle of the 20th century, many thousands of poor families in the United States went to bed hungry.
+Despite the nation’s agricultural abundance, many families had to depend on surplus food donation programs, handouts and bread lines to fend off malnutrition or even starvation. There was no system in place to make better use of the market for food and improve the well-being of needy families.
+Isabelle Kelley, a little-known economist in the United States Department of Agriculture, helped change all that.Jo Andres, a visual artist whose experimental choreography performed at clubs in downtown Manhattan and evocative short films were imbued with fantastical and dreamlike imagery, died on Jan. 6 at her home in Brooklyn. She was 64.
+Her husband, the actor Steve Buscemi, said the cause was encapsulating peritoneal sclerosis, which is characterized by intestinal blockage. She had also been treated for ovarian cancer.
+When Ms. Andres arrived in New York from Ohio in the early 1980s, she began to develop choreography that immersed the audience in a more sensually enriching experience than simply watching dancers, like herself, performing onstage.
+“We had all studied modern dance and dance composition,” Lucy Sexton, who attended Ohio University with Ms. Andres and performed with her, said in a telephone interview. “But when we came to New York, we were performing in nightclubs and punk-rock clubs, so her dances wedded two traditions: modern dance and performance art.”They sound like the ingredients of a pulpy thriller: Bigamy. Secret religious conversions. A doctorate from a mail-order diploma mill. Affairs with powerful women.
+The sordid list — a mixture of facts, accusations and insinuations, packaged in a glossy slide show — represents the crux of a well-orchestrated campaign by Goldman Sachs to discredit one of its former partners and to minimize the Wall Street bank’s role in the looting of a big Malaysian investment fund.
+In recent presentations to American regulators and law enforcement authorities, according to people familiar with their contents, Goldman executives and their lawyers have depicted Tim Leissner, a former top investment banker, as a master con man, someone so sneaky that even the retired military intelligence officers who work for the bank couldn’t sniff him out.
+The scorched-earth tactics, especially against someone who had been a star banker, reflect just how worried Goldman is about the criminal investigations into its role in the theft of at least $2.7 billion from the 1Malaysia Development Berhad, or 1MDB, sovereign wealth fund.It’s a new year, and perhaps you have organization goals on your list of resolutions.
+“This will be the year,” you’ve told yourself with enthusiasm and determination, “when I will finally face the garage and its contents! I will fully overhaul my closet, and let go of all those clothes that are outmoded, and that I no longer fit into! While I’m at it, I further resolve to gussy up my home office with shelves and a proper filing system so I don’t have a repeat of last year’s oh-my-heck-where’s-the-homeowner’s-insurance-policy incident.”
+Possibly, also, you have a history of never getting those same organization projects done.
+If that sounds like you, and you’re ready to break the cycle of resolving, and failing, to get your life in order this year, it might be time to bring in an expert — just like you would enlist a trainer or nutritionist to help with fitness or wellness goals — and hire a professional organizer.
+A who-what now?
+“When I tell people what I do, they say, ‘Oh, that’s a thing?’” Sharon Lowenheim, a professional organizer based in New York City, said with a resigned laugh. “It’s a great service and we want to make sure people do know about it.”
+A professional organizer is a person who can help you organize any of the physical and digital spaces in your life — a closet, a kitchen or the aforementioned home office. She (and it’s almost always a she) will offer support for decision-making, facilitate actions around removal of unwanted belongings, and set up systems, from shelving to labels, that help her clients establish order and clarity.Mr. Sanders has twice apologized publicly for the incidents — but only in response to media questions following detailed articles — and has promised to do better if he runs again. He is still weighing a 2020 bid, after finishing second to Hillary Clinton in the Democratic race in 2016.
+People close to Mr. Sanders have said three of his top advisers from 2016, including his campaign manager, either will not return or will serve in different roles in a future campaign.
+A draft agenda included a discussion with 2016 campaign management and facilitators from Working IDEAL, a company that advises on workplace inclusion and diversity. One of the facilitators is Ms. Yang, a former chairwoman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
+Some of the women who have spoken out to reporters about pay disparities, harassment and other instances of discrimination said they were not a part of the planning process for the meeting and were not aware it was happening. Last Friday, concerned that there would be no meeting, some of those women told the Sanders office that they felt it would be unfair to be excluded should a meeting occur, according to emails reviewed by The Times.
+On Monday, Mr. Sanders’s office told them it would be arranging travel for them to arrive in Washington by Wednesday. But the women said the office did not send them formal invitations or any details about what would be discussed.
+Some of them scrambled to rearrange their schedules, but several women said they did not hear back from Mr. Sanders’s office after being asked for travel details. One of the women was Sarah Slamen, who was the state coordinator in Louisiana in 2016 and who told The Times that she quit Our Revolution, Mr. Sanders’s progressive organization, because of gender discrimination.
+Ms. Slamen said she was eventually given a midnight flight back to Texas on Wednesday after the meeting. She declined, she said, because she is six and a half months pregnant. Though she said she would not attend and did not book a flight, she later received a confirmation email for a hotel in Washington.Being ousted by a company that had resisted doing so would be the latest turn in a swift, stunning fall from grace for Mr. Ghosn, a larger-than-life car industry figure who forged a global business empire that bound Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi Motors together in what was known as the Alliance.
+The public push for Mr. Ghosn’s removal from Renault came after senior French officials flew to Tokyo after the Tuesday bail hearing. Martin Vial, one of two French government representatives on the Renault board, and Emmanuel Moulin, Mr. Le Maire’s chief of staff, are expected to meet Japanese officials and Nissan stakeholders during the trip, which was planned a few days ago, according to a Finance Ministry spokeswoman.
+The carmakers must move quickly to try to put the blowup behind them.
+Demand for cars in China, the United States and Europe, the three biggest markets, is falling. Analysts say the partnership that Renault and Nissan founded in 1999 to share purchasing and expertise is essential if the companies are to stay competitive in an industry where size provides a crucial advantage.
+In a nod to the importance of scale, Ford Motor and Volkswagen outlined on Monday what they hope will become their own broad alliance to speed the development of electric and self-driving cars, potentially creating competition for the Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi alliance on that front.
+Nissan and Mitsubishi removed Mr. Ghosn from their boards immediately after his initial arrest on Nov. 19, but Renault and the French government have maintained that he had a “presumption of innocence.” Privately, though, succession plans were being prepared in case of a prolonged detention. Because Mr. Ghosn still faces a long trial in Japan, he cannot carry out his executive functions.Long before an ordinary chicken egg became an Instagram star, Jun Endo, a Ph.D. student at Kyoto University, sat gazing intently at another egg. This egg was much smaller, roughly the size of a sesame seed, and contained a stink bug.
+The mystery was this: When the egg finally hatched, it would do so virtually in unison with all the other stink bug eggs clumped around it. How? What signaled an egg on one side of the brood to hatch so soon after an egg on the other side?
+Synchronized hatching may be common in the animal world; scientist can’t say for sure, as the phenomenon is not well studied. Sometimes b ird eggs in the same clutch hatch individually, in a series that can unfold over more than a day . The broods of some stink bug species hatch over several hours.
+Mr. Endo’s brood belonged to the brown marmorated stink bug, Halyomorpha halys, which is known for wreaking havoc on farms and in suburban homes across the United States. Through a series of experiments, he attempted to identify the cue that got the eggs hatching.Senator, lawyer, mother, children’s book author and now, Democratic candidate for president. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand is in. “I’m filing an exploratory committee for president of the United States tonight.” Hailing from President Trump’s home state of New York, she’s joining what will likely be a crowded 2020 field. “Which Democrats —” “Who will run for president in 2020?” “The list is growing. It ranges from —” Gillibrand is a former corporate lawyer and congresswoman. Growing up in a political family in Albany, She fell in love early on. “I was drawn into politics when I was a little girl. And it was really with my grandmother, who loved politics.” She was appointed to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate in 2009. “Welcome, Senator.” Gillibrand went on to win the seat again in a 2010 special election and has held it ever since. Over time she has reversed her positions on immigration and gun control. “You start off in a different place on immigration and now you’re more progressive on that. On guns, you started off, you know, more kind of pro-Second Amendment. Now, you went from having an ‘A’ to an ‘F’ from the N.R.A.” “I recognize that there was a lot of things I didn’t know, and I should have been fighting for them before.” She’s now one of the party’s most reliably liberal voices. Some of her priorities: A populist economic agenda, women’s rights and gender equality and fighting for victims of sexual assault with a focus on the military. Who is being held accountable for doing nothing since 2013? Who? Which commander?” Gillibrand was the first senator in her party to call for the resignation of fellow Democrat Al Franken, following accusations of sexual misconduct. “Enough is enough.” Here she is during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. “I want to really have Dr. Blasey Ford’s back tomorrow. So I’m going to sit behind her. Not only do I support her. But I believe her.” So what is her dynamic with President Trump? He said: “‘She’s just a puppet of Schumer. You know that. He put her there.” He’s also referred to her as a “lightweight” who would do anything for money. She responded this way. “It was a sexist smear. It’s part of the president’s effort at name calling and it’s not going to silence me.” Gillibrand has also voted against almost all of Trump’s major nominees. “I urge my colleagues. Reject this bad choice.” So what are her chances? Gillibrand is seen as a serious contender, but so far her poll numbers are low. Her next step? Building a national profile and campaign.1. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked President Trump to reschedule the State of the Union address or deliver it in writing, citing security concerns from the government shutdown.
+The president’s State of the Union address is one of the highest-stakes events for federal law enforcement each year, with the leadership of all three branches of government gathering in one place. The Secret Service, which leads security, has been affected by the shutdown.
+The speech is scheduled for Jan. 29, and the invitation to deliver the address is traditionally at the speaker’s discretion. Above, Ms. Pelosi on Capitol Hill today.His reputation as a tightwad was well earned. At breakfast with a reporter in 1993, at a suburban Philadelphia restaurant near Vanguard’s headquarters, Mr. Bogle figured out that he would beat the $5.95 cost of the buffet by ordering from the menu. If he had an early-morning meeting in New York, he would take the early Amtrak Metroliner shuttle rather than pay for a hotel room in Manhattan.
+Image “John Bogle has changed a basic industry in the optimal direction,” the Nobel laureate Paul A. Samuelson wrote in a foreword to Mr. Bogle’s book “Bogle on Mutual Funds,” published in 1993.
+Mr. Bogle readily took swipes at the press for lauding fund managers who temporarily got a hot hand, and for focusing heavily on a fund’s quarterly performance. Even a fund manager’s long-term record is not an accurate predictor of future performance, he said.
+It was that combative nature that had led him to start Vanguard in the first place.
+After graduating magna cum laude from Princeton in 1951 with an economics degree, Mr. Bogle was hired by Walter L. Morgan, founder of the Wellington Fund, a Philadelphia-based fund management company. Mr. Morgan had read Mr. Bogle’s senior thesis on mutual funds.
+While working his way up at Wellington, Mr. Bogle persuaded Mr. Morgan to introduce a new all-equity fund, called the Windsor Fund, to complement Wellington, which invested in both stocks and bonds.
+Mr. Bogle was named president of Wellington in 1967, and soon thereafter it merged with the Boston investment company Thorndike, Doran, Paine & Lewis. Several years later, a management dispute with the principals of the new company led Mr. Bogle to depart; he founded Vanguard in 1974 to handle the administrative functions of the mutual funds overseen by Wellington Management.
+Two years later, Mr. Bogle founded the First Index Investment Trust, later called the Vanguard Index Trust, now known as the Vanguard 500 Index Fund, the first index fund for individual investors. The next year he again broke from industry practice, selling mutual funds directly to investors rather than through brokers, and thus eliminating the sales fees of up to 9 percent that funds typically charged.Empty offices and unanswered messages have compounded the confusion over the new law, which is called the First Step Act, as thousands of inmates, and their families, seek information about whether they will be set free.
+In addition to creating a system that will allow some low-risk inmates to earn early release, the new law also retroactively increases the number of days inmates receive off their sentences for good behavior. Inmates now get 54 days for each year of their sentence, up from 47, a retroactive change that could potentially free as many as 4,000 inmates, according to The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news website covering the criminal justice system.
+Amadi Busiris, 50, who is serving out the tail end of a 30-year sentence for conspiracy to distribute drugs, had been closely following news reports about the bill’s progress from his prison cell, and then more recently from a halfway house in Washington, D.C., where he has been sent to await his release in November.
+After the law’s passage, Mr. Busiris believed that he would be able to walk free almost immediately. But when he called his lawyer to start the process, he was told that he would have to wait until after the shutdown, he said.
+“The law passed but they are not making any moves,” he said, adding that seven others in Hope Village, the halfway house where he lives, are in the same situation. “We are just stuck.”The internet expands the bounds of acceptable discourse, so ideas considered out of bounds not long ago now rocket toward widespread acceptability. See: cannabis legalization, government-run health care, white nationalism and, of course, the flat-earthers.
+Yet there’s one political shore that remains stubbornly beyond the horizon. It’s an idea almost nobody in mainstream politics will address, other than to hurl the label as a bloody cudgel.
+I’m talking about opening up America’s borders to everyone who wants to move here.
+Imagine not just opposing President Trump’s wall but also opposing the nation’s cruel and expensive immigration and border-security apparatus in its entirety. Imagine radically shifting our stance toward outsiders from one of suspicion to one of warm embrace. Imagine that if you passed a minimal background check, you’d be free to live, work, pay taxes and die in the United States. Imagine moving from Nigeria to Nebraska as freely as one might move from Massachusetts to Maine.
+[Farhad Manjoo answered your questions about this column on Twitter.]
+There’s a witheringly obvious moral, economic, strategic and cultural case for open borders, and we have a political opportunity to push it. As Democrats jockey for the presidency, there’s room for a brave politician to oppose President Trump’s racist immigration rhetoric not just by fighting his wall and calling for the abolishment of I.C.E. but also by making a proactive and affirmative case for the vast expansion of immigration.When the World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee voted in September to reinstate Russia’s corrupted antidoping laboratories, WADA’s own athletes committee blasted the decision, and warned of what might come.
+“Having seen the conditions change once, we have little assurance in them not changing again,” the committee said in a statement, criticizing WADA for letting Russia off the hook even though it had not yet met key requirements of a compliance agreement.
+Two weeks into the new year, the athletes’ concerns look prescient. After two days of meetings in Montreal, a special WADA committee charged with overseeing Russian compliance held off on making any official recommendation, even though Russia has yet to turn over data it said it would.
+The committee’s options ranged from recommending nothing to recommending harsh sanctions, but James Fitzgerald, a WADA spokesman, said the decision was made to make no recommendation because WADA currently has a team in Russia trying to collect computer data on the country’s drug testing program that Russia was supposed to deliver by the end of last year. Collecting that data was supposed to take three days; Wednesday was day seven of the effort.WASHINGTON — The swirl of speculation surrounding the Russia investigation often assumes that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, will release a report of his findings that will serve as the definitive explanation of how Russia interfered in the 2016 election and whether President Trump or his associates coordinated with Moscow.
+But there is no such guarantee. The law does not require the Justice Department to release a report, and Mr. Mueller has been silent on the issue. Mr. Trump’s nominee for attorney general, William P. Barr, said at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday that he wanted to release as much of what Mr. Mueller found as possible. But he said he needed to learn more about the report and the regulations that govern his releasing information from it before deciding what to do about disclosing the findings.
+That answer did not satisfy leading Senate Democrats, who said on Wednesday that they would oppose Mr. Barr’s nomination unless he agreed to release the entire report Mr. Mueller produces, except for redactions of sensitive national security information.
+Why do people assume that a Mueller report is coming?
+Because the government has issued plenty of big reports after important investigations into national catastrophes and scandals. Commissions that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction after the invasion of Iraq, for example, produced book-length public reports that became part of the historical record.Ms. Sandeno, 44, manages 25 wildlife ecologists, biologists, engineers and foresters who make anywhere from $28,000 to $100,000 a year, which puts many of them at the top of the local pay scale. Their missing checks will very likely be felt far beyond their own bank accounts.
+Ms. Sandeno says that since they were furloughed, her staff members stopped eating out at the Dirtbean cafe or Rayetta’s Lunch Box in Marlinton, a town of 1,000. “They are just normal people who don’t want to file for unemployment,” she says. There aren’t a lot of alternatives in the area.
+“It’s 45 miles to the closest McDonald’s,” she said. The shutdown also derailed Ms. Sandeno’s plan to make two job offers to local residents and promote one of her employees.
+“Those are three families that would be getting above-average pay,” she said.
+As globalization has shuttered factories and decimated entire industries, federal employment has been a bastion of stability. It has not grown, and occupies a shrinking share of the overall labor market, but it remains an equalizer for African-Americans and women, who are far more likely to earn high salaries working for the government than they would with a company.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+What should we eat?
+Depends on who is eating.
+That’s one of the principal conclusions of a comprehensive report that sets out targets on how to feed the world in a way that’s good for human health and the health of the planet. Its lightning-rod recommendation is around beef and lamb, the two forms of livestock that require enormous amounts of land and water and produce heaps of methane.
+The report suggests a dramatic reduction in red meat consumption for people who eat a lot of it, like Americans and Canadians, but not the world’s poor, who need more animal protein for better health — like children in South Asia.
+Written by 37 scientists from 16 countries and published Wednesday in the medical journal The Lancet, in conjunction with an advocacy group called the EAT Forum, the report was funded by the Wellcome Trust and Stordalen Foundation. In addition to the recommendations on meat, it calls for curbing food waste, a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and overhauling agriculture so it doesn’t worsen deforestation and the depletion of scarce water.
+“It’s not a blanket approach, but when you look at the data there are certain individuals or populations that don’t need that much red meat for their own health,” said Jessica Fanzo, a professor of food policy at Johns Hopkins University and a co-author of the report. “There’s a real inequity. Some people get too much. Some people get too little.”Their circling of the wagons, she concluded, was “tribal.” As frustrated as they are with Mrs. May, Conservatives are desperate to avoid a change of government that would put Jeremy Corbyn, the head of the Labour Party, in office.
+Many of them feel sympathy for her, as well, believing that she was given an impossible task.
+“It feels like a parallel universe, doesn’t it, considering where we were last night, just 24 hours ago,” she said. “I have to say, looking at the scenes in the last half-hour or so, it’s the most united the Conservative benches have been, probably, for months.”
+A notable tribute to Mrs. May came from Conservative lawmaker Mark Francois, a leader of the arch-Brexiteer European Research Group.
+Mr. Francois, in November, submitted a scathing letter to the party’s 1922 committee, which has the power to remove the party leader, saying Mrs. May “just doesn’t listen” and is “in complete denial.” Since then, he has missed no opportunity to criticize her deal, which he described as “rancid,” and complained that, instead of submitting the deal to a vote, members of her government had “gone and run away and hidden in the toilet.”WASHINGTON — Along Pennsylvania Avenue, not far from the Trump International Hotel and in between the Capitol and the White House, Carrie Wilder, a single mother and 11-year government employee, was on the verge of tears as she waited for free food.
+“I’ve never felt the pervasive sense of hopelessness that I feel now,” said Ms. Wilder, who is doing clerical work without pay for the Justice Department during the government shutdown. She recently began asking her mother, 77, for money after she depleted savings she had accumulated since the government shutdown in 2013.
+“I am watching the news every 10 minutes praying that something happens, because we cannot take any more,” said Ms. Wilder, one of many affected earning an annual salary of around $50,000.
+She was among the federal workers who lined up on Wednesday at a kitchen opened by José Andrés, the Spanish Michelin-starred chef, disaster relief organizer and occasional antagonist of the Trump family. Operated by Mr. Andrés’s nonprofit organization, World Central Kitchen, the relief site is equipped to feed thousands of government workers and their families, many of whom are using food pantries for the first time as their savings accounts dwindle.David Haskell, a longtime deputy editor at New York magazine, will become its editor in chief on April 1, inheriting a glossy biweekly and a suite of websites devoted to pursuits like fashion, food, shopping and politics. He succeeds Adam Moss, who is stepping down after 15 years at the helm.
+The appointment of Mr. Haskell, 39, on Wednesday is a sea change for a publication that has reached journalistic heights under Mr. Moss — collecting dozens of National Magazine Awards and, last year, a Pulitzer Prize — even as it struggled to find financial stability in a topsy-turvy environment for the news industry.
+Mr. Moss, working with the company’s chief executive, Pamela Wasserstein, reinvented New York as a digital company dabbling in e-commerce, TV spinoffs and live events. Since 2016, Mr. Haskell has split his duties between editing (one of his projects, celebrities’ stories of moving to the city, became a book) and imagining the future of the business.
+“I feel so grateful for the opportunity, and obviously so daunted,” Mr. Haskell said in an interview on Wednesday, shortly before an address to the staff. “Anyone who’s a student of narratives knows how dangerous it is to take something over at the top of its game.”LeBron James, sidelined since Dec. 25 with a groin strain, will remain out until at least next week, the Los Angeles Lakers announced Wednesday. The team said in a statement that James did not travel with the Lakers on their current road trip for games against the Oklahoma City Thunder on Thursday and the Houston Rockets on Saturday.
+The Lakers have struggled without James — and without Rajon Rondo, their backup point guard, who was also injured in the Lakers’ road win over the Golden State Warriors on Christmas Day. Entering Thursday, the Lakers had gone 4-7 without those two players and were tied with the Sacramento Kings for eighth place in the Western Conference standings.
+[On Pro Basketball: The Warriors Prepare to Add Another Star: DeMarcus Cousins]
+After their current trip, the Lakers will return home to play the Warriors on Monday — which, incidentally, is slated to be Game 2 of the Warriors’ well-publicized DeMarcus Cousins experiment as he returns from surgery on his Achilles’ tendon — but it is highly unlikely that James will be available. The Lakers said in their statement that James “has been cleared to return to practice commencing next week, and progress toward a return to game play thereafter.”
+James, 34, had been fairly indestructible thus far in his career. He appeared in all 82 regular-season games for the Cleveland Cavaliers last season. But while the Lakers initially listed James as “day to day” after he underwent a magnetic resonance imaging exam last month, the team has been handling him — and his eventual return — with caution.To the Editor:
+Leyla Guven, a member of Parliament from the Peoples’ Democratic Party in Turkey, has been on an indefinite hunger strike for the last two months. Having dedicated her political efforts over the years to the struggle against the Turkish state’s illegal military invasions and occupations of Kurdish regions and against Turkey’s continuing human rights abuses, she now offers her life in protest of the isolation of Abdullah Ocalan, leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and other Kurdish political prisoners.
+Ms. Guven is a major inspiration to people throughout the world who believe in peace, justice and liberation. I join all those who support her and stand in condemnation of the repressive conditions of Mr. Ocalan’s imprisonment.
+Like Ms. Guven, thousands of leaders and representatives of the Peoples’ Democratic Party and the Democratic Regions Party are behind bars. The largest umbrella women’s movement of Turkey, the Free Women’s Congress, founded in Kurdistan, was forcibly dissolved and many of its activists have been imprisoned . And those who have spoken out against the indiscriminate killing of thousands of Kurdish people by the Turkish Army since the breakdown of the peace process in 2015 have been criminalized in multiple ways.
+Those of us here in the United States who have protested the expansion of the prison-industrial complex have been emboldened over the years by the courageous actions of Kurdish political prisoners — especially by the women who have resisted American-type prisons in Turkey.If there’s an upside to the crushing defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May’s laboriously negotiated plan for withdrawing from the European Union, it is that staring in the face of an exit without a deal 10 weeks from now may finally compel British lawmakers to accept reality.
+That was far from evident in the immediate aftermath of the 432-to-202 vote in Parliament on Tuesday. Though it was the worst drubbing a British government had suffered in modern times and a dangerous step toward the cliff’s edge, the vote was cheered by many sides — by hard-core Brexiteers who would sever ties to the Continent at any cost; by “remainers” for whom any glitch in the Brexit process keeps alive the hope of staying in the union or at least softening the terms of a divorce; by Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, who wants to oust Mrs. May so he can come to power.
+Mr. Corbyn’s ambitions, at least, were dashed for the moment when many of the politicians from Mrs. May’s camp who defied her on Tuesday came to her support on Wednesday, opting to keep her in office rather than risk an election in which they had no acceptable alternative candidate.
+On the Continent, the exasperation was tangible. “If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” asked Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, which includes the European Union’s heads of state and government, in a tweet that implied that the solution should be for Britain to stay in the union.The kingpin’s trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, has seen its share of flamboyant figures in the last nine weeks — from Mr. Guzmán’s chief cocaine supplier, who altered his entire face with plastic surgery, to the 20-something I.T. expert who built El Chapo an encrypted cellphone system and then worked with the F.B.I. to hack it. But even in this parade of vivid characters, Mr. Cifuentes has stood out.
+Who else could describe for jurors, as he did Wednesday, how he once planned to “fuse” cocaine into “plastic cubes” and ship it to Canada with the help of twin brothers in the Mafia? Mr. Cifuentes also said he lied about his true occupation on an application for Mexican citizenship, saying he sold “submersible plants.”
+Federal prosecutors have said in court filings that Mr. Cifuentes has an “unorthodox” interest in the occult (which, they noted, he picked up from watching the Discovery Channel) and on several occasions has gone to see a witch doctor. He said he once took a trip to Ecuador to buy cocaine for Mr. Guzmán, filling a cooler with $1 million and traveling the high seas in a six-person boat.
+Mr. Cifuentes first grew close to Mr. Guzmán in late 2007 when he went to live with the drug lord (and his entourage of secretaries, maids and bodyguards) in a series of secret hide-outs in the Sierra Madre mountains. Before he arrived, Mr. Cifuentes said, Mr. Guzmán was living in a rustic hut with plastic folding chairs and makeshift wooden furniture. It was only after he showed up, he claimed, that Mr. Guzmán acquired modern amenities like a plasma-screen television.
+In the next six years, Mr. Cifuentes was involved in nearly every aspect of Mr. Guzmán’s business. His own personal assistant, Andrea Velez Fernandez, once tried to help the kingpin bribe an army general whom she was supplying with “female friends” from a modeling firm she ran. When Mr. Guzmán later wanted Ms. Velez dead, Mr. Cifuentes said he took the contract, sending his wife to Canada to hire a local group of Hell’s Angels for the hit.“If nothing more is presented,” he continued, “it would just be hearsay from a narcotrafficker hoping for some kind of benefit.”
+María Celia Toro, a political analyst at the Colegio de México, a university in Mexico City, said that Mexicans have been conditioned by “a long history of false accusations.”
+She added, “The most sensible thing to do is to wait.”
+Many observers pointed out that if Mr. Guzmán had, indeed, paid Mr. Peña Nieto $100 million, then he did not get much bang for his buck, since he was eventually extradited to the United States by the president. Mr. Cifuentes dated the alleged bribe to October 2012 and Mr. Guzmán was captured for the first time in February 2014. He later escaped from prison only to be recaptured in January 2016 and extradited in January 2017.
+“It isn’t logical that you would pay a bribe so that in a few years you will be captured,” said Juan Alberto Cedillo, a Mexican journalist who has investigated Mexican organized crime groups for more than a decade.
+In addition, Mr. Peña Nieto might have surmised that any deals the two men had brokered would likely have arisen during judicial proceedings in the United States.
+“For all his faults and flaws, Peña Nieto captured Chapo and extradited him, knowing full well that any information would filter out,” said Alejandro Hope, a security expert with a Mexican consulting firm, the Group of Economists and Associates. “The guy was being hunted down from Day 1 of Peña Nieto’s administration.”
+Some who have questioned the veracity of Mr. Cifuentes’s testimony also pointed out that Mr. Peña Nieto is still in Mexico. He attended the funeral of a former governor of his home state several days ago, his first public appearance since leaving office. Were he guilty, some contended, he might have taken a page from the playbook of other politicians and fled, or gone into hiding.The timing of Mr. Pence’s comments was significant, coming just before Pyongyang’s lead negotiator over the nuclear program, Kim Yong-chol, is expected to arrive in Washington to meet on Friday with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. The North Korean negotiator is usually not permitted to travel more than a short distance from the United Nations headquarters in New York, where Mr. Pompeo met him last year, so the invitation to Washington was seen as a gesture to make arrangements for the summit meeting.
+Mr. Kim, the negotiator, is a former general and intelligence chief believed to be about 74, and is viewed as a member of the inner circle of North Korean leaders. He is also widely regarded as the architect of an attack on a South Korean ship in 2010 that killed 46 South Korean sailors.
+But so far, his meetings with Mr. Pompeo, in both Pyongyang and New York, have yielded few results.
+While the United States has demanded that North Korea turn over its nuclear weapons before it sees any significant sanctions relief, the North has argued for a step-by-step approach — including that the United States withdraw troops and weapons from the Korean Peninsula.
+Breaking that logjam will be the key to the meeting with Mr. Pompeo, American officials said. North Korea has still not taken the first step demanded by the United States: Providing an inventory of its nuclear weapons, its stockpiles of nuclear material, its production facilities, missile fabrication plans and launch sites.
+The North has instead said that it would give Washington a target list. Mr. Trump’s negotiators have argued that they already have a list, but want evidence that the North was being truthful in its declarations.Half a world away, crowds of heroic protesters are in the streets. They shout “Peaceful, Peaceful” even as security forces target them with live ammunition.
+They are risking their lives to try to topple a genocidal ruler. But President Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other world leaders are largely ignoring these brave protesters, increasing the risk that they will be massacred.
+These protests are unfolding in Sudan against the regime of President Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for genocide. Other presidents have committed genocide over the last century, but Bashir has the distinction of conducting three different genocides by my count: in South Sudan, in the Nuba Mountains and in Darfur. He is not just a serial killer; he is a serial genocidaire.
+For almost a month, ordinary Sudanese have poured out of their homes and offices around the country to join this “Sudan uprising.” Perhaps 40 or more have been killed by security forces and hundreds more detained and often beaten. The police reportedly have dragged injured protesters from hospital beds, with lawyers, doctors and journalists particularly targeted.At least 35 priests on the most recent list have died, and others have been permanently removed from ministry or restricted from serving in public roles.
+The disclosure offered virtually no details about the claims, just names, career histories and date ranges for the suspected abuse. Even so, the list indicated that one priest who admitted to abusing minors in 1961 served in Jesuit-run schools for 36 more years. It also showed that there were priests accused of abuse whose careers spanned decades, though in most cases the allegations did not emerge until years later.
+One of the priests, Robert Cornigans, was accused of abusing a minor in 1976, an allegation that did not emerge until 2003. He left the Jesuits in 1981, according to the order’s records. In 2004, he joined the faculty of the Masters School. He taught English in its Upper School and lived on campus.
+In the letter, officials said that Mr. Cornigans resigned after the list was released, and that he would be leaving his campus residence in “the next few days.”
+“We want to be very clear that the safety and security of our students, and our entire community, is our highest priority,” the letter said, noting that the school would hire an outside firm to conduct an investigation.
+The school declined to comment further. Efforts to immediately reach Mr. Cornigans on Wednesday were unsuccessful.
+Officials at Regis and Fordham Prep in New York, as well as at St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City, were among those who sent emails to their school communities or issued statements acknowledging the disclosures.WASHINGTON — The federal agency that had leased a prime property in Washington to the Trump Organization failed to grapple fully after the 2016 election with the politically fraught question of whether Donald J. Trump’s victory left the deal in violation of the Constitution, according to an inspector general’s report released on Wednesday.
+The inspector general for the agency, the General Services Administration, found that its lawyers agreed that Mr. Trump’s election raised constitutional issues about the Trump Organization’s lease of the building on Pennsylvania Avenue, which was redeveloped as the Trump International Hotel. The lease was signed in 2013 and the hotel opened two weeks before the 2016 election.
+But rather than confront head-on after Election Day what to do about the issue — or seek the advice of the Justice Department — the agency ignored it, the report said. Essentially, the General Services Administration decided to “punt,” the report said, quoting a senior agency lawyer, effectively clearing the way for Mr. Trump’s business to continue operating in the heart of the capital.
+The inspector general’s report suggested that the intersection of Mr. Trump’s business with his role as president might violate the Constitution’s restrictions on government-bestowed benefits or “emoluments” to federal officials, besides their salaries.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”ATLANTA — A Georgia man was arrested on Wednesday on suspicion of planning to attack the White House with explosives and other weapons, federal prosecutors said.
+Investigators monitored the man for months, and then arrested him when he tried to buy weapons from an undercover F.B.I. employee posing as a dealer, according to an F.B.I. affidavit.
+The suspect, identified as Hasher Jallal Taheb, 21, of Cumming, Ga., had also discussed attacking other buildings in the Washington area, and at one point said he wanted to attack the Statue of Liberty, according to the affidavit. Officials said on Wednesday that the suspect was believed to have acted alone.
+“All potential threats have been neutralized, and they have been under control from the inception of this case,” Byung J. Pak, the United States attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said at a brief news conference in downtown Atlanta announcing the arrest.“He was quiet, for sure, but not any out-of-the-ordinary quiet like something that would alarm somebody,” said one former classmate, who declined to be named out of fear of being ostracized in Gordon, where some residents believe speaking about Mr. Patterson is a betrayal of the town. In a photo given to The New York Times, Mr. Patterson sits in a corner, alone and behind his smiling, posing classmates, absorbed with his laptop.
+One of his former teachers, in a text message to a handful of Mr. Patterson’s classmates, said the man accused of the kidnapping and killings was “not the quiet, smiley, bookish boy in the classroom” she knew. “As the days pass and more news trickles out, I’ll still hold the memory of that sweet boy in my heart. His future will look very different than yours.”
+[Read more about how Jayme’s disappearance shook her hometown.]
+Since graduation, Mr. Patterson had struggled to hold down a job.
+He worked for one day at the Jennie-O Turkey Store in Barron, where Jayme’s parents also worked. He spent two days last fall at a cheese factory. A few years before, the United States Marine Corps sent him home after five weeks of boot camp.In our never-ending search for cheerful news, today we note that Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general says the Mueller probe is not a “witch hunt.”
+On the downside, William Barr doesn’t seem to think the final Mueller report on Trump’s Russia ties should be made public. While the innate leakiness of Washington will overcome this problem, it’s still a bad attitude. We’ve been waiting so long for that report to actually come out, we’re in danger of forgetting everything Robert Mueller was supposed to investigate.
+So let’s try to get back up to speed on all things Russia. Well, some. Pick the right answer:Lawmakers are also pressuring Huawei. A new bill introduced on Wednesday would ban the export of American technology to Chinese telecommunications companies that have broken U.S. sanctions, including Huawei and its smaller Chinese rival ZTE.
+Because the companies make wide use of an array of American parts, like microchips, the bill could have a major impact on their business. A similar ban last year, following a finding that ZTE had violated American sanctions, effectively shut the Chinese company down before the Trump administration lifted it.
+“Both companies have repeatedly violated U.S. laws, represent a significant risk to American national security interests and need to be held accountable,” said Chris Van Hollen, a Democratic senator from Maryland and one of the sponsors of the bill, in a statement.
+The bill, called the Telecommunications Denial Order Enforcement Act, was also sponsored in the Senate by Senator Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas. In the House of Representatives, it was sponsored by Mike Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican, and Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat.
+The charges in Seattle had hung over Huawei for much of last year, as various other crises were unfolding for the company. The charges were due to pass the statute of limitations last year, but the case was extended.
+In plea negotiations last year, Huawei faced the prospect of pleading guilty to a criminal charge of theft of a trade secret and agreeing to some sort of compliance plan, according to one of the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
+If the case is resolved with a plea agreement, Huawei will most likely plead guilty to a criminal charge of theft of a trade secret and have to agree to some sort of compliance plan, the person said.SEATTLE — The Seattle area, home to both Microsoft and Amazon, is a potent symbol of the affordable housing crisis that has followed the explosive growth of tech hubs. Now Microsoft, arguing that the industry has an interest and responsibility to help people left behind in communities transformed by the boom, is putting up $500 million to help address the problem.
+Microsoft’s money represents the most ambitious effort by a tech company to directly address the inequality that has spread in areas where the industry is concentrated, particularly on the West Coast. It will fund construction for homes affordable not only to the company’s own non-tech workers, but also for teachers, firefighters and other middle- and low-income residents.
+Microsoft’s move comes less than a year after Amazon successfully pushed to block a new tax in Seattle that would have made large businesses pay a per-employee tax to fund homeless services and the construction of affordable housing. The company said the tax created a disincentive to create jobs. Microsoft, which is based in nearby Redmond, Wash., and has few employees who work in the city, did not take a position on the tax.
+The debate about the rapid growth of the tech industry and the inequality that often follows has spilled across the country, particularly as Amazon, with billions of taxpayer subsidies, announced plans to build major campuses in Long Island City, Queens, and Arlington, Va., that would employ a total of at least 50,000 people. In New York, elected officials and residents have raised concerns that Amazon has not made commitments to support affordable housing.“You don’t just tax the last person in. You tax everyone causing the problem. It’s not like moving around Manhattan was la-dee-da before Uber.”
+BRUCE SCHALLER, a former New York City transportation official, arguing that yellow taxis should not be exempt from a $2.50 surcharge that would go toward fixing the ailing subway system.WASHINGTON — President Trump has insisted that he is not going to compromise with Democrats to end the government shutdown, and that he is comfortable in his unbendable position. But privately, it’s sometimes a different story.
+“We are getting crushed!” Mr. Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, after watching some recent coverage of the shutdown, according to one person familiar with the conversation. “Why can’t we get a deal?”
+The president is confronted by a divided and partially shuttered government with an untested staff that has undergone yet another shake-up. Polls show that most Americans blame him for the government shutdown, and his advisers are warning him of its negative effects on the economy. And as the shutdown enters its 27th day on Thursday with no end in sight, most of his top aides would like him to find a way out.
+Mr. Trump has told them he believes over time the country will not remember the shutdown, but it will remember that he staged a fight over his insistence that the southern border be protected. He wants Democrats to come back to the table agreeing with his position on a wall, and he does not understand why they have not.•
+Because of an editing error, a picture caption with an article last Thursday about Gov. Jared Polis of Colorado misstated the relationship between Mr. Polis and Marlon Reis. As the article and a caption on the front page of the section correctly noted, they are partners; they are not married.
+•
+An article last Thursday about magazines focused on marijuana misspelled part of the title of one such publication; it is Dope Girls, not Girlz. The article also misstated the name of another publication; it is Kitchen Toke, not Toke Kitchen. The article misstated the slogan of Miss Grass; it is “Welcome to the High Road,” not “High Minded.” And because of an editing error, the publishing history of Miss Grass, an online publication, was described incorrectly. It started last year; it does not have individual issues.
+OBITUARIES
+A picture caption with an obituary on Saturday about the botanical artist Jessica Tcherepnine, using information from the Shepherd Gallery in Manhattan, misidentified the subject of one of her paintings. It is an ackee, not a magnolia. And the obituary misstated part of the name of a museum in London whose collection includes paintings by Ms. Tcherepnine. It is the Natural History Museum, not the National History Museum. (The error was repeated in a picture caption.) In addition, another picture caption with the obituary misstated Ms. Tcherepnine’s given name as Josephine.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).30A: The subversive in me — or perhaps the part of me that really needs a high-adventure vacation — thought the answer to “Jumping off points?” might be CLIFFS, but that didn’t fit, and it wouldn’t have needed a question mark anyway. The answer was IDEAS, or rather SDAEI as written.
+64A: Not the poet, but the Simpson. “Neighbor of Homer” is NED Flanders.
+2D: When I saw the clue “Some Nellies and Noras, formally,” I made two mistakes: I missed the word “formally,” and I automatically wrote in NERVOUS, forgetting that the majority of Noras are not known for being nervous. The answer is ELEANORS.
+16D: Sure you know what LOLCAT is. You’ve seen these memes. If you haven’t, you can always learn.
+29D: “Aspen or Tahoe” are not just ski areas, they are SUVs.
+Today’s Theme
+O.K., for those of you who have just started solving, let’s get this out of the way: It is completely legal to ask solvers to write backward in a grid, just as it’s legal to ask them to write more than one letter in a square when there is a rebus element in the puzzle. Please do not send emails to the editors telling them that it’s not fair; all that does is make them bolder, and the next thing you know we’ll be solving crossword puzzles where we have to guess the clues.
+Anyway, Mr. Trudeau takes us on a trip through THE LOOKING GLASS, the central Down revealer, which divides the grid in half and reflects one half back on the other. The way Mr. Trudeau has visualized that is by setting the right-side entries backward. What’s even more clever, in my opinion, is that there are five entries that cross THE LOOKING GLASS and, because they live on both sides, they are palindromes. It’s quite an elegant theme.“It’s happened before,” he said. “I’ll be all right. And now, what can I do for you?”
+We talked at length, and his voice got stronger as he launched into a lecture on “the relentless rules of arithmetic” for mutual funds. He said they amounted to this: The fees charged by brokerages, fund companies and advisers were sapping the returns of millions of hard-working people who were trying to save for retirement. Reduce the fees and give the money to the people who need it, he said. That, he said, was what his career was all about.
+After a few minutes, he faltered, and we agreed to resume the conversation a week or two later. Jack asked me not to reveal that stretch of weakness and hospitalization — or other bouts that occurred later — and I didn’t, while he was alive.
+Now, after the announcement of his death on Wednesday, I believe it’s fair to let people know how strong he was, and how idealistic.
+[Read the obituary of Mr. Bogle.]
+The basic biographical details are well known. A poor boy and a brilliant student, he discovered an interest in asset management — and the burden of fees on investors — while an undergraduate at Princeton. He had his ups and downs in the fund business but made history by popularizing the index fund and creating Vanguard, giving up his chance at great wealth by eschewing ownership of the company.
+The Vanguard Group, as he structured it, was owned by its mutual funds, which were owned, in turn, by fund shareholders and dedicated to low-cost investing. He was paid well and accrued what would be a great fortune for most of us — he told me last year his assets were “well below $100 million” — but it’s small change by the standards of money management.Theresa May survives leadership challenge over Brexit
+Parliament voted 325 to 306 against a motion of no-confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May, a day after it rejected her plan to withdraw from the E.U.
+Many lawmakers from her own party, who just a day earlier opposed her plan, leapt to her defense and voted to support her government, demonstrating the complex politics around Brexit and Mrs. May’s almost surreal durability.
+What’s next? She has to present a Plan B for Brexit. She promised to consult with Parliament and somehow craft a deal that could get approved. But E.U. officials have already said they’re unwilling to reopen negotiations, leaving Mrs. May with little new to offer. There is growing speculation she could ask to postpone Britain’s divorce from the bloc.ABU DHABI — Qatar forward Almoez Ali joined a small group of record-makers at the Asian Cup last week, becoming only the fourth player in the tournament’s history to score four goals in a single game. His exploits in his country’s 6-0 thrashing of North Korea were cheered by just one fan sporting the Gulf country’s colors.
+That was one more than team officials expected.
+That is because the Asian Cup is being played this month in the United Arab Emirates, one of the main players in the punishing Saudi Arabia-led blockade of Qatar that began in 2017 and already has led to inconveniences for visiting Qatari officials, visiting Qatari journalists and, clearly, given their tiny number, visiting Qatari fans. The looming specter of the political dispute has produced a surreal air around Qatar’s matches, one that is expected to be repeated at its showdown against Saudi Arabia on Thursday at Zayed City Sports Stadium.
+Because of the geopolitical implications, that match could be one of the most-watched games of the tournament, though it will most likely not include many, if any, Qataris in the stands. The official attendance figure for the Qatar-North Korea game on Sunday in Al Ain was announced as 452, though several people who attended said the actual number most likely was closer to 100. Similarly low attendance figures have been a feature of the tournament, Asia’s most important soccer championship, in its first two weeks.
+The one flag-waving fan in Qatar’s maroon colors Sunday was a South Korean woman who had traveled from her homeland to root for Qatar, according to Qatari officials. Two other unidentified men sat nearby behind a Qatari flag, a rare spot of color in a sea of white seats. The sparse crowd only avoided setting another tournament record, for the lowest attendance, because of two groups of fans bused in by North Korea’s delegation.Zoe Saldana plays a ruthless assassin in “Colombiana.” And Melissa McCarthy is a C.I.A. administrator-turned-agent in “Spy.”
+What’s on TV
+COLOMBIANA (2011) 8 p.m. on AMC. It will surprise few that this revenge thriller, with Zoe Saldana as a daughter avenging her parents’ murder, was written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen. A few years earlier, that pair wrote “Taken,” and Besson — whose other movies include “La Femme Nikita” and “Lucy” — is a maestro in the field of films in which vengeful women erase scores of nameless henchmen. In “Colombiana,” Saldana’s ultimate career goal as an assassin is to dispose of the drug lord who once ordered her parents’ killing.
+PLANET EARTH: YELLOWSTONE 8 p.m. on BBC America. While you can still visit Yellowstone during the government shutdown (unlike many other national parks), this three-part BBC nature documentary offers something that you can’t get in just one visit: a look at the national park in three seasons. In the “Winter” episode, aerial shots show coyotes trudging through the park, stalking prey in freshly fallen snow. In “Summer,” the snow melts away, feeding rivers filled with trout, which are seen being devoured by otters. Among the natural meals enjoyed in “Autumn” is the trunk of a cottonwood tree, consumed with impressive speed by a content-looking beaver. All three episodes will run back-to-back on Thursday at 8, 9 and 10 p.m.And in December, Germany’s political leaders agreed to lower the threshold at which foreign investment in security-related industries — including energy suppliers, railways and digital infrastructure — prompts government intervention, a step clearly aimed at China. This policy was already in place in practice; last year, the German state bank KfW bought a 20 percent share of 50Hertz, a power distributing company, to block a bid by the State Grid Corporation of China. The Ministries of Finance and Economy cited security as the reason for the unusual move.
+But is all this enough? Policymakers and diplomats refrain from speaking of a paradigm shift in Germany’s China politics. “We have carefully adjusted our policy,” said Niels Annen, the minister of state at the Foreign Office. Indeed, unlike Germany’s foreign policy on Russia, the country’s relations with China are under less vigorous and ideological public scrutiny. Russia is a passionately divisive topic; most Germans could care less about China. And diplomats probably like it that way.
+When it comes to China, Germany has to walk a very thin line in a rapidly changing international environment. The trans-Atlantic relationship has been rattled since Donald Trump took office; Germany suddenly finds itself agreeing with China more on certain issues, like climate change, than with the United States, its longtime ally.
+As a consequence, German diplomats have to play a tricky game: Partnering with an ideological adversary against its close ally on some issues, while sticking with that suddenly difficult ally against its most important trading partner on others. And in both cases, it has to stand by its commitment to the rules-based international order when neither of those partners holds the same level of commitment, at least at the moment.
+How much longer Germany can continue to walk this line while staying committed to the old trans-Atlantic relationship remains to be seen. Mr. Huotari of the Mercator Institute expects Germany to be put on the spot sooner or later. “China may be content as long as Germany doesn’t take sides with the United States,” he said. “But the United States is expecting us to clearly position ourselves. We are in the middle of the game already — and the pressure is going to increase.”
+Germany’s best option seems to be finding safety in numbers by uniting its European allies, not least because part of China’s geopolitical strategy is to divide Europe. Six years ago, it established the 16+1 framework, an initiative to engage 16 Central and Eastern European countries, 11 of which are members of the European Union, in closer relations to influence European policies in its favor.
+Lately, however, several of those countries have become disenchanted. In some, China is having trouble keeping up with its investment promises. Others, like Poland, face increasing pressure from Washington to loosen ties with Beijing. This could be Germany’s opening, but it has to play it exactly right — and uniting Western, Central and Eastern Europe is no easy task. It is the eternal quandary of German foreign policy: Germany can’t go it alone, but Europe is too divided and too slow to step up.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Note: Our sixth annual 15-second vocabulary video challenge starts today, Jan. 17, and will run until Feb. 18. A runner-up from last year’s competition is shown above.
+equanimity \ˌē-kwə-ˈni-mə-tē, ˌe-kwə-\ noun
+: steadiness of mind under stress
+_________
+The word equanimity has appeared in 36 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on March 15 in the movie review “‘12 Days’ and the Rights of the Mentally Ill” by Manohla Dargis:
+An uneasy calm suffuses “12 Days,” a documentary set at the juncture of personal liberty and the law. An opening title card offers some context: Since 2013, patients in France who have been involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals must be “presented to a freedom and detention judge” within 12 days and then, if needed, every six months. That’s pretty much all the background that the director Raymond Depardon provides in this movie, which suggests that the line between mental illness and health is sometimes determined by who tells your story and how. For those who have long been silenced — and often remain so — being able to tell those stories is clearly monumental. .... The patients seem either accepting of their situation or resistant. Some speak clearly and with equanimity, making their case for freedom; one nearly vibrates with anger; one weeps; another expresses her wish to die. One man sounds heavily drugged, and soon his tale suggests why he might be.Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Here’s where the shutdown stands: Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent President Trump a letter asking him to scrap or delay his State of the Union address, citing security and logistical concerns; a bipartisan group of senators called on him to reopen the government; and the Trump administration is looking to reinterpret the rules of a federal shutdown to put people back to work.
+• Four Americans were among the 19 people killed in a bombing in northern Syria for which ISIS has claimed responsibility. The attack came just weeks after Mr. Trump ordered the withdrawal of American troops from the county, declaring that the Islamic State had been defeated.
+• Mr. Trump has insisted that he’s not going to compromise with Democrats to end the government shutdown, and that he’s comfortable with that. But privately, the president is growing increasingly anxious.Watch the 40-second drone video above of a giant ice disk spinning in a Maine river.
+What questions does the video raise for you? What theories can you come up with for how this ice disk was formed?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out where it came from.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The new fees were supposed to help fix New York City’s ailing subway by raising more than $1 million a day from those who could afford to take taxis and Ubers in Manhattan.
+But before the $2.50 fees on rides could even go into effect as planned on Jan. 1, they were sidelined by a lawsuit brought by a coalition of taxi owners and drivers.
+The opponents warn that the fee will add up for passengers, and will also deal a final blow to a taxi industry teetering on the brink. They say the surcharge will drive away customers when they are already losing business to Uber and other app-based services and struggling with enormous debt and bleak prospects.
+Three taxi owners and five other professional drivers have committed suicide over the last year.
+“If they put the surcharge on, that’s it, we’ve lost our whole life investment,” said Gloria Guerra, 62, who with her husband, William, owns a taxi medallion, the aluminum plate required to drive a yellow taxi in New York that once sold for more than $1 million. “The business will be bankrupt. All the medallions will be bankrupt.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Through the fall, traveler after traveler arrived in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities of New York from areas of Israel and Europe where measles was spreading. They then spent time in homes, schools and shops in communities where too many people were unvaccinated.
+Within months, New York State was facing its most severe outbreak of the disease in decades, with 182 cases confirmed by Thursday, almost exclusively among ultra-Orthodox Jews. Health officials in New Jersey have reported 33 measles cases, mostly in Ocean County, driven by similar conditions.
+In 2018, New York and New Jersey accounted for more than half the measles cases in the country.
+Alarmed, health officials began a systematic effort to bring up vaccination rates and halt the disease’s spread.
+But while there has been progress, the outbreak is not yet over. Health officials said part of the problem has been resistance among some people in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods to fully cooperate with health workers, get vaccinations and promptly report infections.WASHINGTON — Along the 2,000-mile border with Mexico, which sprawls across four states and nine House districts, a single seat is held by a Republican: Representative Will Hurd of Texas.
+And Mr. Hurd, a former undercover C.I.A. officer who barely won re-election in Texas’ 23rd District, the largest of the nine, has emerged as perhaps the most persistent critic in his party of President Trump’s wall.
+Drawing upon his years undercover and his work in the private sector, Mr. Hurd has a starkly different vision for the southwestern border: fiber optic cables, sensors, radar, drones, increased staffing — but not the concrete or steel barrier that Mr. Trump has demanded before he reopens the government.
+He has joined Democrats eight times this month to vote to reopen the government, without wall funding.Unanimity is a rare thing. There is always that one person who believes the Earth is flat, who prefers “The Godfather Part III” to “The Godfather,” who supports Pee-wee Herman for president.
+Or who thinks Mariano Rivera doesn’t belong in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
+On Tuesday, the Hall will reveal its new class of inductees, and Rivera, the superstar Yankees reliever, is certain to be among them. But there is a lot of curiosity about whether he will become the first player elected unanimously by the baseball writers, achieving something other shoo-ins have not.
+Eight voters passed on Cal Ripken Jr., six on Nolan Ryan and 16 on Mike Schmidt.
+In 1992, Tom Seaver came five votes short. In 1979, 23 writers said no to Willie Mays. “It’s an embarrassment to our association,” Jack Lang, the writers’ secretary and ballot-counter, said at the time.
+In 1966, 20 voters decided Ted Williams wasn’t good enough. In 1962, Jackie Robinson fell 36 votes short of unanimity. Somehow, Joe DiMaggio didn’t get in until his fourth year of eligibility.BlackRock has used its heft to promote policy change in the past year, including voting for a shareholder resolution that required the gun maker Sturm, Ruger & Company to be more transparent about the safety of its products.
+In some respects, Mr. Fink is limited in what he can do. Much of BlackRock’s holdings are through 401(k) plans in index funds, and the company isn’t able to sell specific companies whose policies it might disagree with. But it recently introduced a series of socially responsible investment funds that exclude entire industries, such as tobacco, firearms or coal.
+The letter is also a defense against those who criticized him over last year’s letter.
+“I didn’t know Larry Fink had been made God,” the real estate billionaire Sam Zell said the day after Mr. Fink’s letter was sent last year. And Warren Buffett, the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, said he did not believe it was the role of investors to push their views in the way Mr. Fink suggested.
+“I don’t believe in imposing my political opinions on the activities of our businesses,” Mr. Buffett said last year.
+In Mr. Fink’s latest letter, he wrote that he had “no intention” of telling companies what their purpose should be. “Rather, we seek to understand how a company’s purpose informs its strategy and culture to underpin sustainable financial performance,” he wrote.
+He also pushed against the notion, long espoused by the economist Milton Friedman, that a company’s only social responsibility is its profits.
+“Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose,” Mr. Fink wrote. He added, “Purpose is not the sole pursuit of profits but the animating force for achieving them.”• Make a prediction about the article you are about to read: How might the shutdown affect young people across America, including children, teenagers, college students and young adults?
+Now, read the article, “‘The Shutdown Makes Me Nervous’: Young People Caught Up in Impasse,” and answer the following questions:
+1. Why does the author begin the article with Stella Blaylock’s story? What does it tell readers about how the shutdown is affecting young people?
+2. How is the shutdown affecting college students in particular? Why are these issues significant for students like Cartonise Lawson-Wilson who rely on government assistance to fund their education?
+3. The author writes that the standoff between President Trump and Congress has taken a financial and emotional toll on federal workers and their families. What have been the financial impacts on families? What have been the emotional ones?Even as Aparicio is celebrated, she has become a target of racist attacks online. Aparicio said that while it initially upset her, she is now focused on the scores who have called her a role model and sent fan art. “I’m not the face of Mexico,” she added, since the country has many faces.
+Image This cover made history for Vogue México. Credit... Vogue
+The editor in chief of Vogue México and Vogue Latinoamérica, Karla Martinez de Salas, said she witnessed the racist and classist reactions to photos of Aparicio in Vanity Fair, and worried that the Vogue images would meet a similar response. Rather, they were celebrated with the largest response the magazine has ever received on social media.
+In the park, Aparicio sat facing the sun. Her best friend in real life and on film, Nancy García García (who plays Adela, the cook), has told her she looks tired these days. She feels tired. In August, Aparicio flew to Venice for the premiere of “Roma,” where she watched the movie for the first time. She tried to contain her emotions, but 30 minutes in, she began crying, and continued until the closing credits. It has been a whirlwind ever since, with trips to London, San Francisco, New York, Toronto, Los Angeles and more.
+The journey actually started two years earlier. The director of a Tlaxiaco cultural center had invited Aparicio’s older sister, Edith, to a mysterious casting call that would turn out to be for Cuarón’s big-screen portrait of Cleo and Mexico City in the 1970s. Casting the lead was a monthslong process that involved tapes of more than 3,000 women, none of whom Cuarón found quite right. At the audition, Edith Aparicio, who was pregnant, hesitated and urged Yalitza to try out instead so she could recount the details.
+Cuarón met her at a callback. “I was starting to get a bit nervous until suddenly Yalitza walks into the office, and it was that presence — kind of shy but very open,” Cuarón recalled by phone. He’d been looking to match the sensibility of Libo, an empathic way of relating to others.And Mr. Stanley’s debut is meaningful to Mr. Hall. “There’s always a person in the audience who’s watching for the very first time,” he said. “Whoever comes in and sees Taylor performing will think of Apollo as someone who looks like him. That’s really important — and not to give him any more stress, but until now, we’ve had something that was cut from the same block.”
+Mr. Stanley is not cut from any block. When Mr. Abraham was choreographing “The Runaway,” he recalled watching him at an early rehearsal. “It took everything I had not to just start laughing in shock at how good he was,” Mr. Abraham said. For Mr. Stanley, who became a principal in 2016, it’s a great time to be that good. Recently, the male principal ranks at City Ballet were depleted when three dancers left or were fired amid issues of sexual misconduct. (Another, Joaquin De Luz, retired.)
+Mr. Hall sees Mr. Stanley as a role model offstage as well as on. “In this day and age, it’s important to see someone who is not only talented, but has a good heart,” he said. “That makes him a bigger star: to take the time to care for people when no one’s watching.”
+And then there’s his luminous musicality and razor-sharp technique. “He’s a gentle tornado in a way,” Mr. Hall said. “He’s quiet and he’s so calm until he’s destroying your heart.” He added: “And then the minute you tell him how great it was, he runs away from it.”
+It’s true that Mr. Stanley’s self-image could use improving. “He has the weight of trying to please everyone, and that is beautiful and humbling,” Mr. Hall said, adding: “He’s like the most perfect knight.”When tens of thousands of students took to the streets of Spain to protest new education laws in 1987, riot police officers violently dispersed the demonstrators, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. As a 20-year-old freelancer in Madrid, I was photographing these events for Reuters alongside other accredited photojournalists who wore green armbands to identify and protect them from police assaults.
+One day my colleagues and I watched as a young photographer we had never encountered — and who did not have a prized armband — kept getting hassled by the police as he tried to photograph the scene. He was fearless and determined as we watched him fending off the police, day after day.
+“Who is that guy?” we puzzled.
+I found out soon enough when I saw him a few weeks later playing pinball at a bar. “Are you the guy we keep seeing getting into trouble with the cops during the demos?” I asked.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+‘Your Kentucky-Fried Little Heart’
+On Day 26 of the partial government shutdown, Jimmy Kimmel said he might have figured out a way to convince President Trump to abandon his course. He noticed that Trump hadn’t played golf since before the shutdown began. (He last played on Nov. 25, the longest spell without a golf game in his presidency.)
+Kimmel presumes that Trump knows it would look bad for him to be out on the course instead of negotiating with Democrats to reopen the government.Saturday
+4) 9 a.m. Breakfast bagels
+Skeptics may abound, but there are good bagels in the desert thanks to the 18-month-old New Wave Market, a sunny bakery and cafe in shop-filled Old Town Scottsdale. Boiled and baked in-house daily, the chewy bagels come solo ($2 each) or, better yet, as sandwiches. Try the toasty black-and-white sesame bagel with heirloom tomatoes, avocado and a subtle lick of chili ($7.50), along with a rich cup of local Peixoto coffee ($2.50) for a filling Saturday starter. Wait for your order while browsing the market for local jams, chocolate and gifts.
+5) 10 a.m. Frontier art
+Scottsdale’s motto is “The West’s Most Western Town.” That’s debatable, but in its defense is the Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West in Old Town (admission $15). The 43,000-square-foot museum offers an encyclopedia of Western art, from a rare display of Hopi ceramics to lifelike bronze statues of Native Americans by John Coleman. A permanent exhibition on the upper level makes the case for artists as vital chroniclers of Western exploration and expansion. Then head over to the nearby Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, or SMOCA (admission $10). The intimate museum stages thought-provoking shows — including a retrospective on the last 20 years of video art (through April 28) — and houses a permanent Skyspace, a circular outdoor room with a rooftop opening framing the sky, by James Turrell.The Trump administration has long rejected prescriptions like a carbon tax. But policy debates aside, many of the central economic questions of the decades ahead are, at their core, going to be climate questions. These are some of the big ones.
+How permanent will the costs be?
+When we think about the economic damage from a hotter planet, it’s important to remember that not all costs are equivalent, even when the dollar values are similar. There is a big difference between costs that are high but manageable versus those that might come with catastrophic events like food shortages and mass refugee crises.
+Consider three possible ways that climate change could exact an economic cost:
+A once-fertile agricultural area experiences hotter weather and drought, causing its crop yields to decrease.
+A road destroyed by flooding because of rising seas and more frequent hurricanes must be rebuilt.
+An electrical utility spends hundreds of millions of dollars to build a more efficient power grid because the old one could not withstand extreme weather.
+The farmland’s yield decline is a permanent loss of the economy’s productive capacity — society is that much poorer, for the indefinite future. It’s worse than what happens in a typical economic downturn. Usually when factories sit idle during a recession, there is a reasonable expectation that they will start cranking again once the economy returns to health.
+The road rebuilding might be expensive, but at least that money is going to pay people and businesses to do their work. The cost for society over all is that the resources that go to rebuilding the road are not available for something else that might be more valuable. That’s a setback, but it’s not a permanent reduction in economic potential like the less fertile farmland. And in a recession, it might even be a net positive, under the same logic that fiscal stimulus can be beneficial in a downturn.
+By contrast, new investment in the power grid could yield long-term benefits in energy efficiency and greater reliability.Do you ever think about growing old?
+How do you imagine your life to be when you are 65, 80 or older? Are there things that scare you about growing old? Are there things you look forward to?
+In “The Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s,” Mary Pipher, a clinical psychologist, writes:
+When I told my friends I was writing a book on older women like us, they immediately protested, “I am not old.” What they meant was that they didn’t act or feel like the cultural stereotypes of women their age. Old meant bossy, useless, unhappy and in the way. Our country’s ideas about old women are so toxic that almost no one, no matter her age, will admit she is old. In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging. Our bodies and our sexuality are devalued, we are denigrated by mother-in-law jokes, and we’re rendered invisible in the media. Yet, most of the women I know describe themselves as being in a vibrant and happy life stage. We are resilient and know how to thrive in the margins. Our happiness comes from self-knowledge, emotional intelligence and empathy for others. Most of us don’t miss the male gaze. It came with catcalls, harassment and unwanted attention. Instead, we feel free from the tyranny of worrying about our looks. For the first time since we were 10, we can feel relaxed about our appearance. We can wear yoga tights instead of nylons and bluejeans instead of business suits. Yet, in this developmental stage, we are confronted by great challenges. We are unlikely to escape great sorrow for long. We all suffer, but not all of us grow. Those of us who grow do so by developing our moral imaginations and expanding our carrying capacities for pain and bliss. In fact, this pendulum between joy and despair is what makes old age catalytic for spiritual and emotional growth. By our 70s, we’ve had decades to develop resilience. Many of us have learned that happiness is a skill and a choice. We don’t need to look at our horoscopes to know how our day will go. We know how to create a good day. We have learned to look every day for humor, love and beauty. We’ve acquired an aptitude for appreciating life. Gratitude is not a virtue but a survival skill, and our capacity for it grows with our suffering. That is why it is the least privileged, not the most, who excel in appreciating the smallest of offerings.
+The article continues:
+There is an amazing calculus in old age. As much is taken away, we find more to love and appreciate. We experience bliss on a regular basis. As one friend said: “When I was young I needed sexual ecstasy or a hike to the top of a mountain to experience bliss. Now I can feel it when I look at a caterpillar on my garden path.” Older women have learned the importance of reasonable expectations. We know that all our desires will not be fulfilled, that the world isn’t organized around pleasing us and that others, especially our children, are not waiting for our opinions and judgments. We know that the joys and sorrows of life are as mixed together as salt and water in the sea. We don’t expect perfection or even relief from suffering. A good book, a piece of homemade pie or a call from a friend can make us happy. As my aunt Grace, who lived in the Ozarks, put it, “I get what I want, but I know what to want.” We can be kinder to ourselves as well as more honest and authentic. Our people-pleasing selves soften their voices and our true selves speak more loudly and more often. We don’t need to pretend to ourselves and others that we don’t have needs. We can say no to anything we don’t want to do. We can listen to our hearts and act in our own best interest. We are less angst-filled and more content, less driven and more able to live in the moment with all its lovely possibilities.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Do you ever think about growing old? How do you imagine your life will be when you are 65? 80? Or older? Will you be wiser? Happier? Lonely? Something else altogether?
+— Were you surprised by Ms. Pipher’s statement that “most of the women I know describe themselves as being in a vibrant and happy life stage”? What aspects of old age, as described by the author, do you find most appealing? Why?
+— Do you have older adults in your life? The author describes how she has learned a lot about life and happiness as she has grown older; what life lessons have you learned from older adults — especially older women?
+— Ms. Pipher writes, “In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging.” Do you agree? Have you ever witnessed ageism? If yes, tell us what happened?
+— Do you think we spend too much attention in our society on the young and youth? Why do you think many older adults people feel undervalued and ignored?Paul writes: My wife, Samantha, and her grandmother Gigi have a disagreement about whether a creature’s tail is part of its butt. Gigi says that because poop can get stuck to a tail, it is part of the butt. Sam argues that a tail only starts at the butt. Are tails butts? (Specifically a dragon’s tail, which is what sparked this argument.)
+What a surprise twist at the end! Before we walked through this wardrobe into fantasy land, I was confident in my ruling: Tails are NOT butts, as they have specific and separate balance and display functions. And also let’s face it: Poop can get on anything. But as I am no expert in dragon anatomy, I turned to the actual George R.R. Martin, whose number I actually have, who reports: “Poop can also get stuck to a dragon’s leg, but that does not make it part of the butt. Dragon poop is hot, by the way. Fire hazard.”Two women in my cancer support group died last year; both were considerably younger than I am. Furious at the disease, I’m starting the new year with a yowl.
+Survivors of patients who have not survived, people dealing with a terminal condition, and their caregivers are generally advised to seek acceptance. However, great artists of anger have taught us how cathartic a rousing roar can be, especially when the object of rage is not a conjured scapegoat but a clear and present danger. One of the greatest of those artists in living memory — the singer, pianist, composer Nina Simone — lambasted the disasters of American racism. Does she have something to teach those of us dealing with cancer-related tragedies?
+In 1963, after the killings of Medgar Evers and of four little girls in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ms. Simone began producing a number of anthems for the civil rights and black power movements. One of her most powerful songs continues to be all too relevant.
+The lyrics of “Mississippi Goddam,” I thought, might serve me while cancer’s casualties stun me. By tweaking Nina Simone’s words, would I implicitly be comparing rampant racism to metastatic disease or vice versa? I could live with that analogy, as Susan Sontag — the public intellectual who rejected all metaphors of illness — once did.Prepping for a Test Produces a Clue
+The anaphylaxis scared him. But when it didn’t happen again, he relaxed a bit. Still, when his doctor’s office called two years later to schedule a colonoscopy, he was wary of ingesting anything new. He asked about the laxative he was to take in preparation for the test. He was reassured that although this medicine had a different name, it was basically the same one he took seven years before, during his first, uneventful colonoscopy. He took a couple of swallows, then waited. Within minutes, his mouth started to itch, and the strange pins-and-needles feeling that preceded the welts started. He took some Benadryl, and slowly the symptoms subsided. He reported the problem to his GI doctor. He still wanted the colonoscopy but asked for a different laxative to prepare for the exam.
+Image Credit... Illustration by Cristina Daura
+He looked at the package closely. It had a different name and was made by a different manufacturer. Relieved, he drank down the first big glass. But within minutes, he started to experience the same awful symptoms he had after the steroid shot. He took two Benadryl, but it wasn’t enough. He was drenched in sweat, and he had a ringing in his ears so loud he could barely hear. He could feel the sting of the welts rising all over his body. The skin on his face was ablaze and tight. He felt as if a trapdoor were opening under his feet, and then he disappeared into darkness.
+When he opened his eyes, he heard the E.M.T.s discussing whether they would need to cut a hole in his airway. The noisy rattle of his own breath sounded thunderous, and he was afraid. But his breathing improved, and he was once again hustled to the E.R. by ambulance.
+Detective Work
+After this third reaction and second trip to the E.R., he took the doctors’ advice and called the allergy clinic at Vanderbilt. The earliest appointment he could get was weeks away. Impatient and worried, the man started his own investigation. From the first doctor, he got the name of the steroid medicine injected into his spine. It was something called Depo-Medrol. He looked up the colonoscopy prep medication that had given him the same reaction, GaviLyte-C. And the one that had made his mouth itch, MoviPrep. When he compared the three products, the only ingredients they had in common were salt (sodium chloride) and something called polyethylene glycol.
+PEG, as it’s called for short, is an inert chemical used in both industry and medicine, as a lubricant and filler in products ranging from hand lotions to hair spray to gel caps to pills. And, as this patient discovered, PEG is also used in some steroid preparations and some laxatives.
+A Possible Culprit
+Armed with this information, he followed up with the doctors at Vanderbilt. Dr. Cosby Stone, a physician who specialized in allergic reactions to medications, introduced himself to the couple and invited the patient to tell his story. “I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job or anything,” the man started, “but I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to PEG, polyethylene glycol.”
+Stone was amazed. Few patients come in linking an allergy to such an obscure product. The patient described his experiences with the three drugs. There were only two ingredients all the drugs had in common — PEG and salt — and he ate a lot of salt, so it couldn’t be that.Chinese academics recently delivered a stark warning to the country’s leaders: China is facing its most precipitous decline in population in decades, setting the stage for potential demographic, economic and even political crises in the near future.
+For years China’s ruling Communist Party implemented a series of policies intended to slow the growth of the world’s most populous nation, including limiting the number of children couples could have to one. The long term effects of those policies mean the country will soon enter an era of “negative growth,” or a contraction in the size of the total population.
+Annual population growth Great Chinese Famine “Later, longer, fewer” policy is promoted. One-child policy becomes constitutional. One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 1.5% 1 0.5 0 Projection -0.5 1951 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 Source: U.S. Census International Data Base Annual population growth Great Chinese Famine “Later, longer, fewer” policy is promoted. One-child policy becomes constitutional. One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 1.5% 1 0.5 0 Projection -0.5 1951 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 2030 2040 2050 Source: U.S. Census International Data Base Annual population growth Great Chinese Famine “Later, longer, fewer” policy is promoted. One-child policy becomes constitutional. One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 1.5% 1 0.5 0 Projection -0.5 1951 ’60 ’70 ’80 ’90 2000 ’10 ’20 ’30 ’40 ’50 Source: U.S. Census International Data Base Annual population growth Great Chinese Famine “Later, longer, fewer” policy is promoted. One-child policy is introduced. One-child policy becomes constitutional. Two-child policy is introduced. 1.5% 1 0.5 0 Projection -0.5 1951 ’60 ’70 ’80 ’90 2000 ’10 ’20 ’30 ’40 ’50 Source: U.S. Census International Data Base Annual population growth One-child policy is introduced. Great Chinese Famine One-child policy becomes constitutional. Two-child policy is introduced. 1.5% 1 0.5 0 Projection -0.5 1960 ’80 2000 ’20 ’40 Source: U.S. Census International Data Base
+A report, issued this month by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is the latest recognition that while China’s notorious “one child” policy may have achieved its original aim of slowing population growth, it has also created new challenges for the government.
+A decline in the birth rate and an increase in life expectancy means there will soon be too few workers able to support an enormous and aging population, the academy warned. The academy estimated the contraction would begin in 2027, though others believe it would come sooner or has already begun.
+The government has recognized the worrisome demographic trend and in 2013 began easing enforcement of the “one child” policy in certain circumstances. It then raised the limit to two children for all families in 2016, in hopes of encouraging a baby boom. It did not work.
+6 One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 5 4 3 2 1 Fertility rate Births per woman Projected 1961 1980 2000 2020 2040 2050 Sources: World Bank; U.S. Census International Data Base 6 One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 5 4 3 2 1 Fertility rate Births per woman Projected 1961 1980 2000 2020 2040 2050 Sources: World Bank; U.S. Census International Data Base Fertility rate Births per woman One-child policy is introduced. Two-child policy is introduced. 6 5 4 3 2 1 1961 1980 2000 2020 2050 Sources: World Bank; U.S. Census International Data Base
+After a brief uptick that year, the birth rate fell again in 2017, with 17.2 million babies born compared to 17.9 in 2016. Although the number of families having a second child rose, the overall number of births continued to drop.
+In 2018, the total number of births fell to 15.2 million, a drop of nearly 12 percent nationally from 2017. Some cities and provinces have reported declines in local birth rates of as much as 35 percent.
+On Friday, the National Bureau of Statistics announced that in 2019, the total number of births fell for the third year, to 14.6 million.
+Number of newborn babies Projection under two-child policy* Projection under one-child policy 14.6 million babies were born Second child First child * Based on medium fertility variants Sources: China Bureau of Statistics; Study on Measurement of Population Changes with Implementation of a Comprehensive Two-child Policy, Peian Wang at China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission Number of newborn babies Projection under two-child policy* 14.6 million babies were born Projection under one-child policy Second child First child * Based on medium fertility variants Sources: China Bureau of Statistics; Study on Measurement of Population Changes with Implementation of a Comprehensive Two-child Policy, Peian Wang at China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission Number of newborn babies Projection under two-child policy* Projection under one-child policy Second child 14.6 million First child * Based on medium fertility variants Sources: China Bureau of Statistics; Study on Measurement of Population Changes with Implementation of a Comprehensive Two-child Policy, Peian Wang at China’s National Health and Family Planning Commission
+The fertility rate required to maintain population levels is 2.1 children per woman, a figure known as “replacement level fertility.”
+The fertility rates in many advanced economies have fallen as their societies have become wealthier and older.
+China’s fertility rate has officially fallen to 1.6 children per woman, but even that number is disputed.
+Yi Fuxian, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written that China’s government has obscured the actual fertility rate to disguise the disastrous ramifications of the “one child” policy. According to his calculations, the fertility rate averaged 1.18 between 2010 and 2018.
+Fertility rate by country (2017) Replacement level fertility Singapore S. Korea Japan U.S. India Philippines Niger China Source: The World Factbook, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Fertility rate by country (2017) Replacement level fertility Singapore Japan U.S. India Philippines Niger China Source: The World Factbook, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Fertility rate by country (2017) Replacement level fertility Singapore Japan India Philippines Niger China Source: The World Factbook, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Fertility rate by country (2017) Replacement level fertility Singapore Japan India Philippines China Source: The World Factbook, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Fertility rate by country (2017) Singapore Japan China U.S. Replacement level fertility India Philippines Niger Source: The World Factbook, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency
+As in other countries, there are myriad reasons for the declining birth rate, including rising prosperity and new opportunities for women. China’s economic expansion has created a society where many young couples now struggle with economic pressures -- including rising education and housing costs -- making it difficult to have even one child, let alone two.
+But the most profound cause of the drop, Professor Yi and others said, was the “one child” policy. Fewer children were born, and because of cultural preferences for male offspring, fewer of them were girls.
+Chinese women born during the years following the “one child” policy are now reaching or have already passed their peak fertility age. There are simply not enough of them to sustain the country’s population level, despite new efforts by the government to encourage families to have two children.
+Female population 2019 2050 projection Women population in their 20s to 40s will drop by almost 30%. More than 35 million women will be older than 84 years old by 2050. 1 year old 20 50 84 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019 Female population 2019 2050 projection Women population in their 20s to 40s will drop by almost 30%. More than 35 million women will be older than 84 years old by 2050. 1 year old 20 50 84 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019 Female population 2019 2050 projection More than 35 million women will be older than 84 years old by 2050. Women population in their 20s to 40s will drop by almost 30%. 1 year old 20 50 84 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019
+The looming demographic crisis could be the Achilles heel of China’s stunning economic transformation over the last 40 years.
+The declining population could create an even greater burden on China’s economy and its labor force. With fewer workers in the future, the government could struggle to pay for a population that is growing older and living longer.
+A decline in the working-age population could also slow consumer spending and thus have an impact on the economy in China and beyond.
+Many compare China’s demographic crisis to the one that stalled Japan’s economic boom in the 1990s.
+100% More than 64 years old 80 60 Working age 15-64 years old 40 20 Younger than 15 years old Projected 1960 ’80 2000 ’20 ’40 ’60 ’80 2100 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019 100% > 64 years old 80 60 Working age 40 15-64 years old 20 < 15 years old Projected 1960 ’80 2000 ’20 ’40 ’60 ’80 2100 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019 Projected 100% > 64 years old 80 60 Working age 15-64 years old 40 20 < 15 years old 1960 2000 ’50 2100 Source: United Nations Population Division, 2019
+Some experts believe the population has already started shrinking. In a recent paper, Dr. Yi and Su Jian, an economist at Peking University, argued that the population contracted in 2018, the first year it has done so since the famines of 1961 and 1962 induced by the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s industrialization campaign. The researchers said inaccurate census estimates had obscured the actual population and fertility rates.In this charming yet sobering lyric, Jericho Brown confronts his own image as a black man — what those on the outside imagine they see, and what he can’t help carrying inside, locked from view. Driven by the lilt of the blues (ghosted in the buried rhymes of books/looks, concern/earn, blue/new, cracked/black), the layers multiply and intersect with sad, irrefutable logic. A relentless dismantling of identity, a difficult jewel of a poem: painfully candid one minute, in your face the next — and as we approach Martin Luther King Jr. Day, still distressingly apropos. Selected by Rita Dove
+ImageWhat can genes tell us about who we are? Millions of people around the world have begun using consumer ancestry services like 23andMe in an attempt to peer into their personal origins and understand where they came from.
+Meanwhile, though, in a handful of elite genetics labs around the world, scientists have begun analyzing ancient DNA — which can now be extracted from skeletal remains that are thousands or even tens of thousands of years old — to ask, and try to answer, even more fundamental questions about the human past.
+In only the past few years, as a new report in The New York Times Magazine describes, this burgeoning science of “paleogenomics” has begun to offer surprising revisions to the story of humanity. But at the same time, this research has generated significant controversy, including among some of the archaeologists, anthropologists and other academics who have collaborated with geneticists on this work.
+Here are some key takeaways.
+The study of ancient DNA has upended many of our assumptions about prehistoric times.
+For decades, it was commonly believed that ancient communities tended to stay in one place — and thus didn’t mix very much with their neighbors. When a lab in Leipzig, Germany, sequenced the majority of a Neanderthal genome, in 2010, the scientists surprised just about everybody with the finding that humans and Neanderthals had actually interbred; we now know that most people, with the general exception of sub-Saharan Africans, can trace part of their genetic inheritance to our extinct cousins.While Paabo continued to work on the Neanderthal period, Reich devoted his energy to obtaining samples from the last 10,000 or so years — the historical domain of archaeologists. Ancient DNA’s “big bang,” as more than one geneticist described it to me, came with the 2015 publication, in Nature, of a Reich paper called “Massive Migration From the Steppe Was a Source for Indo-European Languages in Europe.” On the basis of genetic information culled from 69 ancient individuals dug up by collaborating archaeologists in Scandinavia, Western Europe and Russia, the paper argued that Europeans aren’t quite who they thought they were. About 5,000 years ago, a “relatively sudden” mass migration of nomadic herders from the east — the steppes of eastern Ukraine and southern Russia — swept in and almost entirely replaced existing communities of hunter-gatherers and early farmers in Central and Northern Europe. These newcomers were known to exploit many of the cutting-edge technologies of the time: the domestication of horses, the wheel and, perhaps most salient, axes and spearheads of copper. (Their corpses sometimes featured cutting-edge wounds.)
+The Reich team inferred that the major source of contemporary European ancestry — and probably Indo-European languages as well — was not, in fact, from Europe but from far to the east. And this discovery, confirmed by the near-simultaneous publication of almost identical results from a competing ancient-DNA lab in Denmark, had monumental implications for science’s understanding of the whole ancient world. Great migration events — like the movement of Siberian peoples into North America or the spread of voyagers into the Pacific — were not outliers but the norm. After Europe and India, there were similar mass migrations identified in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. No one ever expected that we could possibly amass so much new evidence about the human past. And no one was producing this work at the pace and throughput of David Reich and his genomics factory. Most scientists felt lucky if they published one or at the most two Nature papers in a lifetime. Reich was publishing three or four a year.
+There was an obvious pattern to the great migratory arrows freshly drawn across world geography, which were often coincident with the spread of technology or agricultural practices. Earlier paleogenomic results established thousands of years of heady mixture among long-forgotten ancient populations. With the relatively recent rise of everything we associate with “culture” — technologies like agriculture, metallurgy and eventually writing — much of this continuous “admixture” began to give way, it seemed, to discontinuous episodes better characterized as “replacement” or “turnover.” That is, about 5,000 to 9,000 years ago, human history was, at least in a few crucial places, less about various groups coming together and more about some groups blotting out their neighbors.
+This was not only relevant as an eccentricity of prehistoric demography, but broadly consequential for the ongoing study of culture itself — of where new ideas come from and how they proliferate. When we thought of populations as stationary and largely stable, we assumed that whatever evolutionary progress they made, from toolmaking to agriculture, reflected either a native innovation or the incorporation of some adjacent group’s avant-garde practice. Now it seemed as though culture was less about the invention and spread of new ideas and more about the mass movements of particular peoples — and the resulting integration, outcompetition or extermination of the communities they overran. Previously, it was possible to think about prehistory as a kind of grand bazaar. Now the operative metaphor (as multiple science journalists observed) was more like Risk, or even “Game of Thrones.”
+5. Looking for the Lapita
+The ancient-DNA revolution seemed unlikely to have anything to say about Oceania, where the heat and humidity made the preservation of DNA implausible. But in 2014, Stuart Bedford got that second surprise call, from a Dublin-based archaeologist named Ron Pinhasi, a frequent Reich collaborator and procurer of samples. Pinhasi had discovered that the inner ear’s petrous bone, one of the densest in the body, often preserved vast quantities of genetic material. Could he and Reich examine the skulls of Teouma? In Vanuatu, human remains are often associated with ancestral spirits and are thus taboo — understandably, Bedford emphasized to me, explaining that he wouldn’t be comfortable digging up and boring into “Granddad.” But in this case, the ni-Vanuatu expressed no reservations: Local oral traditions contained no sacred reference to the Teouma dead, and Chief Alben gave his blessing. One of Bedford’s colleagues opened the skulls in a workshop warren behind the national museum, extracted the nubbins of petrous bone and shipped them to Dublin, where they were sandblasted. There turned out to be DNA in three of the samples. It was the first to be found in the tropics and suggested the opening of wide new fronts in ancient-DNA research.
+The skulls of Teouma were particularly interesting to paleogenomicists not only because they produced the first ancient DNA in the Pacific but because their genetic evidence could be brought to bear on an outstanding debate in the region. The pivotal moment in Pacific archaeological history happened in 1952, when a team of researchers found a cache of dentate-stamped pots at a place called Lapita in New Caledonia, a French collectivity to the southwest of Vanuatu. More than 200 sites eventually turned up nearly duplicate versions of this innovation across an enormous span of the region. The pots were often found with particular varieties of preserved plants and nuts, as well as stone adzes. Whoever made those pots some 3,000 years ago had traveled across more than 2,000 miles of ocean — from near Papua New Guinea to Tonga and Samoa — in perhaps as little as 10 generations. As Patrick V. Kirch, the dean of American archaeology in the Pacific, once put it, “Without a doubt, the Lapita colonization of Remote Oceania ranks as one of the great sagas of world prehistory.”
+Where had this “Lapita” culture come from, and who were the people associated with it? Over the last 50 years, a collaboration among archaeologists, linguists, botanists, ecologists, geologists and more had produced some form of consensus. A population of early farmers departed from Taiwan about 5,000 years ago, with the help of the newly developed outrigger canoe. They moved down through the Philippines and the Spice Islands, along the northern coasts of New Guinea and eventually out to the Bismarck Archipelago, more or less the limit of Near Oceania; the “tracer dye” for their path was the language family they left behind, one known as Austronesian. Along the way, they encountered populations of “Papuans” — a generic shorthand for highly distinct groups of people who had been in the Papua New Guinea region for 40,000 years. The interactions between the incoming “Austronesians,” another shorthand for whoever was presumably spreading those languages, and the indigenous Papuans created the constellation of practices that would become known as Lapita. Finally, the people now associated with Lapita sailed into the blankness of the open ocean for the first time, crossing the Remote Oceania divide to Vanuatu and, from there, outward to the farthest reaches of the Pacific.The author of “Adèle” and “The Perfect Nanny” (one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018) likes the fact that her shelves are a mess: “It takes me a long time to find the book I need, and very often I find another one I had totally forgotten about.”
+What books are on your nightstand?
+A collection of short stories by Anton Chekhov and another one by Maupassant. “The Journal of Jules Renard,” which continues to move me and inspire me.
+What’s the last great book you read?
+“Ce qui reste de nos vies,” by Zeruya Shalev. I admire her so much. She is an extraordinary writer.
+What’s your go-to classic?
+My favorite classic is probably “Anna Karenina.” But I love “Madame Bovary” also.Deep in the blue-collar San Diego neighborhood of Kearny Mesa, wedged between auto dealerships and neon-lit fast-food chains, the chef John Hong is performing nightly timed shows of the Japanese ritual omakase.
+This isn’t a theater. It’s the restaurant Hidden Fish, a Lilliputian space of only 13 seats wrapped around an L-shaped bar. But you could be forgiven for thinking you’re watching a kind of choreographed dance. Diners, divided into 50- and 90-minute zones, gather and eat for a set time before new customers are rotated in. In the center, wielding his knife like a conductor’s baton, stands Mr. Hong, doling out precise, timed portions of exquisite nigiri sourced from across the globe.
+Omakase, which translates to “I’ll leave it up to you,” is a tradition of Japanese dining in which a chef creates an (often elaborate) tasting menu, and customers eat whatever they are served. Mr. Hong first encountered the concept of timed omakase during a visit to New York’s Sushi by Bou last year. He says he was inspired by how that restaurant, which serves meals in tight 30-minute increments, slashed price tags and made omakase accessible for almost anyone by putting diners on a clock.
+Mr. Hong, who grew up in Los Angeles and trained under sushi master Yukio Sakai, decided the concept was worth gambling on in San Diego. He opened Hidden Fish in September, offering 30-minute and 90-minute meals, and very quickly had to make an adjustment.Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device:
+Apple Podcasts | RadioPublic | Stitcher | Spotify | Google Play
+This week on “The Argument,” could the latest bout of Trumpian chaos finally spur Republicans to turn against the president? Michelle Goldberg sees the government shutdown as most Americans’ first material taste of the costs of an incompetent executive. David Leonhardt thinks the G.O.P.’s turn against Representative Steve King — the racist Iowa congressman rebuked this week by his fellow Republicans — shows just how quickly Trump’s fortunes could change. And Ross Douthat cautions that only a true catastrophe will provoke enough Republican skittishness to end Trump’s presidency.
+Then, does the political left have an anti-Semitism problem? With the third annual Women’s March set to take place this weekend, the columnists discuss the controversy over leadership that’s roiling the grass-roots movement.
+And finally, Ross flies in with a supercalifragilisticexpialidocious recommendation: “Mary Poppins” — the book, not the movie.At 3:38 p.m. on Monday, March 26, 2018, a German tourist called the authorities from the Juan Creek crossing on California’s scenic Highway 1. She had spotted something jarring: a brown sport-utility vehicle, upside down, in the Pacific Ocean.
+When Highway Patrol officers arrived, they found the S.U.V. Jennifer Hart was at the wheel, and her wife, Sarah Hart, was trapped between the roof and the seats in the back. Both were dead.
+Within about three weeks, the authorities would also discover the remains of four of the Harts’ six children — Markis, 19, Jeremiah, 14, Abigail, 14, and Ciera, 12 — and declare them all dead, too. They eventually discovered skeletal remains inside a woman’s shoe, and announced this month that they belonged to 16-year-old Hannah. Devonte, 15, is still considered to be missing, but is presumed dead.
+Jennifer, 38, had been drunk at the time of the crash, and Sarah, 38, and two of their children had in their systems a significant amount of an antihistamine that can cause drowsiness, law enforcement officials said.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”“You weren’t actually involved in any real fighting over there, were you?” a childhood friend asked me on my return from Iraq. I felt as offended as if he’d walked up and slapped me. I felt invalidated by the very question. “Of course I was!” I shot back. “What do you think I’ve been doing for the past 10 years?!” I explained that we were tasked with the pursuit and capture of specific individuals, making our mission unrelentingly violent. We used plastic explosives to enter Iraqi homes in the dark hours, flowing through them like a flash flood, heralding our entry into each room with flash-bang grenades that felt like a punch in the head if you followed them too closely. We fought in the homes of our enemies, among their families. I told him what it was like to be in a firefight inside a house. How the blast of automatic weapons fire in a small room is so loud as to strip away conscious thought, leaving muscle memory born of rote repetition to determine who lives or dies. It was seven months of blood and fire and broken glass. He seemed discomfited by the exchange, and after a silence changed the subject. If a friend I’d grown up with, who knew me well, could not, or did not want to, understand what I was saying, how could I hope to explain it to anyone else?
+On the way home from Iraq, we were herded into a tent in Kuwait and given forms that asked us to indicate the experiences we’d had by coloring in bubbles next to questions. Had I seen Americans wounded? Yes. Had I seen Americans killed? Yes. Had I seen Iraqis wounded? Yes. Had I seen Iraqis killed? Yes. Had I been shot at? Yes. Had I shot at anyone? Yes. We turned in the forms, then wandered the camp, constrained by huge sand berms, with little to do other than eat and ogle mannequins in skimpy lingerie being sold by Kuwaiti merchants. I was never asked about that form again. I still don’t know its purpose. It was the first of many occasions when someone asked me for my story but didn’t seem to know what to do with the answers.
+Having spent the majority of the deployment cleaning ourselves under a single cold-water pipe, we took advantage of a nearby shower trailer reserved solely for Marines permanently assigned in Kuwait. Two such Marines entered as we basked in the steam from the hot showers. One of them demanded we leave. No one said a word, but the look in our eyes must have said something dire because the second Marine grabbed the first by the arm and simply said, “Back away, man, they’ve been up north,” and left us to ourselves. Even before we had left the region, even among our fellow Marines, we had already become disconnected. I wondered how we would explain to people back home the things we had done in their name. But I hold to the notion that there is value in the effort — value for me and, I hope, for the people who I talk to.
+On our return to Camp Lejeune, N.C., we were freed to spend a night with our families. Unable to sleep, I woke my wife at 2 a.m. and made her watch “Napoleon Dynamite,” a movie that so divided my platoon I thought we would come to blows over its absurdities. I wanted her to see and understand something about the previous seven months of my life. I didn’t know how to tell her about a 2-year-old child toddling through window glass shattered by an explosive charge and leaving tiny, bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor of his home. Later that morning, more than a hundred Marines assembled in a final unit formation behind a large brick building immediately across the New River from a demolitions range. Before we were dismissed for the last time as a unified group, some Marines across the river detonated a substantial charge. We all visibly flinched, some of us dropping to the ground, all of us conditioned to dodge the shrapnel and fire that invariably accompanied loud blasts in Iraq. We looked around at one another and slowly stood back up, laughing at ourselves but sharing a level of understanding that has since been elusive.But Mr. de Blasio on Thursday implied that Mr. O’Brien’s behavior had been egregious. He said that two or three other sex harassment cases had been substantiated during his administration against employees of the mayor’s office, which has about 1,000 employees, but that those cases were “nothing like this incident.”
+After leaving City Hall, Mr. O’Brien went to work for Hilltop Public Solutions, a political consulting and lobbying firm founded by Nicholas R. Baldick, a close ally of the mayor who initially recommended Mr. O’Brien to City Hall.
+Mr. O’Brien’s ouster in February 2018 came at a delicate moment for City Hall, as the national #MeToo movement focused attention on sexual harassment, and Mr. de Blasio at the time struggled to answer questions about how his administration handled harassment complaints.
+Administration officials, after months of delays, eventually released data on the sexual harassment complaints filed against city employees: From mid-2013 through 2017, there were 1,312 such complaints lodged at all city agencies, with 221 substantiated, the city said at the time. Those substantiated claims were said to involve as many as five mayor’s office employees. But the administration gave no details and did not identify the workers.
+The report on Mr. O’Brien states that because the two complainants requested anonymity, their names and identifying information were omitted from the document.
+The first assistant corporation counsel, Georgia Pestana, who was one of the authors of the investigative report, said the circumstances of Mr. O’Brien’s departure were kept private in order to protect his accusers.
+“The privacy interest of these women was paramount,” Ms. Pestana said, sitting beside the mayor on Thursday in City Hall’s Blue Room. “ If you don’t create a space where people can believe us when we say we will hold your information and your identities confidential, women are not going to come forward.”Shortly after graduating from Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., Melissa Miller returned home to Baltimore and prepared to head to New York to pursue an acting and voice-over career.
+She briefly considered living in Hoboken, N.J., where a friend was moving, until she realized it would make for a three-leg commute to Manhattan — to, on and from the PATH train.
+“I wanted to be in New York City so I could take the subway and be anywhere,” said Ms. Miller, 22. Specifically, she wanted easy access to Times Square, Penn Station and the theater district, where she takes classes and goes to auditions.
+For her new home, her requirements included a doorman, a laundry room and not too many stairs.
+“I wanted to live alone,” she said. “I had too many bad roommate experiences with people I thought I knew.”Most come from the Lane Collection, a munificent gift of more than 450 Adams photographs to the M.F.A. There are surprises too, like the breadth of Adams’s interests (and the extent of his need to earn a living with commissions and magazine work), from Native Americans to ghost towns, from a World War II Japanese internment camp to cemeteries, churches, a cigar store Indian, a highway interchange.
+Like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Adams experienced a heightened spirituality in the wilderness that spoke to a longing for the beauties, peace and spectacle of untrammeled nature — a yearning that lingers strongly in our time, suggesting it might be innate.
+He was 14 when he first visited Yosemite. He quickly took his Kodak into that stupendous valley and was so moved by the experience that it changed his life. Adams meant his images to convey the emotions he experienced while taking pictures and then heightening their impact in the darkroom. (He was a superb printer.) How lucky it is for the arts that human vision, though it does not register the world in black and white, can respond to colorless representation on a level within reach of its response to color.
+Landscape tourism grew exponentially from the post Civil War years to today, but untouched wilderness has dwindled as the population increased and migrated to cities and suburbs, while mining, drilling and industrialization encroached on open spaces. Adams, though well aware of how commercialized the national parks had become, could scarcely have anticipated that on summer weekends the grounds bordering the Grand Canyon would look like Woodstock.
+He preferred the parks pristine, and Eadweard J. Muybridge’s 19th-century photograph of Yosemite Valley with a logging road cutting across it is paired at the M.F.A. with Adams’s image of the same place, the road carefully retouched out.Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times.
+When Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, arrived in the press room of the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill last month to have her photo taken for The New York Times, she was wearing a gray suit like the one John F. Kennedy was depicted wearing in his official White House portrait.
+Unlike Kennedy’s portrait, which was painted posthumously and was noted for its melancholy tone, Ms. Pelosi is looking directly at the camera in her photos. Her arms are uncrossed, and she appears ready to return to her post as speaker of the House. The photographers wanted to reflect the significance of Ms. Pelosi as a key newsmaker in 2019.
+“She is the only woman that has achieved the level of elected office that she has,” said Elizabeth D. Herman, one of the two photographers. “She is formative in defining what being a woman in power is.”David Ellison, a producer and billionaire financier of big-budget movies like “Terminator Genisys,” was on the verge of leaving Paramount for another studio home base; Mr. Gianopulos persuaded him to sign on with Paramount for four more years. That relationship has once again grown tense, however, with Paramount unhappy about Mr. Ellison’s decision to hire John Lasseter, who was forced to resign from Disney last year amid #MeToo allegations.
+Mr. Gianopulos in November made a deal with Netflix to supply the streaming service with a handful of original movies a year, opening up a new revenue stream.
+And Paramount finally has the full support of Viacom, where a new chief executive, Robert M. Bakish, has put into motion an aggressive turnaround plan. In an interview on the 52nd floor of Viacom’s Times Square headquarters, Mr. Bakish noted that he had just returned from Hollywood, where he met with agents, telling them that, unlike his predecessor, he has no plans to offload Paramount. If anything, Viacom was doubling down on the studio: We are open for business, so bring us your scripts.
+“It was clear we had a major problem,” Mr. Bakish said. “But it’s Paramount — it’s the Mountain.”
+Movie insiders want to believe that Paramount will respond to the heart paddles. But some people are privately sitting vigil.
+When we reached Mr. Diller on a business trip in Europe to talk about his failed bid for Paramount and what has become of the studio and the movie business, his first reaction was to ask why anyone would bother writing about the studio.
+“Why Paramount?” he asked. “It’s irrelevant.”An insidious scourge that has nothing to do with head trauma is ravaging retired N.F.L. players.
+In the past few decades, the N.F.L.’s emphasis on the passing game and quarterback protection has led teams to stock their offensive and defensive lines with ever-larger men, many of them weighing well over 300 pounds. But their great girth, which coaches encouraged and which helped turn some players into multimillion-dollar commodities, leaves many of them prone to obesity problems.
+In retirement, these huge men are often unable to lose the weight they needed to do their jobs. Without the structure of a team and the guidance of coaches for the first time in decades, many of them lose the motivation to stay in shape, or cannot even try, as damage to their feet, knees, backs and shoulders limits their ability to exercise.
+This is a big reason that former linemen, compared with other football players and the general population, have higher rates of hypertension, obesity and sleep apnea, which can lead to chronic fatigue, poor diet and even death. Blocking for a $25-million-a-year quarterback, it turns out, can put linemen in the high-risk category for many of the ailments health experts readily encourage people to avoid.
+“Linemen are bigger, and in today’s world, rightly or wrongly, they are told to bulk up,” said Henry Buchwald, a specialist in bariatric surgery at the University of Minnesota who works with the Living Heart Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides free medical tests to former N.F.L. players. “Their eating habits are hard to shed when they stop playing, and when they get obese, they get exposed to diabetes, hypertension and cardiac problems.”Wendy MacNaughton is a graphic journalist based in San Francisco. You can find her via website and Instagram.I first met my patient, a man in his late 80s, in 2012, when he had been living with myelodysplastic syndromes, a form of bone marrow cancer, for five years — longer than the average survival for those diagnosed with the condition. He was a former high school math teacher who was unerringly precise about his laboratory values. He also had a spark to him that no cancer could extinguish.
+Over the years, we had tried a variety of therapies to treat him, some of which worked for a while, some not at all. After our most recent failed attempt to solve the complicated equation of his disease, he had said enough was enough, and asked to be placed on hospice at the nursing facility where he now resided. Fortunately for him, it was one of the few hospice programs that allowed him to continue seeing me to receive the regular blood transfusions that corrected the anemia brought on by his cancer, which eased his fatigue and made him feel more like himself.
+When I entered the examination room, he was wearing an outfit typical of what he sported to many of our visits: a red and yellow tattersall shirt; chinos with a broken button, held closed with a black belt; red Ohio State socks; and tan moccasins. His face was framed by square, dark brown glasses that gave him an air of being more serious than he frequently was. His son sat by his side.
+“I’m honored to be in the presence of such musical greatness!” I joked with my patient. “I should have brought a Sharpie marker with me to get your autograph.”Anglesey Island, where the plant, called Wylfa Newydd, was to be built, will most likely feel the harshest impact. Llinos Medi, leader of the Anglesey Council, the local government authority on the island, said in a statement that she was concerned about the suspension’s “immediate impact on local men and women whose employment is at risk as a consequence of this suspension.”
+For Hitachi, though, the announcement could mark the end of a long and expensive saga. The company acquired the Horizon sites from two German utilities in 2012 for £697 million, or about $900 million, and wound up spending around £2 billion in total on design approvals, staff and other matters. It has been hiring apprentices, who have been training at a technical college on the island and going to Spain and Japan for work experience. At times in recent months more than 100 archaeologists were on the site, excavating and recording ancient structures that the construction would have destroyed.
+Hitachi hoped Britain would prove to be an international showcase for its reactor designs. Ultimately, the company lost patience with the high level of spending required to land such a project there.
+Hitachi had sought to arrive at a financial arrangement that would attract long-term investors like pension funds to the project and reduce its own exposure. But the offers of support from both the British and the Japanese sides were not enough.
+In an interview on Thursday, Duncan Hawthorne, Horizon’s chief executive, said the Wales site was very attractive and had a supportive community, but that alone, he added, is not enough to attract outside investment.
+Investors, Mr. Hawthorne said, were put off by the eight- to 10-year wait for a return, as well as the risks of cost overruns and other issues. With the project gaining momentum and spending rising, “it became too much for Hitachi to keep going,” he said.
+Mr. Hawthorne said Hitachi would prefer to return to Britain as a supplier rather than a developer taking on large upfront risks.Lawmakers in Parliament rejected an effort to oust Mrs. May on Wednesday, a day after they soundly defeated her Brexit plan.
+News analysis: “This is the bizarro world that is British politics,” our correspondent in London writes. “A Groundhog Day in which Mrs. May awakes every day to discover herself in a dire political crisis, and every day survives .”
+Go deeper: The opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is a lifelong critic of the European Union, but his Labour Party is mostly pro-Europe. How he exerts influence will shape the Brexit battle.
+What’s next: Mrs. May is required to return to Parliament by Monday with a Plan B. We outline the possible outcomes before the March 29 deadline.
+Microsoft pledges $500 million for affordable housing
+The Seattle area, home to both Microsoft and Amazon, is a potent symbol of the housing crisis and income inequality that has followed the explosive growth of tech hubs. Now Microsoft is trying to help address the problem, lending at subsidized rates to preserve and build middle- and low-income housing.
+Executives said they hoped the plan would spur other companies to act, adding that the industry had a responsibility to help people left behind in areas transformed by the tech boom.This New Yorker may be your next president. Or this one. Or this one. Or even this one.
+Eighty-two days after Senator Kirsten Gillibrand said during her re-election campaign that “I will serve my six-year term,” she told Stephen Colbert she was going to run for president.
+Ms. Gillibrand, 52, said she was running “because as a young mom, I’m going to fight for other people’s kids as hard as I would fight for my own.”
+This makes her the first New Yorker — not counting Donald Trump — to enter the race. But she may not be the last.
+Michael R. Bloomberg is considering a bid. Bill de Blasio refuses to rule it out. (Governor Cuomo ruled out a run, but likes giving the impression the door is not tightly shut.)Tours like these are important for the future of museums, Mr. Vo said in an interview later. “It makes them relevant,” he said, “and people want to see themselves reflected in collections.”
+Alistair Brown, policy officer at the Museums Association, an organization for museum, gallery and heritage professionals, agreed. “More and more museums are looking at radical ways of reappraising their collections,” he said in a telephone interview. “They’re either inviting critical and diverse voices into the museum, or at least welcoming their presence if uninvited.”
+The trend benefits from many years of research by museums into the background of the items in their collections, as well as decades of campaigning by minority groups to be heard, Mr. Brown added.
+One of the most prominent series showing museum collections through a new lens is led by Alice Procter, a 23-year-old art historian studying for a master’s degree at University College London. Her “Uncomfortable Art” tours look at how imperialism and colonialism underpin the collections of some of London’s major cultural institutions, including the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery.
+Ms. Procter discusses, for example, how items were acquired in colonial times and paintings were used to shape national identity in Britain, which portrayed itself as a superior and benevolent society. She hands out badges featuring the slogan “Display It Like You Stole It,” and sells “Dear Art Gallery...” postcards to let cultural institutions know when labels are inadvertently racist, sexist or “totally impenetrable,” among other options.
+Not everyone is pleased. The British Museum began a monthly series last year to discuss the acquisition of items in its collection, partly in response to Ms. Procter. (The next is scheduled for Feb. 8.) In April, the British tabloid The Daily Mail wrote that Ms. Procter was “using sell-out tours to label Lord Nelson a ‘white supremacist’ and brand Queen Victoria a ‘thief.’ ” She immediately began receiving threats.After landing a prestigious judicial clerkship, followed by a job at a major Washington law firm — both rarities for a woman in the 1950s — she took 10 years out to raise five children to school age. She then practiced public interest law and worked on policy initiatives on behalf of children and indigent criminal defendants. She served as an assistant attorney general in President Jimmy Carter’s Justice Department.
+In other words, by the time she became a federal judge at the age of 50, she was a fully integrated adult with a breadth and depth of experience, not an ambitious young careerist strategizing the next move up the ladder. In her last decade on the appeals court, she was deeply involved in rule-of-law projects in Eastern Europe under the auspices of the American Bar Association. And when she left the court in 1999 at the atypically young age of 70, it was to accept a two-year appointment as the American judge on the 14-member international court at The Hague that was established to try those accused of war crimes in the former Yugoslavia.
+On Saturday, the day Patricia Wald died, the clinical psychologist Mary Pipher published an essay in The Times titled “The Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s.” Pat Wald could have written it. In fact, she practically did. In 2008, under the title “Why This Older Woman Is for Obama,” she published a remarkable two-page statement on behalf of Barack Obama’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Senator Obama’s opponent at the time was, of course, Senator Hillary Clinton. In her statement, Judge Wald explained why she supported Mr. Obama and why, “with a troop of wonderfully gritty older women, I spent eight days on the icy streets of Cedar Rapids, Iowa,” campaigning for him.
+It’s a tough-minded statement that, if she read it, must have made Senator Clinton wince. While identifying herself as “a veteran of the woman’s movement since its infancy” and as “an ardent supporter of women’s rights to choose, to work, to live as we see fit, and yes, one day to elect a woman president,” Judge Wald explained why, to her mind, Hillary Clinton wasn’t that woman:
+“Her acceptance of the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war in Iraq without reading the National Intelligence Estimate and her rejection of a modest proposal approved by the U.S. Sentencing Commission retroactively to reduce the harsh penalties for crack cocaine hardly evidenced uniquely seasoned leadership qualities or demonstrated a bold force for change.”
+Invoking the memory of Robert Kennedy, Judge Wald wrote, “I recall a time in the not-too-distant past when many of my generation passionately believed in an alliance of government and the people for positive social change.” She went on: “Too often in the 40 years since, our political leaders have divided and polarized us. Our sights have been blurred and misdirected, our youth dispirited and politically apathetic.”And why do the tedious work of preserving the foundations of free government when it is so much more interesting to reinvent it?
+Complacency breeds heedlessness. Liberals were heedless when they wrote off moral character as an essential trait of a good presidency. Conservatives (like me) were heedless when we became more concerned about the state of democracy in Iraq than in Iowa. Liberals were heedless when they embraced identity politics without ever thinking it could also be used against them. Conservatives (again, like me) were heedless when we downplayed the significance of the populism and scaremongering infecting the movement via talk radio and Fox News.
+The heedlessness occurred on the other side of the Atlantic, too. European integration is a blessing; integration without genuine democratic accountability and consent isn’t. Similarly, immigration is a blessing; immigration without assimilation is a curse. Two generations of European leaders allowed the former without requiring the latter, and then airily dismissed public discontent as politically insignificant and morally illegitimate. Now they are living with the consequences.
+As for Brexit, the 2016 decision by 52 percent of the British electorate to leave the European Union over the vehement objections of the 48 percent (details to be hashed out later, if ever), must surely count as one of the worst considered in the island’s storied history. But not as foolish as the decision by former Prime Minister David Cameron to put a foundational question up for a popular vote — just as he had put another foundational question, the independence of Scotland, to a vote two years earlier — without seriously considering the consequences of things going the wrong way.
+The problem here wasn’t a failure by Cameron and the “Remain” camp to make a stronger case for staying in the European Union, or to read the polls better. It was a philosophical failure — a failure to understand that the purpose of representative government is to save democracy from itself. I now find myself vaguely rooting for a hard Brexit, on the theory that lasting lessons are only learned the hard way.Along parallel lines, a far lower percentage of Republicans than Democrats believe that changing gender roles have made it easier for marriages to be successful (26 percent of Republicans compared with 47 percent of Democrats). Similarly, 36 percent of Republicans compared with 58 percent of Democrats believe changing gender roles have made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives. Fewer Republicans than Democrats (30 to 48 percent) believe changing gender roles have made it easier for men to lead satisfying lives.
+The reaction to the A.P.A. guidelines — largely but not exclusively from the political center and right and much of it critical — was swift. Even Gillette has joined the debate with its new television commercial, “We Believe: The Best Man Can Be,” a critique of toxic masculinity:
+“It’s been going on far too long,” the narrator declares. “We can’t laugh it off.”
+In a Jan. 7 National Review article, “Grown Men Are the Solution, Not the Problem,” David French, one of the most outspoken critics of the A.P.A. guidelines, wrote “We are in the middle of an intense culture war focused around men.”
+French went on to ask:
+As we survey a culture that is rapidly attempting to enforce norms hostile to traditional masculinity, are men flourishing? And if men are struggling more the farther we move from those traditional norms, is the answer to continue denying and suppressing a boy’s essential nature?
+His answer is no:
+Male children are falling behind in school not because schools indulge their risk-taking and adventurousness but often because they relentlessly suppress boys and sometimes punish boys’ essential nature, from the opening bell to the close of the day.
+He concludes:
+We do our sons no favors when we tell them that they don’t have to answer that voice inside them that tells them to be strong, to be brave, and to lead. We do them no favors when we let them abandon the quest to become a grown man when that quest gets hard. Yes, we do them no favors when we’re not sensitive to those boys who don’t conform to traditional masculinity, but when it comes to the crisis besetting our young men, traditional masculinity isn’t the problem; it can be part of the cure.
+From a more academic vantage point, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.
+“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding that
+The word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.
+The other dogma, Pinker argued,
+is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.
+In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize that
+a huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.
+Pinker suggested rather that
+One could argue that what today’s men need is more encouragement to enhance one side of the masculine virtues — the dignity, responsibility, self-control, and self-reliance — while inhibiting others, such as machismo, violence, and drive for dominance.
+There is a major difference between the two parties regarding the basic nature versus nurture issue that plays such a prominent role in the debate about men. As my Times colleague Claire Cain Miller reported in December, data from Pew shows a partisan divide over whether
+gender differences were the result of biology (and thus unlikely to change) or societal norms. More than half of Republicans said biology determined differences in how men and women parented, expressed feelings or spent their free time. About two-thirds of Democrats described society as the primary driver of these differences.
+I asked some of those involved in preparing the A.P.A. guidelines for their response to criticisms of the report, including Pinker’s.
+Ryan A. McKelley, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, who participated in some of the research but not in issuing the guidelines, wrote that there was no intent to reject “biological determinants.” Instead, “it was just beyond the scope of those particular guidelines.”
+McKelley noted that he keeps “seeing ‘testosterone is missing’ show up in critiques of the guidelines, but psychologists don’t measure or manipulate testosterone levels in patients.”
+Similarly, he continued,
+If I treat someone for major depressive disorder, it doesn’t matter to me as a clinician what percentage of their depression might have genetic determinants. I can’t change their genes.
+McKelley rejected
+the implication that the goal is to eliminate male characteristics. The real implication is that rigid adherence to extreme expression of a few select masculine norms is related to poorer health outcomes.
+In fact, he argued, the guidelines specifically encourage a kind of competitiveness, citing a section that reads,
+Active play between fathers and children has a functional element correlated with several positive child outcomes, such as competitiveness without aggression, cooperation that buffers anxiety, healthy experimentation, social competence, peer acceptance and popularity, and a sense of autonomy.
+McKelley said he
+would love to have someone argue that “competitiveness without aggression” is somehow undesirable. That sounds exactly like redirecting traits toward more productive activity and behavior.
+Edward M. Adams, past president of Division 51 on Men and Masculinities of the American Psychological Association, emailed that the guidelines
+espouse positive manhood to include living in cooperation, respect, appreciation, courage, and fearlessness about being fully human. We do not see negativity, shame, unwarranted violence and aggression, gender domination, or hate and prejudice as ways to promote a better quality of life for any one of us.
+Adams noted that the guidelines are
+a living document and will undoubtedly evolve over time. What is important is that we are grappling with the impact of destructive expectations that may thwart positive development and diminish the physical and emotional health of men and boys.
+There is a strikingly different approach to the debate over masculinity in a different branch of academic inquiry. As David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in response to my query:
+The greatest adverse shock to the psychosocial welfare of U.S. men has not stemmed from dysfunctional notions of masculinity (not that these are above reproach) nor from #MeToo (which was long overdue) but from deep secular labor market forces — both technological and trade-induced — that have over nearly four decades reduced the demand for skilled blue collar work.
+The effects of these economic changes, Autor wrote, have been devastating:
+These forces have dramatically eroded the earnings power, employment stability, social stature, and marriage market value of non-college men. The ensuing dysfunction touches not just in earnings and employment but also male idleness, dysfunctional and destructive behavior (e.g., drug and alcohol abuse), and the erosion of two-parent families, which, research suggests, facilitate children in becoming successful adults.
+In a December 2018 paper, “When Work Disappears: Manufacturing Decline and the Falling Marriage Market Value of Men,” Autor, David Dorn, an economist at the University of Zurich, and Gordon Hanson, an economist at the University of California-San Diego, argue that adverse trade shocks, like a surge of imports from China, “differentially reduce employment and earnings of young adult males,” “reduce marriage and fertility,” “heighten male idleness and premature mortality, and raise the share of mothers who are unwed and the share of children living in below-poverty, single-headed households.”A Republican Congressman From Texas Who Opposes the Wall Representative Will Hurd’s district runs along the southwestern border. His vision for border security is starkly different from the president’s.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Clare Toeniskoetter and edited by Larissa AndersonThe debt markets these days are being described in nearly apocalyptic terms. We’re in a meltdown! It’s a long freeze! It’s sending us an ominous warning!
+The hand-wringing started with the news that for the first time in years, not a single American company successfully issued a high-yield bond during December. In other words, companies with poor credit that wanted to borrow money by issuing public bonds couldn’t find anyone willing to take the risk on them. (A pipeline company broke the dry spell on Jan. 10.)
+At the same time, an index that tracks the price of leveraged loans — made by big banks to companies with a fair amount of debt already — noted that the average price of such risky loans had fallen more than 3 percent in one month to around 94 cents on the dollar, the largest one-month decline since August 2011. By contrast, last summer investors in leveraged loans couldn’t gobble them up fast enough and were willing to pay much higher prices and accept lower yields, which reflect the interest paid by the borrowing companies. “The market just continues to weaken,” a high-yield bond trader told The Financial Times.
+Actually, quite the opposite is true. The debt markets are undergoing a healthy and much-needed correction that is slowly eliminating a decade of reckless euphoria. Soon after the 2008 financial crisis began, the Federal Reserve instituted a policy of forcing down interest rates to historically low levels. The “zero interest rate policy,” which continued until December 2015, revived the moribund American economy. But when debt is really cheap, borrowers load up on it, to a fault. Even blue-chip companies such at AT&T and G.E. have gorged on the cheap money to acquire other companies, pay dividends or buy back stock. (AT&T has said it is generating enough cash to “manage its obligations.” G.E. says it has plenty of assets and available credit.)It is a measure of English Brexiteers’ political acumen that they were initially oblivious to the volatile Irish question and contemptuous of the Scottish one. Ireland was cynically partitioned to ensure that Protestant settlers outnumber native Catholics in one part of the country. The division provoked decades of violence and consumed thousands of lives. It was partly healed in 1998, when a peace agreement removed the need for security checks along the British-imposed partition line.
+The re-imposition of a customs and immigration regime along Britain’s only land border with the European Union was always likely to be resisted with violence. But Brexiteers, awakening late to this ominous possibility, have tried to deny it. A leaked recording revealed Mr. Johnson scorning concerns about the border as “pure millennium bug stuff.”
+Politicians and journalists in Ireland are understandably aghast over the aggressive ignorance of English Brexiteers. Businesspeople everywhere are outraged by their cavalier disregard for the economic consequences of new borders. But none of this would surprise anyone who knows of the unconscionable breeziness with which the British ruling class first drew lines through Asia and Africa and then doomed the people living across them to endless suffering.
+The malign incompetence of the Brexiteers was precisely prefigured during Britain’s exit from India in 1947, most strikingly in the lack of orderly preparation for it. The British government had announced that India would have independence by June 1948. In the first week of June 1947, however, Mountbatten suddenly proclaimed that the transfer of power would happen on Aug. 15, 1947 — a “ludicrously early date,” as he himself blurted out. In July, a British lawyer named Cyril Radcliffe was entrusted with the task of drawing new boundaries of a country he had never previously visited.
+Given only around five weeks to invent the political geography of an India flanked by an eastern and a western wing called Pakistan, Radcliffe failed to visit any villages, communities, rivers or forests along the border he planned to demarcate. Dividing agricultural hinterlands from port cities, and abruptly reducing Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs on either side of the new border to a religious minority, Radcliffe delivered a plan for partition that effectively sentenced millions to death or desolation while bringing him the highest-ranked knighthood.
+Up to one million people died, countless women were abducted and raped, and the world’s largest refugee population was created during the population transfers across Radcliffe’s border — an extensive carnage that exceeds all apocalyptic scenarios of Brexit.
+In retrospect, Mountbatten had even less reason than Mrs. May to speed up the exit clock — and create insoluble and eternal problems. Just a few months after the botched partition, for instance, India and Pakistan were fighting a war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. None of the concerned parties were pushing for a hasty British exit. As the historian Alex von Tunzelmann points out, “the rush was Mountbatten’s, and his alone.”SAN FRANCISCO — With the growing recognition that prosecutors hold the keys to a fairer criminal justice system, the term “progressive prosecutor” has almost become trendy. This is how Senator Kamala Harris of California, a likely presidential candidate and a former prosecutor, describes herself.
+But she’s not.
+Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent. Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.
+Consider her record as San Francisco’s district attorney from 2004 to 2011. Ms. Harris was criticized in 2010 for withholding information about a police laboratory technician who had been accused of “intentionally sabotaging” her work and stealing drugs from the lab. After a memo surfaced showing that Ms. Harris’s deputies knew about the technician’s wrongdoing and recent conviction, but failed to alert defense lawyers, a judge condemned Ms. Harris’s indifference to the systemic violation of the defendants’ constitutional rights.
+Ms. Harris contested the ruling by arguing that the judge, whose husband was a defense attorney and had spoken publicly about the importance of disclosing evidence, had a conflict of interest. Ms. Harris lost. More than 600 cases handled by the corrupt technician were dismissed.John C. Bogle, who died on Wednesday, is widely seen as having changed how ordinary people invest their money. His firm, the Vanguard Group of Investment Companies, which grew to have $4.9 trillion under management, was built on a belief that, over the long term, most investment managers cannot outperform the broad stock market averages.
+“Jack Bogle made an impact on not only the entire investment industry, but more importantly, on the lives of countless individuals saving for their futures or their children’s futures,” Tim Buckley, Vanguard’s chief executive, said in a statement.
+Here are some of Mr. Bogle’s investment tips:
+1. Stay the course
+“Wise investors won’t try to outsmart the market,” he says. “They’ll buy index funds for the long term, and they’ll diversify.”
+Long-term investors must hold stocks even though the market is risky, because they are still likely to produce better returns than the alternatives, Mr. Bogle said in 2012.
+Investors should weather any storms, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2016.
+“If we’re going to have lower returns, well, the worst thing you can do is reach for more yield. You just have to save more.”Good Thursday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Larry Fink urges business leaders to lead
+Larry Fink, who oversees nearly $6 trillion of investments at BlackRock, wrote a letter to chief executives last year declaring that businesses must make “a positive contribution to society.”
+It was seen as a turning point in the debate over the state of global capitalism, Andrew writes in his column. Some business leaders bristled, but others began talking about their companies’ “purpose” in mission statements and official documents.
+Yesterday, Mr. Fink sent chief executives another letter, arguing that businesses cannot merely have a purpose; they must be leaders in a divided world:
+“Stakeholders are pushing companies to wade into sensitive social and political issues — especially as they see governments failing to do so effectively.”
+It’s a continued explanation of the stance that last year prompted Barron’s to call Mr. Fink “the new conscience of Wall Street.” Not everyone agrees with him, but he has helped further a conversation that is undoubtedly positive, Andrew writes.
+“I don’t see a recession coming”: Mr. Fink told the FT that skittishness among investors was natural, given the developments that buffeted markets toward the end of last year. But he added that he saw few signs of a global downturn.By the time I had finished watching the aggressively whimsical British comedy “Adult Life Skills,” my eyes had rolled so far back in my head I could barely focus. It wasn’t simply the excruciatingly twee musical choices, or the well-worn trajectory of a plot as contrived as its woolly-hatted heroine. It was the realization that stories about adults trapped in the aspic of adolescence are not disappearing from the movies any time soon.
+Here, mounting aggravations are all the more galling in light of the talent on screen. Jodie Whittaker (currently having a blast as the latest incarnation of Doctor Who) is Anna, almost 30 and all the way depressed. Holed up in a shed at the bottom of her Mum’s garden, she dries her underwear in the microwave and makes goofy videos using her thumbs as actors. Like a toddler, she is comfortable relieving herself outdoors.Gentle, wistful and often quite beautiful, Bruce Thierry Cheung’s “Don’t Come Back From the Moon” is a dreamlike meditation on abandoned children and dying locations.
+Set amid the arid emptiness of California’s Salton Sea, its almost alien landscape in perfect harmony with the movie’s title, the filament of story unfolds through the teenage eyes and low-key narration of Mickey (Jeffrey Wahlberg). His small community, he tells us, was once a holiday destination, but the lake is shrinking and the last factory has closed. Now men are leaving, slinking off into the night without explanation — except for one, whose exit note says he has gone to the moon.The single achievement of “I Hate Kids,” a new comedy directed by John Asher, is that it is simultaneously tepid and offensive.
+Tom Everett Scott (once upon a time an engaging screen presence in Tom Hanks’s “That Thing You Do”; here, not so much) plays Nick, a best-selling author whose latest book is titled “I Hate Kids.” It’s also the jovial theme of a dinner party celebrating his engagement to Sydney (Rachel Boston), who’s similarly committed to a childless existence.
+Mason (Julian Feder), a 13-year-old with eyeglasses and hair that suggest a middle-school nerd from an episode of “The Brady Bunch,” spoils the event by announcing that he’s Nick’s son. Abetted by an eccentric and possibly fraudulent radio psychic played by Tituss Burgess, Mason wrangles Nick into a mini road-trip around Los Angeles — here a magical place where good nonfiction book sales translate into a studio-exec lifestyle — to find the kid’s birth mother.“Who Will Write Our History” recounts a bold story of Nazi resistance. And inside that one story are countless others, each immensely important.
+After German forces imprisoned hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, a band of writers and scholars code-named Oyneg Shabes (“The Joys of Shabbat”) began a mission to smuggle reports of atrocities to the outside world, and to document their lives and culture in the hope that they would be remembered.
+Led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum, the men and women recorded eyewitness accounts and collected items — drawings, posters, poems — from daily life during the Holocaust. They sealed thousands of pages in containers, which they buried beneath buildings not long before the ghetto was burned and almost everyone there murdered.“An Acceptable Loss” is an American political thriller that indicates in every frame its intention to take the subject of war seriously. The director Joe Chappelle has heavily filtered the movie’s images — draining the color from his characters’ faces, polishing their features into dull smoothness, dimming even the daylight. And unfortunately, the plot is as lackluster ideologically as the picture is visually.
+The story follows Libby Lamm (Tika Sumpter), a professor who was once the top security adviser to a steely United States vice president, Rachel Burke (Jamie Lee Curtis). Now, after retreating from politics, Libby is hounded by antiwar protests and demands for her trial as a war criminal. At first, the film plays coy with the events that made her a pariah. But the phrase that was central to her foreign policy — “total war” — suggests her history. Despite her diplomatic manner, Libby was the architect of an unprovoked nuclear attack carried out by the United States.
+Libby is racked with guilt and anxiety. Every night, before she falls asleep with a gun under her pillow, she records her memories of the meetings where she supported Burke’s plan to drop a nuclear bomb on Homs, Syria. Libby plans to publish a memoir exposing the moral and tactical failures of those still in power. But she knows from experience that if she shows any resistance to the administration, she risks becoming a target.MIAMI BEACH — For Sarah Harrelson, running an arts magazine, raising three teenagers and collecting contemporary art are intimately entwined pursuits.
+“I had my kids in artist studios when they were 6 years old, which I think has been really defining for them and great for me as a working mother because I’ve been able to pull them into my world,” said Ms. Harrelson, sitting in the family home on Surprise Lake in Miami Beach. Austin Harrelson, her husband and a designer, landscaped the pool area outside and appointed the interior with furnishings by classic modernists including Karl Springer and Samuel Marx, while the family as an ensemble has had a say in the mix of art — often by women, some of them very young — in their home.
+“We’ve all gone to Art Basel in Switzerland together for the last eight years,” Ms. Harrelson said.
+It was the Art Basel closer to home — the sister fair two miles away in Miami Beach — that first immersed Ms. Harrelson in visual art when she became editor in chief of Art Basel magazine, the official publication of the fair, 12 years ago. “That was really when I started to become captivated with the contemporary art world,” said Ms. Harrelson, who earlier in her journalism career had focused on fashion, style, entertainment and design.“The Standoff at Sparrow Creek,” the writing-directing feature debut of Henry Dunham, strands seven actors in a warehouse to bark exposition at one another. Listening closely is necessary: The monotonously dark visuals barely function to carry the story on their own.
+The warehouse contains the arsenal of a covert militia; the members assemble there after learning of a shooting spree. It seems some militia member from somewhere has attacked a police officer’s funeral, targeting the dead man’s colleagues. Missing stock soon reveals that the killer is one of them.“Almost a third of the walls in the world are designed to keep the neighbor out,” Ms. Vallet said.
+‘Fortress Europe’
+Much like the desert terrain along the United States border with Mexico, the perilous seas, not walls, have been the main obstacle for people trying to get to Europe.
+The Continent has gone beyond building walls to impede the arrival of undocumented migrants. Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, and national governments raised a security apparatus that is often referred to as Fortress Europe.
+It includes naval patrols and surveillance on the Mediterranean, where most migrants try to cross into Europe. European governments work with countries like Libya, Morocco and Turkey to try to deter migrants from attempting deadly sea crossings.
+Last year, an estimated 150,000 illegal crossings were detected on the external borders of the European Union, according to Frontex. (The same person may attempt the crossing and be counted in different locations.) This was 25 percent less than in 2017, and the lowest level in five years.
+Still, far-right politicians like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary have promoted the specter of an impending migration crisis, accompanied by xenophobic rhetoric, to justify funds for border protection.
+[Read more about whether Europe is still facing a migration crisis.]
+Success is relative
+“The boosting and militarization of border security has led to a higher death toll for forcibly displaced persons,” according to a report released in May by the Transnational Institute, a research and advocacy institute.
+In another report on border walls, researchers at the institute looked at maritime barriers in the Mediterranean and considered them as significant or more significant than land barriers on the European continent.LONDON — Facebook identified two disinformation campaigns originating from Russia — including one tied to an agency controlled by the Kremlin — that were targeted at users in Europe and Central Asia. The company said on Thursday it had deleted nearly 500 pages and accounts that had posted the misleading messages.
+Many of the pages were discovered to be linked to employees of Sputnik, an agency controlled by the Russian government that was established to spread reports and information sympathetic to Russia. It used independent news pages on topics like weather, travel and sports to mask its efforts, Facebook said.
+The company has been under pressure to more aggressively address the spread of misinformation, and to counter manipulation on its social network that is aimed at stirring division and discord, ever since it became evident that Russia used it to target groups of voters, sow division and spread false information in order to sway the 2016 presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, has said the detection of suspicious activity is a top priority.
+But on a platform of two billion users, disinformation campaigns are hard to detect, and Facebook remains a gathering ground for groups eager to spread disinformation to the widest audience possible.Trump has not broken out of the range where he has been for almost his entire presidency — between roughly 38 percent and 44 percent approval. But the shutdown is not going well for him. He has no evident plan to end it, either.
+Over time, the tangible effects will keep growing, which will probably hurt him more than they will the Democrats — given that most Americans correctly blame him for the shutdown.
+All of this is further evidence of his vulnerability. He is a weak president who appears more likely to get weaker than stronger in the coming weeks and months. Don’t assume that his approval rating has some kind of guaranteed floor. It doesn’t.
+On this week’s episode of “The Argument,” I try to persuade Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg that Trump is more vulnerable than many people think. The three of us also talk about whether the political left has an anti-Semitism problem, given the turmoil surrounding this weekend’s Women’s March .
+Reader callout: Have you read or heard any good descriptions of the government shutdown’s real-world effects, in local or national media? Send them my way, at leonhardt@nytimes.com.MANILA — The Philippine government should take control of the country’s largest shipyard, the defense secretary said on Thursday, after officials raised concerns that Chinese companies seeking to take it over would act as agents of Beijing, projecting China’s power deeper into the region.
+Among the foreign companies expressing interest in the sprawling shipyard on Subic Bay are two Chinese firms, one of which is state-owned, according to Philippine officials. They have voiced fears that a Chinese takeover of the yard would give a strategic foothold to China, which is expanding its economic and military presence in the region and has seized islands in the South China Sea that are claimed by the Philippines, among others.
+Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana said he had raised the issue of the shipyard in a meeting on Wednesday with President Rodrigo Duterte, who has tried to improve relations with Beijing, worrying American policymakers who have long seen the Philippines as a strategic check on China. Also in the meeting were Foreign Secretary Teodoro Locsin Jr. and the country’s economic managers.
+“The Philippine Navy suggested that, why not the Philippines take over so that we’ll have a naval base there?” he told foreign correspondents on Thursday, recounting his conversation with the president. “Then we’ll have shipbuilding capabilities.”CREMONA, Italy — Florencia Rastelli was mortified. As an expert barista, she had never spilled a single cup of coffee, she said. But last Monday, as she wiped the counter at Chiave di Bacco, the cafe where she works, she knocked over a glass and it shattered loudly on the floor.
+The customers all stood still, petrified, Ms. Rastelli recalled. “I was like: Of all days, this one,” she said. “Even a police officer popped in and asked me to keep it down. I was so embarrassed.”
+The people of Cremona are unusually sensitive to noise right now. The police have cordoned off streets in the usually bustling city center and traffic has been diverted. During a recent news conference, the city’s mayor, Gianluca Galimberti, implored Cremona’s citizens to avoid any sudden and unnecessary sounds.
+Cremona is home to the workshops of some of the world’s finest instrument makers, including Antonio Stradivari, who in the 17th and 18th centuries produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made. The city is getting behind an ambitious project to digitally record the sounds of the Stradivarius instruments for posterity, as well as others by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two other famous Cremona craftsmen. And that means being quiet.On the second day of the year, Danielle Miller gave up on the federal government.
+Furloughed from her Internal Revenue Service job near Cincinnati and fearful of running out of money during the partial government shutdown, she filed for unemployment benefits: $414 a week, about $200 less than usual.
+“Once Christmas came and went, after New Year’s, I was like, I can’t go on,” said Ms. Miller, a single mother who has worked for the I.R.S. for almost 14 years. She spent part of this week calculating when her first unemployment check would arrive. “It’s disappointing, and it’s frustrating,” she said. “I have a job.”
+The shutdown, the longest on record, is prompting tens of thousands of federal employees to seek jobless benefits. As the impasse meanders through its fourth week and more bills come due, their numbers have been growing.
+On Thursday, two days after the White House doubled its projections and warned that the shutdown was reducing quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points per week, the Labor Department reported 10,454 initial claims by federal workers for the week that ended Jan. 5, doubling the previous week’s figure. Thousands more have applied since, state officials said.On the Market in New York City
+This week’s properties are on Roosevelt Island and in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and in the East Village.Slide 1 of 15,
+Tuckahoe Five-Bedroom • $710,000 • WESTCHESTER • 235 Read Avenue
+A five-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, renovated 1900 house with 2,572 square feet, a wooden front porch, an eat-in kitchen, formal living and dining rooms, two fireplaces (one working), an enclosed second-story porch and a stone backyard terrace, on 0.13 acre in the Crestwood section. Michele Lasich-Pagnotta, Houlihan & O’Malley Real Estate Services, 914-720-4948; houilhanomalley.com.On the Market
+Homes for Sale in Brooklyn and Manhattan
+This week’s properties are on Roosevelt Island and in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and in the East Village.
+On the Market in New York City 18 Photos View Slide Show › Brad Dickson for The New York TimesIn Tuckahoe, N.Y., a five-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath, renovated 1900 house with 2,572 square feet, a wooden front porch, an eat-in kitchen, formal living and dining rooms, two fireplaces (one working), an enclosed second-story porch and a stone backyard terrace, on 0.13 acre in the Crestwood section.
+In Hoboken, N.J., a 2,400-square foot, three-bedroom, two-bath, four-story townhouse built in the 1860s and updated in the last five years. It has an eat-in kitchen, modern cabinetry and appliances, formal and informal sitting areas, high ceilings, a deck and a slate patio, on 0.02 acre.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+Yesterday, we talked to Austin Beutner, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, about the city’s teachers’ strike that has all but ground the operations of the nation’s second-largest school system to a halt.
+Today, we hear from the other side.
+My colleague Jennifer Medina talked to Alex Caputo-Pearl, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, just before Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that negotiations between the union and the district would resume today.
+A meeting is scheduled for noon at City Hall, with the mayor’s staff serving as a mediator between the two groups.
+Mr. Caputo-Pearl, said that neither he, Mr. Beutner nor the mayor would be at the table for the negotiations. “We’re going to let our teams dig into it and then we’ll be involved soon enough,” he said late last night. He did not make any predictions about when the strike would end.wesley morris
+I am not an opera-goer. I do not go to the opera— not on purpose, not for any sort of like artistic dance. It’s just an art form that I experience maybe once a year. And last year, I got taken to the opera by one of our colleagues— Anthony Tommasini— who does the opera criticism for the New York Times. And there is a little bit of preamble— you know, sit around and talk and you sort of watch everybody in their gowns and dresses come in and you look at people’s very expensive tuxedos. And you’re very aware that you’re about to have this rarefied experience.
+jenna wortham
+Sounds luxurious.
+wesley morris
+And at some point before the opera starts, everybody gets up and the national anthem starts. And then everybody starts singing the national anthem.
+jenna wortham
+How weird.
+wesley morris
+Now, to be fair, it’s the beginning of the New York Metropolitan opera’s season. So we’re seeing the first show. And the season kicks off apparently with the singing of the national anthem.
+jenna wortham
+Like a baseball game.
+wesley morris
+Like a baseball game. Exactamundo.
+jenna wortham
+I mean, that’s so weird, OK.
+wesley morris
+But I’m kind of like— I don’t want to get up. I don’t want to do this here. So I didn’t. I stayed seated.
+jenna wortham
+Good for you.
+wesley morris
+And I didn’t expect to do that. Now I’m in this sunken place, how do I get out?
+jenna wortham
+It’s Get Out 4.
+wesley morris
+So I just sat there. And the longer I sat, the angrier I got.
+jenna wortham
+Of course.
+wesley morris
+I’m sitting there thinking about black people and how they weren’t at the opera. But then there was this additional aspect of it which is I was now performing my patriotism.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+And I just didn’t want to participate in that performance surrounded by white people under those circumstances.
+jenna wortham
+Here’s what I’m wondering— did anybody else notice?
+wesley morris
+I’m sure nobody noticed, but I felt very noticed. I went as the chief opera critic of the New York Times’ guest. And—
+jenna wortham
+Oh, no.
+wesley morris
+To my left is Bret Stephens, the conservative columnist for this paper.
+jenna wortham
+Awkward.
+wesley morris
+And I was trying to think what they were thinking in my not getting up. Like if they’d even noticed that I hadn’t. And I don’t know. I was like, are they going to think I’m like a Black Lives Matter person? And then I was like, well, I hope they do think I’m Black Lives Mattering right now.
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+And when I thought that, I was like, oh, I am staying seated. I’m not getting up.
+jenna wortham
+You went full Rosa.
+wesley morris
+Now I could never until that night have appreciated how long a non-Whitney Houston sung national anthem is.
+jenna wortham
+That’s great. I mean, if Whitney had been singing it, you would’ve been standing.
+wesley morris
+Well, yes, if Whitney had been singing it, my ass would have been up. But in remaining seated, I had a lot of time to think about why I didn’t stand up. Am I sitting as a form of actual political protest? Am I sitting as a form of meta protest? Is my protest a protest for protest’s sake, basically?
+jenna wortham
+Right. This is also just like only a Wesley monologue that’s like happening just for yourself in your head, but go on.
+wesley morris
+Fair. But then it led me to this other question— because I really felt like I was going to be asked to leave the Metropolitan Opera.
+jenna wortham
+These days, the stakes are that high, though. That’s not a wild statement, you know what I mean? Like, this is the climate we’re living in. So what you’re basically telling me, Mr. Wesley Morris, is that you’re like the Colin Kaepernick of the opera. At least that’s how you felt in that moment.
+wesley morris
+Wow. OK. I would not say I was the Colin Kaepernick. But, listen, I did experience an affinity with him and I understood for the duration of that song some tiny part of what he and the other people who’ve carried on these protests of certain American values in his name feel yea when they sit during that song. It’s a long time when you feel like there is a risk to your remaining seated— or kneeling, as it were.
+jenna wortham
+Now I don’t watch sports. I don’t watch the ball foot. All I know about this man is he’s tall, he is fine, he’s biracial, he was adopted by white people, and he grew up in California. So I’mma a hand— I’m going to toss it to you.
+wesley morris
+OK so Colin Kaepernick— he played for the University in Nevada and was drafted by the NFL in 2011. And didn’t really hit his stride as a starter until Alex Smith got injured on the San Francisco 49ers in 2012. And he became the starting quarterback. He had started basically no games and then became a star. He took the team to the Super Bowl in 2013.
+jenna wortham
+Big Willie style. He was a big deal.
+wesley morris
+Big Willie style— you hear that, Colin Kaepernick?
+jenna wortham
+I had too much Diet Coke today, leave me alone.
+wesley morris
+He was a star. And it was one of those great sports stories where a person of whom little was expected and little was known winds up going to the Super Bowl. Now it’s also interesting to note that that Super Bowl in 2013 that was won by the Seattle Seahawks was the first to ever feature two black quarterbacks.
+jenna wortham
+Incredible.
+wesley morris
+Two biracial quarterbacks, by the way. But then— I don’t know— he got into a slump. The thing that was magical about him became somewhat ordinary and probably detrimental, which was his improvisation on the field.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+wesley morris
+So at the start of 2016, Colin Kaepernick is basically fighting for his job. So at the same time that this man is competing to start for his football team, you have this really fraught national political environment.
+jenna wortham
+That’s right.
+wesley morris
+Donald Trump is running for president.
+jenna wortham
+And we’re in a moment too— let’s not forget in 2016— all of our feeds, all the newspapers, everything on television is reverberating with these two seemingly parallel, very close together, really horrific deaths at the hands of the police of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota.
+wesley morris
+And those deaths come in the context of what seems like a constant flow of dead black people at the hands of the police.
+jenna wortham
+Many of whom— there are lots of questions about whether or not they’ll be charged. Most of them end up on paid leave. There is a feeling of unrest and injustice held by, I would say, probably every black person in the country at this moment in time.
+wesley morris
+So during this period, we get to August of 2016. The campaign is heating up. We know at this point that Donald Trump is the Republican nominee for president.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+And that Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee for president. And football season is about to start. They have these preseason games that really only if you care about your team are you watching.
+jenna wortham
+OK. so it’s not like prime time yet.
+wesley morris
+They’re on TV.
+jenna wortham
+But it’s like the diehard fans.
+wesley morris
+Right. So it’s not like these preseason games are big news. They’re like a warm up. They let you know how your team is probably going to do.
+jenna wortham
+A scrimmage.
+wesley morris
+I’ll accept that.
+jenna wortham
+Thank you.
+wesley morris
+So during one of these preseason games, a woman named Jennifer Lee Chan notices that something is off. She basically covers the 49ers for the team. She’s the team beat writer. And she tweets that something is off about this formation of the team during the national anthem. And it’s a wide shot of the whole team. And if you get your magnifying glass out, you’ll notice that somebody with Colin Kaepernick’s number on the back is seated.
+jenna wortham
+Chillin on the bench.
+wesley morris
+And what she says is this is not a Jeff Fisher-approved formation— #hardknocks. She’s referring to Jeff Fisher— the coach of a different team— whose team was the subject of a documentary series called Hard Knocks.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+wesley morris
+And Jeff Fisher’s whole thing is— you’ve got to stand for the national anthem. You’ve got to be grateful for what you got, because the NFL is giving it to you, negros.
+jenna wortham
+Now this is where I started to pay attention. No one had really noticed until this point. Now the sitting starts getting national attention. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+colin kaepernick
+I’ll continue to sit. I’m going to continue to stand with the people that are being oppressed. [END PLAYBACK]
+jenna wortham
+Colin Kaepernick is asked about it directly in interviews. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+archived recording
+Specifically, what would you like to see change in order for you to stand?
+colin kaepernick
+There is a lot of things that need to change. One specifically is police brutality. There’s people being murdered unjustly and not being held accountable. Cops are getting paid leave for killing people. That’s not right. That’s not right by anyone’s standards. [END PLAYBACK]
+jenna wortham
+So it’s around this point in time that a man named Nate Boyer, who’s a veteran, he’s a former Seahawks player as well writes an open letter in support of Kaepernick’s right to protest. He says, “even though my initial reaction to your protest was one of anger, I’m trying to listen to what you’re saying and why you’re doing it. I look forward to the day when you’re inspired to once again stand during our national anthem.” Kaepernick hit him up, they meet up, and Boyer suggests kneeling as a compromise because he sees it as a sign of respect. He says, because people need to pray and we kneel in front of fallen brothers grave. So Kaepernick agrees. He starts kneeling during the lineup during the national anthem rather than sitting on the benches during the anthem itself. And that’s when everything changes.
+wesley morris
+So other players start kneeling and the concept of taking a knee goes viral. So Norman Lear, the great television producer, television creator, All in the Family, Sanford and Son, Good Times. He takes a knee, posts a photo of him taking a knee. And then says, as a combat vet, I fought Nazis in World War II. Today, I #takeaknee once more in solidarity with my brothers and sisters still fighting for equality and justice.
+jenna wortham
+You get Tracee Ellis Ross, the entire cast of Grey’s Anatomy— Gillian Anderson, David Duchovny on the set of new X Files reboot. I mean, a lot of people are paying attention. What’s interesting about this moment is both the national attention, but also the protesting is now tangentially about police brutality. It’s really about defending Kaepernick’s right to protest entirely, which is a much easier thing to get behind if you’re famous.
+wesley morris
+Right, yes. It’s much easier to hashtag—
+jenna wortham
+Take a knee than #StopKillingBlackPeople.
+wesley morris
+Right.
+jenna wortham
+Right?
+wesley morris
+Amen.
+jenna wortham
+It starts to get a little bit more amorphous, it gets a little bit wobbly on the sides, because then you have Noz deciding to launch a line of Christmas apparel in support of prison reform. I mean, by the way, Noz’s sweater campaign is called “Kneeling Santa.” So this thing is getting way out of control in the best way possible.
+wesley morris
+Well, let’s go to the worst way possible. Because the president— the current president at the time in 2017— gets involved— Donald Trump. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+president trump
+Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. You have to stand proudly for the national anthem or you shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the country. You have to stand proudly for the nation. So I watched Colin Kaepernick and I heard he’s terrible. And then it got bigger and bigger and started mushrooming. And, frankly, the NFL should have suspended him for one game and he would have never done it again. They could have been suspended for two games. And they could have suspended him if he did it a third time for the season. And you would never have had a problem. But I will tell you— you cannot disrespect our country, our flag, our anthem. You cannot do that. [END PLAYBACK]
+wesley morris
+He basically understands that he’s able to do this in some ways because anybody who has any passionate feelings for the NFL has, as a just a matter of marketing corollary, feelings for the American military.
+jenna wortham
+In what ways?
+wesley morris
+The Department of Defense has spent millions of dollars trying to get these teams to recruit people— not the players—
+jenna wortham
+Fascinating.
+wesley morris
+But the spectators— either the people at home or the people that go.
+jenna wortham
+You can’t play football, but you can join the military.
+wesley morris
+Right. they spent millions of dollars, mostly in the NFL, for more prominently displayed flags during the games, for actual recruitment either in the stadiums themselves or through advertising on television during games. They would stage these strange— in the context of the games they were strange. You’d have these halftime reunion specials basically—
+jenna wortham
+I remember this, yes.
+wesley morris
+Between troops that are just home from battle and their families during a football game.
+jenna wortham
+So interesting.
+wesley morris
+So the degree to which the sport is conflated with what the military stands for is almost inextricable at this point.
+jenna wortham
+So, basically, football games have become a pipeline for recruitment.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+And advertising for the US military. Which, Mr. Morris, answers your question. Why does it feel so weird to sit during the national anthem? Because you can be accused of not being a patriot, and that’s the rhetoric that gets reinforced by what Trump says about what these protests mean.
+wesley morris
+And so compounding these stress, I would say, around Colin Kaepernick’s protests is also the fact that he is unemployed. You know, by 2015, he was in a slump, he wasn’t playing well. And by 2016, he is talking about wanting to play for another team. So, in addition to fighting for his current job, he also wanted to leave open the possibility of playing somewhere else. And these protests were not helping.
+jenna wortham
+Clearly.
+wesley morris
+Nobody— he’s now a hot potato and nobody wants to be caught with him in their hands.
+jenna wortham
+Nobody has an oven mitt heatproof enough to handle this hot potato.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+So he’s out of a job. But, as we know, there’s about to be another big tectonic shift in the epic saga that is Kaepernick’s life. And we’re going to take a break and we’re going to talk about it when we come back. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+colin kaepernick
+If people say your dreams are crazy, if they laugh at what you think you can do, good. Because calling a dream crazy is not an insult, it’s a compliment. [END PLAYBACK]
+jenna wortham
+In the fall of 2018, this ad drops from Nike featuring Colin Kaepernick, along with a bunch of other very famous athletes— Serena Williams, LeBron James. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+colin kaepernick
+Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. [END PLAYBACK]
+jenna wortham
+But Colin is the star. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+colin kaepernick
+So don’t ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they’re crazy enough. [END PLAYBACK]
+wesley morris
+Yes, I mean, he’s narrating the whole thing over kids falling off of skateboards.
+jenna wortham
+And ambitious surfers.
+wesley morris
+And paralympic athletes. It is a celebration of a triumph over various adversities.
+jenna wortham
+Correct.
+wesley morris
+And the establishment of Colin Kaepernick’s relationship with Nike.
+jenna wortham
+Yes. But now at this point, Colin Kaepernick has been transformed into a folk hero and also a lightning rod, which, in turn, attracted the attention of companies who know what to do with that imagery. Into the fray steps Nike— a multi-billion dollar company both to illuminate him and potentially exploit him.
+wesley morris
+Yeah, I mean, to endorse the message while also possibly diluting the message.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+And, you know, this brings me back to the ad which, I have to say, is pretty mild given—
+jenna wortham
+It needs some seasoning.
+wesley morris
+It needs some cayenne.
+jenna wortham
+The holy trinity— it needs something.
+wesley morris
+Yes, it needs— some Lowry’s.
+jenna wortham
+Lowry’s. No you did not.
+wesley morris
+And I just feel like this was an opportunity for Nike to really step in to complete alignment with what it is Colin Kaepernick had initially been asking for with an ad that features things that we don’t want to see.
+jenna wortham
+They actually could have believed in something even if it meant sacrificing everything.
+wesley morris
+Well, I think you just put the nail on that one.
+jenna wortham
+OK, go on.
+wesley morris
+But the ad if it really— if the ad wanted to be crazy enough, would have just been a montage of the most horrible horribleness. Because—
+jenna wortham
+Wow.
+wesley morris
+Because that’s what he is— that’s what the protest is.
+jenna wortham
+That’s what he’s calling for to stop.
+wesley morris
+That’s what the kneeling was about. That’s what these other guys who are still in the league are kneeling for.
+jenna wortham
+Right
+wesley morris
+That’s what Black Lives Matter is protesting.
+jenna wortham
+That’s what most black people in America want.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+The killing to stop.
+wesley morris
+Yes. And Nike has a long history of using causes and social activists as spokespeople to sell apparel. 1995 they had this ad featuring Rick Munoz who was an HIV-positive runner. And, of course, in ‘78, there was a Nike Liberator. I don’t know if it’s a shoe you ever wore, but the shoes were a thing. They’re still a thing. People wear them. You can pay a lot of money to get them on eBay now. So you had this history of this company being aware that there is a healthy relationship between its bottom line and the political objectives of certain social causes.
+jenna wortham
+Right. Nike sponsoring Colin is complicated. Because on one hand, it feels like this extraordinarily progressive thing. It feels very daring for Nike— like almost scandalous. Like, oh, my god, is Nike supporting Colin? Are they supporting Black Lives Matter protests? Are they are they coming out against police brutality? Actually, they’re not as far as we know. They’re simply saying, we support Colin Kaepernick as a political figure, as a social activist. But the campaign doesn’t really seem to have anything to do with his initial reasons for sitting down and then kneeling. And it’s also interesting, because a lot of people in my communities and in my circles and in my various feeds were applauding the Colin Kaepernick ads. They felt really seen by this corporate company, which I understand. I totally get it. And in some ways, I felt that way too. But I also feel very cynical about a giant, global company co-opting a social movement— which, essentially, they’re doing— that isn’t even about police brutality anymore. It’s just about the idea of what?
+wesley morris
+Of Colin Kaepernick. We are so far from where we started in 2016. And this isn’t Colin Kaepernick’s fault. I think that the way things work now and the way he was attacked and ostracized by his employer, the industry in which his former employer worked— they basically have locked him out of getting a job. So the moral issues that you stand against when you stand with Colin Kaepernick include such things as police brutality and socioeconomic inequality, but also include getting this black man a job, standing up to President Trump, telling the racist in your town that he’s allowed to do whatever he wants as an American. If he wants to protest the national anthem, he should be able to. So it is not quite a grab bag, but there is a lot of things to protest when you stand with Colin Kaepernick. He’s become a symbol of so many things.
+jenna wortham
+And what does it mean when a company like Nike piggybacks on top of that symbol or they try to embody that symbol as a means to sell their products? Because, look, Nike’s stock went up 5%. That was a $6 billion— buh-buh-buh billion dollar increase in the company value after the campaign launched.
+wesley morris
+What?
+jenna wortham
+And so you have to ask yourself a question— so who is benefiting more from this partnership, from this alliance? I feel like for me, all of my alarm bells start going off because I understand why the campaign excited a lot of people and why it felt really good to see Nike get behind Colin Kaepernick. But it also— I feel really skeptical because Nike is still under scrutiny for suspicious labor practices. There are all these anti-sweatshop protests happening against Nike because of their conduct in Vietnam where workers are claiming that they have to work really long hours and too hot conditions. I mean, the idea that somehow Nike is for whatever Colin Kaepernick’s for while still perpetuating some of the same types of oppressive practices— that even if he’s not directly speaking to, tangentially he is against the oppression of people of color— what does it mean to be parting with a company that might be participating in that at the same time?
+wesley morris
+It could be called Colin-washing.
+jenna wortham
+That’s good.
+wesley morris
+And to the degree that I am inclined to be cynical about this, it does involve the distance between what he meant to do in 2016 and what it means to stand up for black people, for oppressed people, for social inequality in a industrial land of plenty.
+jenna wortham
+Well, then you have at-home consumers who— whether or not they’re football fans or not— trying to figure out if burning Nikes is a protest or wearing Nike is a protest.
+wesley morris
+You have people actually destroying their Nike apparel to protest Nike.
+jenna wortham
+Hashtag #justburnit. So you had people cutting off their swooshes, buying shoes and burning them— none of which damaged Nike’s bottom line whatsoever, we should say.
+wesley morris
+But I have to wonder— I have a reverse cynicism about this too. And it has everything to do with the shift of political power in this country over the last 20 years. Where what you and I want as constituents, as voters, as citizens matters increasingly less to the people who we put in office. In the last two years, you’ve had Congress people running from their constituents.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, like actually running from them.
+wesley morris
+Literally fleeing on foot, probably in a pair of Nikes, from their voters. So instead of governments— national, state, and local standing up for people, you now have these multinational corporations filling the void.
+jenna wortham
+That said, though, I mean, is Nike protesting state policy if they’re just putting Colin Kaepernick’s face on a Billboard because my question is— and I’m still looking for the answer to this, but what does their balance sheet look like? Are they donating money to any of the causes that Colin cares about? Or does it count as a protest if these corporations are only shifting the needles in ways that benefit them as capitalist entities?
+wesley morris
+We are no longer individuals. We are constituents to these companies, because they own everything. They now are increasingly owning the government.
+jenna wortham
+Right, pretty much.
+wesley morris
+You can follow that money all the way to Washington because the corporate lobbies basically dictate policy. You know, we live in the United States of America, but we live also on Facebook. We live on Twitter. We live on Amazon.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting to think about even the president calling for his constituents that voted him into power to boycott Nike boosted the company’s returns.
+wesley morris
+Also, he did the same to the NFL, but the NFL went the opposite direction and made it really hard for those players to protest by basically putting their jobs on the line. So you do have this real tension where the only way to alter some of these policies is to find— when we’re talking about the president— is to find a mothra or a King Kong to go up against Donald Trump’s Godzilla.
+jenna wortham
+Of course.
+wesley morris
+And Nike getting behind Colin Kaepernick— it is essentially giving him a platform that he would never have had as an unemployed football player.
+jenna wortham
+So it’s beside the point whether or not Nike is behind the protest. The point is they’re imbuing, they’re amplifying, they’re putting halo around Colin that he, then, hopefully, in theory, then gets to— and I’m not saying whether or not this is good or bad. It’s just that this is sort of how it’s working that now he has this aura that he can spread around the causes that he cares about and hopefully affect some kind of change.
+wesley morris
+Yes, yes, yes. I mean, it’s, listen, I hate to say that it’s better than nothing, but it is kind of better than nothing.
+jenna wortham
+And, look, if your president is actively denouncing you, maybe it is strategic to align yourself with a giant like Nike who actually can take on the president. It becomes a question of multinationals versus nation-states. And maybe aligning with a problematic multinational is the lesser of two evils. It’s better than being out of a job and no one hearing what you have to say— although has Colin said anything lately?
+wesley morris
+No. That’s the other thing about this protest. It has become a silent protest. And that in and of itself is somewhat revolutionary. He doesn’t have to go on Wendy Williams to make his points. He doesn’t have to talk to Michael Strahan and Robin Roberts to make his points. We are simply wanting to know where the hell he is. And him popping up from time to time at the US Open, as one of GQ’s men of the year is in some ways satisfying enough. And he’s enough of an ambient presence to make the idea of standing against something and standing for something a real act in some ways— whether he talks about what he’s doing or not. He’s said his piece, what more could he say?
+jenna wortham
+Colin Kaepernick, at least, has been pretty unwavering in his activism in a financial monetary way. He’s been donating a ton of money— over $1 million— to various charities since this whole thing began. So at least there is that.
+wesley morris
+Right. And that in and of itself is a huge shift. Because he’s now in a position to do something that black celebrity activists had not previously been able to do.
+jenna wortham
+Like actually literally not been able to do because they were mostly broke, destitute, and shuffled out of this country.
+wesley morris
+Or just chose to leave because it was too oppressive to stay. Josephine Baker and Paul Robeson basically wind up having— in fighting racism, wind up finding it more comfortable and safer to live abroad.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+And then you have two guys like Tommie Smith and John Carlos who, in raising their fists at the ‘68 Olympics in Mexico City, received international death threats.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+For besmirching the Olympics with quote “politics” unquote, as though the Olympics weren’t in and of themselves an inherently political activity.
+jenna wortham
+In this country, we have a long history of black people speaking up and losing everything. But now with the backing of Nike, you see Kaepernick more powerful than ever.
+wesley morris
+Yeah, I mean, he’s suing the NFL for collusion, basically, for keeping him out of the league. But I also think that he has awakened in the average person a sense of—
+jenna wortham
+Similar agency, honestly, and similar validation or affirmation that they have a right to be angry too.
+wesley morris
+Or not even angry, but just curious. Just curious. I’m thinking specifically about India Landry— a high school student who was expelled from her school when she refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. And she sued the school last year. The suit is still ongoing— has not been resolved yet. But I do think that there is this sense that what harm comes of my not standing for the Pledge of Allegiance?
+jenna wortham
+Wow.
+wesley morris
+I don’t say that I’m not American, I just don’t know that I can pledge allegiance to a flag under which there are any number of things I have a problem with that my government either seems to perpetuate or neglect or ignore.
+jenna wortham
+Right. So, Wesley, what you’re illuminating for me is bigger than my initial cynicism about Nike— or it just puts it in a new perspective, which is Nike’s intentions are kind of irrelevant. Because what’s happened is something that can’t be put back in a box. So you’ve got India Landry feeling emboldened to exercise her right as an American to take a stand and to say, I’m not OK with this. I dissent. So I guess for me, I’m coming around to— I’m softening a little bit of my earlier critique and I’m raising this question. I don’t know that I want this to be what I define as progress at this moment in time, but this might be as good as it gets. And, more importantly, are we OK with it?
+wesley morris
+Jenna Wortham, you just asked me whether or not Nike’s sponsorship, co-opting, standing alongside in support of Colin Kaepernick— whether that is OK. And in as much as it has brought people to the brink of thinking about these issues that he’s protesting— or even what it means to align themselves or tolerate or think about some of the things that he is asking us to think about despite the sort of benign aspect of those advertisements— which, really, if they wanted to be— what’s the tagline? What’s the other tagline in that ad?
+jenna wortham
+I got to look it up. Hold on, hold on. At the very end of the ad, Colin Kaepernick shakes out his fro and says— and it gets exponentially bigger— it fills the screen. That doesn’t happen. But Colin Kaepernick says, “don’t ask if your dreams are crazy, ask if they’re crazy enough.”
+wesley morris
+Now I think I’m pretty OK with Nike’s sponsorship of Colin Kaepernick. As we’ve discussed, complicated. Complicated.
+jenna wortham
+I hear you, but I don’t buy Nikes now and I’m not going to because Colin’s on the face those billboards. Now someone did buy me a pair of Nike’s because I have a bad back and I do wear them sometimes. But I will not give them money. And it doesn’t diminish my love of Colin Kaepernick and the support or the support for BLM. It doesn’t. It’s just complicated.
+wesley morris
+Complicated, but I’m mostly on board with it because I understand the sort of political necessity of it.
+jenna wortham
+OK, go on.
+wesley morris
+So as I’m sitting there at that opera, it occurs to me as I’m standing here talking to you now— I was at the opera watching Samson and Delilah. Which, if you don’t know—
+jenna wortham
+I don’t know. It’s been a while since I’ve held a Bible, so please refresh my memory.
+wesley morris
+It is simply the basic story of a woman and a man who meet and fell in love. She is powerful, he is powerful. She learns that the secret to his strength is in his hair— his long hair. So she cuts his hair.
+jenna wortham
+I’m sorry. I just— OK, go on.
+wesley morris
+Nobody said the Bible was the gospel truth, it’s the gospel.
+jenna wortham
+Wait, wait— so what you’re saying is in this narrative, it’s possible that Colin Kaepernick is the—
+wesley morris
+Samson.
+jenna wortham
+And Nike’s the—
+wesley morris
+Delilah.
+jenna wortham
+So, Colin, don’t let Nike give you a relaxer— stay afro strong, right?
+wesley morris
+Yes. Colin, you’ve got to keep that afro.
+jenna wortham
+Keep them cornrows. Keep them in.
+wesley morris
+I think that there is a degree to which the fame and the spokesperson would run the risk of collapsing or completely taking over the protest element of what he’s trying to do.
+jenna wortham
+Right. It’s a cautionary tale. And it’s a cautionary tale not just for Colin Kaepernick, but really anyone who is at the risk of co-option or at the risk of being wielded by a corporation for their own consumer benefit under the guise of political or social activism. I mean, look— the relationship between Nike and Colin Kaepernick goes beyond this particular moment. Corporations are interested in capitalizing on black cool. They always have been and they’re willing to do it in any way that makes sense. And it’s happening on a scale as large as Nike to as small as influencers on Instagram. What Colin does sets a template for what other highly visible famous or slightly famous black people decide to do when companies reach out to them and want to promote them because of their alignment with social movement and social activism. It’s just a much bigger deal than just this moment in time. So maybe the question that we’re asking should be different. It’s not whether or not we’re OK with Nike’s sponsorship of Colin Kaepernick, it’s whether or not Colin Kaepernick can survive and whether or not the movement that Colin Kaepernick started can survive the sponsorship of Nike— because it has to. It actually has to.
+wesley morris
+It has to. Still Processing is a product of the New York Times.
+jenna wortham
+It is produced by Nina Pathak.
+wesley morris
+Our editors are Sasha Weiss and Larissa Anderson.
+jenna wortham
+We have editorial oversight from Lisa Tobin and Samantha Henig.
+wesley morris
+And our engineer is Jake Gorski.
+jenna wortham
+Our theme music is by Kindness. It’s called “World Restart” from the album, “Otherness.”
+wesley morris
+And you can find all our other episodes at nytimes.com/stillprocessing.
+jenna wortham
+And, as always, if you’re so inclined, feel free to leave us a review at Apple podcasts.
+wesley morris
+Thanks for listening, everybody.
+jenna worthamThe board of trustees at Michigan State University named a new interim president on Thursday to replace John Engler, a day after he resigned amid widespread criticism over his remarks that some victims of Lawrence G. Nassar, the former university and U.S.A. Gymnastics doctor, appeared to be enjoying “the spotlight.”
+The trustees appointed a top university administrator, Satish Udpa, as the interim leader on Thursday morning at a hastily scheduled board meeting, where they roundly condemned Mr. Engler’s comments and accepted his resignation, effective immediately, by a vote of 7 to 0 with one trustee absent.
+The swift upheaval, nearly a year after a high-profile sentencing hearing for Dr. Nassar where more than 150 young women told stories of sexual abuse, underscored the challenges still facing Michigan State in the wake of the scandal.
+Many of the abuse charges stemmed from Dr. Nassar’s time at the university, where he had been a faculty member and the team physician for two female varsity squads, in addition to his role with the American gymnastics team. The university’s longtime president, Lou Anna K. Simon, stepped down under intense pressure the same day, Jan. 24, that Dr. Nassar was sentenced to prison last year.Vacation rental properties can be a solid investment, depending on the location.
+To help potential buyers decide where to invest, Vacasa, a vacation rental property management company, crunched data on about a half-million rental properties in popular winter destinations in the United States.
+The top 10 most profitable locations listed below are ranked by capitalization rate, or cap rate, a metric used to determine the profitability of rental properties.
+Cap rate is calculated by comparing a home’s sale price to what is left of the annual rental revenue after expenses are met. For example, if a home sold for $100,000 and there was $1,000 left at the end of the year after expenses, the cap rate would be 1 percent. The more money in your pocket at the end of the year, the higher the cap rate.BRUSSELS — Some of the smugness here is gone.
+The European Union took a tough line in negotiating its divorce with Britain, wishing to preserve its unity and discourage other countries from wanting to leave the bloc. But now officials worry that what they have achieved may be “a catastrophic success.”
+British politics is in meltdown after Parliament’s crushing defeat of Prime Minister Theresa May’s carefully negotiated plan for Brexit, as the process of withdrawal is known. And no other compelling alternative plan for an orderly exit is in sight, with just 10 weeks to go until Britain is set to exit the bloc.
+European Union officials are now worried that Britain could leave without any agreement — a so-called “hard exit” that analysts warn could trigger a recession in Britain, causing huge backlogs, delays and shortages of goods, and badly hit the European economy, too, since more than 40 percent of Britain’s trade is with the bloc.
+Yet they see no point in making any concessions now, since Mrs. May has lost control of the process.• New for 2019: Our age ranges have changed slightly in response to new data-protection rules in the European Union. Students in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom must be between 13 and 19 years old to participate. However, you must be between 16 and 19 years old if you are submitting from anywhere else in the world. Please see The New York Times Terms of Service for more details.
+• You can work alone, with a partner or in a group, but only one submission per student, please, whether you’re working alone or with others.
+• Your video should be no more than 15 seconds, but can be shorter.
+• Post your video on YouTube, then post a link to that video in our comments section, along with the name or names of everyone who worked on it. Include the name of your school if you like. Please make sure you make your submission public so that we can see it without a password, and that you abide by the YouTube Terms of Service. (For example, please note what those Terms of Service have to say about the use of copyrighted music or sound effects and, instead, find royalty-free music and sound effects on Bensound or Freesound, or by using audio editing software to create your own music or sound effects.)
+And yes, we will only judge those videos posted to YouTube, not other services, since only YouTube videos easily embed in our system.
+• Use your imagination. You can act the word out, animate it, use puppets, draw, sing a song, create a dance, incorporate photographs, create a Claymation, or anything else that will help viewers understand and learn your word.
+• The contest ends on Feb. 20 at 7 a.m. Eastern time.Rogers grew up in rural Easton, Md. Her father is a now-retired Ford dealer; her mother, a former nurse who introduced Rogers to Erykah Badu and Alanis Morissette, now works as an end-of-life doula. Rogers was writing songs by age 13; at 17, she produced and self-released her debut album, “The Echo,” which channeled the pastoral spirit of early Bon Iver and Sufjan Stevens. The demos for that record helped her secure admission to the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. In New York, she played in multiple bands and “overdosed on live music”; during a semester abroad, she visited clubs in Paris and Berlin and fell in love with house and techno.
+During this time, she also found herself unable to write songs, even as graduation loomed and her music-production classes demanded it. “All my teachers were really frustrated with me,” she said. She began seriously considering a career in music journalism as a fallback; she interned at Spin and Elle and worked as an editorial assistant to the writer Lizzy Goodman, transcribing hundreds of hours of interviews with the leading lights of the early 2000s New York indie-rock boom for Goodman’s oral history “Meet Me in the Bathroom.”
+Then in March 2016, during the second semester of Rogers’s senior year, Pharrell Williams — an artist-in-residence at N.Y.U. at the time — visited her music-production class to critique student work. Rogers brought a demo of “Alaska,” on which her supple soprano bobs and weaves over a sparse shuffle beat that brings to mind Williams’s own work with producing partner Chad Hugo as the Neptunes.Slide 1 of 15,
+The unassuming building at 536 West 29th Street includes a lofted live-work space with over 30-foot ceilings. The kitchen, on a mezzanine level, is lit by large skylights and a rear terrace overlooking the garden.Even though the studio is dwarfed by nearby mid-rises, two large skylights brighten the interior, and they are aided by glass and glass-like cutouts in parts of the floor that give lower levels a solarium quality. Because of the unusual floor plan, visitors can look straight through the skylight from the first-floor den, more than 30 feet below.
+Relics of the past are venerated in the rear garden, which is decorated with giant gears that were once part of a pulley system for hauling stage settings. Mr. Young, whose best-known scenes were produced around 1900 to 1915, was praised for his deft “mechanical displays,” like a scene involving a race between trains and motorcars, according to his 1944 obituary.
+A trap door in the floor, used by a previous owner and photographer, still functions.
+Ms. Knudsen, who has split her time between this space and a home near San Francisco, has left her own mark. The master bedroom has 13-foot wooden doors that were salvaged from a convent’s motherhouse in California. The upstairs library is made of walnut wood that was crafted and sourced from upstate New York.
+The rear private garden has a mature cherry tree and organic soil that Ms. Knudsen shipped from Maine, because it had bits of colorful seashells and peat. “You have no idea you’re in New York,” while in the garden, she said — with the occasional exception of clanging construction nearby. To counter the changes around her, she installed Cor-ten steel walls on three sides of the garden, which rust to a bark-like color and add privacy to the space.
+Ms. Knudsen and her partners are selling the property because they are winding down their fashion business and plan to spend more time in California.
+A sale at this price, on this once largely commercial stretch, would have been unthinkable several years ago.Those cases were among the examples provided to legislators last year by Tennesseans for Reasonable Parole Review, an informal collective including a juvenile court judge, a juvenile court administrator, researchers, people who were incarcerated as youths, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee.
+“The bottom line is most of these kids who end up doing very horrific crimes or tragic crimes have all in some ways been victimized,” said Judge Sheila Calloway, the juvenile court judge, who has been pushing for reform. “When we lock them up for life, we discount their ability to rehabilitate and become better citizens.”
+A previous attempt to pass legislation that would make juveniles eligible for parole after serving 30 years instead of 51 years expired in committee last year. Part of the opposition to the bill cited the murder of a family in eastern Tennessee’s Greene County in 1997 by six youths, two of whom were 14 and 17 and were tried as adults. If passed, the bill would have retroactively applied to the Greene County killers.
+Dan Armstrong, the elected district attorney in the county, lobbied legislators last year when the bill for juvenile sentencing changes was being considered. He said such legislation would make a “mockery” of the judicial system, particularly in cases involving the murder of multiple people.
+“I understand the focus on juvenile justice reform,” he said. “I am not necessarily opposed to the idea. But the community has lived with this for over 20 years. How come we still have to fight this battle to keep these people in jail?”
+In Ms. Brown’s case, she had run away from home at 16 and lived with a pimp who raped and abused her while forcing her to become a prostitute, according to court documents. In 2004, a 43-year-old man picked her up in Nashville for sex and drove her to his home, the documents say.
+At one point, Ms. Brown said, she thought he was reaching for a gun to kill her. She later shot him in his sleep and fled, taking money and guns, the documents say. In 2006, a jury found her guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated robbery.SUGAR RUN, by Mesha Maren. (Algonquin, $26.95.) An ex-convict returns to her Appalachian roots in this debut novel that harks back to hard-boiled fiction and film noir even as it updates those venerable genres. “Though the powerful pulls of land and home and sense of place persist,” Charles Frazier writes in his review, “one of the primary questions ‘Sugar Run’ asks is what these concepts even mean now in this country. Maren is masterly at describing America’s modern wastelands, the blasted towns not yet and maybe never-to-be the beneficiaries of rehabilitation and reoccupation.”
+ANNE FRANK’S DIARY: The Graphic Adaptation, adapted by Ari Folman. Illustrated by David Polonsky. (Pantheon, $24.95.) By turning the famous diary of a girl hiding from the Nazis into a graphic novel, Folman and Polonsky bring out its wit and humor in whimsical illustrations capturing Anne’s rich imaginative life. “The comedy of the ‘Diary’ — one of the book’s most charming and often overlooked aspects — shines in this form,” our reviewer, Ruth Franklin, writes. “Another consistent standout is the way the graphic novel conveys Anne’s fantasies and emotions. … This graphic adaptation is so engaging and effective that it’s easy to imagine it replacing the ‘Diary’ in classrooms and among younger readers.”
+REVOLUTION SUNDAY, by Wendy Guerra. Translated by Achy Obejas. (Melville House, paper, $16.99.) This Cuban novel, about a poet named Cleo facing political and personal questions amid the loosening grip of socialism, plays with expectations; as often as Guerra gives a concrete description of Havana, she gives one that dances and evades. “More than in its plot — a Cold War conspiracy of sorts — the movement of ‘Revolution Sunday’ is in the coming and going from the island, the beacon that will find Cleo in Paris, Barcelona and New York,” Jaime Lalinde writes in his review. “What emerges in ‘Revolution Sunday’ is primarily a novel of the self, of an artist contending with her own vanishing. The paradox of isolation without privacy. The isle in the word exile.”
+GHOST WALL, by Sarah Moss. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $22.) This compact, riveting novel, about a 17-year-old working-class girl forced by her parents to join a re-enactment of Iron Age Britain, asks us to question our complicity in violence, particularly against women. According to Alyson Hagy’s review, Moss “salts the novel with women who practice ancient skills with modesty, who honor historical experience without slavishly imitating it. … If most of the women in ‘Ghost Wall’ find solidarity through collaboration, the men become transfixed by their desire ‘to kill things and talk about fighting.’”
+THE BREAKTHROUGH: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer, by Charles Graeber. (Twelve, $28.) Training the body’s immune system to fight disease now offers the most promising developments in the effort to battle cancer. Graeber recounts the treatment’s 19th-century origins and provides a panoramic view of the work being done today to make it effective. The book, Mimi Swartz writes in her review, “relates an unfolding and very frustrating mystery. Researchers have come tantalizingly close to beating the disease — even creating miraculous cures in mice and the occasional human — only to come up against another harrowing complexity in the body they hadn’t imagined or anticipated. Over the years, these scientists became like a platoon that could get itself behind enemy lines, only to find itself without weapons. Returning with weapons, they would find they had no bullets. Returning with bullets, they would discover they had the wrong kind, and so on. ‘The Breakthrough’ is the story of this desperate war waged on a cellular level.”WASHINGTON — President Trump vowed on Thursday to reinvigorate and reinvent American missile defenses in a speech that recalled Cold War-era visions of nuclear adversaries — though he never once mentioned Russia or China, the two great-power threats to the United States.
+While the president infused the new missile efforts with his ambitions for a Space Force, the actual plans released by the Pentagon were far more incremental. As a political matter, Mr. Trump’s speech seemed designed to play well with his base, a tough-sounding call to a new generation of arms that evoked Ronald Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” missile defense program.
+But the timing was awkward.
+The president’s enthusiastic endorsement of new technologies to detect and intercept incoming missiles stands in sharp contrast to his demand, for example, for a decidedly low-tech barrier — a wall — on the southwestern border to stop migrants from illegally entering the United States. And his call for billions of dollars in new spending on missile defenses comes as the government is shut down in a dispute over $5.7 billion for that wall.
+“Our goal is simple: to ensure that we can detect and destroy any missile launched against the United States anywhere, any time, any place,” Mr. Trump said.BOGOTÁ, Colombia — The suspect in a car bombing that left 21 people dead on Thursday in Bogotá, the capital,was a member of the country’s largest remaining guerrilla group, the defense ministry said Friday.
+José Aldemar Rojas Rodríguez, the assailant who was also killed in the attack, was a member of the National Liberation Army, a Marxist rebel group known as the ELN, said Guillermo Botero, the Colombian defense minister.
+The group did not claim responsibility for the bombing, but it has stepped up attacks against the government since its rival, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, signed a peace deal with the government in 2016.
+Thursday’s attack was the first car bombing in Bogotá in years, a gruesome reminder of a time when drug lords and rebel groups ravaged the capital’s streets with car bombs, killing hundreds of civilians and members of the security forces. Since the signing of the peace accords, the Colombian government has said it turned the page on that violent era.Mr. Cohen was supposed to pay Mr. Gauger $50,000 for the work, the man told The Journal, but the full amount was never paid out. However, Mr. Cohen billed the Trump Organization $50,000 for technology services, according to federal prosecutors in Manhattan, who referenced the amount in a charging document.
+Mr. Cohen did not respond to a message seeking comment. Mr. Gauger could not be reached for comment.
+According to The Journal, Mr. Cohen also asked during the 2016 campaign for Mr. Gauger’s help establishing a “Women for Cohen” Twitter feed that described Mr. Cohen as a “sex symbol,” and sought to promote his public appearances. Mr. Cohen was a frequent cable news presence during the 2016 campaign in support of Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Cohen has agreed to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on Feb. 7. Mr. Cohen’s testimony will be restricted to avoid issues directly related to the special counsel investigation into whether there was collusion by anyone in the Trump campaign with Russian officials.
+Over the weekend, Mr. Trump, in an interview on Fox News, tried to urge prosecutors and members of the media to investigate Mr. Cohen’s family, and he blasted his former fixer as “weak.”In 2016, Atelier Vime, a Provence-based antiques dealer and wicker workshop, was established in an old hôtel particulier in the village of Vallabrègues, France. Though it’s far from any passing foot traffic, within a matter of months the brand’s wicker and rattan furniture had caught the attention of interior designers, including Pierre Yovanovitch, Charles Zana and David Netto. “Instagram is how people found us,” says Anthony Watson, who started Atelier Vime with his partner in life and business, Benoit Rauzy, and the designer Raphaëlle Hanley. “When we opened an account three years ago, we were unknown in the interiors business, but then it all happened quite quickly.”
+Vime’s feed is a lush showcase for its collection of hand-woven furniture and objects — such as mirrors, pedestals and light fixtures — along with an array of rattan, wicker, raffia and rope designs by midcentury designers like Tito Agnoli, Charlotte Perriand, Adrien Audoux and Frida Minnet. The account also offers a window into Watson’s and Rauzy’s unique aesthetic universe: an unusual but arresting mix of rustic designs and Louis XV furniture set against the backdrop of the house in Vallabrègues. (Unsurprisingly, Atelier Vime is expanding its offerings to include interior design services.)
+Image The American artist Wayne Pate (left) with Atelier Vime’s Benoit Rauzy, Raphaëlle Hanley and Anthony Watson in their home-cum-showroom in Paris, from where they are selling their designs and the work of other designers and artists. Credit... Young-Ah Kim
+This week, to coincide with the Parisian design fairs Maison & Objet and Deco Off, Atelier Vime invites clients and collectors to step inside its world. Rauzy and Watson have transformed five rooms of their pre-Haussmann duplex in Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood into a showroom for their permanent collection, along with six new styles — among them wicker place mats, lamps and a daybed — and an array of objects they’ve curated from artisans they admire. “The idea is to show what we like,” says Rauzy of the mix, which includes curtains they designed with Pierre Frey, ceramic vases from fellow Provençal artisans Les Dalo and hand-printed cushions from the American artist Drusus Tabor. “We are all newcomers from the same generation, and we have the same approach.”“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign or between people in the campaign,” he told CNN. He added: “I said the president of the United States. There is not a single bit of evidence the president of the United States committed the only crime you could commit here, conspired with the Russians to hack” the Democratic National Committee.
+[ Trump allies have repeatedly shifted their defense as evidence of contacts with Russians grew.]
+Mr. Giuliani’s backpedaling was the latest in a series of conflicting comments he has made about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III. The evolution of his statements have suggested shifts in the president’s defense strategy, often following developments in the investigations. On Tuesday, prosecutors for the special counsel filed a 200-page, mostly redacted court document related to the case against Mr. Trump’s onetime campaign chairman, Paul Manafort. Among the little information that was not blacked out were details about his relationship with a Russian whom prosecutors have said has ties to Russian intelligence.
+The special counsel’s document was in response to a recent filing by Mr. Manafort’s legal team, which inadvertently disclosed that Mr. Manafort had provided his Russian associate with American polling data — details that offer the clearest example yet that the Trump campaign may have tried to coordinate with Russia before the 2016 election.
+Mr. Giuliani has previously denied that there was coordination by Trump campaign aides.
+“When I say the Trump campaign, I mean the upper levels of the Trump campaign,” Mr. Giuliani said during a July interview with Fox News. “I have no reason to believe anybody else did. The only ones I checked with obviously are the top four or five people.”And it wasn’t just voters who think Mr. King’s career is nearing an end: Republican officials are already planning to move past him, and are busy recruiting and raising money for primary challengers in 2020 if he does not step down.
+Mr. King says he has no plans to seek “another line of work,” as Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate majority leader, recommended this week. He pushed back on Wednesday in a fund-raising letter to supporters, writing that “the unhinged Left has teamed up with Republican ‘NeverTrumpers’ and is pulling out all the stops to destroy me.”
+He attacked The New York Times, which published a quotation from him in an article last week that led to the firestorm in Congress.
+“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive?” Mr. King told The Times, comments he now says were taken out of context.
+Some longtime supporters in Mr. King’s Fourth District said that even if the nine-term congressman defiantly stays on, they will most likely back a primary challenger. Two candidates announced this week that they would jump into the race, including a prominent Republican state lawmaker, Randy Feenstra, and others are expected.
+The Fort Dodge Messenger, which in November endorsed Mr. King over his Democratic challenger, J.D. Scholten, issued an unusual correction on Wednesday night calling on Mr. King to resign.The sly question teased in “Unbreakable,” the mystery that sets it apart from run-of-the-mill grandiose superhero fables, is whether Dunn is the real deal or if Glass merely wants a foil worthy of his self-aggrandizement. In “Unbreakable,” Dunn starts off as a seemingly average guy, a security guard who’s strictly a Clark Kent. Dunn knows that he’s different (he senses evil through touch), but his powers awaken only because of Glass. When the new movie opens, Glass is under wraps and Dunn has been stealthily doing his superhero thing for a while, sneakily saving the day under cover of the security company that he runs with his son (Spencer Treat Clark, reprising the same role).
+“Glass” opens smoothly with some small-scale heroics that set the humorous, twitchy tone and showcases Dunn, who’s still fighting while wearing an identity-obscuring rain poncho. The off-the-rack costume is crucial to his low-key charm and vibe. It’s also representative of Shyamalan’s eccentric, intimately scaled superhero universe, one that leans on quirks of personality and quotidian fears rather than on computer-generated special effects and world-destroying brawls. His heroes and villains are invariably more ordinary — and human — than extraordinary, which raises the stakes and amplifies the tension.
+Shyamalan finds a way to cram Dunn, Glass and Crumb into the same fictional universe, but he hasn’t found a persuasive way to make them fit together. He seems to know that, and so, after the reintroductions and other throat-clearing preliminaries, Shyamalan just locks all three in the same mental hospital. There, they are tended by a spectacularly inept shrink, Dr. Staple (Sarah Paulson), who insists that they are merely delusional. The actor Luke Kirby, who’s currently playing Lenny Bruce on the Amazon show “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” pops up as a hospital attendant, casting that I turned into an imaginary franchise crossover whenever “Glass” started to sag.
+And it does with increasing frequency, even if, for the most part, there is enough in the movie — creeping cameras, off-kilter boos, eye-popping mauve and especially its three male leads — to offset the longueurs, obvious filler and rickety plotting. Shyamalan has been celebrated for his twisty stories, but his truer strength is his gifts for infusing outwardly banal moments with dread and for his work with actors. McAvoy takes his shirt off distractingly often (his pumped bare chest is a special effect), but his quicksilver character changes are fun and often delicate. Jackson and especially Willis remind you again of how fine they can be when asked for more than booming shtick and smirk.Are there any health risks associated with reusable-cloth menstrual pads? I recently read an article about cups, tampons and sponges, but was disappointed that the article didn't touch on cloth pads. I currently use them but haven't found much information on them from health professionals.
+— asked by Marie
+Short take
+Reusable menstrual pads are well-tolerated and just fine. Never use a sea sponge. Ever.
+[Have a question about women’s health? Ask Dr. Gunter yourself.]
+Tell me more
+There are several studies looking at providing women with reusable menstrual cloths designed specifically for menstruation in countries where women have limited access to products for menstrual hygiene. The material is the same or similar to that used for cloth diapers. These menstrual cloths are generally safe to use and many women seem to like them. Anecdotally, over the years many patients of mine have reported using reusable cloth menstrual pads and have been very satisfied.
+The biggest medical risk with any menstrual hygiene product that sits against your vulva is inadequate absorbency. If the cloth or pad is wet, it will irritate the skin. Irritation from the actual material itself does happen, but that is much less common. If you are not wet and don’t feel irritated then the reusable pad or cloth you are using is likely just fine.With a plan to mount the cables along the wall, we then asked ourselves whether removing all of the bench wall — a time-consuming, fraught and expensive endeavor — was necessary. In fact, inspections have indicated that, at most, 40 percent of it is damaged, and we have proposed demolishing only the heavily damaged sections, leaving intact the structurally sound parts.
+The purpose of the bench wall in the new plan is solely to provide a pathway for access by maintenance workers and an emergency exit.
+The parts to be removed would be replaced with a fiberglass or steel walkway that is considerably easier to install than a new concrete structure. Proven fiber-reinforced polymer — a solution used to strengthen critical load-bearing infrastructure such as bridges — would be used to further strengthen remaining bench wall.
+In replacing only the damaged sections, the work can be done in increments on nights and weekends — and we would avoid the total shutdown of the subway line. Our plan would also reduce the amount of hazardous silica dust that results from demolition of the bench wall. We recommend the whole process be monitored by an external agency to further ensure safety.
+A high-tech laser system, known as Light Detection and Ranging, or Lidar, would be used to monitor the structural integrity of the bench wall and the tunnel itself. Smart fiber-optic sensor cables installed along the structure could detect any shifts or cracks, enabling the transit agency to identify, then repair or remove bench wall as needed in the years to come.
+All other upgrades in the original plan — increasing pump capacity, renovating track and stations, enhancing flood resiliency — remain in our plan.
+We are aware that our proposal is a unique approach to the tunnel restoration. Some have referred to it as a “patch job” — but nothing could be further from the truth.Tell Us About an Overlooked Activist in the Civil Rights Movement
+Help us build a more complete account of the civil rights movement by telling us the untold stories of foot soldiers.
+Demonstrators in front of an Indianapolis hotel where Gov. George Wallace of Alabama was staying, in April 1964. Credit... Bob Daugherty/Associated PressThe plot of the season premiere is simple: The Discovery links up with a disabled Enterprise — and what a joy to see the classic ship depicted with 21st century graphics — and must investigate several “red signals” that are emerging across the universe. Pike takes control of the Discovery, with Mount evincing the same rugged charisma Bruce Greenwood brought as Pike to the J.J. Abrams “Star Trek” films. I should also note: Mount also serves as an indirect replacement for last season’s rugged captain, Gabriel Lorca (Jason Isaacs).
+“Brother” has everything that the best episodes of “Trek” have historically had: a mystery, excellent ensemble work with a genuine sense of camaraderie, action scenes that don’t overwhelm the plot and most importantly, genuine fun. Several episodes in the first season of “Discovery” didn’t work because it didn’t feel like the crew enjoyed being around each other — recall for example how much antipathy members of the bridge had toward Burnham for much of the season.
+Now, that seems to have melted away. In addition, Tig Notaro — TIG NOTARO! — is a welcome addition of the cast as Jett Reno, an officer who has found a way to keep her crash-landed crew alive even though she’s not a doctor. It’s great fun to watch one of the world’s best stand-up comics navigate the “Star Trek” universe — and Notaro really seems to embrace her role with gusto.
+Another aspect from last season which thankfully we don’t see in the premiere: Klingons. The depiction of the Federation’s most hated foe was very poorly received by fans, for good reason. The dialogue was difficult to follow and the choices made by the characters were baffling. Now, it appears that Klingons and the Federation are at peace — and we don’t have to see them for a little while.
+But there is an elephant on the bridge. Spock, who will be played by Ethan Peck, was not seen in the season opener. This is the one element that has left fans on edge since even before the series premiere. It’s always been a sore point that Burnham is supposed to be Spock’s foster brother, whom apparently we never hear about in the history of all of “Star Trek.” In “Brother,” we get hints about this. Burnham suggests that Spock didn’t accept her as a sibling — which seems, frankly, out of character for Spock, but it’s too early to determine that until we see how this story unfolds.“I never said there was no collusion between the campaign, or between people in the campaign —” “Yes, you have —” “I have no idea if — I have not.” “Quote: ‘There is no evidence of collusion.’ Now, I know that because I’ve been privy to a lot of facts I can’t repeat. But the reality is no evidence of collusion.” “So if anything, it’s proof there was no collusion.” “This whole thing of Russian collusion didn’t happen.” “This is a witch hunt. There is no evidence of collusion with the Russians.” “Russian collusion is a total — fake news.”If Dr. King came back and seen the way things are, he wouldn’t be pleased with it. No, he wouldn’t be pleased at all. All right. I call us sanitation engineers because we’re supposed to run the job, not let the job run us. I was 24 years old when I started. But back then, it was a different ball game. Back then, the working condition, it was unbearable. After three weeks, when I got my first check, I broke down and cried. We were working full time. And at the same time, the wages were so low, we was qualified to get food stamps. We were determined that we was going to get a union organized, that we would see justice. We were striking about the wages, fair treatment and dignity. When we heard that Dr. King was coming to Memphis to help us in that sanitation strike, we were very surprised. We knew then that there was somebody that cared about our struggle. We was at Mason Temple this particular night. Dr. King said, the Lord allowed me to go to the mountaintop and to look over into the promised land. And he said, I might not get there with you, but we will make it to the promised land. Everybody was just jubilated, just excited, not knowing the next day would be a day of silence. Because of Dr. King’s death, that was one of the reasons that Mayor Loeb went on and signed that union into a decree. We got what we wanted, but at the same time, we lost the great leader. “He never thought in terms of his personal welfare, but always in terms of the cause which he dedicated his life to.” I really had a lot of animosity. I came from the streets. I was a street thug. And Dr. King was the one that taught me, through his humility and his leadership. I said, that’s the way I’d like to be. “— united will never be defeated. The workers united will never be defeated. The workers united will never be defeated. The workers united will never be defeated.” There are still some unsolved problems need to be solved. “What do we want?” “15.” “When do we want it?” “Now!” “What do we want?” “15.” “When do want it?” “Now!” It is what it is until somebody can roll his sleeves up and get out there and fight.For six years, my husband and I have been great friends with two other couples. We ate together, traveled together and hung out a lot. Recently, the other couples told me (separately, but within a month of each other) that they are no longer willing to spend time with my husband. No reason was given. Both couples said they are open to seeing me without him. This is going to break my husband’s heart! Should I tell him directly, or let him discover that he’s being ghosted over time? Is there any way to continue my relationship with these friends?
+ANONYMOUS
+I’m sort of astonished that you didn’t ask your friends (either time!) why your husband was being cast out into the desert. Does this mean you have a hunch? Or maybe it’s not the first time they’ve mentioned their difficulties with him. Either way, I would ask for a clear explanation of the problem.
+We all have failings. But if we’re put on notice of them constructively, we can often make big improvements. If your husband is a conversation hog, occasionally snarky, or too strident in his politics, he can work on those issues if he is told about them. I also get that it can be hard to lodge complaints with friends, especially if they’re defensive. But six years of camaraderie should buy your husband some good will.
+Of course, there are other problems that are much harder, if not impossible, to bounce back from: if your husband has been cruel, for example, or behaved in seriously inappropriate ways. So, find out what the beef is, discuss it with your husband directly, and decide together if there’s a feasible plan for rehabilitation.Many orchestras pass their batons from one conductor to another. Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, based in San Francisco and one of the country’s most respected period-instrument ensembles, will be passing its harpsichord, too.
+The orchestra announced on Thursday that its next music director would be the conductor (and harpsichordist) Richard Egarr, who will succeed the conductor (and harpsichordist) Nicholas McGegan, stepping down from the post in 2020, after 35 years.
+Mr. Egarr is currently the music director of the Academy of Ancient Music in Britain, where he took over from its founder, Christopher Hogwood, in 2006. He will step down from that post — where his tenure included performing Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas” in Libya — in 2021.Updated: Jan. 24, 2019
+Students
+1. This graph compares the yearly average winter (December – February) temperature in the continental United States to the 20th century average U. S. winter temperature. The graph originally appeared elsewhere on NYTimes.com.
+After looking closely at the graphs above (or at this full-size image), think about these three questions:
+• What do you notice?
+Why do you think this is?
+• What do you wonder?
+What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph?
+• What might be going on in this graph?
+Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
+The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order. Start with “I notice,” then “I wonder,” and end with “The story this graph is telling is ….” and a catchy headline.
+2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment. Teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say, or they can have their students use this same activity on Desmos.)This feature is meant to send you into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart. Want to get The Week in Good News by email? Sign up here.
+Here are seven great things we wrote about this week:
+Gymnastics can be a serious business. But Katelyn Ohashi of U.C.L.A. didn’t just deliver a brilliant technical performance last weekend — she also did it with an infectious smile and a sense of genuine fun. A video of her routine attracted millions of viewers on YouTube. The enthusiastic reaction of her teammates on the sidelines, some of them echoing her dance moves, is also worth watching.
+“Performing is my favorite thing,” she said in a telephone interview. “What you see is how I feel.” Read more »After replacing Robert Mugabe as the president of Zimbabwe in late 2017, Emmerson Mnangagwa promised a “new” Zimbabwe, a country with “a thriving and open economy, jobs for its youth, opportunities for investors and democracy and equal rights for all.” But those hopes have died as Mr. Mnangagwa has turned out to be no different from the strongman he served for decades and eventually deposed.
+On Sunday, Mr. Mnangagwa announced a more than 150 percent increase in the fuel price. In response, the Zimbabwean Congress of Trade Unions and the prominent civil society leader Pastor Evan Mawarire called for a three-day strike starting Monday against the increasing fuel price and worsening economic conditions.
+In a broad crackdown, the government blocked the internet — and with it, social media. It deployed the military and the police in urban centers and residential areas of Harare and Bulawayo, the two major cities, where they opened fire on protesters. At least eight people were killed, 68 were shot, and 100 cases of “assaults with sharp objects, booted feet, baton sticks” were reported as the strike continued on Wednesday.
+Confidence in Mr. Mnangagwa’s government has fallen over the past several months as the economy has steadily slid toward a crisis. Zimbabwe has been facing a currency shortage, which has led to devaluation of salaries. Doctors have only recently returned to work after a six-week strike over salaries and working conditions, and their demands have not been met. Civil servants, who number 300,000 and earn between $280 and $300 per month, recently threatened to strike, demanding higher salaries and to have a portion of their salaries paid in dollars.Infants and toddlers were among the children who were put into foster homes or migrant children shelters, often hundreds or thousands of miles away from where their parents were detained. Under separate policies, the administration also made it difficult for relatives other than the children’s parents to take the children into their own homes.
+After a review of internal government tallies, The New York Times found last year that more than 700 migrant children had been separated from their families in the months before the government officially announced the zero-tolerance policy.
+On June 26, 2018, a federal judge in San Diego, in response to the A.C.L.U. lawsuit, directed the federal government to halt the separations at the border and to reunite children with their parents. President Trump rescinded the policy that same month.
+However, the federal inspectors found that separations have continued to occur: As of November, the report found, Health and Human Services had received at least 118 children who had been separated from their families since the court order.
+Officials at the Department of Homeland Security, which oversaw the family separations at the border, have said they have separated families only when necessary, such as when a parent is facing a serious criminal prosecution, or when authorities have reason to believe that the adult accompanying the child is not an appropriate guardian.
+“The report vindicates what D.H.S. has long been saying,” said Katie Waldman, a spokeswoman for the department. “For more than a decade it was, and continues to be, standard for apprehended minors to be separated when the adult is not the parent or legal guardian, the child’s safety is at risk, or serious criminal activity by the adult. We are required under the law that Congress passed to send all unaccompanied alien children to H.H.S.”
+Ann Maxwell, the Health and Human Services Department’s assistant inspector general for evaluation and inspections, said the separations appeared to have been occurring for a full year before the court issued its order.Sometimes the wording suggested that the market was nearing its bottom. Writers didn’t know the decline was over, but evidently felt comfortable joking about it: “Bear Country Good Territory for Stock Hunting,” one headline said.
+That lighthearted approach was unfortunate because the S&P 500 turned out to be less than halfway through its decline. Ultimately, from its 2000 peak it dropped 49.1 percent through Oct. 9, 2002, before turning up. In real terms, correcting for inflation, that was more than a 50 percent price drop from peak to trough.
+Then there was the stock market of the Great Recession. The S&P 500 peaked on Oct. 9, 2007. It became a bear market, having declined over 20 percent, on July 11, 2008.
+There were lots of bear jokes that July, with suggestions that the start of a bear market signaled the end of a process: “Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Bear,” was the headline of a Wall Street Journal article then. Still, the market kept going down, and bottomed on March 9, 2009, after losing 56.7 percent of its peak value.
+Those two episodes tell us something important: The start of a bear market doesn’t mean much. From a historical perspective, it is clear that a 20 percent decline does not predict further market movements with any certainty.
+That may not have been obvious between 1980 and 1990, when the 20 percent definition of a bear market first became established, because there were then two fairly recent 20 percent declines from S&P 500 peaks that did not precede sharper falls.
+On March 3, 1982, after dropping 21.1 percent from a Nov. 28, 1980, peak and entering what we would now call bear market territory, the S&P 500 fell only 6 percent further. And after a one-day S&P 500 decline of 20.5 percent on Oct. 19, 1987, the index fell only 0.4 percent further to a trough on Dec. 4, 1987.You have many relatives who’ve also been successful in the technology industry. How do you explain that?
+Entrepreneurship is in my family’s blood. My grandfather and all of his brothers started a great company together almost 100 years ago. It was called Alborz Corporation, and it was one of the largest industrial companies in Iran. They started by being a trading company and importing goods, but then all the most popular goods they’d import they’d start manufacturing locally, in partnership with whoever was the original producer. Then the entire company was taken away by the government as part of the revolution. So growing up in America, there was this desire for us to effectively make back the money that our family had lost.
+After you graduated college you went to work for Microsoft. What did you work on while you were there?
+The project I’m most proud of is Internet Explorer. Today, Internet Explorer is the dead bastard stepchild of the Web browser market. But I joined that team when it was nine people and two years behind Netscape Navigator in the famous browser wars. It was one of the craziest start-up experiences in a very large company. My proudest creation there was Internet Explorer 5.0 and 5.5. At the time it was a really fantastic product.
+It’s a bit hard to imagine Microsoft acting like a start-up.
+The Internet Explorer team was probably the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve been at multiple start-ups. We would have foosball tournaments for the team at 2 a.m., just to get everybody’s energy back up to continue working. Everybody was working every day, every night. One of the team managers had a sign on his door saying, “This is why I’m going home this evening.” And it was a picture that his daughter had made of the family that showed mommy and daddy and son. But, the picture of daddy was a car leaving the garage. There were many divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But what I learned was that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 50 or 100 people to work like their life depends on it.
+You’ve gone on to be an angel investor. How do you decide which companies to invest in?
+I give coding interviews to the chief technology officers of any start-up I invest in. When I met Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi from Dropbox, I flew them out to meet in Seattle, and I had them both do coding interviews in my house. I had them take a list of numbers and remove all the duplicates from the list. And the other was to write the code to shuffle a deck of cards. So, relatively simple stuff. I mean, you should be able to do it in 20 minutes if you know what you’re doing. It’s not rocket science.
+I’m not a coder. Is there one right answer to those questions?
+No. There’s a little back and forth of seeing how you’re going to go about the problem. And also since these were two that were going to be start-up founders, what are their communication skills like? Because if the C.E.O. just writes the answers and gives it back to you, that’s different than if they walk you through their thinking and explain why they come up with something. When you’re interviewing a potential leader you need to look for both of those things.Her poems, which are built of unadorned language and accessible imagery, have a pedagogical, almost homiletic quality. It was this, combined with their relative brevity, that seemed to endear her work to a broad public, including clerics, who quoted it in their sermons; poetry therapists, who found its uplifting sensibility well suited to their work; composers, like Ronald Perera and Augusta Read Thomas, who set it to music; and celebrities like Laura Bush and Maria Shriver.
+All this, combined with the throngs that turned out for her public readings, conspired to give Ms. Oliver, fairly late in life, the aura of a reluctant, bookish rock star.
+Throughout her work, Ms. Oliver was occupied with intimate observations of flora and fauna, as many of her titles — “Mushrooms,” “Egrets,” “The Swan,” “The Rabbit,” “The Waterfall” — attest. Read on one level, these poems are sensualist still lifes: Often set in and around the woods, marshes and tide pools of Provincetown, Mass., where she lived for more than 40 years, they offer impeccable descriptions of the land and its nonhuman tenants in a spare, formally conservative, conversational style.
+In “Spring,” here in its entirety, she wrote:
+I lift my face to the pale flowers of the rain. They’re soft as linen, clean as holy water. Meanwhile my dog runs off, noses down packed leaves into damp, mysterious tunnels. He says the smells are rising now stiff and lively; he says the beasts are waking up now full of oil, sleep sweat, tag-ends of dreams. The rain rubs its shining hands all over me. My dog returns and barks fiercely, he says each secret body is the richest advisor , deep in the black earth such fuming nuggets of joy!
+For her abiding communion with nature, Ms. Oliver was often compared to Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. For her quiet, measured observations, and for her fiercely private personal mien (she gave many readings but few interviews, saying she wanted her work to speak for itself), she was likened to Emily Dickinson.
+Ms. Oliver often described her vocation as the observation of life, and it is clear from her texts that she considered the vocation a quasi-religious one. Her poems — those about nature as well as those on other subjects — are suffused with a pulsating, almost mystical spirituality, as in the work of the American Transcendentalists or English poets like William Blake and Gerard Manley Hopkins.“He’ll coach as long as he wants to coach,” Buford said.
+Whether or not he stays on the Spurs’ bench, Popovich has committed to spending the next two summers coaching the men’s national team for U.S.A. Basketball, at the 2019 FIBA World Cup in China and the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo. An Air Force Academy graduate who was one of the final cuts from the 1972 American Olympic team, Popovich has served as a U.S.A. Basketball assistant — but this will be his first stint in charge after being named to replace Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University as the head coach in October 2015.
+Among the challenges Popovich would face next season, should he elect to keep coaching the Spurs, is a turnaround of just two weeks between the end of the World Cup on Sept. 15 and the start of N.B.A. training camps.
+The Spurs have recovered from their off-season trade of Kawhi Leonard, the disgruntled All-Star forward, and an 11-14 start this season — the worst record under Popovich through 25 games. A 15-6 surge since then has moved them to No. 6 in the Western Conference.
+San Antonio is seeking a 22nd consecutive playoff appearance in a run that began in Popovich’s first full season as head coach. He coached the final 64 games of a 20-62 campaign in 1996-97, which earned San Antonio the No. 1 pick in the 1997 draft and the right to select Tim Duncan.Consider all the visual material on your devices, the photographs and videos on your phone and hard drive. Family pictures, cats, random visual notes. Images that friends sent and that you never deleted.
+Imagine compiling them into a single reel. What story would it tell? What would it exaggerate or distort? What would it miss? And if you stretched the exercise to cover a long period — say, 12 years — what insight might emerge out of the noise?
+That’s what Banu Cennetoglu decided to find out.
+“The intention was going a little bit inward,” said the Istanbul-based artist , who turned to this project after a draining period of artistic and emotional labor. “But I realized in doing it that it’s a collective history.”Leslie Moonves, the former chief executive of CBS, plans to fight a decision by the company’s board that denied him a $120 million severance payment after he was fired for cause following numerous allegations of sexual misconduct.
+Mr. Moonves, 69, told CBS that he was demanding an arbitration hearing, according to a securities filing on Wednesday. His termination agreement gives him that right, and he had up to 30 days after his Dec. 17 firing to challenge the board’s decision to not pay him the severance.
+Under the terms of his termination agreement, CBS has been paying Mr. Moonves’s legal fees, making it easier for him to challenge the board through an arbitration hearing. The process could end up costing CBS as much as $50 million in lawyers’ fees. But should CBS prevail, Mr. Moonves would have to foot the bill himself.
+The details of the arbitration hearing will remain confidential, and any decision will be binding, according to the terms of Mr. Moonves’s separation agreement.Neil LaBute has long been accused of being a meanspirited nihilist who does not like his characters. Yet for the past 15 years or so, reviews have been pointing out that he’s softened up — by now his reputation is more fearsome than his actual shows.
+Besides, those doing the disliking are Mr. LaBute’s characters, not him. Much of his work is about the power struggles between people who try to camouflage their mutual antipathy under the veneer of social graces. Inevitably, that veneer cracks.
+And so it does in “Great Negro Works of Art,” the centerpiece of the three 30-minute plays that make up the “LaBute New Theater Festival,” a new anthology presented by the St. Louis Actors’ Studio at the Davenport Theater. (This is Mr. LaBute’s first major New York production — albeit a soft re-entry — since MCC Theater announced last February that it was terminating both their forthcoming collaboration and his position as playwright-in-residence, abruptly ending an association that had generated 10 shows, including “Fat Pig” and “Reasons to Be Pretty.”)
+A two-hander sandwiched by a pair of solo pieces, “Great Negro Works of Art” is an ur-LaButian text, starting with a title that should inspire an anticipatory wince, but vague enough to make it difficult to pinpoint the issue.So I tried a glass with a smoky, charred lamb salad, and loved it. It’s an experience I’ve had the pleasure of repeating several times since.
+That wine was the Ritinitis Nobilis from Gaia, one of Greece’s best modern wineries. Since it was first issued, back in 1998, Gaia has been trying to redefine retsina as a proud custom rather than a genre to be shunned.
+Image Gaia Ritinitis Nobilis at Souvla in San Francisco. Credit... Jason Henry for The New York Times
+The origin of Ritinitis Nobilis stretches back more than 25 years ago to the days before Gaia, when Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, a founder and the winemaker, was working at Boutari, a historic Greek producer. A mentor, Yiannis Boutaris, of the family that owned Boutari, dropped an offhand remark that stayed with him: Retsina can be a wine of quality.
+That remark challenged him, he said, both to determine whether it was true and to see if he could do it.
+“Quality retsinas didn’t really exist back then,” Mr. Paraskevopoulos wrote in an email. At the time, he said, they were more a source of shame.
+“Retsina was Greece’s national wine, and as such it needed protection,” he said. “The thing is, you can neither protect nor promote something that isn’t good. I had to make a good one.”Bonnie Guitar, who had hit records as a country singer and guitarist, but whose biggest achievement may have been her work as a businesswoman in the male-dominated music industry, died on Jan. 12 in Soap Lake, Wash. She was 95.
+Howard Reitzes, a longtime friend, confirmed her death, at a rehabilitation hospital.
+Ms. Guitar was best known for her recording of “Dark Moon,” a Top 20 country single on the Dot label that crossed over to the pop Top 10 in 1957. The record, a haunting nocturne sung in a clear-toned alto, was, along with Patsy Cline’s “Walkin’ After Midnight” — which reached the pop Top 40 the same year — one of the earliest records by a female country singer to cross over to the pop chart.
+“Dark Moon,” which also made the pop Top 10 in a subsequent version by Gale Storm, earned Ms. Guitar an invitation to appear on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in June 1957. Later that year she performed “Mister Fire Eyes,” her successful follow-up to “Dark Moon,” on the TV show “American Bandstand.”
+But the achievement for which Ms. Guitar never really received her due, perhaps because she decided to remain in her native Washington instead of resettling in a major recording center like Los Angeles or Nashville, was her trailblazing work as a studio maven and entrepreneur. Over seven decades she did everything from engineer recordings to scout talent and run a record label.In trying to bring freshness to standard repertory works, Mr. van Zweden has a tendency to overdo things. With his insightful account of this symphony, though, he did almost the opposite. He brought out inner details, revealing the rhetoric of the piece — that is, the way phrases are written like sentences, grouped into paragraphs, even when the music seems on the surface to run on with overextended elaborations of themes.
+Rachmaninoff was in his mid-30s when he wrote the Second Symphony, first performed in 1908, and still felt bruised by the hostile reaction to his First a decade earlier. The slow Largo section that opens the piece unfolded like the introduction to an essay, with themes almost presented for consideration. The orchestral sound is rich and thick, with passages played over dark, sustained bass tones. Yet the performance had remarkable lucidity and breadth, which continued as the Largo segued into the restless, expansive Allegro main section of the first movement.
+Mr. van Zweden drew crisp, snappy playing from the orchestra in the exuberant, scherzo-like second movement. The intriguing way he began the slow movement made it seem like it starts in the middle of some long melodic line. His approach set up the Adagio’s true theme, a wistful, elegiac melody for solo clarinet, played gorgeously by Anthony McGill, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet. The account of the finale captured all its headlong energy, music at once festive and frenzied.
+Mr. Bronfman has made news in recent years at the Philharmonic in the premieres of daunting concertos written for him by Esa-Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg. There was plenty of sparkling passagework in his playing of Beethoven’s ebullient Second Concerto. But he seemed intent on highlighting the music’s reflective passages and poetic flights, especially in his dreamy account of the slow movement.BELGRADE, Serbia — The water in Belgrade’s central fountain was lit Russian red, ceremonial artillery blasts thundered at the palace, and tens of thousands of Serbs were bused in from around the country to welcome President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday.
+If the tableau seemed more fitting for the days of kings than a typical state visit, these are no ordinary times for Serbia, which once again finds itself tugged between East and West in ways hauntingly reminiscent of the Cold War.
+Then, Yugoslavia, with its capital in Belgrade, managed to stay out of the Soviet bloc, though it was nominally aligned with it. Now, amid resurgent competition for political and economic influence in Europe, especially in the Balkans, that strategy seems suddenly relevant.
+With Serbia seeking to join the European Union without damaging its ties with Moscow, this country on the eastern flank of Europe is in play all over again.In the 1935 film “Princesse Tam-Tam,” Josephine Baker’s title character is at a chic club when she forgets herself — and her lessons in acting white — at the sound of an African drum. As Baker enters into ecstatic communion with a feverish conga beat, the image cuts back and forth between the black drummer and the floppy-limbed, convulsing black dancer.
+At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Wednesday, the soprano Julia Bullock, the museum’s artist in residence, presented “Perle Noire: Meditations for Joséphine,” a tribute to the first black international superstar and a defining figure of the Jazz Age. Here, too, the diva shared center stage with an array of drums. But Ms. Bullock and her creative partner, the percussionist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, offered a very different image from the exoticized object of European fantasies in “Princesse Tam-Tam.”
+Their darkly captivating show offered a haunting investigation into the psychological shadows and public constructions that shaped the career of a woman who was “no more primal than Princess Grace,” as Ms. Bullock says in the piece, but for whom the most direct route to entertainment royalty and a chateau in the Périgord meant donning a banana skirt.
+Ms. Bullock, who like Baker was born in St. Louis, wrote in the program notes that she, too, has sometimes felt the expectation to embrace exotic roles. She became fascinated with Baker’s story, which led from the black vaudeville circuit in Jim Crow America to stardom in Paris, a World War II role in the French Resistance and, back in the United States, public advocacy for the civil rights movement. In this work, which has been revised after previous versions unveiled at festivals in 2016, Ms. Bullock probes the cruelties and constraints that molded Baker and continue to afflict black artists.Is it biologically plausible that cannabis could cause a psychotic disorder?
+Yes. Brain scientists know very little about the underlying biology of psychotic conditions, other than that hundreds of common gene variants are likely involved. Schizophrenia, for instance, is not a uniform disorder but an umbrella term for an array of unexplained problems involving recurrent psychosis, and other common symptoms.
+Even so, there is circumstantial evidence for a biological mechanism. Psychotic disorders tend to emerge in late adolescence or early adulthood, during or after a period of rapid brain development. In the teenage years, the brain strips away unneeded or redundant connections between brain cells, in a process called synaptic pruning. This editing is concentrated in the prefrontal cortex, the region behind the forehead where thinking and planning occur — and the region that is perturbed in psychotic conditions.
+The region is rich with so-called CB1 receptors, which are involved in the pruning, and are engaged by cannabis use. And alterations to the pruning process may well increase schizophrenia risk, according to recent research at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard. In a 2016 analysis, scientists there found that people with the disorder often have a gene variant that appears to accelerate the pruning process.
+What does this mean for me?
+Experts may debate whether cannabis use can lead to psychotic disorders, but they mostly agree on how to minimize one’s risk.
+Psychotic conditions tend to run in families, which suggests there is an inherited genetic vulnerability. Indeed, according to some studies, people prone to or at heightened risk of psychosis seem to experience the effects of cannabis differently than peers without such a history. The users experience a more vivid high, but they also are more likely to experience psychosis-like effects such as paranoia.
+The evidence so far indicates that one’s familial risk for psychotic disorders outweighs any added effect of cannabis use. In a 2014 study, a team led by Ashley C. Proal and Dr. Lynn E. DeLisi of Harvard Medical School recruited cannabis users with and without a family history of schizophrenia, as well as non-users with and without such a history. The researchers made sure the cannabis users did not use other drugs in addition, a factor that muddied earlier studies. The result: there was a heightened schizophrenia risk among people with a family history, regardless of cannabis use.
+“My study clearly shows that cannabis does not cause schizophrenia by itself,” said Dr. DeLisi. “Rather, a genetic predisposition is necessary. It is highly likely, based on the results of this study and others, that cannabis use during adolescence through to age 25, when the brain is maturing and at its peak of growth in a genetically vulnerable individual, can initiate the onset of schizophrenia.”WASHINGTON — Speaker Nancy Pelosi pressed her case on Thursday for postponing President Trump’s State of the Union address during the prolonged partial government shutdown, even as House Democrats privately weighed action as early as next week on a homeland security spending measure that would counter the president’s demands for a wall with their own ideas for securing the border.
+“The date of the State of the Union is not a special date,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters. “It’s not constitutionally required, it’s not the president’s birthday, it’s not anything. It is a date that we agreed to.”
+Early Thursday afternoon, Ms. Pelosi finally received a response from Mr. Trump to the letter she sent him on Wednesday suggesting he delay his Jan. 29 speech or deliver it in writing, but he did not mention the address. Instead, the president said in his own letter that he was postponing an overseas trip Ms. Pelosi had planned with a congressional delegation, flying on military aircraft, that was scheduled to depart from Joint Base Andrews later in the day.A killer whale has been born in the Pacific Northwest, and so far, it looks happy and healthy.
+It could be a lifeline. For years, no orca born into this group has survived.
+The calf, known as L124, is part of a group of orcas known as the Southern Residents. The group has been shrinking for decades — it had nearly 100 orcas in the mid-90s, and now has 75 — in large part because of a depletion of its main food source, the Chinook salmon. Pollution and noisy boat traffic also appear to be hastening the group’s decline.
+Since no calves born to the group since 2015 have survived to maturity, researchers are crossing their fingers for L124.
+“I wish I could say that the odds are good, but unfortunately, the Southern Residents aren’t doing too well right now,” said Melisa Pinnow, a biologist with the Center for Whale Research, a nonprofit group in Washington State. “In the last three years, every calf that’s been born has died, and we’ve had miscarriages as well.”1:13
+Gorillas Test Positive for Coronavirus at San Diego Zoo
+0:57
+Swans Find New Home in Florida
+1:25
+Hundreds of Whales Stranded in Australia
+0:23
+Video Shows Orcas Damaging a Boat in Spain
+0:58
+Washington National Zoo Could Gain a New Baby Panda
+1:11
+Black Cat Interrupts N.F.L. Game: ‘Go! Go! Go!’
+0:23
+Massive Shark Spotted in Cape Cod
+0:46
+Two Male Penguins Adopt an Egg in Berlin
+0:37
+Giant Swarm of Grasshoppers Takes Over Las Vegas
+0:48
+How ‘Chance the Snapper’ Was Caught in Chicago
+0:37
+Snowball the Cockatoo Shows Off His Dance Moves
+0:56As it happens, the frustration of precisely such a desire — the unfulfilled longing for clarity and accountability from parents who are also artists — is one of the book’s most powerful guiding emotions. Slipping toward middle age as her father moves through his 80s, the daughter, now a successful writer, twice-married with children of her own, records a series of conversations with him. The idea is that their talks will be the basis of a book, a cross-generational collaboration on the subject of aging:
+“He said that things went missing. He said that the words disappeared. If he were younger he would have written a book about growing old. But now that he was old, he wasn’t up to it. He no longer had the vigor of a younger man. This line of thinking prompted one of us, I don’t remember who, to come up with the idea of writing a book together. I would ask the questions, he would answer them, I would transcribe the conversations, and finally we would sit down together and edit the material. Once the book was out, we would take the jeep and go on a book tour.”
+Image
+The rueful humor of the last sentence is typical of Ullmann’s prose, which is plain, succinct and declarative, with currents of intensity flowing beneath the placid surface. The effect, in Thilo Reinhard’s graceful English translation, is almost Didionesque, as the willed, witty detachment of the narrator’s voice at once conceals and emphasizes the rawness of her emotions.
+“Unquiet” can be read as a grief memoir in the tradition of Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” a meditation on the way loss manifests itself in the life of the bereaved. By the time the father-daughter book project gets underway in earnest, it’s too late. The father is slipping away, and then he’s gone. “We made the recordings in May, he died at the end of July at 4 o’clock in the morning.” There will be no book, no tour in the jeep, and the tapes themselves — or rather the miniature recorder with its digital files — will drop out of sight for seven years. Its rediscovery brings back the father’s ghost, but the transcripts that Ullmann reproduces also reveal the extent to which he was already absent:
+“SHE: Can you tell me about Mamma?
+“HE: I have been thinking about Beethoven and how he goes right at you. Right at your feelings. …”
+The narrator’s recollections confirm the impression of a man whose commitments to art, eros and self-exploration dictate a certain remoteness from his children. There were a lot of them — nine in all, with six different women — and he organized life on his island to defend its routines against their unruly energies. The women came and went. Which is not to say that her father was cold or cruel, but that the intimacies his daughter managed to find with him were built on a foundation of estrangement.LONDON — Time is not on Britain’s side as the clock ticks down to its scheduled March 29 exit from the European Union and its politicians remain paralyzed over how the country should leave.
+But on Thursday, decision day was delayed once again when a critical debate and vote in Parliament that could help break the deadlock was put back until Jan. 29.
+Delay has been a frequent tactic of Prime Minister Theresa May, who has gambled that the pressure of a looming deadline for departure would persuade lawmakers to accept her plan for withdrawal, or Brexit.
+That hit the rocks this week when her proposals suffered a crushing defeat in Parliament, leaving the country in limbo and suggesting that Mrs. May would have to redraw her plans or surrender leadership to lawmakers.She said the town of 6,000 people still has a team of psychologists working to help residents who were traumatized by the disaster.
+The footage came from a stock agency called Pond5, which has a library of over 14 million video clips including from military conflicts, natural disasters and fictional scenes. Jason Teichman, the agency’s chief executive, said the company also provided Lac-Mégantic footage to the Netflix series “Travelers.” Peacock Alley Entertainment, which produced the show, said in a statement that it did not know what the footage depicted when they bought it, and that they would replace it. But Netflix declined to explain why the footage would not be edited out of “Bird Box.”
+When Pond5 obtains images or video, it verifies the origins and then provides guidance to their customers as to how to use it appropriately, Mr. Teichman said in an interview. The clip from Lac-Mégantic was tagged as footage of a newsworthy historical event, he said. Mr. Teichman apologized for how the footage was used and said the company would review its practices.
+“All of us here feel awful that we didn’t do as much as we possibly could to make sure it was used appropriately,” he said.
+The mayor said that town leaders learned from news outlets that the footage was in “Travelers” and subsequently a resident notified officials that it also was in “Bird Box,” an apocalyptic sci-fi thriller starring Sandra Bullock in which people mysteriously start committing suicide.But the lull did not last long.
+Mr. Trump’s decision to revoke Ms. Pelosi’s military transport drew howls of outrage from Democrats and some Republicans, and threw into disarray a long-planned trip by the speaker and senior lawmakers — including the chairmen of the House Intelligence and Foreign Affairs Committees — to visit American allies and troops stationed overseas.
+Democrats, newly in control of the House and eager to use their power to challenge Mr. Trump, vowed that they would not be bullied into scrapping the trip altogether.
+Image The dueling letters: Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to President Trump on Wednesday about the State of the Union address.
+“We’re not going to allow the president of the United States to tell the Congress it can’t fulfill its oversight responsibilities, it can’t ensure that our troops have what they need whether our government is open or closed,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff of California, the chairman of the intelligence panel.
+“We are a coequal branch of government,” Mr. Schiff said, suggesting that the president apparently did not understand the new reality in Washington. “It may not have been that way with the past two years when he had a Republican Congress willing to roll over anytime he asked, but that is no longer the case.”
+Mr. Schiff was on the bus outside the Rayburn House Office Building near the Capitol when Mr. Trump fired off his letter, along with Representative Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York and the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, and several other lawmakers in what made for an unusual tableau.
+Instead of heading for Joint Base Andrews and boarding a military plane, the lawmakers sat stunned on their bus, unsure of what to do next, until it eventually drove slowly to the Capitol driveway — some journalists jogging or riding electric scooters to keep up — to disgorge its perplexed passengers. At one point, the House sergeant-at-arms, the chamber’s chief law enforcement officer, turned up to puzzle over the security arrangements for the lawmakers, whose secret travel plans were now public. And the speaker, holed up in her office with aides as reporters mixed near the Rotunda with tourists oblivious to the drama, calmly plotted her next steps.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Several years ago, before Confederate monuments came toppling down amid collective recognition that American public space needed a politicized renovation, a group of women in New York City started a fund to build a statue in Central Park honoring women’s suffrage.
+Memorializing any woman at all was going to be novel, because once you got past Alice in Wonderland, who was there really? As it happens, there is not a single statue of a nonfictional woman in the entire park — one of the most heavily visited tourist sites in the world, with more than 25 million people passing through each year — and yet the list of the commemorated is copious enough to include King Wladyslaw Jagiello, the 14th-century grand duke of Lithuania. At which point you might ask yourself: Where is Barney Greengrass?
+Given this myopia and absence of logic, it is easy to see how the decision to erect a statue of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton on the Mall, the widest pedestrian path in the park, might be considered an innovation. Last summer the city, in partnership with the Statue Fund, as it came to be called, announced that a design for such a sculpture had been selected, following a competition that had received 91 submissions.
+The monument, to be unveiled in 2020 in conjunction with the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, would feature renditions of the two women best known for helping to secure that right. That the suffrage movement was big, broad and diverse is meant to be reflected in the image of a scroll unfolding between Anthony and Stanton like a very long to-do list (procure more rolled oats, seek equality) naming and quoting 22 other women whose contributions were greatly significant.Background: The site was a major American naval base during the Cold War. In 2006, a local unit of a South Korean company leased it and employed 20,000 people to build cargo ships. Then earlier this month, the company filed for bankruptcy, putting the site up for grabs.
+What now? Officials said two Chinese companies were among the several foreign firms expressing interest in the site. But the country’s defense secretary is now suggesting keeping the shipyard under government control to keep it out of Beijing’s hands.
+Why it matters: The shipyard is changing hands amid growing concern about Chinese companies, even those that aren’t government controlled, acting as proxies for Beijing’s influence and espionage efforts. At the same time, China continues to occupy and build military bases on islands in the South China Sea, near the Philippines.
+Here’s what else is happening
+U.S. shutdown: President Trump hit back at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for threatening to delay his State of the Union address, by postponing her planned trip abroad.
+Jamal Khashoggi: A new book by three Turkish journalists offers the most comprehensive description of the killing of the Saudi dissident in Istanbul last year, drawing on audio recordings obtained by Turkish intelligence officials.
+Hitachi: The company said it was suspending work on a $19.3 billion nuclear power plant in North Wales, which had been expected to provide hundreds of new local jobs, after the British and Japanese governments failed to agree on financial terms.To the Editor:
+“Consider Firing Your Male Broker” (Op-Ed, Jan. 16) is typical of the man-bashing that is apt to come across as enlightened in “progressive” circles.
+“ Shoddy behavior ” may be more common among male financial advisers than among female ones, but there are much more accurate ways of judging a financial adviser’s integrity than by whether (s)he is male or female.
+Why not just look at a financial adviser’s reputation and past performance? And why is a reference to “ the testosterone-tinged fren zy” any less bigoted than a reference to women’s “raging hormonal imbalance” would be?
+Felicia Nimue Ackerman
+Providence, R.I.ISTANBUL — A new book written by three Turkish reporters and drawing on audio recordings of the killing of a Saudi expatriate, Jamal Khashoggi, offers new details about an encounter that began with a demand that he return home and ended in murder and dismemberment.
+“First we will tell him ‘We are taking you to Riyadh,’” one member of a Saudi hit team told another, the book claims. “If he doesn’t come, we will kill him here and get rid of the body.”
+Turkish officials have cited the recordings, saying they captured the death of Mr. Khashoggi, a journalist, in his Oct. 2 visit to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. And intelligence officials leaked some details in a campaign to force Saudi Arabia to own up to the crime.
+But the new book offers the most comprehensive description to date of what is on those recordings. It sets the scene as a team of Saudi operatives lay their plans before Mr. Khashoggi arrives, and then recounts what happened next.President Trump on Thursday responded to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California one day after Ms. Pelosi wrote him suggesting a delay to the annual State of the Union address because of the government shutdown.
+[For more coverage of Mr. Trump’s letter, read here.]
+The following is the text of Mr. Trump’s letter as released by the White House.
+__________
+Dear Madame Speaker:
+Due to the Shutdown, I am sorry to inform you that your trip to Brussels, Egypt, and Afghanistan has been postponed. We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the Shutdown is over. In light of the 800,000 great American workers not receiving pay, I am sure you would agree that postponing this public relations event is totally appropriate. I also feel that, during this period, it would be better if you were in Washington negotiating with me and joining the Strong Border Security movement to end the Shutdown. Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative.
+I look forward to seeing you soon and even more forward to watching our open and dangerous Southern Border finally receive the attention, funding, and security it so desperately deserves!To the Editor:
+Re “Speaker Asks Trump to Delay ‘State of Union’” (front page, Jan. 17):
+I was somewhat disturbed by the news about Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s letter to President Trump regarding his appearance in front of Congress for the State of the Union address.
+Of course, if there really are security concerns for this assembly of almost all the political power of our federal government in a single location, the suggestion to skip or postpone it is legitimate. Otherwise it looks as if the Democrats are simply in a competition with the president for the opportunity to be the most petty.
+I would rather see Mr. Trump appear publicly as the “bloviator in chief,” a self-destructive role that he seems to relish. It would be a more powerful statement if those who oppose him attended but sat on their hands, unmoved by what will no doubt be a self-aggrandizing speech, filled with distortions, or, better still, if they didn’t show up at all and the world got to see him address a half-empty hall.
+Steven Goldstein
+Asheville, N.C.For all the excitement created by the N.F.L.’s offensive fireworks this season, the league could be accused of being predictable. From roughly Week 5 forward, the Rams, the Saints and the Chiefs were considered favorites to get to this point. And while it was a down season for the Patriots, relatively speaking, it will probably be several years after Tom Brady’s retirement before people stop assuming he will find a way into the A.F.C. championship game.
+So after all those yards and touchdowns, it comes down to the top four offenses battling to reach the Super Bowl. Four elite quarterbacks, four teams with terrific running games and four head coaches who seem more than capable of getting the most out of their players.
+There will almost certainly be a great deal of scoring in both games, but the results could hinge on a key takeaway or a key pressure from one of the less-heralded defenses. And whichever teams eke out a win will meet in Atlanta two weeks later in Super Bowl LIII.
+Here are our predictions for how the conference championships will sort out, both in terms of who will win and who will win against the spread.“In Blackwater Woods”
+To live in this world
+you must be able
+to do three things:
+to love what is mortal;
+to hold it
+against your bones knowing
+your own life depends on it;
+and, when the time comes to let it go,
+to let it go.
+“No Voyage”
+O, I go to see the great ships ride from harbor,
+And my wounds leap with impatience; yet I turn back
+To sort the weeping ruins of my house:
+Here or nowhere I will make peace with the fact.
+“The Uses of Sorrow”
+Someone I loved once gave me
+a box full of darkness.
+It took me years to understand
+that this, too, was a gift.
+“The Veil”
+There are moments when the veil seems
+almost to lift, and we understand what
+the earth is meant to mean to us — the
+trees in their docility, the hills in
+their patience, the flowers and the
+vines in their wild, sweet vitality.
+Then the Word is within us, and the
+Book is put away.To the Editor:
+Re “Hospitals Post Their Prices. Just Try to Decipher Them” (news article, Jan. 14):
+The recent federal requirement for hospitals to publish price information is an important first step in the journey toward greater price transparency. But because these prices aren’t actually what a patient would pay, the article rightly points out that more must be done to be responsive to patients’ needs and wants.
+There are two roads to take, not mutually exclusive. One involves improving this new process — for example, by having uniform standards for how prices are reported across hospitals so that patients are comparing apples to apples when comparison shopping.
+Another more long-lasting and effective road is to tackle the underlying roots of the problem, as by doing away with gag clauses in provider-payer contracts that ban sharing of prices with patients or on the price transparency websites of health plans.
+While these are more difficult paths, if the final destination is meaningful and useful transparency for patients, then it’s time to hit the road.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is asking most State Department employees to return to work on Tuesday, despite the stalemate in funding negotiations between the president and congressional Democrats that has led to a partial government shutdown.
+In a message posted online on Thursday, the department’s deputy under secretary for management, Bill Todd, cited the agency’s core national security mission as the reason many furloughed employees were being asked to return to work next week. He said the department was “taking steps to make additional funds available” so employees could get paid. It was not immediately clear what these steps entailed or why the department did not take these steps sooner.
+A State Department spokesman said agency budget officials and members of its legal team had been working to find a way to resume payment to many of its employees during the shutdown. While they have found an avenue to pay some employees for work performed during the next pay period, officials said that, as of Thursday, they had not identified sources for funding for future pay periods if the government remained closed.
+The government has been partly shut for 27 days, and there has been no indication that President Trump and Democrats are any closer to an agreement that would lead to reopening the government. Mr. Trump has refused to reopen the government until lawmakers agree to fund a wall along the southern border with Mexico.“Wait —” is a weekly newsletter in which Caity Weaver investigates an unanswered (and possibly unasked) question in the news and pop culture. See last week’s inaugural edition and sign up here to receive it in your inbox going forward.
+One spring evening in 1901, a doctor in Massachusetts laid a tuberculosis-stricken man on a wooden platform so that the doctor could watch him die, and hopefully calculate the weight of his soul. For three hours and 40 minutes, Duncan MacDougall recalibrated his scales by fractions of ounces as the dying man’s nose and mouth dried out, and his last sweat evaporated off his skin.
+At the moment of the patient’s death (9:10 p.m.), Dr. MacDougall recorded that the scales registered an abrupt, inexplicable weight loss of three-fourths of an ounce. (To be certain this was not the effect of all the man’s breath leaving his body, the doctor then climbed onto the bed and breathed deeply; this did not affect the scales.)On the first day of this year — also the first day of the year 2562 in the Thai Buddhist calendar, a time for prayers and divinations — King Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun announced that his coronation would take place in early May. The coronation of a Thai Buddhist king is traditionally the last stage of making him into a thewaracha, a divine monarch. In this case, it will also be something like the last stage of an exorcism .
+When King Vajiralongkorn, the 10th monarch in the Chakri dynasty, ascended to the throne in late 2016 following the death of his father, he inherited a nation in chaos. A political crisis and deepening social rifts had polarized the country, and in 2014 the democratically elected government had been deposed in a military coup.
+The junta has claimed that it intends to stay in power only as long as is necessary to oversee an orderly transition back to democracy . But the government of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha has repeatedly postponed holding an election and has tightened its control, while trying to earn some measure of legitimacy by basking in the popularity, mystique and beliefs that surround the monarchy.
+The reign of King Vajiralongkorn’s father, King Bhumibol Adulyadej, lasted seven decades and was generally perceived as a time of progress and prosperity for Thailand. King Bhumibol came to personify the nation. Many Thais saw him as a demigod; some as a Buddha-to-be. King Bhumibol was also known as Rama IX: Nine is an auspicious number in Thailand, and the word for it in Thai is a homophone of “moving forward.”In 1969, a Chicago advertising agency was working on an ad concept that would parody the social justice marches of the day to sell hair-care products. One of the staff members assigned to execute it, a black woman named Barbara Gardner Proctor, wasn’t amused.
+“It was during the days of the black revolution,” Ms. Proctor recalled 20 years later in an interview with C-Span, “and they wanted me to do a ‘foam-in’ demonstration in the streets, with women running down the streets waving hair spray cans. I said I would never do that.”
+She was fired, which set the stage for a bit of history.
+“It became quite apparent to me,” she said, “that if I did not begin to control my own destiny, I was going to have it changed about every five years.”
+And so the next year she became, by all accounts, the first black woman in the United States to found her own ad agency when she established Proctor & Gardner. There was no partner; she simply used her married name and her maiden name to create the impression that there might be a male associate, in case any potential clients had chauvinistic leanings. Eventually she built Proctor & Gardner into a multimillion-dollar company.To the Editor:
+Re “The Women of the 116th Congress” (special section, Jan. 17):
+Thank you for covering all of the women serving in the 116th Congress. What an impressive, diverse group of women. Their backgrounds, comments and interests demonstrate how important it is that their voices now be heard.
+Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone , Susan B. Anthony and others who fought so hard for women’s suffrage and women’s rights are surely beaming.
+Sally G. McMillen
+Davidson, N.C.
+The writer is the author of “Seneca Falls and the Origins of the Women’s Rights Movement” and a retired professor of history at Davidson College.
+To the Editor:
+The special section on women of the 116th Congress seemed promising, and I was excited to read it. The topic is significant and historic. But I was disappointed when I discovered that it was essentially a display of staged photographs with minimal content.WASHINGTON — A Republican lawmaker plans to introduce legislation on Thursday that would embolden President Trump’s trade war by granting him sweeping new executive powers to increase tariffs on imports.
+The proposal, by Representative Sean P. Duffy of Wisconsin, is unlikely to pass Congress, but it has alarmed conservative advocacy groups and business lobbyists, who warn that such an idea could further destabilize the global rules of trade and prompt other countries to adopt similar presidential powers.
+The legislation would allow Mr. Trump to unilaterally raise tariffs on a foreign product if he determined that a trading partner had imposed “significantly” higher tariffs or other trade barriers on that same American good. The draft proposal would also give the president power to enter into new trade agreements without congressional approval.
+The president already has broad powers to impose tariffs but must go through certain channels to put them into effect, including a formal investigation by the Commerce Department or other agencies. His actions can also be overturned, in some cases, by the United States International Trade Commission or the World Trade Organization.Some protesters and eyewitnesses reported that security forces had fired live rounds at them in the Burri neighborhood of Khartoum, and videos posted on social media by local activists appear to show at least one man being treated for a head injury. Gunshots can be heard in other footage in which the Burri Almahas Mosque is seen in the background.
+The near-daily demonstrations initially began over corruption and mismanagement of the economy.
+But as the unrest broadened over the past month, so did the message of the protesters, who turned their focus to the overall leadership of Mr. Bashir, who has ruled Sudan since 1989, when he seized power in a coup. His party has moved to change the country’s Constitution to prolong his rule.
+On Thursday, security forces were deployed in large numbers in the capital.
+The Sudan Doctors Committee issued a statement accusing the security services of preventing ambulances and emergency responders from reaching those wounded in Thursday’s demonstrations. It demanded immediate access to “every citizen who needs medical assistance.”
+Human rights groups have urged the Sudanese government to end what they said was unwarranted use of force against protesters and to enact reforms that have long been called for by the international community.I think that this image is trying to represent how on edge the news feels today. President Trump has repeatedly said that today’s new is the enemy of the people, and whenever he doesn’t like something on the news he calls it fake news. It shows how careful the reporters have to be. In the image they have to be careful to stay on balance and not fall, but in real life they have to make sure they say the right things so they don’t get President Trump mad. It must feel like walking on eggshells around him … Reporters today have to balance on a tightrope to get to talk to Trump without him calling them fake news or the enemy of the people, and that’s not how things are supposed to be in a Democratic country.
+— Ami S, Masterman, Philadelphia
+I assume the guy with the tanned face and blonde hair is President Trump so I feel like the picture is showing the dangers of news outlets reporting on President Trump. It’s almost like a “tight rope” that you are crossing when it comes to him and the controversy your news outlet can start. I feel like the people on the other side of the tightrope are news reporters that are passed all the controversy with Trump and some of them may even support him. This may be the reason why he is depicted talking to them, when in other situations he is ignoring the reporters that confront him. This picture shows the other news reporters on the rope who may be in the controversy and their news outlet may be undergoing some type of drama with Trump and have to record him from a distance.
+— Abdoul Diallo, Julia R. Masterman, Philadelphia
+I believe that this picture prompt represents how difficult it is for reporters and journalist just to talk to President Trump. A reporter’s job is to get information from a person, but when the person is not cooperative then this cold be a rather hard job. We all know that Trump is not easy to interview because he cuts people off and sometimes turns questions around. I can recall he even kicked a journalist out of a news conference for asking a question about a topic Trump was very strict on (Immigration). So when a reporter is trying to ask the President something its like they are walking on a tightrope because you never know how he could possibly lash out.
+— Jack Dunphy, Philadelphia
+Seeking the truth
+I think that this image is saying how maybe Donald Trump is keeping the truth away from us. He is making reporters and other people who are trying to figure out what s going on work very hard to get it. I feel this picture saying that he is hiding what he is doing and only a few people who are determined will continue to try to get to it. My opinion on what I think is this messages is why not tell them what is happening you are the president but it is still our lives, your people should know what is going on.
+— Sierra McKinley, Philadelphia, Penn.
+In this illustration, Donald Trump is on one side while reporter are trying to get to him on a tightrope. I think the tightrope represents how hard reporters try to figure out what is happening in the Trump presidency. There are so many secrets and things that we don’t know especially in the Trump presidency because of all of the things that have happened during his term and all of the lies he has told. We need to know the truth, and it’s these reporter’s jobs to tell us what’s going on.
+— Maia Keenan, Masterman, Philadelphia
+We think this image depicts reporters trying to ask questions and will risk everything to know the truth and reality. The reporter holding the microphone is asking risky questions, especially because all of the other reporters could fall if he asks something that Donald Trump finds offensive. Finally, everyone in the image can only move forward because if they go back everyone falls but Trump is isolated.
+— Hall MS EL Masters, Corte Madera, Calif.
+The media circus
+When I look at this picture it reminds me of the media image in America, and how it is so focused on Donald Trump. Since the presidential election all that has been in the news is Donald Trump, has been the on the headline of the news so many times that I can’t even keep track anymore. We have been so focused on what he is doing that we are missing out on all the other stuff that is happening in America like all the mass shooting that are constantly happing in America or the mass population homeless people that we have on our streets. They say that he is digging this country into a deeper hole but what they don’t say is that the media is there with him helping him dig this ever-growing hole.
+— Niara Hughes, Masterman, Philadelphia, Penn.
+… The image shows how Donald Trump is trying to get attention, even if people are risking their lives at the same time (for example, the government shutdown). He thinks his wall is more important than the people of America.
+— Maya Kowal, Masterman School, Philadelphia, Penn.“NARRATOR This is Adam McKay, the writer-director of “Vice.’” “Who is calling on Sunday morning?” [phone ringing] “NARRATOR This, to me, is one of the most important transitions in the entire movie. At this moment, history turns, and this is where Dick Cheney gets the phone call from the Bush campaign asking him to come in and meet with George W Bush.” “That’s right. NARRATOR And we were very conscious with this scene about slowing everything down. I wanted a lot of silence here. And my editor Hank Corwin made the choice to just leave the shot on Cheney’s midsection, so we don’t even see his face for the phone call — “ “ — at 3:00 PM. NARRATOR — making the silences feel even more pregnant, so we can become aware of what’s going on.” “Thank you. Thank you. NARRATOR You can feel the moment to moment second to second consequences of this phone call, of each sentence, of Lynne and Dick’s exchange.” “I still can’t believe they’ve got that poor boy running for president. What’d they want? NARRATOR There’s a painting to the left of the scene that was actually there in the house when we scouted that house for this scene, of a big dog with a little dog barking at it. The big dog has a stick in its mouth.” “That’s what they want. NARRATOR And it was a happy accident. I realized, that’s the relationship between Cheney and W. Bush. Cheney’s this big dog, but the little dog thinks he’s in charge. The other important thing with this scene with the silences is that it also shows how methodical, how careful, how unhurried he is.” “It’s just a meeting.” “Is it just a meeting?” “It’s just a meeting. NARRATOR You realize at this point, Dick Cheney really has become a master of the game.” “Good.”To get through those lengthy periods, renewables-dominated systems have to be supersized, installing three to eight times more power capacity than peak demand so they can fill the void when solar and wind output is diminished. That means they also produce way too much electricity when favorable conditions return. That excess is either wasted or stored (at a cost) for later use. And, presently, storage technologies are not available to do the job cost effectively at the scale we are talking about. If such a system were to be built, it would feature a lot of poorly utilized, capital-intensive wind, solar and storage assets. Unless the cost of those technologies falls to extremely low levels, we’ll be forced to choose between clean energy and affordability. The recent riots in Paris show how that conflict might play out.
+Clean power systems with a mix of fuels can more easily match generation to demand and productively use all assets more often, making these systems more economical to operate. There’s no waste of large surpluses of energy or the need to develop seasonal energy storage. These advantages make the economics of a balanced low-carbon power system more attractive than those that rely solely on weather-dependent renewables. Maintaining fuel diversity also minimizes the zero-sum politics of an all-renewables grid. We don’t need to shutter the nuclear and fossil fuel industries to achieve environmental goals.
+To be clear, firm energy technologies face daunting challenges of their own. No one believes it is easy to build nuclear or carbon-capture power plants, which would capture carbon dioxide emissions and utilize or permanently store them. Enhanced geothermal energy (which uses techniques similar to fracking to unlock renewable energy) is still an emerging technology. But the value of these resources to a decarbonized power system would be very high, justifying efforts to accelerate their development and deployment.
+We are not alone in our conclusions. In his State of the State address Tuesday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York deliberately outlined a transition to a 100-percent clean, carbon-free energy system by 2040 — not an all-renewables system . California recently did the same. When two of the most environmentally progressive states both see the wisdom of a broad path to decarbonization, activists would be wise to heed their pragmatic conclusions.
+Expanding and improving the set of firm, carbon-free energy resources would make it much more affordable and feasible to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions from electric power plants. That’s something Green New Dealers and Americans of all political stripes could get behind.
+Jesse Jenkins is a postdoctoral environmental fellow at Harvard. Samuel Thernstrom is the founder and executive director of the Energy Innovation Reform Project, and a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.LONDON — Prince Philip, the 97-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, was involved on Thursday in a car crash while driving himself on a rural road north of London, injuring two women in another vehicle.
+The prince was unhurt, as was a 9-month-old boy in the women’s car, a Kia, the Norfolk police said. He was driving a black Land Rover S.U.V. near the royal family’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk, near the North Sea coast, a spokeswoman at Buckingham Palace said.
+She confirmed that the queen was not in the vehicle at the time of the crash.
+A 45-year-old passenger in the other vehicle suffered a broken wrist, and the driver, 28, had cuts to her knee, the Norfolk Constabulary said in a statement. Both were treated at a hospital in the nearby town of King’s Lynn and then discharged.
+The prince’s S.U.V. rolled over, eyewitnesses told British news organizations, and photos from the scene showed it lying on its side on the shoulder of the A149 road, its window cracked. The other vehicle sat nearby, upright but nosed into a ditch beside the road.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series each Friday. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.
+A phone call. A quiet exchange between husband and wife. A dog painting. On the surface, this scene from the Dick Cheney biopic “Vice” may seem a bit mundane. But a more low-key moment, in a film full of zany ones (A. O. Scott called the movie “a hectic blend of psychohistory, domestic drama and sketch-comedy satire”), turns out to be seismic.
+About that phone call: It comes at a point when Cheney’s life seems to be heading in a more serene direction. But the call ends up taking him on a U-turn right back to Washington. Narrating the scene, the writer-director Adam McKay (“The Big Short”) said he wanted everything in the film to slow down at that moment. In the call, and in the conversation that Cheney has with his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), the drama is found in his silences.“From The New York Times Magazine, this is Behind the Cover.” “I’m Jake Silverstein, editor in chief.” “And I’m Gail Bichler, design director.” “Our cover story this week is about the study of ancient DNA and how it’s causing academics to radically rewrite the story of our prehistoric ancestors. In 2003, a major discovery was made on the islands known as Vanuatu, the oldest and largest prehistoric cemetery ever found in the Pacific.” “We sent a photographer, David Maurice Smith, to Vanuatu. But ancient DNA is a pretty hard concept to visualize.” “Ultimately, we wanted to show something that would very clearly indicate what the story was about, a skull excavated in Vanuatu.” “I had some concerns about it for the cover. It’s very beautifully shot, but it’s an image that you’ve seen before. And so we ended up doing this crop.” “You can kind of feel the ancient reality of it in some funny way.” “With the type, the extreme scale difference adds something, makes it feel very deliberate.” “I think part of what the academic rivalry detailed in Gideon’s story shows is that there still remains, and perhaps always will, a great deal of mystery about our prehistoric ancestors.”Which is sort of what he is. Cummings, as depicted here, has no burning principle beyond a vague resentment of “the system” and contempt for the people who work within it. He doesn’t even like referendums, which he says reduce complex issues to binaries.
+But he is driven by the technical challenge and by a never entirely explained urge to disrupt politics (which he analogizes, at one point, to an operating system). Dismissing his clients’ desire to build a broad coalition, he insists on running a divisive campaign in which the difference will be made by angry Britons who don’t usually vote.
+Key to this is an offer to help target voters from an obscure tech firm: Cambridge Analytica. This is where the dun-dun-dunnn will play in the minds of American politics followers, who know that the firm has been implicated in exploiting Facebook data for the Trump campaign. “British democracy,” Cummings realizes, “is a lab experiment for a greater prize.”
+Cumberbatch’s tight-wired performance is the best thing in this brisk but mechanical retread of recent events. His Cummings is an asocial savant — not unlike Cumberbatch’s Sherlock Holmes — with a penchant for working through his thoughts in a supply closet. (He is fixated on the idea that he can “hear” the sound of Britain, which he describes as a groan.) Perhaps, “Brexit” suggests, he is effective precisely because he’s more comfortable with people as aggregates than as individuals.
+[Read more of our Brexit coverage here.]
+The portrayals of figures like the U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage (Paul Ryan) and the conservative London mayor Boris Johnson (Richard Goulding), on the other hand, verge on sketch-comedy impersonations. Tonally, “Brexit” lands somewhere between the dutiful style of most HBO docudramas and the frantic arm-waving of Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” and “Vice.” Political figures are identified not just with captions but also with a thumping “LEAVE” or “REMAIN” stamped on the screen.Judge Stephenson said that even though the officers’ accounts of the shooting differed from the video, that did not amount to proof that they were lying. “Two people with two different vantage points can witness the same event,” she said, and still describe it differently.
+The judge suggested that key witnesses for the prosecution had offered conflicting testimony, and said there was nothing presented at trial that showed that the officers had failed to preserve evidence, as the prosecutors had argued. Challenging the point that officers had shooed away a witness as part of a cover-up, the judge said it was not obvious that the police had known the witness had seen the shooting.
+The officers, who were brought to trial in November, were accused of writing in official reports that Laquan had tried to stab three other officers, saying they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after a barrage of shots.
+Mr. March, Mr. Walsh and Mr. Gaffney each denied that they had conspired to come up with a narrative that might justify Mr. Van Dyke’s decision to shoot Laquan. None of them fired any shots that night. Other officers, too, had witnessed the shooting and had given questionable accounts, but were not on trial; grand jurors indicted the three officers but declined to indict any others.
+[Read More: Was the Laquan McDonald case a turning point or an aberration?]
+It was “undisputed and undeniable,” Judge Stephenson said, that Laquan had ignored officers’ commands to drop his knife. While she spoke, the three officers sat silently, sometimes staring down at the carpet or nervously jiggling a leg. After she read the verdict, several people broke into applause.Slide 1 of 11,
+Joe’s Steam Rice Roll, which has stands in Flushing, Queens, and Manhattan’s Chinatown, specializes in Cantonese-style cheong fun, broad rice noodles so thin that they’re nearly see-through, rolled around a choice of egg, meat and scattered vegetables.Clouds hover in the corner of Joe’s Steam Rice Roll, inside a narrow mini-mall in Flushing, Queens. A single rice noodle fills a steaming tray as big as a newspaper, one broad sheet, wobbly like custard and so thin that it’s nearly see-through. A brandishing of two bowl scrapers, and it’s peeled from the metal, rolled into a long tube, chopped and slipped onto paper plates.
+This is Cantonese-style cheong fun, a street food and dim-sum perennial. The noodle is floppy and springy, with meat and maybe a fistful of bean sprouts and corn hidden in its folds, and a chef’s adjudication of the necessary sweet soy sauce — sometimes just a stain, sometimes a deluge.
+You can buy it in its simplest form for $1.50 in Manhattan’s Chinatown, from carts that ply the sidewalks of Hester, Rutgers or Centre Streets, or from the Sun Hing Lung tofu factory’s takeout window on Henry Street, although you have to get there before it closes by midafternoon.
+The versions at Joe’s, starting at $4, could almost be considered expensive. But they have an earthiness and elasticity that I haven’t found elsewhere. They flop but don’t droop; you can sink your teeth into them, and slurp.Is Rihanna the Coco Chanel of the 21st century?
+Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton LVMH, the parent company of Dior, Givenchy and Fendi, apparently thinks so. It is in the midst of a deal to back her in a fashion brand, making her the first female designer of color at the largest luxury conglomerate in the world.
+The news, confirmed by sources within the group who were not authorized to speak for the company, was first reported by WWD. Neither LVMH nor Rihanna would comment, though the singer has recently been photographed on the street wearing a “mystery” pair of oversize Fenty-branded square sunglasses hinting at what may be to come.
+While the details of the agreement remain unclear, it is a turning point in both fashion and fame.
+The combination of Fenty and LVMH will be the clearest expression yet of how celebrity, social media and influencers have redefined the power balance between culture and consumption, changing the way brands of all kinds relate to their audience.
+It is not insignificant that despite the number of well-known and respected designers currently unemployed in the fashion world, including Alber Elbaz, Stefano Pilati and Peter Copping, the dominant luxury group decided to put its money where a pop star was.LOS ANGELES — I first met Alex Caputo-Pearl, the union leader at the head of the teachers strike here, in 2002, back when he was teaching social studies at Crenshaw High School.
+He started out as a young Teach for America recruit in 1990, the program’s inaugural year. Alex, a Maryland native, told me he always envisioned Los Angeles as the most promising place in the country to stage a campaign to restore the promise of equality to public education, and to fight for justice for underserved students of color and underappreciated teachers. The fact that the times — the crime-and-punishment ’90s and early aughts — weren’t particularly good for his particular vision didn’t matter. Alex dug in. Among other things, he co-founded the Coalition for Education Justice and started a social justice academy.
+Now the times seem to have finally caught up with his vision. In 2014 Alex became president of United Teachers Los Angeles, the union representing more than 35,000 teachers and school staff members in the Los Angeles school district, and he immediately began infusing it with an activist energy it had lacked for a long time. On Monday, after two years of the union and the district failing to agree on a new contract, teachers began a strike that feels like the culmination of everything Alex came here to do.
+Los Angeles hasn’t seen a teachers strike in 30 years, and the risks are huge. But nearly 100 percent of the union members voted to strike because they believe it is necessary if public education is going to be restored to its rightful status as one of the Golden State’s great attractions.David Caspe turned 8 in 1986, a year (almost to the day) before the stock market crash that is the ostensible subject of his new Showtime series, “Black Monday.” I mention that because, watching the show, it often feels like you’re seeing the ’80s through the eyes of a precocious youngster glued to the television. Designer jeans, Rae Dawn Chong, “Diff’rent Strokes,” Grandmaster Flash, Marion Barry, Michael Jackson, cocaine buffets. Cartoonish characters living large in cartoonish clothes.
+The barrage of period allusions functions as a connective tissue binding the disjointed parts of “Black Monday,” which tries to stitch together an over-the-top comedy of the go-go ’80s and a tut-tutting, cautionary morality tale, fitted out with appropriate music, fashions and hairstyles. What it doesn’t supply is an actual feel for the period, or a coherent point of view about it, or anything more than clichés for the show’s talented stars — Don Cheadle, Andrew Rannells and Regina Hall — to play.
+The half-hour series, which begins Sunday, is clearly meant to satirize something, but the target is elusive. Caspe (who created “Black Monday” with Jordan Cahan) is best known for “Happy Endings,” a short-lived early 2010s network sitcom with a small but rabid fan base. “Happy Endings” charted the intertwined lives of a group of six besties, but it was really about an idea of communal post-college friendship in the post-“Friends” era.
+In a similar way — but with a premium-cable license for smuttier and colder jokes — “Black Monday” seems to be satirizing an idea of 1980s Wall Street excess, rather than anything that actually existed. A subplot in the early episodes (three of 10 were available) even involves a writer trailing the show’s main character, the trader Maurice “Mo” Monroe (Cheadle), to gather material for an Oliver Stone film. (“Wall Street,” one of the best-timed movies ever, came out two months after the real Black Monday.)Thursday’s House vote, in which nearly 70 percent of House Republicans sided with Democrats and against the Trump administration, represented an even more dramatic display of Republican opposition to the move, signaling concerns within President Trump’s own party about his administration’s handling of a key aspect of its Russia policy.
+The congressional showdown over Russia sanctions comes at a time when Mr. Trump’s allies have increasingly struggled to address questions about the investigation by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election on behalf of Mr. Trump, and whether Mr. Trump’s team coordinated with the effort.
+Democrats had urged the administration to delay its decision on the fate of the sanctions until the conclusion of Mr. Mueller’s investigation. They noted that Mr. Deripaska had emerged as a bit character in the story lines around the investigation as a result of his relationship with Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman. Mr. Manafort has been convicted of and pleaded guilty to charges brought by Mr. Mueller’s team.
+Last April the Treasury Department announced sanctions on Mr. Deripaska, his companies and those of other Russian oligarchs in retaliation for the Russian meddling, casting the penalties as evidence that the administration was taking a tough stance against Moscow.
+While the sanctions went into effect against Mr. Deripaska personally, the sanctions against three of his companies were repeatedly delayed amid an aggressive lobbying and legal campaign by his companies and their allies. They argued that the corporate sanctions would have unintended economic ripple effects that would damage companies in the United States, Europe, Jamaica, Guinea and elsewhere by disrupting the supply of aluminum.LOS ANGELES — Pacific Gas and Electric promises that its customers’ lights will stay on if it follows through on plans to file for bankruptcy this month. But companies that supply the California utility’s electricity may have more to worry about.
+PG&E said Monday that it would use bankruptcy to resolve huge liabilities arising from two years of deadly wildfires. Such a move would allow the company to try to revoke or renegotiate contracts it signed with suppliers when power prices were higher than they are now. That, analysts said, could hurt companies that borrowed based on the higher prices — especially those whose power comes from renewable resources.
+That prospect was underscored this week when credit-rating agencies downgraded the debt of Topaz Solar Farms, which is owned by a unit of Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and whose sole customer is PG&E, and Genesis Solar Farm, a large project in the Mojave Desert developed by NextEra Energy. Both companies said they were operating normally, but were monitoring PG&E’s problems closely.
+“People often think utilities are safe investments, but this is such a crazy situation,” said Daniel Lowenthal, a partner at the law firm Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler who specializes in bankruptcy and corporate restructuring, referring to PG&E’s suppliers, shareholders and lenders.How did you conceive of the designs for the show? Did you first come up with the costumes and then the contestants chose which ones they liked? Or did they have more input?
+All the artwork was done before the casting, and once we were working with the casting, the producers and I we were able to figure out which 12 we wanted to keep. From there it was more collaborating, letting some of the cast members possibly choose their own costume or us hearing who’s being cast and thinking, “This would be a perfect costume for this person.” Somehow it just magically worked, even though it was trial and error.
+It sounds like you have really good karma!
+Usually when you sketch a 2D design, you do a lot of alterations to it when you start building the costume. If you look at the original sketches for the show versus the costumes that are onstage, we barely had any changes. I think it gave our celebrities, the famous behind-the-mask personas, a little bit of freedom to play around and become these characters because what they saw on paper is exactly what they look like onstage. It almost became like an inner-child experience for a lot of these people, an alter ego — to go out, cover their faces and become this character and truly have fun with it. I think that’s what made this show come to life.
+How do your designs differ from those on the Korean version?
+The one difference is how anime some of the [Korean-designed] masks were. I wanted to bring something that was a little bit more of a 360[-degree] mask that really hid our talent and embodied all these characters. A lot of the Korean elements had this extravagant mask and extravagant shoulder piece but then everything else was kind of toned down. We created fuller costumes, head-to-toe characters.
+One of my favorite designers is [Alexander] McQueen and I made sure the lion and the unicorn had this couture-y drape work that you don’t even see anymore. I think both fashion and costuming, the art of it is slowly going away. You see more and more digital work in film, in music videos. It was important for me to design this show the old-school way. It was important to do it all by hand.[Read a review of “A Discovery of Witches” and an interview with one of its stars.]
+“It’s a very character-driven story, which is why I’m glad it ended up with Sundance,” Harkness said. “It means we don’t have to blow up so much stuff and have so much fake blood.” As executive producer of the show, Harkness had a hand in everything from the casting to the edits. She has been busy promoting both the show and “Time’s Convert.” Harkness gives a lot of interviews in hotel rooms — which may be why her publicist stipulated that this one take place at the Langham Huntington, even though the author lives less than two miles away. In any case, Harkness, who arrived in jeans and well-worn cowboy boots, her blonde hair staticky from the Santa Ana winds, fairly radiated spontaneity and sincerity. Maybe it was the wine.
+She was, for example, expansive on the subject of new projects, a topic many writers would rather submit to a tax return than discuss. All Souls groupies will be happy to hear she is now 200 pages into a book about Matthew grappling with the forces of religious radicalism in 16th-century Europe. She recently returned from a three-week cruise around New Zealand to research another book about Matthew’s nephew, the beloved soldier and mercenary Gallowglass. A deep dive into the history of witchcraft is also in the works.
+Harkness is descended from a witch — or at least a woman hanged in Salem for allegedly practicing witchcraft. The supernatural seized her imagination at a young age. “I can still see ‘The Witch of Blackbird Pond’ on the shelves of the Horsham library,” she said. Horsham, a suburb of Philadelphia, is not a bad place to grow up if you’re interested in history, another early passion of hers. There were family picnics at battlefields, tours of historic houses. When she was 8, her father, the manager of a paint store, and her mother, who worked as a secretary, took Harkness and her younger brother on a trip to England — sparking a lifelong interest in Elizabethan history.
+She went to college at Mount Holyoke, where she designed her own major, in Renaissance Studies. A class called “Magic, Knowledge and the Pursuit of Power in the Renaissance” was transformative: “It was like somebody had taken a can opener to my brain and peeled off the lid. The teacher opened up the class by asking, ‘How do you know what you think you know?’ I’ve never stopped asking that question.”My grandfather was somewhat prominent in the community. He was very active in the Shriners. He visited people in the hospital when they were sick. He seemed to be a person of faith. But, I have never forgotten this particular memory of him.
+I was lying on the floor in the family room one late afternoon. My grandfather was watching the evening news. The report was on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I don’t remember what it was about exactly, but I do remember my grandfather’s expletive-laced racial slur.
+It was emphatic and clearly heartfelt. I had never heard my grandfather say anything like that before. I had never even met a black person at that point in my life, but if my grandfather hated them, I thought it must be O.K. for me to dislike them as well. And as my grandfather claimed to be a person of faith, I assumed all black people must be godless.
+Unfortunately, I grew up in a town and society where racism was accepted and encouraged, and for no reason other than it was the way things were. I’m sorry to say that I have struggled with this my entire life and continue to struggle with it.Over the years, outside analysts have closely followed visits by North Korean leaders to factories, farms and military units to discern the regime’s policy priorities.
+The sleuthing is challenging: The North Korean state news media often withhold the locations of these sites and their purposes, identifying them only by the names of their managers.
+Now, two analysts based in the United States have located six such factories believed to be linked to North Korea’s missile program, visits to which by the country’s leaders were deliberately obscured by the state news media to thwart Washington’s intelligence-gathering or cyberattacks. The factories and their operations were discovered through a painstaking digital examination of open-source data.
+“North Korea may be reluctant to share those locations precisely to make them harder to target,” Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on North Korea at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, Calif., said in a report published Thursday. “In other cases, however, the visits may have been related to the development of new missile-related systems that North Korea was not yet prepared to reveal.”Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.
+Previews and Openings
+‘ABOUT ALICE’ at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center (in previews; opens on Jan. 20). Based on what The New York Times Book Review called a “slim but walloping book,” this Theater for a New Audience play by Calvin Trillin relates his long, fine romance with his wife, Alice, who died in 2001. Under Leonard Foglia’s direction, Jeffrey Bean and Carrie Paff portray Calvin and Alice.
+866-811-4111, tfana.org
+‘THE CONVENT’ at A.R.T./New York Theaters (in previews; opens on Jan. 24). A girls’ trip with monastic overtones, Jessica Dickey’s new play goes on retreat with a group of women trying to live like medieval nuns (though likely practicing better personal hygiene). Daniel Talbott directs the all-female cast, which includes Lisa Ramirez and Samantha Soule, as they recede from modernity.
+weathervanetheater.orgOur guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.
+‘HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE’ at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism’s holiest genesis tale — that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906-7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith)
+212-423-3500, guggenheim.org
+‘BLUE PRINTS: THE PIONEERING WORK OF ANNA ATKINS’ at New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (through Feb. 17). An intimate, exquisite show of a pioneer of photography and natural science. In the early 1840s, Atkins, a seaweed-loving Englishwoman, began documenting aquatic plants through the new technique of cyanotype (or blueprint, as architects would later call it), and sewed her spectral images into the very first books of “photographical impressions” — albeit ones made without a camera. Atkins, perhaps assisted by servants, placed hundreds of specimens of seaweed or algae on coated paper, left them in the sun, and then washed the exposed sheet to produce white shadows of the plants against rich Prussian blue backgrounds. Each one is a little miracle, with neuronlike roots winding across the page, the leaves revealing every branching vein. (Jason Farago)
+917-275-6975, nypl.org
+‘CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876-1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum’s own collection. But these days, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi’s little-known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost-living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik)
+212-708-9400, moma.org
+‘EMPRESSES OF CHINA’S FORBIDDEN CITY’ at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses’ lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200-odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing — you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People’s Republic. (Farago)
+978-745-9500, pem.orgOur guide to dance performances happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+COMPAÑÍA IRENE RODRÍGUEZ at the Joyce Theater (Jan. 18, 8 p.m.; Jan. 19, 2 and 8 p.m.; Jan. 20, 2 and 7:30 p.m.). As a child growing up in Havana, Rodríguez would slip out of ballet class to secretly study Spanish dance instead. She rose through the ranks of the Spanish Ballet of Cuba before forming her own company in 2012 to express her brand of contemporary flamenco theater. Rodríguez isn’t a purist — she draws from many forms, including fandango, bolero and Afro-Cuban and contemporary dance — as evidenced by the title of her Joyce program, “Mas Que Flamenco” (“More Than Flamenco”). She will be joined onstage by an ensemble of dancers, singers and musicians, but her captivating intensity will likely be front and center.
+212-242-0800, joyce.org
+MERCE CUNNINGHAM at Anthology Film Archives (Jan. 21, 7:30 p.m.). As part of this year’s extensive celebrations of the centennial of Cunningham’s birth, the Anthology presents a weekly screening of his works through Feb. 18. Cunningham, who died in 2009, used technology inventively throughout his career; for the works in this series, the camera is not an impartial observer but an active participant. On Monday, the featured films will be “Fractions I” from 1978, in which four video monitors join dancers onstage, and “Channels/Inserts” from 1982, which employs creative editing and animation techniques. Both were collaborations with the video artist Charles Atlas, who will present the program.
+212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org‘IOLANTA’ AND ‘BLUEBEARD’S CASTLE’ at the Metropolitan Opera (Jan. 24, 8 p.m.; through Feb. 14). Marius Trelinski’s dark, fascinating juxtaposition of these one-act operas by Tchaikovsky and Bartok is one of the most bracing examples of directorial entrepreneurship to have reached the Met’s stage in recent years, and here it makes its first return since its debut in 2015. The cast is excellent: Sonya Yoncheva takes on the title role in “Iolanta,” with Matthew Polenzani as Vaudémont; in the Bartok, Gerald Finley is Bluebeard and Angela Denoke is Judith. Henrik Nanasi conducts.
+212-362-6000, metopera.org
+NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC at David Geffen Hall (Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m.; through Jan. 26). So much for Jaap Van Zweden’s supposed reticence regarding new music. Here the conductor gives the premiere of Julia Wolfe’s “Fire in My Mouth,” a reflection on the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911 and the death of 146 garment workers, most of them immigrants, in Manhattan. (An earlier politically engaged piece by Wolfe, “Anthracite Fields,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.) The Philharmonic is joined by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City and the Crossing, an outstanding chamber choir. The projections and video are by Jeff Sugg, and the whole thing is directed by Anne Kauffman. Before that, Van Zweden leads the “Elegy” from Steven Stucky’s “August 4, 1964,” a piece he debuted with the Dallas Symphony, and Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto. Anthony McGill is the soloist.
+212-875-5656, nyphil.org
+For an overview of January and February’s cultural events, click here.‘QUEER TIGER BEAT’ at the Duplex Cabaret Theater (Jan. 18, 9:30 p.m.). If Nikki Palumbo and Gwynna Forgham-Thrift curated their own magazine of teen heartthrobs, then the comedians and actresses they’ve invited for this show would certainly make the cover. The lineup features Jes Tom, Lorena Russi, Kelsey Bailey, Mila Myles, Jessica Henderson and Taylor Ortega, who co-stars in the upcoming Disney Channel movie “Kim Possible.”
+212-255-5438, theduplex.com
+‘SIDESHOW GOSHKO’ at KGB Bar (Jan. 24, 7 p.m.). Leslie Goshko will celebrate the 10th anniversary of her monthly storytelling series, which has been featured on truTV’s “Impractical Jokers” and NPR’s “Snap Judgment.” You’ll hear stories from the likes of the Moth StorySlam champ Adam Wade, as well as from Andy Christie and Gastor Almonte. Also, there will be a trivia contest and a wine giveaway, in which 10 lucky audience members will take home their own bottle of Sideshow Sauce.
+212-505-3360, kgbbar.com
+For an overview of January and February’s cultural events, click here.Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.
+EARLY GODARD at IFC Center (Jan. 18-March 31). Still going strong at 88, Jean-Luc Godard has a new movie, “The Image Book,” opening on Jan. 25. To mark the occasion, IFC Center is reviving the highlights of what some moviegoers regard as his more digestible early period, starting with “Breathless” (screening from Friday through Monday), which helped usher in an era of self-reflexivity in movies, and concluding with the “end of cinema,” the declaration he made at the close of “Weekend” (March 29-31).
+212-924-7771, ifccenter.comOur guide to pop and rock shows and the best of live jazz happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+Pop & Rock
+BROTHERS OSBORNE at Terminal 5 (Jan. 23, 8 p.m.). For those who appreciate their country music with a healthy dose of roadhouse-ready rock, this Maryland-based duo have released a series of up-tempo, guitar-heavy singles that have earned them both critical acclaim (including five Grammy nods) and a considerable following. Their rough-around-the-edges sound — relative to the slick Nashville aesthetic that’s currently in vogue — has endeared them to those country fans alienated by the genre’s radio-driven conformity. The show is sold out, but tickets are available through the resale market.
+212-582-6600, terminal5nyc.com
+CAM’RON at S.O.B.’s (Jan. 19, 8 p.m.). This Harlem-based M.C. will bring his collection of irresistible, party-starting tracks to this intimate club in SoHo. As a member of the Diplomats, best known for their earthshaking self-titled anthem, Cam’ron helped shape the sound of uptown rap in the late 1990s. Soon after, his solo efforts translated into two massive crossover hits: the indelible “Oh Boy” and “Hey Ma.” Since then, he has remained beloved among rap aficionados for his bombastic, club-ready tracks, but he has enough memorable songs and collaborations to appeal to those newer to the genre.
+212-243-4940, sobs.com‘MICKEY: THE TRUE ORIGINAL EXHIBITION’ at 60 10th Avenue (through Feb. 10). Mickey Mouse has been a constant in popular culture for decades, but that doesn’t mean that he’s been constantly the same. This 16,000-square-foot show celebrates Mickey’s 90th anniversary by charting his evolution from the gloveless, sharp-featured late-1920s version to contemporary iterations in which artists have rendered him abstract, three-dimensionally massive or even psychedelic. Curated by Darren Romanelli, the exhibition includes “Steamboat Willie Redux,” modern animators’ reimagining of Mickey’s first cartoon short; an enormous Mickey portrait by Keith Haring; “Supersonic Skein,” a vibrant mural crocheted by London Kaye; and Shinique Smith’s “Bale Variant No. 0026 (Ode to Mickey Mouse, My First Love),” a sculpture made of plush Mickey dolls. The show, which requires advance purchase of timed-entry tickets, will particularly delight young visitors with Sorcerer’s Way (a room devoted to Mickey’s role in Disney’s “Fantasia”) and the Mickey Mouse Club, a space to eat free ice cream surrounded by TV memorabilia. Children can also participate in a Mickey trivia game show and dance in the “Cosmic Cavern,” Kenny Scharf’s fluorescent disco installation inspired by the classic Mickey wristwatch.
+disney.com/mickeytrueoriginal
+‘ODD DAY RAIN’ at TADA! Youth Theater (Jan. 19, 7 p.m.; Jan. 20, 2 and 4 p.m.; Jan. 21, noon and 2 p.m.; through Feb. 24). Today’s young people, who seem to latch on to digital devices almost as soon as they can toddle, may have more sobering thoughts about technology after watching this rock musical revival, set in a post-apocalyptic landscape in 2211. Society seems to consist of only the youthful survivors of a calamity referred to as “the accident”: One, Claire, lives in a doorless pod where the Computer, an omniscient artificial intelligence, completely controls her existence; another, Aurora, is part of an apparently homeless cohort outdoors. Written by Janine Nina Trevens and Deirdre Broderick and performed by the TADA! Resident Youth Ensemble, “Odd Day Rain” presents a distant future that may feel uncomfortably close.
+212-252-1619, ext. 5; tadatheater.comThe minimum wage in New Jersey is currently $8.85, and raising it to $15 would boost the incomes of more than 1 million people in the state, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a liberal-leaning research group. The bill proposes increasing the minimum wage to $10 an hour on July 1. On Jan. 1, it would increase to $11 an hour, and then would increase by $1 an hour every year until it reaches $15 in 2024.
+“No one working a full-time job should ever live in poverty,” Mr. Murphy, a Democrat, said in a statement. “Putting the minimum wage on a clear and responsible path to $15 an hour is good for workers, good for our businesses and good for our economy. A higher minimum wage strengthens all of New Jersey.”
+The announcement of an agreement between Mr. Murphy, Stephen M. Sweeney, the senate president, and Craig Coughlin, the speaker of the assembly, amounts to a fait accompli; both Mr. Sweeney and Mr. Coughlin had said they would not introduce a bill unless it could pass and Mr. Murphy would sign it. With Democrats in control of both houses of the legislature, passing the bill will be a formality.
+The agreement also marks a major political victory for Mr. Murphy, who made raising the minimum wage and legalizing marijuana central promises during his run for governor. Though he said during his campaign that he wanted to raise the minimum wage to $15 by 2021, the governor said he was willing to negotiate with legislative leaders to get it passed early this year.
+The bill includes some exceptions: For seasonal workers and employees at small businesses who employ five workers or less, the base minimum wage would reach $15 an hour by 2026. For farmworkers, the base minimum wage would increase to $12.50 an hour by Jan. 1, 2024. Then, a special committee would review whether to raise those workers’ minimum wage to $15 an hour.My father wasn’t wrong. At 13 years old, I had already had numerous encounters related to the darkness of my skin.
+Like the winter of second grade, when I was playing on a patch of ice before the first bell rang at my school in Utah, where I grew up. I slid my feet on the ground, pretending I was a professional ice skater. A few minutes in, an older boy came over and pushed me off the ice. He scowled at me and yelled, “Get off the ice!” punctuating his command with the racial slur my father had warned me of. I just sat there.
+Or later in elementary school when we learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My teacher told us how back then black people couldn’t drink at the same water fountains as white people, and I sat in agony as all of my white-skinned peers peeked over the tops of their textbooks looking at me — the only black kid in a sea of white. Later, as we left to go out to recess, I stopped at the water fountain to get a drink, and then watched the white girl after me used her sleeve to wipe the fountain before taking a drink herself.
+My father’s words have come to me often, and I’ve realized how profound they were.
+They came to me when I was 16 and joy riding around town with my white best friend and our two black guy friends. The officer who pulled us over made only the black kids put our hands on the dashboard, telling us we better not move them. My arms trembled from adrenaline, and from holding my arms straight out in front of me for 20 minutes. I was afraid of what would happen if any of us decided to put them down.
+They came to me last March, when I was having beers with friends at a local bar in San Francisco, where I now live . After the white bouncer picked on my friend for accidentally bumping him on her way out, I stuck up for her, and he replied, “Oh I’m sorry, what do you want me to say? ‘Yessa massa’?” The bar refused to fire the guy.
+My cousin Brandon, who’s from Oklahoma, got the talk from his sister when he was 15. He remembered it the time a bouncer at a club refused to let him in because he was wearing Vans, although his white friends who were let into the club a few minutes before him were wearing the same shoes.A Quintessential Parma in Melbourne
+Capitano is part of Carlton’s renaissance — a new restaurant that aims to pay respect to the neighborhood’s history while modernizing its tastes and aspirations.Slide 1 of 9,
+The Olive Jar, in Carlton, Melbourne, serves the cuisine of Italy as seen through the lens of Australia. Upon entering, you’ll see examples of fresh housemade pasta draped over a display on the front counter.MELBOURNE, Australia — The Olive Jar and Capitano have a lot in common. Both restaurants are in Carlton, Melbourne’s historically Italian neighborhood. They sit about a block from each other on Rathdowne Street, not far from Carlton’s touristy main drag, Lygon Street, the center of Melbourne’s Little Italy. They both serve pizza, pasta and wine.
+The Olive Jar is a product of old Carlton; Capitano is part of Carlton’s renaissance — a new restaurant that aims to pay respect to the neighborhood’s history while modernizing its tastes and aspirations. Both are as Melbourne as Melbourne can be, but they exist in almost entirely separate worlds.
+The Olive Jar isn’t particularly well known. For 30 years it was called La Contadina — it became the Olive Jar in 2014 but retained the same ownership. Away from the bustle of Lygon, it has never succumbed to the whims of single-visit customers who are there thanks to a guidebook, so it retains its family-restaurant status. Upon entering, you’ll see examples of fresh housemade pasta draped over a display on the front counter, along with a huge platter of antipasti.
+Specials are noted on a chalkboard in the dining room, the brick walls decorated with photos, posters and tchotchkes, including pots and pans with handwritten signs that say they were brought from Italy by “Nonna.”When one hapless fellow invited family and friends to come watch him in a glassblowing demonstration, a bad cut-and-paste omitted the word “glass.” The result, wrote his wife, was “a shocking offer.”
+Her solution: She made him resend a corrected version of the same message four times. Her hope was that the flood of identical emails would minimize the amount of attention attracted by the first one.
+It worked. “Happily, we never had any responses to the initial rude offering,” she said.
+Some people resort to deception. Janet Katz told people she was the victim of a computer virus. “I blame a small child — son, niece, nephew, whatever,” Roanne Martin said.
+Sharyn Tom pointed out that you don’t have to defuse the fallout alone. “Enlist someone you have good rapport with to Reply All to your Reply All, and say something funny to cut the tension, like, ‘Great story, bro, we appreciate the update!’” she suggests. “The other person helps by taking the focus and embarrassment away from you, and pivots into humor or something useful.”
+In general, though, the wisest course seems to be quick action and a huge helping of humble pie.
+“I just call it what it is by sending yet another Reply All message like: ‘Well, that was awkward,’” Sheryl Moore wrote. “Usually that is met with kind and understanding replies.”
+Or, as Cassandra Kiger put it, “You own it, make apologies, spend 48 hours in shame, and move on.”
+Five ways to avoid Reply All nightmares
+Most people endure a botched Reply All episode only once. After that searing experience, you’re unlikely to make the same mistake again.
+But you can avoid the fiasco in the first place. Here’s how:
+Enter the address last. Jeff Branzburg has cultivated the habit of clicking Forward, not Reply, when answering messages. That way, the Address box of every reply starts out empty. “Compose the email, and only then go back and enter the address(es),” he says. This technique requires extra steps, but it guarantees you’ll never accidentally Reply to All.
+Give yourself an “Oh no!” window. In some email programs, you can set up a freakout delay. Your email will wait 60 seconds (or more) after you click Send, giving you a window in which to realize your gaffe and stop the message in its tracks. You can set this up in Microsoft Outlook or in Gmail. If you’re a Mac person, you need the free version of a plug-in called Mail Butler to add this feature to Apple’s Mail program. “The ‘oh no filter’ gives you enough time to correct errors,” Gerard Stijntjes notes. “I’ve shared it around at work and it is helping.”
+If Microsoft Outlook dominates your email life, as it does in many organizations, you have three additional safety nets at your disposal:[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Something seems amiss in the sky over New York City. And no, a transformer explosion is not turning it an eerie blue again.
+Look up. There is very little snow falling this winter.
+In fact, the city’s five boroughs have not seen one day of measurable snowfall since fall, when a crippling storm on Nov. 15 stranded thousands of commuters outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan.
+Even the Washington area — more than 200 miles southwest of New York — had a recent snow day. Residents there spent Monday digging out from up to a foot of precipitation from a weekend storm that earned an unofficial name ribbing off the government shutdown: “Snurlough,” combining snow and furlough.And then there was the price. Some research on leasing led Mr. Vakil to suspect he could get a better deal than TrueCar offered. Ultimately, he leased a Volt for a lower monthly payment than the TrueCar guaranteed price. “I saved about 60 bucks a month — it’s a meal,” he said. “I just worked up from the bottom price.”
+A study from a nonprofit consumer group and a lawsuit in federal court against TrueCar, as well as myriad complaints on Twitter and web forums, suggest that Mr. Vikal’s experience is not rare, and that shoppers as well as dealers say they have been let down by TrueCar’s service.
+The consumer group found that the TrueCar guaranteed price averaged $1,550 more than what consumers paid when dealers had to bid for their business. The lawsuit, which was brought by 162 car dealers and is still working its way through the court, asserts that TrueCar’s “no haggle” promise is false advertising, and that the “factory invoice pricing” falsely implies savings that TrueCar does not deliver.
+TrueCar, in a written response, said: “On average, the prices offered tend to be thousands of dollars below M.S.R.P. and also tend to be at or below the market average transaction prices because dealers provide prices to TrueCar knowing that consumers can easily compare those prices to what other people paid.”
+TrueCar became a billion-dollar public company by collecting sales data from car dealerships and showing consumers what other buyers had paid for specific cars and options, and offering the cars at a low pre-negotiated price. Its website says it is behind the car-buying programs for over 500 companies, including USAA, AARP and American Express.Where have Earth’s craters gone?
+Certainly we have the striking Meteor Crater in Arizona, and Chicxulub, which lies beneath Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, the 100-mile-wide scar of the meteor that likely killed off the dinosaurs.
+Some of the cosmic battering, from the space rocks that landed in the oceans, did not carve out craters. Others have been erased by erosion and plate tectonics.
+Still, there do not seem to be enough craters on our planet, especially from the older eras — just 190 confirmed examples worldwide.
+A new study suggests that geologists cannot find more big de nts i n Earth’s surface because they were never there.With starting pitchers working fewer and fewer innings these days, relievers are more important than ever. That is how the Yankees see it, at least, and they showed it again on Thursday by giving another three-year contract to an elite free-agent reliever.
+The Yankees reached agreement on a three-year, $27 million deal with Adam Ottavino, a right-hander from Brooklyn who starred last season for the Colorado Rockies. The deal was confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the deal who was granted anonymity because Ottavino must pass a physical exam before the deal is official.
+Ottavino, 33, joins Zach Britton, Dellin Betances and Chad Green as overpowering setup men for closer Aroldis Chapman. The Yankees re-signed Britton — the former All-Star closer for Baltimore who joined the team in a trade last summer — for three years and $39 million this month.
+Ottavino grew up rooting for the Yankees; in 1998, at 12 years old, he was in the stands for David Wells’s perfect game. He attended P.S. 39 in Brooklyn, played ball at Prospect Park and graduated from the Berkeley Carroll School in 2003. Three years later, the St. Louis Cardinals drafted him in the first round out of Northeastern University.“She basically knows where he’s going to hit in advance, because she hits with him every day, so there is no surprise,” Mouratoglou said. “She doesn’t feel that she’s challenged because she knows him too well. I think that counts a lot. And she controls him, in a way, because he’s her employee. Even unconsciously, she makes him play the way she wants to, even if she doesn’t try to.
+“So it’s completely different relationship with a professional player, because she has to give him good rhythm, to give a good ball to him, too, so she can’t lose focus.”
+Other top men and women have shared practice courts in the first month of the tennis season. Andy Murray and Naomi Osaka, for example, hit together for 30 minutes at a tournament in Brisbane, Australia.
+Mouratoglou said that he emphasized to the men that they should not treat Williams differently from any other practice partner.
+He said he told Eubanks, “Play for yourself — it’s your practice.”
+Eubanks said the session with Williams helped him in his first-round loss Monday against 19th-seeded Nikoloz Basilashvili. Eubanks had set points to go up by two sets to one on a player ranked 150 spots ahead of him.
+“Serena hits, in my opinion, one of the cleanest balls in the history of tennis,” Eubanks said. “I was working on absorbing pace, because she puts enough pace on it that you’re really working the legs. I’m being as professional as I can, because you’re on the court with Serena Williams. You don’t want her to think you can’t play.”“Gravity,” “127 Hours,” “Castaway”: The attempt to survive alone amid the majesty and menace of nature is a cinematic standby. With the opulent Spanish endurance saga “Solo” — a title that translates as “Alone” — Netflix enters that curiously well-populated territory.
+Directed by Hugo Stuven, the film is based on the true story of Álvaro Vizcaíno, a surfer who was forced by an injury to spend two grueling days stranded at water’s edge on a remote Canary Islands beach. Immobilized by his wounds, he battles thirst, exhaustion, hallucinations and the threat of drowning in the rising tide.
+Physical suffering aside, the movie’s central question is whether Álvaro — a gregarious but fundamentally standoffish sort whose wanderlust distances him from everyone he loves — truly has enough to live for.
+That’s a very precise cinematic target to hit, and “Solo” winds up just wide of the mark. The film’s opening third cuts between the disaster and Álvaro’s later return to the scene with his ex-girlfriend (Aura Garrido), whom the film idealizes to the point of being more cipher than character. That structure helps Stuven set up a big surprise later on, but it irreparably dilutes the sense of danger.An advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration split evenly on Thursday over whether the agency should approve the first oral medication to treat Type 1 diabetes.
+The committee voted 8-8, leaving it up to the agency to decide by the end of March whether the drug, sotagliflozin, should reach the market.
+The drug, which is used along with insulin, is being developed by the drug makers Sanofi and Lexicon Pharmaceuticals, who plan to sell it under the brand name Zynquista. It carries a higher risk for developing diabetic ketoacidosis, a life-threatening complication that happens when the body doesn’t get enough insulin, which led some of the reviewers to vote against it.
+The companies said they would continue work with the F.D.A. throughout the review process.
+The drug is a once-daily pill designed to help people manage their blood sugar levels. In Type 1 diabetes — also known as juvenile diabetes because it is often diagnosed in childhood — the body does not produce insulin, so people with the disease must monitor their blood sugar and take insulin. But relying on external insulin can lead the body’s blood sugar levels to rise and fall, which is uncomfortable and can lead to health problems.1. A few members of Congress were on a bus, heading to Andrews Air Force Base for their first leg of an unannounced trip to Afghanistan, when President Trump sent a letter addressed to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
+“I am sorry to inform you that your trip to Brussels, Egypt and Afghanistan has been postponed,” Mr. Trump wrote. “We will reschedule this seven-day excursion when the shutdown is over.”
+The point was clear. A day earlier, Ms. Pelosi said Mr. Trump’s State of the Union address should be delayed — or delivered only in writing — because of security concerns raised by the government shutdown. She has continued to push her case for a delay, and also hinted that Democrats would begin promoting their own proposals for border security.HARK
+By Sam Lipsyte
+284 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.
+We begin with a schmuck. His name is Fraz Penzig — Fraz being how his father, Frank, once heard himself paged over a static-filled airport loudspeaker. “Penzig men,” writes Sam Lipsyte. “Always hovering just outside of an inside joke they have played on themselves.” It’s hard to diminish a character faster than naming him for a mistake, but we soon learn that Fraz is abrasive and useless at his job. He has a porn fetish that’s common knowledge in his grossed-out social circle. His 8-year-old twins may have rectal parasites. His wife, Tovah, enjoys French-kissing one of Fraz’s childhood rivals. “Tovah told him that life is not a zero-sum game, but Fraz senses that if it were, he would be the zero sum.”
+Hark Morner is also named for a mistake, this one involving a foreign-born mother and a Christmas carol. “She thought the song was about someone telling their friend Hark that the herald angels were singing,” Hark tells Fraz. But where Fraz has been sinking since birth, Hark is rising — as in “glory to the newborn king” rising — through mental archery, a quasi-religious mindfulness regimen of his own creation. He’s still in the pamphlet-selling phase when he meets Fraz, and he’s not the chattiest messiah. But when Hark speaks, “his voice is an enchanted river with roars and hushes and thick, crystal swerves. It carves a course for Fraz to follow, to flow toward, out from his fetid backwaters, his brack stink.”
+[ The paper’s 2010 review of “The Ask” called it “the sort of book that, if it were an animal, would be a lumbering, hairy, cryptozoological ape-man with a near-crippling case of elephantiasis.” ]
+The attraction and repulsion between would-be Jesus and his apostle Costanza is a major story line in “Hark,” though it’s hardly the only one. “Hark” is Lipsyte’s first novel since 2010’s much-loved “The Ask,” and similarities abound. Both are satires featuring underemployed, middle-aged New York Jewish protagonists with abandoned artistic dreams, cheating wives and snack-food obsessions. That’s a pretty specific box on the census form for a writer to check twice. Both also veer away from narrative to chase any excuse for a riff — then swing back with prose so good you feel guilty complaining about the whiplash. The difference is that in “Hark” the riffing has more serious consequences.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.Others are more particular: How is China using technology to maintain and expand its power? How will China respond to the growing backlash to its policies forming in Australia, the United States and elsewhere?
+These reporting targets, we hope, will yield interesting journalism throughout the year.
+But our discussions in Hong Kong also covered the region. We have correspondents throughout Asia, reporting on politics, culture, business and technology; here are a few of the topics that led to robust conversations about our future coverage.
+This is far from a comprehensive list, but consider it a bit of a preview for 2019.
+Elections: India, the Philippines, Thailand — and Australia of course — all have elections scheduled for this year. Voters will be given stark choices about not just domestic policy, but also foreign affairs.
+Demographics: India has to create a million jobs each year to keep unemployment from rising; Japan is desperate for workers; China is desperate for babies. There are also intriguing stories about South Korea’s aging populace, Australia’s immigration debate and China’s broader population dynamics — especially its overabundance of men.
+Women: The role of women in the work force and in life, in Japan, in China, in Australia — these were all of interest to the group. What are the structures that maintain the status quo, how do they differ from country to country, and to what extent are they changing?An art exhibition, a play and more events that will help you commemorate the civil rights leader.
+‘Crusader: Martin Luther King Jr.’
+This newly opened photography exhibition features images of Dr. King’s Gandhi-inspired pilgrimage to India in 1959 and the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in which he was honored for his nonviolent crusade against racism. The exhibition continues through April 6 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Manhattan; nypl.org/locations/schomburg.
+‘Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom’
+In 1965 Lynda Blackmon Lowery marched as a teenager alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery, Ala. She was jailed nine times before she turned 15 and was beaten on Bloody Sunday, when civil rights protesters were attacked by police officers and vigilantes. This play, adapted from Ms. Lowery’s memoir, dramatizes her experiences. She’ll be on hand for discussions after both matinee performances. Jan. 19 at 2 and 7 p.m., and Jan. 20 at 2 and 6 p.m. at the Riverside Church, 490 Riverside Drive; Manhattan; trcnyc.org.
+‘Unsung Champions of Civil Rights From MLK to Today’
+Jami Floyd and Brian Lehrer of Public Radio’s WNYC host a free program of interviews and panels focusing on the activists who have not yet received the recognition they deserve. The event will also include a photography exhibition and performances by Rutha Harris of the Freedom Singers and members of Urban Word NYC. Chester Higgins Jr., a former New York Times staff photographer, will be among the guests. RSVP in advance. Jan. 20 at 3 p.m. at the Apollo Theater; apollotheater.org/uptownhall.
+‘Play Date: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’
+The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling hosts a free daylong celebration of Dr. King’s legacy. Festivities will begin in the morning with art-making activities focused on the theme of “creating a just world.” In the afternoon, a story hour, more art making and an intergenerational dialogue inspired by Dr. King’s book “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” will follow. Jan. 20 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the museum, 898 St. Nicholas Avenue, Manhattan; 212-335-0004, sugarhillmuseum.org.No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch.
+This Weekend I Have … 10 Minutes, and I Like Pop History
+‘Matt Baume’s Culture Cruise’
+When to watch: Now, on YouTube.
+This thoughtful and thorough web series from Matt Baume takes a closer look at queer representation — the good and the bad — in pop culture. He explains common story elements that popped up, for example, on “Golden Girls” or “Rhoda,” and he traces not only how stories about queer characters have changed but also how TV has changed in general. The episodes are short, informative and funny, but not lecutre-y.
+… a Half-Hour, and I Like FeelingsMark Urman, a distributor who championed independent films and documentaries, helping movies that might have faded into obscurity reach audiences and win major awards, died on Saturday in Newark. He was 66.
+His wife, the writer Deborah Davis, said that the cause was respiratory failure and that Mr. Urman had recently learned he had bone cancer.
+Mr. Urman was an important part of two distribution companies that focused on independent films: ThinkFilm, which was founded in 2001 and essentially shuttered in 2008, and Paladin, which he founded in 2009.
+A distributor’s job is to market movies and place them in theaters. What distinguished Mr. Urman was his devotion to independent movies that can hardly compete with Hollywood blockbusters; he had to persuade moviegoers and theater owners to choose films with subjects that were unfamiliar and, at times, seemingly unappealing.Artful illumination gives visitors a better glimpse of the shelves of books lining the (inaccessible) balcony, hinting at the atmosphere of the grand library on the third floor. “It pulls the books right down into the center of the room,” said Bruce Crawford, the club’s current president (and a collector of Dickens and other 19th-century authors).
+On the way up to the members-only spaces , Mr. Holzenberg offered me a quick look into the second-floor gallery, where a half-dozen members were installing “Two American Poets: Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams,” a new exhibition drawn from the collection of Alan M. Klein, a member and lawyer.
+I made the mistake of tsking that no one was wearing gloves.
+“Never gloves!” several people exclaimed at once. They compromise the grip, as it turns out, increasing the risk of dropping or tearing something.
+Up in the library (open to researchers but not the general public), Meghan Constantinou, the club’s librarian, opened a not-so-secret door concealed in a bookshelf. It opens to a staircase that leads to more shelves holding some of the library’s collection of more than 150,000 bookseller, auction and private library catalogs, as well as over 40,000 books about books.
+Ms. Constantinou, a collector of women’s bookplates, had pulled out one of the oldest printed books in the collection: a copy of Flavius Joseph us’s “The Jewish War,” published in 1470 by a Rhineland printer named Johann Schüssler (no known relation to this reporter, alas).BEIRUT — For American troops posted in the dusty flatlands of northern Syria, the Palace of the Princes restaurant in Manbij offered a pleasant place to stop for grilled chicken, French fries or its locally renowned shawarma sandwich.
+The Americans liked the food so much that they dropped in frequently, often many times a week, residents said. Visiting officials were welcomed to red booths and water pipes; two American senators dined there in July.
+“They stop here for chicken and shawarma whenever they have a patrol in the city,” said Jassim al-Khalaf, 37, who sells vegetables nearby. “People here are used to it, so it’s not a new thing to see them.”
+The jihadists of the Islamic State noticed, too, dispatching a suicide bomber who blew himself up at the restaurant on Wednesday, killing at least 15 people, including four Americans: two service members, a Defense Department civilian and a military contractor.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+“Pretty cool,” Lt. Gen. Paul E. Funk II, then the commander of coalition forces fighting in Iraq and Syria, told me. “This is what stability looks like. This is what winning looks like.”
+General Funk was standing in a crowded marketplace in Manbij, Syria. He was surveying stalls where vendors not only hawked spices, gold jewelry, olive soap and fresh chicken, but also freely displayed women’s undergarments and brightly colored clothes that the Islamic State banned before it was driven from the city in 2016.
+He was with a delegation of two United States senators, their staffs and a military escort — none of whom wore body armor as they walked through the throngs. From the souk, the group strolled to a nearby restaurant, the Palace of Princes, for lunch with local leaders. It was July 2, 2018.Romeo was made for love, as all animals are. But for years he couldn’t find it . It’s not like there was anything wrong with Romeo. Sure he’s shy, eats worms, lacks eyelashes and is 10 years old, at least . But he’s aged well, and he’s kind of a special guy.
+Romeo is a Sehuencas water frog, once thought to be the last one on the planet. He lives alone in a tank at the Museo de Historia Natural Alcide d’Orbigny in Bolivia.
+A deadly fungal disease threatens his species and other frogs in the cloud forest where he was found a decade ago. When researchers brought him to the museum’s conservation breeding center, they expected to find another frog he could mate with and save the species from extinction. But they searched stream after stream, and nothing.
+Romeo, called the “World’s Loneliest Frog,” started sharing his feelings on Twitter. Things got desperate.Will you push for government funding for the U.S. Center for SafeSport?
+Every meeting I’ve had in Washington, I’ve asked for money for the Center for SafeSport.
+How much?
+We asked for, it was before my time, I think $5 million a year. What came back was $2.5 million over five years.
+I don’t think there’s an easy answer that says, yes, the government’s going to fund this to this amount and here’s where it’s going to come from. We don’t have any confidence that real funding is going to come at this point.
+I would think it would be a priority to get it funded properly because it’s sadly underfunded.
+The center asked us for $6.2 million next year. We said yes. They haven’t come back and said we need more money.
+There are coaches that have been banned who are still coaching. These guys are still out there. Sources have said they put in a complaint to SafeSport and no one got back to them. They probably need a lot more money not only for policing but education.
+There is no doubt that the capacity of the center is not where it needs to be to handle the volume. My understanding is that they are growing and hiring as fast as they can. Funding is not the issue; it’s capacity and growth rate. It’s a huge priority for us. But at the same time, it’s an independent organization that’s accountable to its board. We have given them every dollar they have asked for. If SafeSport needs more money, I certainly hope that they will ask for it.
+There’s still fallout from all the lawsuits. Are you confident the U.S.O.C. will survive? Will it have to declare bankruptcy?Her comments clearly got under the president’s skin. Late Thursday afternoon, he revoked her military transport for a secret trip to Afghanistan — a visit to a war zone that Mr. Trump derided as a “public relations event.” He suggested Ms. Pelosi, second in line for the presidency, fly commercial. To Afghanistan.
+Ms. Pelosi’s aides and supporters quickly pointed out that her plans included thanking the troops and meeting with the commanders of the war that Mr. Trump is trying to end. Mr. Trump, in fact, made his first visit to a warzone during this same shutdown.
+Now, none of the fighting over flights gets the country any closer to ending a government shutdown that’s crippling the finances of 800,000 federal workers and starting to have economic impacts far bigger than even the White House anticipated.
+But it is some awfully crafty politics by Ms. Pelosi.
+A 78-year-old, wealthy San Francisco liberal, Ms. Pelosi is nobody’s idea of an everyman politician. Forget fast food — Ms. Pelosi eats dark chocolate ice cream for breakfast. Her campaign superpower involves twisting the arms of rich donors. She doesn’t really use Twitter, never mind Instagram.
+And yet, right now, she might just be the most powerful politician in the country.
+Dozens of Democrats spent months campaigning against supporting Ms. Pelosi as speaker. (Worth noting: G.O.P. attacks on her far outpaced mentions of any other congressional leader in campaign ads for the last three cycles.) In the end, after a weekslong campaign by Ms. Pelosi put down any hint of rebellion, only 15 members cast ballots against her.The Forward, the 121-year-old Jewish publication that started as a Yiddish-language daily newspaper for those who had fled persecution in Europe, announced on Thursday that it planned to stop publishing print editions this spring.
+“Whereas our readers once went to the newsstand with a nickel to read the news of the day, today, the vast majority of our community connects through the digital world,” the publication said in a note to its readers. “That is where The Forward is and will be.”
+In addition to the move away from print, The Forward cut nearly 30 percent of its staff, including the editor in chief, Jane Eisner, and the executive editor, Dan Friedman.
+“The staff here is great, and it was a very difficult decision,” Rachel Fishman Feddersen, the publisher and chief executive of The Forward, said in an interview. “But my job is to make sure The Forward is here for the next 120 years, and that means having an organization that is focused on digital readership.”Officially, a big part of the federal government shut down late last month. In important ways, however, America’s government went AWOL almost two years earlier, when Donald Trump was inaugurated.
+After all, politicians supposedly seek office in order to get stuff done — to tackle real problems and implement solutions. But neither Trump, who spends his energy inventing crises at the border, nor the Republicans who controlled Congress for two years have done any of that. Their only major legislative achievement was a tax cut that blew up the deficit without, as far as anyone can tell, doing anything to enhance the economy’s long-run growth prospects.
+Meanwhile, there has been no hint of the infrastructure plan Trump promised to deliver. And after many years of denouncing Obamacare and promising to provide a far better replacement, Republicans turned out to have no idea how to do that, and in particular no plan to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions.
+Why can’t Republicans govern? It’s not just that their party is committed to an ideology that says that government is always the problem, never the solution. Beyond that, they have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question received doctrine.And because federal law enforcement agencies have failed to adapt to this changing population, agents are ill equipped to handle the asylum seekers once they do arrive.
+Those agents are used to chasing after single Mexican men determined to evade capture. They are now dealing with Central American families, fleeing their countries and running to, not from, the agents. Some carry very small children; all are being crowded into small, inhumane cement cells for days at a time.
+I am not blaming the agents. During one of our visits to an El Paso Sector station, agents were up front with us about how unprepared they were to care for the large groups of people they apprehended. They had to buy burritos from a vendor down the street, then warm hundreds of them in a single, small microwave that eventually burned out.
+Then there was the mother who, in our presence, asked for a cup of water for her toddler, only to be told that the facility was out of cups. What a terrible situation for the mother, holding an exhausted, thirsty child in her arms. And what does that do to the agent who has to say no to her?
+During flu season, agents in El Paso had to dispense medication to their charges. Imagine keeping track of dozens of prescriptions intended to be dispensed every few hours. And all of this was keeping agents from what they were trained to do: track and apprehend bad guys.
+When I ask agents what they worry about most, I hear stories like this — not pleas for a wall. Other times they ask for better cellphone coverage and updated radios to use in rural areas. In urban areas with busy ports of entry, they ask for more personnel and newer equipment. There aren’t enough immigration judges, they don’t have enough independence, and the laws on the books don’t reflect modern realities.
+The agents may not be to blame, but the agencies sure are. Local immigration activists said their main concern was inadequate communication from federal law enforcement, which left their organizations scrambling when the local Immigration Customs Enforcement office releases hundreds of migrants in need of temporary housing into the nighttime streets of El Paso.With the commission’s work scheduled to end in September, why the sudden urgency to expel its staff?
+Cicig has charged Mr. Morales’s own brother and son with fraud and has been investigating Mr. Morales and his associates for possible campaign finance violations. On Jan. 9, two days after the president ordered the expulsion of the prosecutors from Guatemala, they didn’t show up in the courtroom where the president’s son and brother were being tried; it’s the first trial indefinitely suspended because the president revoked the commission’s mandate.
+Guatemala will hold national elections in June. When his term ends, so will Morales’s immunity from prosecution. Mr. Morales and his political, economic and military allies are maneuvering to block pro-Cicig candidates — especially former Attorney General Thelma Aldana — from running. What Guatemalans refer to as a “slow-motion coup,” prompted by his earlier moves against Cicig, is speeding up.
+Meanwhile, the pro-Morales coalition in the country’s congress, known by its critics as “el pacto de corruptos,” is moving to gut the Constitutional Court . Guatemalans are bracing for what’s being deemed as “the restoration”: a return to impunity for corrupt economic and political elites, the release from prison of those charged with crimes by Cicig and the repression of journalists, human rights and judicial activists.
+Cicig’s European donor countries and other governments strongly denounced the commission’s expulsion. The United States is Cicig’s largest donor, but the bipartisan consensus that supported it for 11 years has collapsed. Many agree that the role of the United States is likely to be determinative.
+Democratic lawmakers in the United States have voiced support for the commission. Representative Norma Torres warned that with its abrupt departure, the “complex cases involving organized crime, drug trafficking and human smuggling would fall apart. Powerful criminals and the corrupt politicians would get away with serious crimes.”
+The United States Embassy in Ciudad de Guatemala officially expressed concern “about the future of anti-corruption efforts in Guatemala” but made no mention of Cicig, doing little to dispel concerns that the Trump administration tacitly supports Mr. Morales. Leading Republicans, including Senators Mike Lee of Utah, Marco Rubio of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Representative Steve King of Iowa, have praised Mr. Morales for defending Guatemalan sovereignty.
+“Sovereignty” was arguably pertinent to the decision to end Cicig’s mandate, but Mr. Morales’s other actions undermine Guatemalan rule of law and democratic institutions. Representative Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican, said on Twitter, “I stand by the people of Guatemala and the decision of their president regarding Cicig” — a ludicrous statement, considering that polls have consistently demonstrated overwhelming Guatemalan support for Cicig, the most recent measuring 71 percent approval.Mr. Gabbard, who has been a state lawmaker since 2006, has been an outspoken anti-gay activist. In addition to the Alliance for Traditional Marriage, he also ran a group called Stop Promoting Homosexuality America and hosted an anti-gay radio show called “Let’s Talk Straight Hawaii,” according to Honolulu Civil Beat, a news organization.
+Ms. Gabbard alluded to her conservative upbringing and her father’s work on Thursday in her video, but did not go into detail about her own anti-gay advocacy as a young person. She was the youngest person ever elected to the Hawaii State Legislature.
+According to a 2017 profile in The New Yorker, Ms. Gabbard led a protest in 2004 against a bill to legalize civil unions for same-sex couples. That year she also spoke in the State House against a measure to combat anti-gay bullying in schools.
+She said she objected to students being taught that homosexuality is “normal and natural” and feared that the anti-bullying resolution would mean “inviting homosexual-advocacy organizations into our schools to promote their agenda to our vulnerable youth,” according to The New Yorker.
+On Thursday night, Mr. Gabbard said all of that was in his daughter’s past.
+“I’m not sure why there’s all this conversation about Tulsi’s position right now,” he wrote in an email. “Her position changed a long time ago. So, I’m not sure why it’s coming out now.”
+Indeed, in her video apology Ms. Gabbard said her views had “significantly changed.”
+“While many Americans may be able to relate to growing up in a conservative home, my story is a little different because my father was very outspoken,” she said. “He was an activist who was fighting against gay rights and marriage equality in Hawaii, and at the time I forcefully defended him and his cause."
+Ms. Gabbard, an Army National Guard veteran who was twice deployed to the Middle East, was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2012. She was the first Hindu and the first American Samoan elected to that chamber.It seems that the speaker of the House has gotten under the famously thin skin of the president.
+On Wednesday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised eyebrows on both sides of the aisle by effectively disinviting President Trump from delivering his State of the Union address to Congress this month .
+In a letter citing concerns about the security implications of the continuing government shutdown, Ms. Pelosi suggested, “sadly,” that it might be best if she and the president could “determine another suitable date after government has reopened for this address or for you to consider delivering your State of the Union address in writing.”
+The communiqué was at once excruciatingly polite and brutally dismissive, driving home how the power dynamic has shifted on Capitol Hill. As congressional Republicans sputtered about how grossly political the speaker was being, Mr. Trump was reminded not only of the limitations of his own power, but also of how his House enablers have been stripped of theirs.
+Surprised and clearly irked, Mr. Trump fired back Thursday with a petulant, taunting letter postponing a congressional delegation that Ms. Pelosi had been scheduled to lead to Brussels and Afghanistan — or at least canceling military support for it — for the duration of the shutdown. “Obviously, if you would like to make your journey by flying commercial, that would certainly be your prerogative,” snarked the president.NAIROBI, Kenya — The police intensified their search on Thursday for the plotters of the deadly assault on a Nairobi hotel-shopping complex, as Kenyan news services said at least 11 people had been arrested, including a suspected financier.
+The assault, which began Tuesday afternoon and lasted more than 18 hours, killed at least 21 people, including a police officer. Fifteen of the victims were Kenyan, one was American, one was British and the others were of undetermined African nationality, the authorities said.
+Five assailants also were killed and 700 people were evacuated from the complex in one of the Kenyan capital’s most secure areas.A few years ago, when I was teaching at Yale, I made an announcement to my class. I said that I was going to have to cancel office hours that day because I was dealing with some personal issues and a friend was coming up to help me sort through them.
+I was no more specific than that, but that evening 10 or 15 students emailed me to say they were thinking of me or praying for me. For the rest of the term the tenor of that seminar was different. We were closer. That one tiny whiff of vulnerability meant that I wasn’t aloof Professor Brooks, I was just another schmo trying to get through life.
+That unplanned moment illustrated for me the connection between emotional relationships and learning. We used to have this top-down notion that reason was on a teeter-totter with emotion. If you wanted to be rational and think well, you had to suppress those primitive gremlins, the emotions. Teaching consisted of dispassionately downloading knowledge into students’ brains.
+Then work by cognitive scientists like Antonio Damasio showed us that emotion is not the opposite of reason; it’s essential to reason. Emotions assign value to things. If you don’t know what you want, you can’t make good decisions.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In the early morning of Feb. 17, 2014, the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera was in bed with his mistress — one of many — when his personal secretary burst into the room with an urgent message: Troops were at the door. Time to leave.
+Mr. Guzmán — naked — ran into the bathroom, beckoning the rest of his household to come with him. Popping the top on his escape hatch, he lifted the lid of the bathtub to reveal a set of wooden stairs leading to a tunnel. As a tactical team of Mexican marines used a battering ram on his front door, the kingpin known as El Chapo disappeared into the tunnel’s humid darkness — and into the annals of criminal myth.
+Like other legends that surround Mr. Guzmán, the basic facts of his flight from the marines five years ago have been told so often they have started to develop the haziness of a fable. But on Thursday, the tale was told again, not only with astonishing new details, but by a stunning firsthand source: Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López, the mistress who escaped into the tunnel at his side.
+In an afternoon of testimony at Mr. Guzmán’s drug trial in New York, Ms. Sánchez took the jury through an almost unbelievable drug world love story, starting with the moment she met the crime lord at age 21 and ending with a terrifying trudge through Culiacán’s sewers.A Belarusian escort who claimed to have audio recordings that could link Russia with President Trump’s election was detained in Moscow on Thursday, according to Russian news agencies.
+The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, was deported from Thailand on Thursday after she and seven other defendants — five Russians and two Belarusians — pleaded guilty to charges of solicitation and conspiracy. Russian news services said that she had been detained when she arrived at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow.
+Citing a statement from the Interior Ministry, the Russian news services Interfax and RIA Novosti said that three Russian citizens and a female Belarusian citizen, “arriving on a flight from the Kingdom of Thailand,” were arrested at the airport on charges of inducement to prostitution.
+If convicted, the four face up to six years in prison apiece.
+Ms. Vashukevich, who also goes by the name Nastya Rybka, was detained in Moscow with her associate Alexander Kirillov, who had helped her conduct a sex-training seminar in the Thai city of Pattaya.True Confidence
+Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said Mr. Bogle didn’t just bring low-cost investments to the average person — he ran Vanguard for the benefit of investors.
+“There has been thinly veiled resentment toward Bogle from other mutual fund leaders over the years because of his focus on reducing costs, which was a direct threat to their bottom line,” said Ms. Roper, who met him once, when she was seated next to him at a dinner. “He always cared more about that vision — how the industry should be run — than making friends in the industry. Of course, he was rewarded with a following that was cultlike in its devotion.”
+The cultists call themselves the Bogleheads, a group of like-minded investors who consider Mr. Bogle the spiritual leader of their financial lives.
+Moral Compass
+Each year, the Bogleheads hold a conference . And Christine Benz, the director of personal finance at Morningstar, has interviewed him at each one for the past decade. She called him the conscience of the financial services industry.
+“His consistent belief that all investors deserve a fair shake was a core principle that I incorporated into my work and shaped my career path,” she said. “You listen to Jack Bogle and you think, ‘I want to be on this guy’s team.’ Whatever he is talking about, this is the right thing to do for people.”
+So strong was Mr. Bogle’s belief, she said, that it remained firmly instilled in Vanguard long after he had given up control. And once investors convert to his ethos of simplicity and thrift, it’s for life.
+“Investors come around to Vanguard, and then they never leave,” she said.ABU DHABI — The message to the D.J. was short and to the point: no Arabic music.
+That was the edict from the organizers of the Asian Cup match here on Thursday, an attempt to limit even the opportunity for a flash point in the first soccer match between Saudi Arabia and Qatar since the start of a bitter political feud nearly two years ago. The dispute, and the Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, has so divided countries in the region that even the prematch music at the tournament is now viewed through that prism.
+At other matches at the Asian Cup, the most important soccer event on the sprawling continent, the soundtrack has included music from the participating countries. That was not the case Thursday at the Zayed Sports City Stadium, where the sound system blasted western dance music in an effort to avoid even the risk of inflaming tensions between rival supporters.
+In the case of Qatar, that support was limited to a Korean woman, a male student from China and band of Omanis who arrived during the second half after acquiring free tickets. Almost no Qatari fans have traveled to the tournament amid the blockade of the tiny emirate by a Saudi-led group of its neighbors, including the United Arab Emirates, that has made travel extremely difficult — and entry into the U.A.E. close to impossible.A Skadden Arps team led by Gregory B. Craig, a former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, produced a report concluding that, while the trial violated some of Ms. Tymoshenko’s rights, her conviction was supported by the evidence presented at trial. And the report found no evidence that the prosecution was politically motivated.
+Mr. Craig, who maintained deep connections to Washington’s Democratic establishment and its press corps, worked to shape the public relations strategy for the release of the report, according to a Justice Department filing released with the settlement.
+The filing, which identifies Mr. Craig as “Partner 1” but does not name him, indicates that he arranged for a journalist to receive a copy of the report, then discussed the report with that journalist. The journalist, who is not named in the filing, is David E. Sanger of The New York Times, which published an article in December 2012 about the report quoting Mr. Craig.
+Mr. Craig and Skadden Arps should have disclosed that activity under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, known as FARA, which covers both lobbying and public relations on behalf of foreign political interests, the Justice Department said. But Mr. Craig misled both his colleagues at Skadden Arps and officials in the Justice Department’s FARA unit about his interactions with the news media, leading the Justice Department to conclude that the firm was not obligated to register under the act, the settlement filing said.
+The settlement “puts law firms on notice that they can’t hide behind their identity as lawyers. If they are doing lobbying work on behalf of foreign countries, they need to register under FARA,” said Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School who specializes in legal ethics. “It also shows that the government will not tolerate false statements by lawyers.”
+Skadden Arps said in a statement that it had “learned much from this incident” and was “taking steps to prevent anything similar from happening again.”
+Mr. Craig’s lawyer declined to comment.
+The investigation that led to the settlement with Skadden Arps was handled by the Justice Department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section, which includes the FARA unit. But federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, to which Mr. Mueller’s team referred illegal lobbying cases, asked witnesses about Mr. Craig’s involvement in Mr. Manafort’s work as recently as last month, according to people familiar with the case.The chronic funding shortage for California’s large urban school systems is primarily because of the state’s property tax law. Voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978, capping property taxes and drastically limiting the amount of money the state could collect for public schools. The law has led to smaller, more affluent communities raising money with local bonds or parcel taxes, something that is virtually impossible in poorer urban districts like Los Angeles.
+But despite widespread agreement from education experts that the law harms low-income schools, it is widely seen as a third rail of state politics and changing it would require statewide voter approval. There is now an effort, supported by both district and union leaders in Los Angeles, for a 2020 ballot measure that would change the law to increase commercial property taxes, but not change the law for homeowners.
+Still, Democratic leaders are facing pressure to find significantly more money for public schools. The scrutiny is now turning to Mayor Eric Garcetti and Gov. Gavin Newsom. Austin Beutner, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, has suggested that the mayor use some of the city’s budget to help pay for student services. And many observers say that an agreement between the union and the district will ultimately require more money from Mr. Newsom’s budget.
+Although the union and Mr. Beutner agreed that the state should spend more on public schools, they are locked in a bitter fight over how the district should use the money it already has — and cannot agree on how much that is.
+The union has pointed to a nearly $2 billion reserve, which it says could be used to pay for more educators so that class sizes are significantly smaller and that all schools have full-time nurses, counselors and mental health professionals. But Mr. Beutner has said the district is already spending far more than it brings in. A state-appointed fact-finder supported both claims, and both sides have pointed to the report to bolster their arguments.
+Mr. Beutner has been steadfast in his support for charters, saying they give parents more choices and are an essential option in Los Angeles. But Mr. Beutner has pushed back at the union’s claim that he wants to shut down traditional public schools.Rupert Murdoch’s New York tabloid has a new boss.
+In an announcement on Thursday, News Corporation, the newspaper’s parent company, said that Jesse Angelo was out as publisher and chief executive after two decades at the paper. Taking his place is Sean Giancola, The Post’s chief revenue officer.
+Mr. Angelo, 45, started out as a stringer for Page Six, the paper’s saucy, celebrity-skewering gossip column. He became a staff reporter in 1999 and quickly moved up the ranks. By age 27 he was dispatching reporters to murder scenes as metropolitan editor.
+In 2009, he was promoted to executive editor, and took charge of The Post’s digital operation. Two years later, when journalism circles considered the iPad to be the delivery system of the future, he founded The Daily, a tablet-only subscription publication. Even with a $30 million budget, it crashed and burned, but that did not stop Mr. Angelo’s rise.
+He became publisher and chief executive of The Post in 2012. In 2017, he created “Page Six TV,” a syndicated daily TV show along the lines of “Entertainment Tonight” and “Access Hollywood.”American officials walking through a market, talking to locals, drinking coffee on the streets. This is Manbij, the northern Syrian city that U.S.-backed troops liberated from the rule of the Islamic State over two years ago. And this is Manbij, too. The location where four Americans and at least 12 others were killed on Jan. 16 in a suicide bombing claimed by the terrorist group. Before that, Manbij seemed to be a good example of a U.S. safe haven. Senators Lindsey Graham and Jeanne Shaheen visited in July and toured the city center. Here’s Graham standing in front of the restaurant where the four Americans were later killed. “There was an attack today on a restaurant. I think it’s the same restaurant I visited with the Kurds and Arabs and others in Manbij, Syria.” Here’s William Roebuck, senior adviser for the coalition, touring Manbij in March 2018. He’s with Maj. Gen. James Jarrard, the head of special operations in Syria and Iraq. And here’s Gen. Joseph Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, walking in the city center in June 2018, enjoying a cookie. He’s just steps away from the site of the Jan. 16 attack that killed two Green Berets, a Defense Department civilian and a military contractor. These photo-ops were designed to show that the Americans and their Kurdish allies had the city under control, and would be willing to defend it. One popular stop was the restaurant where the deadly attack unfolded, and where American officials and troops would stop for roasted chicken. In a recent local TV interview, the owner said he left the city when ISIS took control, and only came back once it was safe again. But that safety turned out to be much more elusive than it appeared.Last summer, a federal judge in San Diego said the Trump administration treated immigrant children detained at the border worse than chattel.
+“The unfortunate reality,” wrote Judge Dana Sabraw in ordering a halt to President Trump’s policy of separating the children from their parents, “is that under the present system, migrant children are not accounted for with the same efficiency and accuracy as property.”
+That was underscored on Thursday when the inspector general of the Department of Health and Human Services released a report revealing that thousands more children than previously disclosed may have been torn from their parents for months before the policy was even announced. The report confirmed that, as the number of families seeking asylum has soared, the true crisis on the border was a humanitarian one that the administration’s actions have made far worse.
+The report said department officials who care for immigrant children seized at the border realized by August 2017 that the proportion of children separated from their parents was 10 times greater than had previously been the case, when families were usually broken up only if there were safety concerns for the children. It was not until the following April that the administration announced a zero-tolerance approach, under which families would be pulled apart because all adults crossing the border without authorization would be criminally charged and jailed.A photo published by The Times on Tuesday, showing some of the dead victims of an attack in Nairobi, Kenya, led to a swift backlash among some of our readers.
+Many readers thought it was inappropriate to include an image of bloody bodies slumped over tables in our article about the assault, which was committed by the Islamic extremist group Shabab.
+Readers, including many Kenyans, also questioned whether The Times would publish similarly horrific photos after an attack in the United States or elsewhere in the West.
+“These are not just bodies . These are people whose family and friends are reading your article and experiencing indelible trauma from seeing their loved ones’ photos,” Lorna Kagecha wrote in an email to The Times. “We do not see this kind of nonsense when you write articles on attacks in the Western world.”
+While many social media users blamed our incoming East Africa bureau chief, Kimiko de Freytas-Tamura, for posting the image, she played no role. As with any article, decisions about photography are made by editors in New York or elsewhere, not by reporters.
+The publication of graphic images is never taken lightly at The Times. Many people across the newsroom are involved in difficult conversations, weighing the desire to be sensitive and respectful of victims and their families with our mission to give readers a clear view of what’s happening in the world.
+To provide more insight into the decisions behind publishing graphic photos, Meaghan Looram, our director of photography, and Marc Lacey, our National editor and former foreign correspondent based in Nairobi, have answered questions drawn from reader feedback.
+We welcome you to continue the conversation in the comments section.
+What considerations went into choosing the photos in this article? Why did you decide to run the image of dead bodies?
+MEAGHAN LOORAM Let me first say that editors in New York made the decision on which images to publish with the story. Our reporter did not have any input into this decision.
+Our editors always take into consideration the newsworthiness of the story and our responsibility to our readers to honestly convey the events of the world, horrific and disturbing as those events may sometimes be.
+We look at the universe of images available from any given event, and we try to make a decision that both serves our readers and respects the dignity of those affected by the attack or event.
+Generally, we try to avoid identifying victims or showing unnecessary blood and gore, particularly if it is not central to the news story that the photograph accompanies.
+But it is an important part of our role as journalists to document the impact of violence in the world, and if we avoid publishing these types of images, we contribute to obscuring the effects of violence and making debates over security and terrorism bloodless.WASHINGTON — In a week of White House tantrums and fast-food dinners, of canceled speeches and aborted congressional trips, it seemed fitting that Karen Pence, the wife of Vice President Mike Pence, announced that she was going back to her job as an elementary schoolteacher.
+Washington these days resembles nothing so much as an unruly sandbox. As the shutdown drags on, septuagenarian politicians are squabbling like 7-year-olds, House freshmen staged a boisterous protest march to the empty office of the Senate majority leader and the president’s lawyer went spectacularly off the rails in a television interview. There did not seem to be an adult in sight.
+“I am excited to be back in the classroom and doing what I love to do, which is to teach art,” Ms. Pence said in a statement about her new job, conjuring up a world of finger-painting and construction paper that seemed more civilized than the “Lord of the Flies” playground inhabited by her husband and his colleagues.
+In that world, President Trump sent Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter telling her that he was postponing her trip with a congressional delegation to visit American troops in Afghanistan. The president’s salvo came 24 hours after Ms. Pelosi informed Mr. Trump that because of the shutdown, she was rescinding her invitation to him to deliver a State of the Union address in the House chamber.Physical pain, relentless and undeniable, throbs like a bass line in “Behind the Sheet,” the deeply affecting new historical drama by Charly Evon Simpson at Ensemble Studio Theater. Sometimes it takes the audible, metaphoric form of a hammered drum. And every now and then a scream, quickly muffled, lances the air.
+But for the most part, agony holds its tongue in this meticulously assembled story of a dark chapter in medical experimentation. Like its core of heroines — plantation slave women used as gynecological guinea pigs in the South of the 1840s — “Behind the Sheet,” which opened on Thursday night, resists the natural urge to shout in righteous defiance.
+Instead, as directed with Olympian calm by Colette Robert, the production takes on cumulative power in its steady, cleareyed depiction of a time when it was a given that pain would be borne uncomplainingly by human beings regarded as chattel. That “some things are just the way they are,” as one character says, becomes a stoic’s creed for survival.
+What the young black women portrayed here have to survive includes repeated vaginal surgeries — as many as 30 — performed without anesthetic. “Behind the Sheet” was inspired by the career of J. Marion Sims, an American physician and plantation owner known as “the father of modern gynecology” (and a figure whose commemorative statue was recently removed from Central Park, as we’re reminded in an onstage postscript).How do you solve a problem like liaising with the head of a violent splinter group in a volatile region that might soon fracture into genocidal conflict? Try acting. In Helen Banner’s gripping, rickety “Intelligence,” directed by Jess Chayes at Next Door at NYTW, three women have gathered in a State Department conference room, tasked with creating a manual called “Guidelines for the Resolution of Conflict in Intractable Global Situations.” They’ll create these guidelines through role-playing.
+The leader of this very small and very serious improv team is Sarah MacIntyre (Rachel Pickup), a superstar diplomat with a thing for sleeveless blouses. Joining her are two Foreign Service underlings, the fawning Lee (Kaliswa Brewster) and the skeptical Paige (Amelia Pedlow). Together they have 10 working days to prepare a document that tells “everyone else how to encounter the world even when it’s gone bad.” Sarah wants to kick things off by simulating her last successful negotiation.
+Is that a reasonable premise? Not especially, and in an era of State Department cuts and executive branch bad faith, it risks suggesting that diplomacy is just one more empty exercise. On the other hand, role-playing and simulation is an accepted part of diplomatic training and the first rule of improv is to say yes to a situation no matter how outlandish, so maybe just go with it.
+What you’ll get is a play that might not make much sense, but can still thrill. Ms. Chayes and her designers use the few features of the room — the chairs, the door, the world clock — to create an almost unbearable tension. Even when the stakes should feel low (this is just a role-play, right?), most moments seem balanced on the edge of a very sharp knife. Footsteps in the corridor or a knock at the door can make the breath catch in your throat — even before you learn that Diplomatic Security has taken an interest in the proceedings or that Sarah’s last negotiation may not have been a triumph.FRIDAY PUZZLE — Confession time: I used to be terrified of themeless puzzles. Who was I to think that I could conquer a Friday or Saturday puzzle, the hardest ones of the week?
+Now I really enjoy them, both for the challenge and for the palate cleanser they provide after a week of themed puzzles and the constraints they contain. And here is the deep, dark secret of how I eventually became a regular solver of those frightening, late-week grids:
+I became a regular solver of those frightening, late-week grids.
+That’s really it. It boils down to practice, and to evicting that voice in your head that says, “I am strictly a Monday-Wednesday solver, and I can’t do anything else.”
+Well, it also boils down to getting a foothold so you can eventually solve the whole thing, but it’s not that hard. The clues are written and edited to make sure that no matter who you are or where you come from, there will be something that you know. My first gimme in Friday’s fabulous puzzle, by Andrew J. Ries, was our Friend of the Crossword LISA LOEB, the singer who also collaborated on a celebrity puzzle with the constructor Doug Peterson in 2017. And thank Heaven for her, because between Ms. Loeb and the Down entries in the northwest, that was the only way I was going to get 13A’s ICE BOWL (clued as “Nickname of the subzero 1967 N.F.L. Championship Game”). I also knew the “Old Asian capital,” EDO (the old name for Tokyo), and a few more entries on which I could build.
+What was your gimme? Take a look back at the clue list and let me know in the comments. If nothing else, it will prove to you that you can at least get started in a tough puzzle.“We had one lady offer an agent money. The agent said no, so she just dropped a $5 bill on the ground.”
+KIRK P. SKINNER, acting federal security director at Tampa International Airport, on public sympathy for Transportation Security Administration officers, who are working without pay. (The money was deposited in the lost-and-found bin.)INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Thursday about British Prime Minister Theresa May misidentified the party affiliation of Stewart McDonald. He is a member of the Scottish National Party, not the Scottish Labour Party.
+ARTS
+A review on Jan. 9 of the television series “You’re the Worst” referred incorrectly to an episode in which the character Gretchen takes a trip home. It was in Season 4, not Season 5.
+OBITUARIES
+An obituary on Jan. 9 about the physicist Roy J. Glauber misidentified the field for which his work laid the foundation. It is quantum optics, not quantum electrodynamics.
+•
+A picture caption with an obituary on Wednesday about the actress Carol Channing, using information from the photo agency Photofest, misstated when the photograph of her as Dolly Levi in “Hello, Dolly!” was taken. It was in 1978, when she returned to the role in a Broadway revival — not during the show’s original Broadway run.The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office on Thursday took the rare step of asking a State Supreme Court justice to appoint a special prosecutor in an obstacle-laden case involving two New York Police detectives charged with kidnapping and raping an 18-year-old woman.
+The unusual request was the latest twist in a closely watched case that, for more than a year, has been filled with complications for prosecutors.
+In a letter to Justice Danny K. Chun, Nancy Hoppock, the chief assistant district attorney, acknowledged three issues that have emerged since the detectives, Richard Hall and Edward Martins, were charged in October 2017: that a prosecutor in her office “was involved in a romantic relationship” with one of the detectives; that the accuser “has made a series of false, misleading and inconsistent statements” about the facts of the case; and that because she made those statements, prosecutors cannot call on her to testify and “may not be able to proceed in an ethical fashion on some counts now contained in the indictment.”
+Ms. Hoppock noted that the woman had already made some of the false statements under oath and that prosecutors have had to confront her about them. As a result, the woman harbors “mistrust in the prosecution team” and has shown “hostility toward our office,” Ms. Hoppock wrote in the letter, adding that the woman has publicly expressed her displeasure to news reporters and through social media.Putin visits Serbia as the country adopts his model
+President Vladimir Putin of Russia arrived on Thursday in Serbia, a historical Russian ally where his likeness is on everything from mugs to underwear. Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, welcomed him by busing in tens of thousands of people for a rally. The two announced a big new gas deal, and many who showed up for the events said they were incentivized, including with five liters of milk.
+Context: Serbia is once again a fulcrum of Balkan volatility, and the visit has been a display of what a researcher calls Putin’s orchestra in the country, powered by a growing number of pro-Russia media outlets and nongovernmental groups. But the acoustics are complicated by the fact that Serbia is seeking to join E.U.
+Reaction: Tens of thousands of people have been regularly protesting through the winter against Mr. Vucic’s increasingly Putin-like and authoritarian style, and the country’s opposition leader said he feared the E.U. would further overlook his autocratic tendencies in a bid to counter Russia.
+Looking ahead: To join the E.U., Serbia would have to compromise on Kosovo, which Russia and Serbia refuse to recognize, and which Mr. Putin accused of ratcheting up tensions. Mr. Vucic has floated partitioning Kosovo, a risky proposition that John Bolton, President Trump’s national security adviser, has said he’s open to.PARIS — Two related scenes are currently playing out in theaters here. In “Les Idoles” (“The Idols”), at the Odéon — Théâtre de l’Europe, the actress Marina Foïs recounts in detail the death of the philosopher Michel Foucault, in 1984, of an AIDS-related illness. At the Espace Cardin, Foucault’s homosexuality is seen through the eyes of his first biographer, the sociologist Didier Eribon, in “Retour à Reims” (“Returning to Reims”).
+In both productions, prominent French gay artists reclaim their pasts with striking honesty. “Retour à Reims,” staged by the German director Thomas Ostermeier, is based on Mr. Eribon’s 2009 memoir-cum-essay about his working-class roots, while the writer and director Christophe Honoré looks back at the artistic heroes — those “idols” — he lost to AIDS in his youth.
+Mr. Honoré may be better known for films including “Love Songs,” but his theater work is in some ways more ambitious and original. His recent plays have brought real individuals back to life and imagined, with the benefit of hindsight, how they might have interacted: “Nouveau Roman,” in 2012, focused on the 20th-century French literary movement of the same name; “Les Idoles” brings together six writers and filmmakers who died between 1989 and 1994.
+Extensive research clearly went into the play, but Mr. Honoré doesn’t strive for truthfulness. He isn’t preoccupied with physical likeness, for starters, and regularly casts women in male roles onstage. In “Les Idoles,” Ms. Foïs plays Hervé Guibert, whose autobiographical novel “To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life” evoked Foucault’s last days, while the part of the filmmaker Jacques Demy is taken with gusto by Marlène Saldana, in a fur coat and heels.In second grade, I once got in trouble for asking a girl to marry me via an orange piece of construction paper cut into a heart. She had worn a pair of leopard-print platform shoes to my birthday party, so naturally I assumed we were meant to be together.
+When her parents and mine got called in to a meeting with our teacher, they laughed about it. I don’t know if my father was more relieved or proud — at least I had stopped talking about the leopard-print platform shoes.
+I have mourned the loss of my adolescent love life time and again through movies, books and music, placing myself in the role of some young woman on the receiving end of the affections of some young man, a life I never had the chance to know. Without the opportunity to personally experience romantic relationships, I was left on the sidelines to receive master classes from the greats.
+I learned from Julia and Reese and Bette and Angela and Sarah Jessica and Mindy and Meryl and Dianne. I memorized scenes from romantic comedies and recited the dialogue in the dark in my bedroom, door locked, tears streaming down my face as I tried to summon emotions I yearned to experience in real life. I would perform the scenes in the mirror, Oscar-worthy moments that nevertheless left me feeling empty when I woke up the next day.
+I was trying to capture a version of love that was innocent and new. When you are a teenager, you live in a world where questions about settling down and who the exes are and when you might move in together are largely inappropriate and inapplicable. You get to learn about romantic feelings without the pressure of the rest of your life.
+Because my sister can embrace and revel in her teenage crushes, she’ll be able to develop an emotional skill set that I lacked into my 20s and still lack. She will be able to process electric attraction and aching jealousy a decade before I even allowed myself to admit I had those emotions.Stream Netflix’s behind-the-scenes documentary on the failed Fyre Fest, and the Season 5 premiere of “Grace and Frankie.”
+What’s Streaming
+FYRE: THE GREATEST PARTY THAT NEVER HAPPENED on Netflix. The viral unraveling of Fyre Festival became a big punch lines of 2017. What was originally billed as an ultraluxury music festival in the Bahamas — organized by the entrepreneur Billy McFarland and the rapper Ja Rule, and promoted by supermodels like Kendall Jenner and Bella Hadid — in fact involved soggy tents and deconstructed cheese sandwiches upon the arrival of hundreds of festivalgoers. The documentarian Chris Smith, who directed “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” dives into what went wrong, and how millennial revelers were duped, by talking with festival organizers. Absent from Netflix’s documentary is an interview with McFarland, who was sentenced to six years in prison for fraud in October. He gave an exclusive interview to Hulu, which released its show about the festival, “Fyre Fraud,” days before the Netflix release. In his review of both films, Wesley Morris of The New York Times says, “You watch both movies in a kind of fascinated horror at how easy it was for McFarland to create a network of what appears to be unwitting co-conspirators to help him plan an experience that wound up losing $24 million.”
+CARMEN SANDIEGO on Netflix. Where in the world is Carmen Sandiego? You can find her on Netflix in that streaming service’s new animated show, voiced by Gina Rodriguez. The 10-episode series is based on the globe-trotting criminal mastermind of the late-1980s educational video games, but aims to uncover more about the title character’s back story, from her time as a student at V.I.L.E. Training Academy for Thieves through to her transformation to a crook who steals valuable artifacts from other crooks. Finn Wolfhard, of “Stranger Things,” stars alongside Rodriguez in the series as her trusted sidekick, Player.Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the care of children in federal custody, has identified 2,737 children who were separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. But the real number may be much higher, a government investigation has found.
+• Mr. Trump responded to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s threat to cancel his State of the Union address by grounding the military plane that was going to take her to Afghanistan, a trip he called a “public relations event.” Read about it here (and read the president’s letter to Ms. Pelosi here).
+• House Democrats are contemplating a homeland security spending measure that would counter the president’s demand for a wall with their own ideas for securing the border.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18. A runner-up from last year’s competition is shown above.
+fluke \ˈflük\ noun
+1. a stroke of luck 2. a barb on a harpoon or arrow 3. flat blade-like projection on the arm of an anchor 4. either of the two lobes of the tail of a cetacean 5. parasitic flatworms having external suckers for attaching to a host
+_________
+The word fluke has appeared in 90 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 19 in “Not Just for Grown-Ups: The Broadway Audience Is Getting Younger” by Michael Paulson:
+Fifteen percent of all theatergoers were under 18 years old, the report found. Musical audiences were much younger than play audiences — the average age at a musical was 39, while at a play it was 51.5. “The trend is real — it’s not just a fluke,” said Charlotte St. Martin, the president of the Broadway League, which has made a concerted effort to introduce young people to theater, in part by bringing high school sophomores to shows. “And it’s not a big surprise when you look at the offerings. We just launched our fall program, and there are now 17 shows that teachers say are acceptable for 16-year-olds, which tells you something — 10 years ago we might have had five or six.”What story could these images tell?
+Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by these four photos.
+Post it in the comments, then read the related article to find out where these scenes were photographed.Before reading the article:
+Have you ever dreamed of being on Broadway?
+Andrew Barth Feldman, who is 16, is about to live that dream. Starting on Jan. 30, he will play the lead role in the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical “ Dear Evan Hansen.”
+Watch this video of his performance at the 2018 National High School Musical Theater Awards — a performance that led to his discovery by a Broadway producer. What qualities in his performance do you think might make him a Broadway star?
+Now, read the article, “He’s 16 Going On Stardom: Meet Broadway’s Next ‘Evan Hansen’,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins: “If there is a world in which theater kids rule, Andrew Barth Feldman seems to live there.” How does Michael Paulson, the author, paint a world where Andrew rules? What details in the opening paragraphs help to set the scene?
+2. Although the title role in the play “Dear Evan Hansen” is a teenage character, all previous actors cast in the role have been in their 20s. Why have teenage actors not been cast until now?1 of 11
+It was a high-stakes week for Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, who faced two major votes in Parliament.
+Lawmakers rejected both Mrs. May’s plan to withdraw Britain from the European Union, as well as a no-confidence motion in her government. Neither result was a surprise.
+Which measure was rejected by the larger number of votes?It’s not as though the Queens-based artist just up and started thinking along such apocalyptic lines. He’s been pondering them good and hard, for a long time. Back in 2006, for example, he perpetrated “Prospect,” the bas-relief to end all bas-reliefs, an idyllic sylvan scene (a meadow, a copse of trees) idling atop a wedding cake cross-section of the geological underground, each layer distinct and differentiated, with a thin seam of compressed plastic and metal refuse coursing down below. “The stuff’s positively indestructible,” he noted at the time, “and may well end up being all that’s left to mark our time on this earth.” Tomorrow’s Day Before Yesterday, as it were : a regular laugh riot.
+With his current “This Land,” the polarities get reversed. The product of a year’s concerted effort, and to even more compelling effect, offering up, as it were, Yesterday’s Day After Tomorrow. “I’ve been trawling eBay for years,” Mr. Opdyke commented, as he was recently putting his final touches on the piece, “gathering up vintage postcards like these, often in random batches of hundreds at a time. For a long time I was experimenting with repurposing individual cards — had a whole show of those a few years back — but about a year ago, this current project just swam into view and took over my life.”
+The father of two (a boy, 14, and a girl, 10) with his wife, Kimberlae Saul , who is an architect, Mr. Opdyke noted, “For years I’ve been feeling the need to do something about the dismal future into which we all seem to be sleepwalking. And yet,” he paused before continuing, “I’m constantly haunted by worry. Can such artistic gestures ever really make any difference , especially given the sheer scale of the challenge?”A few years ago, Daniel Ramos’s grandmother asked him just how did he make a living as a photographer. Grants, he replied. His grandmother was puzzled: Do they pay you in food?
+“I asked her what she meant, and she said that when she was growing up in Mexico, the local photographer was paid with food,” he recalled with a chuckle. “So she had the idea I was paid that way.”
+That exchange may sound familiar to many children of working-class immigrants, who hoped their backbreaking sacrifices would lift their children into the middle class.
+For Mr. Ramos, the conversation was another step along his journey from a rough-and-tumble childhood in Chicago to becoming a working photographer in Monterrey, Mexico, where he moved five years ago after inheriting a house from his mother. Caught between his heritage and his hopes, he delved into childhood memories of Mexican summers, using photos, collages and text to document his journey of self-discovery. To do so, he recalled the stories his parents had told him and took images of children, grandparents and relatives.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Day 27
+Even amid the continuing partial government shutdown, revelations continue to spring from the Russia investigation and those caught up in it. Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, said Thursday that he paid a small firm to rig online polls in favor of Trump during the 2016 campaign. Trevor Noah isn’t surprised.
+“It’s crazy that Michael Cohen was rigging polls for Trump, while Trump was out there complaining that the polls were rigged. You realize, this is proof again that whenever Trump accuses anyone of doing something wrong, he’s actually just talking about himself. He’s like, [impersonating Trump] ‘The polls are rigged folks. And also, Hillary’s very disappointed that her sons look like pervy vampires!’” — TREVOR NOAH
+Meanwhile, in shutdown-related news, services continue to be rolled back while government workers are on furlough.
+“It is now Day 27 of the longest shutdown in American history. Funding for low-income housing is in danger, school lunches are facing cutbacks, and things have gotten so bad that Air Force One is now being operated by Spirit Airlines.” — TREVOR NOAH
+Many of the late-night hosts took note of an Instagram video posted by rapper Cardi B, in which she makes a rare venture into politics in order to criticize Trump for allowing the shutdown to drag on. In the video, Cardi B reminds viewers, “It’s been a little bit over three weeks. Trump is now ordering — as in summonsing — federal government workers without getting paid.” Later, she says, “I feel like we need to take some action.”Leonard Cohen
+To the Editor:
+In his review of “The Flame: Poems, Notebooks, Lyrics, Drawings” (Jan. 6), William Logan — whom I had never heard of but who, from his professorial perch, has apparently written numerous hatchet jobs on fellow poets (what a miserable job, hitting those already down) — refers repeatedly, patronizingly, to the “cult” of Leonard Cohen, with all its attendant connotations of not-too-intelligent, uneducated, deluded individuals who are in thrall to fulfilling the narcissistic needs of a power-hungry, often evil leader. Far more than offering a critic’s dispassionate eye, Logan strikes me as passionately, revealingly enraged about Cohen’s fame and his particular appeal to women, which Logan casts as his “famous lechery,” begging the question: “Why the beef, Bill?”
+No matter. Please register me in the “cult” of Cohen as I join with the millions around the globe who are deeply moved, united by Cohen: the man, the music, the “gravelly” voice, the wit, the Astairan grace, the divine self-deprecation. (Full disclosure: I am also a card-carrying member of the “cults” of Dylan, Presley, Orbison, Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Mozart, Bach, Shakespeare. …)
+Logan has, contrary to his aim, succeeded in giving Cohen the ultimate — though pathetically P.C. — honor given to all great artists: the vitriolic posthumous takedown. One sees Cohen, in his fedora, looking down with his all but imperceptible impish grin.
+TONI BENTLEY
+LOS ANGELES
+♦
+To the Editor:
+In his almost heroically ill-informed review of “The Flame,” William Logan writes that Cohen “was never taken very seriously as a poet.” In fact, Cohen won numerous accolades during his career, including the 1968 Governor General’s Literary Award, Canada’s highest prize (which he refused to accept), for his “Selected Poems, 1956-1968”; the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award for “Book of Mercy” in 1985; and the Prince of Asturias Award in the literature category in 2011. Millions of readers would also testify to his brilliance as a poet.‘I’d like to meet my bones.’
+— From the poem “If I Shut My Eyes, What Other Doors in Me Fly Open,” by Ben Purkert, in the collection “For the Love of Endings” (Four Way Books, 2018, Page 6).
+“The difference between the almost right word and the right word,” Mark Twain wrote, “is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.” Good writers, accordingly, sift and combine words with the patient discernment of a pharmacist or a pastry chef or a child sorting Legos. They measure shades of meaning by the milligram.
+Consider, for instance, the word “meet.” As Ben Purkert deploys it in the sentence above, the word carries precisely the right dosage. “Meet” is common, simple and cheerful — and yet in this context, applied to one’s own bones, it is also eerie and jarring and nonsensical. It holds those very different feelings carefully in suspension.
+Purkert highlights a familiar paradox of human life. We are both radically connected to, and yet disconnected from, our physical bodies. Each of us carries, inside ourselves, a dark, slimy ecosystem: the wet bags of our lungs, the spongy filters of our livers, the 100,000 miles of our veins. If we are lucky, we will never actually see this world; our job is to ride the roller coaster of consciousness, not examine the engine room. Still, it is natural to be curious about these internal objects — to wonder what our bones look like or what our gallbladder is doing at this very moment.Here are some tips for building your crew:
+The Top of the List
+A good plumber should top any homeowner’s list of go-to contractors. Water accounts for 45 percent of damage to homes, according to Chubb, a property and casualty insurance company, with plumbing failures cited as the top cause of non-weather related water losses. “Water is your house’s worst enemy,” said Angie Hicks, a co-founder of Angie’s List. “So having a plumber is imperative.”
+Plumbers have different specialties, with some focusing on larger remodeling projects and others handling the everyday problems with water heaters, boilers, sump pumps and pipes. Most plumbers charge by the hour — usually between $45 and $200 — for ordinary tasks, according to HomeAdvisor.
+Ask potential hires what they charge for emergency calls and how quickly they can respond on nights and weekends, because at some point you’re going to need one to come fast.
+Where to Look and What to Ask
+Friends and neighbors can be a valuable resource, particularly ones who have owned their homes for a long time. Connect with a wider network of neighbors through social media groups like Facebook and NextDoor. Ask pointed questions about how quickly the workers respond to calls, how well they clean up after they’re done and how they respond to mishaps.
+Real estate brokers often have a long roster of tradespeople, so ask yours. The workers you hire can refer you to other professionals, too. If an electrician installs some recessed lights in your living room, for example, he may be able to suggest a painter to repair any damage done to the walls or ceiling.
+And websites like Angie’s List and TaskRabbit can match you with professionals. Read the reviews carefully, looking to see if the person you’re considering has done similar work to what you need and what past users thought of it. Check the Better Business Bureau for ratings and complaints.
+Interview Potential Hires
+Ask potential hires for references, proof of license and liability insurance. Find out how long the company has been in business, and if it offers warranties for the work. Get a sense of their personality and working style, as you want to develop a comfortable rapport with anyone who will be coming into your home.I, on the other hand, felt totally devoid of any maternal intuition. When my babies cried, my first instinct was not to get up and comfort them, but to run away. I didn’t. I got up and nursed and sang and soothed even if my whole body was reeling with sleep deprivation and exhaustion. When I was not doing that, I was wondering what was wrong with me. Why did I feel resentful instead of happy?
+When my first baby was born nine years ago, the country of motherhood I found myself in was not in any way as expected. Instead of the beautiful place I envisioned, I found myself on a wild, deserted island. I had prepared, packed all the necessary items, but once I landed, I lost everything and was left with only a pocketknife to fend for myself. I had no point of reference, didn’t speak the language, had no knowledge of the customs. It was a feeling of disorientation I’d never felt so acutely before.
+Because I always turn to books in times of need, I immersed myself into the confusing world of parenting advice. I thought that I could stitch together my own philosophy of parenting, like a quilt made from different scraps of fabrics. But the books I read offered no solace, only patronizing and contradictory advice.
+I gave birth naturally but felt that wasn’t enough because I was supposed to have a home birth. I breast-fed each of my children for a year. That seemed like a good length of time for us, but I know that to some people, it wasn’t enough. For others, that was too long. My children slept in a crib in our room until they were 2 or 3 because it worked for us. For the attachment-parenting types, I was a terrible mother because why weren’t my children in my bed? According to the Ferber faction, I was a terrible mother because I didn’t sleep-train them.
+I felt stifled by these rigid ideas of what it meant to be a mother. The books’ goal was to turn me into a better, more useful vessel to carry my children’s needs and desires. I refused to be a vessel. I wanted to be a person.Q. What is a fecal transplant, and why would I want one?
+A. Fecal transplant is a medical procedure in which stool from a healthy donor is introduced into the intestine of a patient as a treatment for a disease. The idea is that the stool from the donor contains a healthful mix of gut bacteria that can seed the intestine of the patient, bringing healthful results.
+While the procedure may sound highly unappealing, it is not unsanitary. Stool is obtained from a donor or from a stool bank, where it has been screened for pathogens and processed for medical use.
+Donor stool may be administered via a plastic tube inserted through the nose into the stomach or small intestine. Alternatively, donor stool may be introduced into the colon via an enema or colonoscopy, or by swallowing a capsule of stool.
+Fecal transplant is used as a treatment for a serious infection of the colon with Clostridium difficile, a harmful bacterium that can take hold if antibiotics kill off enough of a person’s “good” gut bacteria. In 2011, C. diff caused some half a million infections, 29,000 deaths and $4.8 billion in health care costs in the United States alone.FIRE AND FURY: Inside the Trump White House, by Michael Wolff. (Picador, $18.) Remember the book that had everyone talking this time last year? In Wolff’s telling, President Trump is a barely literate chief executive who heads up a chaotic, aberrant White House. The anecdotes are entertaining, if deeply unrewarding (and at their worst, thinly sourced). A media reporter, Wolff is strongest on his subject’s insecurities and psychological hang-ups.
+THE POWER, by Naomi Alderman. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) One of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017, this novel imagines the sudden emergence of an “electrostatic power” in women that upends gender dynamics across the world. Through the lives of several female characters, the story explores a grim idea: that no one is immune to power’s corruptive effects.
+OFF THE CHARTS: The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies, by Ann Hulbert. (Vintage, $16.95.) Why do many exceptional children fail to sustain their success into adulthood? Hulbert offers an empathetic view of some child geniuses, including Shirley Temple and Bobby Fischer. She aims to “listen hard for the prodigies’ side of the story,” as she puts it. At the same time, she avoids preachy parenting advice.
+THE LARGESSE OF THE SEA MAIDEN: Stories, by Denis Johnson. (Random House, $17.) This posthumous collection takes up many of Johnson’s central themes, including his preoccupation with mortality. Johnson died in 2017, and his impending death is felt on the margins of these last stories, without straying into morbidity. As our reviewer, Rick Moody, wrote, Johnson draws on his “singular skill” for revelation to “brighten the interiors of tragedy and help us wave off the vultures hovering above.”Both Angus and Zimmer were right, but before we can establish a firm legislative or regulatory agenda, we have to learn what surveillance capitalism is, as we come to terms with the novel form of economic and social power represented by Facebook, Google and a handful of other tech behemoths privy to our every click and utterance. Enter, as a critical guide, Shoshana Zuboff, who has emerged as the leading explicator of surveillance capitalism. A Harvard Business School professor emerita with decades of experience studying issues of labor and power in the digital economy, Zuboff in 2015 published a paper, “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization,” which has since become an essential source for anyone looking to reckon seriously with what she described as a distinct, emerging economic logic. Now she has followed up that paper with a doorstop of a book, an intensively researched, engagingly written chronicle of surveillance capitalism’s origins and its deleterious prospects for our society.
+Image
+According to Zuboff, surveillance capitalism distinguishes itself from its industrial forebear as “a new economic order that claims human experience as a free source of raw material.” We are the resource to be mined; the billion-dollar profits of Facebook and Google are built on a general accounting of our lives and everyday behavior. But surveillance capitalism is also many other things: “a parasitic economic logic … a rogue mutation of capitalism … a new collective order based on total certainty” and “an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.” All this may sound a little heady, like perhaps an overseasoned stew of po-mo economic jargon, but Zuboff will have you asking for another helping long before the book’s end.
+Surveillance capitalism depends on the constant gathering of “behavioral surplus,” or the data exhaust that we produce as part of the normal course of web browsing, app use and digital consumption. All of it is potentially revealing, allowing companies to make sophisticated inferences about who we are, what we want and what we’re likely to do. As the economist Hal Varian noted in 2002, “Every action a user performs is considered a signal to be analyzed and fed back into the system.” That means that there is potentially no end to a surveillance capitalist’s extractive appetite, which is why — in the name of more efficient services and relevant ads — companies are constantly pursuing new, more granular data streams in our homes, workplaces and bodies. Unlike oil, to which it’s often compared, personal data is potentially limitless, but its extraction and consumption may be just as toxic, as we’re only beginning to understand.
+Under the regime of surveillance capitalism, it is not enough simply to gather information about what people do. Eventually, you have to influence behavior, beyond the simple suasion practiced by targeted ads. It’s not about showing someone the right ad; you have to show it at the right place and time, with the language and imagery calibrated for precise effect. You have to lead people through the physical world, making them show up at the sponsored pop-up store or vote for the preferred candidate. Armed with a veritable real-time feed of a user’s thoughts and feelings, companies are beginning to practice just this kind of coercion, which is why you might see makeup ads before a Friday evening out or why inducements from a personal injury lawyer might pop up on your phone as you sit in a hospital waiting room. When we want things — health information, travel schedules, a date — is also when we are most vulnerable, when intimate data yield themselves for corporate capture. “The result,” as Zuboff notes, “is a perverse amalgam of empowerment inextricably layered with diminishment.” We seem ever more exposed to and dependent on surveillance capitalists, our benevolent info-lords, but their operations are defined by opacity, corporate secrecy and the scrim of technological authority.
+In the face of all this, Zuboff sees a disastrous overturning of the traditional capitalist order. We are being pushed “toward a society in which capitalism does not function as a means to inclusive economic or political institutions.” With statements like these, Zuboff threatens to lose those readers who don’t share her regard for a bygone halcyon era of industrial capitalism that produced what she calls “traditional reciprocities,” defined by straightforward exchanges of money for goods and services, which in turn bound people together in ostensibly healthy social, economic and political arrangements. Zuboff’s analysis would benefit from more emphasis on the role of deregulation, the declining power of organized labor and the gradual financialization of the economy. With its ability to create boutique investment products that are several degrees removed from any tangible asset, it’s finance that seems like the most obvious ideological forebear of surveillance capitalism, which uses digitalization to render more of life as tradable commodities.The crowd at the recent meeting of Community Board 3 was agitated. Vaylateena Jones, a 50-year Lower East Side resident and board official, was especially vocal. “The way this planning is being done is disempowering,” she said. “City officials collaborated with us over four years and came up with a detailed design — only to now return with this entirely new design. Do our voices even matter?”
+The topic was the future of East River Park. Once a derelict waterfront space, it had been restored, over 10 years, with well-lit ball fields, children’s fountains and a serpentine esplanade featuring a large sink for fishermen to clean their catch. Then Hurricane Sandy deluged the park, swamping F.D.R. Drive and Lower East Side.
+The city’s latest plan to protect from future flooding called for burying the park under eight to 10 feet of landfill, and starting over. This was not the original plan, and that’s what had locals upset.Have you seen the new Gillette advertisement, “We Believe: The Best Men Can Be,” or read or heard any of the commentary about it?
+You can watch it here.
+What is your reaction to the ad? Why do you think it has provoked such a response?
+In “Gillette Ad With a #MeToo Edge Attracts Support and Outrage,” Tiffany Hsu writes about the advertisement and the controversy that has followed. She writes:
+In less than two minutes, the men and boys in Gillette’s new ad engage in a panoply of bad behavior: bullying, fighting, discrimination, sexual harassment and more. A line of them, standing behind smoke wafting up from their grills, recites, “Boys will be boys will be boys will be boys.” “Is this the best a man can get?” the ad asks, challenging viewers to confront issues like toxic masculinity and #MeToo and to abandon “the same old excuses.” By the end of the clip, men are challenging catcallers, championing their daughters and breaking up brawls. The company, known for its razors and personal care products, posted the ad on social media on Monday. Within a day, it was the subject of a battle in which support for its message collided with calls for boycotts. The ad, developed by Gillette’s advertising agency, Grey, was defended and praised by the actress Rosanna Arquette, the comedian Pete Dominick, the screenwriter and director Jeffrey Reddick, Arianna Huffington and others. But on social media, one man called it “a condescending ad from a company that relies on men buying their products.” Another wrote that “being a man is not a disease nor a pathology,” adding that “it is grotesque to repeatedly ascribe collective guilt onto half of humanity known as men.” The television personality Piers Morgan railed on Twitter about the ad, calling it “pathetic,” “virtue-signalling” and “a direct consequence of radical feminists” who are “driving a war against masculinity.” He said he had used Gillette razors for his entire adult life but, like the actor James Woods, was considering jumping ship. On YouTube, the ad has been liked more than 1,700 times. But it received more than 10,000 thumbs down votes. Gillette said it had commissioned a study of 1,188 adults and found that the results “emphasize the outsized importance of ‘soft’ skills in today’s modern man.” Soon after Gillette’s ad appeared online, its rival Dollar Shave Club posted a message on Twitter that seemed to welcome new customers. The post was liked more than 4,500 times, compared with a few dozen likes on the company’s other posts.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— What is your take on the Gillette “toxic masculinity” advertisement? How do you interpret and understand the ad? What part of the ad was most memorable or affecting?
+— What do you think about the public reactions to the ad? Do you think the ad is an unfair attack on all men? Is it a welcome addition to the ongoing conversation about questioning and rethinking masculinity? Is the controversy much ado about nothing?
+— Do you think the advertisement will affect boys’ and men’s attitudes and behaviors? Why or why not?
+— The author writes, “Gillette is a giant in the shaving industry, but its foothold is shrinking as scrappy competitors offering disposable razor subscriptions capture younger consumers.” Do you think the advertisement is a sincere effort to make a positive change in our culture, or is it a cynical attempt to fight off competition? Should advertisers and companies address cultural or political issues?
+— In a related column, “The Fight Over Men Is Shaping Our Political Future,” Thomas B. Edsall writes:
+What is patently clear to those on one side of the debate is patently false to those on the other. The pressures to conform to conservative orthodoxy on the right and to liberal orthodoxy on the left sometimes seem to preclude reasonable compromise — that nature and nurture interact endlessly. Fundamental disagreements about sex and gender have become so polarized that oversimplification is inevitable, and the obvious truth that both social and biological forces are at play is cast aside.
+Do you agree with the statement? Do you think the current conversation on gender is a productive one? Why or why not? Are we talking about gender too much or too little? Is anything missing from the debate?
+Related Resource
+Boys to Men: Teaching and Learning About Masculinity in an Age of ChangeMs. Haddock, who previously worked in health care and served in the Navy, is a self-described anatomy nerd. She knew she wanted her product to be customizable, so she started gathering data for where the G-spot and the clitoris are located on different bodies. “I tried to have that conversation with every single person with a vagina that I knew,” Ms. Haddock said. “I literally asked them to measure it with their hands and a tape measure.”
+Osé, which will be available this fall for $250, expands, according to user preference, once placed on the pelvic girdle. It doesn’t vibrate but uses gentle, autonomous motions and air flow to enhance stimulation. Eight patents associated with Osé are pending. The team that built it includes Dr. Ada-Rhodes Short, who specializes in robotics and artificial intelligence, and Lola Vars, a current doctoral candidate in design-focused mechanical engineering at Oregon State University.
+In follow-up emails, officials from CES and the Consumer Technology Association appeared to step back from the earlier assertion about the product’s violations of the morality clause, writing instead that Osé did not fit into the robotics and drones category, nor into any of the other product categories.
+“It certainly is a robotic device if you look at a definition of a robotic device,” Mr. Parmigiani said. “There is no justification. Lora DiCarlo should have won the award.”
+In a statement provided to The Times, Gary Shapiro, the president and chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, said: “We have apologized to CEO Lora Haddock for our mistake, as the Lori DiCarlo product does not fit into any of our existing product categories and should not have been accepted for the Innovation Awards Program. CES is a professional business show, and porn, adult toys and sex tech products are not part of the event. CES is a large show with over 4,500 exhibitors. We acknowledge there are inconsistencies in exhibiting companies, and these will be addressed.”
+But Ms. Haddock believes that what happened was more than an accidental oversight or a clerical error. So she published an open letter accusing CES of gender bias last Tuesday, Jan. 8, the first day of the convention. It is not the first time the trade show has been accused of gender bias: In 2018, numerous people in the tech industry criticized CES for having no female keynote speakers for the second year in a row, a failing CES attributed to “a limited pool when it comes to women in these positions.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Deep under the New York Bay near Brooklyn, covered in mildew, seaweed and other gunk, is what thousands of commuters would consider a hidden treasure: the start of a subway tunnel linking Staten Island to the rest of New York City.
+“The idea of a subway to Staten Island really goes way back,” said Stan Fischler, a subway historian. “Way, way back.”
+The plan, first proposed in 1890, was approved. Maps were drawn up. Groundbreaking ceremonies were held. Construction began.
+What followed were dozens of missed opportunities that could have prevented the fastest-growing borough in recent decades from becoming the most isolated.These days, parents like to think of themselves as responsible for every aspect of their children’s happiness and well-being. But often overlooked in this 21st-century conception of parent/child dynamics is the powerful sense of responsibility children feel for adults. A desire to protect their elders is particularly strong during the tween years, when the darkness and complexity of the world come into focus, but the magical thinking of childhood still offers the comfort of solutions. These four middle-grade novels capture something moving and seemingly eternal: When trouble strikes the grown-ups around them, children instinctively put themselves on the emotional front lines.
+A prime example is Riley James, the 11-year-old narrator of Greg Howard’s THE WHISPERS (Putnam, 226 pp., $16.99; ages 10 and up). After his mother goes missing, Riley sets out to find the magical voices from a local legend that he believes can help him bring her back. A self-proclaimed “mama’s boy … without his mama,” Riley struggles with bed-wetting plus another “condition” — being attracted to boys — that some in his small, Christian town consider cause for shame. Riley heads into the woods to find the Whispers, accompanied by a “Stand by Me”-like band of misfits including the overweight Gary, his only friend; Gary’s tag-along little brother, Carl; and the “Redneck Superhero” Dylan Mathews, an older boy whose sympathy (or perhaps empathy) for Riley’s situation makes him a winsome champion.
+“The Whispers” does not turn out to be the fable it at first seems, but Howard pulls off the trick of making Riley’s real quest even more heart-wrenching than the fantasy that drives it. This taut, moving tale delves beyond loss into issues of sexuality, conformity and self-acceptance. Riley’s relationship with his missing mother, whom we see in flashbacks teaching him new vocabulary words, is particularly well drawn. “Use it in a sentence, Button,” she tells him, encouraging Riley to redefine his world through language — a lesson he takes to heart after she goes missing. “The Whispers” is a masterful exploration into the power of storytelling but also its dangers, including self-denial and escapism.
+Escapism is the guiding philosophy of Rodeo and his 12-year-old daughter, Coyote, the titular heroine of Dan Gemeinhart’s THE REMARKABLE JOURNEY OF COYOTE SUNRISE (Holt, 352 pp., $16.99; ages 9 to 12). Since the death of Coyote’s mother and sisters five years earlier, the pair have traveled around the country in an old school bus, calling each other by hippie road names and following their hankerings for taco trucks or sandwiches. But for all his whimsy and free-spiritedness, Rodeo has a few “no-go’s,” as he calls them, including ever returning to their hometown, Poplin Springs, Wash. Coyote is protective of her father and accepts their life of wandering, hiding her loneliness and grief behind bravado. But when she learns that developers are tearing up the local park where her mother and sisters buried a memory box, she enlists an eclectic group of fellow travelers to trick Rodeo into driving her there.With its $500 million pledge to address affordable housing in the Seattle area, Microsoft isn’t primarily cutting checks to local charities. Private companies have done that before. Nor is it proposing to create housing for its own employees, as corporations have done in the past, too.
+Rather, Microsoft is trying to help fix a market failure — a job government typically does.
+“It really represents something almost unprecedented,” said Matthew Gordon Lasner, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College. “What we’re seeing Microsoft do is in effect privately assume the role that historically the federal government and the states have played.”
+Microsoft’s announcement is welcome news in the Seattle region, where housing costs have risen faster lately than in any other part of the country. But the fact that a tech company has to step in to help ensure the development of affordable housing points to a long-building reality nationwide: The federal government has largely retreated from this role.
+The government spent about three times as much on housing programs in the 1970s as it does today, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. In the years since, the government has gotten out of the business of building public housing. And capital funds to repair the remaining public housing stock have been cut in half over the last 15 years.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”RESTORATION HEIGHTS
+By Wil Medearis
+336 pp. Hanover Square. $26.99.
+Reddick — an artist-turned-art handler — loathes the privileged white people moving into his beloved Bedford-Stuyvesant; the problem is, he’s one of them.
+At the start of Wil Medearis’s noirish debut novel, “Restoration Heights,” the author declares that we “know Reddick,” because he’s “that white guy on the subway,” totally unremarkable because of his ubiquity. Reddick is surviving but not thriving in Bed-Stuy. He’s guilty about the part he’s played in the neighborhood’s gentrification, having moved there from the South a decade earlier. However, when Reddick is asked to look into the disappearance of a young woman, he banks on the privilege his appearance affords him to gain access and trust, to cross boundaries and invade the privacy of various suspects.
+In his day job, Reddick regularly enters the homes of elite New Yorkers to hang their extravagant art. The missing woman, Hannah, is engaged to the heir to the Seward fortune. Reddick happens to be the last person who saw Hannah — in Bed-Stuy in front of his building late one night, “tapping at her phone, coiled on the hood of a dark sedan,” obviously drunk. The Sewards assure Reddick that Hannah would never be in a neighborhood like that, but he’s certain that he saw her, and that she is in serious trouble. It’s not clear why the Sewards won’t call the police about Hannah’s disappearance, nor why the matriarch of another obscenely wealthy family hires Reddick to find her.
+Image
+Reddick soon connects Hannah to Restoration Heights, the abandoned half-built condominium towers near his apartment, as they would be the perfect place to hide a body. They’re also the boldest example of the gentrification that Reddick despises, designed and constructed for “the white kids” who want “all the cachet of the neighborhood and none of the hassles. The guilty thrill of being surrounded by blackness without having to live like them. Not separate but unequal.” As the mystery unfolds, Reddick must confront the nuances of gentrification as he considers the perspectives of the longtime residents, the developers and even the young newcomers.7 of 7
+New York is having its worst outbreak in decades of this once common childhood illness, with most cases in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community:For one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global travel industry, there is no pork on the hotel dinner menus. There are flights with no alcohol on the drink carts, resorts with separate swimming pools for men and women, and daily itineraries with built-in break times for the five daily calls to prayer.
+Since 2016, the number of Muslim travelers has grown nearly 30 percent, and a recent joint study by Mastercard and Crescent Rating, a research group that tracks halal-friendly travel, projects that over the next decade that sector’s contribution to the global economy will jump to $300 billion from $180 billion. With a population that is disproportionately young, educated and upwardly mobile, they are one of the fastest-growing demographics on the global tourism scene.
+But this wasn’t always the case.
+In 2015 , Soumaya Hamdi went roadtripping through Asia with her husband and her then 4-month-old baby. The trio visited Singapore and Malaysia, and then caught a flight to South Korea and on to Japan. The trip was thrilling, but Ms. Hamdi and her husband, who are both observant Muslims, found the daily search for halal-certified food a difficult one.
+Ms. Hamdi, who is based in London, began blogging about the best Muslim-friendly restaurants she found, as well as prayer facilities and sites that were particularly welcoming for a family with a young baby. Those musings turned into Halal Travel Guide, an online platform offering tips, recommendations and curated itineraries for Muslim travelers.For experts who make a living forecasting hurricanes, storm season is a year-round worry. When the tropics are calm, as they are now, researchers dive into data, analyze results, improve scientific models and train state and local officials on the latest technology that can help them make lifesaving decisions.
+But the partial government shutdown — the longest in United States history — has brought much of that fieldwork and instruction to a halt. Most researchers have been furloughed, and training academies and courses have been canceled, with no makeup dates in sight.
+Emergency workers, such as firefighters, paramedics and physicians, rely on federal academies to earn national certifications, keep their training current and learn how to keep people safe during a disaster. The prolonged stalemate, though, has forced the cancellation of a five-day course at the National Hurricane Center in Florida for recently hired state and municipal emergency managers. And last month, when the shutdown began, some 50 trainees at the National Fire Academy in Maryland were sent home, their coursework incomplete, said Steve Reaves, the president of the union that represents Federal Emergency Management Agency workers.
+W. Craig Fugate, a former FEMA chief, warned that the missed workweeks would be difficult to make up before the next calamity strikes.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo seemingly rescued New York City from the L train shutdown on Jan. 3 by offering a last-minute solution. But two weeks later, no one knows what exactly is going to happen to the subway line.
+Critics have pilloried the new repair plan over safety concerns. It is not clear how long the solution would last or when construction would begin. It might still need approval from federal and local officials.
+Even one basic question has not been resolved: Is the shutdown really off?
+The city’s transportation commissioner, Polly Trottenberg, asked subway officials on Tuesday what would happen if the Metropolitan Transportation Authority board votes no on changes to the L train contract.
+“What would that mean — that the L train shutdown isn’t averted?” Ms. Trottenberg said at a special meeting of the board, which oversees the subway.You might be surprised to learn that, like “Pulp Fiction,” being a cleaning expert is hilariously profane. (Here comes the part where you begin to understand, or understand not at all, based on how much you enjoy a dirty joke, why I’m so certain I have the most fun job at The New York Times.) Your lives are quite often booze- and sex-soaked; even more often, because of toddlers and college students and pets, they are pee-soaked. And you write to me about these problems! I find it endlessly fascinating and amusing and also quite touching to be trusted with your messy lives.
+In your hands, even the most mundane of household furniture, the humble couch, can be fodder for hilarity, as one reader recently demonstrated. His email opened chirpily enough, “Hi Jolie!” Then, a turn toward the dark: “I’m currently stuck to my couch, so I figure it’s time to solve this mess.”
+As it turns out, the joy in reading about cleaning isn’t really in the solutions themselves, though they can be funny. (Using a paste made of meat tenderizer — the unseasoned stuff, please! — for removing set-in blood stains from mattresses? True story!) Rather, it’s in marveling at the marvelous messes people have made for and of themselves. And so, you read. (Or listen, if you’re a podcast enthusiast. I have one of those! It’s called “Ask a Clean Person.”)
+Here’s the downside to my job: I cannot be all things to all people. This hurts me in the tenderest part of my tender heart, because, truly, the joy of the job — other than the joy that comes along with the voyeurism of learning how, exactly, you fused your rear end to the sofa — is helping people. But I can know only as much as you tell me; absent the richness of a full life’s context, my advice will always be imperfect. I do, however, endeavor to provide solutions and options that fit three sometimes opposing criteria: the best solution to a problem; a budget-friendly approach to cleaning and caring for your belongings; and an eco-friendly and/or nontoxic option, because that matters to a great many people.
+But those burdens are mine, and mine alone, and as we’ve established, your burdens are much more interesting. So let’s return to the matter of the viscous couch. The problem, you see, was that its owner, in a misguided attempt to restore its good looks, had doused the cushions in leather conditioner, and then placed them on his roof to bake in the sun. He essentially seasoned it like a cast iron skillet! The solution, then, was to head to the kitchen for a Dobie Pad with which to scour the stickiness away — a trick I learned about from spending, oh, a few thousand hours watching car detailing videos on YouTube and can now pass onto you. But should you find yourself stumped in the face of a cleaning conundrum, don’t fret! Just write to me.Which made it all the more astounding when, a few years after his death in 2007, the truth came out. Starting in the early 1960s, Withers had spent nearly two decades as a paid informant of the F.B.I., feeding its agents information about the activists he photographed. He not only informed; he took requests. At one anti-Vietnam War march, he was asked to photograph all of the 30-odd protesters, taking special care to catch all their faces, and he turned 80 8-by-10 prints over to his F.B.I. contact. On occasion, he sold his work to a local paper, then gave copies to the bureau. His daughter Rosalind, the youngest of his nine children and the one who handles his estate, was blindsided when the news came out via a series of FOIA requests and legal fights undertaken by Marc Perrusquia, a reporter from The Commercial Appeal in Memphis. Perrusquia wrote about Withers and the revelation of his intelligence work in his own book, “A Spy in Canaan,” which was published last year. It’s a smart journalist’s book, crisply marching through Withers’s F.B.I. records and the paper’s battle to pry them out of the government’s grip.
+“Bluff City,” by Preston Lauterbach, aims instead for something less snappy and more lyrical. Its subtitle is “The Secret Life of Photographer Ernest Withers,” which suggests that it’s a biography, but it isn’t quite that, or at least not a comprehensive one. Big stretches of Withers’s life get a fairly cursory look, and Lauterbach basically calls it a day after King’s assassination in 1968, dispatching the photographer’s subsequent four decades in an introductory chapter and an afterword. Nor is this a book about photography history, examining the photographs the way an art historian might. There are 18 pictures, most, though not all, by Withers, enough to hit the main points but no more. (Which is fine. Decisions about including photos in a book like this tend to be limited by the cost of rights, and anyway there are several nice volumes of Withers’s pictures out there. Or, you know, Google.)
+Instead what Lauterbach, a former Memphis resident and the author of two other books set in the South, “Beale Street Dynasty” and “The Chitlin’ Circuit,” is going for is a loose, rangy history of the civil rights movement in Memphis, using Withers and his camera as the (literal) lens. He’s done the work, tracking the complex, intertwined dances of the radicals and the centrists, the local ministers and visiting heavyweights like King. Weirdly, though, his very thoroughness and deep interest in this time and place have the almost certainly unintended effect of diminishing Withers rather than keeping him front and center. There are long stretches where, say, Stokely Carmichael appears, and we get 10 enthusiastic pages about his politics and S.N.C.C. and the dynamics between Carmichael and King, and then Withers pokes his head in to snap a few pictures and go meet his F.B.I. contact. Some of those scenes are nicely wrought, but the secrets in this life are often other people’s rather than Withers’s own.Amenities
+The Eaton can feel a bit like a mission statement that just happens to let you sleep there. But other aspects of the property more appropriately serve its community-focused purpose. The shared work space, where people can rent desks for a monthly fee like at WeWork or Cove, is handsomely furnished — like a graduate student study carrel brought to you by Room & Board. There is a small studio in the lobby for recording or broadcasting audio. The wellness center, which was in its soft opening when we visited in late November, offered yoga classes, a meditation room, sound baths and saunas that use infrared technology to heat your body instead of hot coals.
+Dining
+In case you were wondering whether there are any profit margins for a business that sounds like it would shun high-priced indulgences, look no further than the restaurant American Son, where our starter dish of three smallish-sized scallops was $24. Most of the items on the menu were vegetable based, like the gem-lettuce Caesar served lightly charred ($12) and a rich tofu gnocchi with sunchokes, black truffle and chive ($28). For carnivores there was a shareable rib-eye for $125 (yes, $125) and duck for $100. There are two bars on the property. One is a speakeasy called Allegory tucked away off the lobby behind two unmarked black doors with an extensive menu of craft cocktails. The other is a large rooftop club, Wild Days. Room service breakfast, ordered the night before from a cardboard door hanger, arrived almost exactly on time and with generous portions of scrambled eggs, chicken sausage and a potato and onion cake . Healthier options included an acai smoothie bowl with berries and shaved coconut.
+The Bottom Line
+The Eaton will feel too precious and political for many people. But if you need a break from the corporate, cookie-cutter sterility of Marriott and Hilton, this is your safe space.Psychological suspense is a genre that needs to be handled with kid gloves. Too much reality — or too much foolishness — and the pact made with the reader to believe in the unbelievable is broken. Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen seem to have mastered the formula in AN ANONYMOUS GIRL (St. Martin’s, $27.99), a creepy-crawly tale about putting your trust in a stranger; specifically, in a strange psychologist.
+Jessica Farris, a young theatrical makeup artist living on peanuts, sneaks into a high-paying “morality and ethics research project” being conducted by Lydia Shields, a psychology professor at New York University. Anticipating a formal printed questionnaire, Jessica is disconcerted to be bombarded with highly personal questions. “Subject 52, you need to dig deeper,” she’s prompted by the dauntingly elegant Dr. Shields, who knows Jessica is an impostor, but finds her interesting. And dig she does, revealing herself so completely that Dr. Shields focuses exclusively on her. Although this will no doubt set off alarms for discerning readers, Jessica seems oblivious to the unlikelihood of such a setup. And indeed, it turns out that Dr. Shields is really looking for an attractive (and rather dumb) young woman to test her husband’s fidelity.
+Given the rather far-fetched premise of this tale of mutual sexual obsession, the authors do a neat job of ratcheting up the suspense when Jessica begins going out on assignments to pick up married men in bars. And it comes uncomfortably close to being a justifiable betrayal when Dr. Shields’s husband has an affair with Jessica, confirming his wife’s previously unfounded hypothesis that he’s “an unrepentant adulterer.” At least he has the discretion to warn his lover about his wife. “She’s dangerous,” he says. “Watch yourself.” But it’s the danger that makes infidelity such fun, and the authors know exactly how to play on their characters’ love of danger to bring them to the brink of disaster — and dare them to jump off.
+♦
+You could choke on the bone-dry atmosphere of SCRUBLANDS (Atria, $26.99), Chris Hammer’s gritty debut novel about a sex scandal that has left a small Australian desert town reeling. A year has passed since a church shooting torched the parched landscape of Riversend, where everyone talks about the punishing weather but few have the stamina to take it without boiling over into rage or despair.The author, a freelance journalist, sees Ayn Rand-Milton Friedman free market theologians as concerned only with profits and not distribution or externalities (pollution, dangerous products). His critique of the extremes of wealth and poverty “under the pressures of globalization” is on the money, though he adds little to previous major works by writers like Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Piketty, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich. Yet while chiding extreme libertarianism, Selbourne veers dangerously close to Comstockery in his tsk-tsking of noise that “masquerades as music,” gender fluidity, sperm banks, bad grammar, video plagiarists and other presumed vices.
+Apparently thinking he needs to shoehorn everything into his bipolar analysis of markets and morality, Selbourne also periodically stretches things. Crime rates are generally not rising but falling, and prisons partly depopulating (except for minorities committing drug offenses). He believes that Islam will overtake the West because its adherents are more numerous and intense, a prediction that ignores the realities of oil dependence, anti-modernity and sectarian strife.
+Still, it’s no sin to show how we’re falling short of the promise of America. Selbourne is exactly right to conclude that we need a “practical renewal of the politics and ethics of the civic commonwealth, resting upon a social contract of reciprocal rights and duties.” How to steer between flawed capitalism and extreme individualism to arrive at the sweet spot of a working democracy is something this country has been trying to do since our founding, and despite Selbourne’s apocalyptic critique, the fact is that we’re lurching toward progress, not collapse.
+TRY COMMON SENSE
+Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left
+By Philip K. Howard
+240 pp. Norton. $25.95.
+Image
+TRY COMMON SENSE
+Replacing the Failed Ideologies of Right and Left
+By Philip K. Howard
+240 pp. Norton. $25.95.
+Is now really the best time for another jeremiad against “regulation”? After years of Reagan rhetoric and Trump diatribes, Howard, a lawyer, obviously believes so. He lays down the foundation for “Try Common Sense” with ex cathedra generalizations (“pretty much everything run by Washington is broken”; “bureaucracy is evil”) and then adds a brick-by-brick account of alleged regulatory idiocies: He decries how airport screenings pull people aside “if, say, we left a nickel in our pocket” and highlights the case of an angry public employee who supposedly sued his dry cleaner for $54 million for losing a pair of pants.On the 11th floor of 120 East End Avenue, a 14-room estate-condition apartment listed for $6.25 million recently went into contract, after a price drop of more than $2 million. Four years ago, a seventh-floor apartment with a similar floor plan that was in need of some updating sold for $10.25 million.
+Of course, buyers in such buildings have to have iron constitutions and the patience routinely associated with saints. Some high-end co-ops restrict home improvement — in any case, demolition — to the summer months, thus potentially stretching out a full-on renovation for years. Still, “if you have some vision and you have the stamina for a gut renovation, you are getting a deal,” Ms. Larson said.
+But as with many deals, this one has a catch: You have to get past a barrier known as the co-op board.
+“There are people who, in the past, would have thought Fifth or Park Avenue was too rich for their blood, but who have seen prices come down,” Ms. Larson said. “They’re getting more bold about making offers in co-ops where they wouldn’t have even looked during a seller’s market.”
+Some luxury buildings on the Upper East Side are notorious for their strict financial requirements and will accept only all-cash deals or require a minimum of 50 percent down; others require buyers to have liquid assets worth five or six times the sale price of the apartment. But these days, Ms. Larson said, “there are buyers who are thinking, ‘Maybe they’ll take me; maybe the board will loosen their standards and accept a less financially qualified candidate.’”
+These buyers, however, are not always rewarded for their boldness.
+“If anything, boards have become more strict,” she said. “I don’t think they like to see apartment values dropping in their buildings.”Jeff Bezos and his wife, MacKenzie, may be the first billionaire couple with a huge stake in an enormous technology company to announce their divorce.
+They won’t be the last.
+The surprise announcement last week that the Bezoses would divorce after 25 years of marriage instantly raised questions about the future of their 16 percent, roughly $140 billion stake in Amazon. As its founder, chairman, chief executive and largest shareholder, Mr. Bezos exerts almost complete control over the company he created.
+The big question is, now what? Will Ms. Bezos sell her portion of the family’s vast Amazon holdings? Will she seek a seat on the company’s board? Will she push for big strategic or management changes?
+The Bezos divorce could have consequences for investors in other companies with billionaire founders — Google, Facebook, Groupon and Snap, to name a few. Unlike Mr. Bezos, who owns Amazon shares with ordinary voting rights, these tech entrepreneurs wield control of their companies by holding special classes of shares that confer extra power to their owners.ALL IN THE TIMING At 10 o’clock we start the routine, procedures such as I.V.F. retrievals, I.V.F. transfers. Usually there are one or two urgent appointments. Things really should be done at the best possible time, and if that is your practice philosophy then you have to work every day. Timing is of crucial importance. As women get older, the processes inside the ovaries speed up. If we wait to take out their eggs, we get what I jokingly call hard-boiled eggs. They will not give us good embryos and they will not give us pregnancies. We have a saying that complications happen late on Friday afternoon and on the weekend.
+LUNCH WITH THE LADIES By that time I’m usually hungry and I grab a bite, frequently at Le Charlot. On rare occasion I may do it by myself but more often I do it with my eight-year long companion, Lyka, or with one or both of my daughters, Anja and Daliah, if they are in town. They both love to eat with me, otherwise I wouldn’t see them. I have to take them to a good restaurant. Dahlia is in college in Scotland and has the food Instagram with 80,000 plus followers and Anja is the exercise fanatic, she also loves food, and she’s in law school in Philadelphia.Mr. Jones has adopted a different playbook. While he has voted with Mr. Trump half of the time, according to the website FiveThirtyEight, more than nearly any other Senate Democrat, he has stood with national Democrats on high-profile issues, including opposing Justice Kavanaugh. He used his first speech on the Senate floor to call for new gun control measures, tackling an issue that has long been anathema to many Southern Democrats.
+Democrats hope voters will value Mr. Jones’s decision to stick with his gut when it comes to difficult political issues, even if that means siding with the national party.
+“He’s a guy who’s going to be true to himself,” said John Anzalone, a Birmingham-based Democratic pollster. “Authenticity is what sells in a place like Alabama.”
+But there’s also little question that Mr. Jones hit the political jackpot with his special election in 2017 by facing Roy S. Moore, an already-controversial Republican opponent who became all but radioactive after charges of sexual assault against underage girls. Even with that baggage, Mr. Jones beat Mr. Moore by only about 20,000 votes.
+A number of Republican officials in the state, including Representative Bradley Byrne and the Alabama State Senate president pro tempore, Del Marsh, are considering challenging Mr. Jones next year. None have the liabilities of Mr. Moore, who motivated a surge of black Democratic voters while prompting some Alabama Republicans to cross party lines and others to stay home from the polls.
+On top of those local challenges, Mr. Jones will also be running against the backdrop of the 2020 presidential election, a contest that will both highlight the national Democratic platform and bring out conservative voters eager to support the president.
+Even some of his supporters don’t expect to be represented by Mr. Jones for much longer.
+“Senator Jones, bless his heart, he’ll be a one-term senator,” said Sheila Pressnell, 61, as she walked through a Huntsville shopping center popular with employees of NASA and other government agencies. “The only reason he got it was because he was up against a child predator.”Before she became Reverend Jen, Jennifer Miller acquired her first troll as a child in Silver Spring, Md., when she bought one at a mall. “I’d need a lot of psychologists to explain it, but I guess I liked that they were always happy and smiling,” she said. She started collecting trolls seriously as a teenager and moved to New York in 1990 to study at the School of Visual Arts. She settled into the Lower East Side shortly after.
+In 2000, she started the troll museum in her magenta-painted living room. “New York was already getting boring, and the troll museum was a way to make it less boring,” she said. Before long, locals became accustomed to giving tourists directions to her apartment. But Reverend Jen’s life unraveled after 2013, she said, after she lost her longtime job at the nearby Tenement Museum, and she later started having health problems. Soon, she fell behind on her rent.
+When a city marshal served her eviction papers in 2016 she was only wearing a bath towel. Friends and artists helped move boxes of her trolls out onto the street. “I already felt like the last bohemian clinging on,” she said. “Part of me knew it wasn’t going to last forever.”
+These days, Reverend Jen works odd jobs like babysitting and cleaning houses. She hasn’t adjusted to Brooklyn and detests taking the subway into Manhattan. “I stay in New York because I couldn’t exist anywhere else,” she said. When she was asked to revive the troll museum, she eagerly started organizing her trolls and asked her mother to ship more trolls from Maryland.LR: I’ve heard other polar explorers talk about portaging, or ferrying the load, as an option. I thought, I’ll try it out. I should’ve kept either the tent or the sleeping bag, and just left one of them, so if I lost the tent I would have had the sleeping bag and vice versa, but I left both, marked them with my GPS and my spare ski, and set off with about 40 days of food in the pulk, a satellite phone and down jacket.
+Visibility was all right at that point. You could see a mile on the horizon, and the pulk felt fantastic. It was easy to zip along with half the load, and quite quickly went two miles ahead. And I went back, picked everything up fine. Went forward.
+Then did it again.
+It started to get quite blustery. The wind was building 30 to 40 knots, visibility coming right down. I stopped again at two miles. The first time I’d just followed the ski tracks straight back, piece of cake. This time, the wind and the spindrift had already filled in my ski tracks. I was literally down on my knees trying to look, thinking, “I can’t believe I can’t see my tracks.” I was actually amazed it had gone so fast.
+I couldn’t retrace my track. I went back on the compass bearing. Visibility was like 10 meters. I was thinking, “This is getting quite dangerous now.” I’ve got no tent and no sleeping bag. I’ve literally got a down jacket and I’ve got some food. I’ve got a sat phone, but nobody is coming to get me in these conditions. It could be a couple of days in this sort of thing.
+Without my tent and sleeping bag, I’m instantly in a survival situation, and I was conscious as well that the winds were really strong. There was a ski sticking up, but if that fell over, the whole thing could have been buried. It took me a long time to do the two miles. I was scanning and looking. I’d almost gone past it, which would have been fatal, but by pure luck, I turned my head toward a gap in the spindrift and saw a black shadowy sort of shape. Instantly turned, skied a couple hundred meters, stumbled across it. Relief.Restoring Original Prewar Charm
+The years can be hard on a prewar home. If you want to bring it back to its original glory, you’ll need a team of expert craftsmen.Charlotte Worthy, a New York architect, knows the struggle of restoring original wood floors all too well. Overseeing the restoration of an early 1900s townhouse on the Upper West Side, Ms. Worthy discovered that the detailed marquetry borders in the public rooms could withstand no additional sanding. So she and her team designed new borders and decorative patterns that would look authentic, and Mr. Estrin and his crew of carpenters used the designs to construct and install new floors.
+With a careful combination of white-oak wood grains, the updated flooring changes shade depending on how the light hits it. “The light that rakes in from the windows — and, to a lesser degree, from the light fixtures in the room — reacts differently depending on the angle of light and the direction of the grain,” Ms. Worthy said. “The wood looks darker where the light is being absorbed on the end-grain pieces, and lighter and reflective on areas along the grain.”
+Of course, not all prewar renovations will require such sophisticated repairs, and there are less expensive options available, Mr. Estrin said. “One can simply replace the existing prewar flooring with a new prefabricated and pre-finished wood floor,” he said. “Quite often, these types of floors are easy to install and will end up being less costly than refurbishing an existing prewar floor — you’d just be losing a lot of charm and history by doing so.”
+Ms. Worthy added: “If you are fortunate enough to acquire a project that involves restoration, you must prepare yourself for the ups and downs that any construction project will deliver. But in the end, you’ll be saving a part of the living history of architecture.”
+For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. Follow us on Twitter: @nytrealestate.STOCKHOLM — After a deadlock lasting more than four months, Sweden got a new government on Friday, with the Social Democrats and Prime Minister Stefan Lofven holding onto power under an agreement that excludes a right-wing, anti-immigrant party.
+The pact is a precarious one, creating a minority government run by a coalition that had to make concessions to some of its more conservative opponents. Both of the major, multiparty political alliances fell well short of an outright majority in the Parliament in the September elections, and forming a government 133 days later required splitting both blocs.
+The Social Democrats and Green Party will govern without the third member of their campaign bloc, the Left Party. To consent to the government’s formation, the Center Party and the Liberals broke with the other two members of the center-right alliance they had joined in the campaign.
+In Sweden, a government does not require majority support in Parliament. But a majority vote can prevent its formation, and an attempt to do that on Friday fell short, with 153 of 349 lawmakers voting to block the new government from taking office.On Thursday, a day after Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked President Trump to delay his State of the Union address, he denied her access to a military plane for a congressional visit to American troops in Afghanistan. “Obviously,” he said in a letter, flying commercial remained an option.
+Mr. Trump also canceled plans to send a U.S. delegation to Davos, Switzerland, next week for the World Economic Forum.
+The impact: The partial government shutdown is in its 28th day, and federal courts are running out of money. They’re expected to be able to continue funded operations through at least next Friday.Mr. Astaire called his son, an art lover, and told him he had met a woman named Pilar Ordovas, who was a “kind, interesting, fascinating and beautiful woman,” he said. A recognizable name in the art industry, his son thought he was kidding. “Milo said, ‘Do you know who that is? You’re lying to me. I’d love to meet her.’”
+The following day Mr. Astaire met Sting for lunch and told him all about Ms. Ordovas. Because she was married, he didn’t consider courting her, but he wanted to follow up on the dog breeder she had suggested. They stopped by her gallery on Savile Row in London, but she wasn’t there. Mr. Astaire left his phone number and email address. She responded soon after with the breeder’s information.
+A few months later, he texted and asked if she would meet with his son. She said yes. And as weeks passed, Ms. Ordovas and Mr. Astaire would meet once more, casually, at her gallery.
+On New Year’s Day 2017, Mr. Astaire was having a drink at the White Horse Tavern in Manhattan. Seated under a portrait of Dylan Thomas, he posted a quote from the famed poet on Instagram: “I wrote, ‘Life always offers you a second chance; it’s called tomorrow,’” he said, “and wished everyone a happy New Year.”
+Ms. Ordovas, who was by then divorced, saw the post and was encouraged by co-workers to respond. She, too, was in New York and sent him a message. But by the time he saw it, he was at the airport heading to Los Angeles. He promised to connect when he retuned to London.
+The two had dinner in early March, a year after first meeting. “She was as lovely as I remembered,” Mr. Astaire said. “It’s like for all these years I’d been looking in the wrong place. I met someone that has the essence of understanding me.”“I hope he’s all right,” Mr. Church said after the game. “If you go low for the knees, you are considered a dirty player, and if you go high, they throw the flag at you. It’s a bang-bang play, and I was just trying to play football.”
+“It’s football,” Mr. Gronkowski later told the press. “It is what it is.”
+And that’s the problem.
+The first research into the link between football and traumatic brain injury was published in 2005 . Since then, the science has become impossible to ignore.
+In 2017, The Journal of the American Medical Association published the results of the autopsies of the brains of 111 deceased former N.F.L. players, whose relatives gave their bodies up for study. The group was not a random sample, yet 110 showed signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a degenerative brain disease linked to concussions. Research published in November estimated that a minimum of 10 percent of all professional football players would develop C.T.E. at some point in their lives.
+Professional athletes are well compensated for their dangerous job. But the pipeline is a problem. It can take more than a decade of hard hits to make it to a college team or the pros.
+Research published in The Journal of Pediatrics last month found that concussion rates for youth football players were higher than previously reported. In all, some 5 percent of all youth football players receive concussions each year , a figure that may sound low, but compounds with each additional year of play. In 2017, a study found that playing football before age 12 doubled the risk of problems with behavioral regulation, apathy and executive functioning. It tripled the risk of elevated depression.
+It’s little wonder that lawmakers last year in New York, Illinois, California, Maryland and New Jersey introduced bills to ban or restrict youth tackle football .
+All this isn’t the snowflaking of the next generation of American men. It’s physics. Technology — in the form of, say, better helmets — will not save the game. Researchers note that helmets don’t prevent all concussions and might be making the problem worse, by giving players a false sense of invincibility.But the Kochs pay for politicians in order to enrich themselves and to gut regulations affecting the polluting industries that made them billionaires. Adelson got a similar tax windfall for the millions he put into electing Republicans, with the added benefit of controlling the State Department’s view of Israel.
+The progressive billionaires — Oprah Winfrey, Warren Buffett — are a different breed of fat cat. Mr. Buffett, the third-richest man in the world, has been saying “Tax me more” for years — or at least, “Tax me at the same rate as my secretary.” Like Bill Gates, who is the second-richest man in the world, he has pledged to give away the bulk of his fortune.
+Last year, Tom Steyer spent more than $100 million of his own money helping Democrats get elected, and he says he will drop another bundle on Senate races in 2020. Look what he got for his Democratic House: new members calling for a 70 percent tax rate on earnings over $10 million. Steyer, Gates and Buffett are going to get soaked for their political passions. And good for them.
+The same goes for Bloomberg. He also spent more than $100 million last year on behalf of Democrats, and ballot initiatives on gun regulations and climate change. This got him a kick in the teeth from the Warren crowd.
+God knows why George Soros continues to pour millions into promoting democracy abroad and going after hate speech at home. For that, he’s a target of crazed bombers and a victim of verbal poison from the likes of people such as the actor James Woods. Just a few days ago, Woods called Soros a “grizzled old Nazi prick” in a tweet. As a Hungarian Jew, Soros the boy had to hide from the Nazis.
+The ideal financing model is one perfected by Beto O’Rourke. He raised $80 million, without sucking up to PACs or corporate donors, and nearly knocked off the most hated man in the Senate, Ted Cruz of Texas.
+But we don’t live in an ideal world. Which brings us back to MacKenzie Bezos, a novelist of some acclaim. She may well follow the lead of Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the Apple co-founder, whose political spending has been aimed at recruiting Democratic female candidates.
+I would bet that the time Ms. Bezos spent studying creative writing at Princeton under Toni Morrison did not make her want to build a wall or turn a blind eye to climate change. If her heart is open to benevolence for the greater good, then the least the Democrats can do is not close the door.
+I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@nytegan).
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.But on Monday, this apology tour hit a snag when Mallory appeared on the daytime talk show “The View” and refused to denounce the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, whom she once called “the GOAT,” or Greatest Of All Time. Last February, Mallory attended a Farrakhan rally where he railed against “satanic” Jews. During his speech, he gave a shout-out to Mallory and the Women’s March, and afterward, she posted positively about the event on social media. On “The View,” rather than disavowing Farrakhan, Mallory said only, “I don’t agree with many of Minister Farrakhan’s statements.”
+Following that interview, the Democratic National Committee, which had been listed as a partner of the 2019 march, appeared to pull out. Several groups that have sponsored the march in the past, including Naral and the Southern Poverty Law Center, are also gone from its public list of backers. Local marches around the country have emphasized their independence from the national group. New York City will have two competing rallies.
+Writers I admire have argued that there are good reasons that some black activists hesitate to disavow Farrakhan. Last March, the journalist Adam Serwer wrote in The Atlantic of the successful violence-prevention work that the Nation of Islam has done in impoverished black communities. Mallory told him how Nation of Islam women supported her when her son’s father was murdered in 2001. Serwer described a sense in some black communities that the Nation “is present for black people in America’s most deprived and segregated enclaves when the state itself is not present, to say nothing of those who demand its condemnation.”
+Yet even if you’re willing to accept rationalizations for associating with an anti-Semite, the point of organizing is to build political power, and in that respect the leaders of the Women’s March have fallen short. They were put at the helm of a popular mass movement, and under their leadership it has alienated many supporters and become significantly more marginal.
+The idea for a women’s march on Washington was born in viral Facebook posts that Bob Bland, one of the current co-chairwomen, and Teresa Shook, a retired lawyer in Hawaii, put up after the 2016 election. On social media, tens of thousands of women committed to travel to Washington before any logistical arrangements had been made. Some of the women making initial preparations realized it would be a disaster if the march seemed to be entirely by and for white women. So, at the suggestion of a celebrity-connected activist named Michael Skolnik, Mallory and Perez, both affiliated with Skolnik’s nonprofit, the Gathering for Justice, were recruited to help lead it. They, in turn, brought in Sarsour.A Rift Over Power and Privilege in the Women’s March How tensions in the leadership of the protest movement burst into the open.
+Hosted by Michael Barbaro, produced by Alexandra Leigh Young, and edited by Paige Cowett and Lisa TobinEach consultorio doctor is supposed to see every person in the area at least once a year, if not for a formal physical then at least to take blood pressure.
+All this is possible because Cuba overflows with doctors — it has three times as many per capita as the United States — and pays them very little. A new doctor earns $45 a month, and a very experienced one $80.
+The opening of Cuba to tourism has created some tensions. A taxi driver who gets tips from foreigners may earn several times as much as a distinguished surgeon. Unless, of course, that surgeon also moonlights as a taxi driver.
+Critics inside and outside the country raise various objections to the Cuban system. Corruption and shortages of supplies and medicine are significant problems, and the health system could do more to address smoking and alcoholism.
+There are also allegations that Cuba fiddles with its numbers. The country has an unusually high rate of late fetal deaths, and skeptics contend that when a baby is born in distress and dies after a few hours, this is sometimes categorized as a stillbirth to avoid recording an infant death.
+Dr. Roberto Álvarez, a Cuban pediatrician, insisted to me that this does not happen and countered with explanations for why the fetal death rate is high. I’m not in a position to judge who’s right, but any manipulation seems unlikely to make a huge difference to the reported figures.BERLIN — In April, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will celebrate its 70th birthday. Founded in the earliest years of the Cold War, it is just as relevant today, when many feel that the international order is shaken again. In fact, if NATO did not exist, those in favor of a free world would have to invent it.
+While NATO’s key purpose remains to guarantee the security of its members, it has never been a purely military alliance. It is a political alliance as well, based on the common aspirations of its members who, as the NATO Treaty says, “are determined to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of its peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
+These principles are under assault today. Russian aggression in Eastern Europe, Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the terrorism of the Islamic State spreading from the Middle East to the capitals of Europe, authoritarian regimes developing nuclear weapons — as different as these challenges are, they have one thread in common: They emanate from actors who oppose the international order. They try to undermine or even change the rules that have governed the age of democracy and prosperity since World War II.Till now, winter has been gentle.
+We — you, dear reader, me and the people who bring you this newsletter — have been spared the season’s worst. But we are getting hammered with snow and sleet and more snow and freezing cold.
+Here is the deal.
+First, look out your window. It may still be snowing.
+It will not snow much — maybe an inch — and should stop by midmorning or briefly turn to rain as the temperature climbs toward 40. (This being a New York Friday, give yourself lots of time to commute.)The following report compiles all significant security incidents confirmed by New York Times reporters throughout Afghanistan from the past seven days. It is necessarily incomplete as many local officials refuse to confirm casualty information. The report includes government claims of insurgent casualty figures, but in most cases these cannot be independently verified by The Times. Similarly, the reports do not include Taliban claims for their attacks on the government unless they can be verified. Both sides routinely inflate casualty totals for their opponents.
+At least 62 pro-government forces and three civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the past week. Casualties among pro-government forces saw a significant drop compared to the previous two weeks, but remain high for this time of year when freezing temperatures historically have curtailed Taliban attacks. In Kabul, there were two bombings within two days of each other; the first left at least 22 people dead and 120 wounded; the breakdown of casualties between security forces and civilians was not available. The second bombing killed one N.D.S. official.
+[Read the Afghan War Casualty Report from previous weeks.]
+Jan. 17 Parwan Province: one police officer killed
+Afghan forces launched an operation against the Taliban in Shinwari District. The district police chief was killed and two police officers were wounded in the fighting.
+Jan. 16 Faryab Province: four police officers killed
+The Taliban ambushed an Afghan security convoy in Khwaja Sabz Posh District, killing four police officers and wounding two others. The convoy was driving from Balkh to Faryab.TOKYO — Mitsubishi Motors has joined Nissan in accusing Carlos Ghosn of financial wrongdoing, saying on Friday that he secretly received compensation of 7.8 million euros, or almost $9 million, from a joint venture of the two automakers.
+Osamu Masuko, Mitsubishi’s chief executive, told reporters in Tokyo that the automaker was considering suing Mr. Ghosn, the former chairman of both Nissan and Mitsubishi. Renault, the third automaker in the global car alliance that Mr. Ghosn ran, is also preparing to cut ties with its star executive.
+Mr. Ghosn has been detained in Tokyo since Nov. 19 on suspicion of understating his salary for eight years, and of temporarily transferring personal investment losses to Nissan’s books during the 2008 financial crisis. Mr. Ghosn has denied all charges. His lawyers could not immediately be reached for comment.
+Mitsubishi’s findings involve a joint venture between Nissan and Mitsubishi established in 2017 in the Netherlands. The company said Mr. Ghosn, who is listed as a director of the joint venture, had drawn up an employment contract that rewarded him €7.8 million in compensation.Tesla will reduce its full-time work force by 7 percent in an effort to lower the cost of producing its Model 3 sedan and make it a mass-market vehicle, Elon Musk, the electric-car maker’s chief executive, told employees on Friday.
+The least-expensive version of the Model 3 now available costs $44,000. Mr. Musk said in a companywide email that he wanted the lowest-priced Model 3 to sell for $35,000.
+To do so, Mr. Musk said in the email, Tesla must improve the car’s design, increase production and shed thousands of workers. “There isn’t any other way,” he wrote.
+Tesla shares closed down 13 percent after the announcement.
+The cuts, which could put more than 3,000 people out of work, follow a 9 percent reduction in Tesla’s staff in June. Another of Mr. Musk’s companies, the privately held rocket maker SpaceX, said this month that it would shrink its work force by about 10 percent.Afghanistan’s presidential race is in full swing, with several former officials lining up to challenge President Ashraf Ghani in a vote to be held in July, amid a raging war and fears that yet another fraud-marred election could further destabilize the country.
+On Friday, Mohammad Hanif Atmar, a powerful former national security adviser who parted ways with the government in August, became the most serious challenger to formally join the race so far. He vowed to “save the country” from what he has described as Mr. Ghani’s mismanagement.
+He joins a list of former officials who have either formally joined the race or declared that they will do so. They include Rahmatullah Nabil, a onetime intelligence chief who has selected an army general and a female former cabinet minister as his running mates (Afghanistan has two vice presidents); Zalmai Rassoul, a 75-year-old former foreign minister, who came a distant third in the disputed 2014 race that brought Mr. Ghani to power; and Shaida Abdali, a former diplomat seen as close to former President Hamid Karzai.
+Mr. Ghani, who has declared that he will seek a second term, is scheduled to begin his re-election bid on Sunday. A senior official close to him said Mr. Ghani had dismissed his controversial first vice president, Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, from the ticket, with Amrullah Saleh, a former intelligence chief that he recently tapped to lead the country’s police force, replacing him.Good Friday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+A thaw in trade talks with China? The market sure hopes so
+A report from the WSJ on Thursday said that Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had suggested ending some or all tariffs against China, lifting global stocks even after his agency stressed that trade talks were far from complete.
+Mr. Mnuchin said that easing the penalties would encourage China to make longer-term concessions while calming jittery markets, according to the report, which cited anonymous sources.
+The Treasury Department later said that officials had made no recommendations on tariffs.
+China’s trade czar, Liu He, is scheduled to participate in negotiations in Washington on Jan. 30. After March 1, tariffs on $200 billion in Chinese goods are set to grow to 25 percent from 10 percent.
+In other China news:
+• China’s ambassador to Canada warned of “repercussions” if the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei were blocked from Canada’s 5G network. Huawei’s chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested last month in Vancouver, British Columbia, and the company has also faced resistance and suspicion from Germany, the U.S. and other Western countries.Two ideas:
+You could rebrand yourself and look for new work accordingly. You are a chief of staff. You are a senior project manager. You are a chief of operations. This has the advantage of bringing your level of caring into a more correct level of authority, salary and respect.
+You could also stop caring and devote your apparently fearsome energies into a project worthy of your time — a local literacy project, a food bank, a refugee settlement group. Then you could clock out of your job at 5 and get your satisfaction elsewhere. I can imagine that would lead to a rewarding career transition for you, too. What if your passion and your abilities were joined in the same enterprise! You’d be unstoppable and happy at the same time.
+This Man Is Too Lonely
+How do I meet non-co-workers to get it on with if I have to work every waking hour to afford rent?
+— Anonymous, via Twitter
+Your intention to not sleep with your co-workers is appreciated. (From 10 weeks of monitoring the workfriend@nytimes.com inbox, I know that all of you are sleeping with each other, and I promise it will only end in tears and/or children — equally terrible fates.)
+This is, secretly, a hard question, because the dating apps are a desert of emotional sustenance. They are only effective like Bitcoin mining is effective. You have to put in the hours and the electricity. You have to grind through the leveling-up of bad dates and endless swiping to actually have intercourse. (To be fair, it was much worse in the olden days, let me tell you! You would meet some seemingly wonderful guy and there was no open-source spreadsheet on the internet to tell you that said man was in fact a bad man.)
+Your other options include: trivia nights, live music shows in small venues and, I dunno, the gym? (Do straight people actually ever hook up at the gym? Seems unlikely.) Get back on that Hinge, I guess. Only 418 more swiping hours until you identify someone you might feel some connection with. Your question has given me a little more empathy for all the office-sex emails.
+This Man Needs to Quit
+I work in a small regional office of financial analysts. We're all nerds, and only a few of us possess a material amount of emotional intelligence (or we think we do). One colleague in particular — a peer, though he’s been here longer — appears to be completely blind to his faults in this area, and is increasingly becoming unhappy at not being promoted. Do I try to help him understand why is he being passed over for people who do not have the self-awareness of a smooshed avocado?
+— Sam, San FranciscoCompanies have long paid close attention to the content that they fund with their television commercials. Shows like “Gilmore Girls,” for example, were backed by an advertiser group that sought to produce more prime-time programming for families. Lowe’s and others dropped ads from ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” in 2004 because they thought it was too racy. And after revelations that Bill O’Reilly had reached settlements with women over allegations of harassment and inappropriate behavior, at least 50 major brands said they would not advertise on his Fox News show, hastening his exit from the network.
+Many brands were not paying the same attention to their online advertising, outside of avoiding the obvious, like pornography sites. In the past two years, however, the business of brand safety has boomed, and major marketers have sought new control over their digital presence — even if that means leaving platforms that reach vast numbers of young people, like YouTube.
+The advertiser exodus brought a focus to the potential risks of digital ads, which often follow individuals on whatever content they are viewing. Questions were raised about what that meant for advertisers, which could inadvertently end up funding disturbing material and be associated with such content by viewers.
+“We care deeply about where we appear and whether it reflects our values and whether it breaks that trust with our consumers,” Ms. Carter said. “It was a moment to remind us that marketers must have their hands on the wheel at all times of their brands’ destiny.”
+The outcry over YouTube occurred as brands were discovering their automatically placed ads on websites promoting conspiracy theories and other toxic material. JPMorgan Chase, for example, reduced the number of sites that could run its display ads to about 5,000 after The New York Times showed the company one of its ads on a site called Hillary 4 Prison, where a headline promised to reveal “the horrifying truth about the Satanic liberal perverts who run Hollywood.” Previously, the company was running ads on about 400,000 sites a month.Theater: 5 Ionesco Plays in 1 Performance
+Jan. 23-26, bam.org.
+Eugene Ionesco didn’t love being called an absurdist playwright, but he and his fellow Parisians Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet all found themselves lumped under that banner. While Europe strained to rebuild after World War II, they looked around at the rubble and constructed a strange new form of theater. Out went conventions of language, plot and character; in came works meant to embody the stark illogic and dark comedy of the human condition.
+Perhaps by now Ionesco’s own writings could benefit from a bit of dismantling? The Paris-based company Théâtre de la Ville and the director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota have reassembled some of them into “Ionesco Suite.” Starting performances on Wednesday, Jan. 23, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it’s a mash-up of five texts from plays including “The Bald Soprano” and “The Lesson.”
+A heads-up to spectators who require a firm fourth wall: When the show ran in Chicago, The Tribune critic Chris Jones warned that it contained “some of the creepiest audience interaction” he had seen in a long while. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESMELBOURNE, Australia — Maria Sharapova walked up to the dais as if she were walking into a bash. She wore a black crop top that fell to her waist and tights that were shimmery and chic.
+“I don’t pull those out too often,” she chirped to a roomful of reporters, referring to the top. “I’m really happy.”
+Known for her frosty reserve on the court, Sharapova was in a celebratory mood on Friday after dispatching the reigning champion and No. 3 seed, Caroline Wozniacki, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3, in a third-round grudge match.
+Wozniacki, who is friends with the other women on the tour, and Sharapova, who keeps her competitors at arm’s length, are one-time Australian Open winners and full-time adversaries. Their clashing personalities don’t account for why they approached every point in the 2-hour, 24-minute slugfest as if they were playing for the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup instead of a berth in the round of 16.Tejal Rao: It’s torture because there’s so much ground to cover: So much good food and so little time! I’m new to the state, it’s only been a couple of months, so for now I think of every single place I visit as a kind of vital lesson. Every meal is giving me context and helping to establish the ins and outs of California dining culture.
+In deciding where to go, I’m always paying close attention to cooks, friends, readers, purveyors, local newspapers, menus, everything, and trying to gather as much information as possible so that I can decide how to spend my time strategically, since it’s limited. (If you want to email me a tip about where to go, I’m at tejal.rao@nytimes.com.)
+Can you tell us about how your review process works? Are you factoring in things beyond the experience of eating at a place? (For instance, you considered how Angler’s chef is adapting to climate change.)
+I don’t have a formal process. It’s all pretty messy and intuitive, but it does start with the food. With the pleasure of it, ideally, but not always. Basically I know a meal has the potential to be a review if I can draw readers’ attention to a restaurant that’s interesting and I can weave in other narratives and ideas into the criticism.
+I tend to do a lot of reporting and research that maybe doesn’t make it into a story, but does help to shape it. Calling professors, interviewing fishermen, reading academic papers or old cookbooks. Yes, eating at the restaurant is at the heart of the review, but eating can’t exist in a vacuum or it’s pretty boring.The technologies that power the behavior speculation market, of course, have spread far beyond online ads.
+They enable auto insurers to surveil drivers and offer discounts based on their driving performance. They allow workplace wellness programs to charge higher health insurance premiums to employees who decline to wear fitness trackers. They helped Kremlin-linked groups mount political influence campaigns on Facebook (although, as my colleague John Herrman pointed out this past week, we have yet to learn how effective those campaigns were).
+The flash-trading in human behavioral data was not inevitable.
+In her book, Dr. Zuboff describes how Google, in its early days, used the keywords that people typed in to improve its search engine even as it paid scant attention to the collateral data — like users’ keyword phrasing, click patterns and spellings — that came with it. Pretty soon, however, Google began harvesting this surplus information, along with other details like users’ web-browsing activities, to infer their interests and target them with ads.
+The model was later adopted by Facebook.
+The companies’ pivot — from serving to surveilling their users — pushed Google and Facebook to harvest more and more data, Dr. Zuboff writes. In doing so, the companies sometimes bypassed privacy settings or made it difficult for users to opt out of data-sharing.
+“We saw these digital services were free, and we thought, you know, ‘We’re making a reasonable trade-off with giving them valuable data,’” Dr. Zuboff told me. “But now that’s reversed. They’ve decided that we’re free, that they can take our experience for free and translate it into behavioral data. And so we are just the source of raw material.”
+Of course, tech companies tend to bristle at the word “surveillance.” They associate it with government spying on individuals — not with their own snooping on users and trying to sway them at scale.
+“When organizations do surveillance, people don’t have control over that,” Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief, said in April during a Senate hearing on Cambridge Analytica, the voter-profiling company that improperly harvested the data of millions of Facebook users. “But on Facebook, everything that you share, you have control over.”For the tens of thousands of Australians of Serbian descent, Djokovic is the secular saint of sport, worshiped by Serbs who still feel an acute sense of persecution nearly two decades after the worst of the Balkans’ fractious ethnic violence. That was evident on Wednesday afternoon, when Djokovic hit with the Australian teenager Alexei Popyrin in front of a crowd that included about a dozen fans flying the red, blue and white colors of the Serbian flag.
+Even during the 50 weeks of the year when the Melbourne Park courts go quiet, Djokovic’s presence looms. In the office off the Serbian Voice, a weekly newspaper on the western edge of Melbourne, one wall serves as a shrine to celebrated Serbian figures from history: Serbian Orthodox Church figures; Vuk Karadzic, the creator of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet; Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor; and Djokovic.
+For Serbia, a nation of seven million people, it is “a big deal” to be able to claim the top-ranked player in men’s tennis — and one of the best ever — said Zeljko Prodanovic, the newspaper’s editor.
+“After the war, it’s not so easy to say, ‘Here we are,’” he said. “You look at the movies, Serbs are always the bad guys. But now we can say we have the best tennis player in the world. That makes us proud.”
+The newspaper’s owner, Zivana Jovanovic, has welcomed several Serbian luminaries to her office in her two decades at the helm, including the actor Dragan Nikolic and the retired N.B.A. player Vlade Divac. She has never met Djokovic but said she felt as if she knows him because of his high profile. For all his fame, Jovanovic said, Djokovic comes across as humble.The artist, for his part, said that he was surprised and hurt by the controversy.
+“It was an enormous surprise to see some people, not even many of them, contest the statue,” Mr. Abella said in a phone interview.
+“Segovia is a normal city with normal people,” he added, “and it hurts me to see the image of the place where I have lived for some 30 years damaged by this.”
+To Mr. Abella, the statue has nothing to do with religion. It refers to a Segovia myth that the Devil, not the Romans, had given the city its famous aqueduct, which towers 90 feet over the Old Town of Segovia.
+According to the legend, the Devil offered a deal to a young girl who was tired of dragging water through the city’s steep streets: He would get the water to her home before dawn, in return for her soul. As the Devil labored all night to build the aqueduct, she prayed. A storm came, holding up the Devil’s work, and in the end, he lost his bid by one stone.
+Ms. Lazaro said the statue was a departure from the true message of the legend: to “take care of one’s soul and repent.”
+In recent years, Spain has seen similar high-profile court cases led by the Spanish Association of Christian Lawyers. The association has mostly used an article in the Spanish criminal code that forbids “offending the feelings of members of a religious confession.”
+In 2014, the association tried to remove the director of the Reina Sofia art museum in Madrid for displaying artwork that alluded to burning churches. In 2017, it filed a complaint against a drag queen who performed as the Virgin Mary and Jesus on the cross. And the actor and theater producer Willy Toledo was briefly detained by the police last year after he ignored a court summons for publishing insults about God and the Virgin Mary online. He is still awaiting trial.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+It’s day 28 of the government shutdown. Here’s what that looks like:
+In many cases, federal agencies have taken temporary steps to minimize the effects of the shutdown — not so different from the approach of that Wisconsin worker who is rationing her insulin. Yet if the shutdown continues, many of those temporary steps will become untenable, and the effects will begin to increase. Soon, lists like the one I’ve put together here will start looking much worse.
+A reminder: This shutdown isn’t about some “partisan divide.” It’s about President Trump. Last month, Senate Republicans and Democrats agreed to a deal to avoid a shutdown. Trump, goaded by cable television hosts and Rush Limbaugh, rejected the deal. Since then, Republicans have changed their position and backed the president. This is his — and now their — shutdown.
+[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]Los Angeles isn’t the only place where Latinos are disproportionately affected by strikes. In Arizona, Latinos make up about half of the students enrolled in public school and across the country, Latinos make up the highest percent of public school enrollment after whites. That number is growing: The National Center for Education Statistics estimates that by 2025, Latino children will make up 29 percent of the students enrolled in K-12 public schools.
+In a 2008 paper, Patricia Gándara, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at U.C.L.A., called the state of Latino education a “crisis.” “These students will form the work force in the immediate future,” she wrote, and, more specifically, “if the state of California does not immediately begin preparing more underrepresented students for higher education, by 2020 the state will experience an 11 percent drop in per capita income, resulting in serious economic hardship for the people of California.”
+Part of the problem, Gándara said, is misplaced attention on English language ability. “The notion of speaking a language other than English as an educational liability must be turned on its head,” Gándara wrote, noting the positive effects of dual language programs on both Latino and non-Latino students.
+BLACK BURNOUT
+Earlier this month, a BuzzFeed News article about burnout as the perennial millennial condition went viral, hitting a nerve with many who could relate to feeling overworked and obsessed with productivity. The result of our current condition, wrote Anne Helen Petersen, is that millennials tend to neglect ostensibly simple tasks, like going to the post office or doing laundry, if they aren’t directly related to our jobs. (Guilty!) Petersen described burnout as a systemic issue: “The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster.” Her essay set off alarm bells in my head and gave language to a latent feeling I’ve had for a long time that something’s got to give.
+A response written by Tiana Clark expanded on Petersen’s idea to consider how race and economic inequality increase burnout even more. “Yes, we are all so damn tired and in debt,” she wrote, but it is compounded for people of color, who must also manage microaggressions and systemic discrimination as well. It’s a worthwhile read that adds another dimension to discussions about our collective health.MELBOURNE, Australia — The authorities in Australia have charged a 20-year-old man with the rape and murder of Aiia Maasarwe, an Israeli exchange student who was attacked on a Melbourne street this week.
+The man, Codey Herrmann, of the Melbourne suburb of Greensborough, was arrested on Friday afternoon and was charged in the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court on Saturday. He was being held without bail and was scheduled to appear in court again on Monday.
+The police allege that Mr. Herrmann, who has been described by local news media as an aspiring rapper, killed Ms. Maasarwe, 21, just after midnight on Wednesday morning.
+She had been returning from a night out with friends and was speaking via FaceTime to her sister, who is overseas, on the short walk from a public transportation stop to her home when the attack occurred, the police said.Whether or not you’re planning to march on Saturday, here’s a breakdown of what’s been happening, and what to expect.
+[Listen to The Daily: A Rift Over Power and Privilege in the Women’s March]
+Charges of anti-Semitism
+Recent articles in Tablet, a Jewish magazine, and The New York Times have renewed scrutiny of claims that some of the earliest founders of the Women’s March had made anti-Semitic remarks.
+In both articles, Vanessa Wruble, a Brooklyn-based activist and an early leader of the Women’s March, says her Jewish heritage played a role in her being pushed out of the group — charges that Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland, presidents of the national Women’s March, have vehemently denied.
+Mallory has also been criticized for expressing support for Louis Farrakhan, who has been widely condemned for making anti-Semitic, as well as transphobic and sexist remarks. (Mallory has said she disagrees with some of Farrakhan’s statements.)
+Linda Sarsour, another one of the march’s co-chairs, has expressed solidarity with Palestinians under Israeli occupation. On the allegation that the group did not address concerns of anti-Semitism fast enough, she said: “Give us a chance.”
+[READ MORE: Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of anti-Semitism]
+Calls for a leadership change
+In recent weeks, Jewish groups and Teresa Shook — the first person to suggest the idea of a women’s march in a 2016 Facebook post — have called for the resignations of the leaders of the national movement: Mallory, Bland, Sarsour and Carmen Perez.
+Regional chapters of the Women’s March, civil rights groups and high-profile allies — including the Democratic Party , which until recently was listed as a supporter on the Women’s March website — have distanced themselves from the national entity. On Thursday, Women’s March Global, a group that organizes marches around the world, sent out an email underscoring that it had never been affiliated with the national Women’s March.Ali Fitzgerald is a graphic artist and the author, most recently, of “Drawn to Berlin.”
+Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.On the surface, it seems like one of the most joyfully innocent moments in Oscar history: Tatum O’Neal became the youngest competitive winner in history, taking home the 1974 Academy Award for best supporting actress at the age of 10 for the Depression-era comedy “Paper Moon.” But the story behind her victory is darker, involving a fractured family and bitter controversy surrounding a competitor.
+The director Peter Bogdanovich had cast the girl, an acting novice, opposite her father, Ryan O’Neal, with whom he worked on the 1972 farce “What’s Up, Doc?” At the time, O’Neal said he hoped the new movie would bring him closer to his restless daughter, who was estranged from her mother, the actress Joanna Moore. “This was the first opportunity to try to channel her energy and mind into something constructive,” he told People in 1974. “And give her what she never had enough of — love.”
+The film, shot in black-and-white for $2.5 million, was a hit, earning more than $30 million. But when Tatum O’Neal was nominated for an Oscar and her father wasn’t, it created tension. “In the press, he played the doting father,” she wrote in “A Paper Life,” her 2004 memoir. “But in his eyes, I read the truth: deep resentment that his own brilliant performance was being dismissed.” (O’Neal declined to comment for this article.)Twenty years into her career, Anne Hathaway is used to being cast a certain way.
+“I’m not usually sent roles that are defined by the male gaze,” she said. “Normally I get sent women who live and think for themselves — to the extent that we do in this very sick world.”
+But at first glance in “Serenity,” Steven Knight’s noirish thriller, opening Jan. 25, Hathaway’s character appears to have spent her lifetime catering to the pleasures of men. As Karen, Hathaway makes a jaw-dropping entrance — long blond tresses and soul-crushed eyes, a femme fatale in white — in the only bar on Plymouth Island. And she has a proposition for her ex (Matthew McConaughey), a struggling boat captain: Take her violent new husband (Jason Clarke) out fishing then drop him in the ocean for the sharks, in exchange for $10 million.
+It’s the first entry in a big year for Hathaway, who stole the show from Sandra Bullock and Cate Blanchett in last spring’s “Ocean’s 8.” Come May, she’ll appear in “The Hustle,” a female-centric remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” with Rebel Wilson, followed by “The Last Thing He Wanted,” Dee Rees’s adaptation of the Joan Didion novel about a reporter turned arms dealer, and “Modern Love,” an Amazon series spun from the New York Times column.
+When she’s not on set, Hathaway, 36, lives in New York with her husband, the producer, actor and jewelry designer Adam Shulman, and their son, Jonathan, 2 ¾. (“He’s like butter,” she said, sighing deeply. “Those moments they cuddle up into you just because they want to.”) Calling from a family vacation spot somewhere north of Los Angeles, Hathaway spoke about the actresses who still floor her and Hollywood’s echo chamber of men.“Chance can give you a gift,” said Pat Steir, offering a preview of 11 just-completed paintings in her studio in Chelsea. The petite, monastically dressed, 78-year-old artist stood before a monumental black painting, with a row of broad white strokes from which rivulets of pigment spilled down the dark ground.
+Ms. Steir allowed the random shower from each brush stroke to determine the composition without further intervention. “In some way, the paintings paint themselves,” she said.
+The works are titled “Silent Secret Waterfalls” and are all seven feet high and as wide as 17 feet, part of an ongoing series that goes back 30 years and traverses the artist’s engagement with abstract expressionism and Eastern philosophy.
+“Pat’s ‘Waterfall’ paintings have this performative, gestural, meditative activity,” said Thom Collins, executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. He commissioned the new works for the serene, naturally lit central Annenberg Court in the collection’s home, designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. It is the first time a painter has been invited to make something site-specific for the Barnes since the collector Albert Barnes commissioned his Matisse mural, “The Dance,” in the early 1930s.Fritz, who is 21 and considered to be one of the most promising players in the game, had come to this Australian Open match on the heels of the biggest Grand Slam victory of his career: a tense, hard-fought win over the 30th-seeded Frenchman Gaël Monfils.
+After that match, though he was playing as confidently as he ever had, Fritz was cleareyed about his slim chances against an all-time great like Federer. He noted how his only previous meeting with Federer had been a battle that went to the later stage of a tight third set. Then Fritz had crumbled.
+This time, though aware of the long odds against him, Fritz vowed to play loose and relaxed. “Have fun,” he said. “Play my game, hit big.” He wanted to soak up the moment, and learn.
+At 1 p.m. on a muggy afternoon, Fritz finally took the court at Rod Laver Arena. He had never played there. He smiled tightly. He fidgeted with his brown hair and white headband. His mind raced.
+“There were a lot of thoughts going on in my head,” he would explain, noting that he had simultaneously tried to pump himself up and find calm by listening to rap on his headphones as he strode before the fans.But the ideas amount to a tacit acknowledgment by Democrats that, even as they criticize Mr. Trump’s tactics and demands in the shutdown fight, they have largely allowed him to define the terms of the debate on border security, and that they must be more effective in articulating their own position on the issue.
+“People want to make sure that it’s clear that the Democrats do stand for border security, and not allow the president to determine how we talk about it,” said Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California. “We can’t cave to his vision for a wall, because of everything that it represents, but we also want to show that we’re for something.”
+The issue came up in a meeting of the Democratic caucus this week as Ms. Pelosi was briefing rank-and-file lawmakers about her latest broadside against Mr. Trump over the shutdown: her letter requesting that he delay or cancel his State of the Union address this month in light of the security measures that would have to be provided by federal workers who are working without pay. Mr. Trump’s response was to prevent Ms. Pelosi from taking her trip on a military plane.
+His letter to Ms. Pelosi announcing that step also disclosed her itinerary, which was secret given that Afghanistan was her destination. Official congressional trips are kept confidential for security reasons, particularly when they involve travel to war zones and high-ranking leaders like the speaker, who is second in line to the presidency.
+“You never give advance notice of going into a battle area — you just never do,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters at the Capitol, adding that Mr. Trump may not have understood that because of his inexperience.
+“The people around him, though, should have known that,” she said. “That’s very dangerous.”
+After Ms. Pelosi rushed to salvage the trip by making alternative travel arrangements to fly commercial instead, people close to Mr. Trump who had been briefed revealed the speaker’s plans to reporters late Thursday. By dawn on Friday, said Drew Hammill, her deputy chief of staff, facing a heightened State Department threat assessment and amid concern that the administration’s leaks had further compromised the safety of those involved, Ms. Pelosi canceled the trip.
+A White House official on Friday denied the charge, saying that there was no way for Ms. Pelosi to have kept her trip a secret and that any suggestion of a leak “is a flat-out lie.”“There isn’t a teenager who would have won the first round against Niculescu besides Amanda,” said her agent, Max Eisenbud. “That match, until today’s match, was her most impressive win. The way Niculescu slices and throws everything at you, it was getting tight, and she was able to perform. A crafty, experienced girl who threw everything at her, and she still won in straight sets.”
+Eisenbud also represents the player to whom Anisimova is most often compared: Maria Sharapova. While he said that comparisons between the two — blondes with Russian roots who stormed the tennis stage at a young age — were unfair to both, he observed that Anisimova and Sharapova did share a diligent work ethic and an ability not to be fazed in the biggest moments.
+Frances Tiafoe, who also reached the second week of a Grand Slam for the first time on Friday, gushed over Anisimova, in his own way.
+“It’s like she’s been a veteran,” Tiafoe said. “She’s going out here, and Sabalenka is playing great tennis — she routined her like it was nothing. It was barbecue chicken for her. It’s unbelievable.”
+In her news conference Friday, Anisimova said that her confidence was growing.
+“I believe in myself so much more than I ever did in this tournament,” she said. “It’s just trusting myself. That’s why I have been also playing really well.”
+That confidence leads her to hope she can follow in Sharapova’s footsteps in another way: by becoming a Grand Slam champion as a teenager. Asked what her dream was for her career, Anisimova expressed a desire for instant gratification.
+“I want to win this tournament — right now,” she said, smiling.
+Anisimova, who broke through at the junior level by winning the 2017 United States Open girls’ title, complements her desire for immediacy with an uncommon curiosity about the past, expressing her admiration for Billie Jean King, the pioneer who played a formative role in getting women’s professional tennis off the ground.Rich fare, I know! For those who don’t want to play, try out some sweet and spicy tofu with soba noodles instead. A winter vegetable curry. Anna Jones’s amazing warm kale salad with coconut and tomato, so great.
+There are thousands and thousands of recipes awaiting your attentions on NYT Cooking. Go take a look, see what intrigues. (Yes, you need to be a subscriber to do that. Here is how to become one.) Come visit us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter as well, or find me personally: @samsifton. Run into trouble along the way, with your cooking, with our technology? Write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’ll get back to you.
+Now, please read this beautiful, haunting excerpt from a new memoir by Tommy Tomlinson that ran in The Atlantic recently, “The Weight I Carry.”
+Also this beautiful, haunting essay by Russell Worth Parker in Lauren Katzenberg’s essential At War section of The Times, “I’m Prepared to Talk About the Things I Did in Iraq. Are People Ready to Listen?”
+You should check out, as well, this Dwight Garner review in The Times of Doug Bock Clark’s new book, “The Last Whalers: Three Years in the Far Pacific With a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life.”Name: James DeSantis
+Age: 30
+Hometown: Sylvan Beach, N.Y.
+Now lives: In a two-bedroom apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.
+Claim to fame: Mr. DeSantis is one-third of the Manscapers, a landscape design firm in Brooklyn with an eclectic clientele drawn from the city’s cultural fauna. Along with his longtime pals Garrett Magee and Melissa Brasier, Mr. DeSantis has created eye-popping green environments for Diane von Furstenberg, the David Lynch Foundation, Calvin Klein and Sies Marjan. “I’ve found clients at low tea on Fire Island and even through teaching yoga classes,” he said.
+Big break: The Manscapers took root in 2014 after friends complimented the outdoor décor at a party Mr. DeSantis and Ms. Brasier held at their Williamsburg apartment. An early client was Ladyfag, a night life personality who hired them in 2015 to create a tropical theme for a Dsquared2 party at the Halston House on the Upper East Side.Colleen McCullough
+“The pall of dust which came with every summer filled the silent air, and the sun thrust its fingers through the fine-strung particles so that it seemed the whole world had turned to gold and purple. Streaky clouds rimmed in brilliant fire poked silver streamers across the great bloody ball which hung just above the trees of the far paddocks.”
+Image
+Penelope Lively
+“It is hot. The summer is by now becoming legendary, a news item in its own right. Toppling records, incipient drought. Swarms of jellyfish in the channel, basking sharks off the Cornish coast, ice-cream sales at an all-time high, melanoma warnings with the weather forecast. One summer’s day rolls into the next, indistinguishable days in which it is light still at ten o’clock, then the sky starts to drain and within a short while it is a strange dark electric blue, and the trees and hedges are shadows in a monochrome landscape.”
+Image
+Beloved
+Toni Morrison
+“The crickets were screaming on Thursday and the sky, stripped of blue, was white hot at eleven in the morning.”
+Image
+Alex Garland
+“Without a sea breeze or cool water, the heat was incredible. By the time I reached the waterfall my whole body was prickling with sweat.”
+Image
+Francoise Sagan
+“It was 3:00 and the heat was overpowering. I was lying on the sand half asleep when I heard Cyril calling to me. I opened my eyes; the sky was white, shimmering with heat. … I was nailed to the sand by all the strength of the summer heat — my arms were like lead, my mouth dry.”Carmen Ejogo leapt in the air and grasped two lengths of silk, each the color of arterial blood. She took a deep breath, fell back and spun upside-down in the middle of a warehouse in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.
+“Whoooo!” she yelled, squeezing her legs together to increase her speed.
+Ms. Ejogo, 45, who plays an English teacher with an air of mystery on the new season of HBO’s moody police serial, “True Detective,” has a few tricks up the sleeves of her Adidas workout top. Here’s one: She is a closet circus enthusiast.
+On a break from filming the Netflix thriller “Rattlesnake,” Ms. Ejogo had driven to the Muse, a circus training center on a scruffy block just down the street from a hearse rental agency.
+An athlete all through school and a longtime ballet student, Ms. Ejogo loves any exercise “where it starts feeling lyrical and more like a dance,” she said. She stumbled into circus arts when a yoga teacher introduced hanging silks into the class. “It was immediately captivating to me,” she said.It’s a colossal time-waster, as patients, pharmacists and doctors log hours upon hours calling, faxing, texting and emailing to keep up with whichever insulin is trending. It’s also dangerous, as patients can end up without a critical medication for days, sometimes weeks, waiting for these bureaucratic kinks to get ironed out.
+Lost in this communal migraine is that this whole process is corrosive to the doctor-patient relationship. I knew that my patient wasn’t angry at me personally, but her ire came readily through the phone. No doubt this reflected desperation — she’d run out of insulin before and didn’t want to end in the emergency room on IV fluids, as she had the last time. Frankly, I was pretty peeved myself. By this point I’d already written enough insulin prescriptions on her account to fill a sixth Book of Moses. I’d already called her insurance company and gotten tangled in phone trees of biblical proportions.
+This time I called her pharmacy. A sympathetic pharmacist was willing to work with me, and I stayed on the phone with her as we painstakingly submitted one insulin prescription after another. The first wasn’t covered. The second wasn’t covered. The third was. But before we could sing the requisite hosannas, the pharmacist informed me that while the insulin was indeed covered, it was not a “preferred” medication. That meant there was a $72-per-month co-payment, something that my patient would struggle to afford on her fixed income.
+“So just tell me which is the preferred insulin,” I told the pharmacist briskly.
+There was a pause before she replied. “There isn’t one.”
+This was a new low — an insurance company now had no insulins on its top tier. Breaking the news to my patient was devastating. We had a painful conversation about how she would have to reconfigure her life in order to afford this critical medication.
+It suddenly struck me that insurance companies and drug manufacturers had come upon an ingenious business plan: They could farm out their dirty work to the doctors and the patients. Let the doctors be the ones to navigate the bureaucratic hoops and then deliver the disappointing news to our patients. Let patients be the ones to figure out how to ration their medications or do without.
+Congress and the Food and Drug Administration need to tame the Wild West of drug pricing. When there’s an E. coli outbreak that causes illness and death, we rightly expect our regulatory bodies to step in. The outbreak of insulin greed is no different.The risks of speaking out were underlined during that period. Shortly after a local girl was raped and murdered, Ms. Ammini said she and two other women marched into the office of a senior police official and called for the arrest of the men responsible for the crime.
+“They were siding with the criminals,” she said.
+Instead, a few days later, the police arrested Ms. Ammini, she said, accusing her of attacking a man and knocking out one of his teeth. After a night locked in the police station, she escaped by jumping from the building’s first floor.
+(Ms. Ammini said she was not convicted in the “fake case.”)
+The first in her family to attend college, Ms. Ammini gravitated to leftist circles at the University of Calicut and joined the Communist Party of India. She also met her future husband, K.V. Hariharan, a party member, bonding with him over books by Pablo Neruda and humanist writers.
+“Even his love letters were serious,” Ms. Ammini said.
+With little money, Ms. Ammini wore a $2 sari to her wedding in a building called “Freedom Fighters Hall.” A few years later, she gave birth to a daughter, B.H. Olga, naming her for Olga Benário Prestes, a German Communist who was killed in a Nazi gas chamber.PARIS — When Chris Brown and Gunna fired up spliffs in the front row at the Yohji Yamamoto show on Thursday, it was a sure signal that fashion had crossed into new territory.
+The outlines of the landscape we’ve now entered are starkly unlike the one that came before in ways that are as much attitudinal as demographic. Fashion can’t afford anymore to be precious or exclusionary. Instagram unlatched the gate to a once largely closed realm and the world rushed in.The study found that opioid-related spending on doctors was most highly concentrated in counties in the Northeast; the Midwest had the lowest concentration.
+Areas with large numbers of payments and high overdose rates included four cities in Virginia — Salem, Fredericksburg, Winchester and Norton — as well as Cabell County, W.Va., which has one of the highest overdose death rates in the nation. Lackawanna County, Penn., which includes Scranton, also ranked high in both measures, as did Erie County, Ohio.
+The authors said they were particularly struck by the fact that the number of marketing interactions with doctors — such as frequent free meals — was more strongly associated with overdose deaths than the amount spent.
+“Each meal seems to be associated with more and more prescriptions,” Dr. Hadland said. He added that while pharmaceutical company payments to doctors seem to have started dropping, the practice of companies buying meals for doctors “remains alive and well.”
+The study noted that while some states have sought to limit the total amount drug companies spend promoting their products to doctors — New Jersey, for example, recently adopted a new regulation limiting such spending to $10,000 per doctor, per year — what may matter more is for states or health systems to limit the number of interactions.
+“I think what seems to be less important is the amount of money spent,” Dr. Hadland said, “compared with the number of interactions.”
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+The study linked information from 2013 to 2016 across three national databases: the Open Payments database, which includes all payments made by pharmaceutical companies to physicians, which companies are required to report under a section of the Affordable Care Act; drug overdose data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and C.D.C. data on opioid prescriptions dispensed at pharmacies.President Trump, you surely could not have wanted your partial government shutdown, your tariffs, your corporate tax cuts and your war on undocumented immigrants to hobble economic growth and to hurt farmers, factory workers, airline passengers, government contractors, retailers, Coast Guard members and F.B.I. agents. But the economy can take only so many bad policies.
+A $19.4 trillion economy is losing momentum as fast as your approval ratings. Growth is slowing down in spite of a $1.5 trillion tax cut that is blowing up the deficit while help ing companies like Goldman Sachs, which earned $2.5 billion in the fourth quarter, thanks in part to a $467 million tax benefit.
+Government workers have already missed an average of $5,000 in pay because of the shutdown. These unpaid federal employees may represent only 0.53 percent of all payrolls, according to the economist Ian Shepherdson, but because these employees have above-average earnings, the harm to the economy is greater than that proportion might suggest. Presumably, they’ll get back those wages at some point. Even then, some of those earnings will have to go to pay late fees on credit card and mortgage bills that are piling up. None of that money, though, will compensate for restaurant meals not eaten; movies not seen; Frappuccinos not sipped ; or supermarket runs not made, at least not by Coast Guard members who are heading to food banks instead. Those sales, and sales taxes, are lost forever.
+The shutdown is also aggravating damage you’ve already caused. You must have thought your audience was just a bunch of hayseeds when you told the American Farm Bureau Federation this week that “we’re setting records together for farmers and for agriculture.” Farmers are losing sales to China, Mexico, Canada and elsewhere because of your trade policy. They’ve lost customers who may never return. And now, because of the shutdown, they can’t get services ranging from crop financing to vital information about commodity supplies from the Department of Agriculture. Farmers have crucial decisions to make before the spring planting season begins, and the shutdown is keeping them in the dark. And in the red.Chickpeas give the dish a boost of protein. Feta cheese adds creaminess and tang, though how much tang will depend on the kind of feta you buy. Greek tends to be the saltiest and most intense in taste, while cheeses imported from Bulgaria and France are generally milder. Taste a bit before you add it to the pan. If it seems very salty, give the cheese a quick rinse. And if it seems too bland, add an extra pinch of salt and dash of balsamic vinegar to the pan to perk things up.
+Every one-pan meal needs a vegetable and here, roasted sturdy grape tomatoes — a winter staple in my kitchen — get the job done. Cooked along with balsamic vinegar, garlic and scallions, they turn both savory and sweet, their juices condensing in their brief stint in a very hot oven.
+They do not, however, provide any kind of textural contrast. (This is not a dish for anyone looking for crunch.) Soft, cheese-filled and warming, this meal is as gently comforting as that spot on the couch.
+Recipe: Pearl Couscous With Creamy Feta and Chickpeas
+And to Drink …
+While pearl couscous gives this dish the weight and texture to satisfy in cold weather, the herbs and flavorings bring to mind a Mediterranean summer. For that reason, it’s a great opportunity to indulge in a winter rosé. But don’t reach for the last bottle from the past summer’s $50 case. Those cheap rosés have a fleeting life span. You need a sturdier bottle, like a Bandol rosé or a few others that not only survive a few years aging but actually improve. If you find a winter rosé is too jarring — though I don’t know why it should be — this dish will go well with any dry Mediterranean white. Try something from Greece, like an assyrtiko, a moschofilero, maybe even a retsina. ERIC ASIMOVA diminutive Japanese woman kneels, eyes closed, caressing a rug with open palms. She appears to be praying — to a house. She greets it, thanking it for its service.
+The camera pans to her American hosts, Kevin and Rachel. Ensconced in armchairs, struggling to keep a straight face, they look a little like children in church — and in a way, they are. In her new Netflix series, the decluttering guru Marie Kondo is shown not just sprucing up people’s homes but also reimagining them as sacred spaces — channeling her experience as a former assistant at a Shinto shrine, along with the related belief that life, even consciousness, of a kind, courses through everything.
+The series leans on Ms. Kondo’s nationality in other ways, too: The conspicuous presence of her interpreter helps to create the impression of a cultural chasm being effortfully but productively bridged; Ms. Kondo’s own energy and kindness is tinged with an artfully ill-concealed sadness at these desperate Americans, their homes and minds choked with trash. When her first book came out several years ago, Ms. Kondo’s publisher did much the same: To “ The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up ” it added the subtitle “The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.” Readers would no longer be doing chores; they would be engaged in a cultural and possibly spiritual activity.
+Marie Kondo is by far the most successful participant in a larger trend of the past few years: packaging inspirational but fairly universal lifestyle advice as the special product of Japanese soil and soul, from which Westerners might usefully learn. We’ve had “ikigai, ” which translates as the familiar concept of value and purpose in life. We’ve had forest bathing, as though the soothing power of nature had not occurred to people like Wordsworth and Emerson. Such advice books may be having a moment, but they are not new. Rather, they’re the latest installment in a surprisingly old tradition: Japan and its culture marketed as a moderating force in a world otherwise overwhelmed by the West.A manager for R. Kelly turned himself in to the authorities in Georgia on Friday on charges that he threatened a man who accuses the R&B singer of holding his daughter captive.
+The manager, Henry James Mason, 52, of Mableton, Ga., was wanted on a warrant for terroristic threats and acts against Timothy Savage, whose daughter Joycelyn is believed to be living with Kelly. Savage told the police that after he tried to contact his daughter, Mason told him over the phone that he would do “harm” to Savage and his family and threatened to kill him.
+Mason surrendered to the Henry County Sheriff’s Office, near Atlanta, and was released on $10,000 bond on Friday. In a statement released by his lawyer, Mason denied that he had “engaged in any acts of bullying, harassment, or aggressive acts.” He said he had, in fact, tried to help Timothy Savage and his wife, Jonjelyn, re-establish a relationship with their daughter.
+[Read about RCA’s decision on Friday to drop R. Kelly from its label.]
+The police report was filed last May, but a storm of controversy has surrounded Kelly in recent weeks, after “Surviving R. Kelly” aired on Lifetime. The documentary series chronicled decades of allegations against Kelly, including that he operates a so-called sex cult in which he physically and emotionally abuses women and keeps them from their families.As a 24-year-old corporate lawyer at Skadden, Arps in New York City in the mid-1990s, Marie Benedict was often the only woman in a room full of men — an experience she has drawn on in her subsequent career as a writer of novels inspired by women whose achievements have been overlooked or underappreciated by history.
+The idea for “The Other Einstein” (2016), about Mileva Maric, the Serbian mathematician and physicist who was Albert Einstein’s first wife, came to her while she was reading a children’s biography of Einstein with one of her sons. The book dispensed with Maric in a couple of sentences.
+“I started thinking: Here’s this woman who made this incredible ascent from the backwater of Eastern Europe, where it was actually illegal for girls to attend high school, to become one of the very first women at a university physics program in Europe,” Benedict says. “Why had I never heard of this woman? She and Einstein had the same physics education, and they were married during his most prolific period — 1905. I couldn’t help but wonder what role she might have played in his theories.” (Debate over Maric’s contributions continues, with some scholars arguing that she may have collaborated with Einstein or even co-authored some of his papers.)
+Benedict’s new novel, based on the life of the Hollywood film star and legendary beauty Hedy Lamarr, puts the conceit of the lone woman in a man’s world once again on center stage. “The Only Woman in the Room,” which enters the hardcover fiction list at No. 11, homes in not on Lamarr the movie star but on Lamarr the inventor (with the composer George Antheil) of a “frequency-hopping” radio communication technology that distantly prefigured wifi. “Every day most of the people in the world stare at an invention that she had a hand in, and that’s the cellphone,” Benedict says. “Once I knew that, I knew absolutely that I had to tell her particular story.”Dr. John Mendelsohn, who led the prestigious University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center through an era of substantial growth, and who, as a scientist, helped pioneer a new type of cancer therapy, died on Jan. 7 at his home in Houston. He was 82.
+His death was confirmed by MD Anderson, which said the cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer.
+Dr. Mendelsohn was the cancer center’s third president, serving from 1996 to 2011, a period in which MD Anderson rose in prominence to be considered the nation’s top cancer hospital. At the same time, its annual revenues quadrupled, to $3.1 billion.
+“He was an extraordinary scientist, he was a compassionate individual, he was a strategic thinker, and he was able to bring all of those capabilities to bear as an exceptional leader of MD Anderson,” Dr. Peter Pisters, the center’s president, said in a telephone interview.David Dunn
+We first meet David Dunn (Bruce Willis) on a passenger train from New York to his hometown, Philadelphia; that train derails en route, killing every passenger except David, who not only survives, but also emerges with nary a scratch. In time, we discover he has never broken a bone, never had a serious illness and never even succumbed to a common cold.
+Elijah Price
+Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson), the wheelchair-using owner of a comic-book art gallery, is an expert on the history and archetypes of the form. He offers an explanation for David’s run of extraordinarily good health: David is a Superman-style hero, blessed with special powers of strength and vision (when he touches strangers, he can see their darkest secrets). And when David recalls how he nearly drowned as a boy, Elijah determines that water is his weakness — his Kryptonite, as it were. Elijah’s knowledge of comics grew out of his own history: From birth, he has struggled with a rare disorder than renders his bones especially brittle and easy to break. When he was a child, his classmates called him “Mr. Glass.”
+[Read the Times review of “Glass” by Manohla Dargis.]
+David’s Family
+When we meet David, his marriage to Audrey (Robin Wright) is all but over, and his relationship with his son, Joseph (Spencer Treat Clark), is clearly remote. His brush with death causes the couple to give their union a fresh start, while the discovery of David’s newfound gifts helps him forge a new bond with Joseph. When David finally accepts Elijah’s explanation of his fate and saves two children from a twisted home invader (while wearing the green poncho of his day job as a security guard — effectively his superhero costume), David insists that his secret identity stay between him and his son.
+The Twist
+Once David’s course is set, he shakes hands with Elijah and finds out the terrible truth: the art dealer is, in fact, a supervillain who caused the train derailment (and several other horrible “accidents” before it) in order to flush out his superhero nemesis. According to the closing titles, “Elijah Price is now in an institute for the criminally insane,” and that’s where we find him in “Glass.”
+‘Split’The initial teaser for the director Jason Reitman’s sequel to his father Ivan’s ’80s comedies doesn’t reveal much, aside from the spirit-hunting team’s Ecto-1 transport, which has been gathering dust in a barn. All we know is the movie won’t feature the characters from the female-centric 2016 reboot. No word on whether any original stars will return, but Dan Aykroyd did tweet to Reitman, “If you need a tune-up, you know who to call.”CLEVELAND — Is Strauss’s “Ariadne auf Naxos” the best opera? Probably not, though it’s up there. If you asked me whether it was my favorite opera, my answer would be the same.
+But it must be the most operatic opera, the one that reflects most sweetly and profoundly on the nature of this strange, lovely hodgepodge of an art form. Putting on an opera, after all, is what the piece is all about.
+So it makes sense that the Cleveland Orchestra’s audience at Severance Hall here — for a pristine, poignant production of “Ariadne” that runs through Saturday evening — takes its seats to find what looks like a rehearsal.
+The players, wearing their own street clothes, are onstage, with a plastic work table and some chairs. A digital clock, the kind that keeps precise time for obeying musicians’ union regulations, is visible. The orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Möst, sits on the podium, chatting with the wind section.Hi, it’s Emily, and I have five weeknight dishes for you, starting with one of my personal favorites, this garlicky chicken with lemon-anchovy sauce. I realized I was maybe not alone in this when I saw this tweet by the writer Hannah Giorgis: “I make this chicken so much that I truly look forward to passing the recipe down to my future children while pretending it’s an old family secret.” Same. (Also, while I’m not sure anyone ever tried to conceal this, my nana’s special matzo ball soup was almost certainly made from the mix in the box.)
+If (a) this kind of culinary deception exists in your family or (b) you feel this way about another recipe, either on NYT Cooking or another website, then tell me at dearemily@nytimes.com.
+[Sign up here to receive the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter in your inbox every Friday.]
+Here are five recipes for the week:For a coloratura soprano, the Fire Aria from Ravel’s “L’Enfant et les Sortilèges” — high runs and Queen of the Night histrionics — is a perfect showcase for technical wizardry and spunk. So it made sense for Sabine Devieilhe, a rising star in her native France who has won acclaim at the leading opera houses of Europe, to include it in her debut at Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall on Thursday.
+But Ms. Devieilhe’s impetuous and sparkling rendition of that showpiece was only the encore — an afterthought, really — for an evening of delicate, nuanced French art songs. It says something about the confidence of this 33-year-old artist that she felt no need to offer a grab bag highlighting her strengths. The program she assembled, songs by Debussy and his circle, was refined and cohesive. And it still held plenty of opportunities to show off her nimble singing and radiant tone.
+Ms. Devieilhe also had a superb partner in the pianist Mathieu Pordoy, whose artistry helped to make this an evening of first-rate chamber music. His finely contoured playing, especially in numbers by Debussy, stood out for its clarity and light pedal use. He revealed details in music that other pianists tend to dissolve in a reverberant haze.
+Clarity was also the defining quality of Ms. Devieilhe’s performance, both in her lucid, evenly weighted tone and in her meticulous attention to language. Her program drew heavily on settings of quietly enigmatic texts, whether by Symbolist poets like Paul Verlaine or Sanskrit miniatures filtered through the lenses of Western translators.Born in Neuquén, Argentina, Beatriz emigrated with her parents when she was 2 years old to Webster, Tex., just outside Houston. Her interest in acting began with that perennial refuge for young outsiders: high school theater.
+“That’s where the weird kids were; that’s where the gay kids felt comfortable. A lot of people of color gravitated toward that group,” Beatriz said. “I just felt like the best version of myself when I was with that group of kids.”
+After high school, Beatriz graduated with a theater degree from Stephens College in Missouri, then moved to New York.
+“I knew there was space for me in theater, but I didn’t know if there was space for me in TV and film,” she said. Eventually, she found her place: Following bit parts in a few TV series and a notable supporting turn in the film “Short Term 12,” Beatriz got her big break in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” which debuted in 2013.
+In portraying a “tough good guy,” Beatriz found inspiration in spaghetti Westerns, a genre which sometimes featured a character in an all-black get-up. She describes it as a “robot-cowboy” look: “I think I was taking elements of that archetype when I started thinking about her as a character. I remember going into the first costume fitting and saying, ‘I think it’s a lot of black.’”
+Aside from her inscrutable nature, Rosa is known for her sardonic tone and dedication to being a solid detective.In Vietnam, whatever the weather, breakfast might look like what Westerners would choose for a wintry day’s supper: piping hot soups and long-simmered stews.
+When I visited a couple of years ago, my guide began nearly every day with a steaming bowl of pho, the traditional beef and noodle soup found throughout Vietnam. In that regard, it was no hardship to follow his lead.
+But one day, instead of pho, we had a breakfast of bo kho, a hearty dish of braised beef and vegetables, another popular morning option. As a lover of all things stew, I was thrilled.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — A major winter storm was on a path Friday to wallop as many as 80 million people in the Midwest and Northeast over the weekend with a punishing mix of heavy snow, strong winds and frigid temperatures.
+In Kansas, officials dispensed warnings to ranchers about how to keep their horses from freezing to death. Small towns notified residents that their plows might not keep up with the rapid snowfall, leaving streets impassable. And, in a foretaste of the chaos likely to ensnarl the country’s transportation networks, hundreds of flights were canceled at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, before a single snowflake had fallen there.
+The storm was also expected to further strain the National Weather Service, where many employees have been furloughed as part of the partial government shutdown. Others — including those putting out the storm warnings that state and local officials rely on for their planning — are considered essential and are working without pay.
+“I’ve been working for the National Weather Service for over 27 years — I’ve never seen the morale as low as it is right now,” said Dan Sobien, the president of the National Weather Service Employees Organization.“The consumer’s really the star of the show right now, and if you were to see any signs of a break there, it would be significant,” Mr. Stanley said.
+Downturns in consumer sentiment don’t always translate into cutbacks in actual spending. And past shutdowns haven’t done lasting damage to either confidence or spending. Jim O’Sullivan, the chief United States economist for High Frequency Economics, wrote in a research note that the Michigan index also fell in 2013, then bounced back quickly when the government reopened. But he cautioned that the current shutdown had already outlasted any previous one.
+Adding to the challenge for forecasters, the shutdown has stopped the release of much government economic data. The Commerce Department, for example, was scheduled to release retail sales figures for December e this week; that report has been put off indefinitely.
+“Disentangling what is temporary effects and what is the underlying trend becomes that much more difficult,” said Brett Ryan, an economist with Deutsche Bank in New York. “It just adds more uncertainty during a period when the market’s already skittish.”
+In the absence of much hard evidence, economists have been left guessing about the shutdown’s impact. White House economists this week doubled their estimate of the damage being inflicted. The Council of Economic Advisers said the shutdown would reduce quarterly economic growth by 0.13 percentage points for every week that it lasted as federal contractors lost out on work and government employees went without pay.
+Some analysts see even bigger potential effects: Deutsche Bank estimated on Thursday that in the worst case, the economy could contract in the first quarter because of an extended shutdown.
+Portions of the surveys offered a pointed political warning to Mr. Trump. In the span of a year of SurveyMonkey polling, the president has lost much of the approval he enjoyed with Americans on economic policy. Nearly as many respondents now say his policies are making the economy worse as say they are making the economy better. A year ago, Mr. Trump held a seven-percentage-point advantage on that question.It is a truth universally acknowledged — or it was, for a while — that New Yorkers in possession of a good fortune must be in want of antiques. But times change, and so do tastes. The dominance of modern design has sent antiques prices plunging, and the Winter Antiques Show, one of the industry’s bellwether events, has now been rechristened The Winter Show, promising “5,000 Years of Art, Antiques and Design.”
+Under whatever name, it remains both a trove of potential artistic discoveries and a gold-star appointment on New York’s social calendar. It’s also a fair with a philanthropic mission: Unlike its for-profit cousins, it was established in 1954 by East Side House, an educational charity in the Bronx, which nets the proceeds from ticket and catalog sales.
+For decades, the blue bloods around Park Avenue came here to pick up Americana, Asian decorative arts, English silverware and backbreaking amounts of heavy brown furniture. And that’s still here, for the shrinking tribe that still decorates with old oak and mahogany instead of modern (and even pricier) leather and steel. The New York dealers Bernard & S. Dean Levy have brought a Chippendale side chair, made in Boston circa 1770, with telltale cabriole legs in the shape of birds’ claws. Hirschl & Adler, also of New York, have a serpentine sofa from around 1820, possibly made by the cabinetmaker Duncan Phyfe and upholstered in a racy red. The style is known as a récamier, after the society hostess who lounges on one in a famous portrait by Jacques-Louis David in the Louvre.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+When some of my colleagues at The New York Times approached me about doing a health program for our readers, I knew immediately what I didn’t want. I didn’t want another impossible fitness program. (Some of us find even the 7-Minute Workout too hard!) I knew I didn’t want a plan that made readers feel guilty about their choices or bad about themselves.
+I’ve always believed that living well doesn’t have to be hard — it actually makes us really happy! I wanted to create a wellness program that was simple, easy-to-do and, yes, fun. Since launching Well at The New York Times 11 years ago, I’ve always felt a strong connection with readers and their struggles. I’ve chronicled my own challenges with losing weight, and I find that when I write about something that personally interests me — whether it’s midlife resilience or the power of surrounding yourself with positive people — I discover that readers are usually thinking about the same thing.
+So, together with a team including designers, developers and editors, I set out to create a wellness program that I would want to do myself. I thought about doing one nice thing for myself every day that helped me move more, that nourished my body, that connected me with loved ones or refreshed my spirit. In the Well section, we have always taken a holistic approach to health, and our coverage reflects that view. We focus on fitness and nutrition, of course, but we also share science-based information on mindfulness, sleep, family, love and friendships.LONDON — Don’t pester the wombats.
+That is the plea from Australian tourism officials dealing with hordes of visitors to an island and nature preserve who cannot resist the urge to follow the marsupials around, approach them for selfies or even cuddle them.
+Wombats roam free on Maria Island, where there are no natural predators and no permanent human inhabitants. Along with other wildlife, they have taken over the island, a former prison colony with a small ghost town and vast green expanses, just off the coast of Tasmania, south of the Australian mainland.
+Looking like big teddy bears, the stocky, furry animals — each about three feet long and weighing 50 to 70 pounds — have no fear of people, and amble up to visitors as soon as they get off the ferry. But officials this month have called on people to fight the urge to get too close and to respect the habitat they are visiting.
+“The tourists are in love with the wombats; so in love that we need to give them some education about how to interact with them,” Ruth Dowdy, the head of the tourism board on Tasmania’s East Coast, told ABC Radio Hobart.Slide 1 of 14,
+The Fashion Scholarship Fund held its 82nd awards dinner on Jan. 10 at the New York Hilton Midtown hotel. Martha Stewart was among the honorees.Yes, that’s exactly how I felt that week when I read “When Death Comes,” one of Ms. Oliver’s best-known works. I recall distinctly how at the end of the silent retreat I was so excited not only to be able to speak again — but to talk about the final stanzas of that poem and what they meant to me:
+When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
+In our group of eight, two of us were cancer survivors — a woman who had breast cancer, and me. In the 17 years since my diagnosis, I’d struggled to understand the lessons that accompany a life-threatening illness in a twenty-something. Sure, I tried to remember to “stop and smell the roses,” but other aphorisms, like “everything happens for a reason” or “when a door closes, a window opens” left me cold at best.
+I explained all that as we sat knee to knee, relishing our newfound voices, and then read Ms. Oliver’s lines out loud, especially focusing on the last one: “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”
+The other cancer survivor was already a devotee of Ms. Oliver’s, and of that poem in particular. She said she’d taken it as her personal mantra. This was years before “mindfulness” became a thing, but my fellow traveler with cancer quoted another of Ms. Oliver’s lessons for living: “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
+That, too, was new to me, as I started to use not only my eyes, but my ears and even my nose, to pay attention: to see, to hear and to smell the world around me.
+In the many years since then, Mary Oliver’s gentle insistence that we do not end up “simply having visited this world” became my touchstone. When scared, I did my best to stand up to the fear (“I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened…”).Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to Listen
+Linn Ullmann’s sixth novel, “Unquiet,” features characters that are not-so-veiled — O.K., unveiled — versions of the author and her famous parents, the actress Liv Ullmann and the filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. A. O. Scott, who wrote about “Unquiet” for the Book Review, joins us on the podcast this week to discuss the novel.
+Scott points out that between biographies of Bergman and memoirs written by Liv Ullmann, much is known about the two, but that the novel offers a unique perspective.
+“A lot of their own accounts of their own lives and the details are available and accessible, and I’m not sure that this adds very much to that,” Scott says, “except that you kind of see them through the eyes of a child, which is something you hadn’t before. So you see their vulnerability, their cruelty, their carelessness all these ways that parents can be around their children that great artists never allow themselves to be in public.”
+Image
+Judith Newman also visits us this week, to discuss her review of new books about dealing with anxiety, mental illness and grief, including “How Not to Fall Apart: Lessons Learned on the Road From Self-Harm to Self-Care,” by Maggy Van Eijk. “I think that for people who have a kid who’s in a lot of pain,” Newman says, “this would be a good book to give them.”That is what Marsch knows he is up against now, and it is the reason he says he has tried to take a holistic approach to this new chapter of his life.
+Under RB Leipzig’s manager, Ralf Rangnick, Marsch has assumed what he described as a fluid, all-encompassing role. At the same time, he is responsible for a weekly set of tasks — running different elements of training, game analysis and opponent preparation — whose strict implementation he has found exhilarating in a way only a knowledge-hungry coach can.
+While RB Leipzig and New York’s Red Bulls are both technically part of the same corporate sports empire, his first months experiencing the nuances of German soccer culture — the structure, the specificity, the attention to detail — reiterated for him how much he still can learn.
+“It would have been easy for me to stay in New York,” Marsch said about his last job in Major League Soccer, where he spent three and a half seasons and compiled the most wins in franchise history. “But in the end, that wasn’t really what I was interested in.”
+Instead, Marsch, who had begun the process of obtaining his UEFA pro coaching license in 2017, accepted an offer to join the Leipzig coaching staff and left the Red Bulls in midseason. Rangnick, an experienced coach and former Red Bull sporting director, is in his second stint leading Leipzig but plans to coach only for this season. The club has previously announced that Hoffenheim’s Julian Nagelsmann, a rising star in German coaching, will take over this summer.
+“I know the league, the team and I speak the language,” Rangnick said when he returned to the bench. “That isn’t the case yet for Jesse Marsch, so that’s why he will be working as an assistant coach.” Still, the club noted specifically when it hired Marsch that he had signed a two-year contract, with the expectation that he would continue in the role once Nagelsmann arrives.
+Until then, Marsch has been stockpiling professional experiences like a backpacker collecting souvenirs. That mind-set was one reason he was not interested in pursuing the United States national team coaching job, which still sat vacant when he left for Europe. Marsch wants to hold the position one day, he said, but only after he has accumulated more experience.Waiting for the fir st real snow of winter is an annual exercise in anticipation and dread, with the accompanying hallmarks invariably falling into place: breathless headlines, familiar checkout line chatter, readying the shovels and snowblowers, restocking the cocoa, bracing for traffic tie-ups and rail delays — or perhaps doing nothing at all.
+If that all feels eternal, consider what it was like to endure a snowstorm in a time before Gore-Tex and Doppler radar, snow blowers and plow trucks, subway commutes and automobile windshields — actually, before automobiles. Instant hot chocolate didn’t become a supermarket staple until the 1940s, and it took Swiss Miss until 1972 to roll out a revolutionary cocoa mix with mini marshmallows already inside. (“What’ll Swiss Miss think of next,” the first ads asked.)
+Early New York Times photographs of snowstorms really capture the havoc, misery and peril a blizzard could visit on the city in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The Blizzard of 1888, for example, dumped 21 inches of snow on the city and killed an estimated 200 New Yorkers. But even a garden-variety snowstorm in those days would menace New York’s main form of transit — horses — and impose human suffering of all kinds, while posing the immense logistical challenge of clearing an entire metropolis of snow.
+Still, then as now, snow slowed the city down in a stop-and-look-around way. It brought a serene kind of beauty and wonder, turning almost anyone into Peter, the wide-eyed child hero of Ezra Jack Keats’s 1962 ode to winter reverie, “The Snowy Day.”Even before the attack, Mr. Duque, whose right-wing Democratic Center party campaigned against the peace deal with the FARC, expressed little enthusiasm for negotiating with the ELN.
+Image A vigil outside the police academy. The attack on Thursday was the first car bombing in Bogotá in years. Credit... Leonardo Munoz/EPA, via Shutterstock
+“If the ELN really wants peace,” he said on Friday, “they need to show the country concrete actions, like the immediate return of all kidnapped people and the end of all criminal actions.”
+Mr. Botero, the defense minister, said the attacker, Mr. Rojas, had joined the ELN in the 1990s and worked as an explosives instructor. He lost a hand at one point in an explosion and thereafter was known by the nickname “Mocho,” slang in Colombia for someone who is missing a hand or arm.
+In 2015, as the FARC was nearing its peace deal with the government, Mr. Rojas had tried three times to pass himself off as a member of that group to receive demobilization benefits, but FARC members rejected him repeatedly, said Mr. Botero, the defense minister.
+The FARC, which has given up arms and formed a political party, worked to distance itself from the attack this week.
+“We express our solidarity with the victims and their families,” the party wrote in a statement after the attack. “And we call on all sectors of the country to keep building a pact that takes violence and weapons out of doing politics.”But I’m struck in particular by how the indisputable parts of the BuzzFeed article underscore what many Trump observers have long believed, an insight that explains so much about his eccentric campaign and unethical governance: He never really expected to be president. More than that, he never really hoped to be.
+That’s why he didn’t put business matters on hold or disentangle himself from glaring conflicts of interest. That’s why he refused to yoke himself to the sorts of rules that his predecessors had endeavored to follow.
+That’s why he indulged in behavior that would come back to haunt him in the White House: He never planned on moving there. He wasn’t supposed to come under this kind of glare or have to lie this much (though lying comes easily to him). If victory had really been the point, he might not have left himself so exposed.
+The BuzzFeed report, published late Thursday, cites two unnamed law enforcement sources, and other news organizations have approached the scoop with varying degrees of caution and have been unable to corroborate it. If the account holds up, it’s arguably the clearest evidence yet that Trump obstructed justice, recommending perjury in an effort to cloak his interests in Russia as Mueller investigated that very matter.
+Regardless of the report’s veracity, we already know that Cohen pursued the Moscow project through June 2016 but falsely told lawmakers that he’d wrapped up that work the previous January: Last November he pleaded guilty to lying under oath.In a December court filing, prosecutors working for Mr. Mueller described how Mr. Cohen had repeatedly lied to Congress both about the length of negotiations over the Trump Tower Moscow deal and about Mr. Trump’s involvement in the project.
+Mr. Cohen had told lawmakers that the negotiations ended in January 2016 — before the first presidential primaries — and were never discussed extensively among executives of the Trump Organization. In fact, according to prosecutors, the discussions continued as late as June 2016, after Mr. Trump was the presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
+They also said Mr. Cohen discussed the progress of the Moscow project with Mr. Trump more frequently than he had told the committee and had briefed members of Mr. Trump’s family about the negotiations.
+When he appeared in court to plead guilty to lying to Congress, Mr. Cohen said he had concealed his interactions with Russian officials and the fact that he asked Mr. Trump to travel to Russia to promote the deal because he wanted to support Mr. Trump’s “political messaging.”
+That day, Mr. Trump defended his role in the Trump Tower Moscow discussions, brushing aside concerns that he was advancing his business interests at the time he was hoping to become president. “There was a good chance that I wouldn’t have won, in which case I would have gotten back into the business, and why should I lose lots of opportunities?” he told reporters.
+Mr. Cohen drafted his statement to Congress in August 2017 along with Steven Ryan, his lawyer at the time, according to people familiar with how the testimony was put together. Mr. Ryan was working with lawyers for the Trump family as part of a joint defense agreement.
+At least one of Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers saw Mr. Cohen’s congressional testimony before he delivered it in August and October 2017, according to people with knowledge of the discussions.One truth unites most riders of New York City public transit: The system is in crisis.
+Many people who live in, or even just visit, New York can’t help but dream of an alternate transit universe with the on-time arrivals of the Berlin U-Bahn, the spotless platforms and cars of the Tokyo Metro, the modern payment system of the London Underground and the low fares of Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway.
+If you’ve lived in or visited a city, domestic or international, with laudable transit features, we want to hear from you. Tell us what you like or remember most about the system. Your submission may be chosen for publication.[Read all of our classical music coverage here.]
+Happy Friday! Call this the Week of the Critic’s Pick, our positive distinction for reviews that reviewers want to flag for you: the reader, the listener, the concertgoer. We’ve had many in recent days:
+Also receiving a Critic’s Pick this week was the premiere of Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande” at the Metropolitan Opera — where it is back for an agonizingly brief run, through Jan. 31.Tone is essential to Ms. Golden’s — and her clients’ — success. She learns to imitate their conversational styles through the use of an eight-page intake form that includes specific questions: How do you take your coffee? Have you ever “swam with dolphins or stingrays or enormous turtles”?
+By the time a potential client has answered those questions and had an hourlong introductory conversation, Ms. Golden thinks she can mimic them convincingly enough — down to whether they would type “gonna” or “going to” — to start chatting.
+Ms. Golden, who has been covered by The Cut and CNBC, upholds certain rules for all of her clients. She subscribes to a less-is-more mind-set, and much of the work she does is in how little she says. She will not get caught in volleys of conversation, and judges prospective dates who do so.
+“They should be wondering more about me, and I’m not going to give it all to them right then and there,” she said. “When I’m messaging someone and they respond right away I’m like, chill out, eager beaver.”
+Outside of the $2,000 package (“the whole shebang”) she offers other services: a dating diagnosis (analysis and coaching) for $600 and her “perfect profile” service for $300. She is amazed at how often her clients come to her with a lineup of pictures that look like mug shots, or in which they are standing with three friends and are thus impossible to identify.
+Ms. Golden picks the best of what they have to offer (clear portraits in which they are distinct and seem happy) or, in some cases, sends them to professional photographers.For years, R. Kelly had seemed untouchable.
+Acquitted on charges of child pornography, accused of misconduct with underage girls, Mr. Kelly long remained embraced by the music industry. He toured widely, appearing at Grammy parties and making records with stars like Lady Gaga and Jay-Z.
+But on Friday, Mr. Kelly — once one of the biggest and most influential stars in pop music — was dropped by his record company, RCA, in the music industry’s highest-profile casualty of the #MeToo era.
+RCA’s agreement to part ways with Robert Kelly, confirmed by a person briefed on the move who declined to be identified because the deal was confidential, came after weeks of protests. A recent television documentary, “Surviving R. Kelly,” drew wide attention for its visceral testimonials by women who said that as underage girls they had been lured into sexual relationships with Mr. Kelly, and abused by him mentally and physically.
+Yet as pressure had mounted on RCA — including from other artists on its roster — the company remained silent. The news of Mr. Kelly’s departure was first reported by Billboard, and RCA, a unit of Sony Music Entertainment, made no formal announcement; by Friday afternoon, Mr. Kelly had simply been scrubbed from the label’s website.The Playlist: Maren Morris Is a Little Bit Country, and 11 More New Songs
+Hear tracks by the Cranberries, Tamaryn, Dawn, the Killers and others.WASHINGTON — Anti-abortion demonstrators descended on the National Mall in Washington on Friday for an annual rally a day after Republicans in the Senate were slowed in their efforts to advance a ban on federal abortion funds.
+[Trump became the first president to give speech at March for Life rally in 2020.]
+Organizers had pledged to go on with the event, called the March for Life, in a capital full of shuttered federal agencies because of a partial government shutdown.
+While thousands of demonstrators marched and cheered on guest speakers, the climate in Washington this year was not the same as a year ago, when Mr. Trump hosted some of the marchers in the Rose Garden with enthusiasm after having just broadened religious freedom protections for health care providers who were opposed to performing abortions and gender reassignment surgery.WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin flew from Washington to Los Angeles this month on the private aircraft of Michael R. Milken, the billionaire “junk bond” king who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and served two years in prison.
+The flight, which was confirmed by the Treasury Department on Friday, was the latest example of Trump administration officials using luxury or government aircraft for personal reasons. Mr. Mnuchin, who was accompanied by Secret Service agents on Mr. Milken’s jet, travels frequently to California to visit his children who live there.
+A Treasury Department spokesman said that Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Milken have known each other for years and that after reviewing internally the secretary’s plans to take the flight, it was decided that he did not need an ethics waiver. Mr. Mnuchin has reimbursed Mr. Milken for the cost of the flight, the spokesman said, but did not disclose the amount.
+Trump administration officials, including Mr. Mnuchin, had been encouraging President Trump last year to pardon Mr. Milken, who pleaded guilty to six criminal charges related to securities transactions undertaken in the 1980s. Mr. Milken, who had to pay $600 million in fines, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and released after two years.Someday soon, perhaps within a year, you’ll be able to slap a soft, stretchy patch on to your arm that tells you if you’re dehydrated. Or that your electrolytes are dangerously out of balance. Or even that you have diabetes.
+Fitness trackers such as Fitbit and Apple Watch already track step counts, heart rate and sleep rhythms. But they tend to be rigid and bulky, and mostly gather mechanical metrics, rather than assess a person’s underlying biology.
+A new generation of devices instead aim to analyze sweat for many chemicals at once, producing a real-time snapshot of the wearer’s health or fitness. These devices also fit intimately against the skin, and are comfortable for anyone, from premature babies to the elderly. One version is already being advertised by Gatorade.
+The latest advance in this technology, described Friday in the journal Science Advances, provides real-time information on the wearer’s pH, sweat rate, and levels of chloride, glucose and lactate — high levels of which could signal cystic fibrosis, diabetes or a lack of oxygen .“I’ve been working in and with this community for two decades now and police brutality has always been an issue, relationships between the police department and the community have always been an issue,” said Alyshia Galvez, 45, a cultural anthropologist who works in the South Bronx. “The way Yajaira was disrespected is the same way other members of the community are disrespected on a daily basis.”
+For the South Bronx’s immigrant community, a negative experience with the police is not just an issue of respect and trust. It also brings fears for their immigration status. For Ms. Saavedra, her arrest made that fear palpable.
+“It doesn’t matter if I live in a sanctuary city,” she said. When the incident occurred, “I was just thinking that this could lead to my deportation.”
+It all began around 4:30 p.m. last Friday when an undercover officer from the Bronx narcotics unit made a felony purchase of narcotics on the street outside the restaurant and the individual from whom she purchased the drugs began acting aggressive, according to a police spokesman.
+Noticing what appeared to be an arrest happening outside the restaurant, Ms. Saavedra began filming the incident on her phone, mindful of the stories she hears often from friends and customers of what she describes as prejudiced police practices in the neighborhood.
+The police do “not have a good relationship with the community,” Ms. Saavedra said. “We see them making unfair arrests, racially profiling us, so I started recording so if that happened it could be exposed.”There is no shoe that conjures the word “ladylike” as readily as a low-heeled pump with a bow. It’s a style as prim and timeless as a tweed skirt suit — and is perhaps best embodied by Salvatore Ferragamo’s classic round-toed leather Vara pump, which originated in 1978 and has been beloved by first ladies ever since. But recently, the bow shoe has emerged in new shapes, such as the Row’s pointed ankle-tie mules or Freda Salvador’s gingham-trimmed loafers. For Gucci’s resort show, Alessandro Michele accessorized many of his maximalist looks with beribboned mid-heel pumps. Dressed like teenagers reinterpreting their grandmothers’ clothes, these characters were, he said, “ladies who aren’t ladies.” Here, eight perfect versions of the bow shoe.To the Editor:
+“Bangladesh’s Farcical Vote” (editorial, Jan. 16) correctly identifies why Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was re-elected: a booming economy, a dramatic reduction in poverty, and human development indicators that outpace even its runaway growth.
+But it’s wrong when it suggests that voters were intimidated into voting for her party, the Awami League . Law enforcement authorities reined in pre-election violence not for political reasons but to ensure a peaceful and fair vote, which is what most election observers said it was.
+There were no mass arrests. Indeed, compared with previous elections, the 2018 vote was tranquil and safe.
+Voters look to their government for security and economic progress. Prime Minister Hasina has provided both. That’s why her party won overwhelmingly.To the Editor:
+“The Big Stakes in a Teachers’ Strike,” by Miriam Pawel (Op-Ed, Jan. 15), asserts that Proposition 13, a 1978 California voter initiative, “crippled” school districts’ ability to raise funds, saying Prop 13 is the reason “state government assumed control of allocating money to schools.” I strongly disagree.
+California is now spending 30 percent mo re per student in inflation-adjusted dollars than it did in the mid-70s, a period when liberals and conservatives agreed that California schools were top-notch.
+School funding in California changed before 1978 as a result of a state court case, Serrano v. Priest, in the early 1970s. The courts held that school funding had to be equalized across districts, which took local financial decisions out of the hands of local school boards. That’s why Sacramento assumed control of allocating education dollars.
+Proposition 13, a much-needed restraint on yearly property tax increases, is not to blame for the failures and excesses of California politicians.To the Editor:
+Re “Upstart Veterans’ Groups Elbow Their Way In” (news article, Jan. 5):
+Yes, we are old. In March, the American Legion will have its 100th birthday. And just as our founders and previous generations of Legionnaires have tirelessly served their communities and veterans since 1919, today’s American Legion is as relevant as ever.
+We have thousands of certified service officers in communities across the country who will assist veterans with claims and benefits, free of charge and regardless of their Legion membership status.
+We sponsor job fairs for veterans and welcome into our ranks any current active-duty, reservist or Guard member or honorably discharged wartime veterans of previous generations regardless of whether they served in the United States or overseas.
+There are many important issues facing veterans today. From the enacting of the V.A. Mission Act , which consolidates community medical care programs into a single, streamlined service, to obtaining benefits provided by the “Forever” G.I. Bill, which removes the deadlines that veterans had to use their G.I. Bill educational benefits, today’s veterans can be confident that the American Legion will continue to be on their side, fighting for their interests in the halls of Congress and at V.A. facilities around the country.Outsider Art, which once had fringe cachet, is now pretty well inside the mainstream fold . As a genre, it has developed branding strategies, a collecting base and a marketable canon of (mostly male) stars, with Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez and Bill Traylor leading the list. All three are present, like tutelary deities, in the 27th New York City edition of the show, at the Metropolitan Pavilion.
+With 66 exhibitors from seven countries, it’s an expansive display of mostly smallish, textured, densely detailed things — modest-size figurative paintings and drawings dominate — but with a good share of stop-and-stare surprises .
+One comes with a group of large-scale architectural models by the Philadelphia artist Kambel Smith. Born in 1986 and diagnosed with autism as a child, Mr. Smith began painting, and when his family could no longer afford to buy canvas and oil paint, he turned to constructing models from cardboard, with the goal of creating what amount to sculptural portraits of historical Philadelphia buildings.Mr. Kim, for his part, has balked at dealing with anybody but Mr. Trump. He rebuffed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, whom Mr. Trump put in charge of the negotiations, and told the president in a letter that he preferred to deal directly with him.
+There have been no substantive working-level negotiations between the two sides since last fall. While Mr. Pompeo emerged from a meeting with Mr. Kim in October declaring that the North Korean leader told him “he’s ready to allow” inspectors into a nuclear testing site that the North had blown up, that inspection has yet to happen.
+Larger issues of inspection will hang over the next meeting as well. One subject under discussion with the North, according to officials of several countries briefed on the talks, is whether the country would “freeze” its nuclear fuel and weapons production during negotiations, so that the country’s arsenal does not grow while talks drag on.
+“But that would require highly intrusive inspections, across the country,” said Jung Pak, a former senior C.I.A. analyst now at the Brookings Institution. “Previous negotiations have fallen apart because of our insistence on those inspections. And who is going to take North Korea’s word on whether it is truly freezing its program?”
+Some analysts and diplomats said they worried that by agreeing so readily to another meeting, Mr. Trump was inviting the same situation as in Singapore — a press extravaganza that produces little in the way of concrete achievements.
+“You have to be afraid that we are playing into North Korea’s hands,” said Joseph Y. Yun, a former State Department official who has negotiated with the North. “They want to wait, and have as much time as possible elapse when they don’t do anything significant to denuclearize, and become accepted regionally and globally as a nuclear state.”
+The risk was even greater, some said, because of the multiple political and legal challenges facing Mr. Trump, from the government shutdown to the investigation of ties between his presidential campaign and Russia.This is the latest twist at the intersection of politics, sports and music that has surrounded this year’s Super Bowl. Kaepernick is still in the middle of an ongoing arbitration case regarding a grievance he filed against the N.F.L. He has accused the league’s owners of colluding to keep him out of the league after not being signed last season.
+His protests during the anthems became a cultural flash point, even though he wasn’t in the league. Other N.F.L. players began kneeling to support Kaepernick, as did celebrities off the field. Last fall, Nike made Kaepernick the face of a prominent advertising campaign.
+This year’s Super Bowl became particularly fraught because of the halftime show. Some high-profile artists, including the rapper Cardi B, said they would not be willing to perform, in a show of solidarity with Kaepernick. Last year, Jay-Z rapped in one of his songs: “I said no to the Super Bowl, you need me, I don’t need you.”
+Earlier this week, the N.F.L. announced the halftime acts would be Maroon 5 and the rappers Travis Scott and Big Boi. Scott’s decision to participate, in particular, received backlash, including from prominent African-Americans like Al Sharpton. Variety reported that Kaepernick and Scott spoke before the announcement and described the conversation as “cordial and respectful.” But on Wednesday, several posts critical of Scott appeared on Kaepernick’s Twitter account.To the Editor:
+Re “Did the Police Spy on Black Lives Matter Protesters?” (news article, Jan. 15):
+The allegations of police spying require mayoral intervention.
+Under federal court rulings in the Handschu case, now nearly half a century old, the police are barred, under the First Amendment, from doing what in the current case they are accused of doing: spying on peaceful expressions of political opinion.
+Yet in the current case, the police refuse even to say whether they are doing it or not, raising spurious claims of terrorism.
+Mayor Bill de Blasio has in the past opposed a City Council bill to require the police to even disclose what they are doing. This is beyond legitimate policy differences; it involves police-state tactics against fundamental First Amendment rights.
+No mayor who claims the label “progressive” can fail to step in and stop this.
+Ira Glasser
+New York
+The writer was executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union in 1971 when it helped bring the original Handschu lawsuit.To the Editor:
+Re “Owners Tied to Plan to Hide OxyContin Risk” (Business Day, Jan. 16), documenting the talking points of Richard Sackler , then the president of Purdue Pharma, while misleading the public in 2001:
+I met with a representative of Purdue Pharm a around that time while an editorial writer with The Day of New London, Conn. I have never forgotten the meeting. He was combative and echoed exactly Mr. Sackler’s contention that those who were addicted to OxyContin were misusing the drug and were therefore criminals.
+This repulsive argument sought to place the entire blame on the people who became addicted to OxyContin while holding the company harmless.
+Now the body count of opioid overdose victims is in the hundreds of thousands . The Sacklers should not be lauded and honored for wealth that is built on the bones of far too many children and family members, dead because of their product. The entire family should be, at a minimum, shunned and shamed for their greed in seeking profits heedless of human pain.
+Maura J. Casey
+Franklin, Conn.
+The writer is a former editorial writer for The New York Times.It was a well-intended policy. Almost all parties agree on that much.
+A decade ago, when Medicare beneficiaries were discharged from hospitals, one in five returned within a month.
+Older people faced the risks of hospitalization all over again: infections, deconditioning, delirium, subsequent nursing home stays. And preventable readmissions were costing Medicare a bundle.
+So the Affordable Care Act incorporated something called the Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program, which focused on three serious ailments with high readmission rates: heart failure, heart attacks and pneumonia.
+The A.C.A. penalized hospitals — withholding up to three percent of Medicare payments — when readmissions within 30 days exceeded national averages.Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union has provoked months of bitter division, but on Friday there was a break in the routine: an outbreak of affection and good will.
+In a tenderly written missive to Britons, more than two dozen leading figures in Germany — including Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, the favorite to become the country’s next chancellor — described their admiration for many things British, including its tea and beer, and their sorrow over the impending divorce.
+“After the horrors of the Second World War, Britain did not give up on us,” said the open letter published in The Times, the British newspaper favored by the establishment. It emphasized Germany’s appreciation that it had been welcomed back as a sovereign nation after the conflict and as a European power.
+“This we, as Germans, have not forgotten and we are grateful,” the letter went on, concluding that “Britons should know: From the bottom of our hearts, we want them to stay.”With each fresh year in pop music comes the hope that there will be new sounds, new ideas, new styles, and new artists leading the charge to make the field even more wild and expansive than it already is.
+For 2019, the pop music critics for The New York Times took on the task of identifying several promising young talents. The results include British punk-rap, morbid electronic pop, breezy 1970s-influenced country, colorful Puerto Rican hip-hop and club music with roots in the Andes.
+On this week’s Popcast:To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Hits Back, and Pelosi’s Visit to Troops Is Off” (front page, Jan. 18):
+Another low from the president of the United States. The purpose of the visit to American troops in Afghanistan by a congressional delegation is to assert through our representatives that they have our full support and gratitude for their service. To use our military as pawns to retaliate against Speaker Nancy Pelosi is undignified. Once again Mr. Trump is unable to put country above politics.
+David S. Cantor
+Los Angeles
+To the Editor:
+Re “A Game of Spite and Malice,” by Michelle Cottle (Editorial Observer, Jan. 18):
+Having duly remarked about “Mr. Trump’s brattiness,” you proceed to praise Nancy Pelosi's “chops to manage it.” But how does this punch and counterpunch strategy help with the most important conundrum of the political moment — eliminating the government shutdown?
+I am afraid that it may only make things worse. We need a compromise. And smacking Mr. Trump, however much he may deserve it, can only make it more difficult for him to get out of his contrarian hole.
+Valentin Lyubarsky
+Brooklyn
+To the Editor:
+The great thing about America used to be that anyone could grow up to become president. Now you don’t even have to grow up.WASHINGTON — Shrugging off the limitations of the partial government shutdown, the Trump administration finalized rules on Friday governing who can claim a new 20 percent tax deduction for business owners.
+Officials said the rules would allow millions of businesses to file their 2018 taxes with certainty over whether they qualify for the break.
+The deduction for so-called pass-through businesses was a central feature of the sweeping tax-cut legislation that President Trump signed at the end of 2017. The vast majority of American small businesses are organized as pass-throughs, whose profits are divided up among owners and taxed as individual income. Many financial firms and real estate companies — including hundreds that are under the umbrella of the Trump Organization — are also set up as pass-throughs.
+The regulation includes several changes from a proposal the Treasury Department issued in August. It now allows certain mutual-fund holders to benefit from the deduction if they have holdings in a real estate trust. It also provides far greater detail on the type of service businesses that are excluded from claiming the deduction above a certain income threshold. The law’s drafters have said that limitation was meant to prevent certain high-earning individuals, such as lawyers, from reclassifying individual income as pass-through income, in order to reduce their tax bills.When 30,000 Los Angeles teachers went on strike on Monday, prominent Democrats — and potential presidential candidates — lined up to give their blessings.
+Senator Kamala Harris of California said she was “standing in solidarity” with teachers, who are demanding higher pay, smaller classes and more support staff.
+“I’m with teachers all the way,” Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts said on Twitter.
+Senators Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders all shared similar sentiments about a strike that has drawn broad public support but disrupted the routines of half a million, mostly low-income children.
+In 2019, after a year of teacher walkouts across the country, it is practically impossible for a national Democrat to profess anything short of full-throated support for picketing educators. But many of them this week steered clear of the most contentious underlying cause of the strike: the teacher union’s opposition to the growth of charter schools, and the union’s claim that district officials — who are largely Democrats — favor charter schools over traditional ones.Materials/textbooks
+“Cortlandt Anthology of 20th and 21st Century Fiction ”
+Griggs-Massey’s “Guide to Grammar and Style”
+Note: The instructor will not be assigning the self-published novel “Through the Wild Dreaming Night” by Prof. Arnold R. Young. This novel was for many years on the “required list” for introductory fiction, but this instructor cannot in good conscience continue to inflict it on undergraduates. Through Professor Young’s temporary and capricious patronage I have survived on white bread and tuna in an apartment the size of a closet for the past two years; given my nonrenewal of contract, I am no longer obliged to pretend to respect his work.
+Course objectives/goals
+Via writing exercises and discussion, students will gain an appreciation for plot, character, setting, mood, tone, dialogue, chronology, structure, tension, etc. They will experience the short story as a brief immersion in the lives and experiences of others — a vehicle for insight. Students may come to understand, for example, why a 39-year-old woman, graduate degree in hand and reasonably attractive, would allow herself to be seduced by a potbellied has-been 20 years her senior, a scholar-cum-novelist who, after buying her a number of drinks at a conference, persuaded her to relocate from a reasonable metropolitan area to a splotch on the prairie, only to reunite, two and a half weeks after her arrival, with an almost-ex-wife he had somehow neglected to mention.
+Evaluation/grading
+Criteria for evaluating fiction will be discussed in class. To those who would raise the buga boo of subjectivity or instructor favoritism, please see the classroom motto: Life Is Not Fair. Though the instructor promises to do her best to evaluate student work according to clearly defined standards and procedures, students should note that this represents a break from the way in which business is conducted on campus. See, for example, my recent performance review, a vengeful hack job written by a member of the faculty not to be identified here (but recognizable by her badly dyed bouffant and her marriage to the scholar-cum-novelist referred to above).
+Schedule of readings and assignments
+These will be issued in class, week by week. The instructor has found that spontaneity is often best, keeping the student reader in suspense and creating the impression that anything might happen: Imagine, for instance, a gloved hand reaching for a knife, and the next thing we know a body is dappled in blood as if in red sunshine, his hoary bulk splayed across a desk in a modest office cluttered with manuscripts … but suddenly the alarm clock erupts with a —
+Note: Syllabus and classroom policies are subject to change.
+Julie Schumacher, a creative writing instructor at the University of Minnesota, is the author of the novel “Dear Committee Members.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.[Get a weekly roundup of Times coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.]
+From that day a huge cross-section of people can draw a line to their own proximity to, or roles in, an extraordinary amount of uncharted violence. For then-Captain Parker of the Second Force Reconnaissance Company, the opening experience became “seven months of blood and fire and broken glass,” a life of fighting “in the homes of our enemies, among their families” and then, back in the safety of the United States, the startling and yet woefully common quandary of being unsure how to share with a loved one a particular memory. In his case it was the lingering recollection of a “2-year-old child toddling through window glass shattered by an explosive charge and leaving tiny, bloody footprints on the polished concrete floor of his home.”
+Many veterans know something that the Pentagon and the politicians who speak for military action often do not: that regardless of the organizing ideas behind a military campaign, for those who do the fighting, war is often reduced to who is near and whatever happens. And the rest of a life can be spent trying to make sense of it all.
+TIMES EVENT: Civilian Casualties of the War on Terror
+Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019 | New York City
+A rare convergence of experts on the human costs of war will discuss the often-ignored outgrowth of the global war on terror: two decades of civilian casualties. Times journalist and Marine Corps infantry veteran C. J. Chivers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 story about an Afghan war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, will moderate the discussion. The panelists are Alissa J. Rubin, the Times Paris bureau chief who won a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting on Afghanistan in 2015; Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter and New York Times Magazine contributor, who uncovered civilian casualties among nearly 150 airstrike sites across northern Iraq; and writer Brian Castner, a veteran of the Iraq war and weapons expert for Amnesty International’s crisis team, who also investigates war crimes and human rights violations.
+Get tickets here.
+The Latest Stories From At WarJust a few years out of college, Jeff Arnold sold his first company, which made a remote cardiac monitoring system, for $25 million. In 1999, he sold his second company, WebMD, becoming a billionaire before age 30.
+Now he’s on his third company, Sharecare, a platform that helps people manage their own health care and allows companies to give employees incentives for better behavior. But while Mr. Arnold has an impressive entrepreneurial biography, what he lacked was an entrepreneurial history — more precisely, a history of his and his wife’s families after they emigrated to America from Ireland, Germany and elsewhere in the mid-19th century.
+So, last summer, he sought one out.
+“I don’t feel my parents did a very good job of explaining my family history to me,” Mr. Arnold said. “I was the fifth of six children, so maybe they were tired. But I have four children, so explaining to them their roots was an important box I wanted to check.”
+Generationally wealthy families have long commissioned or participated in documenting family histories — think of the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. At their most basic, these works preserve the stories of suffering and greatness that can remind younger generations of what came before them.A little more than a year ago, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was traveling to Beijing, hoping for a free trade deal. How things have changed. Since Canada carried out an American warrant and arrested Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, in the Vancouver airport last month, Canada seems to have become enemy No. 1 of the Chinese government. The price has been steep for three Canadians in particular: Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, both detained in China and accused of threatening national security, as well as Robert Schellenberg, who was hastily retried this week for drug smuggling. His original sentence of 15 years in prison was replaced with the death penalty.
+[Want the Canada Letter in your inbox every week? Sign up here.]
+In Canada, the sentence has been viewed as a kind of international ransom. But I wondered how the détente has been perceived in China. I reached out to my colleague Chris Buckley. An Australian by birth, Chris has lived in China for more than two decades and studied Chinese Communist Party history at Renmin University in Beijing. He joined The Times in 2012.California joined about a half-dozen states this month in banning the use of a person’s gender when assessing risk factors for car insurance, a change that could potentially alter rates for scores of drivers across the state.
+The state, which is the country’s most populous, requires insurers to prioritize criteria like drivers’ safety records and years of experience behind the wheel when setting auto rates, but it also allows them to weigh other factors, like marital status. Gender had been among the optional criteria until the beginning of this year, when a new regulation went into effect prohibiting the practice.
+In announcing the change, the departing state insurance commissioner, Dave Jones, said the new regulations “ensure that auto insurance rates are based on factors within a driver’s control, rather than personal characteristics over which drivers have no control.”
+Mr. Jones’s term as commissioner ended in early January, and the new regulation was one of his final acts. The state’s Insurance Department, in explaining its reasoning for the change, noted that the industry had inconsistently — and perhaps unfairly — applied gender weighting in pricing.LONDON — Prince Philip was at the wheel?
+To the astonishment and alarm of some Britons, he was. At age 97. On a public road, alone. And, on Thursday afternoon, straight into the path of a minivan hurtling down a motorway with a 9-month-old boy inside.
+The crash flipped the armor-plated Land Rover driven by Prince Philip. The minivan careened off the road.
+Prince Philip and the child were unhurt, though a minivan passenger broke her wrist and the driver suffered knee cuts. The prince told police officers he had been “dazzled by the sun,” a witness said.
+Still, some Britons were confused over why the prince, the wizened and gaffe-prone Duke of Edinburgh who is the husband of Queen Elizabeth II, was even driving.I want to take a moment to apologize. We have heard from a viewer about a mistake I made in our 5 a.m. newscast this morning. In our story about the tribute to Dr. King, I unfortunately mispronounced his name. Please know, I have total respect for Dr. King, what he meant and continues to mean to our country. This was not intentional in any way, and I sincerely apologize.On a winter’s evening in 1949, Walter Chandoha was walking to his three-room apartment in Astoria, Queens, when he spotted an abandoned gray kitten shivering in the snow. He put it in a pocket of his Army coat and brought it home to his wife, Maria.
+The kitten’s antics — racing through the apartment each night as if possessed, shadowboxing with his image in a mirror — inspired the couple to name him Loco. Mr. Chandoha (pronounced shan-DOE-uh) was moved to photograph Loco and quickly sold the pictures to newspapers and magazines around the world.
+Taking pictures of cats soon began to look like a more fulfilling career path than the one in advertising that Mr. Chandoha had planned while attending New York University, after serving in World War II. So, after graduating, he turned to freelance photography for a living — and, by the mid-1950s, he had begun a long period as the dominant commercial cat photographer of his era.
+“Walter Chandoha’s cat models, shown on this page, must be alert, graceful and beautiful,” read a newspaper ad in 1956 for a cat food brand that featured his photos. “To keep them that way, Mr. Chandoha feeds them Puss ‘n Boots because Puss ‘n Boots is good nutrition.”Susan Bucher, the supervisor of elections in Palm Beach County, Fla., was suspended on Friday by the state’s new governor, Ron DeSantis, after problems in her county contributed to chaos during the state’s midterm election recount.
+In an executive order, Gov. DeSantis said that Ms. Bucher had demonstrated incompetence and neglect of duty, resulting in systemic problems that prevented Palm Beach County from completing a state-mandated recount until Dec. 26.
+“An election that happened the week after Halloween, you ended up not having the recount done until after Christmas,” the governor said at a news conference on Friday. “Palm Beach County stands alone in that level of ineptitude.”
+Gov. DeSantis appointed Wendy Sartory Link, a West Palm Beach lawyer and Republican, to replace Ms. Bucher, a Democrat who was halfway through a four-year term. At the news conference Friday, Ms. Link said she will serve out the remainder of Ms. Bucher’s term but does not plan to run for election in 2020.The United States has more expansive laws for incarcerating people who joined terrorism groups, including the offense of providing material support to a terrorist organization. It also operates the Guantánamo prison, where it holds several dozen terrorism suspects without charges and is trying to prosecute a handful through the troubled military commissions system.
+Like many European allies, Britain strongly opposes the Guantánamo prison. Mrs. May’s government was afraid that the Trump administration might send the two British men there, a recurring theme in the ruling.
+Last March, the ruling said, the British home secretary at the time, Amber Rudd, met with Mr. Sessions to discuss the case: “In the course of those discussions, he expressed the view that all foreign terrorist fighters should be prosecuted in their home countries. He referred to them as ‘prisoners of war,’ and to Guantánamo Bay as the appropriate place of detention for prisoners of war.”
+After discussions with Justice Department officials in April, the British security minister, Ben Wallace, internally argued against pushing for assurances against the death penalty, saying that he had been warned that “there were strong voices arguing for Guantánamo” and that “the more restrictions the U.K. attached to support, the harder it would be to avoid that outcome.”
+And on May 30, when the new British home secretary, Sajid Javid, met with Mr. Sessions, the attorney general said that “if the U.S. were to be willing to try Elsheikh in a civilian court as opposed to a military one, he could not see how the U.S. could do that without the U.K. evidence or without recourse to the death penalty.”
+Ultimately, Mr. Javid told Mr. Sessions in June that the United States could have the evidence without death-penalty conditions, so long as it was not introduced in the military commissions system. That concession by the British appears to have persuaded senior Trump administration officials to focus on an eventual civilian trial in the Eastern District of Virginia on charges that would most likely include conspiracy in kidnapping resulting in death, an offense that carries the death penalty, according to officials familiar with internal deliberations.
+Both Mr. Sessions, who was fired in November, and John R. Bolton, who became President Trump’s national security adviser in April, have agreed that a civilian trial is now seen as the most likely venue, according to former American officials. The family members of the victims had strongly pushed for that outcome. In a meeting with Mr. Bolton in late April, he was visibly emotional and pulled out a handkerchief in response to the families’ arguments, according to several people familiar with the meeting.Keturah Redmond, with her 3-month-old son, Karson. The question of “having it all” still comes up, especially in regards to children.
+Credit... Kevin D. Liles for The New York TimesThe Car Key Conversation
+Now I learn that the “car key conversation” is the one that caregivers dread most. Thirty-six percent of adult children polled by the website Caring.com and the National Safety Council said that talking to their parents about the need to stop driving would be harder than discussing funeral plans (29 percent) or selling the family home (18 percent).
+Should Doctors Stop Patients From Driving?
+Alas, among the takeaways of the guidebook are the great difficulties physicians have at this fraught moment, and how much easier it would be for them if the decision did not involve them. As it is, physicians must wrestle with laws that vary by state on a variety of issues: if and how elderly drivers are assessed differently than younger ones; whether it is mandatory or optional for doctors to report their concerns; how they are supposed to go about it and strike the right balance between confidentiality and safety; and whether they risk legal liability if, on the one hand, they alert the state authorities or, on the other hand, they keep silent and a subsequent accident occurs.
+Elderly Drivers Fail a Test
+True or false? Most older drivers drive as safely as anyone else. It’s just that a few bad apples, particularly those behind the wheel despite poor vision or dementia, make mistakes and produce the statistics showing that per mile driven, drivers over age 75 are almost as dangerous as teenagers.
+I want this to be true, given how dependent Americans of all ages are on automobiles. But researchers in Australia, using a novel method to gauge how well people drive, have concluded that serious errors are alarmingly commonplace. “We are seeing a ubiquitous increase in driver errors with age,” said Kaarin Anstey, a psychologist at Australian National University and lead author of the report, just published in the journal Neuropsychology.Cozy Bear hackers are skilled at rummaging through a network without drawing attention, said Matthew Dunwoody, a FireEye security researcher. Once in, they often swap out their phishing tools for malware that can be hard to detect, he said.
+FireEye said that although Cozy Bear was the likeliest culprit, the firm could not firmly establish who was responsible for the 2018 campaign against the D.N.C. and other targets. CrowdStrike, another cybersecurity firm, also noted an uptick in hacking activity in November, but it could not say definitively that Cozy Bear was to blame.
+Cozy Bear, also known by security firms as APT 29 or the Dukes, was one of two Russian groups involved in the 2016 hacking of the D.N.C. It has not attracted the same scrutiny as the other group, Fancy Bear, or APT 28, which has been linked to a string of cyberattacks against the D.N.C., the International Olympic Committee and other international organizations.
+Cozy Bear has been active since 2016, security researchers say, and has been linked to a coordinated wave of hacking attacks on Democratic Party officials.
+The D.N.C. says in the amended complaint that the November campaign was consistent with a continuing push by Russian hackers to target Democratic candidates and party leaders. In 2017, Russian hackers are believed to have attempted a hack of the computer network of former Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri and the networks of at least two other candidates in the midterm elections.
+Mr. Trump has long denied any collusion with Russia, and in December several defendants named in the D.N.C.’s lawsuit argued that it should be dismissed because the committee was using it to try to “explain away” the Democratic “candidate’s defeat in the 2016 presidential campaign.”
+On Friday, Geoffrey A. Graber, a D.N.C. lawyer, said the committee expected defendants named in the case to file another motion for dismissal soon.
+The Russian government has consistently denied hacking the D.N.C. In a “statement of immunity” from Russia’s Ministry of Justice, Russian authorities argued that even if it were responsible for the hacking, such a “sovereign act” would be considered a “military action” protected by a 1976 law that offers some immunity from lawsuits regarding foreign governments’ actions in the United States.Q. Is the coelacanth the only living fossil?
+A. The term “living fossil” was originally used by Darwin to describe ancient species, like the ginkgo tree or horseshoe crab, that appeared little changed over millions of years.
+But in the popular imagination, the phrase has come to be mean a species or groups of species known only from the fossil record until living examples were discovered, often in remote places.
+The most famous is the coelacanth, a bony fish found in 1938 in the catch of a fisherman in South Africa. It was spotted by a museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer and named Latimeria chalumnae in her honor.
+Examples of a second species were found in Indonesia waters in the 1990’s. Coelacanths had been thought to have become extinct about 65 million years ago.Tribune Broadcasting, the station’s parent company, said that Mr. Steincross would not face disciplinary action. Mr. Steincross started at Fox2 as a general assignment reporter in 1996 and became a morning newscaster in 1998, according to the station’s website.
+“The Fox2 management team spoke to Kevin following the mistake, and we believe that it was truly inadvertent and does not reflect Kevin’s core beliefs,” the company said in a statement. “Kevin is extremely upset by the mistake and regrets it deeply. We do not believe additional disciplinary measures are necessary.”
+But some people said the apology was not enough. The St. Louis chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. said on Twitter that it was “unacceptable and very disappointing” and called for Mr. Steincross to resign. Others on Twitter questioned how he could mix up the insult with Dr. King’s name.
+During his lifetime, Dr. King’s last name was often swapped out for the epithet, both by avowed racists and others who claimed to have used it mistakenly. More recently, American broadcast journalists have made similar utterances in 2005, 2010, and 2014, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle reported.
+Heather Taylor, a sergeant in the St. Louis police force and president of the Ethical Society of Police, an association for African-American police officers in St. Louis, said the slur was so insulting because of the long history of its use against a man of towering stature.The New York Times Magazine is looking for people in the New York area who have been doing the same job — not necessarily with the same employer — for 40 or more years because they love what they do. We’re looking for all kinds of jobs. We want to hear from employees making minimum wage to over six-figures, those working freelance gigs to permanent positions.The latter view is widely held by those who have been outed as agents but insist they had never knowingly worked for the K.G.B. Instead, they say, they have been framed by Soviet secret police officers who padded their roster of informants, either to impress superiors or plant a slowly ticking time bomb under Latvia’s future as an independent state.
+“It is impossible that the K.G.B. would leave behind a real list of agents in what it considered enemy territory,” Mr. Tjarve said. The files, he said, must have been doctored and deliberately left as a “special gift” to Latvia, now a member of NATO, as part of a “disinformation operation” by retreating Soviet officers.
+Latvians found “in the bags,” the term of art for people who have turned up in the files, include a two-time former prime minister, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, a onetime foreign minister, leaders of the Catholic and Orthodox churches, three post-independence rectors of the University of Latvia, celebrated filmmakers and assorted television stars and writers. Some names leaked years ago or appeared in a Latvian documentary, “Lustrum,” released late last year.
+But the publication of the full list has still caused dismay.
+Mara Sprudja, director of the national archive, which began posting the files online in December and will release another batch in May, said she was particularly shocked, for example, to see the name of Andres Slapins, a Latvian cameraman, shot and killed by Soviet troops who attacked pro-independence activists in Riga, the capital, in 1991.One day last month, a New York City health inspector showed up at the juice cart at 54th Street and Avenue of the Americas where Long Huynh works. The inspector spent about an hour examining ingredients for freshness, and making sure the work equipment and surfaces were spotless and organized.
+“He got up all inside there,” said Mr. Huynh, 54. “But I am very particular. I clean the inside well.”
+Mr. Huynh’s diligence was rewarded Friday when his cart became one of the first to receive a letter grade from the city Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. A placard bearing a blue A was affixed to the front of the cart. “They gave me the big one,” he said.
+Since 2010, city inspectors have been assigning grades to restaurants, which are required to post them prominently, as a way to heighten awareness of food safety and hold restaurants more accountable. Though owners still complain about the fairness of the grading, and the fines that accompany violations, the practice has become more or less accepted; today, more than 90 percent of the city’s 24,000 restaurants receive A grades.Members of the ruling board of the World Anti-Doping Agency will spend the weekend considering a secret recommendation from a committee reviewing Russia’s actions in the continuing investigation into its drug-testing operations.
+The committee delivered its evaluation of Russia on Thursday, after investigators spent more than a week trying to get computer data from Russia’s antidoping agency that it has been seeking for years.
+The WADA board — its executive committee — has scheduled a conference call for Tuesday to consider whether Russia can continue to be considered in compliance with the antidoping agency’s standards. That status allows Russian athletes to compete internationally and for Russia to host international competitions. According to several people involved in the matter, all signs point toward the Russian Anti-Doping Agency’s remaining reinstated, despite having missed a key end-of-year deadline.
+WADA announced Thursday night that its three-person team in Moscow had “successfully retrieved” computer data from a Russian antidoping laboratory at the heart of a state-sponsored doping scheme that corrupted international competitions from at least 2008 to 2015. The data consists of information on about 10,000 suspicious doping samples.Updated Jan. 28, 2019
+Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+Find your long johns, break out the thick socks and raid the supermarket. After a month of relatively mild winter weather, the Midwest and the East Coast are experiencing what has become a seasonal rite of passage: the polar vortex.
+The phrase has become synonymous with frigid temperatures that make snowstorms more likely. And if it seems as if these polar freezes are happening more often, you’re right. “They are definitely becoming more common,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center. “There have been a couple of studies that have documented that.”
+Colder temperatures have been arriving later in winter over the past few years, according to Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk assessment firm. But because of changes to the polar vortex, when wintry weather does arrive, it’s often more intense — witness the four back-to-back nor’easters last year.
+“I’ve been making that argument that winter is shortening, but you’re getting these more intensive periods in that shorter winter,” Dr. Cohen said.In the days before the artist Robert Indiana died last May at 89, two of his close associates were brainstorming just what sort of art might be sold under the Indiana brand during his last years.
+Maybe people, they wondered, who had enjoyed Mr. Indiana’s iconic sculpture LOVE, with its jaunty, tilted O, would appreciate similar works also based on short words.
+What about JOY, one of them proposed in a text message to the other. Or FUN USA? Why not BEER, or perhaps BREW, or even BOB.
+There were markets to explore.
+“VINO seems to be the biggest that would be the wine drinkers,” Mr. Indiana’s caretaker, Jamie L. Thomas, wrote in one of the text messages to Mr. Indiana’s New York art publisher, Michael McKenzie.That claim echoes earlier ones from Mr. Trump: baseless warnings that “unknown Middle Easterners” had infiltrated a migrant caravan and that terrorists were pouring across the southern border.
+Nowhere in the White House’s 25-page counterterrorism policy, released in October, was the threat of terrorists infiltrating the nation’s southwest border raised. And the State Department, in a September report, said there was “no credible evidence” that terrorist groups had sent operatives to enter the United States through Mexico.
+The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to requests for evidence of Mr. Trump’s claims.
+The Washington Examiner report, like most of its predecessors over the past decade, did not include any photographic evidence of the prayer rugs in question and largely relied on hearsay.
+“Along the Mexican border there have been stories of suspicious items picked up by local residents, including Muslim prayer rugs and notebooks written in both Arabic and Spanish,” former Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, warned in a March 2005 speech.
+Later that year, former Representative Tom Tancredo, Republican of Colorado, told CBS that, during a visit to the border in Arizona, “we’ve found copies of the Quran, we have found prayer rugs, we have found a lot of stuff written in Arabic, so it’s not just people from Mexico coming across that border.”
+In 2014, David Dewhurst, then the lieutenant governor of Texas, invoked prayer rugs found “on the Texas side of the border in the brush.” PolitiFact Texas rated his claim “Pants on Fire,” and noted that it could find only one photo of a purported prayer rug, presented by the conservative news outlet Breitbart.
+That photo, eight scholars and religious figures said, looked nothing like a prayer rug, and it appears to have been removed from the current version of the Breitbart article. (Perhaps, suggested Gawker, the photo was actually of an Adidas soccer jersey.)1. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi postponed an official trip to Europe and Afghanistan over security concerns after President Trump grounded her military flight and White House officials leaked a secret plan for her to fly commercially.
+It was the latest turn in a bitter tit-for-tat between the president and Ms. Pelosi, who asked Mr. Trump on Wednesday to postpone his State of the Union address.
+Late in the day Friday, Mr. Trump tweeted he would be making a “major announcement” about the southern border and government shutdown at 3 p.m. on Saturday from the White House.“This is not pleasant and this is not easy,” Judge Gaughan said in delivering his ruling.
+Mr. Van Dyke’s sentencing comes only one day after the acquittals of three fellow police officers who were accused of attempting to cover up his crime, a ruling that left many Chicagoans stunned and furious. And even with Mr. Van Dyke’s conviction and sentence, there remained an unsettled question in Chicago of whether anything in the police department — and what many see as a decades-old “code of silence” in which officers conceal and conspire to protect their own — had really changed.
+For several hours in a cramped courtroom on Friday, residents who had filed complaints against Mr. Van Dyke years ago testified for the prosecution about those encounters. One man said he had been called the N-word. Another cried and said he had to undergo surgery after being manhandled. Another, a young black man who said he was wrongly arrested, chuckled and said, “He’s definitely in the right attire” when asked to identify Mr. Van Dyke in the courtroom.
+Mr. Hunter, the spokesman for the McDonald family, told Judge Gaughan how he had used Laquan’s final paycheck from his construction job, issued four days after his death, to buy the suit the teenager was buried in.
+“Please think about me and about my life when you sentence this person to prison,” Mr. Hunter said in court, reading a statement written from the perspective of Laquan. “Why should this person who has ended my life forever because he chose to become judge, jury and executioner — and has never asked for forgiveness — be free when I am dead.”
+Mr. Van Dyke, who has grown a patchy beard and become noticeably thinner since going to jail, sat expressionless throughout much of Friday’s testimony. He wore a faded yellow jail jumpsuit. And when he entered and exited the courtroom, he clasped his hands behind his back, flanked by sheriff’s deputies.
+Jurors convicted Mr. Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for each bullet he fired. Prosecutors asked Judge Gaughan to sentence him to at least 18 years in prison. Mr. Van Dyke’s lawyers suggested probation.
+Just before learning his sentence, Mr. Van Dyke rose and read a short statement.
+Shooting Laquan was “the last thing I ever wanted to do,” said Mr. Van Dyke, who spoke softly and read from a piece of paper. “People have the right to judge my actions, however no one knows what I was thinking in that critical moment.”If there is one thing that this latest violation of online privacy teaches us, it is that — in the words of Scott McNealy, the chief executive of Sun Microsystems, back in 1999 — “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.”
+We still haven’t gotten over it, and even in this advanced time of always-on, I’m not sure we should. The sweet nothings that Mr. Bezos was sending to one person should not have turned into tweets for the entire world to see and, worse, that most everyone assumed were O.K. to see.
+Some in the media have focused on the possibility that there would be fallout for Amazon from the Bezos divorce, suggesting that Ms. Bezos might seek to control and change the company. I knew them both in the early days of Amazon’s history, a history in which Ms. Bezos was quite present and important. While things can change, I would be utterly surprised by either of them indulging in any acrimony that would hurt the company. But we use this as an excuse to stare at their private lives anyway.
+Obviously, the trend of allowing the outside to see the inside is not a new one — gossip and its tabloid incarnations, as well as tell-alls and all the shabby circuses like it, were skulking around well before the digital age ever dawned. But the trend has accelerated in the last few years, as means of communication have mutated and proliferated. It’s too easy now to forget that at least some of our utterances are not meant for public consumption.
+How were Mr. Bezos’s texts released into the wild? Was his phone hacked? If so, why was he not using encryption? If he did protect his online selfies, did someone somehow get screenshots of them and send them around until one of the recipients dropped a dime to The Enquirer? If so, is anyone safe?
+No, we are not.
+Part of the problem is the United States lacks any truly toothy privacy law. We don’t even pretend that we think privacy is something to be protected, and there are no consequences for revealing someone else’s personal foibles made into so much data.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+For decades, the New York City skyline was dominated by one building, the 1,250-foot-tall Empire State Building. But 17 “supertall” skyscrapers — defined as over 984 feet in height by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat — have been started or completed since the Great Recession, completely remaking the city’s traditional silhouette.
+If the developer Harry B. Macklowe has his way, an 18th will soon join them. On Friday, Mr. Macklowe submitted a preliminary application to the Department of City Planning outlining his intention to build a new super tower, east of Fifth Avenue between 51st and 52nd streets, overlooking St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
+If approved at 1,551 feet tall, his skyscraper, known as Tower Fifth, would rank as the second-tallest building not only in New York, but in the Western Hemisphere.
+In the heady world of competitive building, Tower Fifth would hover 216 feet above the roofline of One World Trade Center — which would remain the city’s tallest building because a mast brings its official height to 1,776 feet — and reach a scant 12 inches above Central Park Tower, the skyscraper nearing completion on Billionaires’ Row.On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a commitment of $500 million “to advance affordable housing solutions” in the greater Seattle area. While it was striking for the company to acknowledge how supremely difficult it is for “lower- and middle-income workers to afford to live close to where they work,” 95 percent of its commitment would be in the form of loans to housing developers, much of it for market-rate housing that will benefit more-affluent residents.
+What is needed in Seattle — as well as San Francisco; Austin, Tex.; New York City; Boulder, Colo.; and other urban areas where the rapid influx of high-paid tech workers has made housing unaffordable for nearly everyone else — isn’t a corporate takeover of housing policy but, rather, a per-employee “head tax” that would fund real investments in affordable housing, which should be a public good.
+The notion of a head tax isn’t unprecedented, even in Seattle. In May 2018, faced with a crisis of homelessness and housing insecurity, the Seattle City Council levied a fee of $275 per employee on corporations whose annual revenues exceed $20 million — the most conspicuous of which is Amazon . (Microsoft is based in nearby Redmond, Wash.) The tax would have raised a modest but useful sum to build affordable housing units and fund social services. But just weeks later, after Amazon hinted that it might leave Seattle altogether, the Council voted overwhelmingly to reverse its decision.
+It was a terrible loss for Seattle’s housing advocates, who were hoping for a systemic response to doubling rents, inhumanely fast evictions (Washington State has a three-day notice period) and a rise in the number of families living in their cars. And they were not reassured when, a few months after killing the head tax, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, announced that he would pay a minimum wage of $15 per hour to all of its United States workers , a boost to low-wage warehouse and cafeteria workers. But in Seattle, where the minimum wage is now $16 for big employers, low wages cannot buy decent housing. The average rent in Seattle was nearly $2,000 in 2017, and nearly half of all renters spent more than 30 percent of their incomes on housing. For many workers, $15 or even $20 an hour, at 40 or 50 hours a week, means couch-surfing.Tick that box, too. Trump has described the European Union as “brutal,” called it a “foe,” spoken in favor of British withdrawal from it, and downgraded the E.U. ambassador’s status in Washington.
+In short, the president has shown disdain for an organization that has furthered American interests. Safeguarding the stability and security of Europe was the greatest single American strategic challenge from 1945 to 1990. The E.U. was a foundation of this effort that ended with the establishment of a Europe whole and free.
+Like every “enemy of the people” in the press, like every poor schmuck who ever worked for this guy, like any American patriot who wants to respect the president, I’ve struggled to find a redeeming feature in Donald Trump. I can now report: There is none.
+But I must return to Russia again. Just because Trump furthers Russian designs does not mean he’s in Russia’s employ. Of course it does not. I want to be clear about that. Just because you assist Russia does not means you’re an asset of Russia even if you assist Russia from the Oval Office.
+Putin, who has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the last century, seeks the collapse in the 21st century of the American quasi-imperium that has provided the organizing structure of the free world. The Russian president favors a retreating United States that has abandoned its values, granting open season to autocrats — an America for which human rights, a rules-based international order, the rule of law itself, and the dignity of the free citizen in a democracy have been nullified.
+Again, Trump is working in sync with Putin. Tick another box. There is not a despot on the face of the earth who fears Donald Trump’s United States. From Beijing to Budapest, authoritarianism and illiberalism have been given a boost by Trump as alternative models to liberal democracy.
+The president’s principal emotion in the face of dictators is envy. He is a would-be King Ubu for whom self-aggrandizement never self-aggrandizes quite enough.John E. Merow, a former chairman of the venerable Wall Street law firm Sullivan & Cromwell, who presided over its expansion as it opened offices overseas and pushed into areas like mergers and acquisitions, died along with his wife, Mary Alyce Merow, on Jan. 12 in a fire in their Manhattan apartment.
+Mr. Merow was 89, and Mrs. Merow was 85.
+A Fire Department spokesman said that the cause of the fire was under investigation, but that it was not considered suspicious. It started in the Merows’ ninth-floor apartment at River House, a prestigious 27-story building, built in 1930, along the East River at East 52nd Street. The building is also home to former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and the actress Uma Thurman.
+The Fire Department said 78 firefighters and Emergency Medical Services responders were sent to the scene, and five suffered minor injuries.
+Mr. Merow, a lawyer whose clients included Kaiser Aluminum and affiliates of the mining company Rio Tinto, took the reins of century-old Sullivan & Cromwell in 1987, a time when Wall Street firms were broadening their services. No longer were they what the author Louis Auchincloss, who had worked at Sullivan & Cromwell from 1946 to 1951, called “green goods firms” — those that dealt mainly with securities offerings.KODIAK, Alaska — The morning after more than 40,000 Coast Guard members missed their first paycheck, and the federal government’s shutdown stretched into its fourth week, Eleanor King placed an empty jar next to her diner’s cash register.
+In scribbled black marker, a sign on the jar, written in all capital letters, read: Donation Coast Guard. By 9 a.m. on Wednesday, nearly an hour before a rainy winter sunrise, the jar held $120 — money with which patrons were effectively buying meals for members of the maritime force.
+While the shutdown has affected hundreds of thousands of federal workers across the United States, halting paychecks and furloughing those who have been deemed nonessential personnel, it has brought a particular chill to Kodiak, a small town of 6,300 on an isolated island in the Gulf of Alaska.
+Roughly a quarter of the island’s population is either an employee or dependent family member of the Coast Guard, which has now had to scale back some of its operations in one of the world’s most dangerous waterways.An American-born journalist who works for an Iranian state-run television channel was arrested in the United States as a material witness in an undisclosed investigation, according to a federal court order unsealed on Friday.
+The journalist, Marzieh Hashemi, was arrested at the St. Louis airport on Sunday and was transferred by the F.B.I. to Washington, according to Press TV, where she works as an anchor.
+American officials had not confirmed her detention until Friday, when Chief Judge Beryl A. Howell of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia ordered some details about her arrest unsealed.
+The court order said that Ms. Hashemi, 59, had been arrested on a material witness warrant and was not accused of any crime. She had made two court appearances, it said, and American authorities expected her to be released after “her testimony before a grand jury investigating violations of U.S. criminal law.” Though the order said a lawyer had been appointed for Ms. Hashemi, none was named.Germs became a resident band at the Los Angeles club the Masque and thrived on shock value. At some shows, Darby Crash would cut into his chest a symbol that he called “circle one”; Germs fans showed loyalty by giving one another cigarette burns. Laura Jane Grace of the band Against Me! posted on Twitter, “I can still see the ‘Germs burn’ on my wrist from when I was 14 years old.”
+Germs’ only album, “(GI),” was produced by Joan Jett and released in 1979. Its lyric sheet revealed the poetic intelligence of the words that Darby Crash would drunkenly yowl, slur or skip during performances. The band also recorded six songs for the William Friedkin film “Cruising,” although only one, “Lion’s Share,” was used.
+During the late-1970s punk era, Germs shows grew tumultuous. “It all got terribly violent and extremely frightening towards the end,” Ms. Ryan told The Guardian in 2008. “There was this influx of punks from Southern California who latched on to our gigs and basically made it impossible for us to play without a riot happening. That was the beginning of the end.”
+By 1980, most promoters were unwilling to book the band. “Now we can’t play anywhere,” Darby Crash complained in Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 punk documentary, “The Decline of Western Civilization.” He started another band, but regrouped Germs for a final show on Dec. 3, 1980. Four days later, he was dead.
+Ms. Ryan moved to New York City with her boyfriend, who was the bassist in Joan Jett’s band, the Blackhearts. Born Gary Moss, he took Ms. Ryan’s last name as a stage name when he joined the band in 1979, performing as Gary Ryan. They were married in the early 1980s and divorced in the 1990s.
+Ms. Ryan is survived by her brother, Richard Ryan.
+In New York City, Ms. Ryan worked for art galleries. She returned to California in the early 2000s to help care for her ailing father, and worked there as a personal assistant and a bookkeeper. She lived in Agoura Hills, Calif.
+Ms. Ryan was an adviser for “What We Do Is Secret,” a 2007 movie about Germs that featured Shane West as Darby Crash and Bijou Phillips as Lorna Doom. After singing with the reunited Germs at a party for the film, Mr. West went on to tour as lead singer with the surviving band members. In clubs, and on the Warped Tour in 2006 and 2008, Germs performed for a younger, more well-behaved generation of punk fans.
+“It was totally surprising to get the band together again,” Ms. Ryan told The Guardian, “but it’s also the most comfortable thing in the world.”WASHINGTON — A Democratic senator asked the F.B.I. on Friday to open a perjury investigation into the homeland security secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, over her congressional testimony about the Trump administration’s policy of separating migrant families at the southern border.
+The senator, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, cited a previously unreleased document from December 2017 that showed that Ms. Nielsen’s staff considered a range of options for dealing with the influx of families seeking asylum, including a policy that would “separate family units.”
+But testifying before the House Judiciary Committee last month, Ms. Nielsen said that “we’ve never had a policy for family separation.” She also denied in subsequent interviews and statements on social media that she had pursued such a policy.
+“In light of these conflicting facts,” Mr. Merkley wrote in a letter to the F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, “the F.B.I. should immediately investigate whether Secretary Nielsen’s statements” violate “federal statutes that prohibit perjury and false statements to Congress.”The four Americans who were killed by a suicide bomber in Syria on Wednesday were no strangers to America’s war zones overseas.
+One was a top military linguist who worked closely with the National Security Agency and was on her eighth deployment. One was a hard-pounding rebounder on his high school basketball team who joined the Army Special Forces and served a half-dozen times in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. And one was a former member of the Navy SEALs who later supervised the collection of intelligence for a Pentagon agency.
+A fourth American killed was an Arabic interpreter who spent much of her childhood living in Syria and worked for a private defense contractor.
+Before Wednesday, there had been only two American combat deaths in Syria since 2015.
+The suicide bombing in a restaurant in Manbij in northern Syria came shortly after President Trump called for a pullout of American troops from the country, asserting that the Islamic State — which claimed credit for the attack — had been “largely defeated.” But administration officials have struggled to articulate a coherent policy or plan for withdrawal.WASHINGTON — The Federal Trade Commission is in the advanced stages of its investigation into whether Facebook violated privacy rules and is expected to seek large fines from the company, according to two people familiar with the inquiry.
+The five members of the commission met in mid-December to discuss the investigation, according to the people, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is not public. The meeting is a sign that the investigation is far along, the people said, because the commissioners rarely meet in the early stages of an inquiry.
+The investigation, which began in late March, is continuing, and the commissioners and staff have not reached a final conclusion, including how much the agency might seek in fines, the people said. Consumer-protection and enforcement staff members have provided updates on what they believe is evidence of privacy violations, but they have not submitted a final report.
+The commissioners would vote on any recommendations from the staff, including whether to pursue fines or other penalties. They do not always approve staff recommendations.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+TRENTON — The chief counsel to Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey came under withering questioning on Friday from lawmakers who pointedly challenged whether the administration took seriously an accusation of sexual assault against a top Murphy official.
+“You thought it was important but you let him stay there for all those months,” asked Assemblywoman BettyLou DeCroce, a Republican, referring to why the state continued to employ the accused, Albert J. Alvarez. “With all due respect, do you believe it was better for him to remain employed? Was it intentional to leave him employed or was it just lack of experience?” she said.
+After a pause, the chief counsel, Matthew Platkin, replied, “It was not intentional.”
+Assemblywoman Pamela R. Lampitt, a Democrat, commented: “What is so special about Al Alvarez; why is he a protected person? We’re here because of Al Alvarez.”
+Mr. Platkin, who has emerged as a central character in the administration’s handling of the accusation, also said during testimony that while he asked Mr. Alvarez to leave, he never directly tried to force him out, including imposing a deadline.To the Editor:
+Re Lara Bazelon’s Op-Ed article about Senator Kamala Harris’s prosecutorial record (nytimes.com, Jan. 17):
+As a civil rights and racial justice and juvenile justice advocate in the Bay Area for more than 20 years, I would like to shed some light on Senator Kamala Harris’s record as a progressive prosecutor.
+As district attorney, she was on the front end of changing the way we view incarceration. I used to run a program she created in 2005, Back on Track. It pioneered job training for nonviolent, first-time offenders. This didn’t just mean helping those who were formerly incarcerated. It diverted young people who were largely arrested for crack offenses into jobs, substance abuse treatment and apprenticeship programs, and got them housing and child care.
+In other counties, those charged with these same crimes were getting sentences of 20 years. It was revolutionary and the recidivism rate among graduates was only 10 percent, far lower than the state average.
+As Senator Harris has written and said before, she became a prosecutor to give the job a perspective it had sorely lacked: a voice for the voiceless and vulnerable. And that’s what she did.The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill weighs race so heavily in its admissions process that it is the predominant factor in determining whether many black and Hispanic students get in, according to court papers filed on Friday by an anti-affirmative action group that is also suing Harvard.
+The group, Students for Fair Admissions, says the university is excluding white and Asian applicants in favor of less qualified black and Hispanic students.
+The plaintiffs accuse U.N.C., a public flagship university, of using race “at every stage” of the admissions process, in violation of the law, “even when the application gives no indication that race affected the student’s life in any way.”
+“This is wrong,” the university said in a brief in its defense, also filed Friday. An applicant’s race does not provide an automatic boost or guarantee admission, the university said. Rather, “This factor, like all others, is always considered in the context of everything else known about a candidate and in light of the range of contributions the candidate might make to the University.”The nicknames assigned by federal investigators to some bank robbers are drawn largely from their appearances or modus operandi.
+In March, the F.B.I. said it was seeking a bank robber in California who used wigs and facial hair disguises, calling him the Shaggy Bandit. Another in Massachusetts was named the Faceless Bandit because he was completely masked. And in April, investigators sought a robber in Knoxville, Tenn., whom they called the Edentulism Bandit because witnesses said he was missing several teeth.
+The latest to appear on F.B.I. “Wanted” posters is the Traveling Bandit, who the authorities said on Friday has robbed at least seven banks in six states in less than a month.
+The Traveling Bandit has covered more than 3,200 miles in a string of robberies that started on Dec. 28 at a Capital Bank in Aventura, Fla., about 20 miles north of Miami. He progressed from there to holding up a bank in North Carolina, then two in Tennessee, and one each in Alabama and Illinois. His most recent one was on Thursday in Price, Utah.“It’s our understanding the victim just came forward to prosecutors as an adult with an allegation of abuse that occurred while a minor in the early 1990s,” Bishop Checchio said in a statement. If the allegations were proved to be true or if Father Ganley admitted to them, the bishop said, “as per Church protocol, he would then be removed from the priesthood.”
+In a letter sent to members of Father Ganley’s parish in Phillipsburg, the Rev. John Barbella, the pastor, said that a statement about the arrest and indictment would be read to parishioners at Masses this weekend. Father Ganley’s name had been removed from the parish website by Friday evening.
+“It truly breaks my heart to have to share such news with you,” Father Barbella said in the letter. “Please pray for the victim of this crime, and for the healing of everyone who has been hurt by it.”
+The attorney general’s office said Father Ganley was currently being held at the Middlesex County Adult Corrections Center in New Brunswick. In his statement to the diocese, Bishop Checchio advised anyone with information about the allegations against Father Ganley or any other priest to contact law enforcement and the diocese’s Office of Child and Youth Protection.
+“The sexual abuse of a minor is among the most terrible of crimes because it is committed against society’s most innocent and vulnerable,” Bishop Checchio said in his statement. “Incidences of this type truly sicken and sadden me. I am truly sorry to learn of this abuse and the suffering of this victim.”
+The attorney general’s office formed the Clergy Abuse Task Force in September 2018 in response to the publication of a 1,350-page Pennsylvania grand jury report that detailed abuse allegations against Roman Catholic priests by more than 1,000 accusers in four of the state’s six dioceses. Its mandate is to investigate claims of abuse in all seven of the Catholic dioceses in New Jersey as well as any efforts to cover up acts of abuse.Later he adds: “There are an awful lot of people who are looking for a voice that represents the people who feel disaffected.” And: “I do want to be more of a voice of reason and moderation in the Republican Party.”
+Hogan is attracting notice partly because he just romped to re-election over the progressive Democrat Ben Jealous — becoming the first G.O.P. governor to win re-election in Maryland since 1954 — and partly because he’s one of only three Republican governors in deep-blue states (Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker and Vermont’s Phil Scott are the other two). His approval rating is 68 percent in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1.
+But mostly Hogan makes no secret of his disdain for the president, though he goes out of his way to avoid mentioning his name. In his second inaugural address this week (written with the help of Mark Salter, John McCain’s old wordsmith), he merely noted that his father, the late Congressman Lawrence Hogan, was “the first Republican to come out for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.”
+“Despite tremendous political pressure,” Hogan said of his dad, “he put aside partisanship and answered the demands of his conscience to do what he thought was the right thing for the nation that he loved.”
+That doesn’t quite answer the question of whether Hogan would really contemplate a run — though he is traveling to Iowa in March, ostensibly in his role as vice chairman of the National Governors Association. The downside of any primary challenge is that it is guaranteed to be nasty: Nobody emerges from an encounter with Trump without feeling soiled. It’s also likely to be losing: With the qualified exception of Lyndon Johnson in 1968, no incumbent president who sought his party’s nomination has failed to win it since Chester A. Arthur in 1884.Wow, so much Trump impeachment talk. People, how would you feel about a President Mike Pence?
+Never thought much about Mike, did you? But if Trump gets tossed out of office, he’s next in line. We’d have a chief executive who reportedly calls his wife “Mother.” Who has a rule that he won’t drink in a room where there’s mixed company unless his wife is present, or eat a meal alone with any woman he’s not married to.
+The least alarming interpretation of the vice president’s rules of sexual separation is that this guy is such a wild man, he can’t control himself unless there’s somebody else there to guard a female in his near proximity.
+O.K., no.
+Then we’ll have to presume that Pence is living in a world of the old order, when women weren’t seen as normal employees, employers and colleagues, but as a different species entirely, defined by their gender, deserving of special treatment and special discrimination.
+On a practical basis, if he became president, would that mean no private lunch with Nancy Pelosi unless Chuck Schumer came, too? If Theresa May wanted to sit down with him and confer about Brexit, would he be able to offer her a snack?A gas pipeline in the Mexican state of Hidalgo exploded on Friday night, killing at least 21 people in a blast the authorities said was caused by an illegal tap used to steal fuel.
+Omar Fayad, the governor of Hidalgo, said on Twitter that more than 70 others were injured in the explosion in Tlahuelilpan, a town about 80 miles north of Mexico City.
+The state-run energy company, Pemex, said that the explosion was caused by an illegal fuel tap at the Tuxpan-Tula pipeline.
+[The death toll soars as officials begin an in-depth examination.]
+The country has been plagued by fuel thefts, and Mr. Fayad called on Mexicans “not to be accomplices.” He said the practice was not only illegal, but it also “puts your life and families at risk.”17A: There were a few funky throwback entries today, which could have been winks to us olds, or just really good words like this one, last used in 1983: POTBELLIED STOVE. I guess it’s a tubby little thing.
+19A: I felt a smidgen curmudgeonly about the name here, ADIA, because it was unfamiliar to me, and because it seemed like a gimmicky twin to the venerable AIDA at 48A. But first of all, the name means “gift” in Swahili, so I might just be too provincial to know it; second of all, Sarah McLachlan almost won a Grammy for a song by this name, and references to that have been used to clue this entry a ton of times.
+34A: All three entries in the center zigzag here were debuts. “Becoming” might ring a bell as a recent blockbuster book (I hope it rings a bell, because it was the best-selling book of 2018); the “someone” who wrote it, MICHELLE OBAMA, also had a birthday this week.
+35A: The meeting of two great puns here, where this cue meets 12D, is inordinately pleasing to me. A “Mine field?” is referring to that sacred area around each of us that is shared only grudgingly in most cases — one’s PERSONAL SPACE. Running down into that final E, a “Stretch for relaxation" is ALONE TIME, those reflective moments that you take after being stuck on a crowded subway car for an hour, silently screaming, “Serenity now!”“It’s like you’re on the front lines and you’re being shot in the back by your own forces. That’s how it feels.”
+CHIEF JUDGE RUBÉN CASTILLO, of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, on fears that veteran employees will decide to quit if federal courts run out of money during the government shutdown.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Friday about the debate over charter schools amid a teachers’ strike in Los Angeles misstated the share of students at Citizens of the World, a charter school, who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. It is 45 percent of students, not 15 percent.
+INTERNATIONAL
+A photograph with an article on Friday about a new book detailing the killing of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was published in error. The picture showed the residence of the Saudi consul-general in Istanbul, not the consulate.
+•
+An article on Jan. 11 about doubts surrounding elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo misidentified the candidate who counts Limete as a stronghold. It is Felix Tshisekedi, not Martin Fayulu.
+WEEKEND ARTS
+A children’s entry in the Listings pages on Friday about Celebrating 50 Years of the Coretta Scott King Book Awards With Sharon Draper stated that the event would take place at the New-York Historical Society on Saturday at 1 p.m. Because of the severe weather forecast for this weekend, the event has been canceled.Delve into fraught British affairs with the movie “Brexit” on HBO. Or stick with politics right at home with the documentary “Fahrenheit 11/9” on Amazon Prime.
+What’s on TV
+BREXIT (2019) 9 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO Go or HBO Now. After an earlier introduction in Britain, the feature-length drama “Brexit” hops across the pond to tell the story — or one possible version — of how the British referendum on leaving the European Union resulted in the narrow triumph of the Leave campaign. Written by the political playwright James Graham, the movie follows the Vote Leave campaign manager, Dominic Cummings (Benedict Cumberbatch) as he ignites a dormant group of voters to “take back control” with strategies to overwhelm the Remain campaign and its leader, Craig Oliver (Rory Kinnear). As the Brexit controversy continues to send shock waves around the world, the only film yet to attempt to unravel the chaos may do the same.
+ESCAPING THE MADHOUSE: THE NELLIE BLY STORY (2019) 8 p.m. on Lifetime. Nellie Bly, the famed female journalist, is the stuff of legend — and so is this drama detailing her infiltration of the Women’s Lunatic Asylum (based on the real New York City institution on Blackwell’s Island). Inspired by Bly’s real-life investigation into the mistreatment of mentally ill patients, this movie, starring Christina Ricci, brings a dark intensity to the deplorable conditions Bly experienced, with several cinematic twists.From the shutdown that won’t end to the latest revelation about the president and Russia, it’s been a busy week in American politics. Here are some of the biggest stories you might have missed (and some links if you’d like to read further).
+___________________
+No end in sight for the shutdown.
+In its fourth week, the government shutdown has cascaded across generations, from children worried about their parents to college students unable to pay tuition to federal workers filing for unemployment. It’s also beginning to affect federal court funding and criminal justice reform.
+But as the effects spread, Washington is still at a stalemate. President Trump rejected a proposal from the Republican senator Lindsey Graham on Monday to temporarily reopen the government in an effort to jump-start negotiations with Democrats. Democrats, in turn, rejected an invite from Mr. Trump on Tuesday to discuss the shutdown over lunch at the White House.
+The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, asked Mr. Trump on Wednesday to scrap or delay his State of the Union address, citing security and logistical concerns stemming from the shutdown. Mr. Trump retaliated on Thursday by grounding the military plane that was going to take the speaker and other lawmakers to Afghanistan, a trip he called a “public relations event.” Ms. Pelosi ultimately postponed her plans, saying that Mr. Trump’s announcement “had significantly increased the danger” of the trip.WILTINGEN, Germany — In the bright, cavernous basement of the new Van Volxem vinery building, Christoph Dirksen, one of the Mosel region’s most important wine tasters, was making his rounds sampling from giant stainless-steel tanks.
+It’s early to make a final judgment on the wines of 2018, even for Mr. Dirksen, a critic for Vinum, an industry publication. But he nodded his head approvingly. Here, and almost everywhere else in the country, German winemakers are celebrating what they believe will prove to be a banner vintage.
+“It’s not just good,” said Roman Niewodniczanski, one of Germany’s most celebrated vintners and the owner of Van Volxem. “It’s grandiose!”
+What proved to be the country’s hottest, driest spring and summer on record were disasters for many German farmers, river boat captains and foresters. But they were a blessing for winemakers, leading to a record harvest — Mr. Niewodniczanski estimates his output will be up 20 percent or more on last year — while also imparting a high must weight: the all-important measure of a grape’s sweetness.TAIPEI, Taiwan — Just a few weeks ago, President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan was struggling politically. Her party had lost in key local elections, imperiling her run for a second term next year.
+But then she got help from an unlikely source: the president of China.
+In a speech this month to the people of Taiwan, a self-ruled democracy that Beijing considers Chinese territory, President Xi Jinping said the island “must be and will be” united with China and warned that independence efforts could be met by armed force.
+Mr. Xi’s speech raised anxieties in Taiwan that Ms. Tsai was able to tap into by delivering a rebuke of Mr. Xi’s proposal, in a rare departure from her usual cautious ambiguity.
+“Democratic values are the values and way of life that Taiwanese cherish,” she said, “and we call upon China to bravely move toward democracy.”Argentina 77 A gay high school teacher in 1970s Buenos Aires tries to keep a low profile as his friends and students begin to disappear.
+Austria Abel and Cain First published in 1985, Rezzori’s “The Death of My Brother Abel” is released this year with a posthumously published prequel.
+Poland Accommodations A girl in search of herself leaves her childhood village, a close-knit agricultural community, for a nearby city where she moves between a hostel and a mysterious nuns’ convent.
+Sweden Acts of Infidelity A young woman who begins an affair with an actor comes to terms with her role as a mistress.
+France Adèle A novel about a sex-addicted woman living in Paris.
+Senegal Afrotopia New An examination of Africa’s unique communal values and landscape of traditions, reflecting on the work of African intellectuals, artists and musicians.
+France After the War New A corrupt police chief and fascist sympathizer comes up against a young man who lost his family in World War II.
+Austria Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister New Ulrich, a major character of Robert Musil’s unfinished novel, and his sister engage in conversation on identity and sexuality.
+Switzerland Agnes New A man begins writing a story about his lover at her request, adding intrigue and drama until reality and fiction begin to blur.
+Switzerland “Air of Solitude,” Followed by “Requiem” New In this two-part work the author, living on his grandfather’s farm, tries to piece together the past and the present, contemplating rural bodies and a male laborer of the Vaudois.
+France All Happy Families Le Tellier, a prominent French writer, meditates on life and dysfunctional family relationships.
+Czech Republic All My Cats New The author reflects on his relationship with a community of cats, inspiring further meditations on nature and love.
+Argentina All My Goodbyes A self-critical and self-punishing Argentine woman settles in the southernmost region of Patagonia only to be caught up in horrific murders.
+Germany All the Land The story of Alfred Wegener, the German scientist who gave us the theory of continental drift.
+Switzerland Allmen and the Pink Diamond Johann Friedrich von Allmen and his Guatemalan butler, Carlos, a detective duo, search for a missing pink diamond.
+Germany American Fatherhood New A study on the nuclear family, with a focus on fatherhood and its effects on American society.
+Mexico Among the Lost Two people who grew up in an orphanage in an unnamed land fall in love, but are separated, revealing the abuses of the system they are caught in.
+Germany Anarchy’s Brief Summer A study of anarchism through the life of Buenaventura Durruti, who became a key figure in the Spanish Civil War after a militant and adventurous youth.
+Germany Animal Beauty An illustrated examination of colors, communication patterns and social life in the animal kingdom.
+France Animalia New Éléonore assumes the role of family matriarch, running an industrial pig farm.
+Austria Anti-Electra A feminist counterpart to Deleuze and Guattari’s “Anti-Oedipus,” offering a new view on gender.
+France Antonin Artaud New Reproduced visual work with biographical context of Antonin Artaud, a director, visual artist, and stage and film actor.
+Thailand Arid Dreams Thirteen stories that explore race, gender and disillusionment in working-class Thailand.
+France Article 353 A noir novel set in coastal France about the murder of a real estate developer.
+France The Artist as Economist New An examination of art’s capacity to shed light on economic models by approaching capitalism and commerce through a human-centered lens.
+Italy Arturo’s Island The life of a boy from the isolated Neapolitan island of Procida is upended when his father brings home a young bride.
+South Korea At Dusk When a company is investigated for corruption, the wealthy director, who was born into poverty, re-evaluates his relationship to his country.
+Italy At the Wolf’s Table A young woman flees war-torn Berlin for the countryside only to be recruited as one of Hitler’s tasters.
+France Atlas of Poetic Zoology A catalog of the animal kingdom that demonstrates the persistence of species, from walking virgin sharks to flower-impersonating insects.
+Iraq Baghdad, Adieu A selection of poems spanning the 35-year career of the author.
+France Bakhita A novel about a slave who becomes a saint, inspired by a true story.
+Hungary Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming New A Hungarian baron who fled to Buenos Aires to escape gambling debts returns home to a childhood sweetheart and a cast of scheming locals in this last novel of a tetralogy.
+France Being and the Screen New An argument that the real and virtual have no boundary, and that digital technology teaches us new ways of perception.
+France Berezina New Four friends begin a 2,500-mile journey to retrace the retreat of Napoleon’s army from Russia.
+Germany Berlin Noir A volume of short stories that revolve around the history, geography and literary traditions of Berlin.
+Brazil The Besieged City The third novel from the Brazilian modernist writer about a young woman and the growth of her small town.
+Sweden Beyond All Resonable Doubt A lawyer tries to overturn a murder conviction and exonerate her client, but the more she learns, the more questions she has.
+Italy Beyond Babylon Half sisters coincidentally meet in Tunisia in a novel set against the backdrop of Argentina’s “dirty war.”
+Russia Beyond the Stars, Part 2 The second volume of the memoirs of the Russian filmmaker and theorist.
+Mexico Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories New Six unnerving stories, from a man searching for a woman by odor to a photographer who documents before and afters of cosmetic eye surgeries.
+France Billie Two young people are trapped in a gorge in the Cevennes Mountains, with the narration alternating between their childhoods and their current dire predicament.
+France The Birth of the Idea of Photography New A history of photography that traces the birth of idea photography, an “art without artistry.”
+Argentina Birthday Meditations on turning 50 years old from one of Argentina’s most celebrated writers.
+South Korea Blood Sisters A woman in 1980s Korea struggles to understand her identity in the face of injustice.
+Germany Blue Jewellery A young woman’s fairy-tale marriage turns into a prison of dependency and violence when her husband subjects her to physical and psychological abuse.
+South Africa Bom Boy Leke — a troubled young man living in Cape Town — tries to break a family curse.
+Iraq The Book of Collateral Damage An Iraqi scholar finds his New York life interconnected with his homeland’s past and present when he encounters an eccentric bookseller in Baghdad.
+Israel/Palestine The Book of Disappearance A novel set in contemporary Tel Aviv 48 hours after Israelis discover that all of their Palestinian neighbors have vanished.
+Spain Bowie New An illustrated biography of David Bowie, with the British pop icon’s journey presented with fantastical elements.
+France The Boy A historical novel tracing the life of a mute and nameless boy who attempts to join civilization.
+Thailand Bright After his father abandons him, a young boy finds himself adopted by members of his community.
+France Camille in October New In 1950s France, Camille begins a sexual relationship with her dentist’s wife, grappling with who she wants to become and where she fits in the world.
+Austria The Capital A cast of schemers and tragic heroes in a nationalistic “union” reveal the absurdities of the European Union.
+Iceland The Casket of Time In this fantastical tale of time travel, a young girl and her friends try to break an ancient curse and save the planet from an apocalyptic end.
+Germany Castle Gripsholm A pair of lovers meet a young woman escaping the sadistic headmistress of a local orphanage and try to help free her.
+Denmark A Change of Time A schoolteacher rebuilds her identity after her husband, the town doctor, dies.
+Guatemala Chaos, a Fable A Mexican author reconnects with an old friend in Morocco, and grants a favor that draws both men into irreversible events already in motion on distant shores.
+Germany Charisma and Disenchantment New Two lectures delivered by a sociologist to his students on the academic environment and the current state of vocation.
+Norway Clearing Out In a mix of novel and autobiography, a woman heads to the far north of Norway to learn about her Sami ancestry.
+Mexico Clio’s Laws New Ten essays by a historian with roots in the United States and Mexico, meditating on storytelling, nationalism and identity.
+Italy Cold for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone An inspector and his co-workers try to bring the perpetrator of a double murder to justice in order to save their reputations.
+Brazil The Collector of Leftover Souls New A work of investigative reporting on Brazil’s marginalized communities, from indigenous midwives to favelas and modern-day gold rushes.
+Finland The Colonel’s Wife New Near the end of her life, a woman recounts her years spent in the grip of fascism and Nazism, with her marriage becoming increasingly destructive as World War II escalates.
+Norway The Complete and Original Norwegian Folktales of Asbjornsen and Moe New A new translation of a Norwegian story collection filled with forests, humor and griffins.
+France The Cook A coming-of-age story centered around a young, self-taught cook as he travels through different cities.
+Russia The Coronation The latest from one of Russia’s most celebrated crime fiction writers is a tale set on the eve of Czar Nicholas II’s coronation.
+France The Cracks in Our Armor A collection of short stories that explore suffering, salvation and the possibility of moving beyond the wounds of the past.
+France Criminal Child New The first English translation of the author’s 1949 account of prison life, with its hazing rituals and distinctive jargon.
+Argentina The Crossed-Out Notebook New The diary of a screenwriter kidnapped by a filmmaker, who imprisons him in a country estate and forces him to write a successful script.
+Finland Crossing Two friends leave their homes in communist Albania behind in search of new identities and lives in Italy.
+Romania A Cry in the Snow A collection from the trilingual poet who has published in French, English and her native Romanian that draws on two themes: the beauty of nature and the limitations of language.
+Argentina Dance for Me When I Die The story of Víctor Manuel Vital (also known as Frente), a Robin Hood-style legend in Argentina, who was fatally shot by Buenos Aires police officers in 1999.
+Argentina Dark Constellations A sweeping novel that investigates humanity’s quest for knowledge and control beginning with the 19th-century obsession with scientific classification and moving through present-day mass surveillance.
+Hungary/Britain Darkness at Noon New An updated translation of the anti-fascist classic, based off of the original German manuscript found in 2015.
+Netherlands The Darkness That Divides Us After her mother’s release from prison for a bizarre crime, a formerly popular girl and her family try to make a clean start on a Scottish island.
+Turkey Dawn A collection of stories from a former leader of the Peoples’ Democratic Party in Turkey about ordinary people living through extraordinary times.
+Spain Daybook 1918 New Forty-five poems that take the reader to twentieth-century Catalonia.
+Israel Days of Peace New As a secular former architect’s marriage to a religious immigrant doctor crumbles, she drifts through a diverse and changing 1950s Jerusalem, trying to find her place.
+Syria Death Is Hard Work Estranged siblings set aside their differences to travel through war-torn Syria and fulfill their father’s dying wish.
+Italy A Devil Comes to Town The Devil shows up in a village of egotistical writers, claiming to be a big-time publisher.
+France Dialectic of Pop New An analysis of pop music, looking at its surprising depths and its place in consumer capitalism.
+Argentina Die, My Love New A woman confronts the terrors and complexities of belonging, freedom and adulthood in the French countryside.
+Spain The Dinner Guest An autobiographical novel that connects the public death of the author’s grandfather and the work of caring for her mother, who is dying from cancer.
+France Disturbance New A journalist survivor of the attack on satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo rebuilds his life, turning to the work of famous authors for guidance.
+Djibouti The Divine Song New An African-American singer-composer, poet and novelist is at the center of this novel that moves from Paris to New York and Tennessee, exploring religion, addiction and segregation.
+Croatia Doppelgänger New A retired Yugoslav army captain has a passionate sexual encounter with a Holocaust survivor on New Year’s Eve.
+France The Double Mother A 4-year-old boy, haunted by nightmares of being handed over to a stranger, begins claiming his mother is not his real mother.
+Kenya The Dragonfly Sea A young woman leaves her home on an island off the coast of Kenya for the Far East where she discovers friends, enemies and love.
+Argentina The Dreamed Part New The second volume of a trilogy in which an insomniac encounters a foundation dedicated to preserving dreams.
+Ireland The Dregs of the Day New With little money or hope, a widower tries to plan his wife’s funeral in this tragicomic novel.
+France Duchamp Looked At (From the Other Side) New An exploration of Marcel Duchamp’s hiatus from painting and subsequent dive into linguistic sign.
+Netherlands The Dutch Maiden A young Dutch girl is sent to a bitter aristocrat to train as a fencer, only to fall in love with him.
+Brazil Eden-Brazil A fable of environmentalist ideals pitted against the realities of local politics and global consumer culture.
+Croatia EEG In Drndic’s final novel, published posthumously, a retired pyschologist dissects society and his environment after a failed suicide attempt.
+China Eight Outcasts New The story of eight victims of the Maoist dictatorship, documented through transcripts of interrogations and trials that reveal corruption and illicit activity.
+Italy Elena Ferrante: Keywords New A study of the celebrated author’s linguistic choices, examining the writing structure that led to her success.
+Uruguay Empty Words A writer obsessively works on improving his own handwriting in search of ways to understand and improve himself.
+Germany The End of Loneliness After the sudden death of their parents, three siblings struggle to recover the connection they once shared.
+Mexico The Enlightened Army In this satiric novel a Mexican schoolteacher tries to mobilize a force against the United States.
+France Exposed An art teacher visits the exhibit of a celebrated former student, posing for the student in the nude and leading the two to reflect on their lives.
+Japan The Factory New For three workers, life in the factory begins to subsume all else in surreal and absurd ways.
+France Family Record New A family history that includes nightclub singers, Nazi informants and Egyptian royalty, bringing to life Paris during World War II.
+France A Father The daughter of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan grapples with their relationship.
+Mexico Field of Battle An argument that the world today is a battlefield under the sway of a global governance that has replaced the rule of law, utilizing surveillance and control instead.
+South Africa The Fiery Spiral: The Thousand Steps New The first of a dystopian trilogy set in Cape Town in 2055, imagining a post-apocalyptic world through the eyes of a 16-year-old.
+France Finding Our Place in the Universe The author charts how she and fellow astrophysicists pinpointed Earth’s precise location in the universe.
+Denmark The First Stone New Morality and comradeship are called into question when a platoon is dropped into the chaos of the war in Afghanistan.
+Iceland A Fist or a Heart New A woman in her early 70s becomes fascinated with a young playwright, seeking a bond with her and surfacing troubling memories.
+South Korea Flowers of Mold Ten stories exploring how ordinary people have been left behind in an increasingly urbanized and fragmented world.
+France The Fool and Other Moral Tales New Three fables involving a tarot deck and polyamory.
+Germany The Fox and Dr. Shimamura A young Japanese medical student is sent to the provinces to cure women of an epidemic of “fox possessions.”
+France Fragments of an Infinite Memory New A young philosopher places life with and without Internet in historical and cultural contexts, laying out scenarios in which the self interacts with memory.
+France France in the World This sweeping history of France, published during the country’s 2017 presidential election, challenges nationalist narratives.
+France Fraud in the Lab New An exposé of scientific fraud, looking at case studies of the pressure to publish and the lack of consequences in the field.
+Israel Frayed Light New A poetry collection grappling with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from the Israeli military to familial relationships.
+France Free Day New A 14-year-old student reflects on the tension between her pride in attending a private Catholic school on scholarship and her guilt over neglecting her impoverished family.
+France From Montaigne to Montaigne New Two newly published lectures of Claude Lévi-Strauss engaging with the French essayist Michel de Montaigne’s views on the evolution of ethnography.
+Spain From the Shadows A man finds himself trapped in a wardrobe and begins to serve as an invisible butler to the unknowing household it is delivered to.
+China Fu Ping New An orphaned girl set for an arranged marriage discovers the bustle of Shanghai in the early years of the People’s Republic of China, growing ever-resistant to life as a countryside wife.
+Czech Republic The Gentle Barbarian New An homage to the work of the famed Czech artist Vladimír Boudník in the 1950s and 60s.
+Italy Geometry of Shadows New Pulled from manuscripts, magazines and television recordings, a collection of poems from the neoclassical artist.
+Italy The Girl at the Door New A girl arrives at a pregnant woman’s door and reveals the long and violent affair she had with the unborn child’s father.
+Italy A Girl Returned A 13-year-old girl must leave the family that raised her to live with her birth family, a chaotic group that seems anything but welcoming.
+France The Girl Who Reads on the Métro New A woman with a dead-end job reads on the metro each morning, where she encounters a bookshop owner who offers her a job at his store.
+Italy The Girl With the Leica New A historical novel on the aftermath of the death of Gerda Taro, a German-Jewish war photographer and activist.
+Korea Good Entertainment New In a mix of Kant, Buddhism, Kafka and more, a philosopher reflects on what entertainment means to the West today.
+Greece Good Will Come From the Sea Four loosely connected stories about the Greek economic crisis.
+Russia The Goose Fritz A young Russian man delves into his family’s German past.
+Cuba Grab a Snake by the Tail A police inspector investigates a murder in the rundown Chinatown of Havana.
+Germany Gramsci’s Fall New A 46-year-old man with a broken marriage and dead-end career goes to Rome to conduct research and falls in love with a young woman.
+Greece A Greek Ballad New The first English translation of the renowned Greek poet, exploring folklore and modern history.
+France Hear Our Defeats An Iraqi archaeologist’s fate intertwines with that of a French intelligence officer searching for a former United States Special Forces member suspected of drug trafficking.
+Germany Hebrew Melodies New Original German poems from the nineteenth century poet alongside English translations, reflecting on a return to God and a celebration of the Jewish people.
+Sweden The Helicopter Heist A novel inspired by the true story of four young Swedish men who, with a stolen helicopter, made off with $6.5 million.
+Norway Henrik Ibsen: The Man and the Mask A new biography of the important 19th century playwright.
+China A Hero Born New When Guo Jing’s father is murdered, he joins Genghis Khan and carries out a destiny of war and treachery.
+Iceland History. A Mess. A satirical novel in which the protagonist finds career success after discovering the first documented professional female artist, only to realize that the “discovery” was the result of two pages stuck together.
+France Hold Fast Your Crown A writer obsessed with American cinema sets out to get his screenplay on the life of Herman Melivlle produced, embarking on a madcap international journey.
+Zimbabwe House of Stone A debut novel about a family whose son goes missing, set as Rhodesia is falling and the new Zimbabwe is being born.
+Mexico The House of the Pain of Others This mix of reportage, essay and personal reflection attempts to reckon with the 1911 massacre of 300 Chinese immigrants in Mexico.
+Italy How to Think About God New A new translation of the Roman philosopher’s best known writings on religion and how it shapes the world.
+Guatemala Human Matter A fiction writer scours through police archives and uncovers deep histories of systematic transgressions.
+Ghana The Hundred Wells of Salaga Based on true events, this is a story about love and courage in precolonial Ghana.
+Italy I Am God God has an existential crisis after he falls in love with a human who is an atheist.
+Germany I Have No Regrets A candid account of life in the German Democratic Republic from the author of “Ankunft im Alltag,” considered a masterpiece of socialist realism.
+Bangladesh I Remember Abbu In order to remember her father during his prolonged absence, a young girl reminisces about him through his diaries.
+Turkey I Will Never See the World Again New A memoir written from the prison cell of the novelist Ahmet Altan, who was arrested on trumped-up charges and sentenced to life in prison under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
+Colombia I’m Not Here to Give a Speech A collection of the speeches of the Nobel Prize-winning author who died in 2014, now available for the first time in English.
+Iran I’m Writing You From Tehran A journalist returns to her family home in Iran and chronicles the country’s changes over the course of a decade.
+France If New The author documents her fears, doubts and tender memories of caring for a sick son and two other children.
+France The Immersion Program A freelance operative is caught in a triangle of espionage as reality unravels and memory can no longer be counted on.
+China In the Face of Death We Are Equal New A corpse burner at a Beijing crematorium approaches his retirement and reflects on his past, bringing to life the world of working-class gay men in China.
+Norway Inadvertent New The Norwegian artist meditates on the creative process of writing and how it clarifies the mind and pinpoints the truth in life.
+Italy Incidental Inventions New Pieces from the bestselling author’s column at The Guardian, accompanied by illustrations.
+Argentina The Incompletes New A retracing of a day years ago in attempts to figure out what happened at a hotel, where a cast of colorful characters and backdrops lead to more information.
+Italy The Ingenious Language New A focus on the Greek language and how its poets and philosophers relate to modern times.
+Switzerland An Instinctive Feeling of Innocence A woman tries to process her trauma after the bank where she works is robbed.
+Spain Insurrection One of the foremost historians of the Spanish Civil War delves into the violence of May 1937.
+Austria Intimate Ties Originally published in 1911, these two novellas involve a young woman in the throes of sexual and romantic troubles.
+Venezuela It Would Be Night in Caracas New A Venezuelan woman who has buried her mother in Caracas faces chaos and violence when she is offered a terrible way to escape the country.
+Mexico Jakarta New Trapped in a room with his lover, a man reflects on the seemingly unrelated events and details that shaped the dystopian city they live in.
+Italy The Javelin Thrower After witnessing his mother having sex with a Fascist commander, a boy channels his frustration and confusion into the javelin until he becomes a local champion.
+Austria Journeys New The novelist and biographer reflects on his European travels before World War II.
+France Kafka’s Monkey and Other Phantoms of Africa An examination of the effects of migration, religious and ethnic identity and postcolonial history on contemporary France.
+Germany Käsebier Takes Berlin An untalented singer, catapulted by media attention, becomes a star in this satire of the Weimar Republic.
+Spain Killing Plato New Twenty-eight poems that circle the story of a truck accident and contemplate mortality.
+France A King Alone In this existential detective story, residents of a small village start to disappear.
+Indonesia Kitchen Curse New A variety of characters in dark and perverse fables, from an ex-prostitute to anticommunists and an elephant.
+Norway Knife Rogue police officer Henry Hole is given a new start in the cold case office at the Oslo Police, only to wake up one morning with blood on his hands that isn’t his own.
+Turkey Labyrinth New A blues singer attempts suicide by jumping off a bridge and wakes up in a hospital with his personal memories lost.
+Germany The Labyrinth of Tender Force A collection of 166 stories by the esteemed German filmmaker and author exploring love in its many forms.
+Germany Last Letters New A chaplain in Nazi Germany is co-conspirator of a famous inmate and the inmate’s wife, passing the couple’s letters in and out of prison at the risk of his own life.
+Greenland Last Night in Nuuk A debut novel about five young Greenlanders on the cusp of adulthood.
+Hungary The Last Wolf & Herman New A man endures an exhausting journey when he is mistakenly hired to write about the last wolf of Spain.
+France League of Spies Pierre de Siorac protects an uneasy peace in France as a spy for King Henry IV. The fourth book in the “Fortunes of France” series.
+France Lessons on Rousseau New An unpacking of the Enlightenment philosopher’s “Discourse on the Origins of Inequality,” delivered in a series of lectures.
+Uganda Let’s Tell This Story Properly Stories about Ugandans living in Britain, trying to find home in a new land.
+Israel The Liar New A teenager catapulted to national attention after telling a lie meets an elderly immigrant caught in a lie of identity in this exploration of the consequences unleashed by individual choices.
+China Life A stubborn and idealistic young man’s life is upended when corrupt local politics cost him his job as a schoolteacher, prompting him to reject rural life and try to make it in the big city.
+France Life of David Hockney A novel-biography hybrid of the English painter David Hockney, charting his college years through the turbulent era of the AIDS epidemic.
+Colombia Like This Afternoon Forever The author’s sixth novel weaves together a series of murders and the story of two gay Catholic priests who become lovers.
+Germany Lions The German philosopher's wide-ranging reflections on the metaphorical power of lions in history and literature.
+France The Little Girl on the Ice Floe A debut novel about the emotional journey of a young woman who was raped as a child.
+France A Long Way Off A father, his grown daughter and a cat embark on a road trip that takes a bizarre, revealing turn.
+America Lost in the Spanish Quarter New An American woman gets an email from her first love and is taken back to the tumultuous time she spent as a college student in Naples.
+Spain Mac’s Problem Strange things begin to happen when this novel's protagonist decides to edit his neighbor’s stories, most of which are narrated by a ventriloquist who has lost the ability to speak in different voices.
+Belgium Maigret Defends Himself New Accused by a well-connected individual of a crime he did not commit, Inspector Maigret does everything he can to prove his innocence.
+Germany Malina An unnamed narrator, her lover and her androgynous roommate are caught in a fraught love triangle.
+Kuwait Mama Hissa’s Mice New Three friends in Kuwait form a protest group, finding solidarity as they become the targets of Sunni and Shi’a extremists.
+Sweden The Man Who Played With Fire New A journalist traces the crime author Stieg Larsson’s archive and pieces together evidence of a true crime.
+Bosnia Mars A debut story collection of dark speculative fiction.
+France Matter and Form, Self-Evidence and Surprise New A breakdown of five of artist Jean-Luc Moulène’s objects, connecting them to Western philosophy.
+Netherlands Max Havelaar A renegade Dutch colonial struggles to end the exploitation of Indonesian peasants.
+France Me & Other Writing New Nonfiction essays ranging from the Holocaust to desire and Gustave Flaubert.
+Italy The Measure of a Man New A fictional account of the Duke of Milan turning to Leonardo da Vinci for help when a man is found to be murdered.
+Japan The Memory Police A young novelist and her editor try to preserve literature on an unnamed island where things begin to disappear.
+Germany Metternich New A multifaceted portrait of Clemens von Metternich, a man labeled as a 19th century reactionary conservative.
+France The Missing of Clairdelune In this second book of the Mirror Visitor Quartet, Ophelia, promoted to Vice-storyteller of Pole, finds herself implicated in a criminal investigation.
+Netherlands Monk’s Eye Poems about islands that form a meditation on the poet’s life.
+India Monsoon New Twelve stories about colonial Goa, looking at the social and religious structures of the once-Portuguese colony.
+Argentina Mouthful of Birds A collection of unsettling short stories about men and women on the edge, from the author of “Fever Dream.”
+Netherlands Mr. Miller A successful consultant goes on the run after witnessing a suspicious incident and is followed by a mysterious man.
+Malta Murder Island New When a journalist is killed on the job, her legacy is honored by a collaboration between news organizations around the world, her story highlighting the corruption that lives on today.
+Mexico The Murmur of Bees A mysterious child with the power to see into the future protects his adoptive family.
+France “Muslim” A poetic novel reflecting on Islamic history and what it means to be Muslim.
+France My Friends A clown roams the streets of Paris in search of companionship.
+India The Mystic and the Lyric New Four female poets from Kashmir — Lalded, Habba Khatun, Arnimal and Rupa Bhavani — investigate wedding songs, unrequited love and the lyric tradition of Kashmir poetry.
+Italy A New Sublime New From Homer to Aristotle, ten lessons taken from the classics of the Western canon.
+New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set (Sita) A limited edition, 11-piece box set that features 10 new African poets.
+Spain News on the American Dream New An examination of the Portuguese-American press, analyzing the political, economic, social and cultural roles of ethnic media in the United States.
+Italy The Night of Rome With a crime boss in jail, his protégé attempts to establish himself as the designated successor in Rome.
+Hungary Night School: A Reader for Grownups A story collection that doubles as an encyclopedia of life.
+South Korea The Nine Cloud Dream A new translation of a Korean literary masterpiece about a young monk trying to comprehend the fundamental truths of the Buddha’s teachings.
+Spain The Nocilla Trilogy The first complete English translation of a landmark trilogy in contemporary Spanish literature.
+Italy Notes on a Shipwreck A firsthand account of migrant shipwrecks on the remote island of Lampedusa, a part of the world’s deadliest migrations route.
+France A Novel Bookstore New Two people open a bookstore dedicated to their favorite literature. As the store gains popularity, they face threats and animosity.
+France Now, Now, Louison A portrait of Louise Bourgeois, the prolific 20th-century French artist.
+Lithuania The Odyssey of an Apple Thief Rozenbaumas traces his Lithuanian boyhood, his years in Europe and Central Asia, his escape from Soviet Russia and the new life he builds in Paris.
+France Of Morsels and Marvels New A literary and culinary journey through India, Indonesia and South Africa, sprinkled with the author’s childhood memories of cooking.
+France Older Brother New A family from Syria tries to integrate into society in France, encountering the demons of technology and terrorism.
+France On Logic and the Theory of Science New The final essay of the French philosopher, written while he was imprisoned for Resistance activities.
+Austria On the End of the World New A cri de coeur about the end of the free world, written after Roth fled to Paris on the day Hitler seized power in Germany in 1933.
+Italy On the Shoulders of Giants New A posthumous collection of essays on the nature of ugliness, the seduction of mysteries and the beginnings of language.
+France Once Upon a Time in France New A historical graphic novel tracing the life of a Romanian Jewish immigrant who becomes one of the richest men in Europe.
+Argentina Optic Nerve The story of an Argentine woman told through her relationship with various artists and their works.
+Zimbabwe Out of Darkness, Shining Light New The explorer and missionary Dr. Livingstone’s body is transported back to his home in England in this tale narrated by his cook and a religious freed slave.
+France Out of Italy The first English translation of Braudel’s classic text examining two distinguished centuries of Italian history.
+Germany The Outsiders New Fifteen case studies that examine religious intolerance, political persecution and other situations faced by refugees and asylum seekers.
+Israel Pain New Stuck in a passionless marriage, a woman who survived a terrorist attack encounters the love of her youth and begins a fraught affair.
+Russia Pale Horse A thinly disguised recounting of the assassination of the Russian Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich that reveals the violent and shadowy workings of the political underground of pre-revolutionary Russia.
+Austria Party Fun With Kant The story of Immanuel Kant — told with a comic edge.
+India The Past as Present An argument for the rigorous investigation and analysis of Indian history, to better understand the present.
+France Paul Verlaine New A collection of work from the “Prince of Poets,” ranging from his time in prison to his affair and the end of his marriage.
+Iraq & Iran The Philosopher Responds New Two philosophers ponder everything from the consequences of the past to the earth’s landscape and the effects of laughter.
+Portugal Poems in Absentia & Poems from The Island and the World A collection of poems exploring deep connections to place, particularly the mid-Atlantic islands of the Azores.
+Sweden The Polyglot Lovers Ellinor, a smart and unsentimental woman, gets stranded by a snowstorm with a literary critic after trying online dating.
+South Korea Princess Bari The story of a young girl who escapes famine and death in 1990s North Korea.
+Italy Pulcinella An exploration of an album of 104 drawings created by the Italian painter Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo.
+Mozambique Rain Published in the aftermath of Mozambique’s civil war, this collection grapples with what’s been lost and the country’s future.
+India Reflection Four works from the 1970s and ’80s by the celebrated Indian playwright known for experimenting with forms of dramatic expression.
+Chile The Remainder Three friends in modern-day Santiago take a road trip across the Andes, confronting generations of family pain and the legacy of Chile’s dictatorship.
+Netherlands The Republic The friend of a dead pop philosopher impersonates him at a symposium for historians in Vienna.
+Madagascar Return to the Enchanted Island New The second novel to be published in English from Madagascar, bringing to light the country’s place in an increasingly linked world as a young man returns to his hometown.
+France The Ribbon at Olympia’s Throat Short essays that explore how the seemingly irrelevant details in art show the sublime in the everyday.
+India River of Fire Considered the most important work of 20th-century Urdu fiction, this book follows four central characters over the course of two millenniums in India.
+Russia Rock, Paper, Scissors Twelve short stories from a contemporary Russian master of the form, translated into English for the first time.
+France/Lithuania The Roots of Heaven An environmentalist, assisted by a call girl and a disgraced military officer, tries to save the elephant species from extinction.
+Georgia Sacred Darkness A group portrait of citizens from all walks of life, mixing reportage and fiction, that illuminates the Soviet Union and its demise.
+Poland Salt of the Earth After being drafted into the army, a man from a remote village is forced to fight a war he does not understand — against his national and personal interests.
+Colombia The Scandal of the Century A selection of the Nobel Prize winner’s journalism from the late 1940s to the mid-1980s.
+Germany Scenarios III New Four scripts of film director Werner Herzog’s early works.
+Argentina The Scent of Buenos Aires New Stories that zoom in to the everyday moments of Argentina’s small towns and people.
+Italy The Sect of Angels A novel based on the true story of an Italian lawyer and journalist who discovered a secret organization of priests, politicians and regional luminaries in Sicily.
+France Self-Confidence New An essay that draws from case studies and philosophical texts to break down the nuances of self confidence and how it develops.
+Syria Sentence to Hope The first English-language collection of plays and essays by one of the Arab world’s most significant writers of the 20th century.
+Norway Sickle A lyrical novel about a 19th-century love in Norway.
+The Siege of Troy New A retelling of “The Iliad” from the point of view of a young Greek teacher who tries to contextualize the Nazi occupation to her students through the history of myths.
+Germany A Slap in the Face The story of an Iraqi refugee living in Germany whose right to asylum has been revoked in the wake of Saddam Hussein’s defeat.
+Netherlands Sleepless Night In the span of a night, a widow recounts a shameful incident with her husband, exploring rage, jealousy and fresh starts.
+Belgium Sleepless Summer The arrival of a wind farm disrupts the superficial harmony of a town, with disturbing consequences.
+Italy Snapshots From the author of “Danube” comes a collection of intimate meditations on nearly two decades of life and culture.
+Italy Solitary A portrait of the isolating experience of solitary confinement.
+Germany Songs From a Single Eye New A collection of troubador songs from a one-eyed Medieval knight and singer.
+Syria Songs of Mihyar the Damascene A new translation of Adonis’s poetry written while he was on a scholarship in Paris from 1960 to 1961.
+Switzerland Soutine’s Last Journey New Undergoing surgery, a morphine-induced artist hallucinates about his life — from his childhood in a town near Minsk to his years of hiding from the Nazis.
+Chile Space Invaders New A group of childhood friends ponder the fate of a former classmate, revealing the trajectory of young lives in the midst of a fading dictatorship.
+Chile The Spirit of Science Fiction The story of two young poets in Mexico City trying to make it in the literary world.
+Chile Spiritual Choreographies A paraplegic man — the onetime vocalist in a famous rock band — composes an anti-biography that is corrected and expanded upon by an unknown editor.
+Uruguay Springtime in a Broken Mirror The story of a political prisoner jailed after a military coup and his family’s adjustment to life in exile.
+Japan Star Mishima, who was an actor himself, paints a pyschological portrait of a celebrity slowly unraveling.
+Germany The Storyteller A son leaves his family’s adopted home, Germany, to travel to Beirut in search of his missing father.
+Germany The Storyteller Essays A collection of essays from a master of the form.
+France The Strange Journey of Alice Pendelbury On the advice of a fortune-teller, Alice Pendelbury travels to Turkey to meet the most important person in her life.
+Denmark The Summer of Ellen A middle-aged architect returns to his great-uncle’s farm after 40 years to confront the disappearance of a local girl during the summer he spent there.
+France A Summer With Montaigne Forty short chapters, written over a single summer, exploring how the writings of Michel de Montaigne can help us think about life today.
+Martinique Sun of Consciousness A book-length essay about arriving as a foreigner in a country, while writing on the history of the Caribbean.
+Brazil The Sun on My Head Short stories about boys growing up in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas during the early years of the 21st century.
+Sweden Swede Hollow New When a family leaves Sweden for St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1890s, they are faced with the economic and community hardships of twentieth century immigration.
+Switzerland Sweet Days of Discipline New This novel’s young and ruthless protagonist plots to win the affections of the new girl at a boarding school.
+France Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants New In this historical novel, a young Michelangelo escapes Rome for Constantinople to design a bridge over the Golden Horn.
+Japan The Ten Loves of Nishino Ten women — all seduced by a mysterious man — tell their stories as they attempt to construct his identity.
+France The Tenderness of Stones New An illustrated depiction of a family deconstructing the father’s body, piece by piece.
+Dominican Republic Tentacle A young maid from Santo Domingo discovers that she must travel back in time to save the world.
+Japan Territory of Light A novel that chronicles a young woman’s attempt to restart her life in Tokyo.
+Sweden They Will Drown in Their Mothers’ Tears New Terrorists interrupt a bookstore reading by a comic book artist who has made fun of the prophet Mohammed, but one of the attackers has a sudden premonition that changes the course of history.
+France This Tilting World New A love letter to the author’s homeland, Tunisia, which she decides to leave after a terrorist attack and the loss of two important figures in her life.
+Lebanon Time A collection of poems showcasing the intertwining of war and love and experiences in nonlinear time.
+Russia Time Within Time The translated diaries of the Russian filmmaker, covering his life and work in the Soviet Union and his time in exile.
+Portugal The Translator’s Bride A dark comedy about a translator wandering the streets of Portugal without much going his way.
+Spain Treasure of the Castilian or Spanish Language New A selection from the lexicographer's pre-Enlightenment dictionary, first published in 1611, arranged into a series of prose poems.
+India Turkey, Egypt, and Syria A professor on a six-month leave travels the Ottoman Empire, compiling a portrait of imperial culture in the Middle East.
+South Africa Unmaking Grace New A childhood friend reappears years after an apartheid riot police encounter in Cape Town, bringing back traumatic memories for the narrator.
+Italy The Unnamable Present A meditation on society’s transformation in the 21st century.
+Portugal Until Stones Become Lighter Than Water New A boy brought to Portugal by a soldier who had destroyed his village later murders the man at a ritual pig killing.
+Netherlands Ventoux Five friends return to the scene of a fateful crash on a mountain in the south of France.
+France Vintage 1954 A man invites neighbors to share a bottle of wine that holds special properties, and the group finds themselves in 1950s Paris the next morning.
+Sweden Wage Slaves The author, working at a restaurant illegally to make ends meet as she tries to get a Swedish personal identity number, starts a legal battle for workers’ rights.
+France Waiting for Bojangles A young boy and his father try to keep his mentally ill mother happy and safe.
+Germany The Wall When his car breaks down, a man in South Africa enters a gated community and, in the wrong place at the wrong time, makes a terrible mistake.
+France Wanderer A debut novel about the relationship between a music teacher and his student.
+Italy We Are Family The story of a child prodigy who has to find a home for his family.
+Ukraine What We Live for, What We Die for Selected poems exploring the cultural landscape of post-Soviet devastation.
+Portugal What’s in a Name? Spare poems — in the style of Emily Dickinson — that interweave the everyday with the dreamlike.
+Denmark When Death Takes Something From You Give It Back New The author’s account of the first few years after the unexpected death of her son.
+South Korea The White Book An unnamed narrator struggles to come to terms with how the loss of her older sister, who died as an infant, continues to haunt her family. Shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize.
+France Who Killed My Father From the author of “The End of Eddy,” a nonfiction work about France’s working class and poor citizens.
+Norway Will and Testament New A woman who fled from her family years ago is forced to confront her siblings when a disagreement over their parents’ will grows hostile.
+Argentina The Wind That Lays Waste A minister and his daughter are led to the home of a mechanic and a young boy when their car breaks down in rural Argentina.
+Romania Women A young man from Romania reflects on his relationships with three different women.
+Peru The Word of the Speechless New A collection of stories focused on marginalized populations.An impressive reception to greet President Vladimir Putin. He came to Serbia this week to shore up one of his allies, President Aleksandar Vucic, who critics accuse of dismantling democracy at home. The ceremony played out at this historic church. We watched the lavish festivities which felt more like a coronation than a state visit. People attended from all corners of the country. But most of them were bussed in. It’s a carefully orchestrated show loaded with symbolism. And at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise, a visit like this suggests that Serbia is moving in a similar direction. Vucic was elected in 2017. Over the last two years, he’s amassed more power, silenced the press and undermined opposition. In November, Borko Stefanovic, a prominent opposition leader, was assaulted on his way to meet some of his supporters. “Just describe the attack itself. What happened?” “They knocked me unconscious from the back, so I was hit. They actually tried to murder me because when I was unconscious, they continued to hit me in the head. There was a lot of blood on my shirt and at the press conference the day after, I showed the bloody shirt to the public, and actually actually that the image of that shirt was the spark for these protests.” “And that’s why the protesters carry signs saying ‘No more blood’.” “Yes, exactly that’s the reason why.” The attack sent thousands of protesters into the streets. And they’ve returned for six weeks straight, accusing the president of creating a climate of fear and paranoia. We sat down with President Vucic and asked him to respond to his critics. “I guess there’s some concern that in your relationship with Putin that maybe that model is being adopted here as well.” “Which model?” “The model the more authoritarian-style of government.” “If you think so, what can I say to you?” “You can tell me if you think that’s an incorrect analysis, or if you think that’s accurate.” “I think it is an incorrect analysis. I think that we belong to a very democratic society.” We met Jelena Anasonovic, one of the original organizers of the antigovernment protests. “So what is this what we’re getting on here?” “Yeah” “Number 41?” “Yeah, 41.” “41.” “O.K.” “Serbian public transportation.” “So these protests, they started over the beating of one politician, but it’s sort of taken on a lot more. So it’s kind of everyone who is upset about what exactly?” “The main reason is the like raising violence in our institutions. They’re creating the atmosphere of fear.” She sat down with a group of friends in a downtown cafe to plan the next demonstration. “Have all of you thought about leaving at some point?” “Yeah, definitely at some points of despair we thought about leaving the country. But it was like more, we want to have decent jobs. We want to have a decent society without lies, manipulation discrimination.” “I mean, to me, you guys, you guys are out here with your faces, your names. Are you not afraid? I mean, are you worried that there might be consequences for either you or your family?” “Yes, we are.” “You are?” “But you’re still out here?” “Yes, because we need to be here because I want to change something and I want to live in a decent, normal country.” The students’ frustrations have echoed throughout the city, and people have joined the movement from all walks of life. Like here, at one of the oldest theaters in Belgrade. The night we attended, a dark comedy about the breakdown of society was showing. Bane Trifunovic is a well-known actor here. And he is now a public face for the movement. “Bravo!” Two of Bane’s shows have been banned. A reminder, he said, of the 1990s when former President Slobodan Milosevic ruled through intimidation. In 2000, a popular movement swept him out of power. “This building has a lot of history because you when you see all these photos here, it’s all about history.” “They’re amazing.” “One of the things that I’m so curious about, how heavily history hangs over everywhere here.” “It’s everywhere. It’s in this whiskey, you know. It’s everywhere.” “So I don’t want to date you, but, you would’ve been in your 20s in 2000 right? You know, now 18 years after that moment, here you are in, I don’t know how you would describe it, but do you feel disappointed?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because actually nothing happens. Now, we were living in worse play ever written.” “You’re living in the worst play ever written?” “Yeah.” We met up with Jelena again. She was one of the thousands attending a vigil for a politician who was murdered one year ago. But even as more people have risen up, week after week, few of them expect to take down the government. Vucic remains powerful and many who oppose him don’t see a real alternative in the opposition. But they hope that their continuing resistance will at least break down the barrier of fear.TLAHUELILPAN, Mexico — Mexico’s president vowed on Saturday to redouble his fight against an epidemic of fuel theft after thieves punctured a pipeline north of Mexico City, causing an explosion that killed at least 79 people and injured 81 others.
+The blast underscored the deadly perils of the fuel-theft racket, which has cost the government billions of dollars a year and has been the target of a weekslong crackdown by the administration of Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
+The government’s strategy has included diverting fuel from the pipelines most heavily targeted by criminal gangs, and transporting it by truck. But the logistical changes have slowed deliveries across the country, causing shortages and long lines at service stations.Welcome to the weekend. For much of the U.S., it will be cold and messy. Don’t despair because we have some great journalism to keep you warm.Televisions. Jewelry. Tools. At Blaine Fortner’s pawnshop in Billings, Mont., there has been a slow but steady increase in one segment of his clientele pawning these and other items in exchange for cash: employees of the federal government.
+As the longest government shutdown in American history continues, federal workers who are not getting paid are increasingly turning to pawnbrokers for short-term loans.
+The turnout is small — a few people per day — pawnbrokers said, with similar stories emerging from places like Capitol Heights, Md.; Alexandria, Va.; Las Vegas; and Anchorage, Alaska. But many said they expected the numbers to increase amid the stalemate.
+“They’re just bringing more and more in because they’re getting behind,” Mr. Fortner said.
+About 800,000 federal workers have missed a paycheck during the nearly monthlong shutdown. Thousands have filed for unemployment. Private businesses, banks and charitable organizations are offering help in the form of suspended fees and food banks.Lori Clarke, 62, a retired schoolteacher from Bucks County, Pa., said the 2018 women’s march in Philadelphia was the first time she had attended a public protest.
+“I’m just a normal everyday average woman,” Ms. Clark said. “I would never have thought of coming out to protest.”
+“I hate crowds,” she added. “The reality of a Trump administration hit home, and I felt that I needed my voice to be heard.”
+And in Washington, Hilary Ruesch, a 38-year-old marketing director for a wine importer, said she and others had traveled from Brooklyn to “come back to where it all began.”
+They were members of a local chapter for the liberal grass-roots group Indivisible. The chapter has a mailing list of about 300 members, but in two years, the core of the group — the ones who could be counted on to do the grunt work of local political advocacy — had dwindled to about 50 people. “We’ve seen some attrition,” she said. But those who remain “are really dug in.”
+And she said they played a small — but satisfying — role in the 2018 election that gave Democrats a working majority in the New York State Legislature, and in the subsequent lobbying campaign that ended this week with the Legislature’s vote to liberalize the state’s restrictive election laws.
+“This time there are not as many,” Ms. Ruesch said of the march this year. “But it’s a long battle. And we still have all these people.”For Ms. Cruz and her children (she has four), the Casita Maria Center, an 85-year-old charitable organization for the local Latino community, is like a second home. In fact, it has been a part of Ms. Cruz’s life since she was a teenager.
+Looking to earn money in her youth, Ms. Cruz heard about a local Beacon Youth Program that matched teenagers to jobs. She received a selective semester-long business internship at the Casita Maria Center, which has a wide variety of arts offerings, in addition to academic-based programs.
+After Ms. Cruz graduated from high school, she got her first job at the center as a group leader. She worked one session, September to June, and was offered one of the limited positions available for the summer session. “It was a privilege,” she said, to be chosen even once. Ms. Cruz worked every fall and summer session for 12 years.
+Along the way, she had her first two children — Neven, 13, and Serenity, 11 — and they sampled piano, chorus, violin, dancing and more at the center. Ms. Cruz saw her children flourish in programs that would have been otherwise unaffordable.John Aslanyan, a pharmacist from San Diego and a regular visitor to Rosarito, said he couldn’t convince his fiancée to join him on this day trip to the town.
+She was nervous, he said, that there would be a repeat of November’s border closing — a worry shared by many other of his friends, he added. He did persuade his sister to tag along on this jaunt.
+“This is the first time I am seeing this beach this empty,” said Mr. Aslanyan, the lone diner at a restaurant on Rosarito’s oceanfront.
+Moises Espitia, an analyst with the Metropolitan Center of Economic and Business Information, a local research group, said the financial pain caused by the border’s shutdown in November was felt particularly acutely in the services and tourism sector.
+On the day of the shutdown, the more than 59,000 restaurants and hotels in the Tijuana and Rosarito Beaches metropolitan area suffered a collective loss of $6.7 million, Mr. Espitia estimated.To casual observers of either military service or the practice of yoga, the path from Oorah to Om may not seem obvious. But the intersection of yogi and veteran is natural if unexpected, beginning with the five classic yoga poses known as warriors.
+While veterans make up a small percentage of yoga instructors, their ranks are growing. Many members of the military now often include yoga — sometimes taught by veterans — as an element of their workout routine, and veterans turn to the practice for therapeutic applications. The Department of Veterans Affairs has successfully used yoga to help treat opioid addiction and post-traumatic stress.
+“A lot of vets have post-traumatic stress,” said Thierry Chiapello, who served in the Marines and now teaches yoga at the National Defense University in Washington. “By lengthening the exhalation of breath, this gets people out of those fight-or-flight instincts that drain you,” he continued, putting them in a mode of “rest and recovery that definitely is associated with less aggressive behaviors.”
+Veterans, long schooled in discipline and concentration, also make excellent yoga teachers, both to other veterans, whose experiences they understand, and to active-duty military members, whose trust they often gain. They are becoming a welcome addition in civilian yoga studios, where students are usually attracted to their compassionate yet frequently no-nonsense approach.MELBOURNE, Australia — The reigning United States Open champion, Naomi Osaka, was serving to extend her third-round match against Hsieh Su-Wei when she rolled her right foot while running for a ball and tumbled to the ground, prompting the chair umpire to ask if she was O.K.
+“No,” Osaka replied, but she was laughing.
+Osaka, 21, who was born in Japan and is based in Florida, had already squared herself once, picking her game up after dropping the first set and falling behind 2-4, 0-40 in the second against Taiwan’s Hsieh, a big-seed slayer with a bedeviling slice.
+By rising to hold off Hsieh 5-7, 6-4, 6-1, Osaka showed that she is more than O.K. She proved that she is maturing in front of everybody’s eyes like a Polaroid picture.
+Osaka’s round of 16 opponent is Anastasija Sevastova, whom she defeated in three sets — after dropping the first — in the quarterfinals of a tuneup event in Brisbane two weeks ago. Osaka struggled with her composure early on against Sevastova in what turned out to be a prelude to a hissy fit.A hitchhiking robot was beheaded in P hiladelphia. A security robot was punched to the ground in Silicon Valley. Another security bot, in San Francisco, was covered in a tarp and smeared with barbecue sauce.
+Why do people lash out at robots, particularly those that are built to resemble humans? It’s a global phenomenon. In a mall in Osaka, Japan, three boys beat a humanoid robot with all their strength. In Moscow, a man attacked a teaching ro bot named Alantim with a baseball bat, kicking it to the ground, while the robot pleaded for help.
+Why do we act this way? Are we secretly terrified that robots will take our jobs? Upend our societies? Control our every move with their ever-expanding capabilities and air of quiet malice?
+Quite possibly. The specter of insurrection is embedded in the word “robot” itself. It was first used to refer to automatons by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek, who repurposed a word that had referred to a system of indentured servitude or serfdom. The feudal fear of peasant revolt was transplanted to mechanical servants, and worries of a robot uprising have lingered ever since.The authors delineated between “first wave” digisexuality (online pornography, hookup apps, sexting and electronic sex toys), where the tech is simply a delivery system for sexual fulfillment, and “second wave” digisexuality. Those practitioners form deeper relationships through immersive technologies like virtual reality, augmented reality and A.I.-equipped sex robots, sometimes obviating the need for a human partner altogether.
+Dr. Twist, who also runs a clinical practice in family and sex therapy, said she has had several patients in their 20s and 30s who qualify as second-wave digisexuals.
+“What they’ve been into is sex tech, toys they can control with their tech devices, that attach to their penis or their vulva,” she said. “They haven’t had contact with humans, and really don’t have any interest in sex with people. This is what they want to be doing, and if they could afford a sex robot, they would.”
+Their sexuality may seem boundary pushing or deviant. Every advance in cybersex has met with cultural resistance before it became normalized, Dr. McArthur said.
+“Each time we have new technologies, there’s a wave of alarmism that follows,” he said. “It happened first with porn, then with internet dating, then with Snapchat sexting. One by one these technologies come along and there’s this wave of panic. But as people start to use these technologies, they become part of our lives.”
+Are Bionic Sex Toys Also Romantic Partners?
+Indeed, the latest generation of robotic sex toys make Charlotte’s low-tech Jack Rabbit vibrator from “Sex and the City” look as antique as the 28,000-year-old siltstone dildo found in a cave in Germany a few years ago.LAGOS, Nigeria — Rock music is often produced and enjoyed under the pressure of social constraints, and the restrictive culture of post-dictatorial Nigeria made for a perfect cooker. In the 1990s and 2000s, teenagers who rejected the country’s politics of restraint in dress, physical appearance and behavior embraced American punk and metal imports.
+Footage of Western concertgoers dancing in defiance of any discernible rhythm, alone in a throng of bodies, moving with careless abandon to music, presented a possible escape.
+Many of these young Nigerians first encountered bands beloved by early 2000s emo kids — Linkin Park, Evanescence, Paramore, Fall Out Boy — online and, through the exchange of music, formed a digital community. They called themselves “Gothics,” shorthand for a composite of binding beliefs and aesthetics from different rock subgenres, including dark clothing, severe makeup and an obsession with death.There were conflicting accounts of what happened on that bus. Joyous soldiers, black and white, may have been sharing a celebratory bottle of whiskey. Woodard and the driver argued about restroom breaks and Greyhound’s rules requiring a driver to accommodate passengers’s needs.
+When the bus stopped in Batesburg, a small town about 30 miles from Columbia, the state capital, the driver summoned the town’s two police officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and his deputy, Elliot Long, and Woodard was ordered off the bus.
+Shull admitted using his blackjack on the sergeant. When Woodard wrested it away, Long, gun drawn, ordered him to drop it. Then, by the Gergel book’s account, Shull rained blows on Woodard so ferociously the blackjack broke. Woodard was left sightless, both eyes gouged out, and thrown in jail, igniting a racial fuse that would burn its way across America to Waring, the White House and eventually the Supreme Court.
+“It’s more than just an incident, it’s a huge historical moment,” said Patricia Sullivan, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and author of “Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement.”
+As a law student at Duke University in the 1970s, Gergel had read of Waring. But passing mention of Woodard escaped him and he didn’t think much of Waring again until, as an intellectual property and personal injury lawyer and outside counsel to the city of Columbia, he was named to the federal bench.
+“In my installation talk, I spoke about Judge Waring,” Gergel recalled. “I saw blank looks.”
+He plunged into research, using his inside knowledge of court dockets and evidentiary records. “I understood what I was looking at,” he said. “I knew what to ask for.”I, too, was disappointed by the photo, but I could hardly say I was surprised. Many news organizations are still struggling to diversify their staffs, The New York Times included.
+I’m a black woman who is an editor in a newsroom. I think it’s important that black people are represented in the editorial process, soup to nuts — editors, correspondents, producers, photographers, digital, print, you name it.
+However, as the backlash to the CBS News announcement played out, a question lingered in my mind: If black reporters had been represented, but, say, Asian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans or Muslim-Americans had not, what type of furor would have occurred, if any? Why or why not?
+I plan to spend more time focused on this question in 2019.
+CBS News didn’t take any of this lying down, by the way. It clarified that the digital journalists and field reporters included in the photo were part of an “initial wave” of journalists who would be embedded with 2020 candidates. It also pointed out that Lorna Jones, a black woman, had been promoted to oversee much of the network’s political coverage.
+It should be said that CBS is in a moment of transition. Susan Zirinsky, who will be the first woman to run CBS News, is taking over from David Rhodes in March. Les Moonves, the former chief executive, stepped down in September following multiple accusations of sexual harassment. All three executives are white.“The more discomfort an athlete expects, the more she can tolerate, and the more discomfort she can tolerate, the faster she can go,” Matt Fitzgerald wrote about bracing in “How Bad Do You Want It: Mastering the Psychology of Mind Over Muscle.” It’s also just smart. I made sure my hydration and fueling plan matched the extra strain heat and humidity would put on my body (and I set a new personal record by 70 minutes).
+I do this all the time in my everyday life: acknowledging how something I’m about to face — a tense conversation, going to the grocery store before a snowstorm — is going to stink, and do what I can to prepare for the experience. I hate going to the dentist, so I brought headphones to my last cleaning. Even though I didn’t end up using them (they showed HGTV on an overhead TV screen — does any property flop in “Flip or Flop”?), at least I knew I was prepared in case I needed the help.
+Mindfulness
+I do this most by focusing on my breathing. Not only does this help me physically at the end of a fast interval or a grueling race, but it also helps me mentally as well. At the end of the 2016 New Jersey Marathon, where I knew I was within sight of a new personal record, and I screamed down the Long Branch Boardwalk hoping I could keep it together until I crossed the finish line, I focused on my breathing. That helped flatten out my mind and acknowledge any doubts about reaching my goal — then flick them away.
+When people can watch experiences come and go instead of grabbing them and allowing those thoughts to spin out into anxiety, they can shift their focus to their performance, according to Keith Kaufman, a Washington, D.C.-area psychologist who spoke on mindfulness in sports at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2017.
+“For example, an athlete could identify that ‘right now, I’m having the thought that I can’t finish this race,’ so rather than reflecting an objective truth, it’s seen as just a thought,” he said.ANKARA, Turkey — After lengthy meetings with the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Senator Lindsey Graham called on Saturday for a slower, smarter withdrawal of American troops from Syria to avoid setting off a broader war and a nightmare for Turkey.
+Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, has a long familiarity with Turkey and its place in the NATO alliance, and he said he was on a mission to ensure that the American withdrawal announced by President Trump in December did not cause greater damage that would be against United States interests in the long run.
+“I can understand the desire to withdraw, but withdrawal without a plan is chaos,” he told a news briefing in Ankara, the Turkish capital. “It would be Iraq on steroids,” he warned, in a reference to how the Islamic State gained power after the withdrawal of American forces from the country in 2011.
+Mr. Graham’s trip to Turkey came after an aborted visit by the White House national security adviser, John R. Bolton, who left the country without meeting with Mr. Erdogan. Infuriated by comments Mr. Bolton had made in Israel that Turkey would be forced to ensure that Kurdish forces were protected, Mr. Erdogan canceled a proposed meeting.Hannah Jessie Diamond and Samuel Raphael Feldman are to be married Jan. 20 at the Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan. Jon Hanson, who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion and was a professor of the couple at Harvard Law School, is to officiate.
+The couple met in 2013 at Harvard, from which they each received a law degree.
+Ms. Diamond, 29, is a public defender at the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. She graduated from Oberlin College.
+She is the daughter of Shelley J. Sherman of Great Neck, N.Y., and the late David A. Diamond. Until 1990, the bride’s mother was a deputy council at the New York State Department of Health’s Office of Professional Medical Conduct in Manhattan. She is on the national board of Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization of America, and Young Judaea, a Zionist youth movement with programs for Jewish youth, both in Manhattan. The bride’s father was a law professor at Hofstra in Hempstead, N.Y., where he taught civil procedure, education law, trial advocacy and family law.
+Mr. Feldman, 31, is a public defender at Appellate Advocates, a nonprofit organization in Manhattan that has contracts with the city to defend cases involving low-income clients in Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. He graduated from the University of Chicago.Lindsay Catherine Church and Andrew Mark Ellis were married Jan. 19 at the Stables at Foxhall Resort in Douglasville, Ga. The Rev. Dee Stone, a minister affiliated with Peachtree Christian Church in Atlanta, officiated.
+The bride and groom met at Harvard, from which each received a law degree.
+Mrs. Ellis, 27, is an intellectual property associate at the Atlanta law firm Alston & Bird. She graduated summa cum laude from the University of South Carolina Honors College. In 2014, through a human rights fellowship from Harvard Law School, she worked at the Media Legal Defense Initiative in London. She is on the board of VOX Teen Communications, an uncensored publishing platform for teenagers, in Atlanta.
+She is a daughter of Suzanne P. Church and Donald C. Church of Fleming Island, Fla. The bride’s father retired as a master chief in the United States Navy at Naval Air Station Jacksonville. He more recently retired as a retirement relationship manager in the Jacksonville, Fla., office of Fidelity Investments, a brokerage firm. He is the treasurer on the board of AMIkids-Clay County, in Green Cove Springs, Fla., a provider of programs and services to at-risk youth in the area. Her mother is a social worker at three elementary schools and a high school in the Clay County School District in Florida, for which she is also a coordinator of Project Reach, the youth homelessness program there.
+Mr. Ellis, 28, is a litigation associate in the Atlanta office of the law firm Jones Day. He graduated magna cum laude from the University of Missouri with two degrees, one in economics and the other in political science.Whitney Arminte Way and Charles Frederick Stewart are to be married Jan. 20 at the Ocotillo Golf Course in Chandler, Ariz. John Kavanaugh, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, is to officiate.
+The bride, who is 28 and taking her husband’s name, is a Google Cloud marketing manager for the Intel Corporation, a multinational technology company in Santa Clara, Calif. She graduated from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and received an M.B.A. from Texas A&M University-Commerce.
+She is a daughter of Kelly P. Way and George A. Way, both of Chicago. The bride’s father retired as a first sergeant in the United States Army. He was last stationed at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Her mother is an advanced registered nurse for the State of Illinois in Warrenville.
+The groom, 35, is to begin working next month as a shared services manager at Workday, a financial management and human capital management software vendor based in Pleasanton, Calif. He is part of Workday’s career accelerator program for military veterans. Until November, he served as a major on active duty at Fort Meade in Maryland, and will continue to serve as a reservist in Upland, Calif. He graduated from the University of New Mexico and received an M.B.A. from Emory University.Two couples in the wedding announcements, Hannah Diamond and Sam Feldman, and Lindsay Church and Andrew Ellis, who were all in the same Harvard Law School section, were married this weekend. Two other classmates, Habin Chung and Mark Jia, were also married (in 2017) after connecting in the class.
+The couples were in the same first-year section (similar to a homeroom period) called 1L, Section 6. Jon D. Hanson, their torts professor, who is also responsible for supervising and orchestrating intellectual and social activities, leads the section.
+Professor Hanson, who has taught at the university for 26 years, weighed in on the romances with three theories.
+“One, there is nothing to see here,” he said, explaining that 560 students in 1L are divided into sections of 80 students each. “It’s just probability. They are arriving at a certain stage of their life. They are thinking of long-term plans and are young enough not to be committed. Love connections emerge from interaction. It happens to everyone in every section.”“They do not feel sorry; they are sowers of hatred,” Mr. Szczepaniak said. “We hope very much that after this murderous murder, the Polish nation will finally understand which side the truth is on. And again we can be proud of Poland and our solidarity, as we were in 1989.”
+That was the year Poland broke free from communist rule. The spark in the fight for freedom came from this city, where the labor unions of the shipyards banded together in a movement that became known as Solidarity, or Solidarnosc in Polish.
+But the roots of today’s current political divide can also be found in those days of uprising.
+Mr. Kaczynski, along with his twin brother, Lech, fought alongside Lech Walesa to bring down Communism. In 1990, he helped the Solidarity hero win the presidency and later served as Mr. Walesa’s chief of staff. But they fell out after an intense power struggle and have been enemies ever since.
+Mr. Kaczynski soon came to believe that the revolution had never been completed. By agreeing to a bloodless transition that allowed some Communist figures to remain in public life, he believed political leaders had failed to eradicate the Soviet infection.
+He formed Center Agreement and, ultimately, Law and Justice, which had a brief turn in power from 2005 until 2007. But much of his agenda had been stymied by the courts. The party lost the early election to the liberal Civic Platform.Neri Oxman and William Albert Ackman were married Jan. 19 at Central Synagogue in New York. Rabbi Angela Buchdahl performed the ceremony.
+Ms. Oxman, 42, is a professor at the M.I.T. Media Lab. She graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, RIBA Part 2 (Royal Institute of British Architects) in London. She also holds a Ph.D. in design computation from M.I.T. and was recently honored with the National Design Award in recognition of her contribution to the world of design and architecture. The bride served as a member of the Israeli Air Force from 1996 to 1999, achieving the rank of first lieutenant.
+She is a daughter of Rivka Oxman and Robert Oxman of Caesarea, Israel. The bride’s father is professor emeritus of architecture and the history of modern design at Technion Israel Institute of Technology, where her mother retired as a professor of digital design.
+Mr. Ackman, 52, is the founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, a hedge fund company in New York. He is also the founder of the Pershing Square Foundation, a charitable venture that has provided more than $400 million in grants since 2006.Q: I live in a market-rate rental on the Upper West Side. My refrigerator has broken several times over the past few months, despite repeat visits from repairmen. We’ve had to throw out spoiled food and devote too much money to takeout. We asked the landlord for a new fridge, but he refuses to replace it unless we agree to a $17-a-month rent increase for the remainder of the lease. He claims that New York City law requires tenants to pay for new appliances. Is this really the case?
+A: There is no city law requiring tenants to pay for new appliances if their old ones break. On the contrary, the warranty of habitability, a state law, requires your landlord to provide you with a safe, livable and clean apartment, which would include a functioning refrigerator.
+So he must either fix your broken one or replace it with one that works. The replacement does not need to be new, but it must be similar or better than the one you had before. Unless your lease states otherwise, your landlord cannot charge you for this. It is his responsibility.
+So where did your landlord get the idea that you should shoulder the cost? He may be referring to the state’s rent stabilization code, which allows a landlord to pass the cost of apartment improvements onto a rent-stabilized tenant as a rent increase if the tenant gives written consent, according to Peter A. Schwartz, head of the real estate practice at the Manhattan law firm Graubard Miller. But since your lease is market rate, the rule does not apply to you. (And even if your apartment were stabilized, you would still have to consent in writing to a rent increase.)ROME — More than 100 African migrants who set off in a rickety, inflatable dinghy have died in a wreck off the Libyan coast, humanitarian workers said on Saturday, in what was the deadliest such episode in recent months.
+The scale of the catastrophe became clear after three survivors, two Sudanese and one Gambian, who were rescued by the Italian Navy and brought to shore in the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, told the aid workers that 117 migrants had died.
+“Survivors told us that they had about 10 women on board, and one of them was pregnant,” Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration, said in a phone interview. “There were also two toddlers, one of them was 2 months old.”
+The migrants were believed to have been from countries in West Africa and Sudan. Libya is the principal springboard for most African migrants seeking to enter Europe, and before they even set to sea, the migrants face other dangers like traffickers and violence.
+The dinghy set out on Thursday from the coastal town of Garabulli, Libya, west of Tripoli, and in about 10 hours started deflating and taking on water, survivors told humanitarian workers.
+When an aircraft from the Italian Navy on a security and surveillance mission spotted the craft 50 nautical miles northeast of the Libyan capital, the vessel had already started sinking, the Navy said in a statement, and roughly 20 people could be seen on board.
+The rescue effort comes in a fraught political environment, with several European governments questioning the motives and behavior of independent rescue groups, and some bringing criminal charges against them.
+The Italian Navy said that, after launching two inflatable rafts toward the migrants, it immediately called another helicopter to provide support, as their closest vessel was well beyond 110 nautical miles from the shipwreck.
+The helicopter rescued the only three survivors and brought them to the hospital on the island of Lampedusa. They were suffering from hypothermia, had burn scars and were traumatized, humanitarian workers said.
+The Italian Coast Guard said in a statement that it had “immediately verified that the Libyan Coast Guard was aware of the event within their search and rescue area, ensuring the outmost collaboration.”
+It also confirmed that a nongovernmental organization, Sea Watch, had offered its help and that the message was passed on to the Libyan Coast Guard.
+In a separate incident,Sea Watch said that it had rescued another 47 people on a rubber dinghy in the Mediterranean on Saturday. But it had yet to receive information on what port, if any, the group could be brought to. One of the group’s boats was stranded at sea for weeks earlier this month after being denied entry to several European ports.
+In February 2017, the bodies of 74 migrants were recovered from a beach near the town of Zawiya in western Libya. The bodies were believed to have come from a shipwrecked inflatable raft that was found on the shore.
+European countries have struggled to stem the flow of migrants, training the Libyan Coast Guard and offering money and other resources to Libyan officials to shift the migration crisis off its shores and to deal with it at the source. But the migrants keep making the perilous journey.
+On Friday night, the Italian Navy said the rescue operations, coordinated by the Libyan Rescue Coordination Center, had concluded after the search for the dinghy proved fruitless.If you have an extra day off, spend time cooking for yourself and for others. Make slow cooker chili (above), Alison Roman’s cauliflower gratin or any of the recipes in the collection below.For a moment in August, an event hall in Texas teemed with hope, taquitos and unity.
+It was a border-town stop for Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, but another Democratic politician commanded particular attention: Gina Ortiz Jones, a history-making congressional candidate — gay, Filipina-American, an Iraq war veteran — hoping to turn a majority-Hispanic district blue. “Really special person,” Mr. O’Rourke said, as Ms. Jones stood and waved.
+But soon, a county chairwoman posed an uncomfortable question. Mr. O’Rourke had not endorsed Ms. Jones. In fact, he had elevated her Republican opponent, Representative Will Hurd, with frequent praise and, most memorably, a live-streamed bipartisan road trip that helped jump-start their midterm campaigns. Would Mr. O’Rourke support the Democrat?
+He would not.
+“This is a place where my politics and my job and my commitment to this country come into conflict,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “I’m going to put country over party.”
+Some supporters of Ms. Jones saw it differently: Beto O’Rourke was once again putting Beto O’Rourke first.Those personal qualities have come into play at a pivotal moment as Britain hurtles toward its March 29 exit with a government in stalemate.
+“He is a law unto himself,” said Bobby Friedman, the author of a biography of Mr. Bercow, recalling the speaker’s decision on Jan. 9 to allow Parliament to amend a government business motion on Brexit. Business motions give the executive power to determine what happens in Parliament and when, and have not been considered changeable by Parliament.
+“From a political geek’s point of view, it was pretty astonishing,” Mr. Friedman said of Mr. Bercow’s decision. “He said, ‘I’ll do what I like.’ If anyone else was speaker, it would have been incredibly surprising. With him, not particularly.”
+Even in the hyper-loquacious environment of British politics, Mr. Bercow stands out for his love of ornate language and withering insult.
+“He could never say, ‘It’s great to see you’ ”; instead he would say, ‘It gives me inestimable pleasure to meet you for the finest condiments created by Mrs. Twinings,’ ” a colleague told Mr. Friedman, his biographer. A sitting lawmaker told The New York Times in 2013, “It’s as if he goes to bed every night, reads a thesaurus, inwardly digests it and then spews it out the next day.”
+Occasionally, when a fellow politician was speaking, he would cry out, “Split infinitive!”
+Mr. Bercow has made a career out of annoying his conservative colleagues. Some are still seething over his decision not to wear the traditional speaker’s regalia, including wig and knee-breeches, which he said created “a barrier between Parliament and the public.”The storm continued to move briskly and was not expected to linger in the Northeast. Mr. Otto said he expected the worst to move past New York City, where only two or three inches were forecast, by Sunday morning. In New England, the storm was expected to pass by Sunday night.
+As with any storm, National Weather Service offices across the country were busy providing detailed forecasts and updates. But this time their meteorologists were doing it without pay, a casualty of the federal government shutdown.
+“There’s definitely a drain on morale,” said Ray Martin, a senior meteorologist in the Weather Service office serving Washington and Baltimore. He said he knew colleagues with young children or a new house who were struggling. “There’s a little bit of not feeling appreciated,” he added.
+Though the snowstorm was not exactly surprising — it is January, after all — its impact has proved frightening, especially on transportation.
+A United Airlines plane slid off a concrete surface at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago on Saturday, while the plane was turning off a runway. Airline officials said no injuries were reported.
+The night before, at Eppley Airfield in Omaha, a Southwest Airlines plane slid off the runway after landing. After a bumpy descent, the plane seemed to be coming in sideways just before touching down, said Benny Salz, a passenger on the flight. It hit the ground hard, fishtailed and slid into the grass just off the runway, said Mr. Salz, 30, a music producer and singer who lives in Los Angeles.
+“People were definitely freaked out when we landed,” he said.President Trump was several minutes into an extemporaneous speech on Monday when an offhand locution clarified an important reason the government shutdown persists: “I said I’ll build the wall and I’m going to build the wall.”
+The first-person singular is familiar to observers of both this president and his recent predecessors. Mr. Trump has escalated this phenomenon, as in his telling inquiry regarding Jim Mattis, the former secretary of defense: “What’s he done for me?” In this acceleration of the personal presidency, Mr. Trump is abetted by opponents who insist on interpreting all events through him. The result is that the space between the man and the office is vanishing. The shutdown dispute has sharply divided Democrats and Republicans, but all seem to agree on one crucial point: “L’état, c’est Trump.”
+The motto of this presidency might best be expressed as the reverse of the old feminist slogan “The personal is political.” According to Trumpism, the political is determined by the personal. All issues are judged by their compatibility with Mr. Trump’s interests. This may be smart politics. It is not serious conservatism. It is a formula for an all-encompassing politics that intrudes into every realm of life.
+Mr. Trump’s presidency has upended many conservative orthodoxies. Perhaps none is more disconcerting than the collapsing barrier between the political and the social. The key distinction is between state and society. The state wields coercive authority over certain realms of life, the extent of which liberals and conservatives reasonably dispute. Society, by contrast, consists of the rich layers of private associations — families, religious institutions, civic clubs, businesses and media — that provide a buffer between the individual and the state.PARIS — Nearly four months after an Interpol chief was detained in China on corruption charges, his wife has applied for asylum in France, she said on Saturday.
+Grace Meng, wife of Meng Hongwei, the former Interpol president, has remained in France, where the organization has its headquarters, since his arrest.
+“I have officially claimed asylum in France,” Ms. Meng said in a text message on Saturday.
+Ms. Meng, who has refused to specify her Chinese given name or to have her face photographed or filmed by the news media, said in interviews on Friday that she was seeking French protection for her and her twin boys.
+“I cannot go back to China; such strange things happen there, and fundamental rights are not respected,” she told the newspaper Libération. “Even here, I am afraid of being kidnapped, and I fear for the safety of my children.”“But for sure she’s the best player in the world because she won so many Grand Slams,” Halep added in reference to Williams, who is a 23-time Grand Slam singles champion. “She’s been a lot on No. 1. I cannot compare my results to her. But in this moment, I am confident that I am in this position, and I’m positive about it.”
+Monday’s blockbuster match is a product of a draw that has been almost devoid of major upsets, with seven of the top eight women reaching the fourth round (No. 3 Caroline Wozniacki lost to five-time Grand Slam champion Maria Sharapova in the third round).
+That steadiness by the favorites represents an abrupt arrival of order to women’s Grand Slam tennis: at Wimbledon last year, only one of the top eight reached the fourth round; at the United States Open, only three did.
+Pliskova, the only player seeded in the top 8 to make the second week at the last three Grand Slams, could face the winner of the Halep-Williams match in the quarterfinals. She is looking forward to which of the two it might be.
+“For sure, the best match now in the draw,” Pliskova said.
+The men have also had a steady ride to the round of 16, with six of the top eight seeded players reaching the second week, including the top four.
+But those four all have tough challenges directly ahead of them. The top-seeded player, Novak Djokovic, faces No. 15 Daniil Medvedev, whose ranking has soared from No. 65 since the beginning of last season. Rafael Nadal, who is seeded No. 2, faces resurgent veteran Tomas Berdych, who beat him in straight sets here in 2015, which was their most recent meeting on hard courts.ACROSTIC — Today’s acrostic is a passage from a book by Constance Hale called “Sin and Syntax: How to Craft Wicked Good Prose” (or “How to Craft Wickedly Effective Prose,” the subtitle of an earlier edition). Much of the excerpt concerns prominent visual artists, though, referring to the style evolution of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso to their ultimate, more streamlined maturity.
+I like both painters, and I confess that I don’t often think about artists’ timelines, the way I do with a lot of book writers that I discover in midcareer or after their careers have ended. Bibliographies are usually arranged chronologically; museum exhibits are often works from a particular era of an artist’s life, yes, but I don’t walk from painting to painting in the order they were created. But the argument made in the passage is interesting and valid, and it sounds like another good read for would-be writers (and writers resolved to improve in the coming year).
+I thought the clues today were pretty tough. I was confident enough to get started with NEAR MISS, NIACIN, AGITATE and SESAME. I then went a bit astray with “benny” instead of TRANQ (that “Q” was vital to figuring out the beginning of this quotation, too); I also put “Connick” instead of NILSSON. Thrown off by the “Harry,” I guess, and not remembering this song, which played at the start of “Midnight Cowboy.”4:31
+After the Storm, a Fight for Survival in Mozambique
+0:57
+Madrid Struggles With Heaviest Snowfall in 50 Years
+1:41
+Ugandan Police Harass Opposition Candidate
+0:50
+E.U. Secures 300 Million Additional Doses of Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine
+0:42
+‘Angry and Sad,’ Merkel Says of Capitol Mob Attack
+0:51
+‘We Believe in the Strength of American Democracy,’ Macron Says
+0:43
+Britain Scrambles to Battle the Virus
+0:46
+Merkel Extends Coronavirus Lockdown in Germany
+1:35
+It’s Back to Lockdown for Britain as Cases Soar
+1:20
+Scotland Will Go Into Lockdown After Coronavirus Variant Spread
+1:31
+The World Says Goodbye to 2020
+1:27WASHINGTON — As the most diverse freshman class in history settles into the House of Representatives, newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan have been racking up social media followers and soaking up the spotlight, liberal firebrands largely elected to safe Democratic seats.
+But overlooked in the hallway protests and often glowing news media coverage, a larger group of more centrist Democrats has arrived with a different agenda. And now, they are quietly asserting their influence as the partial government shutdown, which has left them scrambling to explain why 800,000 workers are still without pay, enters its fifth week.
+The centrists, elected to seats held last year by Republicans, delivered Democrats their House majority, and their re-elections will be critical to keeping the party in power. They include a sizable subset with backgrounds in military, intelligence and national security, and won by promising to work across the aisle and to end dysfunction in Washington. Now they are caught in the most dysfunctional situation of all — a record-breaking shutdown — and they are under pressure from constituents to do something about it.
+[The Latest: In White House Address, Trump Proposes DACA Deal in Exchange for Wall Funding]
+This past week, a group of freshmen in Trump-leaning districts convened a private strategy session to discuss how they could press Speaker Nancy Pelosi to reclaim the issue of border security for Democrats and to open the door to negotiations with President Trump. Some also aired their frustrations with Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the chairman of the Democratic caucus, who hosted a small dinner for freshmen from battleground districts.Ed Tant
+Athens, Ga.
+To the Editor:
+In his short satirical tale “Zadig, or the Book of Fate,” Voltaire describes the fictitious great lord Irax: “The peacocks are not more vain, the doves not more voluptuous.” He is, we are told, “corrupted by vanity and voluptuousness” and “breathed nothing but false glory and false pleasures .”
+Zadig, the prime minister of the kingdom, undertakes to rectify the bad behavior. He does this with the cooperation of a vast entourage of the court’s sycophants and via such an uninterrupted litany of praise for Irax for all the good qualities he lacked, that after five days Irax, exhausted and chastened, begged for it to stop .
+President Trump does not appear to be exhausted or chastened.
+Jerry Kavanagh
+Pearl River, N.Y.
+To the Editor:
+In a time when the classics are nearly all forgotten by the average reader, I was heartened to read Bret Stephens’s imaginative column about how the classic writers might have portrayed Donald Trump and his minions. Missing, however, was the wonderful “Don Quixote,” by Cervantes.
+Written at the turn of the 17th century , “Don Quixote” conjures a character who can only be seen as a premonition of the leadership we live with today. It is the story of a man who thinks he is something he is not and who cannot tell the difference between reality and illusion. When confronted with the evidence of his illusions, he simply dismisses the reality as enchantments.
+While Don Quixote the character lacks the malevolence of Donald Trump the president, his misstatements and actions still cause embarrassment to himself (that he does not recognize) and sometimes tragedy for others. Cervantes wrote of Don Quixote, “He accommodated every thing he saw, with incredible facility, to the extravagant ravings of his disordered judgment .”
+If that doesn’t sound like Donald Trump, I don’t know what does!
+Jeffrey E. Green
+Somerville, Mass.ROME — Women of all ages, and some men, took to the streets in a dozen cities around the world on Saturday, the anniversary of the 2017 Women’s March that served as a strong rebuke of President Trump’s policies.
+The annual marches and rallies have taken on wider themes since then, such as challenging the rise of the far right, while also calling for an end to inequality, the gender pay gap and violence against women.
+Some events were organized in response to a call from the United States to create a “Women’s Wave.” But others were held independently, and in many cases, the core message was that women’s rights are about more than Mr. Trump.
+In cities across the United States, women braved subzero temperatures in some parts of the country to march even as accusations of anti-Semitism have rocked the movement and prompted questions about its future.Want this column in your inbox? Sign up here.
+I’ve been thinking a lot about that famous egg — you know, the one that just broke the world record for the most-liked Instagram post ever. It’s a normal egg, brown, with freckles, nothing special. It could’ve been the egg you’ll eat for breakfast this morning. Instead, it hatched an internet phenomenon, for reasons no one can explain.
+Say what you will about that egg and those who cared about it. But in a week when much of the world seemed so mired in acrimony, it was a small (very small) symbol of what collective effort can do. Speaking of accomplishments, prepare for the week ahead with the top stories in business and tech, below. Then go enjoy an omelet.
+Jan. 13-19
+What’s Up?
+Entering Crisis Mode
+President Trump’s government shutdown continues, and the household budgets of federal employees are hurting. Some 800,000 haven’t been paid in weeks, and a typical furloughed worker is now about $5,000 behind in salary. Thousands have filed for unemployment. They’ve cut back on spending and investing, which is taking a serious bite out of the country’s economic growth. On a warmer note, some thoughtful souls have been offering free pizza, wine, financial services and even homemade casseroles to unpaid workers across the country. Still, none of these gestures can substitute for a paycheck.He paired the address with his first naturalization ceremony at the White House, a move intended to underscore the idea that he supports legal immigration. And his language was markedly different; instead of insisting on the “big beautiful wall” he promised during his 2016 campaign, Mr. Trump took care to use the word “barrier” as well — and seemed to pare back his vision for it.
+Calling the wall “a powerful and beautifully designed see-through steel barrier on our southern border,” Mr. Trump said: “This is not a 2,000-mile concrete structure from sea to sea. These are steel barriers in high priority locations. Much of the border is already protected by natural barriers such as mountains and water.”
+Mr. Trump noted that he had adopted some Democratic proposals on border security. The president proposed $800 million for humanitarian assistance and $805 million for drug detection technology, in addition to funding for 2,750 more border agents and law enforcement officials and 75 new immigration judge teams.
+In her talking points, issued to Democrats, Ms. Pelosi said her party favored “new drug, weapons and contraband scanning technology at official ports of entry,” and “filling the more than 3,000 vacancies for customs officers.” Ms. Pelosi also intends to bring up legislation in the coming days that includes an additional $1 billion for border security, including $563 million for 75 new immigration judges and support staff.
+Even so, Democrats roundly criticized the president’s plan. They were particularly incensed that Mr. Trump’s offer extended protections to Dreamers and T.P.S. recipients that he himself revoked. And they said the deal was a nonstarter because it did not offer any permanent protections for Dreamers.
+“I think it’s simply more fake promises raising false hopes,” Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, said. “It will fool few Americans because it’s neither serious nor credible as a real remedy for Dreamers.”WASHINGTON — After I’d been writing a column for a few years, a male boss gave me a T-shirt depicting the Furies swooping.
+He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
+The three sisters, the “infernal goddesses” of ancient mythology born from the blood shed by Uranus when he was castrated by his son, were known for relentlessly hounding men. But the Furies took vengeance on wicked men who hurt women and swore false oaths.
+So I took it as a compliment.
+The capital has suddenly been infused with the spirit of the Furies. After many false springs and discouraging backlashes, we are finally experiencing a revolutionary assertion of women’s power that is transforming Congress.
+“Kill Bill”-style, the fiery Democratic women keep coming, driven by vengeance against the wicked man in the White House with the history of hurting women and swearing false oaths.The stoic model critiqued in the A.P.A. guidelines is one attempted embodiment — but only one. There is also the romantic model, who channels lust into romantic idealism, aggression into artistic ambition or religious purpose. And then there is the gentleman, whose persona seeks to balance self-control with idealism, politesse with passion, holding all in synthesis.
+The 19th-century canon doesn’t imply that a single model always works. In “Far From the Madding Crowd,” the hero, Gabriel Oak, is a stoic with a well-integrated romantic streak; his foil and rival for the heroine’s affections, William Boldwood, believes himself a stoic but discovers a romanticism he can’t control, with violent consequences. In “Pride and Prejudice,” Mr. Darcy’s gentlemanly self-conception needs the leaven of humility that only romance can provide. The plot of “Wuthering Heights” turns on the question of whether Heathcliff’s romantic appeal is really toxic.
+Then, too, across the life-cycle the models may need to shift — romanticism tempered by stoicism for the young, the reverse for fathers of young children, and some gentlemanly combination in old age.
+So every model has limits — but it’s folly to blame any or all of them for the pathologies they aspire to tame. (Stoicism, especially, doesn’t exactly seem oversupplied in America these days.) Yet that’s what contemporary progressivism is constantly inclined to do: Because the male archetypes were forged in more sexist eras, that sexism is regarded as a reason to reject the archetypes tout court, in the hopes of building some sort of New Progressive Man instead.
+In overreaction to this rejection, conservatives in the Trump era have ended up defending a caddishness that would make Wickham blush, in the mistaken belief that they’re defending masculinity itself. But the New Progressive Man isn’t much of a success either: If you listen to liberal women complaining about the male-feminist cads and “soft-boys” in their dating pool, progressive culture seems to have ended up creating a lot of Uriah Heeps and Gilbert Osmonds — men pretending to reject the masculine vices, but really sublimating them into softer forms of exploitation.
+The alternative, adapting the older archetypes to an era of greater equality between the sexes, is admittedly a difficult task. But it’s a better path than throwing out the older models, and all their wisdom with them, and then cursing Gabriel Oak and Gary Cooper because toxic masculinity hasn’t gone away.A well-known novelist, filmmaker and commentator, Mr. Moix has made plenty of provocative statements before. But this time he committed the twin sins of inelegance and indiscretion. As a public intellectual he’s supposed to play the “seducteur” who engages in a chaste flirtation with his audience. Announcing that he wouldn’t sleep with some of them kills the mood.
+And in a country that lives by the maxim “Not all truths should be told,” knowing what not to say — and what parts of your life to conceal — are key social graces.
+“He can sleep with whoever he wants, Yann Moix, who cares?” the 20-something humorist Agnès Hurstel said on France Inter radio. “Desire, erotic thoughts, are never politically correct.” What’s unacceptable, she said, is that Mr. Moix spoke to the magazine “as if he was on the couch of his shrink.”
+Mr. Moix tried to explain that he’s a prisoner of his preferences and of his own fear of aging. His relationships with younger women often end painfully after a few months, dooming him to a perpetual adolescence. “It’s not something enviable, it’s something sad,” he said on a French talk show. His new book is based on his misery after a breakup.
+But his remarks caught Frenchwomen in a take-no-prisoners mood, and feeling a new solidarity. #MeToo has made them more alert to the discrimination they face. They sense that they are still having to tolerate treatment their American counterparts have squashed, especially at work, and that this isn’t changing quickly enough.
+The bedroom was one place where Frenchwomen were winning. Surveys report that they are far more likely to remain sexually active after age 50 than their American counterparts . The way the French see it, everyone is entitled to sex and love, and “there’s beauty in every age.”
+Still, aging while female isn’t simple. Even in France it takes delicate internal calibrations to keep counternarratives at bay and stay “bien dans votre âge” — comfortable in your own age.Brad Stolbach, a trauma psychologist at the University of Chicago, said this kind of trauma often takes on a life of its own.
+“That experience, in a lot of ways, it lives by itself,” he told me last year while I was working on a story on the impact of trauma in young people in gun-weary Chicago. “It doesn’t get integrated with the rest of your memory, the rest of your brain, the rest of yourself. Then we go to great lengths to keep it out of awareness.” If we don’t find ways to integrate a near-death experience, it can change the way we live. “We function as if we are in there, in that moment, under constant threat, as if it’s still happening to us, or we function as if it never happened,” Dr. Stolbach said.
+I was reminded of Ahriel Fuller, a young woman I met a few years ago in Chicago. She had survived being shot when she was 6 years old. She told me that even more than a dozen years later, it was as if that bullet was still screaming toward her.
+She sat among a group of nearly 20 other young people who all recounted stories of witnessing shootings and beatings or being victims of them. A group of young people in folding chairs, with earbuds dangling from their necks, who could talk matter-of-factly about what it felt like when the bullet pierced their stomach or they saw people they loved being gunned down. These kinds of memories, they said, clung regardless of how hard they tried to shake them.
+“It never leaves you,” Ms. Fuller said. The challenge is not to become numb.
+A blood clot and a bullet are very different things. But both have the ability to take or shred a life. The physical and emotional toll that both can leave on their victims and those who witness them can be lasting. Both take a physical toll — that is obvious — and an emotional toll, which is sometimes less evident. And both require attention.
+Fortunately, I’d suffered only minimal heart damage, but enough to leave me exhausted most days. After months of cardiac rehab, running on the treadmill, lifting weights and tugging at the rowing machine, I slowly began to repair the physical damage that was done. But the emotional rehab continues.
+About seven months ago, exhausted and stressed out, I stood up too quickly and suffered syncope, medical jargon for passing out. When I came to I was lying in my hallway in a pool of sweat. My wife was clutching my face, again, wide-eyed and terrified. I thought I was dying. I called my daughter close and told her that I loved her. I said what I’d said dozens of times before at her bedside: “You’re going to do something special one day.” She nodded a yes. “Do you believe it?” I asked.The World Health Organization has ranked vaccine hesitancy — the growing resistance to widely available lifesaving vaccines — as one of the top 10 health threats in the world for 2019. That news will not come as a surprise in New York City, where the worst measles outbreak in decades is now underway. Nor in California or Minnesota, where similar outbreaks unfolded in 2014 and 2017, respectively. Nor in Texas, where some 60,000 children remain wholly unvaccinated thanks in part to an aggressive anti-vaccine lobby.
+Leading global health threats typically are caused by the plagues and perils of low-income countries — but vaccine hesitancy is as American as can be. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of children who are unvaccinated has quadrupled since 2001, even though the overall utilization of most vaccines remains high. More than 100,000 American infants and toddlers have received no vaccines whatsoever, and millions more have received only some crucial shots.
+It’s no mystery how we got here. On the internet, anti-vaccine propaganda has outpace d pro-vaccine public health information. The anti-vaxxers, as they are colloquially known, have hundreds of websites promoting their message, a roster of tech- and media-savvy influencers and an aggressive political arm that includes at least a dozen political action committees. Defense against this onslaught has been meager. The C.D.C., the nation’s leading public health agency, has a website with accurate information, but no loud public voice. The United States Surgeon General’s office has been mum. So has the White House — and not just under the current administration. That leaves just a handful of academics who get bombarded with vitriol, including outright threats, every time they try to counter pseudoscience with fact.
+The consequences of this disparity are substantial: a surge in outbreaks of measles, mumps, pertussis and other diseases; an increase in influenza deaths; and dismal rates of HPV vaccination, which doctors say could effectively wipe out cervical cancer if it were better utilized. But infectious disease experts warn that things could get much worse. Trust in vaccines is being so thoroughly eroded, they say, that these prevention tools are in danger of becoming useless. The next major disease outbreak “will not be due to a lack of preventive technologies,” Heidi Larson, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, writes in the journal Nature, but to an “emotional contagion, digitally enabled.”The rationalization camp, which has gained considerable prominence in recent years, is built around a set of theories contending that when it comes to politically charged issues, people use their intellectual abilities to persuade themselves to believe what they want to be true rather than attempting to actually discover the truth. According to this view, political passions essentially make people unreasonable, even — indeed, especially — if they tend to be good at reasoning in other contexts. (Roughly: The smarter you are, the better you are at rationalizing.)
+Some of the most striking evidence used to support this position comes from an influential 2012 study in which the law professor Dan Kahan and his colleagues found that the degree of political polarization on the issue of climate change was greater among people who scored higher on measures of science literary and numerical ability than it was among those who scored lower on these tests. Apparently, more “analytical” Democrats were better able to convince themselves that climate change was a problem, while more “analytical” Republicans were better able to convince themselves that climate change was not a problem. Professor Kahan has found similar results in, for example, studies about gun control in which he experimentally manipulated the partisan slant of information that participants were asked to assess.
+The implications here are profound: Reasoning can exacerbate the problem, not provide the solution, when it comes to partisan disputes over facts. Further evidence cited in support of this of argument comes from a 2010 study by the political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler, who found that appending corrections to misleading claims in news articles can sometimes backfire: Not only did corrections fail to reduce misperceptions, but they also sometimes increased them. It seemed as if people who were ideologically inclined to believe a given falsehood worked so hard to come up with reasons that the correction was wrong that they came to believe the falsehood even more strongly.
+But this “rationalization” account, though compelling in some contexts, does not strike us as the most natural or most common explanation of the human weakness for misinformation. We believe that people often just don’t think critically enough about the information they encounter.
+A great deal of research in cognitive psychology has shown that a little bit of reasoning goes a long way toward forming accurate beliefs. For example, people who think more analytically (those who are more likely to exercise their analytic skills and not just trust their “gut” response) are less superstitious, less likely to believe in conspiracy theories and less receptive to seemingly profound but actually empty assertions (like “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena”). This body of evidence suggests that the main factor explaining the acceptance of fake news could be cognitive laziness, especially in the context of social media, where news items are often skimmed or merely glanced at.BERKELEY, Calif. — A few months ago in Chicago, where I was visiting for a wedding, a department store clerk asked me what kind of accent I had. I admitted it was Russian. “Would you take our president home with you?” he asked. His question threw into sharp relief my predicament: As a liberal Russian living in the United States, I am now associated with a man whose xenophobic, antidemocratic agenda I detest.
+American attitudes toward Russia and Russians have always been hostage to the larger relationship between our nations. During the Reagan years, Russia was the “evil empire,” purveyor of nuclear arms, spies and Hollywood villains. The Russians repaid in kind: At a New Year’s show in the Kremlin Palace that I attended at the tender age of 9, the antagonist was an agent of the “rotting West” sent to steal Soviet children’s gifts.
+But there were always counterpoints. Which American intellectual didn’t lose him or herself in “The Brothers Karamazov”? Which Soviet dissident didn’t hope to be shouldered by the American government, the guarantor of human rights, dignity and freedom of conscience? As we listened to the Voice of America on crackling radio transmitters in our tiny Soviet kitchen, devouring the facts that our government concealed — about the war in Afghanistan, the dissidents thrown into mental asylums, the Chernobyl disaster — we couldn’t help but admire America as a moral counterweight. Of all my beliefs assailed by the realities of Donald Trump’s America, this one is the hardest to let go.
+Nothing indicated we were headed this way. By and large, the previous five American presidents of my lifetime, Democrats and Republicans both, all maintained some steady policies when it came to Russia: supporting democratic elements and shunning authoritarianism. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” Ronald Reagan famously demanded in 1987, his deep personal sympathy for the energetic Soviet leader notwithstanding.Growing up in the 1950s as one of the few Chinese-American kids in my New Jersey town, I was so often told to “go back where you came from” that I wondered about this place called China, where I had never been. But whenever I asked my mother about her young life in China, I always received the same curt answer: “That was wartime, unhappy memory.”
+Over time, I stopped asking. Until one day, when she was in her 70s and we were having dinner in her small apartment, I lapsed into my childhood mantra. “Too bad you can’t tell me about my grandparents in China,” I muttered with no expectation of a reply.
+But this time my mother put down her chopsticks and said: “All right, you want to know? I’ll tell you.”
+I listened, transfixed, as my gentle mother launched into a tale with such clarity and force that I sat mute, fearing any sound from me would disrupt the narrative unfolding like a storybook that had never been opened:
+One day in 1935, my 6-year-old mother climbed onto her father’s back in their dirt-floor cottage as they prepared to go to Suzhou, about 60 miles away. She was known only as Little Sister, and she was overjoyed because Baba had chosen her, not one of her brothers, for the special trip.Op-Art
+An 18-Month-Old Victim in a Very Old Fight
+Renewed conflict in Kashmir is killing and blinding the young as politicians remain unwilling to find a just resolution to the old dispute.There were a few awkward drives to the rim, more than a few of his familiar grumbles to the referees and six fouls in those 15 minutes, but Cousins also racked up an impressive 14 points, 6 rebounds and 3 assists. Despite Cousins’s rust and apparent lack of conditioning, Golden State outscored the Clippers by 21 points in his time on the floor before he fouled out.
+“This is his night,” Curry said afterward.
+It certainly was. The 6-foot 11-inch Cousins hammered home a vicious dunk for his first basket as a Warrior, ran the floor with aplomb, hounded the various Clippers he guarded one on one into 0-for-7 shooting, found a cutting Curry for a layup with a nifty bounce pass out of the post, took a charge against a driving Tobias Harris and, most notably, drained three 3-pointers.
+Two of those 3’s, early in the fourth quarter, “really broke the whole game open,” Warriors Coach Steve Kerr said.
+Most of all, Cousins smiled. He smiled and laughed a lot. He soaked in a celebratory water-dousing on live TV from Curry and Thompson, proudly awarded the game ball to his mother, Monique, and came away from his first real game action in 355 days by proclaiming it “probably one of the best days of my life.”
+“Like a kid on Christmas,” Cousins said.
+And that might be the most ominous aspect of Cousins’s long-anticipated bow with the juggernaut he joined on a bargain deal via free agency last summer. That one-year-deal, worth just $5.3 million, came amid leaguewide concern about how Cousins would respond to a torn Achilles’ tendon in his left foot, historically one of the sport’s most devastating injuries. The resultant skepticism wiped out most of his free-agent market.Indeed, King’s views may have evolved alongside many other spiritually grounded thinkers, like Rabbi Brian Walt , who has spoken publicly about the reasons that he abandoned his faith in what he viewed as political Zionism. To him, he recently explained to me, liberal Zionism meant that he believed in the creation of a Jewish state that would be a desperately needed safe haven and cultural center for Jewish people around the world, "a state that would reflect as well as honor the highest ideals of the Jewish tradition.” He said he grew up in South Africa in a family that shared those views and identified as a liberal Zionist, until his experiences in the occupied territories forever changed him.
+During more than 20 visits to the West Bank and Gaza, he saw horrific human rights abuses, including Palestinian homes being bulldozed while people cried — children's toys strewn over one demolished site — and saw Palestinian lands being confiscated to make way for new illegal settlements subsidized by the Israeli government. He was forced to reckon with the reality that these demolitions, settlements and acts of violent dispossession were not rogue moves, but fully supported and enabled by the Israeli military. For him, the turning point was witnessing legalized discrimination against Palestinians — including streets for Jews only — which, he said, was worse in some ways than what he had witnessed as a boy in South Africa.
+Not so long ago, it was fairly rare to hear this perspective. That is no longer the case.
+Jewish Voice for Peace, for example, aims to educate the American public about “the forced displacement of approximately 750,000 Palestinians that began with Israel’s establishment and that continues to this day.” Growing numbers of people of all faiths and backgrounds have spoken out with more boldness and courage. American organizations such as If Not Now support young American Jews as they struggle to break the deadly silence that still exists among too many people regarding the occupation, and hundreds of secular and faith-based groups have joined the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
+In view of these developments, it seems the days when critiques of Zionism and the actions of the State of Israel can be written off as anti-Semitism are coming to an end. There seems to be increased understanding that criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government is not, in itself, anti-Semitic.
+This is not to say that anti-Semitism is not real. Neo-Nazism is resurging in Germany within a growing anti-immigrant movement. Anti-Semitic incidents in the United States rose 57 percent in 2017, and many of us are still mourning what is believed to be the deadliest attack on Jewish people in American history. We must be mindful in this climate that, while criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-Semitic, it can slide there.
+Fortunately, people like the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II are leading by example, pledging allegiance to the fight against anti-Semitism while also demonstrating unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people struggling to survive under Israeli occupation.
+He declared in a riveting speech last year that we cannot talk about justice without addressing the displacement of native peoples, the systemic racism of colonialism and the injustice of government repression. In the same breath he said: “I want to say, as clearly as I know how, that the humanity and the dignity of any person or people cannot in any way diminish the humanity and dignity of another person or another people. To hold fast to the image of God in every person is to insist that the Palestinian child is as precious as the Jewish child.”Supporters of facial recognition technologies said they can be indispensable for catching criminals or finding missing people. But critics warned that they can enable mass surveillance or have unintended effects that we can’t yet fully fathom.
+Lauren A. Rhue, an assistant professor of information systems and analytics at the Wake Forest School of Business, said the #10YearChallenge could conceivably provide a relatively clean data set for a company that wanted to work on age-progression technology.
+But she added that Facebook already has billions of photographs on its platform, and people should be wary of any company being in possession of such a large trove of biometric data.
+“The risk in giving up any type of biometric data to a company is that there’s not enough transparency, not only about how the data is currently being used, but also the future uses for it,” she said, pointing to another form of biometric data, DNA, which is increasingly being used by law enforcement to track down suspects — something many people might not have anticipated when they volunteered saliva in exchange for help tracing their ancestral roots.
+“There are things we don’t think of as being threats,” Professor Rhue said. “And then five or 10 years from now, we realize that there is a threat, but the data has already been given.”
+Like the rest of us, Facebook looked different 10 years ago. In 2009, the “Like” button was introduced, and the site unveiled a new home page to make it easier for people to see their friends’ posts in real time. Facebook also reached 360 million active users in 2009; now, it has more than 2 billion.
+Facebook announced that it was using facial recognition technology in 2010. When people upload photos of their friends, Facebook can use the technology to suggest the names of people in the picture. It can also alert users if they are in a photo posted by a friend.In the presidential election of 1948, he voted for the Socialist Norman Thomas, not the Democrat Harry S. Truman.
+Two groups of thinkers that have had a lasting impact on American culture had a lasting impact on Mr. Glazer as well. The first was the New York Intellectuals, the collection of writers, gathered around Partisan Review and later The New York Review of Books, who combined leftist politics with modernist aesthetics. The Partisan Review writers Dwight Macdonald and Hannah Arendt were early influences; another contributor to the magazine, the art critic Clement Greenberg, helped get him his first job.
+While he was at Commentary, Mr. Glazer’s circle widened. Writers like James Baldwin and Irving Howe would drop by the office, and at Greenwich Village parties he met prominent intellectuals like Lionel Trilling and the Partisan Review editors Philip Rahv and William Phillips. These were people, Mr. Glazer said, who seemed to be “working at the forefront of knowledge,” with their understanding of Marx, Freud and Modernist developments in the arts.
+“There was an awful lot of talk,” Mr. Glazer said, but he had always felt that he was something of an outsider, a “junior member” at these get-togethers, “more like a hanger-on” than a full participant.
+Mr. Glazer’s turn to neoconservatism followed an almost paradigmatic path. Throughout the 1950s, and even after he went to work for the Kennedy administration’s Housing and Home Finance Agency in 1962-63, he continued to consider himself a radical. But if, as his longtime friend Irving Kristol put it, a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality, then Mr. Glazer got hit over the head.
+He had taken a teaching post at Berkeley in 1963, just as the student rebellions of the 1960s were erupting. Opposed to the growing American military involvement in Vietnam and supportive of social policies designed to help the poor, he initially sympathized with the student protesters. But as they grew more extreme — “nihilistic” was Mr. Glazer’s word — he turned away from them and his own leftist past as well. He moved toward what he saw as a hard-won pragmatism but what others saw as a reactive conservatism.The school’s website and Facebook page were down as of Saturday afternoon.
+The encounter became the latest touchpoint for racial tensions in America, particularly under Mr. Trump, who has painted immigrants in broad strokes as rapists and drug dealers and recently mocked Senator Elizabeth Warren with a reference to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, sacred ground for Native Americans whose ancestors fought and died there.
+Across the country, Mr. Trump’s name — and his campaign for a wall on the southern border with Mexico — have been used to goad minorities, including by high school students at sporting events.
+[Read more about the Wounded Knee massacre, the Battle of Little Bighorn and why the president invoked them to attack Senator Elizabeth Warren, a 2020 presidential candidate. And a new book by David Treuer, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee,” shows the history of American Indians as more than victimhood.]
+The episode drew widespread condemnation from Native Americans, Catholics and politicians alike.
+“This veteran put his life on the line for our country,” Representative Deb Haaland, a Democrat of New Mexico who recently became one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress, said on Twitter. “The students’ display of blatant hate, disrespect, and intolerance is a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking.”
+Sisters of Mercy, a group of Roman Catholic women who take vows of poverty, chastity, obedience and service, condemned the behavior in the videos as disturbing and bigoted. “Racism and intolerance in all forms go directly against Catholic social teaching,” the Sisters of Mercy said.
+In a statement on Saturday, the Indigenous Peoples Movement identified the man in the videos as Nathan Phillips, an Omaha elder, a veteran and the former director of the Native Youth Alliance, a group that works to ensure that traditional culture and spiritual ways are upheld for future generations. Mr. Phillips also holds an annual ceremony honoring Native American veterans in Arlington National Cemetery, the group said.
+Mr. Phillips could not be reached for comment on Saturday. He told The Washington Post that he noticed the teenagers taunting participants at the Indigenous Peoples March.4D: I had no memory at all of these brothers, the MAHRE twins, although I probably did watch the 1984 Olympics. Back then, there weren’t a thousand people recording every schuss on their phones, so that may have also been why I drew a blank.
+40D: I sort of filled these letters in with growing disbelief at LITTER BOX, the place to literally “get the latest poop.” If you ever find yourself apoplectic with rage while solving a crossword puzzle, and you’re familiar with the item in question, it turns out that toxoplasmosis might make people flip out. Where are the litter box robots we were promised at the World’s Fair?
+47D: And now, I find myself utterly relieved to not have firsthand experience with the WET WILLY, another debut (that gave our constructor a sense of satisfaction, people). Maybe because I have no older brothers? I don’t know — don’t tell anyone, it’s not something I want to happen. “Noogie” has made many appearances in the puzzle, and “wedgie” just a couple when defined as a “prank involving underwear” (and not a style of shoe).
+Today’s Theme
+There are seven interrogatory theme entries today at 23, 33, 45, 63, 80, 96 and 108 across. Each entry uses a different relative pronoun (e.g. who, what, where and how), and all the entries are commonly heard queries — some idiomatic, some just common to conversation. They’re all used as puns today; the italicized clue for each is just a reference to whoever would appropriately ask such a question.
+The first clue that I dug into was at the bottom, “Baseball scorekeeper,” which I solved on the crosses as ANYBODY HOME. This didn’t do much for me but provide a small hint (baseball/home plate), but it did start to sink in when I meandered up to 80A, “Maternity room nurse,” and found myself first filling in “Who’s coming now,” which sort of made sense until I corrected 75D to DREAM and then realized this had to be WHO’S CRYING NOW, which struck me as hilarious. At this point, the theme started to come together, so much so that I was able to take a couple of guesses that panned out (well, sort of):
+First, maybe because I just got some lovely souvenir paintings back from the frame store, 45A seemed like a no-brainer:The 1,371 touchdowns scored in the 2018 N.F.L. regular season were the most for a single season in the 99-year history of the league. Quarterbacks threw more touchdown passes than ever. For the first time, both teams in a regulation game scored 50 or more points. Dozens of individual and team offensive records fell as players raced up and down the field, apparently to the delight of fans, because the N.F.L.’s television ratings spiked substantially.
+Fittingly, and not surprisingly, the four teams that remain in the hunt for a berth in the Super Bowl — the New Orleans Saints, the Kansas City Chiefs, the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots — scored the most points this season.
+But the recent offensive explosion in the N.F.L. didn’t just happen in the past year, nor did productive, pass-happy, fast-paced offensive schemes materialize in a vacuum. Instead, for roughly four decades (or the life span of Patriots quarterback Tom Brady), a series of innovations, minirevolutions, bold strategies from pioneering coaches and the purposeful rule changes by the N.F.L. led to the unprecedented 2018 season.
+And it was on this path that the four starting quarterbacks in Sunday’s conference championships games — two in their 40s and two in their early 20s — were also shaped.When I was there singing, I heard them saying, ‘Build that wall! Build that wall!’ This is indigenous lands. You’re not supposed to have walls here. We never did. I wish I could see that energy of that young mass of young men, to put that energy into making this country really great.Several reporters who cover the Justice Department said they interpreted the statement as a full denial of BuzzFeed’s conclusions. Mr. Smith, in the interview, said the wording of Mr. Carr’s statement was imprecise, adding that he was “eager to understand” which specific aspects of the article the special counsel’s office had denied. Asked if the statement had caught him by surprise, Mr. Smith replied, “You always have to be ready for everything in this business.”
+BuzzFeed News, the reporting division of a website better known for viral videos and quizzes, has scrambled for respect and recognition since its founding eight years ago. Under the direction of Mr. Smith, a longtime political journalist, the site has pursued ambitious stories. Last year it was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for an inquiry into the deaths of Russians in England, which Mr. Leopold worked on.
+BuzzFeed’s longtime investigative editor, Mark Schoofs, left in October for an academic post at the University of Southern California. His replacement, Heidi Blake, who is based in London, edited the Cohen piece, along with Mr. Smith and Ariel Kaminer, a senior investigations editor, both of whom are based in New York.
+This is not the site’s first brush with controversy. In January 2017, Mr. Smith was the first editor to publish the explosive, but unverified, dossier compiled by the former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele during the 2016 campaign. Besides earning ire from the White House, and some scolding from media ethicists, the site was also sued for libel by Mr. Cohen in a case that was later dropped. Last month, a federal judge ruled in favor of BuzzFeed in a separate dossier-related lawsuit.
+Mr. Leopold, who is based in Los Angeles and known for his mastery of Freedom of Information laws, has a self-described “checkered past” in journalism that includes retracted reporting and accusations of plagiarism. In 2006, he reported for TruthOut.org, a liberal website, that Karl Rove, a senior adviser to then-president George W. Bush, would soon be indicted; the story proved false. Mr. Leopold has also spoken openly about his recovery from addiction. Asked about Mr. Leopold’s past, Mr. Smith pointed to his Pulitzer Prize nomination last year.
+The contentiousness over the recent BuzzFeed article is unlikely to abate soon.
+Its central assertion pleased many liberals impatient for Mr. Mueller to release his findings. Democratic lawmakers were quick to write on Twitter that, “if true,” the article’s findings could lead to impeachment. In covering the reaction to its own scoop, BuzzFeed ran the headline, “More And More Democrats Are Suggesting Trump Should Be Impeached After He Told His Lawyer Michael Cohen To Lie To Congress.”
+The cold water of Mr. Carr’s denial led some journalists to cringe on-air in real time. “This is a bad day for us,” the CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said on Friday, after his network had devoted many segments to dissecting the piece. “It reinforces every bad stereotype about the news media.”An initial report by Illinois State Police contradicted some witness accounts.
+The report, which Mr. Kulis has criticized, says Roberson was given “multiple verbal commands” to drop his weapon and get on the ground before he was shot by Officer Covey. It also says Mr. Roberson was wearing “plain black clothing with no markings” that would identify him as a security guard, according to witnesses. Mr. Kulis told NPR that Mr. Roberson was wearing a hat with the word “security” on it.
+Midlothian and Illinois state police, who are both investigating the shooting, had declined to name Officer Covey, even as Mr. Kulis subpoenaed records of the shooting and Mr. Roberson’s family pressed for the officer to be identified.
+Nick Valadez, a lawyer for Midlothian, told The Chicago Tribune that growing pressure led to the decision to release the officer’s name.
+“Given that the vitriol has died down slightly and given that the name was being batted around, speculated to, as well as the plaintiff pursuing it and amending the complaint, it just seemed to be time,” Mr. Valadez said.
+Neither Midlothian nor Illinois state police responded to requests for comment on Saturday. Neither Officer Covey nor a union representing him could be reached for comment.
+“I want justice for my son. I want this officer put away. I want him to lose his job,” Ms. Roberson said as some supporters held T-shirts with the words “Security Guard. Don’t Shoot” and a picture of Mr. Roberson’s face.
+Mr. Roberson had an infant son, and his girlfriend was pregnant with their second child. Ms. Roberson said he was a musician who loved playing the organ at church. She did not like that he worked as a security guard or that he wanted to become a police officer.“I now consider myself the only legitimate president,” he added.
+Congo went to the polls in December in what was intended to be the country’s first democratic handover of power in the 59 years since it gained independence from Belgium. For the past 21 years, the country has been led by the Kabila family, first by Laurent-Désiré Kabila and then by his son Joseph Kabila.
+But challenges were filed to the court, including by Mr. Fayulu, who said the result was announced only after Mr. Tshisekedi and Joseph Kabila, the outgoing president, came to a power-sharing agreement. The two have denied any such deal.
+Fears of violent protest and a crackdown by the government have gripped the nation since the election. The government went as far as cutting internet and text messaging services in an attempt to maintain order in the weeks after the polls. Service was restored on Saturday night.
+On Saturday, hundreds of supporters of Mr. Tshisekedi gathered in the capital, Kinshasa, to protest the challenge to his win. During a Friday news conference, Mr. Fayulu urged calm ahead of the results.John Coughlin, an American pairs figure skating champion, died at 33 in Kansas City, Mo., on Friday, one day after he had been suspended from the sport.
+“My wonderful, strong, amazingly compassionate brother John Coughlin took his own life earlier today,” his sister, Angela Laune, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday night.
+The police in Kansas City, Coughlin’s hometown, did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday, but USA Today reported that officers had been dispatched to respond to a suicide on Friday night.
+“I’m just saddened that he felt that this was the only option left for him,” his coach, Dalilah Sappenfield, said in an interview on Saturday, adding that “he was always a skater who did more than what he thought he was capable of.”Mr. Kushner conceded in a briefing after the president’s speech that he did not see the proposal as a solution for the DACA program, which Mr. Trump moved to rescind in 2017.
+“At this moment in time,” Mr. Kushner said, “this is a good path forward.”
+Many conservatives did not share that view.
+“Trump proposes amnesty,” the conservative commentator Ann Coulter said on Twitter. “We voted for Trump and got Jeb!” she added, referring to Jeb Bush, who challenged Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination in 2016 and supported a broad immigration overhaul that would have given undocumented immigrants a path to legal status.
+Still, in the eyes of many White House officials, the prospect that Mr. Trump could use the proposal to shift blame for the shutdown and pressure Democrats to end the impasse was worth trying. Mr. Pence argued on Saturday that the speech was a “sincere effort” by Mr. Trump to break the logjam, and he and other White House officials suggested that the measure could attract enough support to succeed from centrist Democrats fed up with the shutdown and willing to side with Republicans.
+But such a coalition did not appear to be forming, and courting one bears considerable risk for a president who is most comfortable when he is defying convention, eschewing compromise and being hailed as a hero by supporters who often equate bipartisan deal making with weak-kneed capitulation.
+The vast majority of Democrats knocked the approach. While many of them have pressed for measures to protect DACA recipients and immigrants living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status enacted when their countries were destabilized by war or catastrophe, most regard the proposal he put forth on Saturday as woefully inadequate. It offers only three years of protections for the DACA recipients and those who hold T.P.S., which the Trump administration has also moved to end for several countries.
+“This is not an amnesty bill,” Mr. Pence said. “There is no pathway to citizenship in this proposal.”BOONE, Iowa — Senator Kirsten Gillibrand represents one of the biggest and bluest states in America, anchored by the nation’s largest urban metropolis. But as she made her way across snowy Iowa during her first visit as a presidential candidate, Ms. Gillibrand put far more emphasis on her upstate New York roots, bipartisanship and small-town political ancestry.
+She talked about her love of RVs and her family vacation last summer to see a Nascar race — and suggested she could make an RV trip in Iowa this year. She spoke of her faith and finding common ground with Republicans. And she harked back repeatedly to her first run for Congress, in 2006, when she ousted a Republican incumbent in a seat that her pollster warned she couldn’t win because there were “more cows than Democrats.”
+“I grew up in upstate New York, a community not unlike this one,” Ms. Gillibrand said as she introduced herself at a house party in Sioux City on Friday evening. Of her first race, she said, “It was a two-to-one Republican district, a lot like the district we’re in today.”
+The next morning, inside a cafe in Boone, she told the dozen or so people there: “I really appreciate being in a rural place. I’m from a rural place. I grew up in a rural place. I represented a rural place for Congress.”“I came two years ago. It’s definitely smaller, but the spirit is very much alive. The experience I had two years ago was indescribable. I wanted to feel that way again.”
+RACHEL STUCKY, a 53-year-old educator from Salem, Ore., who attended the third annual Women’s March in Washington.SUNDAY BUSINESS
+An article in last Sunday’s special section on mutual funds and exchange-traded funds about the investing strategies of three mutual funds that outperformed the market in the fourth quarter of 2018 misstated the process for allocating the assets of the MFS Diversified Income Fund. The fund starts with allocations of 25 percent of assets to high-yield bonds and 15 percent to emerging-markets bonds, not with allocations of 20 percent to both those categories.
+TRAVEL
+An article last Sunday about Puglia, Italy, as part of the 52 Places to Go in 2019 misstated who has been attracted to the region and its winemaking. It is the Antinori family, which operates the Tormaresca bistro in Lecce, not the owners of the London restaurant Bocca di Lupo.
+•
+An article on Jan. 6 about Jada Yuan’s experiences traveling the world for The New York Times described incorrectly the status of Puerto Rico. It is a territory of the United States; it is not its own country.
+•
+An article on Dec. 23 about hotels that have music events planned this year misstated who will be promoting the Beat Hotel festival in Marrakesh. The promoters are the group behind the Beat Hotel at Glastonbury, England, festival, not the promoters of the entire Glastonbury festival.Mary Catherine Sellers and Andrew Gary Sadow were married Jan. 19 at Point of Rocks, an outdoor park in Point of Rocks, Md. Sarah Elizabeth Glass, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated. On Jan. 20, the couple is to take part in another ceremony, also led by Ms. Glass, that is to include Jewish wedding traditions as well as an exchange of vows and rings, at Raspberry Plain Manor, an events space in Leesburg, Va.
+The bride, 33, is a grants specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington. She graduated from the Catholic University of America and received a master’s degree in arts administration from Drexel University.
+She is a daughter of Mary Jo Sellers and Tom G. Sellers of Hamburg, N.Y. The bride’s father is a vice president of Charles J. Sellers & Company, an insurer in Athol Springs, N.Y. Her mother retired as a teacher at Saints Peter and Paul Elementary School in Hamburg.
+The groom, also 33, is a business analyst for Capital One Financial in McLean, Va. He graduated from Harvard.Jacob Victor and Yaran Noti are to be married Jan. 20 at 26 Bridge, an events space in Brooklyn. Rabbi Jason Rubenstein is to officiate.
+Mr. Victor, 33, is an acting assistant professor of lawyering at N.Y.U. and a fellow at the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy, focusing on intellectual property law. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and received a law degree from Yale.
+He is a son of Dr. Ester Fuchs and Daniel Victor of Manhattan. Mr. Victor’s mother is a professor of international and public affairs and political science at Columbia and the director of the Urban and Social Policy Program at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs. She was previously the special adviser for governance and strategic planning for New York City under the former mayor, Michael Bloomberg. His father is the founder and principal of Victor Advisors, a law firm in New York.
+Mr. Noti, 38, is the senior director of content at Blue Apron, a meal-kit company in Manhattan. He was formerly the deputy editor of Saveur, a food and travel magazine. He graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania.Sarah Marybelle Weiss and Rachel Sietz are to be married Jan. 20 at the Temple Beth Sholom in Cherry Hill, N.J. Rabbi Micah Peltz is to perform the ceremony.
+Ms. Sietz, 30, is a taxonomist for Sears Holdings Corporation in Chicago, where she works on the classification and organization of products in the digital marketplace for Sears and Kmart.com. She graduated from Smith College and received a master's degree in library and information sciences from Simmons College.
+She is the daughter of Gilah L. Sietz and Brian S. Sietz of Cherry Hill, N.J. Ms. Sietz’s father is a lead network engineer at ASRC Federal in Moorsetown, N.J. Her mother teaches Judaism to adults and high school students in South Jersey. The bride is the maternal granddaughter of the late Rabbi Albert Lewis, who served as the president of the Rabbinical Assembly from 1988 to 1990. Rabbi Lewis was also the subject of the book "Have a Little Faith" (2009) by Mitch Albom.
+In July, Ms. Weiss, also 30, is to become an associate in the New York office of Evercore, an investment bank, where she will specialize in mergers and acquisitions. She is currently studying for an M.B.A. at the University of Chicago. She graduated from Columbia.Urvashe Sameer and Ryan Joseph Harris are to be married Jan. 20 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. Ronald L. Levy, a Baptist minister and an uncle of the groom, is to officiate in a ceremony incorporating Christian wedding traditions. Later that day at the same place, the couple is to take part in a Hindu ceremony, led by Shukavak Dasa, a Hindu priest.
+The bride, 29, is a litigation associate at the New York law firm Fleischner Potash. She graduated with two degrees from the University of California, Irvine, one in psychology and one in political science. She also received a law degree from Fordham.
+She is the daughter of Sameer Khera of Fremont, Calif. The bride’s father is the vice president for enterprise architecture and mergers and acquisitions at Symantec, a software company in Mountain View, Calif.
+The groom, 31, is a corporate associate at Proskauer Rose in New York. He graduated with two degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, one in political science and one in African-American studies. He also received a law degree from N.Y.U.Dr. Kaartiga Sivanesan and Rajiv Menjoge are to be married Jan. 20 in Orlando, Fla. Pandit Ashok Shukla, a Hindu priest, is to officiate at the Gaylord Palms Resort.
+Dr. Sivanesan, 34, is a cardiologist at Palo Alto Medical Foundation in Palo Alto, Calif. She graduated from Harvard and received both a medical degree and M.B.A. from Vanderbilt.
+She is the daughter of Renuka B. Sivanesan and Dr. Siva Sivanesan of Windermere, Fla. The bride’s father is an emergency room physician at Florida Hospital Orlando and a former president of the Orange County Medical Society in Orlando. Her mother is a former chairwoman of the Florida Hospital Golden Gala, a fund-raising event that benefits programs and patient treatment options at the Florida Hospital Cancer Institute in Orlando.
+Dr. Menjoge, 35, is a data scientist on the research and machine intelligence team for Google, where he works in the artificial intelligence division in Mountain View, Calif. He graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth, and received a Ph.D. in operations research from M.I.T.Kate Lacey Barnett and Avi Lichtschein are to be married Jan. 20 at the Temple House in Miami Beach. Rabbi Shalom Baum is to officiate.
+The bride, 31, is a senior partnership executive in New York for LiveRamp, a data company enabling marketers to unify customer databases. She graduated from the University of Miami.
+She is a daughter of Susan C. Barnett and Joel M. Barnett of Miami. The bride’s father is a lawyer with Waks & Barnett in Miami. Her mother is a producer at Eventures Special Event Production, also in Miami.
+The groom, 32, is an independent software developer in New York. He graduated from Yeshiva University.Catherine Elizabeth Roosevelt and Seán Vincent McCluskey were married Jan. 19 at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral in Manhattan. The Rev. Jason Smith, a Roman Catholic priest, led the ceremony.
+Mrs. Roosevelt McCluskey, 33, is the assistant executive director at the Cornelia Connelly Center in New York, an education nonprofit organization serving girls at risk in New York City. She graduated from the University of Michigan, from which she also received a master’s degree in higher education administration.
+She is the daughter of Vickie J. Roosevelt of West Bloomfield, Mich., and the late Louis C. Roosevelt. The bride’s mother is a senior financial and business analyst in the quality department at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor, previously the University of Michigan Health System. The bride’s father was an account executive of commercial insurance at Kemner Iott Benz, an insurance firm in Ann Arbor.
+Mr. McCluskey, also 33, is a music teacher at Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, and a jazz pianist. In October, he performed with an alto saxophone player at Row House, a restaurant in Harlem. The groom graduated from Northwestern, and received a master’s degree in education from Hunter College through the Lincoln Center Scholars Program.Rachel Elizabeth Looff and Ashley Lynn Ruderman were married Jan. 19 at Limestone Hall in the Historic Courthouse in Lexington, Ky. Dr. Ellen Riggle, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the event, officiated.
+Ms. Looff (left), 27, is a fourth-year medical student at the University of Kentucky. She graduated from Yale. She is a daughter of Carolyn S. Looff and Dr. John D. Looff of Lexington. Ms. Looff’s father retired as an obstetrician/gynecologist in Lexington for Baptist Health. Her mother, retired as a higher education consultant, also in Lexington.
+Ms. Ruderman, 29, is a Ph.D. candidate in gender and women’s studies at the University of Kentucky, from which she also received a master’s degree in English. She graduated from Gonzaga University. She is the daughter of Teresa L. Ruderman and Christopher D. Ruderman of Albany, Ore. Ms. Ruderman’s father teaches business administration and accounting at Linn Benton Community College in Albany. Her mother is a vocational rehabilitation counselor at the Oregon Department of Human Services in Corvallis.
+The couple met on OkCupid in August 2015.Cara Adele Willenbrock and Piotr Osmenda were married Jan. 18 at the Manhattan Marriage Bureau. Joey Tai, a staff member of the city clerk’s office, officiated.
+The bride, 30, is the creative director at the Partnership for New York City, a nonprofit business coalition. She graduated from the University of Missouri.
+She is the daughter of Joan M. Willenbrock and Joseph F. Willenbrock of Wentzville, Mo. The bride’s father retired as a guidance counselor at Timberland High School in Wentzville. Her mother retired as a library media specialist for William Cappel Elementary School in Moscow Mills, Mo.
+The groom, 31, is a product designer in Manhattan for Pivotal Software. He graduated from Sheridan College in Toronto.Regina Hall and Don Cheadle parody 1980s Wall Street in “Black Monday” on Showtime. And “High Maintenance” returns for a third season on HBO.
+What’s on TV
+BLACK MONDAY 10 p.m. on Showtime. The cocaine flows and the cash is blown in Showtime’s claustrophobic new half-hour comedy series, which dresses Regina Hall and Don Cheadle up in 1980s garb and attempts to bottle the trembling energy of a B-level Wall Street brokerage firm operating on the brink of a stock market crash. Cheadle plays Maurice Monroe, the head of the firm, who delights in riding in a Lamborghini limousine and whose response when presented with a bag of cocaine as a birthday gift in the first episode is to say, “You guys get me.” Dawn Darcy, played by Hall, is an expert trader; Andrew Rannells plays an eggheaded Wall Street newcomer.
+CRASHING 10 p.m. on HBO. Following in the footsteps of shows like “Seinfeld” and “Mulaney,” this big-hearted comedy series features the stand-up comic Pete Holmes playing a version of himself. When the series picked up, Holmes’s character was spat out of a crumbling marriage and into the New York comedy scene. In the third season, debuting Sunday night, his character — a spiritual comedian — is returning to the city from a college comedy tour and plunging into a new romance. “While I love ‘Louie,’ and ‘Seinfeld,’ those are about successful comedians,” Holmes told The New York Times in 2017. “We’re telling a story of what it’s like to hand out fliers in exchange for stage time at 1 in the morning at a club for five people. And that’s such richer kind of tapestry to explore.”MELBOURNE, Australia — Danielle Collins, who had not won a match at a Grand Slam tournament before this year, pummeled second-seeded Angelique Kerber in the fourth round on Sunday, sealing the most stunning result of the Australian Open with a 6-0, 6-2 victory that took just 55 minutes to complete.
+Collins commanded the match from the beginning, dictating play by aggressively attacking, particularly with her two-handed backhand. She hit 29 winners in the match, compared to just six for Kerber.
+Kerber, a three-time Grand Slam champion from Germany, had few solutions for Collins and was unable to use her counterpunching to wrest control of the match at any point.
+“It was completely not my day,” Kerber said. “I was not playing the tennis that I can play. She played really well. I think she played one of her best matches, to be honest. She hit, yeah, every ball in the court.”CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.
+Poor Smith. Forty years ago, he had only his bare hands to try to pull in Roger Staubach’s low pass. Had he played in a more recent edition of the N.F.L. playoffs, he almost certainly would have been wearing a pair of the sticky, silicone gloves that have transformed receivers’ mitts into virtual Spider-Man hands.
+The technological advances on the skin of those gloves have been so profound that they now enable receivers to snare passes their forebears never dreamed of catching, and in making the seemingly impossible possible, they may be changing the way football is played.
+The grippy polymer used on the new generation of gloves, said to be developed first by a Canadian wide receiver and a chemist in a Pakistan laboratory in 1999, is about 20 percent stickier than a human hand — according to a recent study by the M.I.T. Sports Lab performed at the request of The New York Times.The data in that report came before the government shutdown had stretched to nearly a month. Now the longest in United States history, the closing will start to take a toll. The latest estimates from the White House’s own Council of Economic Advisers suggest that the shutdown has already knocked almost half a percentage point off the economy’s growth rate, though that drag should end once the government reopens.
+The shutdown is affecting some large businesses already. On Tuesday, Delta Air Lines cautioned that reduced travel by government officials and contractors would hurt its sales growth, at a rate of about $25 million a month. JPMorgan Chase executives noted that if the Securities and Exchange Commission — currently closed except for emergency matters — was not able to give approvals for stock market share offerings, and mergers went unapproved by other government agencies, it could cut fee revenue for its investment banking operations.
+Profits at American companies may be hurt by the United States’ trade war with China. Evidence that it is slowing global growth mounted this past week, with Germany reporting its slowest annual growth rate since 2013 and China saying that exports fell last month.
+Companies in the S&P 500 generate 37 percent of their sales, on average, from markets outside the United States, according to the data provider FactSet, and businesses that have increased their exposure to global economies now look vulnerable.
+But for the most part, stock investors have shrugged off these concerns in January, now that they see the Fed as less eager to raise rates.
+The Fed had spooked investors as recently as Dec. 19, when it raised interest rates, and its chairman, Mr. Powell, said he didn’t see a need for the central bank to change the way it has been slowly selling off the bonds it bought to bolster the economy over the last decade. The stock market slid 6 percent in the days afterward.
+“Clearly the market was skittish about, primarily, the Fed,” said Alicia Levine, chief strategist at BNY Mellon Investment Management. “It sounded like the Fed was on autopilot.”[Looking for TV and movie recommendations? Sign up for our newsletter, Watching.]
+With the partial government shutdown continuing to stretch on, “Saturday Night Live” proposed its own solution to the standoff: a game show parody.
+The first new “S.N.L.” of 2019 opened with a special “government shutdown edition” of “Deal or No Deal,” whose only contestant was President Trump — played by Alec Baldwin in his recurring role — looking for a compromise that would end the impasse.
+As the host Steve Harvey (played by Kenan Thompson) explained to Baldwin, “Earlier today you went on TV and you told the American people that you wanted to make a deal.” He added, “So we decided to do this in the only format that you can understand: a TV game show with women holding briefcases.”
+After rejecting the immigration deal that Congress offered in December, Baldwin made a counterproposal: “I want $5 billion for my border wall,” he said, “and in exchange I’ll extend DACA, and I’ll release the kids from cages so they can be free-range kids.”Skygazers across the Western Hemisphere will be treated to celestial eye candy on Sunday night into early Monday morning as the full moon turns coppery red during a total lunar eclipse. It will be the only total lunar eclipse of the year, and that in itself should be reason enough to stay up late and marvel as the moon gets swallowed by Earth’s shadow.
+You might have heard that this eclipse is also being called a “Super Blood Wolf Moon.” But as astronomers know, no number of edgy modifiers could make this display of cosmic clockwork any cooler.
+[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
+Unlike a total solar eclipse, when the moon moseys between the sun and the Earth, it’s our planet that slides between the sun and the moon during a total lunar eclipse. As the Earth blocks the sun, only slivers of light make it through the planet’s atmosphere and to the moon.
+“If you were standing on the surface of the moon when this event was happening, and you were staring back at the Earth, what you would see is this beautiful reddish-orangish tinted ring,” said Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History.Image
+WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE: CHAOS OR COMMUNITY?
+By Martin Luther King Jr.
+256 pp. Beacon Press. (1967)
+In his final book, written in 1967 after a decade of civil rights work, King lays out his vision for America’s future, including the need for better jobs and housing, higher pay and quality education. He also writes about how reforms had fallen short: “Laws are passed in a crisis mood after a Birmingham or a Selma, but no substantial fervor survives the formal signing of legislation. The recording of the law in itself is treated as the reality of the reform.”
+Image
+DREAMER
+By Charles Johnson
+236 pp. Scribner. (1998)
+In this imagined account of King’s final days, Johnson gives him a doppelgänger named Chaym Smith who, when the pair meet in Chicago, gets a job as King’s stand-in. Smith served in the military during the Korean War and, since his return, has suffered alcoholism and had a mental breakdown; he lost his wife and kids. As Smith learns to impersonate King, Johnson uses the parallel to explore how society determines what makes one man great and another not. “Johnson has created King’s body double and spiritual doppelgänger not so he can unfold a thriller but in order to explore the soul of inequality and some of the unpleasant ways in which the world divides,” wrote our reviewer. “As a journey, ‘Dreamer’ is not content merely to explore inequality and its pesky moral dilemmas; it goes farther, to hold up a mirror in which the interrelatedness of these apparent opposites can be viewed.”
+Image
+DEAR MARTIN
+By Nic Stone
+210 pp. Crown Books for Young Readers. (2016)
+(Ages 14 and up)
+This young adult novel follows Justyce McAllister, an ambitious black student at an elite private school in Atlanta who is the captain of the debate team and has stellar grades. But a number of racially motivated incidents force Justyce to realize some will always judge him by his skin color. In his diary, which is addressed to King, he writes, “I grew up in a rough area, but I know I’m a good dude, Martin. I thought if I made sure to be an upstanding member of society, I’d be exempt from the stuff THOSE black guys deal with, you know? Really hard to swallow that I was wrong.”Seven months ago, Michael Dickerson worked the morning shift at the McDonald’s in Far Rockaway, Queens. He stocked the freezers with hamburgers, fixed frying machines and did whatever was needed.
+Mr. Dickerson, 34, had no problem working hard, he said. But he was barely making enough to pay his bills, let alone make child support payments for his four children. Something had to change, he recalled thinking.
+“I want to live right and healthy and be somebody my kids can look up to,” he said in a recent interview.Each week, our survey of recent residential sales in New York City and the surrounding region focuses on homes that sold around a certain price point, allowing you to compare single-family homes, condos and co-ops in different locales.
+The “list price” is the asking price when the property came on the market with the most recent broker. The time on the market is measured from the most recent listing to the closing date of the sale.
+Brooklyn | 1 bedroom, 1 bath
+$567,500“When it was decided to create a sculpture in that dimension, we decided we could just as well step in and make the world’s largest and, in addition, the world’s finest,” Ms. Bakke said. “That was not so difficult to beat.”
+The Guardian reported on the outsize moose-measuring contest on Saturday.
+Mac the Moose was created in 1984 out of a steel frame, metal mesh to provide the shape, and layers of concrete. It was not only the pride of Moose Jaw but of all of Canada, Mr. Tolmie said.
+Now Moose Jaw has mobilized to make Mac the Moose great again.
+Justin Reves, 32, and Greg Moore, 33, made a video calling on the people of Moose Jaw to action. The duo created a GoFundMe campaign to make Mac the tallest moose sculpture in all the world.
+The online fund-raiser has raised about $2,000 of its $50,000 goal. The Ford dealership in Moose Jaw donated $1,000 to the campaign and is challenging local business owners to do the same.
+“I think what is fun is when a community gets behind something and sees what it can accomplish,” said Shaun Airey, 45, the general manager at Moose Jaw Ford. He added, “We can make him taller, and give him some new antlers and have some fun with it.”“He did a nice job of taking care of his half volleys,” Federer said. “That’s maybe what won him the match tonight, I’m not sure.”
+Perhaps pride kept Federer from equivocating. The difference in the match was Tsitsipas’s youthful energy, which he oozed with his every Tigger-like step. Federer simply couldn’t match it from the first point to the last, a backhand that he netted.
+Federer wasted no time after the match completing his media responsibilities, leaving the clear impression that he couldn’t put this loss in his rearview mirror fast enough. His eyes grew glassy as his news conference wore on, as if his feelings about the loss had traveled from his mouth to his marrow.
+“I have massive regrets, you know, tonight,” said Federer, who also announced he intended to play some events on clay this spring after skipping clay-court season the past two years. “I might not look the part, but I am. I felt like I have to win the second set. I don’t care how I do it, but I have to do it.”
+Tsitsipas, who trains at the academy of Patrick Mouratoglou, whose best-known pupil is the 23-time major winner Serena Williams, was proud of the mental toughness he showed in fending off a dozen break points in all.
+“I could have cracked at any moment,” he said, “but I didn’t because I really wanted it bad.”
+Tsitsipas said he believed from the first point that he could pull off the upset and described the victory as “a beginning of something really big.”
+Tsitsipas broke onto the scene last year by reaching the final of the Rogers Cup in Toronto in August, defeating four top-10 players, including Novak Djokovic, on the way.THE HEARTBEAT OF WOUNDED KNEE
+Native America From 1890 to the Present
+By David Treuer
+Illustrated. 512 pp. Riverhead Books. $28.
+Over the past 12 months, Native American politicians, artists and academics have made uncommon gains. Indeed, Native American women helped to make 2018 the Year of the Woman. In November, New Mexican and Kansan voters elected Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Sharice Davids (Ho-Chunk) to Congress, while voters in Minnesota elected Peggy Flanagan (Ojibwe) their lieutenant governor. In October, the sociologist Rebecca Sandefur (Chickasaw) and the poet Natalie Diaz (Mojave) won MacArthur Foundation Awards, while throughout the spring and summer, the playwrights Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), Larissa FastHorse (Lakota) and DeLanna Studi (Cherokee) had historic openings at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., Artists Repertory Theater in Portland, Ore., and Portland Center Stage, respectively. From the cover of American Theater magazine in April to CNN on election night, the work of these eight dynamic Native women garnered national acclaim.
+Such achievements represent more than added texture to the mosaic of modern America. They underscore the rising power of American Indians over the past two generations. During an era known as “Self-Determination,” Indian tribes and their citizens have changed not only their particular nations but also the larger nation around them. Though still poorly understood, this era emerged from urban and reservation activism in the 1960s and ’70s, when community leaders, students and veterans, among others, challenged onerous policies that had aimed to assimilate tribal communities. The Self-Determination Era has now grown in prodigious ways and yielded countless examples of achievement across Native North America, including the elections of Haaland and Davids as the first American Indian women ever elected to Congress.ATHENS — A peaceful demonstration by tens of thousands of people in Athens turned violent on Sunday, as protesters seeking to enter the Parliament building used clubs, firebombs and other objects to attack officers guarding the building, according to the police.
+For the most part, the rally, called days before the Greek Parliament was to vote on ratifying an agreement to rename the country’s northern neighbor North Macedonia, was peaceful. But around 3 p.m., clashes broke out and footage shared on social media showed the police using tear gas on some demonstrators. The police said that 25 officers had been wounded in the clashes and that seven people had been arrested.
+The office of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras accused extremists of trying to force their way into Parliament and of attacking police officers with stones and clubs, wounding dozens of people. A photographer was among those injured.Ms. Laco also said that the government had “asked a citizenship question in the census for most of the last 200 years.” But Ms. Menin countered that the last time a citizenship question was part of the census was in 1950.
+Some census experts worry that the 2020 head count will be affected even if the citizenship question is ultimately thrown out. “To some extent the damage has been done in making people skittish about filling out the form on their own or having to open the door to a government worker and provide information, said Steven Romalewski, who directs the mapping service at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center.
+So Ms. Menin’s census job will likely involve a lot of persuasion, like convincing community organizations to spread the word that the census is important and that New Yorkers’ answers to census questions will not be used against them. She envisions “microtargeted outreach and microtargeted advertising,” as well as close coordination with community groups and faith-based organizations.
+“It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach because every community is different,” she said. “Every community has different concerns, and we have to make sure that our message is extremely focused.”
+But there are other census problems over which the city has little control. She does not have power over enumerators who will fan out across the city next year. That said, there will be less fanning out than in the past because the federal Census Bureau, which employs the census takers, wants 80 percent of the questionnaires to be answered online.
+Mr. Romalewski said that could help with responses in some households but not in others. “At the very least, it’s new,” he said, “and the census is a onetime thing. If you don’t get it right, if you get it wrong, it hurts for a decade.”
+In the short term, at least, Ms. Menin sees the online effort as “a value-added proposition” because during the six months between when the questionnaires become available and when they must be completed, city officials will be able to track where responses come from, something that was not possible in the past. “We will indeed be able to see, in real time, oh, here’s a neighborhood, these are certain blocks where there’s no response or the response rate is incredibly low,” she said. “What do we need to do? We’ve got to get people in there immediately.”But remember to soak some white beans when you’re done with dinner so that you can break out the slow cooker on Wednesday morning and let it cook white bean and Parmesan soup all day.
+For dinner on Thursday: Portobello patty melts. They’re just ridiculously good.
+And then you can run into the weekend with David Tanis’s superb Thai-style spare ribs, best served with ice-flecked beer.
+Thousands more recipes consider cooking this week are waiting for you on NYT Cooking. Go take a look at what we’ve got, see what tickles your fancy. (You do need to be a subscriber, I’m sorry. You can become one today.)
+And while you’re online? Come see what we’re up to on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and visit me to boot: @samsifton. If you get caught sideways with a recipe or with our site and apps, please write for help: cookingcare@nytimes.com. We’ll get back to you. If you want to send rockets or offer us roses, write me: foodeditor@nytimes.com. I’ll do my best.
+Now, it’s nothing to do with cake flour or spelt, but there’s a new James Lee Burke novel, and I want to slide into it slow. Burke’s good with violence and dialogue, but the truth is there’s no better weather writer working. Watch those squall and humidity passages close.DUBLIN — The police in Northern Ireland arrested four men on Sunday in connection with a car bombing outside a courthouse in central Londonderry the night before that drew condemnation from across the political spectrum.
+The bomb, which had been planted in a hijacked delivery van, caused no casualties or major damage. But after receiving a warning, the police had little time to evacuate children from a youth club nearby and hundreds of people from a luxury hotel and a masonic hall before the device exploded around 8.10 p.m. Saturday.
+The explosion followed a pattern of attacks in the city attributed to republican groups opposed to the peace agreement that ended the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland 20 years ago.
+The delivery van used in the attack had been hijacked shortly before in Brandywell, a nearby nationalist area of the city. The police arrested two men in their 20s, then later on Sunday detained two others, age 34 and 42, Reuters said. The police did not identify them or provide a possible motive.Two days after Prince Philip was involved in a car crash that injured two women and prompted a debate on older drivers in Britain, the police gave him a warning after he was photographed driving on Saturday in another vehicle — this time apparently without a seatbelt.
+British news outlets published a photo of the 97-year-old duke behind the wheel of a Land Rover outside the Sandringham Estate, a private property of the royal family in Norfolk County in eastern England.
+The police said officers had approached the driver.
+“Suitable words of advice have been given to the driver,” a spokeswoman for the Norfolk Police said in a statement on Sunday. She added that it was standard policy when “being made aware of or receiving such images showing this type of offense.”
+News of the genteel warning to the husband of Queen Elizabeth II came as a woman who broke her wrist in the crash, Emma Fairweather, 46, complained in an interview with the British tabloid The Mirror that the prince has yet to offer her an apology.1. The government shutdown lives on, but there have been hints of movement.
+President Trump is still insisting on $5.7 billion for his wall on the southern border, and he announced Saturday that he would extend deportation protections for some undocumented immigrants in exchange for the wall money.
+But it looked unlikely that Democrats, who had added more than $1 billion in border-related spending to their funding bills to try to get him to relent, would budge. Eight hundred thousand federal employees are still going without pay.Mariano Rivera will not be the only player elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this week on his first try. Public ballots have shown overwhelming support for Roy Halladay, the former ace of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Philadelphia Phillies. If Halladay were here, he would surely acknowledge that Rivera, the sublime Yankees closer, helped nudge him over the Cooperstown border.
+Halladay died on Nov. 7, 2017, at age 40 when the small plane he was piloting crashed into shallow water near Holiday, Fla. In one of his final interviews, he enthusiastically recalled a tutorial with Rivera at the 2008 All-Star Game, and a tip that gave him his final burst of brilliance.
+“I’d been watching Mariano a lot, and my cutter was pretty good, but it wasn’t always consistent,” Halladay said in March 2017 at a picnic table beneath palm trees at the Phillies’ training complex in Clearwater, Fla. “There were times where it would be really good and other times when it just wasn’t as effective. Mariano really helped me.”
+I had chased Halladay for more than two years to set up this conversation. I needed his perspective for a book I was writing on pitching — “K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches,” to be published this spring by Doubleday — and knew he would be a critical voice.Major online ad networks offer different ways to target customers. A brand that sells running shirts for women might turn to Google to find people who the company believes are female and interested in running based on their search and browsing history. The company may turn to Facebook for people in a women’s running group.
+Many of Amazon’s features are similar to those of Google or Facebook, like offering ways to target users based on their interests, searches and demographics. But Amazon’s ad system can also remove a lot of the guesswork by showing ads to people who have bought the shirts on Amazon.com.
+Advertisers have long run some targeted campaigns through Amazon’s ad network. Many have done that by working directly with Amazon’s staff, who would place their orders on their behalf. That option has historically been focused on larger brands because it requires a minimum advertising commitment. Over time, Amazon has given more advertisers and their agencies access to the self-service system to run their own targeting campaigns on and off Amazon’s websites, and at a variety of spending levels.
+Users of the self-service system can choose from hundreds of automated audience segments. Some of Amazon’s targeting capabilities are dependent on shopping behaviors, such as “International Market Grocery Shopper” and people who have bought “Acne Treatments” in the past month, or household demographics, such as “Presence of children aged 4-6.” Others are based on the media people consume on Amazon, such as “Denzel Washington Fans” or people who have recently streamed fitness and exercise videos on Amazon. The company declined to comment.
+Just the Cheese, a brand run by Specialty Cheese Company in Reeseville, Wis., makes crunchy dried cheese bars that have taken off as a low-carb snack. By using algorithms to analyze how Just the Cheese’s search ads performed on Amazon’s site, the ad agency Quartile Digital noticed that people who searched for keto snacks and cauliflower pizza crust, both low-carb diet trends, also bought a lot of cheese bars. So Quartile ran display ads across the web targeting Amazon customers who had bought those two specific product categories. Over three months, Amazon showed the ads on websites more than six million times, which resulted in almost 22,000 clicks and more than 4,000 orders.
+That 20 percent conversion rate — a sale to one out of five people who clicked on the ads — was “amazing,” Mr. Knijnik said. “That is the kind of powerful granularity for building the target audiences that just Amazon can give you.”
+Like other ad networks, Amazon uses cookies and other technical tools to track customers from its site onto other websites. They let the company know that a person who recently bought a diet book is now reading news on CNN and could be targeted on that site with an ad for a protein bar. Amazon does not tell the advertisers who that user is, but it does serve her ads on the brand’s behalf.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Hal Abelson, a renowned computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was working the classroom, coffee cup in hand, pacing back and forth. The subject was artificial intelligence, and his students last week were mainly senior policymakers from countries in the 36-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
+Mr. Abelson began with a brisk history of machine learning, starting in the 1950s. Next came a description of how the technology works, a hands-on project using computer-vision models and then case studies. The goal was to give the policymakers from countries like France, Japan and Sweden a sense of the technology’s strengths and weaknesses, emphasizing the crucial role of human choices.
+“These machines do what they do because they are trained,” Mr. Abelson said.
+The class was part of a three-day gathering at M.I.T., including expert panels, debate and discussion, as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development seeks to agree on recommendations for artificial intelligence policy by this summer.
+But where are policymakers supposed to even start? Artificial intelligence seems to be everywhere, much hyped, much feared yet little understood. Some proclaim A.I. will be an elixir of prosperity, while others warn it will be a job killer, even an existential threat to humanity.MELBOURNE, Australia — Sometimes Grand Slam breakthroughs, even for the most hyped and promising tennis players, come when least expected. Consider the case of Frances Tiafoe, the 21-year-old American hopeful who limped into this year’s Australian Open with little to suggest his first week would unfold in the stirring way that it has.
+An electric talent who has been talked about since his midteens because of his potential and hardscrabble history, Tiafoe, ranked 39th, staggered through the end of last season. Then he went winless in a string of early January exhibition matches in Perth. Six days before this tournament began, he was outgunned at a warm-up tournament in Sydney by the Australian journeyman John Millman.
+“Perth was terrible,” Tiafoe said. “Sydney was bad.”
+Buzz? The kind of stirring expectations that surrounded the Federer slayer Stefanos Tsitsipas, the 14th-seeded Greek player, going into Melbourne?
+Around Tiafoe, there was no buzz.
+But all that changed over the first week of this tournament, a stretch that Tiafoe, a 6-foot-2 power hitter, capped on a hot Sunday afternoon with a round-of-16 win over Grigor Dimitrov, who was seeded No. 20. The score was 7-5, 7-6 (6), 6-7 (1), 7-5.In the past, China has helped the world out of such weak spots, most notably during the global financial crisis. But this time, its economy is showing pronounced weakness.
+Car sales have plunged in China since last summer. Smartphone sales are falling. The real estate market has stagnated, with deeply indebted developers forced to pay steep interest rates to roll over their debts. And trade frictions with the West, coupled with tough policies from Beijing toward foreign investors, have made Chinese and foreign companies alike warier of further investment in China.
+“European investment in China is going down,” Cecilia Malmström, the European Union’s commissioner of trade, said during an interview in Washington. “That is more because it is becoming increasingly complicated to do business there, with the forced technology transfer, with the lack of transparency, discrimination as compared to Chinese companies, with the massive subsidies of state-owned companies .”
+For the heads of state and corporate leaders gathering this week in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum, the Chinese economy could be the most pressing issue, even among the trade fights and political uncertainty plaguing the rest of the world.
+China on Monday said its economy grew 6.4 percent during the last three months of 2018 compared with the same time in 2017. For all of 2018, China’s economy grew 6.6 percent, the slowest pace since 1990, though many economists believe the country’s headline figures are unreliable.LOS ANGELES — Cocaine has disrupted countless Hollywood productions, and that was the case not long ago on the set of Showtime’s new comedy “Black Monday.” But this time, it was its absence, not its presence, that was the problem.
+“I need my coke, sorry,” Regina Hall said, an oversight that brought an elaborate wedding scene to a halt. Clad in a sequined denim bridesmaid dress and an enormous pink hair bow, Hall chatted with her co-star Don Cheadle as extras milled about and someone ran to fetch her nose candy (actually a mix of comparatively benign powders like B-vitamins and starch). At a cluster of monitors, the showrunners Jordan Cahan and David Caspe pondered whether key bumps were wedding-appropriate, even in the baroquely dissipated world of 1980s Wall Street.
+“Maybe just a cigarette?” Cahan said, and soon a production assistant was handing Hall a fake cigarette instead of a vial of fake cocaine.
+These are the sorts of behind-the-scenes decisions that arise on “Black Monday,” an outrageous new comedy that began Sunday on Showtime, about a ragtag bunch of traders running a long con on the street’s blue-blood establishment. (Think “Bad News Bears” meets “Trading Places,” with lifestyle cues borrowed from “The Wolf of Wall Street.”)In the plan he unveiled on Saturday, Mr. Trump offered to restore the DACA and T.P.S. protections for three years. But Democrats say that is a nonstarter, because it does not offer a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers, and because Mr. Trump is simply giving back protections that he himself took away.
+The McConnell aide, Don Stewart, said the Republican legislative package would include seven appropriations bills that would fund government agencies that have been partially closed for a month.
+“The legislation that the majority leader will bring to the floor this week would both reopen the remaining portions of the government, fund disaster relief, fund border security and address immigration issues that both Republicans and Democrats would like to address — all in one bill,” Mr. Stewart said.
+Mr. McConnell would need votes from all Republicans and seven Democrats for the package to pass. But only a handful of Democrats in Republican-leaning states might feel pressured enough to cross the aisle. A spokesman for one of them, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, said Mr. Manchin — who just won re-election — would remain undecided on the Republican proposal until he saw it.
+In broadening the package beyond Mr. Trump’s plan, Mr. McConnell may be trying to pick up additional Democrats — especially those who are eager to vote for disaster relief.
+“He’s starting to move the pieces around to see what’s going to fly and what’s not going to make it,” said Jim Manley, who was a top aide to Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader from Nevada. “He’s trying to put the pressure back on Democrats, and he’s trying to see what the possibilities of a deal are by putting a larger package there. He’s trying to see how large the package has to be to bring Democrats on board.”
+But Mr. Trump seemed to be holding fast. He retweeted a series of endorsements of his proposal from Republican lawmakers on Sunday evening, and earlier in the day, he took aim at Ms. Pelosi and pushed back against conservative critics who have described the plan as amnesty for undocumented immigrants.Spiro Mitrakis, the owner of the Purple Steer Restaurant in Whiting, said that was not unusual to see.
+“To each his own, I guess,” he said.
+Mr. Mitrakis said the area had received about three inches of lake-effect snow in the morning, but that the skies and the roads were clear — and frigid — by early afternoon, with temperatures around 17 degrees. “Just another day in the wintertime,” he said.
+Farther from Lake Michigan in Valparaiso, Ind., Samantha Minton is a waitress at The Bait Shop, where brunch offerings include foie gras with French toast and a “Wagyu McMuffin.” She said she had yet to see a snowflake on Sunday, and that overall the storm, which delivered only a few inches on Saturday, had been a bit of a disappointment.
+“I was really hoping to get snowed in and watch movies and gorge myself on junk food, but that didn’t happen, so here I am at work,” she said.
+For many people in Connecticut, binge-watching to ride out the storm would have meant seeing their batteries head for zero along with the temperature. Eversource and United Illuminating, two utility companies in the state, said there were widespread power outages in large part because so much of the storm’s precipitation had come in the form of sleet or freezing rain. Mr. Otto, the Weather Service meteorologist, said the trouble could multiply as the frigid winds pick up.
+“Those kind of winds blowing on those power lines and trees that are already stressed from the weight of the ice, I think, is going to be problematic,” he said.
+Farther north and farther inland, the storm had mainly dropped snow. As of Sunday morning, the greatest total reported was in Lake Desolation, N.Y., north of Albany and in the southern Adirondack Mountains, where 16 inches fell, Mr. Otto said.Fully aware of the memories people have of the store, the Drama Book Shop has invited visitors to share them on sheets of paper that have been taped to the bookshelves. Many simply wrote thank you for helping them get their first jobs, or into college. One person’s favorite memory was “getting to marry the cashier.”
+The papers are helping to hide the increasing emptiness of the Drama Book Shop. Its window displays are still up — currently, for “The Prom” and “Kiss Me Kate” on Broadway — and its famous dog, a decade-old German spitz named Chester, still sits sleepily on a counter by the door. But on Friday there seemed to be more people in the store than books on the shelves. (They remain on sale through Sunday.)
+In the basement theater, a black-box space decorated with white Christmas lights, every seat was filled, with the audience spilling out into the hallway outside. Many of the younger people in the crowd took notes as Ms. Baker and Ms. Herzog, with aw-shucks humility and deadpan humor, shared anecdotes about their artistic processes and experiences together.
+The two playwrights said they had been involved in each other’s work for about 12 years; they also have a reading group together, in which they and other artists test drive their latest projects. On Friday, they reprised their roles from the group: Ms. Baker as Mary Jane, Ms. Herzog as Sarah, the assistant from “The Antipodes.”
+After a brief conversation and audience questions, everyone moved upstairs to get their Baker and Herzog plays signed — but not before the store’s manager stepped out to say, solemnly, “Thank you very much for attending the last event at the Drama Book Shop!”To the Editor:
+Noted in “Cuomo’s L-Train Save Resembles Plan Rejected Earlier by the M.T.A.” (news article, Jan. 16) are disagreements among world-class engineers over safety of the subway tunnel during and after repairs.
+This highlights what we professionals and oversight agencies know and suffer silently to remain in operation: Planning and design are subject to political and economic interests of our clients that bend, stretch — even break — sound judgments .
+Risks of this practice are cloaked in smooth-talking rationales to satisfy agendas beyond professionals’ control. To avoid professional suicide, it’s best to hold tongues.
+Concealed high risk has become inherent in New York City structures, new and repaired. Imagine who is left holding the bag when disaster strikes: those who are licensed to assure the safety of the public.Jeanine Schaefer edits the new series. She recruited Bellaire for the book thanks in part to her work on Redlands, about a coven of witches in a small Florida town. “It felt like the exact right mix of talking about identity issues, gender issues and still having that thread of horror and so moments of levity,” Schaefer said during a conference call with Bellaire.
+Terror and humor resonate for many as an apt description of high school, including for Bellaire. “Me and Jeanine talked about how teenagers now are growing up a bit different than they did in the ’90s,” she said. “It is a trying time for teenagers. I think people are feeling a lot of pressure and negativity.”
+Previous adventures will not be rehashed in the reboot, which will tell all new stories. The setting allows some of the characters to begin at a new point. While Willow, for example, eventually came out as a lesbian on the TV series, she is already open about her orientation in Issue No. 1 of the new comic. “The ’90s was a different time on TV and for the L.G.B.T. community,” Bellaire said. “I’d like to think it is a little more open now,” allowing Willow to be much more confident.“Green Book” chronicles a road trip that, while fraught and contentious, ultimately pays dividends for those involved.
+The film’s award-season run has been just as bumpy and rewarding.
+Saturday night in Beverly Hills, the Producers Guild of America gave Peter Farrelly’s racial-issues comedy its top prize, a win that opens a clear path for “Green Book” to potentially take the academy’s best picture Oscar. Only twice since the academy expanded the best-picture field a decade ago have the two organizations differed on a winner. (That would be 2017, when “La La Land” won the PGA and “Moonlight” took the Oscar; and 2016, when the producers crowned “The Big Short” and the Oscar went to “Spotlight.”)
+The victory for “Green Book,” over heavy hitters like “Roma” and “A Star Is Born,” surprised many in the Beverly Hilton ballroom, not least of all Farrelly, whose best-known film was previously “Dumb and Dumber.”
+“It’s my first time at the PGA Awards, and the first time I ever heard of the PGA Awards,” Farrelly joked during his acceptance speech.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Harvey Weinstein’s criminal trial in New York will be perhaps the biggest and most important production of his lifetime.
+Mr. Weinstein, the Hollywood mogul known for his ego and tenacity, parted ways with his defense lawyer, Benjamin Brafman last week, and is working fast to assemble a “dream team” of powerhouse trial lawyers to handle his sexual assault case — a cast that may feature a woman as his lead counsel, according to people familiar with the discussions.
+Mr. Weinstein’s break from Mr. Brafman followed weeks of intense arguing between the two. It appeared to reflect a change in Mr. Weinstein. He had spent the past year largely in hiding after an avalanche of accusations from women about sexual harassment and assault made him the symbol of the #MeToo movement. During that time, he placed his entire faith in Mr. Brafman — a pugnacious former prosecutor at home in the city’s criminal courts — to speak for him on the courthouse steps and to fight the sex-crime charges brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
+But now Mr. Weinstein appears to be reasserting control over his defense — using the template set out by O.J. Simpson in his murder trial in 1995 — and assembling a team of legal experts. One person familiar with Mr. Weinstein’s thinking said he is “looking for an experienced woman” to defend him against allegations of rape and sexual assault.What did, and do, we see in him? Both a steward of music’s traditions and an explorer of the future. A vibrant interpreter of the music of others and a creator of his own. An artist who can star more than plausibly in an Apple commercial without seeming a sellout — one who’s thoughtful, even analytical, without ever seeming to try too hard.
+Almost no one else in classical music so completely satisfies our polarized demands for old and new, innovation and tradition, head and heart. As Mr. Salonen prepared to leave Los Angeles, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that he’d become “a fixed point of cerebral cool in a city of spectacle and flux.”
+But if his persona has a certain wry distance to it, there is heat in his presence on the podium, and in his effect on orchestras. His connection to the San Francisco Symphony seemed close, confident and charged on Friday, just his fourth time leading the ensemble. (Classical marriages can be shotgun.) If his feet were bothering him, there was no betraying it in the music-making.
+That he was able to come here for a visit so soon after the announcement last month was happenstance. This weekend of concerts at Davies Symphony Hall was supposed to be conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, who has canceled a spread of dates this season (including her debut with the New York Philharmonic) after giving birth in August.
+Mr. Salonen, who happened to be free, kept the second half of her program — Sibelius’s “Four Legends from the Kalevala” — and preceded it with Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Metacosmos” and Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”To the Editor:
+I worry about the nation my children will inherit.
+I worry about the erosion of confidence in our government and its institutions by the working-class community.
+I worry that more and more people believe that all politicians and public officials are corrupt, partisan and out for themselves.
+I worry that as this point of view becomes more accepted, the ground for autocrats and strongmen becomes more fertile, and our democracy more imperiled.
+I worry that our representatives, on both sides of the aisle, are so removed from the reality of working-class life that they fail to see, and fail to understand, the true driving forces of working people’s discontent.“We’re at Cohen’s mercy for the dates,” Mr. Giuliani said, adding that the president “doesn’t remember the dates. He does remember conversations about Moscow. He does remember the letter of intent. He does remember, after that, fleeting conversations.”
+He added that he was trying to keep Mr. Trump from legal exposure if prosecutors uncover evidence of a conversation that the president has said he does not recall.
+Like so many other threads of the Russia saga, the story that the president’s aides have told about the Trump Tower Moscow negotiations has changed repeatedly. First, they said that the discussions never moved beyond their infancy, barely involved Mr. Trump, and ended well before the Republican primaries. Then, when Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in November to lying to Congress about the Tower negotiations, the special counsel’s office revealed they extended at least until the middle of 2016.
+When — and even if — the discussions officially ended remains unclear, and Mr. Giuliani did not provide clarity.
+Even after Mr. Trump secured a surprise victory in November 2016 — and as evidence was mounting that the Russians had carried out a sophisticated campaign to disrupt the presidential election — Mr. Trump’s top aides took part in numerous meetings and phone conversations with Russians that have been a focus of Mr. Mueller’s investigation.
+Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, met with the head of a Russian bank under sanctions and asked Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Sergey I. Kislyak, whether Mr. Trump’s aides could use phone lines at the Russian embassy to communicate with Moscow during the presidential transition. Michael T. Flynn, who would become President Trump’s first national security adviser, discussed sanctions with Mr. Kislyak numerous times in December 2016 as President Obama punished Russia for its campaign of election interference.
+Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty a year later to lying to F.B.I. agents about his communications with Mr. Kislyak.SAN ANTONIO — Donald J. Trump got Brenda Hernandez’s hopes up in 2016 when he indicated that he had a heart for young undocumented immigrants like her, who were brought into the country by their parents. But her hopes were dashed when Mr. Trump became president and ordered an end to the federal program known as DACA that shields her from deportation.
+After the president’s latest announcement on Saturday — that he was proposing to end the standoff over the partial government shutdown by, among other things, temporarily extending that shield — Ms. Hernandez just shrugged.
+“I don’t trust Trump — I don’t believe him,” she said as she hoisted her 3-year-old son onto a swivel chair at the D & H Beauty Salon in San Antonio. The blue-collar shop, with rows of wooden chairs in the waiting area, is a favorite among immigrants in the city. But in the hours after Mr. Trump’s White House address, his latest offer of an immigration deal was finding little support.
+[Read: In Trump’s Immigration Announcement, A Compromise Snubbed All Around]
+In exchange for $5.7 billion to erect a barrier along the border with Mexico, Mr. Trump said he would agree to extend protection for three years for the roughly 800,000 immigrants who benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which covers people brought into the country illegally as children. The president held out the hope of similar relief for 300,000 immigrants living in the United States with temporary protected status, known as T.P.S., after fleeing earthquakes and other disasters in their own countries.To the Editor:
+Re “The Joy of Being a Woman in Her 70s,” by Mary Pipher (Sunday Review, Jan. 13):
+Kudos to Ms. Pipher for writing about women in their 70s. However, I was disappointed that she did not mention the sadness that women feel when the mirror no longer recognizes the pretty young woman who used to stare back; the frustration of being afraid to drive in the dark any longer; the fear of going out in the snow when we used to ski down mountains; and so much more.
+These are not discussed daily but perhaps shared from time to time with contemporaries. How do I know this? I am 76 years old and happily married with children and grandchildren. I have friends who have become family; I have a laugh every day and have wonderful conversations with my husband. Life is good.
+But I miss the woman I used to be.
+Leanna McEvoy
+Fort Lee, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+Thanks for this great article. I went on a bicycle ride cross-country with WomanTours to celebrate my 75th year, and there were eight of us ladies over 70 on the ride. We all finished biking in the rain to dip our front wheels into the Atlantic. Our back wheels had been baptized in the Pacific three months earlier.
+You need to accept change to grow older happily. Yes, I have wrinkles and my silhouette is definitely larger than it was. But I can still walk and talk and laugh, and enjoy children and grandchildren as people who have minds and lives of their own.The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s “Extended Life” residencies are getting an extension.
+The organization announced Sunday that the dance development program, which provides financial and developmental support to midcareer artists, has been newly fortified by a $600,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which will allow the project’s scope to be expanded. The organization also announced the latest recipients.
+The choreographers Nora Chipaumire, Beth Gill, Maria Hassabi, Sarah Michelson, Jennifer Monson, Okwui Okpokwasili, Pam Tanowitz and David Thomson will all receive support, with Ms. Chipaumire, Mr. Thomson, Ms. Gill and Ms. Michelson being given $15,000 a year and residency development space as part of a new branch of the program.
+The organization’s executive director of artistic programs, Lili Chopra, explained in a phone interview that the idea behind the new branch is to not only support creative endeavors but also to work with artists to make life in New York City more affordable.
+“We are really interested in looking at how artists are working today,” she said, “and how we think about the models in which independent artists — especially ones that are really heavy in research and development — operate today.”The last politician she liked, she said, was Charles de Gaulle, but — dead for nearly 50 years — he is little more than a childhood memory.
+But also there was Mr. Laziou, an admirer of the far-right, nationalist leader Marine Le Pen.
+At the other end of the table, Mr. Huvé, the carpenter, described himself as an environmentalist and supporter of a far-left, anticapitalist party.
+Divorced with grown children, he can afford to live only in the house he is renovating — two open-plan rooms with a hodgepodge of tools, an old wardrobe, a simple wooden table, a sink and a spotlight for doing carpentry late at night.
+He worried that the Yellow Vest frustration with government would sweep up the movement, perhaps unwittingly, in far-right politics.
+“It’s not that people are extreme right, but they find in it a way of saying, ‘We don’t agree,’” he said — with the government, with the way things are.
+“Then they say, ‘Well, we’ve tried everything except the extreme right, so why not?’”
+That may be the danger of the government’s approach of dispersing the eclectic clusters of protesters and taking back their public space.
+As Ms. Laplanche watched the gendarmes dismantle the camp on the roundabout where the protesters had gathered since mid-November, her reaction was telling about the great distance Mr. Macron needs to close.
+“The government has no response to us,” she said. “Now they are taking away our right to demonstrate; they don’t want to hear us.”The Hearth & Hound, the Hollywood restaurant opened by the chef April Bloomfield and the restaurateur Ken Friedman in 2017, closed after dinner service on Saturday night. Ms. Bloomfield, who made the announcement on the restaurant’s Instagram account, had acquired Mr. Friedman’s share of the Hearth & Hound last June, when their decade-long partnership was dissolved in the wake of the sexual harassment scandal that engulfed the business.
+Ms. Bloomfield posted the announcement as dinner guests were still ordering, and offered no reason for the closing. The post showed pictures of her and smiling employees, who number nearly 100. “I’m so proud of what we accomplished in our short time,” she wrote. (The restaurant was open for just 15 months.) “I thank our guests, friends and supporters for the warm welcome during a tumultuous last year.”
+Ms. Bloomfield did not respond to phone calls and text messages seeking further comment, and declined to speak to a reporter who approached her during dinner service on Saturday.
+The large restaurant was packed, inside in the dining room and bar, and outside on the patio. Fires were still blazing in the open kitchen, where Ms. Bloomfield was cooking in a blue shirt and apron. She paused occasionally to greet regulars; as diners hugged her, she teared up and wiped her eyes.THE HAGUE — They enjoy diplomatic perks, earn six-figure salaries and pay no taxes. As they enter and exit the courtrooms of The Hague in their adorned judicial robes, all rise in a required gesture of respect.
+So it may seem incongruous that the international judges — sitting on two of the most important global courts — are entangled in awkward legal questions over how much money they make and whether they deserve it.
+At the International Criminal Court in the Netherlands, responsible for trying individuals for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, a number of judges have filed a lawsuit against their court for more pay.
+The judges say the court has not granted them salary increases paid to other senior court officials. They want a pay raise of 26 percent plus retroactive compensation, pension increases and damages that could run into the millions.BEIRUT — Since disappearing in Syria nearly two years ago, an American therapist has missed the birth of one grandchild, then another.
+His family in the United States does not know where he is, who is holding him, whether he has the diabetes medication he needs or even whether he is still alive. They have not spoken to him since he told them he was making a quick trip to Damascus from Lebanon to visit relatives in February 2017, packing little more than pajamas in his overnight bag.
+Majd Kamalmaz, now 61, had been in Damascus for less than a day when he was stopped at a government checkpoint, according to the taxi driver who had been driving him around the Syrian capital. That was the last time anyone has heard from him.
+Like some other Westerners with relatives who have been detained or held hostage over the course of Syria’s long and bloody civil war, Mr. Kamalmaz’s family chose at first not to speak publicly about his disappearance as they tried to push for his release.TOKYO — Carlos Ghosn, the embattled global auto executive who has spent the last two months jailed in Japan, is offering to post a higher bail amount and personally pay for an apartment in Tokyo along with private security guards as he prepares a case seeking his release before trial.
+Mr. Ghosn, 64, who has been charged on three counts of financial misconduct at Nissan Motor, the Japanese auto company he led for two decades, was denied bail by a Tokyo court last week. The court rejected an appeal by his lawyers, who made a new bail application to the district court in Tokyo on Friday.
+“As the court considers my bail application, I want to emphasize that I will reside in Japan and respect any and all bail conditions the court concludes are warranted,” Mr. Ghosn said in a statement released to the news media on Monday morning.
+Mr. Ghosn, until recently the head of the car-making alliance of Nissan, Renault and Mitsubishi, is making new assurances in support of his bail request in Tokyo as Renault, the French automaker, is preparing to cut ties with him under pressure from the French government, a shareholder in Renault.For a weekend dominated by M. Night Shyamalan, there weren’t many twists at the box office.
+Universal’s “Glass,” a superhero successor to the director Shyamalan’s “Unbreakable” and “Split” that stars Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis and James McAvoy, sold an estimated $40.6 million in tickets during its first weekend in North American theaters, easily topping the chart at the end of a relatively quiet week.
+“Glass” completes a trilogy that started in 2000 with “Unbreakable,” a superhero thriller that introduced audiences to David Dunn (Willis), a football player-turned-security guard with superhuman abilities, and Elijah Price (Jackson), a comic-book theorist. While that film was successful at the box office and has since developed a cult following, its sales were modest compared to those of Shyamalan’s previous blockbuster, “The Sixth Sense,” which was the second-highest-grossing movie of 1999.
+With “Glass,” Universal was likely hoping to combine the cult status of “Unbreakable” with the box-office momentum created by “Split,” which came out in early 2017. The latter movie, which stars McAvoy as a kidnapper with multiple personalities, was a surprise hit, making about $138.3 million domestically during its time in theaters against a production budget of just $9 million, according to Box Office Mojo.
+“Split” made about $40 million during its opening weekend, so “Glass” is performing comparably — though it seems unlikely that the movie will wildly outpace “Split,” particularly given mixed reviews from critics. (“Glass” has a 36 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.)In one night, the Rams vindicated two off-seasons’ worth of bold personnel moves intended to turn a middling team from St. Louis into a champion in Los Angeles. Having pierced the aura of the Superdome, where Payton and quarterback Drew Brees had won their previous six playoff games, the Rams will now face New England on Feb. 3 in Atlanta.
+It is not a surprise that the Patriots – who also advanced with an overtime victory, by 37-31 at top-seeded Kansas City – will be there. They always are. But the Rams have gotten this far because, at bottom, every move they made after losing to Atlanta in the playoffs last year, all the off-season splurges and in-season roster churn, positioned them to thrive amid the jackhammer-in-your-ear din that they confronted on Sunday in the Superdome.
+“We didn’t feel pressure,” said cornerback Aqib Talib, one of several new players on the Rams’ revamped defense. “We applied it.”
+This N.F.C. title-game matchup registered somewhere between sunrise and sunset on the inevitability scale. Since September, New Orleans and Los Angeles had jockeyed for the conference’s top seed, with one coaching mastermind named Sean striving to duplicate the success of another. No other matchup embodied the season’s offensive boom better than having the conference’s most prolific teams — who combined for 80 points in the Saints’ Week 9 home victory over the Rams — vying to outscore each other for a second time.
+On Sunday, a full quarter elapsed before the Rams looked comfortable — or, at least, they no longer looked sleeping-above-an-alligator-pit uncomfortable — and then gradually, they chiseled away at the Saints’ lead. They trailed by 13 after the first quarter but by just 3 at halftime and ultimately tied the score, at 20-20, on Zuerlein’s 24-yarder with 5:03 left in the game.
+The other day in the Saints’ cafeteria, Brees, newly 40, glanced up and saw himself on television. The channel was showing the N.F.C. championship game from 2010, the last time New Orleans played in the Super Bowl. His teammates ribbed him about all the hair he had nine years ago, all the hair he seems to have lost.
+Seizing the chance Sunday to lead them to another, Brees drove the Saints to the Rams’ 13. On third-and-10, Lewis scooted out of the backfield and ran a wheel route. Brees saw him and released a pass down the near sideline — the Saints’ sideline — toward Lewis, who was now inside the 5-yard line. The ball never reached him. Robey-Coleman made certain of that.ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — At first, the police described a weekend shooting in central Pakistan as a successful operation against a group of terrorists: four dead, including a middle-aged couple, their daughter and another man.
+Then the couple’s children — a boy and two girls who survived the firefight with minor injuries — told a story about police brutality that was painfully familiar to Pakistanis, and the authorities arrested more than a dozen police officers, the prime minister demanded answers, and officials were left struggling to explain what happened.
+From a hospital bed near his younger sisters on Saturday, Muhammad Umair, 9, told local journalists that his family had been traveling on Saturday from Lahore, the capital of Punjab Province, to a town in the region’s south to attend a wedding. They were stopped near the city of Sahiwal by police officers belonging to the counterterrorism department, he said.
+“My father said to the police, ‘Take the money, but let us go,’” Muhammad Umair said.
+But the police opened fire, killing his father, Muhammad Khalil, a 43-year-old grocery store owner; his mother, Nabila; his 12-year-old sister Areeba; and a family friend, 36-year-old Zeeshan Javed.Beginning on Jan. 22, visitors to Gracie Mansion will encounter a disconsolate sight as they approach the residence of the mayor of New York City and his family: a cloaked, faceless figure sitting on the ground behind its own severed feet, a signal that an unusual set of guests has arrived.
+They were invited by the first lady.
+The figure, made of dark bronze, is a sculpture by the artist Kara Walker, titled “Invasive Species (to be placed in your native garden),” and has been put on a small patch of land near the entrance.
+The occasion is “She Persists: A Century of Women Artists in New York,” an installation of works by 44 artists and collectives in the public spaces of Gracie Mansion. The show is the largest one to be mounted there and the first to focus exclusively on female and women-identified creators, all of whom have significant connections to New York City. Some are young — like Jordan Casteel, born in 1989, and Kaveri Raina, born in 1990; three are centenarians — Toko Shinoda, born in 1913, Carmen Herrera, born in 1915, and Florence Knoll, born in 1917; and many are no longer living. The subtitle refers to the period from 1919, the year the 19th Amendment, which gave American women the right to vote, was sent to the states for ratification, to today.
+“This exhibit is really important at this time, given the #MeToo movement, the centennial anniversary of the suffrage movement, the historic number of women running for office,” the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said in an interview at the Mansion. “And of course, the personal is the political. What I believe is being exercised in my home as well as out there in the world.”PARIS — When, at 12, Grayson Perry began covertly dressing in women’s clothes, he assumed in his innocence that the impulse must have something to do with wanting to be a member of the opposite sex. For decades he pursued his cross-dressing adventures, first in private and then very publicly as a Turner Prize-winning artist whose performances increasingly incorporated his feminine alter ego, Claire.
+It wasn’t until 2000, the year he turned 40, that Mr. Perry experienced an epiphany about his cross-dressing. It was, as it turned out, really “about me putting on the clothes that gave me the feelings that I wanted,” he has been quoted as saying.
+The most joltingly direct and concentrated emotional hit, he found, came from wearing frilly, flouncy, beribboned frocks, the kind of confectionary stuff you picture when you think of Little Bo Peep. Classic preadolescent dresses, in Mr. Perry’s mind and also in his polemics, came to symbolize the antithesis of the macho. And it was Mr. Perry as Claire that came to mind often during the week of men’s wear shows that ended in Paris on Sunday, and not only because Mr. Perry is the subject of an excellent exhibition at the Monnaie de Paris, or Paris Mint (“Grayson Perry: Vanity, Identity, Sexuality,” through Feb. 3).BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Randall L. Woodfin, the 37-year-old mayor of Birmingham, Ala., made an unlikely sales pitch the other day after glancing toward some black-and-white photos of his city’s segregated past.
+A 52-foot-tall Confederate monument, a sandstone obelisk erected in 1905 and within sight of City Hall, is available, he said. For free.
+“Any Confederate museum that wants this thing can have it,” Mr. Woodfin said in an interview at City Hall. “I’ll give it to them right now. Hell, I’m even willing to give them whatever they need to get it to them.”
+But Mr. Woodfin, and the State of Alabama, know such a transfer would not be without political and legal consequences. Almost 154 years after the end of the Civil War, the country is still quarreling — in state capitols and courtrooms, on college campuses and around town squares — over how, or whether, to commemorate the side that lost.But that’s a gamble. Over the last century, Puerto Rico has produced landmark social housing projects like El Falansterio in San Juan, an Art Deco-detailed waterfront complex from the 1930s that, all these years later, remains a thriving community and a model of elegant, humane design.
+Unfortunately, anyone who knows about rising construction costs, the island’s crippled bureaucracy and its legacy of failed projects, and the federal government’s looming deadlines for spending reconstruction money also knows that the only things that may actually end up getting built are sprawling, quasi-suburban projects on cheap, shovel-ready agricultural land, uncoordinated with services and transit.
+And also a bunch of luxury hotels and condo towers on the coast.
+“The system favors cheap and quick solutions,” said Federico del Monte, president of the Puerto Rican Planning Society.
+Omar Marrero, who runs Puerto Rico’s Central Office of Recovery, Reconstruction and Resiliency, demurred while acknowledging the problems. “We will try to keep communities intact,” he said. “But to the extent the legal requirements don’t allow us to use federal dollars, families will have to decide whether they want to remain where they are.”
+Carmen Chévere Ortiz has decided already. She became accustomed over the years to floods in Villa Calma, an informal working-class community near the northern coast of the island that lies below sea level.
+“But Maria was different,” she told me the other day. The area was swamped in minutes by what seemed to her like a tidal wave that suddenly swept away houses and cars. “We lost everything,” Ms. Chévere said. “Now I just want to get out of here as fast as possible.”
+On the other hand, many islanders in similar predicaments, like Mr. Torres, won’t want to leave, free apartment or not.A branch of Al Qaeda in northwestern Africa claimed responsibility for an attack on a United Nations base in Mali that killed 10 Chadian peacekeepers on Sunday, saying it was in response to Chad’s resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel.
+In a statement, the United Nations mission in Mali said that a peacekeeping base had come under attack in the northeastern village of Aguelhok. The village is in one of the most troubled regions of the country, which has repeatedly been in the cross hairs of a jihadist insurgency.
+“Early this morning,” the statement said, “the blue helmets of the Minusma” — the peacekeeping mission in Mali — “fought off a complex attack launched by assailants who arrived aboard a convoy of numerous vehicles.”
+Besides the 10 peacekeepers killed, 25 were wounded.
+The Qaeda branch, the Group to Support Islam and Muslims, released its statement late Sunday. The group, which has gone through a series of name changes since pledging allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2006, framed the killings as a response to a decision by President Idriss Deby of Chad to normalize relations with Israel.The email did not mention that the article would also assert that Mr. Mueller had substantial evidence of the supposed presidential marching orders — a vital component that gave the story so much apparent heft.
+To be fair, Fortress Mueller has been a frustration for reporters. The special counsel’s office has kept leaks to a minimum while refusing, for the most part, to confirm or deny whatever report about its work is firing up the news algorithm. While its impenetrability may explain the BuzzFeed reporters’ casual-seeming approach, it’s not much of an excuse for skipping the steps taught in Journalism 101.
+The Mueller team’s challenge to the BuzzFeed report is also exposing the flaws of the wider media ecosystem, which is all too ready to spring into action at any sign of the Big One. Within minutes of the article’s publication on Thursday, Twitter was ablaze, and cable panelists were effusive. “This is stunning,” Don Lemon said on CNN. Lawrence O’Donnell spoke of “a Nixonian moment” on MSNBC.
+Fox News reported the article’s claims as potentially an “enormous, enormous problem for this presidency.” But the guest who described it that way, the Fox News contributor Guy Benson, also warned, “Proceed with caution on this story — it may be true, it may not.”
+By the following morning, other news organizations had failed to match the BuzzFeed piece with their own reporting and increasingly included “if true” caveats — but that didn’t prevent hours of on-air speculation about the potential implications of “subornation of perjury,” with its echoes of Watergate.
+Even after the special counsel’s statement on Friday night, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC speculated that it wasn’t a true denial. During an interview with Mr. Smith, she asked, “Do you have any concern that this statement from the special counsel’s office might be an effort to dissuade you and dissuade your reporters from pursuing this, even if it is accurate, either because it interferes with the special counsel’s investigation in some way or it is otherwise too uncomfortable for this Justice Department?”In a phone call with the president before Saturday’s proposal announcement, Mr. McConnell encouraged Mr. Trump to extend the offer with temporary immigration protections as a way to reach out to Ms. Pelosi and other Democrats with a more appealing overture, according to a person familiar with the call who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a private conversation.
+Ms. Pelosi has argued that it is Mr. Trump’s intransigence — and Mr. McConnell’s refusal to allow a vote on House bills that would reopen the government but not fund a border wall, despite the Senate’s passage of such a measure last month — that is putting the nation at risk.
+“The president’s insistence on the wall is a luxury the country can no longer afford,” Ms. Pelosi said on Thursday.
+Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, suggested that Mr. McConnell was “way out to lunch” in trying to place responsibility for the shutdown on Ms. Pelosi. Her allies in the House say the speaker is hardly the sort to wilt under Mr. McConnell’s attacks.
+“The bottom line is Pelosi is showing some leadership over here,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of the Rules Committee, said last week. “McConnell is behaving like a coward. He is afraid to take on Trump.”
+As longtime party leaders, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. McConnell have history with each other, much of it not good given their divergent ideologies. Ms. Pelosi was a harsh critic of the 2017 tax law that Mr. McConnell championed. They have also clashed bitterly over the Affordable Care Act and the economic stimulus program enacted by Democrats under Ms. Pelosi’s stewardship during the first years of President Barack Obama’s administration despite Mr. McConnell rallying his party in near blanket opposition to the Democratic agenda.This led to a Tarquinio Merula canzonetta for soprano and lute. In this short 1636 duo, the Virgin Mary (soprano Alice Teyssier) holds the baby Jesus in her arms, trying to get the restless infant to sleep, though she is overcome with premonitions of the suffering that awaits him. The lute (played by the fine Arash Noori) is curiously fixated on two notes, though these recurring pitches are often decorated with filigree.
+Next came the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya’s radically unconventional Symphony No. 5, “Amen” (1989), lasting just 15 minutes and scored for a curious ensemble: violin, oboe, trumpet, tuba, big wooden box and a speaker (Gleb Kanasevich), who says the Lord’s Prayer in Russian. The music is at once grave and grumpy, utterly serious and almost comic, swinging along in a foursquare meter like some slow march with a steady tread, each thematic note encrusted in a dour harmonic block. Then Mr. Noori returned to play Alessandro Piccinini’s “Toccata Cromatica” for solo lute (1623), a work in which lyrical strands spin out into soft-spoken swirling passagework.
+Ms. Teyssier was the compelling soloist, singing Maria Maddalena, in the Sciarrino piece, which over 30 taut minutes tries to evoke the scene of the mystic nun issuing her clipped bursts of words. The instrumentalists become her eight attentive novices, sitting for long stretches doing nothing, or just breathing in anticipation (the sounds of, say, a flutist playing a short tone then audibly inhaling), or sometimes muttering some jittery, quiet mini-phrase. Then Ms. Teyssier’s Maria would sing a frenzied burst of pent-up notes, and the instruments would scurry, trying to scribble down her words. Jacob Ashworth, Cantata Profana’s artistic director, conducted a suspenseful account of this radically episodic and spacey score.
+The audience in pews sat in almost complete darkness; the players were illuminated by theatrical lighting, so you had to give yourself over to this contemplative program, even when you could not read the translations of texts, even if you lost track of what piece was being played. A large and appreciative audience seemed ready to do so on a chilly Friday in a Chelsea sanctuary.MANILA — Henry Sy, a tycoon known as the “father of modern Philippine retail,” whose chain of super malls changed the country’s retail landscape, died on Saturday in Manila. He was 94.
+His company, SM Investments Corporation, announced the death.
+For the last 11 years, Forbes had named Mr. Sy the richest person in the Philippines. His net worth was estimated as $19 billion.
+Mr. Sy opened the first ShoeMart in 1958 after a stint selling surplus boots. It later became known simply as SM.
+From a tiny shop in downtown Manila, SM grew into a behemoth, with 62 department stores, 56 supermarkets and more than 200 smaller grocery stores. SM had revenues of $6.7 billion in 2016. The chain also operates six malls in China.In a “show trial” like this one with intense security measures and a plethora of witnesses, Mr. Cutler said the defense has to mount a show of their own.
+“Trials like this are never won, unless — unless — you do something unusual,” he said.
+Mr. Guzmán might not have much to lose. In nearly three months of testimony, prosecutors have used Mr. Guzmán’s former associates, law enforcement officials and secretly recorded phone calls and text messages to exhaustively paint him as a vindictive, murderous criminal who led the largest drug trafficking organization in North America.
+“He may feel that it’s a foregone conclusion that he will be convicted,” said Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham Law School who specializes in legal ethics and criminal procedure. “And the testimony that he wants to give may not be to get the jury to acquit him but rather to establish his place in history and to explain himself to the world.”
+Preparing Mr. Guzmán for the stand would take time, and Mr. Balarezo said such preparation had not yet begun.
+“Any client who testifies obviously has to be advised of the possible consequences of testifying,” Mr. Balarezo said. “And has to be prepared to face cross-examination.”
+Mr. Guzmán’s possible testimony could come soon. Prosecutors told the judge earlier this week they expect to rest their case by Jan. 28 at the latest. Afterward, the defense will mount its own case.
+Mr. Guzmán’s testimony, if it happens, would be likely to extend the trial by a week or more since he’d have many details to offer and the cross-examination would probably be lengthy.No corrections appeared in print on Monday, January 21, 2019.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).
+Comments on editorials may be emailed to letters@nytimes.com or faxed to (212) 556-3622.
+For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.MONDAY PUZZLE — We welcome Sean Biggins to the New York Times Crossword roster, and he offers us a contemplative puzzle, fitting for this day of observance.
+Tricky Clues
+Smooth and easy, just the way I like my Monday puzzles.
+Some of you may know that sports is not really in my wheelhouse unless the answer is very well known to the general public, so I needed the very kind crossings to get entries like 27A’s Mike SCHMIDT and 62A’s ODELL Beckham Jr. I recommend the same strategy for entries that are not in your wheelhouse.
+Today’s Theme
+The surnames of three important figures who worked to advance CIVIL RIGHTS (the revealer at 57A) are the last words in the theme phrases. For example, the answer to the clue “Regal” is FIT FOR A KING, with KING indicating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It’s a simple theme, just right for a day of meditation on how we can do better.
+Not sure who the other CIVIL RIGHTS leaders are in the puzzle? Click a clue below to get additional help.MELBOURNE, Australia — As the tennis world was transfixed on Andy Murray as he played what may have been the final match of his career last Monday night, another drama was beginning in Interview Room 2 at the Australian Open.
+After a first-round loss, Australia’s Bernard Tomic launched the opening volley in an off-court rift between Lleyton Hewitt and some of the top male players in Australian tennis, a conflict that kept heads turning and eyes rolling throughout the tournament’s first week.
+“I’m going to say it honestly: No one likes him anymore,” Tomic said of Hewitt, the country’s most successful men’s player in the past 20 years and the current Davis Cup captain.
+Australian men’s tennis was a dominant force in the sport in the 1950s and 1960s, producing players who won 52 of the 80 Grand Slam singles titles in that span. Hewitt arrived on the scene many years later and in the early 2000s, finished two seasons at No. 1 and captured two Grand Slam titles.In 2016, the league hit what was perhaps a modern low point when Morocco announced that it would not be bothering to host the annual leaders’ summit. It dismissed it as “just another occasion” to “pronounce speeches that give a false impression of unity.” When Mauritania stepped up to host instead, only seven leaders attended.
+“It’s constitutionally incapable of addressing the real problems that are facing the Middle East,” said James Gelvin, a professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of California, Los Angeles. “That’s everything from bad governance and political violence to climate change, population growth, bad health care and bad educational systems.”
+Matters have not improved much since 2016.
+“Half these countries are fighting each other in wars or undermining each other,” said Rami G. Khouri, a Beirut-based political columnist who has covered several Arab League summits.
+It is only a slight exaggeration.
+In Yemen, Saudi Arabia and its partners in the United Arab Emirates are mired in a war against the Houthis, a rebel group, a conflict that has killed tens of thousands and thrust millions to the edge of famine. (Representatives of Yemen’s Saudi-backed government attended the summit, but the league took no action to address the humanitarian crisis.)
+There are hostilities between the Saudis and Emiratis and the Qataris, whom the Saudis and Emiratis have tried to ostracize politically and isolate economically, and between the Saudis and anyone linked to Iran. There is bad blood between Lebanon and Libya. No one has entirely forgotten that Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979, a move seen as such a historic betrayal of the bloc that Egypt was voted out for a decade.
+And when it comes to Syria and the several countries that have funded rebel groups taking on President Bashar al-Assad’s government, water is only just beginning to trickle under the bridge.
+Soon after the Syrian war broke out, the Arab League suspended Syria’s membership, and it later welcomed representatives from the Syrian opposition. Almost eight years later, Mr. Assad has all but re-clinched control of the country.Two Canadians seized by authorities in China remain detained in an apparent tit-for-tat brawl stemming from the arrest of a top Chinese technology executive in Vancouver, Canada. The case involving Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei, is seen as an escalation of the trade war between the United States and China.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Two white girls in blackface grunted and swung their arms like apes. They jumped up and down to music playing in the background, moving in front of a camera, sneering as a third girl recorded them.
+The six-second video snippet was recorded about two and half years ago, but it resurfaced this month, thrusting Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn, one of New York City’s elite private schools, into the national conversation about racism.
+On Friday, hundreds of Poly Prep students, dressed in black, walked out of an assembly, filtered into the hallways and staged an hour-and-a-half sit-in, which was first reported by the Polygon, the student newspaper.
+That same day, on the eve of the holiday weekend honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the video of the Poly Prep students was lumped into a montage of other imagery that swept across social media: a viral video from the University of Oklahoma of a female student with her face painted black and using what sounded like a racial slur, and video of white male students wearing “Make America Great Again” hats who had encountered a Native American veteran of the Vietnam War outside the Lincoln Memorial last Friday. A longer version of that video posted over the weekend led to divergent views about what had actually taken place.Three decades ago, Donald J. Trump waged a public battle with the talk show host Merv Griffin to take control of what would become Mr. Trump’s third Atlantic City casino. Executives at Mr. Trump’s company warned that the casino would siphon revenue from the others. Analysts predicted the associated debt would crush him.
+The naysayers would be proved right, but throughout the turmoil Mr. Trump fixated on just one outcome: declaring himself a winner and Mr. Griffin a loser.
+As president, Mr. Trump has displayed a similar fixation in his standoff with Congress over leveraging a government shutdown to gain funding for a wall on the Mexican border. As he did during decades in business, Mr. Trump has insulted adversaries, undermined his aides, repeatedly changed course, extolled his primacy as a negotiator and induced chaos.
+“He hasn’t changed at all,” said Jack O’Donnell, who ran a casino for Mr. Trump in the 1980s and wrote a book about it. “And it’s only people who have been around him through the years who realize that.”A fuller and more complicated picture emerged on Sunday of the videotaped encounter between a Native American man and a throng of high school boys wearing “Make America Great Again” gear outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
+Interviews and additional video footage suggest that an explosive convergence of race, religion and ideological beliefs — against a national backdrop of political tension — set the stage for the viral moment. Early video excerpts from the encounter obscured the larger context, inflaming outrage.
+Leading up to the encounter on Friday, a rally for Native Americans and other Indigenous people was wrapping up. Dozens of students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, who had been in Washington for the anti-abortion March for Life rally, were standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, many of them white and wearing apparel bearing the slogan of President Trump.
+There were also black men who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites, preaching their beliefs and shouting racially combative comments at the Native Americans and the students, according to witnesses and video on social media.The Patriots, who ran twice as many plays as the Chiefs did on Sunday, had taken a 24-21 lead late in the fourth quarter on a drive aided by a roughing-the-passer penalty and an 11-yard, one-handed reception by New England wide receiver Chris Hogan. On 4th-and-1 from Kansas City’s 10-yard line, Sony Michel, who had 113 rushing yards, burst through the middle, giving his team a lead with just 3 minutes and 32 seconds left to play.
+The Chiefs responded quickly, regaining the lead in five plays and less than 90 seconds when a pass interference penalty and a 38-yard pass to wide receiver Sammy Watkins led to a 2-yard touchdown run by Damien Williams.
+With just over two minutes to play, Brady got the ball and marched his team down the field, with Burkhead bulling into the end zone to put New England ahead, 31-28, with 39 seconds left in the game.
+Quarterback Patrick Mahomes coolly led the Chiefs back, going 48 yards in just two plays, and with 11 seconds remaining, Kansas City’s kicker, Harrison Butker, sent the game into overtime with a 39-yard field goal that tied the game, 31-31.
+Kansas City had trailed by 14-0 after the opening two quarters — the first time since Coach Andy Reid took over the team in 2013 that the Chiefs had failed to score in the first half — but the team came out for the third quarter invigorated, scoring a touchdown less than two minutes into the half.
+It was the Patriots who looked more energized amid frigid temperatures at first. New England opened the game with a 15-play, 80-yard masterpiece of precision and versatility, consistently confusing the Chiefs’ defense and keeping it backpedaling for more than eight consecutive minutes of playing time.
+The tone of the opening drive was set on the first New England play from scrimmage, when Michel sliced through a gaping hole in the middle of the Kansas City front line for an 11-yard gain.“There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North which is truly liberal,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told an interracial audience in New York City in 1960. He called for a liberalism that “rises up with righteous indignation when a Negro is lynched in Mississippi, but will be equally incensed when a Negro is denied the right to live in his neighborhood.”
+On this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it’s tempting to focus on the glaring human rights abuses, racist fear-mongering and malfeasance happening at the federal level. But taking seriously Dr. King’s critique of Northern liberalism means also calling out liberal public officials and residents who profess commitments to equality yet maintain a corrupt criminal justice system and a segregated school system. It means calling out Northern newspapers, along with Southern ones, to atone for their skewed civil rights coverage. And it means reckoning with the dangers of “polite” racism, as Dr. King warned, which still rings true today.
+Dr. King visited New York City throughout the 1960s and called attention to its racial problems. In Harlem in 1963, he spoke to an audience of some 15,000 white people as City College’s commencement speaker. Fewer than 2 percent of the graduates that day were black, giving visual proof to his admonition that the “de facto segregation of the North was as injurious as the legal segregation of the South.”
+The next year, in a TV interview after the Harlem uprising, Dr. King called for “an honest, soul-searching analysis and evaluation of the environmental causes which have spawned the riots,” which started after the police killed 15-year-old Jimmy Powell. Dr. King was nearly run out of town when he dared to suggest that New York would benefit from a Civilian Complaint Review Board to oversee the Police Department.This week, the Baseball Hall of Fame will announce a new class of inductees, setting off rounds of celebrations — and debates. Fans will argue over whether Mariano Rivera deserves unanimous approval, or whether the use of performance-enhancing drugs should permanently block the enshrinement of Barry Bonds.
+Oddly, amid these debates, one of the Hall of Fame’s key omissions is likely to be overlooked. How is it that it has left out — and perhaps not even discussed — the man who has had the greatest influence on baseball in the last 40 years, who has changed how the game is understood, how it is enjoyed and even how it is played? I’m talking about the statistician and historian Bill James.
+A graduate of the University of Kansas, James began his professional involvement with baseball in the late ’70s, while working nights as a security guard at a cannery. When not foiling pork-and-bean burglaries, he used his free time to record and analyze baseball statistics. He had a quirky curiosity that led him to ask offbeat questions, whose answers he extracted from the numbers he kept. He wasn’t afraid to deflate reputations or debunk conventional wisdom. He turned his findings into articles, and eventually best-selling books. His writing was smart, funny, contentious, and unlike anything fans had ever read.
+It may be hard for younger fans to grasp how innumerate baseball was. There were homers and R.B.I.s and batting averages for hitters; wins and losses and E.R.A.s for pitchers. Teams had winning and losing streaks. Instead of analysts, broadcasts had color commentators.John Limbert belongs to an exclusive club — the 52 American diplomats held hostage by Iran for 444 days during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Since that crisis, which began 40 years ago next month, the two countries shared an enmity that has only grown worse under President Trump.
+Secretary of State Mike Pompeo raised the rhetorical stakes earlier this month when he urged the world to isolate Iran and promised to “expel every last Iranian boot” from Syria. The United States and Iran are so hostile one wonders whether they will be enemies forever.
+“I’ve thought about that a lot,” Mr. Limbert said in an interview. At 75, he remains fond of Iran and committed to helping Americans understand the country, but he finds the bilateral dynamic more dangerous than ever. “I think the best we can hope for is not to get into a war,” he said, setting a low if tragically realistic bar.
+In theory, no Islamic country is better positioned than Iran to play a leading role in the Middle East, because of its location, its wealth and the sophistication of its people. But that potential has been stunted because of Iran’s continued meddling in Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, and an antipathy for the United States that is mutual and obsessive.Yes, strikes by federal workers are illegal. But requiring people to work without pay may also be illegal, legal scholars have pointed out. Either way, protest movements often use illegal tactics. It’s called civil disobedience, and it can succeed when the cause is sympathetic. Federal workers forced to visit pawn shops because of a petulant, wealthy president are pretty sympathetic.
+The modern labor movement was launched in part by the illegal sit-down strikes of 1936-37, when workers in Flint, Mich., and other cities occupied factories to keep them from operating. The civil-rights movement frequently used illegal tactics. Last year, teachers in Arizona, Kentucky, Oklahoma and West Virginia risked breaking the law by walking off their jobs — and nonetheless won concessions. “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws,” wrote a certain reverend whose 90th birthday the country is celebrating on Monday. “Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”
+The celebrations of Martin Luther King Jr. will include a lot of pap about peace and equality. But King didn’t think that peace and equality just happened. He thought people had to struggle for them. He understood that most great societal advances in America’s history — independence from Britain, the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, decent pay for workers — depended on mass political movements.
+The government shutdown, of course, is a minor issue compared with those advances. But it is also a clear sign that the country lacks the sort of popular movement necessary to make progress against today’s great challenges: a fraying democracy and dysfunctional government; a stagnation of living standards for much of the population; a violently warming planet.
+The Trump resistance has been the most hopeful sign of activism in decades. Thousands and thousands of people, mostly women, have been inspired to march, organize, dive into local politics and get out the vote. They have already proven that their activism can make a difference. A lot of Americans owe their health insurance today to this new movement.
+But relative to the scale of the country’s problems — and the strength of past political movements — the new movement remains too small and too weak. Figuring out how to build it up is a vastly more important question for progressives than, say, figuring out who the ideal 2020 Democratic nominee will be. Get the movement right, and the politicians will follow.
+In the meantime, the shutdown reaches its one-month mark by the end of Monday, the same day the country is supposed to be honoring grass-roots activism.John F. Kelly, as White House chief of staff, presented himself as the man leading a charge of “country first, president second.” The attorney general suggested administering lie-detector tests to the small group of people with access to transcripts of the president’s calls with foreign leaders. And President Trump sought a list of “enemies” working in the White House communications shop.
+Those are some of the portraits of the Trump White House sprinkled throughout “Team of Vipers,” an inside account of working there written by Cliff Sims, a former communications staff member and Trump loyalist who worked on the campaign.
+A White House spokeswoman declined to comment on the book.
+The book, which will be published at the end of January, describes a nest of back-stabbing and duplicity within the West Wing, a narrative by now familiar from other books and news media reports. But Mr. Sims, who left last year after clashing with Mr. Kelly, is one of the few people to attach his name to descriptions of goings-on at the White House that are not always flattering to Mr. Trump, and many of the scenes are not particularly flattering to anyone, including himself.
+“It’s impossible to deny how absolutely out of control the White House staff — again, myself included — was at times,” Mr. Sims writes.WASHINGTON — After Russian forces seized three Ukrainian ships in November and threatened to turn the Sea of Azov into a Russian lake, Trump administration officials outlined possible responses like imposing additional sanctions, sending ships to make port calls or deploying monitors.
+Two months later, President Trump has not taken significant action despite widespread support within his administration, nor have the European allies. In Moscow, President Vladimir V. Putin’s Kremlin, rather than being deterred, has grown so emboldened that it is talking again about dismantling Ukraine as an independent state.
+Mr. Trump’s approach toward Russia has attracted new attention with recent reports that the F.B.I. in 2017 opened a counterintelligence investigation into whether the president was acting on Russia’s behalf, that he has gone to unusual lengths to conceal the details of his meetings with Mr. Putin and that he threatened to pull out of NATO. The president’s lawyer revealed on Sunday that Mr. Trump’s proposed skyscraper in Moscow was under discussion all the way through the November 2016 election.
+Mr. Trump has adamantly insisted that there was “no collusion” with Moscow during his campaign and that he has never worked for Russia. He regularly tries to dispel suspicions by declaring that he has done more to counter Russian aggression than other recent presidents have. “I have been FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush or Clinton,” he wrote on Twitter a week ago.“I was really hoping to get snowed in and watch movies and gorge myself on junk food, but that didn’t happen, so here I am at work.”
+SAMANTHA MINTON, a waitress at the Bait Shop, in Valparaiso, Ind., who said she was disappointed by a sprawling and powerful winter storm that ended up leaving only a few inches of snow in her town.Season 4, Episode 12: ‘Providence’
+This has been an uneven season. On top of the usual demands — two time periods, two countries, two major couples, a villain, an ever-expanding supporting cast — there were the racial issues of colonial America, Brianna’s rape, and the fracturing of the Frasers. No wonder this week’s episode struggled to weave things back together as we near the season finale.
+It’s so busy that we get only one glimpse of Jamie, Claire and Ian. There just isn’t time for more, given everything else. Fergus and Marsali stage a jailbreak to get Murtagh out of enemy hands. Brianna and Lord John take a road trip to confront Stephen Bonnet. And Roger has a rotten time in the Mohawk village, meets two new friends and ends up lighting one of them on fire. Busy week.
+The most satisfying subplot is Brianna’s. Not the actual encounter with Bonnet — that’s a real casualty of this episode’s rush. Bonnet races from the season’s monster to tearful fatherhood, and Brianna practically pingpongs back and forth from the cell door as they battle for the last word. Sophie Skelton and Ed Speleers do their best to give weight to the rapid-fire confrontation, but given how long Brianna has suffered, there’s just not enough time for her to settle all those ghosts.
+No, the most satisfying thing about Brianna’s journey is watching her navigate it with Lord John, who turns out to be a dream co-pilot. He tells her immediately that Bonnet has been caught. When she says she wants to see him, Lord John expresses concern, but he respects her wishes and offers his help. And in the jail, he honors her choice to go in alone but promises he is nearby if she needs him.But creating these simulacra of the book’s characters, however accurately, is not the same as dramatizing them. Sometimes it is the opposite. Having a narrator describe his wife in prose is a remarkably different experience from having him introduce her in a play and then letting her speak his description herself. What seemed doting in his voice may seem sharp or critical or canned in hers, and his recitation of her endless admirable qualities may seem more like flattery than mourning when the woman is standing quite vividly right there.
+The production, directed by Leonard Foglia, tries to address the relentless writerliness of the material by opening it up a bit. The Alice onstage is given, in addition to Calvin’s words, some of her own, drawn from two of her published works about illness: “Dear Bruno,” a letter to a 12-year-old boy hospitalized with a malignant tumor, and “Of Dragons and Garden Peas,” an influential essay about the patient’s experience of cancer treatment. But merely reciting passages from these works doesn’t help much; a play is not an audiobook.
+[What’s new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter]
+What we long for are moments in which the couple’s personalities collide: hers earnest and practical, his airy and arch. When we get them, the light of drama finally flickers on, as in a scene depicting a party in 1963 at which the two, meeting for the second time, flirt. But though that interaction is fleshed out with conversation only alluded to in the book, the dialogue — mostly about chiggers — does not really support Alice’s bemused contention that her future husband was never again so funny as he was that night. He just seems like Calvin Trillin at a run-of-the-mill Barnes & Noble reading.
+That distinction between literary dialogue and stage dialogue keeps stalling the action; the only scenes to benefit from theatricalization are thus those whose conflict is subtextual. In the most wrenching of them, when Alice’s health is failing, Calvin must promise that, even if she dies, their younger daughter’s imminent wedding will proceed as planned. Yet death is never mentioned. The emotion is in the silence: hers to convince him and his to acquiesce.For example, in 2017, the Department of Labor filed a lawsuit and investigation against Google. Their regional director Janette Wipper told the Guardian, “discrimination against women in Google is quite extreme, even in this industry.” The suit claimed that Google refused to disclose data on employee salary history, as required by equal opportunity laws.
+Which brings us to the wage gap. Rather than a deliberate, methodical attempt to sabotage women’s earnings, often the wage gap takes on more subtle, but no less detrimental forms. For example, women are viewed as less likable when they negotiate. They’re also less likely than men to get what they want when they ask for a raise, according to Harvard Business Review.
+“By keeping compensation secret, we might obscure structural inequalities and enable inequalities to persist,” said Morela Hernandez, a researcher and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. In the big picture, it’s easy to see how these biases might contribute to a wage gap, but it’s harder to prove wage discrimination on an individual level. Employers can hide “structural inequalities” (even from themselves) with a myriad explanations. When wages are transparent, it’s harder to hide.
+It’s not just women. Pay secrecy reinforces racial biases as well, and the pay gap is wider for black and Hispanic men and women, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a study with her colleague Derek R. Avery of the Wake Forest University School of Business, Dr. Hernandez found that when black job applicants negotiated their starting salaries, evaluators viewed them as more pushy than white job applicants who also negotiated. Evaluators also mistakenly thought black job applicants negotiated more than white applicants, even when they negotiated the same amount. Worse still, the black job applicants received lower starting salaries as a result of this.
+Dr. Hernandez said that because evaluators expected black job seekers to ask for less, they perceived the black applicants as pushy when they negotiated and penalized them accordingly. In the real world, employers probably aren’t even aware of this dynamic; that’s how unconscious biases work. When numbers are out in the open, however, it’s easier to see potential blind spots.Even though the Purcell children are the victims here, no matter the circumstances, the fact that they were lying to their parents and perhaps had a “secret friend” who may be responsible for their abduction plays on Hays’s mind. The lesson for him is that children are never safe outside his watch, for one, but also that they’re as capable of deception as grown-ups. That feeling of powerlessness over a child’s fate was a dominant — and at times, laughable — element of “True Detective” last season, when Colin Farrell’s absentee dad made several heavy-handed attempts to have a relationship to his son but often erupted into anger and violence. When the boy got bullied in school, his answer was to drive over to the kid’s house and beat his father to a pulp on the front lawn.
+One of the most crucial sequences this week’s episode, which is devoted mostly to picking up bread crumbs, catches Hays at a Wal-Mart in the 1990 timeline with his two children, Henry and Becca (Isaiah C. Morgan and Kennedi Butler), who are still of elementary school age. He demands they stay by his side, despite their antsy desire to visit the toy aisle, and when Becca wanders off as he’s picking out toilet paper, he quickly loses his cool.
+He dashes through aisles with his son, has customer service call for her over the public address system and even demands that they lock down the entire store to keep anyone from getting out. When she turns up, his reaction is maybe 20 percent relief and 80 percent fury, and he terrorizes her just as Farrell terrorized his already put-upon son last season.
+Back home, he barks at his wife for acting too giddy over a piece of good information she picked up from the police about Julie Purcell’s reappearance at the drugstore robbery. He barks at her again to check on the kids, and gets reminded that she spends far more time looking after them than he does. The difference between Hays and Farrell’s character, however, is that the big case is about children, so his unhinged rants around and about them cannot be chalked up to garden-variety cop-on-the-edge behavior. We don’t know everything that has happened in the decade between the Purcell case breaking and the scene at Wall-Mart, but we know enough that his fear over what can happen to kids — and his knowledge that they can lie — has poisoned his thinking.
+And although we also don’t know why the grown-up Becca is estranged from him in the 2015 timeline, his temperament suggests the answer.BEIJING — China’s economy is slowing, and the slowdown is probably worse than Beijing says.
+Official numbers released on Monday show an economy that is posting new, but manageable, lows. For the last three months of 2018, growth came in at 6.4 percent compared with a year earlier. That’s the slowest pace since a decade ago, when China was grappling with the global financial crisis.
+For the full year, according to official data, the Chinese economy grew 6.6 percent. That’s the weakest pace of growth since 1990, when China’s economic miracle stumbled in the aftermath of the crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square the year before.
+As slowdowns go, the numbers indicate a mild one befitting a big, maturing economy like China’s. While the figures match historic lows, they show only a small drop from previous periods.
+Monthly data released on Monday also suggested better-than-expected consumer spending and industrial production in December, raising the possibility that growth is stabilizing.NEW ORLEANS — The Saints’ locker room at the Superdome was consumed by silence. Players dressed quickly before departing. A mountain of shoulder pads formed at the center of the room, next to a couple of yellow duffel bags labeled “PLAYOFFS.” Defensive tackle David Onyemata pulled on black jeans with designer rips that revealed skinned knees.
+When running back Mark Ingram was asked for his reaction to the moment that had freshly defined the N.F.C. championship on Sunday afternoon, he stared at the floor in front of him and shook his head. When he finally spoke, it came out a whisper.
+“I can’t say any words,” he said.
+The topic of the day, and one that will probably linger like a noxious cloud over football-crazed New Orleans for years, was a noncall that had helped the Los Angeles Rams secure their Super Bowl berth with a 26-23 overtime victory over the Saints. On a cold day outside, the crowd left the building bubbling with rage. Most of the players tried to exercise at least some restraint.
+“Nothing you can do about it now,” wide receiver Tommylee Lewis said.
+The play in question happened late in the fourth quarter of a tie game. On third-and-10 at the Rams’ 13, Saints quarterback Drew Brees lofted a pass toward Lewis, who had run a wheel route out of the backfield toward the right sideline. But well before the ball arrived, Lewis was clobbered by cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman, who had his back to Brees and to the airborne ball — and later acknowledged that, yes, he had probably committed a pass-interference penalty.JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said on Monday that it had attacked Iranian military targets in Syria, capping an exchange of blows in a rare, direct confrontation between the two antagonists that risks escalating the fight over Iran’s military entrenchment in Syria.
+Israeli military officials said the latest strikes, most likely the broadest wave in months, were in retaliation for Iranian forces launching a surface-to-surface missile from the Damascus area on Sunday toward the northern part of the Israeli-held Golan Heights. They said that the missile had endangered a ski resort and other areas where civilians were present, but that it had been successfully intercepted by Israel’s air defenses.
+The Iranian missile, in turn, was fired shortly after a strike against a weapons store in Syria, for which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel strongly hinted that his country was responsible.
+Israel’s acknowledgment of its strikes reflect a shift in policy, with the country increasingly taking responsibility for specific attacks in Syrian territory after years of ambiguity.But the biggest “Jew” today in the demonology of modern anti-Semitism is the Jewish state, Israel. While there are perfectly legitimate criticisms that one can make of Israel or the actions of its government — and I have never been shy about making them — those criticisms cross the line into anti-Semitism when they ascribe evil, almost supernatural powers to Israel in a manner that replicates classic anti-Semitic slanders.
+During the weeklong November 2012 war, which began when Hamas fired roughly 100 rockets at civilian targets, Israel “hypnotized” nobody. It was subject to the usual barrage of intense criticism in the news media and at the United Nations, and from the leaders of other nations, not to mention protesters across the world. That Israel continues to retain support in the United States among mainstream Democrats and Republicans is because — contrary to Ms. Omar’s tweet — the Jewish state is not engaged in “evil doings,” but defending itself against the enemies pressing on all of its borders, including Hamas, which has genocide of the Jews, and a belief in Jewish manipulative power, at the heart of its ideology. The original Hamas charter from 1988, only recently revised, claimed that the Jews orchestrated the French and Russian revolutions and both world wars.
+Those who call themselves anti-Zionists usually insist they are not anti-Semites. But I struggle to see what else to call an ideology that seeks to eradicate only one state in the world — the one that happens to be the Jewish one — while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority. Israeli Jews, descended in equal parts from people displaced from Europe and the Islamic world, are barely 6.5 million of the world’s 7.7 billion people. What is it about them, exactly, that puts them beyond the pale?
+During that interview with CNN, Ms. Omar also tried to defend another of her controversial tweets, this one from last Tuesday, suggesting that Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican, was being blackmailed. Many people read this as an insinuation that he is gay and closeted, and someone was threatening to out him. Her evidence? She had none. But it was in keeping with her predilection for making accusations based on nothing more than prejudiced stereotypes.
+Democrats may want to believe that such conspiracy thinking is the domain of the Republican Party. But Ms. Omar’s comments are proof that no party has a monopoly on speciousness.
+The particular challenge in the case of Ms. Omar is that she is exactly the kind of politician a vast majority of American Jews, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic and who have long aligned themselves with liberal causes, want to celebrate: Here is a refugee, a mother, a Muslim and a woman of color — the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress. It’s no wonder she has already landed on the cover of Time magazine and in front of Annie Leibovitz’s camera. Who wouldn’t want to cheer her on?
+Indeed, some Jews have insisted that we ought to hold back from criticizing people of color who have recently exposed their anti-Semitism (Tamika Mallory, Marc Lamont Hill) because, well, it’s just not a good look to be criticizing leaders of the black community right now.BIXLER HIGH PRIVATE EYE (2019) 7 p.m. on Nickelodeon. For kids too young for “Riverdale,” Nickelodeon’s original movie may provide all the mystery while replacing the more adult themes with some light fun and humor. Follow the teenage detective Xander DeWitt (Jace Norman) as he tries to find his missing father. His new school, Bixler Valley High, may lead to a break in the case, but he must first forge a partnership with the school’s investigative reporter Kenzie Messina (Ariel Martin).
+CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER 8 p.m. on CBS. Where can you find Ryan Lochte, Dina Lohan, Anthony Scaramucci and Tamar Braxton in the same place? The second season of “Celebrity Big Brother” will put them and other stars under constant surveillance as they share a house, with no connection to the outside world. As they fight to become the last remaining house guest, be prepared for stellar fights, alliances and betrayals, and some memorable lines.
+PAWN STARS 10 p.m. on History Channel. One of the History Channel’s most popular shows returns for its 16th season of following three generations of the Harrison family and the inner workings of their pawnshop in Las Vegas. The series turns the world of hocking into one of amusement and suspense, where viewers can expect to celebrate the shop’s successes as much as the Harrisons do.
+What’s StreamingGood Monday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump offered Democrats a deal: temporary protections for the so-called Dreamers, in exchange for $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall. Democratic leaders called it a “hostage taking,” saying they wouldn’t negotiate until the government reopens. On Sunday, the president attacked Democrats and defended his plan to conservative critics who said he gave in to liberals’ demands.
+• Resolving the shutdown may require cooperation from the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi. If history is any indication, it won’t be an easy task.
+• Last week, a group of House freshmen in Trump-leaning districts convened a private strategy session to discuss how they could press Ms. Pelosi to reclaim the issue of border security for Democrats.There it was in the night sky as Sunday stretched into Monday: a total lunar eclipse. Where people had clear conditions and unobstructed views, the moon took on a coppery red color.
+It was the only such eclipse of 2019, and it occurred just before midnight Eastern time. In parts of New York City, the night might have been frigid enough to keep potential skywatchers indoors, but the clouds had cleared enough for a good view, following cloudy obstructions earlier in the day.
+The eclipse took place because Earth got between the sun and the moon, throwing a shadow over our planet’s pearly satellite. It’s the opposite of a solar eclipse, when the moon gets in the sun’s way, causing night to fall during day on parts of Earth’s surface.
+The eclipse also marked a supermoon — a full moon that is at perigee, or much closer to Earth than usual. To the naked eye, a supermoon is barely perceptible, but it was another reason to enjoy the night’s astronomical show. Some even called it the “super blood wolf moon.”This has been a recurrent theme for De Laurentiis this season. He has singled out Frosinone — a minor team from a town between Rome and Naples, promoted to Italy’s top league, Serie A, for only the second time in its history last year — as an example of a club that arrives in the top flight “already relegated.”
+Clubs like Frosinone do not draw fans, or interest, or broadcasters to the league, De Laurentiis says. They come up, they do not try to compete, and they go back down, except with their coffers stuffed by what he sees as an unwarranted share of the division’s television revenue.
+“The problem is the small teams have the same rights as the big ones,” he said, adding, with a reference to a type of bread: “Why should Frosinone have a season in Serie A, be given a slice of the pagnotta and then be relegated back to the third division? If they cannot compete, if they finish last, they should have to pay a fine. They shouldn’t be given money for failing.”
+After yet another tangent in which he dismisses an overmatched club in a major league as a mere “sparring partner,” he quickly builds up a head of steam. “Promotion and relegation is the biggest idiocy in soccer,” De Laurentiis says. “Especially when you also have UEFA trying to force clubs to comply with financial fair play rules. Clubs should be structured geographically, so they can all be self-sufficient. If they cannot survive financially, if they cannot be self-sufficient, they should be booted out.”
+It would be easy to listen to De Laurentiis’s words, to hear the many and varied ways in which he feels soccer has gotten things wrong, and to assume that he holds it in contempt, that he has wearied of the sport in the 15 years or so since he bought up what remained of Napoli — “just the name,” he has said previously — and set about reinvigorating it.
+His actions, though, are rather different. De Laurentiis is not distancing himself from soccer; rather, he is embedding himself more deeply in it. He has, for several years, been seeking to add another club to his portfolio; ideally, he would have liked one in London. “We never found the occasion,” he said.BENSALEM, Pa. — They call it the “magic box.” Its trick is speedy, nearly automated processing of DNA.
+“It’s groundbreaking to have it in the police department,” said Detective Glenn Vandegrift of the Bensalem Police Department . “ If we can do it, any department in the country can do it.”
+Bensalem, a suburb in Bucks County, near Philadelphia, is on the leading edge of a revolution in how crimes are solved. For years, when police wanted to learn whether a suspect’s DNA matched previously collected crime-scene DNA, they sent a sample to an outside lab, then waited a month or more for results.
+But in early 2017, the police booking station in Bensalem became the first in the country to install a Rapid DNA machine, which provides results in 90 minutes, and which police can operate themselves. Since then, a growing number of law enforcement agencies across the country — in Houston, Utah , Delaware — have begun operating similar machines and analyzing DNA on their own .They All Offered
+Dear Diary:
+On June 13, 2018, eight months pregnant with my first child, I rode the subway four times.
+On my way to work at 9:45 a.m., a man on an uptown R closed the mystery novel he was reading and stood up.
+“Please take my seat,” he said.
+A woman with damp hair made eye contact with me.
+“Seat?” she mouthed.
+A man with enormous headphones and enormous sweatpants widened his eyes as if to say, “I see you” and began to stand.
+I thanked each of them, but declined their offers. I was only going three stops.
+There was more of the same on my way to and from a doctor’s appointment later that afternoon: eye contact and gestures from a teenage girl in a school uniform, two men in suits, an older man with a robust mustache and a woman with extravagant nails playing a casino game on her phone.
+I declined each offer again. It was just two stops each way.
+At 6:45 p.m., I waited on a crowded platform at the 49th Street station, ignoring the humidity and the smells of the subway.
+A downtown W arrived and the doors opened. As I shuffled onto the train, I felt a hand on my elbow. A woman in a skirt suit with bags on her lap and earbuds in smiled at me and stood up.
+I nodded in appreciation. I was ready to sit.
+— Alexis Anzelone AllenThe soldiers seemed to have made little effort to hide their presence or vary their routine to make it harder for enemies to track them.
+In a newsletter ISIS released shortly after the attack, the group quoted a member of its “emni,” or intelligence and security branch, based inside Manbij, who explained that the militant group had regularly tried to hit American forces in rural Manbij. Their efforts failed until last week.
+In the article, the ISIS operative explained the surveillance the group had used, saying American forces were positioned at three small bases on the outskirts of Manbij. He said United States troops moved regularly among these bases in convoys of five to 10 armored cars, escorted by guard vehicles belonging to an American-backed Kurdish militia.
+While it is impossible to verify the claims made in the ISIS newsletter — and the Pentagon has released no further details on the attack — the surveillance described in the article is consistent with what is known about how the group is carrying out its insurgency.
+He explained that American soldiers entered the city in convoys of Land Cruisers, but rarely appeared outside their armored cars, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist content.
+“To conduct an attack like this means that ISIS was conducting intelligence and reconnaissance on the movement of U.S. soldiers and had someone pre-positioned in the city so that once they got info on timing and location they could get someone on the site pretty fast,” said Mr. Jones of the strategic and international studies group. “That means that in Manbij, they have a cell structure.”
+Mr. Jones said strikes like the one on the American troops require militants to carry out intelligence, build the bomb, transport the bomb and deploy a suicide bomber.
+“It shows they have a clandestine network,” he said.Mr. Sialelli’s “singular and very personal vision, his audacity, his culture, his energy and ability to build a strong creative team definitely convinced us,” Mr. Hecquet said in the announcement. He was in China and not available for further comment.
+There is a lot riding on the choice, not just for Mr. Sialelli but also for Fosun, a relative newcomer to the luxury industry.
+Lanvin was once the darling of the fashion set thanks to the designer Alber Elbaz, who along with the former owner Shaw-Lan Wang revived the house he called a “sleeping beauty” and made it beloved of stars like Meryl Streep and Natalie Portman. But it has recently suffered from poor management, designer churn, plunging revenues and internal strife. After a disagreement with Mrs. Wang, Mr. Elbaz was fired in 2015; he was replaced the next year by Bouchra Jarrar, who lasted only 16 months before also coming into conflict with management. Her successor, Olivier Lapidus, made it half as long.
+Though Lanvin men’s wear was overseen for 14 years by Lucas Ossendrijver (who left last November), the house had been largely defined by Mr. Elbaz’s women’s wear, and the result of the chaos after his dismissal was an almost total loss of identity. By the time Fosun bought the company early last year, it was seen as an example of how quickly brand equity and reputation could be destroyed, rather than as a heritage jewel. (The label was founded by Jeanne Lanvin in 1899.)BURBANK, Calif. — In his opening monologue here one recent Thursday afternoon, Conan O’Brien told his studio audience he’d discovered a trick to help him get used to the new half-hour running time of his TBS late-night show, “Conan.”
+“I ordered a Domino’s pizza,” he said. “I’ll know when it arrives to shut the [expletive] up.”
+This was just a test show — an episode not intended for air and an opportunity for O’Brien to adjust to the new rhythms of his refashioned program, which formerly ran for an hour a night.
+As of Tuesday, he will have no such safety net. That’s when, after having taken a break for more than three months, O’Brien will resume hosting “Conan” in its shortened version.
+[Read an interview with Conan O’Brien about the new “Conan.”]
+This modified program is one he hopes will be looser, less predictable and more intimate, with a spirit informed by other projects that O’Brien pursued during his production hiatus, including a podcast and a live tour.That said, people facing cancer often can glean valuable information and support through the internet. “The internet can be a tool that can give people access to good scientifically vetted information,” Dr. Schapira said. “It can help patients be better prepared for a consultation with an expert. And after such a consultation, they can check on the wisdom of the advice they got.”
+She suggests relying on web-based resources that are free of commercial interests. Even sites posted by medical institutions can be self-promoting. In addition to www.cancer.net, which is prepared by members of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, Dr. Schapira recommended information offered by the American Cancer Society (www.cancer.org) and the National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov), as well as the free patient-oriented arm of a site called UpToDate that translates into lay terms the best available information that doctors get.
+The cancer institute notes that the three letters attached to a site’s domain name can give people insight into the independence and validity of information it contains; best to choose .edu or .gov over .com.
+In addition to providing valuable information and guidance to trustworthy sources, the internet can help patients glean psychosocial support through online groups. In a review of 170 studies of patients who use information technology, Danielle Gentile of the Levine Cancer Institute of Atrium Health in Charlotte, N.C., and her co-authors found that social media communities can be very helpful to cancer patients, especially those who lack personal social support. Cancer patients can converse with others, anonymously or otherwise, about emotional and spiritual issues and glean helpful firsthand tips on dealing with treatment-related issues.
+But while some online communities “are curated by medical professionals, others may be posted by people who have no scientific knowledge,” Dr. Schapira cautioned. The information patients glean through such lay communities is best discussed with their doctors lest they be led down the garden path of bad advice.
+She also suggested that patients not be pressured to research their cancers until and unless they are emotionally and intellectually ready to deal with the information they uncover.
+“It may be better to let others look things up,” she said. “Different people need different information at different times. Some people are not ready to absorb all the information upfront, and that’s completely normal. Some want to receive the information but leave decisions to the experts, while others want to have a hand in making the decisions.”
+Don’t be afraid to discuss alternative remedies with the doctors treating your cancer, and be sure to tell them about any such remedy you plan to try in case it can interact badly with prescribed treatments. Nearly all major medical centers now have departments of integrative medicine, and today’s oncologists are well aware of how much the mind can influence the body’s well-being, Dr. Schapira said.Sometimes the seemingly small things in life can be major stressors.
+Nobody likes sitting in traffic, for example. According to one study, commuting is one of the least pleasant things we do. But it’s not just an annoying time waster — there’s a case that it’s a public health issue.
+According to analysis by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute, the average American commuter spends 42 hours per year stuck in rush-hour traffic. In the Los Angeles area, the figure is nearly twice that, equivalent to more than three days. A 2015 Los Angeles Times poll found that among residents of that city, traffic concerns exceed those pertaining to personal safety, finances or housing costs.
+The total cost of traffic associated with lost time and wasted fuel exceeds $100 billion per year. As time slips away, idling vehicles add pollution, which has environmental and health consequences, including contributions to climate change. Long-term exposure to vehicle exhaust is associated with respiratory problems, especially in children.
+Another toll is to psychological well-being, stemming from the sense of helplessness we experience in traffic, and its unpredictability. This, too, can be quantified. One study found that to save a minute of time spent in traffic, people would trade away five minutes of any other leisure activity. Another study found that we deal better with the commuting delays that we can anticipate.Demolition was halted to figure out what the painting was and how it came to be in what was about to be a shop. Seeing the aristocrats on horseback and the mosque in the picture, Mr. Bolen said, visions of Crusaders and Knights Templar began to dance in his head. “I think maybe I have seen too many movies,” he said.
+A Whodunit
+In the game of six degrees of separation, this was a good one: Mr. Bolen’s mother-in-law, Annette de la Renta, had cousins (via her mother, Jane Engelhard) who had married into the de La Rochefoucauld family, storied members of the French aristocracy. One of those family members happened to live across the street from the new de la Renta boutique.
+So when the painting was found, and it became clear Mr. Bolen would have to talk to the building’s owners, whom he had never met (the lease had been negotiated through a broker), his relative was able to make the introductions. Another de La Rochefoucauld, who happened to work at the Louvre, got a recommendation for an art historian: Stephane Pinta of the Cabinet Turquin, an expert in old-master paintings.
+Mr. Pinta determined that the painting was an oil on canvas created in 1674 by Arnould de Vuez, a painter who worked with Charles Le Brun, the first painter to Louis XIV and designer of interiors of the Château de Versailles. After working with Le Brun, de Vuez, who was known for getting involved in duels of honor, was forced to flee France and ended up in Constantinople.
+Mr. Pinta traced the painting to a plate that was reproduced in the 1900 book “Odyssey of an Ambassador: The Travels of the Marquis de Nointel, 1670-1680” by Albert Vandal, which told the story of the travels of Charles-Marie-François Olier, Marquis de Nointel et d’Angervilliers, Louis XIV’s ambassador to the Ottoman Court. On Page 129, there is a rotogravure of an artwork depicting the Marquis de Nointel arriving in Jerusalem with great pomp and circumstance — the painting on the wall.
+But how it ended up glued to that wall, no one knew, nor why it was covered up. There was speculation that maybe it happened during World War II, given the setting. It could be “a fog-of-war issue,” Mr. Bolen said.The best place for these children to get care, Dr. Friedrichsdorf said, is in a pediatric pain clinic. Ideally, the children are seen by a team including a physician or nurse practitioner, a designated pain psychologist, a physical therapist, and a social worker whose job includes taking care of the parents.
+Pediatric pain clinics are available in 26 states. If there is no clinic near where a family lives, or if the waiting list is prohibitively long, Dr. Friedrichsdorf recommends that parents try to put a team together themselves: Work with your pediatrician to find a physical therapist and a psychologist who can help.
+The most important message for these children and parents, who often have already gone from doctor to doctor experiencing one diagnostic procedure after another, he said, is “we explain to them why the pain is real, and a large number of the kids actually start crying because they feel not believed.” The experts reassure children and their families that the pain will usually go away, but it will take a lot of hard work.
+Children who live with chronic pain have often cut back all their normal activities, and the priority, Dr. Friedrichsdorf said, is to get “the four S’s” back to normal: school, sports, social life and sleep. “First you go back to school full time, and second you get better; it’s not the other way around,” he said.
+There may be a lot of fear and anxiety that movement and exercise will hurt, Dr. Wilson said, but “the pain they’re experiencing is not a message that something threatening or dangerous is happening, and once the family understands that, it’s easier to work toward having the kid do more movement, and movement is really essential.” Chronic pain, Dr. Schechter said, “is hurtful but not harmful.”
+Dr. Coakley said: “I’ll often say that having chronic pain is like a tricycle with three flat tires, and to get them going again we have to fill each of the tires.” One tire might be filled with medications — and rather than painkillers, these might include drugs that treat the nervous system, from certain antidepressants to seizure medications. Another tire might be filled with an activity program, and a third with cognitive behavioral therapy, she said.
+Children can learn mind-body techniques such as diaphragmatic breathing, guided imagery, mindfulness and biofeedback. Dr. Coakley compared these to “dimmer switches” for the nervous system, dialing down the sensitivity. And children and parents can use what she called “circuit-breaker strategies” to disrupt the habit cycles and behavior patterns that have built up around chronic pain.Jerry Brown, the former governor, left office recently with a $15 million campaign war chest, and has said some of that money can be used to defend his criminal justice legacy by trying to defeat the ballot measures.
+The data on crime, and what it says about reforms, has been contested. Small upticks in some types of crime in some areas has muddied the picture. And Californians may well be confused about what to believe: One day, headlines say that crime is up; the next, that crime is down. For instance, violent crime rose in California in 2012 and between 2015 and 2017, allowing opponents of the laws to point to increases, even as scholars say arguments about criminal justice policies should not be based on short-term fluctuations — and that overall crime rates are declining.
+Activists see parallels in the strategies of opponents of more lenient sentencing laws in California and the rhetoric on crime at the national level. The former attorney general, Jeff Sessions, warned early last year about a “staggering increase in homicides.” Violent crime had ticked up in 2015 and 2016 after a long decline, but when F.B.I. statistics for 2017 were released — after Mr. Sessions’s warning — they showed that violent crime had gone down again.
+One of the most controversial changes in California was a law passed last year to end cash bail. Initially anticipated by liberal activists as a significant step to end the practice of holding poor defendants in pretrial detention because they could not afford bail, the final version of the law has been disavowed by many of its early supporters. That is because, activists say, the law gives judges more discretion to hold the accused before trial. The new system will also use algorithms to assess whether a defendant is a flight risk or might commit another crime — tools that activists say are biased against people of color.
+“It gives judges basically unlimited power without due process,” said John Raphling, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch in Los Angeles. The risk assessment tools that judges would use, he said, “embed racial bias.”
+The controversy over the bail law has essentially placed the bail industry and civil liberties advocates like the A.C.L.U. on the same side. But it is the bail industry that has backed a ballot measure to overturn the law, which has received enough signatures to go before California voters in 2020.
+In pushing the measure, the industry has offered contradictory arguments, sometimes suggesting that eliminating cash bail would mean more criminals on the streets, and other times adopting the argument of the liberal activists that the new law could, in fact, end up locking up more people in a manner that would be unfair to poor African-Americans.If one clause is unconstitutional, they argued, then so is the other.
+The Supreme Court apparently thinks the question is more complicated, as it agreed this month to hear the government’s appeal. If nothing else, the court can use Mr. Brunetti’s case to sort out just what it meant to say in the 2017 decision, which ruled for an Asian-American dance-rock band called the Slants. (The decision also effectively allowed the Washington Redskins football team to register its trademarks.)
+The justices were unanimous in ruling that the prohibition on disparaging trademarks violated the First Amendment. But they managed to split 4 to 4 in most of their reasoning, making it hard to analyze how the decision applies in the context of the ban on scandalous terms.
+Still, the two blocs of justices did appear to agree that a central flaw in the ban on disparagement was that it took sides or, in legal language, was not viewpoint neutral. Criticism was forbidden; praise was not.
+The first battleground in the new case, then, will be whether a ban on vulgar words and the like is viewpoint neutral.
+The government, defending the law, said it barred entire categories of speech — “vulgar terms and graphic sexual images” — but did not discriminate against particular viewpoints within those categories.
+Mr. Brunetti’s lawyers disagreed. “Marks favorable to religion are allowed, but marks critical of religion or likely to cause religious controversy are prohibited,” they wrote. “Marks about input into the digestive system are approved, while marks about output are rejected. Polite humor is fine, raunchy humor is scandalous. Raising babies is sweet, making babies is disgusting.”
+The trademark appeals board, moreover, took account of the views expressed on Mr. Brunetti’s website and products, saying they “contain strong, and often explicit, sexual imagery that objectifies women and offers degrading examples of extreme misogyny.” That sounded like viewpoint discrimination, Mr. Brunetti’s lawyers wrote.Read our analysis of the 2019 Oscar nominations.
+Before dawn on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles, Kumail Nanjiani and Tracee Ellis Ross will gather to read this year’s Oscar nominees in 24 categories.
+But why wait until then to discuss what may go down? As your Carpetbagger, I’ve been studying the race for months and flagging several developments to look for. Who might make Oscar history, and how should we read some of these tea leaves?
+Here are six pressing award-season questions that will soon be answered.
+[See the complete list of nominees and cast your vote in our Oscars ballot.]
+Which film will get the most Oscar nominations?
+Bradley Cooper’s “A Star Is Born” has received across-the-board recognition from every major Hollywood guild it was eligible for, suggesting that on Tuesday morning, it will be our nomination leader. Oscar nominations for picture, director, actor (Cooper), actress (Lady Gaga), song, cinematography, editing and sound mixing are all but assured. Less certain but still likely are nominations for supporting actor (Sam Elliott) and adapted screenplay.Nestled in the forested hills of southern Guatemala, the small city of Antigua was once the most prominent seat of Spanish colonial government between Mexico City and Lima, Peru. Founded in the early 16th century, it served as Guatemala’s capital for almost 300 years, until 1773, when it was abandoned by crown officials following a series of devastating volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods. In the mid-1800s, agriculturists took note of Antigua’s rich volcanic soils, and the city thrived once again, as a center of coffee and grain production. It was during this period that its canary-colored Santa Catalina Arch, built in 1694 as a walkway for nuns, received its domed clock tower, becoming Antigua’s most iconic monument. In 1979, Unesco designated Antigua a World Heritage Site, ensuring the protection of its architectural and cultural legacy.
+Now, the city’s cobbled streets — arranged in an easy-to-navigate grid, with views of the imposing Volcán de Agua to the south and the twin peaks of Volcán de Fuego and Acatenango to the west — are lined with farm-to-table restaurants, contemporary art galleries and design studios. Beyond the city’s verdant Parque Central, these new additions are taking root near 17th- and 18th- century buildings in the Baroque Antigueño style, with decorative stucco ornamentation and low bell towers designed to withstand earthquakes — such as Las Capuchinas, a former convent that is now a colonial-era art museum. The city’s architectural heritage is only bested by its vibrantly patterned traditional textiles, made using natural dyeing techniques and sold at workshops and bustling open-air markets across the city. With its towering volcanoes (accessible by challenging day hikes), booming coffee scene and bevy of boutique hotels, Antigua is quickly garnering appeal as one of the most enticing cities in Central America.
+[Sign up here for the T List newsletter, a weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting now.]BEIJING — A beer in one hand, a microphone in the other, Meng Xiaoli stood in a crowded restaurant and began to sing.
+Your smile is as sweet as honey, Just like flowers blooming in the spring breeze. I wonder where I’ve seen you.
+During the workweek, Mr. Meng, 53, a strait-laced budget analyst who wears a red Chinese Communist Party pin on his lapel, spends his days shuttling between meetings and poring over reports as a budget analyst for a state-owned firm.
+But on weekends, he retreats to what he calls his “spiritual home,” a two-story restaurant and museum in Beijing that is a shrine to the woman he considers a goddess: the Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng, one of Asia’s most celebrated artists.
+“She knows what it’s like to be human — to find love and to make mistakes,” Mr. Meng said.
+Ms. Teng, who died suddenly in 1995 at age 42, was renowned for turning traditional Taiwanese and Chinese folk songs into maudlin Western-style hits. She was once banned in the mainland, her music denounced by the authorities as “decadent” and “pornographic.”Conversion therapy, also called reparative therapy, has been widely denounced by medical professional organizations as traumatizing and harmful to minors. The American Academy of Pediatrics warned against it as early as 1993, saying it reinforced anxiety and shame. In 2009, the American Psychological Association condemned the practice in a report, saying that conversion therapy was predicated on the idea that homosexuality was a mental disorder.
+But despite the consensus that conversion therapy was unsound, it has remained fairly common, said Mathew Shurka, who underwent conversion therapy and works as an activist fighting against it.
+An estimated 698,000 L.G.B.T. adults in the United States have received conversion therapy, according to research by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, which studies L.G.B.T. issues. About half of them underwent conversion therapy as teenagers.
+Mr. Shurka was among them. He was 16 years old in 2004 when his father took him to a therapist who said he could make gay people straight, and he spent five years undergoing the purported treatment.
+Conversion therapy assumes that everyone is a heterosexual, Mr. Shurka said, and that same-sex attraction is caused by childhood trauma. The therapists say, “If you can just heal that trauma and understand what your role is as a male or female, you will naturally start to be attracted to the opposite sex,” he said.
+Mr. Shurka said he was told to separate from his mother and sister for three years to make sure that he did not look at women as his peers.
+Mr. Shurka worked with Mr. Hoylman and Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Manhattan Democrat who was New York’s first out gay legislator, when they introduced a bill to ban conversion therapy in the state in 2013.By the time the tiny hut came into view, nestled high in a corrie in Scotland’s 1,748-square-mile Cairngorms National Park, I’d trekked for nearly nine miles, three of which, regrettably, I’d had to navigate after nightfall. The hike, through a broad valley in the Eastern Highlands called Glen Derry, carried me past groves of Scots pines and over a series of streams, some of which, lined with slick steppingstones, made for precarious crossings. All the while, two rows of smooth, eroded mountain peaks enclosed me in an amphitheater of muted colors: hazel-hued heather, golden grasses. Though much of my walk was solitary, the flickering glow in the hut’s main window, I knew, meant I’d have some company for the night and the warmth of a fire to greet me.
+My overnight home, the Hutchison Memorial Hut, colloquially called the Hutchie Hut, which I visited in late October, is one of more than 100 rustic shelters scattered throughout England, Wales and Scotland that are frequented by a motley assortment of outdoor adventurers. Left unlocked, free to use and with most offering little more than a roof, four walls and perhaps a small wood-burning stove, the buildings, called bothies (rhymes with “frothy”), are an indispensable — if for many years underground — element of British hill culture.HONG KONG — With President Trump planning to meet North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, next month, Vietnam appears to be the leading contender as host for the event.
+The meeting would be a reprise of the leaders’ landmark summit meeting last June, and holding it in Vietnam would cast a spotlight on a country that has become an economic powerhouse in Southeast Asia after emerging from poverty and isolation in the decades since the Vietnam War.
+A White House official said the meeting’s date and location would be announced later. Thailand and Hawaii have also been mentioned as possible sites, but Vietnam is considered the best bet.
+Picking Vietnam could make sense for the United States and South Korea, because American officials have pointed to it as a political and economic model for North Korea to follow.The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was born 90 years ago on Jan. 15. He is lauded as a hero for his work in advancing social justice. “I am not interested in power for power’s sake, but I’m interested in power that is moral, that is right and that is good,” he said.Bobby’s is an altogether different kind of bar. It began life in 1948 simply as the Idle Hour. By 1978, when Bobby Herald bought it and added his name to the sign, it had already been on the Row for decades, a place where songwriters and neighbors and music scouts and industry regulars gathered. On weekend afternoons, people would bring their kids to hear the music.
+In 2005, the Idle Hour was evicted from its longtime site — a condominium complex sits there now — and Bobby Herald and his wife, Dianne, moved the bar to its current location on 16th Avenue, eight doors down from the old trailer. Bobby died later that year, but Dianne kept the bar going. It still has autographed head shots of musicians taped to the walls, interspersed with dollar bills signed by guests. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollar bills, many yellowed by smoke from the years before the bar banned smoking.
+Lizard Thom Case, 72, bought the place in 2013 after Dianne retired, but he’d been a regular at the bar there for years before he bought it — so much of a regular that Dianne handpicked him to be Bobby’s “steward,” as Mr. Case calls himself. Even he doesn’t remember how the tradition of taping dollar bills to the walls began: “I don’t know how it started, but it grew like a fungus,” he said. His best guess: “Tourists love this place so much, they just want to leave some part of themselves here.” Visitors still come back years later, he said, and take selfies next to their own signed bills.
+Last summer Mr. Case’s landlord announced that he was selling the site and four adjacent buildings to a developer. (All five evicted businesses are quintessentially Music City: a clothing store called So Nashville, a guitar repair shop, a music academy, a music publisher, and Bobby’s.) Short of the kind of 11th-hour miracle that saved Studio A, Bobby’s Idle Hour (“The only live music venue on Music Row!” according to its website) would end its seven-decade run, and yet another office building would rise in its place.
+“Nashville doesn’t have preservation tools that other cities use as a matter of course,” Carolyn Brackett, senior field officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, told The Tennessean last summer. “There are practical solutions that would balance development with the preservation of Music Row’s historic fabric and retain the music businesses that fill them. We urge Mayor Briley and Metro Nashville leaders to adopt them before it’s too late.”
+For the current iteration of Bobby’s Idle Hour, it’s already too late. Last fall Bobby’s was named to the “Nashville 9,” an annual list of the most endangered historic places in Nashville, but this time no miracle was forthcoming. Mr. Case has until the end of the month to clear everything out.
+It was never his plan to retire: “If we’d been able to stay in this venue, this particular building, I could’ve kept this bar another 10 years,” he said. “I love it. I love nurturing the songwriters. I love setting up these great nights of music. It’s been my life.”The Trump administration’s so-called “race” with China to build new fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks is speeding toward a network vulnerable to Chinese (and other) cyberattacks. So far, the Trump administration has focused on blocking Chinese companies from being a part of the network, but these efforts are far from sufficient. We cannot allow the hype about 5G to overshadow the absolute necessity that it be secure.
+Our current wireless networks are fourth-generation, or 4G. It was 4G that gave us the smartphone. Reaching the next level of mobile services, however, requires increased speed on the network. Fifth-generation networks are designed to be 10 to 100 times faster than today’s typical wireless connection with much lower latency (response time). These speeds will open up all kinds of new functional possibilities. Those new functions, in turn, will attract cyberintrusions just like honey attracts a bear.
+Some envision 5G as a kind of “wireless fiber” for the delivery of television and internet much like a cable system does today. Iranians hacking the delivery of “Game of Thrones” isn’t good, but the real transformational promise of 5G goes far beyond wireless cable and its security is much more critical.
+The most exciting part of the 5G future is how its speed will change the very nature of the internet. Thus far, the internet has been all about transporting data from point A to point B. Today’s internet-connected car may be able to get driving directions sent to it, but it is essentially the same as getting email: the one-way transportation of pre-existing information. The autonomous car is something vastly different, in which the 5G network allows computers to orchestrate a flood of information from multitudes of input sensors for real time, on-the-fly decision-making. It is estimated that the data output of a single autonomous vehicle in one day will be equal to today’s daily data output of three thousand people.HONG KONG — A Chinese scientist who claimed to have created the world’s first genetically edited babies “seriously violated” state regulations, according to the results of an initial government investigation reported on Monday by Chinese state media.
+The investigators’ findings indicate that the scientist, He Jiankui, and his collaborators are likely to face criminal charges.
+Dr. He shocked the world in November when he announced that he had used Crispr, a powerful gene-editing technique, to alter the genes of human embryos. He produced some data but no definitive proof during his presentation at an international conference in Hong Kong.
+The investigation found that Dr. He and his team had edited the genes of human embryos and then implanted the embryos in female volunteers, as he claimed last year. One volunteer gave birth to twin girls in November, and another volunteer is now pregnant, according to Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency.MELBOURNE, Australia — Simona Halep of Romania is ranked No. 1 in the world in women’s tennis. Last season, she won her first Grand Slam title, on the red clay of Roland Garros.
+On Monday night at Melbourne Park, she faced an opponent who, if judged by the numerical listing spit out by the pro tour’s computer, should have been handled by Halep with relative ease. Except that player, currently ranked 16th in the world, is no slouch. That player, in fact, is Serena Williams, pure greatness in fishnet tights.
+Halep versus Williams in the round of 16 was a rare moment in tennis. It was a match in which the top-ranked player was also the decided underdog. Not only was Halep facing a formidable opponent with 23 major titles, seven of them in Melbourne alone, but she was also confronting someone who had dominated their career head-to-head matchups, winning eight times and losing just once.
+So it was hardly a shock that Williams ended up improving that record on Monday, rolling past the 27-year-old Halep by a 6-1, 4-6, 6-4 score.A barrier-breaking prosecutor with a love for grilling — “Question, I will repeat” — roasting and music. “One nation under a groove, getting down —” California Senator Kamala Harris has joined the race for the White House. “I’m running for president of the United States. And I’m very excited about it. I’m very excited about it.” So who is she? Harris has a history of being the first. “You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.” In 2010, she was the first woman and person of African and South Asian descent to become California’s attorney general. “I decided to become a prosecutor because I believed that there were vulnerable and voiceless people who deserved to have a voice in that system.” And in 2016 she became the first black senator from California. “So my question to you —” Harris serves on four Senate committees, and is perhaps best known for her tough questions. “It makes me nervous.” “Is that a no?” “Is that a yes?” “Can I get to respond please, ma’am?” “No, sir.” “No, no.” She’s moved to the left in recent years. But her political message remains broad, stressing unity and togetherness. “We are all in this together.” She has defended immigrants’ rights, as well as public schools and Medicare for All. But her signature issue is criminal justice reform. “Crime is not a monolith. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice policy.” Critics on her left have called her record into question, arguing that she failed to embrace progressive reforms during her tenure as district attorney and California’s attorney general. So, what’s her dynamic with President Trump? Harris has voted against more Trump administration nominees than most of her peers. She has called Trump’s border wall: “his vanity project.” And the government shutdown: “a crisis of leadership.” For now, Trump has said little about her. So, what are her chances? Political strategists believe Harris may be better positioned to build coalitions than some of her party rivals. “This is our house.” But despite strong initial fund-raising numbers and a liberal donor network in her home state, she’s stagnated in the polls. As a relative newcomer to national politics, many voters may be waiting to hear more from Harris before making up their minds. “I voted.”Her announcement kicked off a day of tribute and outreach to black voters by Democratic presidential candidates and potential candidates. Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont made appearances, as did Ms. Gillibrand, Ms. Warren and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who expressed regret for supporting crime bills earlier in his career that have been criticized for disproportionately impacting black Americans.
+Ms. Harris’s long-expected entry comes as many Democrats are eager to find new leaders and as the party grasps for a unifying message that can appeal to its increasingly progressive base and more moderate voters who have recoiled from President Trump.
+A 54-year-old former California attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, Ms. Harris is something of a bridge between the Democrats eyeing the race who are in their 70s, like Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders, and those in their 40s, like Mr. Booker and former Representative Beto O’Rourke. Further, while she hails from one of the country’s most famously liberal cities, she has ties to both the pragmatic and leftist wings of the party: She is rooted in the Bay Area’s Democratic establishment but has embraced a more progressive agenda since being elected to the Senate in 2016.
+While other Democrats have focused their economic policy on regulating corporations or limiting the influence of Wall Street, Ms. Harris’s signature proposal is more focused on individuals and would provide lower-income families with monthly cash payments of up to $500. She has also proposed a bail reform bill that’s backed by several civil rights groups, and she focused her initial Senate work on curbing maternal death rates, particularly among black women.
+Like many Democrats, Ms. Harris has sought to align herself with the party’s leftward drift in recent years, proclaiming her support for “Medicare for All” and, after an initial hesitation, disavowing most corporate donations. She has also embraced the legalization of recreational marijuana, a position she once rebuffed.
+[Who’s in, who’s ready to join? Follow the Democratic field with The Times’s candidate tracker.]
+“She has long been a reform-minded prosecutor who struck a balance between the need for public safety and reckoning with civil rights ideals,” said Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
+But not everyone agrees that Ms. Harris can easily assuage Democrats worried about her record as a prosecutor and district attorney.BEIJING — For months, a group of outspoken young communists has put China’s leaders on edge, organizing a fiery campaign for workers’ rights that has evaded the government’s tight political control.
+Now the authorities appear to be deploying a new weapon in their efforts to crush the movement: forcing students to watch videotaped confessions in which detained activists say they spread false information and violated the law.
+Student activists, who asked not to be identified for fear of being punished, detailed the existence of the videos in interviews and online posts on Monday. They said that more than 20 students at elite Chinese universities had been forced to watch the videos in recent weeks as a way to pressure them to abandon their activism.
+On Monday, the activists said they believed the confessions were coerced and vowed to continue their campaign.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+I’m a great admirer of the so-called Trump resistance. Over the past two years, it has had two huge accomplishments: helping defeat Obamacare repeal and helping defeat the Republican House majority. But I also think it’s a mistake to avoid criticizing organizations and movements you admire.
+My column today is a critique of the resistance — not of its tactics, which have generally been excellent, but of its strength. I think the shutdown shows that this country’s grass-roots progressive movement is weaker than the country needs it to be.
+Political activism has had virtually no effect on the politics of the shutdown. There have been no major protests that add to the political pressure on President Trump. There has been no organized effort to persuade federal workers to stay home from their (unpaid) jobs or to support any who do stay home.KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The N.F.L. this season finally appeared to have accomplished its goal of “getting back to football” after several years of off-field turmoil that ranged from player misconduct to weekly protests during the national anthem. But the league’s bounce-back season was knocked off stride on Sunday, as officials in the two conference championship games made baffling, controversial calls that to some degree overshadowed the otherwise thrilling matchups.
+The calls — or noncalls — left legions of fans feeling their teams had been robbed of a chance to advance to the Super Bowl, and left others simply confused. Once again, the conversation Monday focused as much on the meaning of penalties like roughing the passer and pass interference — and why they were or weren’t called — as it did about the outcome of the games themselves.
+The officiating uproar may lead to even more rule changes, video reviews and coaches’ challenges. Those could make games even longer despite the league’s professed goal of cutting down stoppages. And another debate is likely to ensue about the use of technology, which sometimes fails to provide the closure it promises.“Not all of the decisions were good decisions, but ultimately they led me to a place where I felt safe,” she said.
+From ages 13 to 21, she lived in the same foster home, feeling that she had found safety and stability. But she did not make it easy for her new foster mother.
+“I put her through hell,” Ms. Vassell recalled. “I wasn’t used to being treated good.”
+After years of difficulty, Ms. Vassell said it was a high school psychologist who inspired her to help other children in need.
+“That’s who I want to be, I want to be here, I want to help someone,” Ms. Vassell said. “When you don’t have someone you can relate to, especially if it’s someone you’re telling your life to, you’re just sitting there, and you’re O.K., but you don’t even know me, you don’t even know a little bit of what I’ve gone through.”BEIRUT, Lebanon — A car bombing targeted a joint American-Kurdish patrol in Syria on Monday, injuring a number of fighters from a Kurdish-led force allied with the United States. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
+The explosion came just five days after at least 15 people, including four Americans, were killed in a suicide bombing by the Islamic State in Manbij, Syria, which is controlled and protected by American-backed local forces.
+Coming only weeks after President Trump ordered American troops to withdraw from Syria, the attacks serve as a reminder that the Islamic State, while controlling just a small fraction of the territory it once had, remains capable of striking in what was considered relatively safe territory.
+The Amaq News Agency, which is linked to the militant group, reported that a suicide bomber had attacked a convoy of United States troops and Syrian Democratic Forces in what it claimed as a “martyrdom-seeking attack,” wording it uses to take responsibility.MELBOURNE, Australia — “I’ve never done this before,” Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova said as she climbed on a stationary bike in front of a crowd that didn’t feel that much smaller than the one that had watched her 6-7 (3), 6-3, 6-3 upset of fifth-seeded Sloane Stephens at the Australian Open.
+The fourth-round match ended six minutes before 2 a.m. on Monday morning, and Pavlyuchenkova was mentally making a list of all the tasks that stood between her and a good morning’s sleep: the stationary bike, the reporters with their notebooks and microphones, the ice bath, the shower, the change of clothes, the drive back to the hotel.
+Pavlyuchenkova asked if she could field questions from reporters while she pedaled so she could kill two tasks with one bike ride. She was so tired, she had struggled to construct her points on the court, and now she was having trouble organizing her thoughts in front of reporters.
+That’s what a starting time of nearly half-past 11 will do to a player. “It’s honestly terrible,” Pavlyuchenkova said, adding, “It’s not ideal time to play tennis.”“This is a Bulgarian umbrella; have you heard about this one?” Agne Urbaityte asked, pointing to a blue umbrella behind a glass case. There was a needle peeking out from the top.
+“It’s a weapon umbrella,” she said. “You press the button here, you see the needle, the needle goes out and shoots a small shot of ricin poison. It’s still the most harsh poison in the world .”
+Thank goodness this was not the real thing. It was the kind of tool famously used to kill the Bulgarian dissident author Georgi Markov on Waterloo Bridge in 1978, roughly a decade after he defected to the West. Many have speculated since that the K.G.B. was involved .CARACAS, Venezuela — Members of the Venezuelan National Guard were detained in the capital early Monday, the military said, after online videos showed a group of soldiers pledging allegiance to an opposition leader seeking to oust President Nicolás Maduro.
+The soldiers’ apparent defiance at a military installation in the western Caracas neighborhood of Cotiza occurred days after opposition leaders offered amnesty to members of the armed forces who turned their backs on the government and helped establish a transitional government that would convene fair elections.
+The opposition leaders have called for nationwide demonstrations on Wednesday, which they hope will show that their bid to replace Mr. Maduro has widespread support.
+The United States and several governments in the region have backed the opposition’s plan, but leaders of the movement acknowledge that getting the armed forces to flip will be the toughest hurdle.Bernie Telsey was still a student at N.Y.U. when he met an actor named Robert LuPone and decided to form a theater club. Their duo became a trio when they met Will Cantler, and soon they were putting on shows whenever and wherever they could.
+That was more than three decades ago, and over the years the company they founded — now called MCC Theater, with a focus on new work by living writers — has become one of the more respected Off Broadway nonprofits, attracting such stars as Lucas Hedges, Judith Light and Zachary Quinto to its stages.
+But they have never had their own building, until now. On Jan. 23, the box office opens at their first permanent home, on West 52nd Street at 10th Avenue, with two theaters, two rehearsal studios, and all the amenities (including a bar) one has come to expect from a modern theater. “To have a home, it’s mind-boggling,” Mr. Telsey said.
+The $45 million project has been a long time coming, and brings MCC into a corner of Hell’s Kitchen with a growing number of performing arts organizations.Good morning. It is Martin Luther King’s Birthday, Stevie Wonder has the soundtrack, and I think you might mark it by listening this morning to King’s “Loving Your Enemies” sermon, delivered at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., on Nov. 17, 1957.
+It’s not much of a food holiday. People trot out King’s fondness for pecan pie, for sweet potato pie, for fried chicken and black-eyed peas — and of course we have recipes for those. But the observance of his birthday as a national holiday isn’t so much about feasting as, increasingly, it is about service — a day “on,” they say, rather than a simple day off. Even if you’re not involved in a community project, then, you might consider doing something to improve the common good today, something to address King’s notion of a beloved community, a world of interconnectedness.
+For a lot of us, that can happen in the kitchen even if it’s not about dinner. Today’s a day to bake for those who are working on a federal holiday, maybe: supernatural brownies for the firehouse or the team in the I.C.U.; ginger-molasses cookies for the newsroom or the cops on the beat. It could be a good day to check in on those who don’t have much family or who have a hard time with the stairs, to make and deliver one of our casseroles for cold nights, or a lasagna, or a gingery chicken stew.
+Want a new recipe? Melissa Clark has an excellent one, for baked lemony couscous, with chickpeas, tomato and feta (above). Or maybe an ancient one? Here’s Craig Claiborne’s 1983 recipe for smothered chicken, one of my favorite midwinter meals.KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban infiltrated an Afghan intelligence base on Monday, killing dozens of people in what Afghan officials said was one of the deadliest attacks against the intelligence service in the 17-year war with the Taliban.
+While the Afghan police and army have been dying in record numbers, the loss of intelligence forces, who are often better trained and equipped, was another indication of the violence stretching the Afghan government’s defenses, even as the United States may be preparing to withdraw some of its troops.
+The attack, early Monday morning, came hours before the Taliban announced they had resumed peace talks with American officials. It was a sign, analysts said, of how violence is likely to grow deadlier even as the sides of the long war have indicated a willingness to seek a negotiated settlement.
+Akhtar Mohammad Khan Tahiri, the head of the provincial council in Wardak Province, where the base is, said the target was a training center for pro-government militia members run by the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency.Syphilis continues to make a dismaying comeback in the United States.
+Between 2012 and 2016, the rate of primary and secondary syphilis among women increased 111 percent. Over the same period, the rate of congenital syphilis increased by 87 percent.
+The sexually transmitted disease is caused by infection with the bacterium Treponema pallidum. The bacterium also can be passed from mother to child during pregnancy or birth.
+Up to 40 percent of infants with syphilis are stillborn. The rest appear normal at birth; if left untreated, however, they may develop a number of serious symptoms, from bone pain to deafness and blindness.
+Infected babies are treated with penicillin. Infants who picked up the bacterium while passing through the birth canal generally fare better than those infected during pregnancy.State television, from which a significant number of Poles get their news, consistently smears, in aggressive and defamatory language, the political opposition and anyone who thinks differently from the ruling party. The murdered mayor had been called a thief, a German, a homophile and a Mafioso. Furthermore, television propaganda has repudiated the justice system for the past three years, calling it harmful for citizens, in need of a complete changing of the guard; judges are accused of being a caste above the law. From his jail cell, this man would have seen precisely these messages, of bad guys and the necessity of radical solutions.
+The news in Poland today feels like a new kind of monster, a Frankenstein ’s monster that has gotten out of control online and mutated into hate speech that can then be found everywhere else . Open your email, and you’ll see: “You’re a piece of trash, and you will die.” “We know where you live.” “We’re going to cut off that stupid head.” The internet hums with violence.
+The body reacts to verbal aggression with reflexes. It curls up into a little ball and starts to sweat, adrenaline pumping. If this happens to many people at once, then we are in a mental war, where instead of bullets, words are fired. I believe absolutely that words must be treated as material weapons, every invective or threat as violence and aggression.
+Unfortunately, as hate speech has proliferated, no one in Poland has been held responsible. The police take people’s statements and dismiss them. This tacit consent has demoralized weakened minds. Hate speech has seeped into public discourse and the process of lowering standards has become increasingly visible: elected officials publicly avow conspiracy theories; members of parliament post diatribes filled with hate, knowing that the more brutality and emotion there is in a tweet, the wider it will circulate.
+Populists use language that is more aggressive and more hate-filled . They reach for scapegoats. In Poland, these scapegoats are the so-called crazy leftists, queer-lovers, Germans, Jews, European Union puppets, feminists, liberals and anyone who supports immigrants.
+Add to this the silence and cynicism of the clergy, the clumsy, aggressive propaganda of state television, the consent of the police to anti-Semitic excesses, public demonstrations dehumanizing “enemies of the nation,” the denigration of the authority of the judiciary and the unforgivable destruction of the environment , and we have a suffocating atmosphere of hate, a highly emotional stalemate in which there can only be traitors and heroes.
+In a healthy, normal society, people can disagree with one another , even have diametrically opposing views, and this does not at all mean that they must hate one another. The Polish authorities, however, have made the division of Poles their primary task .In 1916, Irish nationalists sparked the Easter Rising, a bloody revolt against the British, who had controlled Ireland for some 700 years. They failed in their immediate goal — and many of them were executed or jailed in retribution — but the violence left behind a wave of separatist sentiment across the island. Three years later, with the ink from the armistice ending World War I still drying and President Woodrow Wilson calling for “political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike,” the surviving nationalists realized they had a second chance. On Jan. 21, 1919, they declared independence.
+Ireland was probably not on Wilson’s mind when he uttered those words; wary of alienating Britain, he and other world leaders did not look kindly on the Irish cause. And yet Ireland, a wee speck of an island with a diasporic population spanning the globe, manifested Wilson’s vision for a postwar world that squared national “self-determination” — the diplomatic buzzword of the age — with international cooperation, state autonomy with global alliances.
+The events of Jan. 21 began at the Mansion House in Dublin, where 27 nationalists met to form the Dail Eireann, Ireland’s first self-governing assembly. Outside, more than a thousand people gathered in the streets, some climbing lampposts to gain a better view. Inside, guests, priests and the press filled the floor and gallery of the mansion’s Round Room. Elected representatives of the Sinn Fein party, mostly young men with “no gray hairs among them,” reported The Irish Times, entered “with countenances of funereal solemnity.” Then, from a table draped in green baize, the assembly delivered a Declaration of Independence, announced its “Democratic Program,” publicly implored the “Free Nations of the World” to recognize their new government, and enacted a provisional constitution under which it would operate.
+The New York Times called the proceedings “dull” because they were held in Irish, which few of the people in the room understood. “This was a tribute to sentiment,” the newspaper explained, “but it was deadening to interest.” Lost in translation was the soaring rhetoric that voiced Ireland’s commitment to both its own interests and those of the global community, fixing Irish independence firmly in “the promised era of self-determination and liberty.”WASHINGTON — Ramona Wormley-Mitsis got welcome news in December: After years of waiting, the federal government had approved a subsidy that allowed her to rent a three-bedroom house, bracketed by a white picket fence to keep her two autistic sons from bolting into traffic.
+A few days later, the dream was deferred. The Department of Housing and Urban Development — one of the federal agencies hit hardest by the shutdown — would not be able to pay her new landlord until the government reopened.
+“It is my dream home. It’s like my last stop; it’s like my last chance — you know?” said Ms. Wormley-Mitsis, 39, who lives in Fall River, Mass., and is staying with relatives until the check clears. “We drive by that house all the time. It’s torture. Waiting, waiting, waiting.”
+One month after the government shutdown began, its effects have begun to hurt some of the most vulnerable Americans: not just homeless people, but also those who are one crisis away from the streets. And nonprofit groups dedicated to helping low-income renters are already scrambling to survive without the lifeblood payments from HUD that began being cut off on Jan. 1.LONDON — After European policymakers adopted a sweeping data privacy law last year, the big question was how regulators would use their newfound authority against the most powerful technology companies.
+In the first major example, the French data protection authority announced Monday that it had fined Google 50 million euros, or about $57 million, for not properly disclosing to users how data is collected across its services — including its search engine, Google Maps and YouTube — to present personalized advertisements.
+The penalty is the largest to date under the European Union privacy law, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, which took effect in May, and shows that regulators are following through on a pledge to use the rules to push back against internet companies whose businesses depend on collecting data. Facebook is also a subject of several investigations by the data protection authorities in Europe.
+The ruling signals a new phase in enforcing the European law, which the region’s lawmakers and privacy groups have cheered as a check against the growing power of technology companies, while for general consumers it has led mostly to a frustrating increase in the number of consent boxes to click. The fine against Google is just the fourth penalty against any company since the law took effect.The problem with Tommy Tomlinson’s inspirational new book, “The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America,” is that reading it will make you hungry.
+Tomlinson grew up in Georgia. He’s an ardent scholar of the glories of the South’s vernacular cuisine: fried chicken, biscuits, barbecue, catfish browned in flour and bacon grease, and “tea so sweet it could hold its shape without a cup.”
+“There has never been better food created anywhere than the food of the American South,” he writes. “There has never been any food that will make you fatter.”
+Southern eats are a working people’s eats. The pandering calories, the dishes baptized in butter and other cooking fats, are meant to be burned off outdoors. Tomlinson is a writer. He mostly sits at a desk and, between paragraphs, ingests cubes of cheese.[The seven factors that will help decide who wins on Tuesday.]
+If you need evidence that next month’s special election for New York City public advocate is vastly different than any ordinary election, look no further than Theo Chino — though you will no longer see his name on the ballot.
+Just four minutes before the Jan. 14 midnight filing deadline, Mr. Chino submitted his petitions to run for the position — one of the last of 24 potential candidates to do so.
+Because ballot order in the Feb. 26 special election is determined by order of petition submission, Mr. Chino, 46, a self-described bitcoin entrepreneur, was slated to be listed toward the very bottom of a ballot that is likely to rank as one of the longest in city history.
+But after ballot challenges and other technical reasons, Mr. Chino and six other candidates were disqualified, leaving 17 challengers in New York City’s first citywide special election, which was necessitated by Letitia James’s win in the race for state attorney general in November. The contest is nonpartisan, so there will be no party primaries, and candidates must run under their own party lines — often hinting at a candidate’s priorities.A slimmed-down deal could also open Mr. Trump up to criticism from Democrats, who in some cases are more aligned with the president’s aggressive approach to pressuring China than many Republicans.
+“Anything less than a full effort to secure a fundamental reset of the U.S.-China trade relationship is a betrayal of the American economy and the future of American workers, industry, consumers and innovators,” said Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “The Trump administration needs to stiffen its spine and get tough in these China talks.”
+Trump administration officials have been debating whether they can push more tariffs on China without facing significant repercussions. China’s economy is already slowing, in part because of the tariffs, and any further weakening could hurt global economic growth and the United States economy, which is itself showing signs of cooling.
+Mr. Mnuchin has been particularly interested in how big a role America’s trade actions are playing in China’s recent economic weakness.
+Trump administration officials have debated whether they should follow through with plans to raise tariffs to 25 percent, from 10 percent, on March 2 if China does not maintain the promises Mr. Xi made to Mr. Trump, like accelerating purchases of American goods and making structural changes to its economy.
+Progress over the next six weeks could result in an extension of the March 2 deadline, even if a final deal is not reached, or some tariff relief as a reward for initial changes that China says it is willing to make. But the decision will ultimately rest with Mr. Trump.
+One question bedeviling the talks is how to enforce any trade agreement with China, given its opaque business environment and largely managed economy. One option that administration officials have considered is “snapback” tariffs, which would be reimposed if China appears to be reneging on its commitments.Squint and this week’s Billboard album chart looks almost identical to last week’s, as the rapper A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie holds at No. 1 and most of rest of the Top 10 is just slightly reshuffled.
+With no major new releases to compete with, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie’s “Hoodie SZN” holds the top spot for a second week with the equivalent of 56,000 sales in the United States, down 4 percent from last week, according to Nielsen. The breakdown of that number is also almost identical to that of last week, with 81 million streams and fewer than 1,000 copies sold as a complete album.
+Also this week, the soundtrack to “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” featuring Post Malone, Juice WRLD and Nicki Minaj, among others, rose one spot to No. 2, swapping places with 21 Savage’s “I Am > I Was,” which fell one rung to No. 3. Post Malone’s “Beerbongs & Bentleys” is No. 4, and Meek Mill’s “Championships” is in fifth place.$2,325 | Murray Hill, Manhattan
+Blake Bejan, 25
+Occupation: Marketing manager, Uber Eats
+Apartment hunting in New York vs. California: “I had to consider air-conditioning for the first time in my life,” said Mr. Bejan, who is from San Jose and has lived in San Francisco since college.
+On using a broker: The broker’s fee gave him pause, but using a broker turned out to be a big help. “I was so overwhelmed seeing apartments,” he said, “and they kept certain things in mind.”
+Good and bad surprises: A dishwasher, which he wasn’t expecting, and noise from the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. “At 6 a.m., it’s loud as hell,” he said. “I made a sound dampener out of a board and foam, and bear-cage myself in most mornings.”
+The best things about New York: “I really like the people. I think they’re really genuine here; people in San Francisco can be fake.” Plus, the music scene in Brooklyn and the food. “I love Levain Bakery. I recently took visiting friends through Central Park and strategically navigated us through the park to end up there.”
+As he and his real estate agent, Marien Richardson of Citi Habitats, toured listings around Murray Hill and Kip’s Bay, they kept bumping into another apartment seeker and his broker.
+“Sometimes we’d be there first, sometimes they’d be before us. I was like, ‘O.K., you’re my competition.’” Mr. Bejan said. “It was really intense.”
+At a building in the East 30s, the unit they had come to see wasn’t available for viewing — the tenant was in the midst of moving out — but the one below was empty.
+For $2,325 a month, the apartment was not too small but not too large. There was a small entrance hall and space for not only all the furniture he owned, including the bed, but also for a small sofa. Plus, there was laundry in the building and an unexpected bonus, a dishwasher. And if the view was nothing much — the one window faced a brick wall — at least the wall was on the other side of a street, so there was natural light.To the Editor:
+Re “Gillibrand, Senate Advocate for Women’s Causes, Joins Presidential Race” (news article, Jan. 16): As a “yellow dog Democrat” I will never support Senator Kirsten Gillibrand for president. She led the charge that deprived Minnesota of Senator Al Franken without due process. While #MeToo may be good politics, let us at least have evidence and hearings before we put people in front of political firing squads.
+Mr. Franken was the most effective spokesman for this state in recent memory. We needed him in the Senate. Especially with Donald Trump as president, we do not need any more “off with their heads” attitudes in national politics. Ms. Gillibrand, go away.
+Charles Quinn
+Apple Valley, Minn.To the Editor:
+Re “Run, Joe, Run,” by David Leonhardt (column, Jan. 14):
+The prospect of the “cast of thousands” on the horizon for the next Democratic presidential nomination does not bode well. Joe Biden is the sure bet for the general election. Past fumbles, a little plagiarism and tone-deaf Anita Hill hearings aside, he owns his mistakes, apologizes, moves on and grows.
+Joe will appeal to a greater cross- section of American voters than all other possible candidates. He will assemble experienced, informed and skilled cabinet members and advisers. Joe knows what he does not know.
+Don’t squander resources in an embrace of the inspired and sometimes inspiring prospects, none of whom match his breadth and electability. Joe Biden will provide international dignity and restore national trust. And Joe, select Stacey Abrams as your running mate.
+Patrick Hunt
+Davis, Calif.
+To the Editor:
+I like and respect Joe Biden and hope he will be smart enough not to run for president in 2020. He currently enjoys well-deserved high favorability ratings, especially among Democrats and independents. That will quickly dissipate if he becomes a candidate. He won’t be seen as a change agent, and scenes from the Anita Hill hearings would haunt him throughout the campaign.Jill Valentine is pretty sure the kids have a nickname for her: Fun Killer. For nearly four years, Ms. Valentine has been the head guardian of “School of Rock,” which played its last performance on Sunday at the Winter Garden Theater. Guardians care for child actors during rehearsals and before and after performances, making sure they’re fed, watered and rested. Ms. Valentine distributes children’s pain relievers, she runs science flashcards, she confiscates contraband.
+She doesn’t have children of her own — “I have two cats and a boyfriend, that’s enough!” she said — but 63 have come into and out of her care since she joined “School of Rock” for pre-Broadway rehearsals in 2015. Thirteen children, age about 8 to 13, star in every performance, with four more waiting backstage. Thirty-six alumni joined them for Sunday’s show-closing jam session.
+Before the Saturday evening performance, Ms. Valentine met me at the show’s rehearsal space, now mostly denuded and bubble wrapped. She talked about the responsibilities of the job, the hectic schedule and why there are no children showmances. Her feelings about the show’s ending were bittersweet, but not so bittersweet that she hadn’t booked a 5 a.m. Miami-bound flight for Monday. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
+What exactly is a guardian?
+It’s the responsible person for the child actor. We are responsible for their safety, health, well-being from the time that they walk into the stage door until the time they walk out.After her Brexit plan went down to the most resounding defeat in modern British history, Prime Minister Theresa May was told to come back with a Plan B.
+She did that Monday.
+But her Plan B looked a lot like Plan A, setting the stage for another battle royale with rebellious British lawmakers over Brexit, or the process of withdrawing Britain from the European Union.
+Even though her plan was defeated in Parliament last week by 230 votes, Mrs. May told lawmakers on Monday that she still hoped to win them over by negotiating changes to the plan that many regard as cosmetic.
+[What is Brexit? A simple guide to why it matters and what happens next.]
+She told lawmakers that she could not rule out the possibility of leaving the European Union without any agreement, even though preventing that outcome is probably the one thing that a healthy majority in Parliament can agree on as a course of action.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”WASHINGTON — President Trump briefly visited a national monument to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday to lay a wreath below the towering statue of the slain civil rights leader.
+“Beautiful day,” Mr. Trump said to reporters. “Thank you for being here. Appreciate it.” He was accompanied on the two-minute visit by Vice President Mike Pence and David Bernhardt, the acting interior secretary.
+Mr. Trump’s stop by the memorial — to observe a moment of silence without extended public remarks — appeared to be a last-minute addition to his calendar. The president’s schedule listed no public events to mark the federal holiday honoring King’s life, which had drawn criticism from civil rights activists.
+“There is no official event at the White House to celebrate Martin Luther King Day,” the Rev. Al Sharpton said on Monday morning, speaking at the National Action Network breakfast in Washington before Mr. Trump’s visit to the memorial. “This is an insult to the American people that the president of the United States does not officially recognize or give any ceremony for Dr. King.”As Donald Trump was fighting with Congress over the shutdown and funding for a border wall, his administration implemented a new rule that could be a game-changer for health care.
+Starting this month, hospitals must publicly reveal the contents of their master price lists — called “chargemasters” — online. These are the prices that most patients never notice because their insurers negotiate them down or they appear buried as line items on hospital bills. What has long been shrouded in darkness is now being thrown into the light.
+For the moment, these lists won’t seem very useful to the average patient — and they have been criticized for that reason. They are often hundreds of pages long, filled with medical codes and abbreviations. Each document is an overwhelming compendium listing a rack rate for every little item a hospital dispenses and every service it performs: A blood test for anemia. The price of lying in the operating suite and recovery room (billed in 15-minute intervals). The scalpel. The drill bit. The bag of IV salt water. The Tylenol pill. No item is too small to be bar coded and charged.
+But don’t dismiss the lists as useless. Think of them as raw material to be mined for billing transparency and patient rights. For years, these prices have been a tightly guarded industrial secret. When advocates have tried to wrest them free, hospitals have argued that they are proprietary information. And, hospitals claim, these rates are irrelevant, since — after insurers whittle them down — no one actually pays them.To the Editor:
+In eliminating majors in French, German and history, the University of Wi sconsin-Stevens Poi nt is sending a message that students at regional public universities do not deserve the same opportunities as those who attend the state’s flagship campus or private institutions.
+Students at regional public universities are largely first-generation college students, students from families of modest means and in many cases students of color. To offer those students only narrow vocational study is to reinforce the notion that the liberal arts, and especially the humanities, are reserved for the elite.
+Language study especially pays dividends in the job market for undergraduates, while broadening students’ sense of the world and its possibilities, producing the ability to understand, appreciate and work with national and cultural differences.
+Students at regional universities may choose to major in business, but they should be able to double-major in French or German or history as well.
+Paula M. Krebs
+New York
+The writer is executive director of the Modern Language Association.
+To the Editor:
+The situation at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point was altogether predictable. When relatively few young people continued their education beyond high school in the past, possession of a degree in any major from an accredited school was enough to distinguish them.None of this is as straightforward as it sounds. Chinonso is a cipher. His story is told not by him, but in the voice of his chi: the Igbo guardian spirit who inhabits him. The chi is not a guiding presence, but a witness to, and chronicler of, Chinonso’s actions.
+It’s a unique narrative device. The chi is wise and all-knowing, and has lived through many eras inside many bodies, which gives it the ability to connect the historical past with the setbacks in Chinonso’s life. The chi remembers the era of the Aro slave raiders; it remembers the horrors of the Biafran War. These dips into history are quite wonderful — they anchor the story within a broader cultural context, marking this tragedy as one of many in the grand and inevitable flow of time.
+But there is also a risk to this narrative strategy. Establishing intimacy between a reader and a character can already be a delicate dance, and in this case the use of the chi clouds that relationship by creating an enormous psychic distance, limiting any deep understanding of Chinonso beyond the chi’s analysis. Though the chi can negotiate with the gods on Chinonso’s behalf, it can’t interfere in his daily actions, and so lacks all immediate power of influence. Chinonso is therefore left the victim of his impulses. His emotions can sometimes be hard to connect with when filtered through the distant lens of the chi. This is a story, then, in which the events take place behind a veil, and the intensity of passion is dimmed.
+An Odysseus-Penelope paradigm is established between the lovers: Chinonso’s delayed journey back to his beloved; Ndali’s interminable wait for his return. And yet, in many ways, the novel seems to reject its epic trappings. Despite the frame of the chi pleading Chinonso’s case to the higher gods, and despite the novel’s spanning many landscapes — from rural Nigeria to Lagos, from the churches of Turkey’s countryside to its tangled urban streets — its fixation remains the repressed, claustrophobic, paranoid psyche of its broken narrator.
+Ultimately, the novel’s tension rests on the clash between Ndali’s modern, newly awakened sense of agency over her romantic choices, and Chinonso’s persistently naïve, unchanged ideas of romantic ownership. Sadly, it’s his vision that will win out.
+The novel comes alive in those moments when it captures the alienation of foreigners in strange lands. Even a simple meal can cause astonishment: In Cyprus “the people placed a premium on the need for things to be eaten in their raw states, once they had been washed. Onions? Yes, simply cut them up and add them to your food. … Cooking is a time-wasting experience.” When Chinonso enters a Turkish police station, he’s stunned at the orderliness; likewise, the silence of a city bus unnerves him. He is shocked to be told that he can’t drink alcohol in a taxi. A group of boys mistakes him for a famous soccer player, presumably because of his skin color.
+Obioma is especially good at exposing such instances of casual racism. In a city park, Chinonso sits down beside a Turkish couple on a bench, and they swiftly get up and leave. There is a striking scene in which Chinonso and a friend are approached by two Turkish girls asking to touch their Afros. Later, when Chinonso sees a very dark-skinned Nigerian man who has become a taunted public spectacle, he shudders at the idea of becoming like him.
+The “orchestra of minorities” refers to the crying of birds mourning the slaughtered among them. It extends, symbolically, to the broader human community of the poor, the dispirited, the silenced, the plundered — those whose spirits have been savaged, those who have been stripped of all dignity, those who risk everything or make impossible journeys to better their lives. It’s a story as old as the epic, but, sadly, an all too modern one.This inconvenience has in no way prevented Mr. Slimane from continuing to riff on the image of a person who sometimes seems to have dressed herself at the little boy’s department of the Leather Man. Like some of Mr. Slimane’s other style idols (like Courtney Love, seated beside Carine Roitfeld in the front row), Ms. Catroux reaches into history’s closet and grabs what she likes. It’s an instinctive process, not overthought, and a highly personal one. Though Mr. Slimane’s men’s wear debut at Celine had clearly been deliberated, it was not done by committee or corporate fiat. Success has either earned him that right, or else he arrogated it to himself.
+And it worked. All designers are now scrambling to dress a generation of men unafraid to embrace fashion though ignorant of its rules. There is Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton; Kim Jones at Dior Men; Jonathan Anderson at Loewe; Kris Van Assche at Berluti — to name just those in the LVMH stable alone. Somehow Mr. Slimane manages to stand apart, not necessarily because he is the most skilled designer (that would be Mr. Jones) but because he possesses a cultural divining wand.
+The suit is dead, as we are constantly being told. That is, until it is not. And Mr. Slimane made it his business to tune out the death knell of tailoring, opening with a black double-breasted suit with cropped trousers, a white shirt, a skinny black tie and sunglasses that you would certainly have seen, once upon a time, on that most stylish of New Wave musicians, James Chance (a.k.a. James White of James White and the Blacks.)Here’s what else is happening
+Warning to Beijing: More than 100 prominent scholars and former diplomats, including two former U.S. ambassadors, signed an open letter cautioning that the detention of two Canadians threatens the flow of ideas with China essential for policy work and research aimed at narrowing international rifts. The letter calls for the immediate release of the Canadians, who were detained last month after Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, was arrested in Canada.
+Crackdown on young communists: Chinese activists say the authorities have been forcing them to watch taped confessions from fellow student activists who say they spread false information and violated the law. It’s the government’s latest effort to quell a resilient pro-labor movement fed by the ideas of Mao, Marx and Lenin, which are required subjects at China’s universities.
+Genetically edited babies: He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who said in November that he had used the Crispr gene-editing technique to alter human embryos, “seriously violated” state regulations, according to an initial government report. The findings indicate that he and his collaborators are likely to face criminal charges.
+Carlos Ghosn: The former chairman of Nissan, who has been charged with financial misconduct, offered a higher bail amount and pledged to hire private security guards in a bid to be freed from jail. A Tokyo court is expected to rule this week.
+Google: French authorities fined Google about $57 million for not properly telling users how it collects data across its services, including its search engine, Google Maps and YouTube, to present personalized advertisements. It is the largest penalty to date under the E.U.’s privacy law known as G.D.P.R.Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, both likely presidential candidates, spoke to the attendees after attending an early-morning prayer service and marching with N.A.A.C.P. leaders to the capitol. It is an annual rite that began in 2000 as a protest of the flag that once flew above the statehouse dome.
+The day was drenched in history. The church that hosted the service, Zion Baptist, was poised to host Dr. King in the spring of 1968, but he postponed a trip there to remain with striking sanitation workers in Memphis, where he was assassinated.
+When the procession arrived at the capitol on Monday, a handful of speakers were blaring Dr. King’s oratory from the foot of a monument to Confederate soldiers, the last site of the Confederate banner.
+The two senators used their remarks to hail Dr. King, each in a way that foreshadowed their likely campaign messages.
+Mr. Booker summoned the pastor’s words and those of other African-American icons to challenge the mostly black crowd to emulate Dr. King’s determination. “What is important is that we apply the ideals of Martin Luther King,” said the senator, adding: “Our dissatisfaction has to turn in action.”
+But he also warned against using vitriol toward political adversaries.
+Mr. Sanders sought to link his signature call for “a political revolution” with the life of Dr. King.
+“King had a revolutionary spirit, yes, he was a revolutionary,” Mr. Sanders said before outlining an array of racial justice proposals that demonstrated both his leftist politics and how eager he is to improve his performance with black voters from 2016. He was soundly defeated by Hillary Clinton in South Carolina’s primary.The troubles on “A New Leaf” (1971), Elaine May’s directorial debut, were worrisome before they were legion. She had never directed a movie and had to learn as she went along. The head of the studio changed while she was making it (the new boss wasn’t keen). And then there was her peerless star, Walter Matthau, whom she grew to love but who called her Mrs. Hitler. Years later, she suggested what the real problem was. People thought that May, a slight, beautiful woman, was “a nice girl, and the thing is, of course, I wasn’t a nice girl.” She added, “And when they found this out, they hated me all the more.”
+Being nice can be a liability for a woman; not being nice can be a career killer. By the time May made “A New Leaf,” she had already established her place in American cultural history as one half of the comedy team with another future filmmaker, Mike Nichols. Her film trajectory proved far more fraught than his, and was filled with stops and starts. A terrific director of actors whose comedy can lacerate, she remains a criminally underappreciated moviemaker. If you are in New York, you should clear your calendar for a tribute to her that begins Tuesday at Film Forum as part of a larger program on 1970s comedy. (She’s currently in a critically lauded Broadway play, “The Waverly Gallery.”)
+After four years together, Nichols and May split up in 1961, and he vaulted forward, directing for Broadway and soon Hollywood. When his film “The Graduate” hit in 1967, Life magazine ran a profile of her asking, “Whatever became of Elaine May?” She was writing — an unused, highly regarded draft of “The Loved One” — and acting in movies, including alongside Peter Falk, whom she later cast in her film “Mikey and Nicky.” “The Graduate” went on to be anointed a cultural touchstone; she appeared in Carl Reiner’s less-memorable “Enter Laughing.” May isn’t the star, alas, but she easily steals the movie (it’s at Film Forum) playing a bad actress in a worse play.
+In 1968, when May signed her extraordinary contract with Paramount Pictures to write, direct and star in “A New Leaf,” she became the first female director with a Hollywood deal since Ida Lupino. Her manager pushed the female angle, telling the studio that having a woman filmmaker would be of significance. Perhaps he had noticed that second-wave feminists were agitating for change, even as the industry remained stuck in its sexist rut: it’s been estimated that at the time less than 1 percent of American directors were women. She and Paramount soon clashed, though, and the studio took the movie away from her. She sued and tried to get it to remove her name. It’s still wonderful.MOSCOW — An explosion and a fire involving two tanker ships near the contested Kerch Strait, the waterway separating Crimea from mainland Russia, left at least 11 sailors dead on Monday and several missing, according to Russian news reports.
+Although the exact cause of the episode that ignited the tankers was not immediately known, fuel from one was being transferred to the other, the Russian news agency RIA said. Initial reports suggested that a fire and an explosion on one ship had spread to the second. The sailors killed were from India and Turkey, the reports said, with 12 survivors jumping into the water.
+Some 10 ships were involved in rescue operations, according to Interfax, another Russian news agency, which said the press service of the country’s Federal Agency for Maritime and River Transport announced the toll of victims and survivors.
+Television footage from the shore showed flames erupting and thick black smoke engulfing the ships.
+Both tankers were registered in Tanzania and were anchored just off the southern shore of the Crimean Peninsula and just outside the Kerch Strait.STORM LAKE, Iowa — The Republicans in Des Moines and Washington are doing what they can to run away from and run off Representative Steve King, the Republican from my district, for yet more of his outlandish remarks over white supremacy, nationalism and western civilization — remarks that simply echo things he has said many times over the past two decades in my paper, The Storm Lake Times.
+But the voters along the county blacktops and gravel roads of Northwest Iowa, most of them Republicans, are hanging tough with the congressman, who was r ecently stripped of his seats on the House Agriculture and Judiciary Committees .
+A Republican state senator, Randy Feenstra, a professor at Dordt College with solid Christian conservative credentials , has said he will challenge Mr. King in the 2020 primary. Mr. Feenstra said he stands with President Trump but is not as “caustic” as Mr. King and will not embarrass ever-polite Iowans. Other Republicans are pondering primary runs , too, thinking that condemnation at the hands of the party elite may give them a rare opening.
+Not so fast. Mr. King may be wounded, but he remains popular here.
+“They can’t change my mind about him,” said Cathy Greenfield, a dog groomer adamantly opposed to abortion who lives with her husband, Larry, a teacher and auto body mechanic, in the village of Fonda, just east of here. “The left has been after him forever. I don’t think he’s a racist. I think he will be successful.”Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+Greenland’s enormous ice sheet is melting at such an accelerated rate that it may have reached a “tipping point” and could become a major factor in sea-level rise around the world within two decades, scientists said in a study published on Monday.
+The Arctic is warming at twice the average rate of the rest of the planet, and the new research adds to the evidence that the ice loss in Greenland, which lies mainly above the Arctic Circle, is speeding up as the warming increases. The authors found that ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. After a lull in 2013-14, losses have resumed.
+The study is the latest in a series of papers published this month suggesting that scientific estimates of the effects of a warming planet have been, if anything, too conservative. Just a week ago, a separate study of ice loss in Antarctica found that the continent is contributing more to rising sea levels than previously thought.
+Another new analysis suggested that the oceans are warming far faster than earlier estimates. Warming oceans are currently the leading cause of sea-level rise, since water expands as it warms.LONDON — Last fall an energy company began a hydraulic fracturing operation in northwest England that it hoped would be a milestone in creating a new, domestic source of natural gas for Britain — in much the same way that fracking has taken hold in the United States.
+Three months later, after regularly causing earthquakes, the fracking has stopped, and the company has begun pulling some equipment from the site.
+The company, Cuadrilla Resources, says it will continue to work in the cow pasture near Blackpool in Lancashire, seeking to extract natural gas economically and safely from the shale rocks. But so far, its results have failed to win over skeptics.
+Some gas has bubbled up through the fracking liquids in its well, demonstrating that the rock formation Cuadrilla was exploring, known as the Bowland Shale, indeed contains some fuel. But the company was forced to suspend fracking at least four times when the work led to earthquakes that exceeded a magnitude of 0.5, the upper limit set by British regulators. There were also many smaller tremors.WASHINGTON — When the Trump administration announced last month that it was lifting sanctions against a trio of companies controlled by an influential Russian oligarch, it cast the move as tough on Russia and on the oligarch, arguing that he had to make painful concessions to get the sanctions lifted.
+But a binding confidential document signed by both sides suggests that the agreement the administration negotiated with the companies controlled by the oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, may have been less punitive than advertised.
+The deal contains provisions that free him from hundreds of millions of dollars in debt while leaving him and his allies with majority ownership of his most important company, the document shows.
+With the special counsel’s investigation into Russia’s role in the 2016 election continuing to shadow President Trump, the administration’s decision to lift sanctions on Mr. Deripaska’s companies has become a political flash point. House Democrats won widespread Republican support last week for their efforts to block the sanctions relief deal. Democratic hopes of blocking the administration’s decision have been stifled by the Republican-controlled Senate.NASHVILLE — Reggie Young, a prolific studio guitarist who appeared on landmark recordings by Elvis Presley and many others and played a prominent role in shaping the sound of Southern popular music in the 1960s and ’70s, died on Thursday at his home in Leipers Fork, Tenn., just outside Nashville. He was 82.
+His wife, Jenny Young, said the cause was heart failure.
+Mr. Young played guitar on hundreds of hit recordings in a career that spanned more than six decades.
+Among his best-known credits are the Box Tops’ “The Letter” and Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” both No. 1 pop singles in the late ’60s, and Neil Diamond’s 1969 Top 10 hit “Sweet Caroline.”
+Mr. Young also played the funky chicken-scratch guitar lick on “Skinny Legs and All,” the soul singer Joe Tex’s 1967 Top 10 pop hit. He contributed the reverberating fills and swells that punctuate James Carr’s timeless soul ballad “The Dark End of the Street,” also from 1967. And his bluesy riffing buttressed the sultry, throbbing groove on “Son of a Preacher Man,” a Top 10 single for the British pop singer Dusty Springfield in 1968.BEIJING — Warning that China’s arrest of two Canadians has created a dangerous chill for people working on policy and research in that country, more than 100 academics and former diplomats have signed an open letter calling for the two men to be immediately freed.
+Made public on Monday, the letter was an international cry of concern from people who work and study in China, saying the arrests threaten the flow of ideas with Chinese academics and officials that is essential for policy work and research aimed at narrowing international rifts.
+The letter warned China that the detentions will result in “greater distrust.”
+Its signatories included 27 diplomats from seven countries and 116 scholars and academics from 19 countries.
+“Meetings and exchanges are the foundation of serious research and diplomacy around the world, including for Chinese scholars and diplomats,” the letter said. The arrests, though, “send a message that this kind of constructive work is unwelcome and even risky in China.”LONDON — To hear some British politicians tell it, they are mere servants. They can only execute popular will, whatever the cost to the country or themselves. To do otherwise would be to betray democracy itself.
+“The will of the British people is an instruction that must be delivered,” Prime Minister David Cameron said after voters narrowly approved leaving the European Union in a 2016 referendum, though this meant both his resignation and, in his telling, devastation to the British economy.
+Yet lawmakers also believe they must determine for themselves how to serve Britain’s best interests. Prime Minister Theresa May, Mr. Cameron’s successor, justified her plan for withdrawal, or Brexit, as the best way forward, even if it was not the most popular.
+Voters seem to share these dual expectations. The British government, many believe, should first and foremost safeguard the national good, including from the whims of public opinion, which has flipped several times since the initial vote. But it must also respect public opinion, as captured in that nearly three-year-old vote, above all else.WASHINGTON — President Trump boasted recently that he has been “FAR tougher” on Russia than other American presidents. But while the Trump administration has cracked down on Russian diplomats, government officials and oligarchs, Mr. Trump himself largely has taken a far more generous stance toward Moscow.
+The contradiction has taken on new meaning in light of several recent reports, including one on an F.B.I. counterintelligence investigation that was opened in 2017 into whether Mr. Trump had secretly acted on Russia’s behalf — one facet of the Justice Department’s investigation into Moscow’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.
+Here are five key ways in which Mr. Trump has been at odds with his own administration over Russia in the past year.
+Pulling troops out of Syria and Afghanistan
+Mr. Trump’s go-it-alone decision in December to pull 2,000 American troops from Syria set up a dramatic clash with top officials in his administration and prompted protest resignations by Jim Mattis, the defense secretary, and Brett McGurk, the special presidential envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State.Gary’s devotion to The Stone and its mission of making philosophy useful and meaningful to the broader public was, like him, unwavering, reliable, consistent, marked by an unmistakable clarity of language and a respect for the reader of any background. In my view, he practically invented the prevailing form of the philosophical op-ed. Over time, the phrase “a Gary Gutting piece” became part of my own editorial vocabulary.
+But Gary was much more than a regular contributor to The Stone. He was an adviser and mentor to both me and The Stone’s co-founder and moderator, the philosopher Simon Critchley, who first met and worked with Gary at Notre Dame more than 15 years ago. Simon described Gary’s work well as “a properly American voice, clear, without ever being shrill, tolerant without ever being uncritical, and instinctively committed to the idea that philosophy could be communicated to a larger public audience.” He would also, when speaking of Gary, most often refer to him as “a prince.”
+The most bitter cultural arguments in American intellectual life were comfortable places for Gary — perhaps he saw them as opportunities. And I believe that he entered them not so much to establish the dominance of his own view — as a believer in God, in humanistic education, or in the promise of the United States — but to help put the debates on sane ground, to level them through reason and friendly engagement, to be a peacemaker and to advance the invaluable work of civil public discourse and argument.
+I was honored to play the role of Gary’s editor, nominally a position of some authority, but to be honest — and I must be if I am to pay proper respect on the profoundly sad occasion of his death — I was more his student. Over the years, as Gary’s involvement in The Stone waned and he returned to his students and writing books, I often found myself considering the merit of a certain idea or argument, or wondering about the philosophical soundness of a particular essay. I would quite literally ask, sometimes out loud, “What would Gary do?” I would then think hard about that and try to act accordingly. But when I got stuck, I would write or call him for guidance — a session, I might call it. The pleasure of those calls came not just from having my thinking clarified and gently set right by a person wiser than me, but also from hearing once again his reassuring, friendly, articulate Midwestern tenor, and what seemed to be his endlessly renewable excitement about people and ideas.Quankang is working with Xiaomi to design and make smart home appliances such as space heaters and electric fans. Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu plan to build three fully automated assembly lines. The first is expected to be running by March.
+And for the first time, Quankang is accepting direct government support. Mr. Shao’s modernization campaign will happen on more than 30 acres far away from Dongguan, in neighboring Hunan Province. The local government there is giving Quankang the land almost free of charge. The local government of Yanling County is more interested in tax revenue and job creation than revenue from land sales, Mr. Shao said. So far, he has spent nearly $12 million on the Hunan plant.
+China’s boom started when the Communist Party unleashed the country’s entrepreneurs and largely left them alone. This next stage of growth may not be so easy. To help it along, the central government is spending vast amounts to upgrade manufacturing. Local officials in less developed provinces are trying to lure companies to replicate southern China’s economic miracle.
+It proves appealing to entrepreneurs like Mr. Shao and Ms. Yu, who are desperate to find a new niche to survive and thrive.
+“The business of our factories isn’t as good as before,” Ms. Yu said. “But since we’ve been doing this, we’ll keep charging ahead because behind us it’s a precipice. We’ll fall if we step back.”It all adds up to a daunting set of rules for frequent-flier programs. As Gary Leff, creator of the travel blog View From the Wing, put it, airline customers need to believe that it’s worth spending the time to wade through the rules and plan their travel in a way that benefits them.
+Travelers should keep in mind, Mr. Leff said, that the airline programs have become less rewarding. Tickets cost more to redeem, and because flights are fuller, they are harder to redeem, he said.
+The airlines do not release figures on the number of frequent fliers. But Mr. Leff said he believed that the number of elite status fliers had actually increased from a decade ago. That’s because more people are flying more miles now, he said, and because airline mergers have made it easier to concentrate trips on one brand.
+Those who attain elite status can get hooked on the benefits. Andrea Umbach, an executive coach in Seattle, found that her Alaska status meant she could change or cancel an Alaska ticket without a fee.
+“I could book a trip to a client meeting or conference far enough in advance to get a good price, but could change it without spending a lot if my plans changed,” she said. That helps her manage her business expenses.
+Ms. Umbach is spending January looking at her plans for travel this year with an eye on retaining her MVP Gold frequent-flier status — the second level of status. She plans to check in on her progress periodically and make extra flights at the end of the year if she needs to.
+For those who like to plan ahead, January is a good time to read airline and credit card website details and think about the next 12 months of travel, Mr. Leff said. Travelers should look at airlines’ schedules and destinations, and the benefits offered at each elite flier level. Then, he said, they should approximate the travel they will do and see what status levels they can achieve.“My comments did not represent the actual timing or circumstances of any such discussions,” he added. “The point is that the proposal was in the earliest stage and did not advance beyond a free nonbinding letter of intent.”
+Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty late last year to lying to Congress about the duration of the Moscow proposal; he had indicated initially that it stopped in January 2016.
+It was not the first time Mr. Giuliani has reversed himself in his comments about issues related to the investigation of Russian election interference that is being led by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
+Last week, Mr. Giuliani backtracked from another surprising assertion that left open the possibility that Trump campaign aides might have coordinated with Russia in its election interference in 2016.
+“There was no collusion by President Trump in any way, shape or form,” Mr. Giuliani said in a statement on Thursday, reiterating the president’s longstanding defense against accusations that his campaign secretly coordinated with Moscow to help swing the election. “Likewise, I have no knowledge of any collusion by any of the thousands of people who worked on the campaign.”
+He added, referring to discredited conspiracy theories that the president and his allies have long cited, “The only knowledge I have in this regard is the collusion of the Clinton campaign with Russia, which has so far been ignored.”
+A day earlier, Mr. Giuliani stopped short of defending Trump campaign aides, drawing speculation that he might have inside knowledge of possible coordination with Russia.On Sunday, a person with knowledge of the Coughlin case, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that more than one skater had accused him of sexual misconduct that went beyond harassment. Also on Sunday, USA Today reported that two complaints against Coughlin involved minors.
+U.S. Figure Skating, the national governing body, has said little, beyond expressing shock and condolences. Daniel Hill, a spokesman for SafeSport, said on Sunday that “the center has a charter to put an end to sexual misconduct in the Olympic movement, and we have exclusive authority to investigate those cases.”
+Hill was speaking in general terms and not specifically about Coughlin. Referring to sanctions against individuals, Hill said, “We will only use those if there are concerns and we believe individuals need to be kept safe now.”
+In an interview with USA Today on Jan. 7, Coughlin called accusations against him “unfounded” and stated, correctly, that a preliminary sanction “in no way constitutes a finding by SafeSport or that there is any merit to the allegation.”
+The U.S. Center for SafeSport was created by the United States Olympic Committee in 2017, after allegations of sexual abuse were repeatedly made in such sports as gymnastics and swimming. Reaction to SafeSport’s effort to curb sexual misconduct in figure skating has been mixed and complicated.
+“Is SafeSport cleaning up the sport? I’d have to say my answer, generally speaking, is yes,” said Craig Maurizi, a longtime coach and the director of figure skating at the Ice House training center in Hackensack, N.J., said on Sunday. “I think the mechanism is making people think twice before they act.”
+At the same time, Maurizi criticized SafeSport for the manner in which it was adjudicating a high-profile case involving him that has been going on for two decades.Throughout the fall, the producer Greg Berlanti was trying to save his cable drama “You.”
+The series had premiered on Lifetime in September, but its viewership was virtually nonexistent: roughly 650,000 people were tuning in to each episode of the soapy stalker thriller, starring Penn Badgley. Even Mr. Berlanti, one of the most successful and prolific producers in television thanks to shows like “Riverdale,” “Arrow” and “Blindspot,” conceded in an interview that “barely anybody watched” it.
+He made repeated calls to Lifetime executives, asking for patience and making his case for a second season. It wasn’t enough. In early December, Lifetime announced it was finished with “You.”
+But right after Christmas, something happened. “You” started lighting up social media. People were searching for it online. Entertainment sites like The Ringer were writing about the show.
+What changed? It began streaming on Netflix.
+Mr. Berlanti heard from family and friends about how much they were enjoying his new show, ignoring the fact that it had debuted months earlier.It was a blind ad in a newspaper that caught Tony Mendez’s eye in 1965. The ad (“Artists to Work Overseas — U.S. Navy Civilians”) did not identify the employer, but it carried the whiff of adventure.
+At the time, Mr. Mendez was working for Martin Marietta (now Lockheed Martin) in Denver, making technical drawings of the wiring harnesses for missiles. It was not the most exciting task.
+The employer behind the ad turned out to be the Central Intelligence Agency. And Mr. Mendez’s artistic skills, which included hand-eye coordination that enabled him to look at something and copy it precisely, suited the agency’s need for a counterfeiter and forger.
+And so began a career that in time would lead Mr. Mendez, who died on Saturday at 78, to orchestrate one of the most audacious covert operations in C.I.A. history: the rescue of six American diplomats from a tumultuous Iran after Islamic militants had stormed the United States Embassy in Tehran on Nov. 4, 1979. The militants held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, a humiliating foreign policy debacle that would severely undermine Jimmy Carter’s presidency.NEWARK — The Devils appeared to be a franchise on the rise after a surprising playoff berth last season. But except for the glimpse of hope offered by the young goalie Mackenzie Blackwood, 2018-19 quickly devolved into a lost season.
+As they head into their bye week and the All-Star break, the Devils (18-23-7) have a league-low 43 points and their five road victories are the fewest in the league. On Friday, the veteran Drew Stafford led a players-only meeting.
+Injuries have taken their toll. The reigning most valuable player Taylor Hall has missed the last 13 games with a lower-body injury and will not play in the All-Star Game as a result. The absence of his playmaking ability has been felt.
+“I think everybody in this room and in this organization has expected more this year,” defenseman Ben Lovejoy said. “We have not been nearly good enough this first half of the season, and it’s definitely been a disappointment.”Slide 1 of 34,
+Skepta, second from left, in Paris. This musician’s puffer was just one of the riffs on plaid seen during on the streets during the men’s fashion shows in Milan and Paris this season.And there is no chance of a “morning in America”-type boom over the next two years.
+For one thing, in 1983-84 America was able to grow very fast by taking up the huge amount of economic slack that had accumulated over the course of the double-dip recession from 1979 to 1982. Right now, with unemployment below 4 percent, it’s not clear whether there’s any economic slack at all. There’s certainly not enough to allow the 7-plus percent growth rates in real personal income that prevailed in the run-up to the 1984 election.
+Also, a housing boom driven by dramatic interest rate reductions was central to the rapid growth of Reagan’s third and fourth year in office. (No, it wasn’t all about the miraculous effects of tax cuts.)
+But today’s Fed can’t — literally can’t — deliver the kind of boost it did back then by bringing double-digit interest rates down to single-digit levels, because rates are already quite low. And with housing prices looking rather high, it’s hard to imagine a huge surge looking forward.
+Are there other ways that the economy might rescue Trump? What about the 2017 tax cut, which Trump said would be “rocket fuel” for the economy?
+Well, by increasing the budget deficit, that cut probably gave the economy some stimulus, temporarily raising growth. But that effect is already fading out, and the economy would have been slowing down even without the extra drag created by the Trump shutdown. This doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ll have a recession soon, but we’re almost surely looking at unimpressive growth at best.
+But wasn’t the tax cut supposed to increase long-run growth, by increasing business investment? Yes, it was — but it isn’t delivering on that promise. Corporations received huge tax breaks, but they mostly used the money to pay higher dividends and buy back stocks, not for investment. And even the modest rise in business investment that did take place in 2018 seems to have been driven by higher oil prices, not tax cuts.
+So Donald Trump is no Ronald Reagan.
+Actually, even Ronald Reagan was no Ronald Reagan. Although right-wing legend portrays his experience as proof of the magical power of tax cuts, the economy actually performed somewhat better under Bill Clinton, who raised taxes. (Although, to be fair, almost all Republicans seem to have managed to expunge that fact from their memories.)Abortion opponents have spent decades planning for a Supreme Court with a majority hostile to reproductive rights. So it’s little surprise that, with the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh in the fall, the necessary fifth vote, they’ve been quick to seize the moment.
+The anti-abortion movement has also spent those decades building a vast fund-raising and organizing network, with the goals of securing an anti-abortion voting bloc and getting more like-minded judges, at every level, and lawmakers — and presidents — into power.
+Mere weeks after Justice Kavanaugh was sworn in, West Virginia and Alabama passed state constitutional amendments that could ban abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
+Those on the other side, then, need their own robust and creative playbook — not just to fight back against attacks on reproductive freedom but also to pre-emptively protect and expand those freedoms wherever possible.Not every Super Bowl is super, and we’ll find out if this year’s edition fits the tag on Feb. 3. But we do know some of what is in store.
+One of those things is (no surprise) the New England Patriots, who will be appearing in their third consecutive Super Bowl and fourth in five years. The Rams will be the first team to represent Los Angeles in the game since 1984.
+Those are not the only records and oddities about Super Bowl LIII.
+Game of Ages
+Sean McVay, who took over the Rams last season after a meteoric rise as an N.F.L. assistant, turns 33 this week, which will make him the youngest head coach in Super Bowl history. He breaks the record held by Mike Tomlin, who was 36 when his Pittsburgh Steelers won the big game in 2009.
+At 66, Bill Belichick will not be the oldest Super Bowl coach, as Marv Levy went to the game with the Bills at age 67 and 68. But Belichick could become the oldest winner, breaking the record held by Tom Coughlin, who was 65 when the Giants beat the Patriots in 2012.WASHINGTON — Consumers who use expensive brand-name prescription drugs when cheaper alternatives are available could face higher costs under a new policy being proposed by the Trump administration.
+The proposal, to be published this week in the Federal Register, would apply to health insurance plans sold under the Affordable Care Act.
+Health plans have annual limits on consumers’ out-of-pocket costs. Under the proposal, insurers would not have to count the full amount of a consumer’s co-payment for a brand-name drug toward the annual limit on cost-sharing. Insurers would have to count only the smaller amount that would be charged for a generic version of the drug.
+For example, if a consumer filled a doctor’s prescription for a brand-name drug with a $25 co-payment, rather than using a generic medicine with a $5 co-payment, the consumer might get credit for only $5 in out-of-pocket spending. Consumers would have to spend more of their own money before reaching the annual limit on out-of-pocket costs.Carmelo Anthony will finally secure his escape from the Houston Rockets on Tuesday when the Rockets complete a trade that sends the former All-Star to the Chicago Bulls, according to a person with knowledge of the deal.
+The Bulls have no intention of playing Anthony but could elect to keep him until the Feb. 7 trade deadline and use him in another potential deal, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the trade publicly.
+The trade with Chicago, which is also expected to include some minor draft compensation, could not be executed Monday because the league office was closed in observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. But the Rockets, as first reported by ESPN, offered an undisclosed amount of cash to convince the Bulls to take on the remainder of Anthony’s $2.4 million salary for this season, which will result in a luxury-tax savings of $2.6 million for Houston.
+Anthony, 34, has been in search of a new team since Nov. 11, when The New York Times first reported that the former Knick’s time with the Rockets was coming to an end after just 10 games together.MEXICO CITY — Word spread quickly: free gasoline. It was spewing from a pipeline, through a hole punched by fuel thieves. People — as many as 900, by some estimates — flocked to the rupture, many carrying containers to fill.
+But just as quickly, the apparent windfall on Friday turned to disaster when the pipeline exploded in flames, killing at least 89 and wounding scores more.
+Amid the national lamenting, some Mexicans have insisted that the victims had only themselves to blame: They were breaking the law, pilferers taking what wasn’t theirs, and had put themselves in harm’s way.
+But the man steering the nation’s response to the incident, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has rejected that view, arguing that the people were compelled to participate by the poverty and unemployment caused by past government policies.All of it was the result not just of the cold, but of how quickly temperatures dropped.
+Experts pointed to several factors. One culprit: the polar vortex, a giant mass of cold air normally contained above the North Pole by strong bands of circulating winds. In recent weeks, the vortex has broken apart, with one block of cold air escaping into Canada and the United States, and another into Europe.
+“It’s sort of like a dam bursting into two or three pieces, and those pieces took the cold air with them,” said Judah Cohen, director of seasonal forecasting at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk-assessment firm. “The polar vortex is the enabler, and it set the table for the weather we’re now seeing.”
+At the same time, meteorologists said, the brutal drop in temperatures was also spurred by the effect of a low-pressure weather system that brought snow in recent days being followed by a high-pressure system.
+Imagine a hand-held mixer, with two spindles circulating in opposite directions. The low-pressure system rotated counterclockwise and the high-pressure system arrived behind it, rotating clockwise. From there, the systems worked in tandem to suck cold air from the Northwest into regions that had just been pummeled with up to two feet of snow.
+“You had two weather systems spinning in opposite directions, so that combination is what is basically drawing down the colder air from Canada,” said Ryan Hanrahan, the chief meteorologist at WVIT, the NBC station in West Hartford, Conn.“We are incredibly saddened by the news of his passing,” the Estée Lauder Companies’ statement said. “As the visionary behind Deciem, he positively impacted millions of people around the world with his creativity, brilliance and innovation. This is a profound loss for us all.”
+News of Mr. Truaxe’s death came after a year of unusual behavior from the Deciem founder, much of which was displayed on social media. In Instagram posts on the company’s account, Mr. Truaxe canceled the company’s marketing plans and canceled company partnerships.
+Executives began to leave the company in response to Mr. Truaxe’s odd behavior, including Stephen Kaplan, the company’s chief financial officer, and Nicola Kilner, his co-chief executive, who said her employment was terminated by Mr. Truaxe. (She rejoined the company in the summer.) Mr. Kaplan later explained that he had departed “because Brandon’s demeanor had changed following a December vacation in Mongolia.”
+Then, after a relatively quiet period, Mr. Truaxe announced in October that Deciem would shut down its operations, claiming, as an aside, that virtually all of the company’s employees had been involved in “major criminal activity.”
+The investors interceded, asking a judge to remove Mr. Truaxe from the company to stop him from hurting the business. “He has essentially lit the company on fire,” a lawyer representing the brand said at the time. The company’s application to oust Mr. Truaxe was granted, and management of Deciem was ceded to Ms. Kilner.Stocks around the world tumbled overnight after Mr. Trump’s victory. But by the start of trading in the United States on Nov. 9, investors had begun to embrace the idea of a Republican-controlled White House and Congress.
+The chaotic first year of the Trump presidency would feature policy missteps, White House firings, tensions with North Korea and developments in the Russia investigation. But investors focused on the promise of tax cuts and deregulation, pushing markets up and up, and Mr. Trump spent much of 2017 crowing about the market’s gains.
+Mr. Trump was inaugurated as the 45th president of the United States.
+In his first speech before Congress, Mr. Trump called on politicians to back a repeal of the Affordable Care Act and an overhaul of the tax code. The next day, the S&P 500 posted its biggest daily gain since November.
+But in March, concerns about the White House’s ability to push through this agenda began to creep into the market. The S&P 500 suffered its worst weekly decline since the election after the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, confirmed that the bureau was investigating potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and House Republicans failed to muster enough support to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
+Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey as director of the F.B.I.
+A week after Mr. Trump fired the F.B.I. director, the stock market had its worst single-day decline of 2017. News had broken that the president had asked Mr. Comey to shut down a federal investigation into his former national security adviser, adding to doubts about Mr. Trump’s ability to accomplish his legislative agenda.
+Mr. Trump escalated his war of words with North Korea, declaring that a provocative threat to rain down “fire and fury” might not have been harsh enough. Stocks suffered their steepest daily decline in months.
+In November, Republican lawmakers unveiled a sweeping rewrite of the tax code that would deliver a significant tax cut for corporations.
+Mr. Trump signed a $1.5 trillion tax cut into law on Dec. 22. By the end of the year, the S&P 500 had risen 19.4 percent and logged its 14th straight month of gains, the longest such streak in history.
+In February, stocks showed real signs of weakness for the first time in Mr. Trump’s presidency, falling by more than 10 percent from their high in January. Fears of inflation and higher interest rates, prompted by a strong jobs report, set off the selling.
+It became clear that Mr. Trump was serious about pursuing bellicose trade actions against many of the United States’ biggest trading partners. Investors worried that a global trade war was looming.
+Mr. Trump’s proposal for tariffs on imports from China helped drive the S&P 500 down 4.5 percent over two days.
+But starting in April, the S&P 500 posted monthly gains for six straight months.
+Mr. Trump said increases in United States interest rates were “not acceptable.” Later in the year, as stocks tumbled, he ramped up his criticism of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy decisions, unnerving investors along the way.
+The Fed decided to raise interest rates for the second time in 2018.
+A summer rally took stocks to record levels. Much of the drive came from large technology companies. But the higher these stocks rose, the more expensive they became, making them more vulnerable to a sell-off.
+The bull run in stocks that began in 2009 became the longest in recent history, by one measure. In a tweet, Mr. Trump congratulated America.
+The S&P 500 hit its all-time high of 2,930.75. With an eye on the midterm elections, Mr. Trump tweeted, “Financial and jobs numbers are fantastic.”
+Tensions with China and comments by the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome H. Powell, about rising borrowing costs helped crater stocks, which suffered their steepest declines since the February rout. Mr. Trump lashed out at the Fed: “They are raising interest rates and it’s ridiculous.”
+Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
+Mr. Trump tweeted that he was a “Tariff Man.” Stocks fell 3.2 percent.The February before the 2016 election, Dan Cassino, a political scientist at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and some of his colleagues tried to measure how threats to traditional masculinity affected male voting behavior.
+They polled 694 registered voters in New Jersey about their support for various candidates. Half of the respondents were first told that in an increasing number of households, women out-earn men, and they were asked whether that was true in theirs. The researchers expected many men to lie; the point of the question was to get them thinking about shifting gender roles.
+Presented with a hypothetical matchup between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, men who weren’t asked about women’s earning power favored Clinton by 16 points, close to Barack Obama’s 2012 margin of victory in the state. Men who got the question about gender and money, however, favored Trump by eight points. There was no difference between the two groups in the margin of their support for Bernie Sanders versus Trump.
+“In essence, the threat of losing the traditional norm of men as breadwinners led men to abandon support for the first major-party female candidate in American history and come out in support of her opponent,” wrote Cassino in an article titled “Emasculation, Conservatism and the 2016 Election.”NATIONAL
+An article on Sunday about scrutiny that the website Buzzfeed is facing over an investigative article about President Trump and Michael Cohen misstated the month that Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed’s longtime investigative editor, left the organization. It was October, not August.
+NEW YORK
+An article on Saturday about the handling of a sexual assault accusation against a top official in the administration of Gov. Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey misidentified the lawmaker who asked a question of Mr. Murphy’s chief counsel during a hearing. It was Assemblywoman BettyLou DeCroce, not Assemblywoman Holly T. Schepisi.
+METROPOLITAN
+An article on Sunday about a plan to protect the Lower East Side from flooding misspelled the given name of a member of Community Board 3. She is Vaylateena Jones, not Vaylateeba.
+SPORTS
+An article on Monday about the tennis player Frances Tiafoe misstated the given name of the Italian player beaten by Tiafoe. He is Andreas Seppi, not Andrea.The man, Nathan Phillips, told two different versions of what happened. He told The Washington Post that he was singing a traditional song when the teenagers swarmed around him, some chanting, “Build that wall, build that wall.” He decided the right thing to do was to get away. “I’ve got to find myself an exit out of this situation.”
+He told The Detroit Free Press that the incident started when the boys started attacking four African-Americans. So he decided to intervene. “There was that moment when I realized I’ve put myself between beast and prey. These young men were beastly and these old black individuals was their prey.”
+Many news organizations ran one of these accounts. Before you judge the reporters too harshly, it’s important to remember that these days the social media tail wags the mainstream media dog. If you want your story to be well placed and if you want to be professionally rewarded, you have to generate page views — you have to incite social media. The way to do that is to reinforce the prejudices of your readers.
+In this one episode, you had a gentle, 64-year-old Native American man being swarmed by white (boo!), male (boo!), preppy (double boo!) Trump supporters (infinite boo!). If you are trying to rub the pleasure centers of a liberal audience, this is truly a story too good to check.
+Saturday was a day of liberal vindication. See! This is what those people do! This is who they really are. Reza Aslan, the religious scholar, tweeted a photo of the main Covington boy and asked, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?” The filmmaker Michael Green showed the same image and tweeted: “A face like that never changes. This image will define his life. No one need ever forgive him.”“She knows what it’s like to be human — to find love and to make mistakes.”
+MENG XIAOLI, a fan of the late Taiwanese pop singer Teresa Teng, whose music was once banned on mainland China as “decadent” but has been experiencing a resurgence.COVINGTON, Ky. — On Friday night, all anyone at Covington Catholic High School was talking about was that their star Colonels basketball team had unexpectedly lost to the rival St. Xavier Bombers, 55-45.
+For the “Colonel Crazies,” as locals call them, identity is wrapped in state championship titles, and their all-male brotherhood.
+But by Saturday afternoon, the Northern Kentucky school off the Dixie Highway had been ripped out of its overwhelmingly white, heavily Catholic, and largely Republican world and thrust into a national firestorm that touched seemingly every raw nerve in this polarized country — race, President Trump and the behavior of young white men.
+Videos surfaced of dozens of Covington students in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington after the March for Life, chanting as they do at games, wearing “Make America Great Again” hats and appearing to be in a standoff with an elderly Native American man.On July 31, 2017, the Yankees sent three solid prospects to the Oakland Athletics in exchange for Sonny Gray, who was expected to immediately stabilize New York’s starting rotation.
+At the time, it seemed like a smart deal for the Yankees, who were acquiring a formidable right-hander who had been an All-Star in 2015. But it never worked out that way. Instead, by early August of last season, a struggling Gray had been demoted to the bullpen. And when the postseason arrived, Gray was left off the team’s roster for both rounds. Not much later, General Manager Brian Cashman made it clear that he was ready to trade Gray elsewhere.
+On Monday evening, Cashman did just that. The Yankees announced that they had sent Gray and a minor league pitcher to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for a second-base prospect, Shed Long, and a draft pick. In a subsequent trade, the Yankees then shipped Long to Seattle in exchange for the outfielder Josh Stowers, who was rated the Mariners’ 10th-best prospect.
+The change of scenery could benefit Gray, who is 29. So might his reunion with Derek Johnson, who was his pitching coach at Vanderbilt University and has now taken on the same role with the Reds.Racism, homophobia, sexism, police violence, immigration: All of these issues come up in “Awake.” It would be a lot for any one play — but “Awake” has nine of them, each clocking in at around 10 or 15 minutes. To its credit, the show, written and directed by K. Lorrel Manning at the Barrow Group, moves at a steady clip. After all, the best thing about an anthology is that if an individual play isn’t very good, it also won’t be very long.
+Then again, these are not so much plays as vignettes. There is no time to get attached to any of the characters, or to let the situations blossom in a dramatically impactful manner. Setup, red herring, reveal, punch line: over and out.21A: TIL that you can have your very own TWIBE on Twitter. I’m on Twitter all the time (come say hi to me at @NYTimesWordplay), and I had no idea this was even a thing. Join or make one of your own today.
+31A: Wordplay alert! On first read, the clue “Long past time?” sounds as if it were talking about lateness (“It’s long past the time you were supposed to be here!”). The answer is YORE because the clue should really be read as “A time long past.”
+32A: This is another clue that beginning solvers probably look at and think to themselves, “How am I supposed to know that?” The short answer is that you’re not. No one knows trivia as specific as “Guinness record-holder for the U.S. city with the most consecutive days of sun (768), informally.” But working those crossings will set you free, my friends. They are particularly kind here, and before you know it, you’ll be saying to yourself: “Huh. I didn’t know ST. PETE got that much sun. Perhaps I should plan a vacation there.”
+41A: Do the names of sports figures trip you up? Try one of our topical articles, “10 Sports Names That Will Help You Become a Better Crossword Solver” under the “Words to Know” tab on Wordplay’s main page. Once you’ve read that, you’ll know that the answer to “Baseball's Matty, Felipe or Moises” is the surname ALOU, which has appeared 239 times in the New York Times Crossword. So it’s worth knowing.
+33D: Sneaky. You’ll start off thinking about what kind of ORE the constructors are looking for, and you’ll end up realizing that it’s a TYPO. “Ore, for one?” is all dressed up like a straightforward, ORE-finding clue until you get to that question mark. Slow down and think. It’s obviously wordplay because of that question mark, so read the clue this way: “What is ORE, to ONE?” Well, there’s only one letter’s difference, so it has to be a TYPO. I would have liked this one even more if the R and the N were closer together on the keyboard, because that’s a tough TYPO to make. Still, it’s a very clever clue.TOKYO — For the second time in a week, a Japanese court has rejected a bail request by Carlos Ghosn, the former global auto chieftain who has spent more than two months in a Tokyo jail.
+A Japanese judge, after reviewing a request from Mr. Ghosn’s lawyers in which he offered to pay for private security guards and surrender all of his passports, ruled on Tuesday that Mr. Ghosn would have to stay in detention. The court gave no immediate reason for its decision.
+Mr. Ghosn, 64, has been charged on three counts of financial misconduct at Nissan Motor, the Japanese auto company he led for two decades. He was detained on Nov. 19 in a dramatic arrest off his corporate jet and has been held in Tokyo ever since. His trial could be months away.
+In a court appearance early this month, Mr. Ghosn denied guilt over charges that he improperly transferred personal losses to Nissan’s books and withheld millions of dollars in income from Nissan’s financial filings for years as the company’s chairman and chief executive.More than 50 cameras blanketed the Superdome on Sunday afternoon, ensuring endless angles and replays of every highlight from the N.F.C. championship game between the New Orleans Saints and Los Angeles Rams.
+At stake was a trip to next month’s Super Bowl, but when the officials needed a replay most, the N.F.L.’s complicated rules for what is and is not subject to video review prohibited them from watching one, even in the midst of a game that cost tens of millions of dollars to produce and is among the most watched events on television.
+So, despite dizzying rules changes and stunning camera angles all aimed at getting the calls right, the decision came down to a simple fact: The most important guy was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time and nobody could do anything about it.
+Those rules might change this off-season, though in the past the N.F.L. has shown little appetite for making penalties reviewable because they are considered judgment calls. This means that rulings of fact — such as whether a ball crossed the goal line, or a foot touched the sideline, or whether a pass is complete — are reviewable. Whether a player committed holding or pass interference is not.May returns with Brexit Plan B
+Prime Minister Theresa May returned to Parliament with an alternative blueprint for Britain’s withdrawal from the E.U.
+Infuriating some lawmakers, it looked a lot like her initial plan, which was voted down last week in one of the most resounding parliamentary defeats in British history.
+Why it matters: The face-off could become another epic political showdown that leaves the Brexit process where it has been for months — stuck in limbo with no obvious path forward.Good Tuesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Senator Kamala Harris, the California Democrat and barrier-breaking prosecutor who became the second black woman to serve in the United States Senate, declared her candidacy for president on Monday. She entered the race on the holiday of Martin Luther King’s Birthday, an overt nod to the historic nature of her candidacy.
+• The Democratic field for 2020 is getting more crowded by the day. Here’s an updated list of who’s in, who’s out and who’s still thinking it over.
+• From Washington to South Carolina to Harlem, Democrats across the country commemorated Martin Luther King’s Birthday with events that honored the slain civil rights leader and lashed out at President Trump as a racist.Conan O’Brien returns with his revamped late-night show. And “Many Sides of Jane” offers an intimate look at life with dissociative identity disorder.
+What’s on TV
+CONAN 11 p.m. on TBS. The late-night host Conan O’Brien unveils his show’s new look and 30-minute format with Tom Hanks as guest star. The revamp will give “Conan” a more casual feel: O’Brien will be wearing fewer suits and will do away with the desk, bringing the audience closer to the action. “If I hadn’t changed this up, I can’t say how many more years I could have done it the same way, every night,” he said in a recent interview with The New York Times. Among the guest stars on this week’s episodes: Bill Hader, Tig Notaro and the cast of “The Good Place.”
+THE CONNERS 8 p.m. on ABC. The first season of this third “Roseanne” incarnation — brought about by the thorny end to the revival that debuted last spring — wraps up with a momentous offer for Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and worrisome news for Becky (Lecy Goranson). In his review for The Times, James Poniewozik called the show “unsettling and raw and fitfully funny,” and said it feels more like the original “Roseanne” than the reboot did.This month, Mark Zuckerberg announced that his pledge for this new year is to “host a series of public discussions about the future of technology in society.” He added that he intends to “try different formats to keep it interesting,” and we in Britain would like to suggest such an event for him.
+Perhaps he could present information in our Parliament to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee that I head — something he refused to do in 2018. Or if that doesn’t work for him, I would be happy to reconvene the special International Grand Committee, which met at the House of Commons in November and included lawmakers from Britain, Canada, Ireland, France, Latvia, Brazil, Argentina and Singapore.
+Indeed, we offered Mr. Zuckerberg plenty of opportunities to have these discussions last year. These committees met with the intention of discussing the following with him: the Cambridge Analytica Facebook data breach scandal; the Russian government’s use of social media platforms to interfere in the politics of democracies around the world; the anti-competitive nature of some of Facebook’s business practices; and Facebook’s harmful content policies. He didn’t want to have these discussions then, but we hope that he’s sincere and wants to have them now.
+Last year, Facebook lashed out instead of opening up. It criticized the investigations of this newspaper into the company, it criticized the investigatory work of my committee, and it claimed that both investigations demonstrated unfair bias against them. It refused to appreciate that its customers have genuine concerns about the way Facebook gathers data from its users and makes it available to other companies through advertising targeting tools or reciprocal sharing agreements.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18. A runner-up from last year’s competition is shown above.
+hibernate \ ˈhī-bər-ˌnāt \ verb
+1. be in an inactive or dormant state 2. sleep during winter
+_________
+The word hibernate has appeared in 58 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 7 in “There Are Fat Bears in Alaska, and You Can Vote on Your Favorite” by Andrew R. Chow:
+At Katmai National Park in southern Alaska, brown bears are winding down a stretch of nonstop eating, in which they gain hundreds of pounds to prepare for hibernation. They cavort and dive in Brooks Falls, feasting on migrating sockeye salmon and gaining up to four pounds a day. .... There are more than 2,000 brown bears in Katmai, and in October and November they enter their dens, where they can hibernate for up to half a year and lose a third of their body mass. To prepare their bodies, they must enter a state known as hyperphagia, in which they eat nearly nonstop until they become practically unrecognizable to the rangers who know them.“You are trying to fool the body’s immune system,” Dr. Humar said. “That is not easy to do.”
+Most of the scientific research so far has focused on liver and kidney transplant patients for several reasons, said Dr. James Markmann, chief of the division of transplant surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital.
+Those organs can be transplanted from living donors, and so cells from the donor are available to use in an attempt to train the transplant patient’s immune system.
+Far more people need kidneys than need any other organ — there are about 19,500 kidney transplants a year, compared with 8,000 transplanted livers. And those transplanted kidneys rarely last a lifetime of battering with immunosuppressive drugs.
+“If you are 30 or 40 and get a kidney transplant, that is not the only kidney you will need,” said Dr. Joseph R. Leventhal, who directs the kidney and pancreas transplant programs at Northwestern University.
+Another reason to focus on kidneys: “If something goes wrong, it’s not the end of the world,” Dr. Markmann said. If an attempt to wean patients from immunosuppressive drugs fails, they can get dialysis to cleanse their blood. Rejection of other transplanted organs can mean death.
+The liver intrigues researchers for different reasons. It is less prone to rejection by the body’s immune system. When rejection does occur, there is less immediate damage to the organ.
+And sometimes, after people have lived with a transplanted liver for years, their bodies simply accept the organ. A few patients discovered this by chance when they decided on their own to discard their anti-rejection drugs, generally because of the expense and side effects.This is a carpenter ant sniffing. That’s how they follow the chemical trails that are laid by fellow ants — or research scientists. Of course, ants don’t have noses. Their smelling organs are mostly in their antennae. They have a few on their feet, but that’s another story. Smelling is how they navigate the world. It’s how they recognize other ants and locate food. It’s more important than sight, sound or even touch. Scientists wanted to find out more about exactly how ants follow a scent. So they painted tiny trails with ant pheromones and added ink so they would be visible. The ants, as expected, could follow various routes, like zigzags, dotted lines and curves. Sometimes, they just wandered off. Researchers analyzed dozens of hours of footage using various computer models that tracked the ants’ body positions and antennae movements. What they found was that ants use their antennae to sweep the trail side to side the way you might use a metal detector. And they weren’t one-trick ponies — or ants. They adopted three strategies to navigate their environment. First, there was probing. When an ant was still or moving slowly, it kept its antennae close to each other. There was exploratory. Ants took slow, winding paths near a trail with antennae further apart. And, when they had the trail down pat, there was trail following. They moved along the trail accurately, antennae on either side of the path. Interestingly, each ant seemed to have a left-right antenna preference. They kept one closer to the trail. Some were lefties. Some were righties. And when an antenna was removed, many ants adopted new strategies for navigation, changing their body position and antennae range. They definitely weren’t automatons. You might almost say they had personality.Carpenter ants follow trails. Just watch them wandering about on your wooden porch until they strike a trail of pheromones (chemicals ants use for communication) that another ant has laid down.
+Ants don’t have noses, so they wave their antennas around to pick up the trail , then off they go on the road to ruin. (Carpenter ants destroy houses.)
+Scientists know plenty about ants, including their ability to follow scent trails, but researchers at Harvard wanted to get a more detailed understanding of how exactly ants sniff, or taste, the pheromone-marked path.
+First, some basics: Ants use their antennas to pick up chemical cues left by other ants.
+And the chemical sense of ants, call it smell or taste or chemo-reception, enables them to follow straight trails, curved trails, even zigzags.Slow-moving, hulking ships crisscross miles of ocean in a lawn mower pattern, wielding an array of 12 to 48 air guns blasting pressurized air repeatedly into the depths of the ocean.
+The sound waves hit the sea floor, penetrating miles into it, and bounce back to the surface, where they are picked up by hydrophones. The acoustic patterns form a three-dimensional map of where oil and gas most likely lie.
+The seismic air guns probably produce the loudest noise that humans use regularly underwater, and it is about to become far louder in the Atlantic. As part of the Trump administration’s plans to allow offshore drilling for gas and oil exploration, five companies are in the process of seeking permits to carry out seismic mapping with the air guns all along the Eastern Seaboard, from Central Florida to the Northeast, for the first time in three decades . The surveys haven’t started yet in the Atlantic, but now that the ban on offshore drilling has been lifted, companies can be granted access to explore regions along the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific.
+And air guns are now the most common method companies use to map the ocean floor.
+“They fire approximately every 10 seconds around the clock for months at a time,” said Douglas Nowacek, a professor of marine conservation technology at Duke University. “They have been detected 4,000 kilometers away. These are huge, huge impacts.”How do you feel about math? Do you like it? Do you think you are good at it? Why or why not?
+What role does math play in your day-to-day life? When and how do you use it? Do you think it is an important skill to learn?
+How do you feel about the way your school teaches math? Is it useful and does it make sense to you? What do you think is the best way to learn math and why?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related Op-Ed to find out why one engineering professor thinks we should all practice math more.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When Michael Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, was sentenced last month to three years in federal prison on fraud charges, he had the right to request any number of prison camps favored by white-collar offenders for their relatively resort-like settings.
+But Mr. Cohen chose a shabby, low-slung building 75 miles northwest of New York City, with an antiquated weight room, an uneven tennis court and no swimming pool.
+What the minimum-security camp at the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, N.Y., does offer is a rarity in the federal prison system: a full-time Hasidic chaplain who oversees a congregation of dozens of Jewish inmates who gather for prayer services three times a day.
+“For a Jewish person, there is no place like Otisville,” said Earl Seth David, 54, a former inmate who attended kosher meals, religious classes and weekly Shabbat services in the prison shul, a shared space where the Torah scrolls are locked up every night.Infantino’s problem is that European officials attending the meetings have stubbornly refused to offer any opinions. Instead, they have told Infantino and his team that the feelings of Aleksander Ceferin, the president of the European governing body, UEFA, and his governing council represent their views.
+Some of the Europeans balked because the list of options for the Club World Cup did not include the option of not holding the tournament, which is often an annoyance for the European champion who attends, at all. On FIFA’s tablets, voters are asked to pick from only three choices: a tournament with 16, 24 or 32 teams.
+Ceferin, under pressure from clubs and federations in Europe, has clashed repeatedly with Infantino over the proposed changes both to the Club World Cup and to the broader global soccer calendar, with Ceferin most frustrated by new initiatives that could challenge the hegemony of existing club tournaments like UEFA’s Champions League and add to the workload of players.
+“I cannot accept that some people who are blinded by the pursuit of profit are considering to sell the soul of football tournaments to nebulous private funds,” Ceferin said in a speech last May. “Money does not rule — and the European sports model must be respected. Football is not for sale. I will not let anyone sacrifice its structures on the altar of a highly cynical and ruthless mercantilism.”
+Infantino first presented details of a plan for an expanded Club World Cup at a FIFA Council meeting in Bogotá, Colombia, last March. Citing a nondisclosure agreement, he refused to identify the financial backers of the proposal, which are believed to include not only SoftBank but also financing from the Middle East, which Infantino eventually denied were directly linked to sovereign wealth funds. (Saudi Arabia remains the biggest individual backer over Softbank’s Vision Fund, the biggest private-equity fund ever raised.) Instead, Infantino pressed the council to let him close the deal on his own.Mr. Klarman, sometimes called the Oracle of Boston, is one of the few financiers ever praised by that Omaha oracle, Warren Buffett. His views are so sought after that an out-of-print book he wrote about value investing sells for as much as $1,500 on Amazon.
+The circulation of his letter is likely to add to the hand-wringing that typically takes place in Davos during a week of panels and conversation over Champagne and canapés.
+For one thing, he details the way virtually every developed country has taken on mounting debt since the financial crisis in 2008, a trend that he says could lead to a financial panic. He cites the increasing ratio of government debt to gross domestic product from 2008 to 2017, to a point exceeding 100 percent in the United States and nearing that figure in France, Canada, Britain and Spain.
+“The seeds of the next major financial crisis (or the one after that) may well be found in today’s sovereign debt levels,” he said.
+Mr. Klarman is especially worried about debt load in the United States, what it could mean to the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency and how it could ultimately affect the country’s economy.
+“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford,” he wrote. “By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”
+Mr. Klarman believes that the public, almost irrationally, has become too blasé about all these risks and that investors have been lulled into taking on even more risk.“The wall or the steel barrier. They can have any name they want. But we have to have it.” President Trump often repeats the same things when talking about why he wants a southern border wall. “The crime.” “Drugs.” “American jobs.” While there is little evidence these problems are caused by unauthorized immigration or that any of this will be helped by a wall, he has remained steadfast. “I will build a great, great wall.” “You need that wall.” “We can do without a wall.” But as the fight over border security has dragged on, here’s how he’s expanded his argument. He’s always said it was about securing the border. But recently, Trump has emphasized that he believes building the wall is the moral and compassionate thing to do. “This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end. ” And he says a wall will benefit people on both sides of the border, addressing what he is calling — “This is a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” But Democrats say the current situation at the border was escalated by Trump’s policies. “A challenge that President Trump’s own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened.” So who does Trump think will benefit? Over time, Trump has named many groups that he says will benefit from a wall. It started as the — “American worker.” And then expanded to — “Legal residents.” And — “And our vets.” “Our immigrant communities.” “Asian-Americans.” “Hispanic-American communities.” “African-American workers.” “It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need.” How will Trump pay for the wall? After some discrepancies regarding the wall’s price tag — “$6 billion.” “Probably $8 billion.” “Maybe $10 or $12 billion.” “$18 billion.” “$5.7 billion for a physical barrier.” Trump has modified his claim that Mexico is going to pay for the wall. “Mexico —” “will pay —” “for the wall. 100 percent.” It’s gone from — “They don’t know it yet, but they’re paying for it.” To — “It may be through reimbursement, but one way or the other Mexico will pay for the wall.” And — “The border wall would very quickly pay for itself.” And finally, what will Trump’s wall look like? Trump’s vision for the wall itself has also changed over time. Early on, Trump said the wall would be — “It’s going to be a Trump wall. It’s going to be a real wall.” “An impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful —” “A serious wall.” “This is a wall that’s a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling.” “It’s going to be made of hardened concrete and it’s going to be made out of rebar and steel.” Now, it’s sounding more like this: “I never said I’m going to build a concrete — I said I’m going to build a wall. Just so you know, because I know you’re not into the construction business.” “Steel is stronger than concrete.” “It’s a new design, highest technology.” “Walls that you can see through.” “It will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.” So, will his latest push end with a wall? There’s still a tough political fight ahead.The biggest challenge of doing tour laundry, Topf explained, was the volume, which can vary unpredictably, and the need to work without fixed facilities. He often had to work outside or wherever he could find running water, he said, including, at one point, in empty holding cells intended for disorderly fans in a South African stadium. “I know every disabled bathroom in every German football stadium,” he said.
+When he is on tour, Topf begins almost every day by washing the performers’ clothes, which usually have to be air-dried with a small fan. The most soiled garments he ever handled, he said, were coveralls worn by the metal band Slipknot that had been sprayed with beer, cream and fake blood, and left in garbage bags for three days.
+The most common stains on performers’ clothes, he said, were sweat and aluminum dust from truck ramps carried onstage by equipment-case wheels. The dust gets on the clothes when performers throw themselves on their knees or roll around onstage. The best solution, he said, was for crew members to put down mats: “It’s better for the pants.”Before reading the article:
+What do you know about DNA? Have you heard of events in which a person’s DNA helped prove either guilt or innocence in criminal cases?
+How do law enforcement officers gather DNA samples? How long does it generally take for the samples to be analyzed?
+Now, read the article, “Coming Soon to a Police Station Near You: The DNA ‘Magic Box,’” and answer the following questions:
+1. How does the method for using a Rapid DNA machine differ from how law enforcement agencies have traditionally investigated crime-scene DNA?
+2. What is the Rapid DNA Act? What does it allow police booking stations to do themselves?
+3. What are the advantages of using Rapid DNA machines? What, on the other hand, do some legal experts and scientists say is problematic about how the technology is used and how DNA samples are gathered?The family was relatively lucky. In 2014, they had seen the ISIS convoy headed their way and managed to escape immediately. They didn’t stay atop Mount Sinjar, unlike many other Yazidis who were trapped there without food or water. But one male relative, Qassem, had to briefly return to the village after the family escaped and was kidnapped by ISIS. To survive, Qassem told Ms. Malfatto, he converted to Islam — or at least, pretended to — and ISIS spared him.
+Now, life is inching back to normalcy. But it is largely a contradictory existence. Schools have reopened and the Khalafs feel slightly more relaxed. They are even building a house near Sharaffadin, a village on the base of Mount Sinjar, where they say they feel safe, protected.
+The family has also told Ms. Malfatto that they sometimes regret returning, and that there is no future in Sinjar. ISIS may be gone, but an undercurrent of fear and mistrust runs throughout the area, and to some extent, the whole country.MANILA — A proposed law making its way through the Philippine Congress would consider children as young as 9 criminally responsible for their actions, drawing fierce opposition from rights advocates and opponents of President Rodrigo Duterte’s deadly antidrug campaign.
+The justice panel in the House of Representatives hurriedly approved amendments on Monday to the country’s juvenile justice law, which was signed in 2006 and set the minimum age for criminal liability at 15. Mr. Duterte has repeatedly criticized the current law as tying the hands of law enforcement against underage offenders working for drug gangs. The measure still awaits approval by the full House.
+Rights groups say Mr. Duterte’s antidrug campaign has been a human rights disaster for the Philippines, with thousands of drug dealers, users and others killed since he came to power in 2016.
+Romeo Dongeto, head of the Philippine advocacy group Child Rights Network, said advocates around the world were “shocked and disappointed” by the proposed law, which he called a “stark mockery of the field of child development.”The other group, however, met the kind of doctor all too many of us have encountered: glued to the computer screen throughout the exam, the provider didn’t bother introducing herself and asked questions only to gather practical information. She also stumbled through some of the procedures in the messy exam room and sounded rather unsure of herself.
+In both groups, the provider gave patients a cream that she said was an antihistamine to reduce the allergic reaction and decrease itching. The cream was merely unscented hand lotion: a placebo. (A benefit of doing this research in the lab is that for the purposes of the study, we can temporarily lead patients to believe something that is untrue, something doctors could never do in a real clinic visit.)
+Decades of robust literature on placebo effects demonstrate that, even without any active ingredients, this cream should reduce the allergic reaction. But no one had examined how the doctor’s demeanor might influence the effects of a placebo treatment.
+Our study revealed that the placebo cream reduced participants’ allergic reactions only when the provider projected warmth and competence. When the provider acted colder and less competent, the placebo cream had no effect. It seems that it’s not just what the doctor says about a treatment that matters. It matters how the doctor who says it engages with patients. Doctors who are warmer and more competent are able to set more powerful expectations about medical treatments. Those positive expectations, in turn, have a measurable impact on health.
+So, we saw that when the provider projected both desirable qualities of warmth and competence, her words had an effect. When she projected neither, they did not.
+What about a provider who seems competent, but not warm? One other group of patients met a provider who seemed highly competent but remained businesslike and distant throughout the interaction, and they did not respond to the placebo cream as much as when the provider acted warm and competent.
+Patients of even the most accomplished and skillful doctors may benefit more when that doctor also connects with them.And there are reasons for not contacting your half sister while the father you share is alive. It would let her know that he hadn’t been forthcoming with her, which might seriously disrupt a relationship you know nothing about. You can think that your father should have told his daughter and her mother about your existence — and think, too, that it isn’t up to you to decide this for him.
+Note that these reasons for discretion may be counterbalanced by other considerations and, in any case, wouldn’t survive his death. He would have lived his life on the terms he requested. He made no covenant with eternity. The daughter might well be angry about his having kept this secret, but she might also take consolation in the discovery of a new half sibling. (If she didn’t, she would only have to tell you she didn’t want a relationship.) Whatever reputational harm might befall your late father at this point doesn’t fall under the term “unkindness.”
+But you also envisage a situation in which your half sister discovers your relationship via genetic and genealogical databases. And here’s where things get complicated. You say that in order to preserve your father’s secret, you’ve avoided genetic tests that you otherwise would have wanted to take; you wonder about reconsidering that policy. The fact is that you were always within your rights to take those genetic tests and let the chips fall where they may.
+How is this consistent with the value of respecting your father’s decision? There’s a principle, usually dated to Thomas Aquinas, known as “double effect.” The idea is that accepting a consequence that is the byproduct of an action is different from pursuing an action intended to bring about that consequence. It’s why the Catholic Church permits medical procedures that are intended to save the life of a pregnant woman even if it ends the viability of the fetus (by removing a cancerous uterus, say). Your right to use one of the services you mention isn’t defeated by the fact that doing so might, as a byproduct, expose your paternity to others.
+When your father chose a closed adoption, he did not intend to prevent you from availing yourself of genetic and genealogical services he couldn’t then have imagined, and he would not have had the right to do so even if he could. (Sometimes the children of a closed adoption never learn that they were adopted, and so they have no reason to think twice about being genotyped. It’s a contingent fact that you do know.) By not availing yourself of tests that you wanted for other reasons, you went beyond compliance: Rather than passively respecting his agreement, you were, in effect, joining your father’s efforts at concealment.
+It’s worth observing that not everyone will be on one of these databases, so there’s no guarantee that your half sister will find you this way. But suppose she could. Going on one of these websites now would have one advantage: It might allow her, if she was on the site, to decide for herself whether she was interested in unknown close genetic relatives. The decision to contact you would be left to her. Of course, her first probable response would be to talk to your birth father about the existence of someone who looked like a half sibling, but that’s not on you. Your birth father’s hopes for maintaining his secret must be recalibrated to match a changed reality. In an era of mass-market genomics, it’s hard to hide the twisting branches of our family trees.An analysis by the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law shows that more than 90 percent of court challenges to major Trump deregulatory actions have been successful so far. By the institute’s count, 30 big rules have been challenged, and the courts have found for the litigants 28 times.
+Some of those rulings may change after appeals to higher courts, but administrative law experts said even the string of lower-court rulings was unusual. In a typical administration, the government wins on such challenges around 70 percent of the time, said Richard Revesz, a law professor at N.Y.U. who specializes in environmental law. “This is truly aberrational,” he said.
+The law gives federal agencies a lot of latitude to write regulations, but it says that major actions have to follow certain steps. For big changes, agencies are supposed to go through what’s called “notice and comment”: They must issue a proposal, let the public respond with ideas, then incorporate feedback into a final version.
+A lot of the losses came because the administration skipped those steps, instead announcing that it would pause or reverse pending rules — or that some emergency conditions justified an instant regulatory change. An earlier version of the contraceptive rule, and several environmental rules, including a suspension of Obama-era methane standards, were attempted without notice and comment.
+But even some Trump policies that have followed the usual regulatory steps have been found to run afoul of the law’s standards for administrative process. The law says that the executive branch should be allowed to interpret the law as long as its decisions aren’t “arbitrary” and “capricious.”Typically, the period just after the midterm elections has represented a little break for political journalists to take a breath and reflect. Not so this year, when partisan discord over Mr. Trump and his policies has made politics a source of near-constant obsession.
+“There is intense interest in this 2020 race because of how voters in both major parties feel about President Trump,” said Patrick Healy, The Times’s politics editor. “Reader comments and response to my Twitter threads have been voluminous and passionate.”
+“We really had no lull,” said Haeyoun Park, an editor on the Politics desk. “This cycle has really started early — right after the midterms, we were moving straight on to the presidential. To have this many candidates clear this early, I think, is pretty unusual.”
+In fact, graphics and politics editors had been discussing the need for a clear, concise presentation of the possible, probable and definite candidates for 2020 even before the midterm elections were over in early November. What came as a surprise, as they began compiling names, was the sheer number of candidates mulling a run. “It feels like nearly everyone held back in 2016, and now, after the biggest midterm election for Democrats in years, the floodgates are open,” said Wilson Andrews, a graphics editor who oversaw the project with Ms. Park.Congratulations on winning the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress! I’ve been watching your work for years, and it feels as if your moment is finally upon us. Does it feel that way for you too? It’s great to be recognized. It’s a nice pat on the back when you’ve been putting in the work. But I also know that the next thing is never promised.
+In your Globes acceptance speech, you vowed that everything you produce will include at least 50 percent women. What has the response been like? It’s been huge, which is great, because there is no way that I can meet the challenge without other people helping. A lot of times we hear, in all industries, “I would hire women if there were more experienced women.” It’s laughable, because how can you become experienced if you don’t get the opportunity to show your skills? When I decided to say, out loud, that I wanted to be a director, I got all these people who wanted to help me. No one who’s successful got there by themselves.
+Have you seen the kinds of roles available to black people, and especially black women, evolve over your career? I have had moments playing roles that were not written for a black woman. My agents may have read a script and submitted me for that role and that studio and those producers said: “Huh. Never considered that.” But asking that question of the industry on a whole? No, I’m not seeing those changes. Getting something like “If Beale Street Could Talk” is not something that happens often. So many producers turn away from producing something by a black author. But Barry Jenkins’s talent makes it a less daunting journey to go on, because someone at that level is going to hit a home run. And that goes across the board: Each time we — as women or black people — shine, then we all shine. The door just opens a little bit more. The window cracks a little bit wider.He is — and also of his place in it. McConnell is atypically unconcerned, among senators, with his public profile. Even friends who attest to his dry wit and well-concealed sentimentality acknowledge a Man Without Qualities aspect to him: “He isn’t a jokester,” says Slade Gorton, the former Republican senator from Washington State and an old friend of McConnell’s. “He isn’t a party guy. He’s just — there. He’s just a fact of life.” Like a spy or a pinto bean, McConnell has used this blankness to his advantage, made it a carrier for designs greater than himself. His ascent in Republican politics came through his willingness to be the face of party prerogatives — fighting against campaign-finance reform during the Clinton and Bush presidencies, impeding a then-popular president’s agenda during Obama’s — that were distasteful to the general public, his shrugging willingness to play a villain when a villain was required.
+But beneath this unconcern is a different kind of self-regard, a sense of himself as a historical figure in waiting. In his first Senate race, his campaign paid for a rare two-minute TV commercial tracing the arc of his life and work at a time when his elected career consisted of two terms as the judge-executive — a county-level mayor, essentially — of Jefferson County, Kentucky. When he was named Senate majority leader in 2014, and The Louisville Courier-Journal described him as the third from Kentucky, his staff called the paper, insisting he was the second and demanding a correction. (Earle Clements only filled in briefly for Lyndon Johnson after his heart attack.) At the McConnell Center that McConnell founded at the University of Louisville, his alma mater, there is an exact replica of the mahogany desk McConnell used as a junior senator, which was once occupied by Henry Clay, a fellow Kentuckian and one of the heroes of the 19th-century Senate, who engineered the Missouri Compromise. There is a bronze statue of Clay standing at the desk, but the brass nameplate on the desktop says “Mr. McConnell.”
+But the particular way in which McConnell has always conceived of his own historicity is significant and unusual among contemporary Republicans. The Tea Partyers have their Mel Gibson-movie fantasies, the Trumpists their Pinochet-meets-“Die Hard” pastiches. But McConnell aspires to be not the bloody and maybe tragic hero in a revolutionary drama but one among a short list of undisputed masters of the machinery of American government, both essential to and dwarfed by the history of this machinery. Notably, the political philosopher he cites to the near exclusion of all others is Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Irish writer and Whig politician who essayed trenchantly against the French Revolution, and whose influence on 21st-century Republican politics you would have to squint very hard to make out.
+This vision is also unmistakably senatorial. McConnell recognized his future in politics by high school and narrowed his ambitions to the upper chamber by the time he graduated from college; on his law-school applications, according to his authorized biographer, John David Dyche, one of his professors wrote that McConnell ‘‘will be a U.S. Senator.” “I was running for the Senate in ’84 from the moment I was sworn in as county judge on Jan. 1, 1978,” McConnell once said — and he has never aspired to anything outside it. “I think most senators look in the mirror and think they hear ‘Hail to the Chief’ in the background,” Terry Carmack, who has worked for McConnell on and off since his first Senate campaign, told me. “But he always wanted to be in the Senate.” And from early in his Senate career, McConnell later wrote, “I wanted to one day hold a leadership position in my party, helping to call the plays and not just run them.”
+The Senate majority leader wields an elusive kind of power. The position, which dates back to the 1920s, is as paradoxical as the institution, which is given the authority to make great changes but also given as many tools to impede those changes as to enact them. To the Senate’s defenders, this is the “cooling saucer” of George Washington’s probably apocryphal explanation; to its detractors, it is more like an unreleasable parking brake on progress, never truly succeeding at holding back the future but ensuring that the country’s arrival at it will be as delayed and frictional as possible. At the turn of the 20th century, the Senate proved ineffectual in regulating railroads and banking. It failed to grasp the severity of the Depression until Americans had endured its hardships for years, offering only the meekest of remedies until Franklin D. Roosevelt forced lawmakers to do otherwise. Isolationists in the chamber impeded efforts to check Adolf Hitler’s advance in Europe; Southern conservatives were effective enough at delaying legislative action on civil rights to prompt the oft-quoted observation of William S. White, The Times’s congressional correspondent in the 1950s, that the Senate was “the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
+This began to change under the leadership of Lyndon Johnson in the late 1950s, but especially under Mike Mansfield, the Montana Democrat who served as majority leader from 1961 to 1977, longer than anyone before or since. Though he enjoys a lesser profile than Johnson, Mansfield is more admired within the Senate by Democrats and Republicans alike, as a magnanimous and gentlemanly conductor of the upper chamber’s fractious orchestra. “He treated everyone alike, without regard to politics or seniority,” Ted Stevens, the Republican senator from Alaska, once said. It was on Mansfield’s watch that the Senate passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, enacted Medicare, forced the resignation of Nixon without conviction and passed an array of post-Watergate reforms to the government and the Senate itself. Senators talk about Mansfield the way jazz musicians talk about Charlie Parker: He is the figure whose accomplishments they are doomed to be judged against forever, even as the context in which those accomplishments were possible recedes irretrievably into the past.
+McConnell first arrived in the Senate in what was arguably the most momentous year of the Mansfield era, 1964, as an intern for John Sherman Cooper. A moderate-to-liberal Republican, Cooper was then helping round up Republican votes for what would become the Civil Rights Act. McConnell, who supported civil rights as a college student, has spoken reverently of attending the signing ceremony for the Voting Rights Act in the Capitol Rotunda, at Cooper’s invitation, the following year. In his telling, it remains the platonic ideal of legislation, passed with the support of majorities of both parties.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”The most virtuosic example of spider architecture is the orb, built by the family Araneidae, whose species are common all over the world. Unlike cobweb spiders, which tend to construct their tangled traps in ceiling crevices, an orb-weaver’s handiwork appears in more conspicuous places, often along garden borders, where prey is abundant. The best time to catch spiders establishing their foundations is at dawn or dusk, from late summer through early fall, when they send out gossamer strands, which, deployed onto a breeze, enable them to parasail across chasms in search of a hunter’s vantage. If you spot these threads, the web-building process will not be far behind.
+My favorite time to seek out webs is in the early hours, when spider silk is at its most splendid, often glistening with dew. On busy days, my web-watching might comprise little more than a brief reconnaissance of my garden before I start work: here a web dotted in fresh prey, its owner happily sated by its breakfast of liquefied aphid innards; there one damaged by some nocturnal disturbance, its owner half-concealed on a stem of honeysuckle, already busy planning a replacement. By mentally mapping the shifts in the local webscape over each 24-hour cycle, I’ve found that the spiders’ relentless industry provides a shot of inspiration for the day ahead.
+We are increasingly advised, by writers and wellness gurus, to seek sanctuary from our hyperdigitized lives in nature. For years, working as a travel writer, an inconsistent line of work that served as shallow cover for a flâneurial pursuit of spectacular things, I took this imperative to extremes. If my feet itched for experiential refreshment, my first recourse would be to switch off my phone and flee the city to go somewhere with hills, forest, beasts — the wilder the better. It is a source of no small rapture, then, with a young family requiring a more sedentary life, to discover a surrogate for this impulse in something so ignored and ubiquitous, often within a few feet of my door.
+So much of the meditative and aesthetic communion we seek in nature finds expression in these miniature coliseums. In design, their gratuitous beauty humbles us into reflections on the divine; in cruelty of purpose, they are a memento mori, a symbol of ineluctable fate embodied in the futile wriggling of an ensnared fly. Perhaps a web’s most poignant allegory, however, lies in the disdain with which we tend to treat them — the appreciation that most of us, whether through overfamiliarity or revulsion, think nothing of obliterating that which required such balletic artistry to build. In this way, spider webs betray the tragedy of our indifference when we are too busy to see.When you should rent
+Free bags aren’t a possibility? This is when you consider renting equipment. It’s easier and more convenient than it may seem at first, and comes with a few advantages. The gear is always tuned up and ready to go (a fresh wax on your neglected skis or board can cost you $50), and the shop will have the right equipment for the terrain, which may differ from your home slopes. Renting can also be a great deal for families: Children under 12 often get a free, or at least discounted, rental with each adult rental. Finally, if you usually take public transit or a shuttle from home to the airport, you won’t have to lug the gear.
+Whether renting gear is cheaper than paying to check the bags depends mostly on how many days you’ll use it. An average adult rental package can cost up to $50 a day, and often less. Will you be on the mountain for two or three days? Then renting is cheaper than checking two bags.
+What if you’ll use the gear five days or more? That’s where you think ahead; you’ll pay about the same for two bags as you will to rent for five days. So if you’re going to be skiing longer than a week, paying for baggage becomes worth it again. Can you get by with checking only your ski gear and living out of a carry-on? Checking one bag costs at most $60 round trip, so it’s cheaper to pay for the bag than rent, as long as you use your gear more than once.
+Don’t want to wait in a rental line on the mountain? If you have access to a car, rent from a shop in town; it may even have better prices. If you don’t have a car, see if Ski Butlers serves the area. The service will bring the rental gear to your hotel or condo door, and then pick it up when you’re done. The standard adult package is $50 a day. That falls on the high end of rental pricing, but you can get a 10 percent discount if you book a week in advance.
+When you should ship (almost never)
+There is only one type of person who needs to ship their stuff: someone who’s absolutely set on using their own gear and can’t check a bag. Why not? Maybe you’re traveling in a large, fractious party and need your hands free in the airport. Maybe your gear absolutely must arrive by a specific date. Maybe you’re not heading straight to the ski hill but visiting other places first and don’t want your gear tagging along.Yet despite the careful cultivation, Huawei’s position in Europe is now at risk of unraveling. The United States has moved to restrict the use of Chinese technology because of concerns that it is being used for espionage. Last month, the American authorities asked Canada to detain a Huawei executive, who is the daughter of the company’s founder, on charges of committing bank fraud to help the company’s business in Iran. And federal prosecutors in Seattle are also investigating Huawei for intellectual property theft.
+[Read More: The United States plans to formally make its extradition request within a week.]
+The fallout is growing across Europe, which has become Huawei’s biggest market outside China, foreshadowing what the company faces in the rest of the world. This month, one of its employees was arrested in Poland and charged with espionage.
+Officials in Germany, France and the Czech Republic are now among those considering restricting Huawei from the next-generation wireless networks, known as 5G. The head of Britain’s intelligence service, MI6, has raised alarms about using Chinese networking technology. European carriers, including Deutsche Telekom, are reassessing their use of Huawei. And on Thursday, Oxford University announced that it would suspend donations and scholarships from Huawei.
+“Until there were red flags on security risks, it was smooth sailing for them in Europe,” Thorsten Benner, a founder and director of the Global Public Policy Institute, a policy think tank in Berlin, said of Huawei. “The movement that you’ve seen over the past three months is all in one direction: to find regulatory measures to curtail the use of Chinese equipment in Europe.”
+Heli Tiirmaa-Klaar, an Estonian diplomat involved in cybersecurity discussions with American and European officials about Huawei, said Europe was shifting on Huawei because of suspicions about China rather than specific actions by the company. She highlighted China’s history of hacking and stealing trade secrets, its poor record on human rights and internet censorship, and Chinese cybersecurity rules that could require network operators to defend national security interests.One story is about an increasingly precarious sex game, another about an 11-year-old’s birthday party gone wrong. There’s a princess fairy tale, a guy in the Peace Corps who’s tormented by his students, a bachelorette party with a special guest from a dirty movie — and that’s just the half of it.
+Image
+As varied as Roupenian’s stories are, they all clearly come from the same brain, one of those brains that feel out-of-this-world brilliant and also completely askew — like those of Karen Russell, George Saunders, Mary Gaitskill.
+In addition to her simple, punchy opening lines, Roupenian likes to begin stories at true beginnings, like childhood or a brand-new relationship, her tales often ones of maturation in fast-forward. She also has a distinct method of ending, which I can only describe as pushing her characters and their plights off the deep end. These stories get really dark, really fast, often in the last page or two. That’s especially the case with the first story in the book — “Bad Boy,” the one about the sex game. If you can handle its brutal conclusion, you can likely handle the rest of the collection.
+I’ll say here that I’m not usually a fan of the dark, creepy or supernatural. My imagination holds onto those things for too long; I can’t shake them. But the power of these stories transcends any one genre or element. Ultimately they’re about what it means to be human. In “Sardines,” a picked-on girl makes a “mean” wish for her birthday, and gets a complicated sort of revenge on her bullies. In “The Mirror, the Bucket, and the Old Thigh Bone,” a princess falls in love with a figure in a cloak, which turns out to be an inanimate reflection of herself. I had a hard time determining exactly why I felt so moved by that story, but I sensed I too would be happier with that mirror, bucket and thigh bone as a partner than with most of my dates.
+“The Matchbox Sign” relates a man’s perspective on his girlfriend’s skin condition: “What if she really is hosting some kind of exotic infestation, and because of David’s poorly timed outburst, the doctor wrongly consigned her to the realm of the mentally ill, drugging her into a mute endurance of her pain?” Oof. In “Biter,” a woman fantasizes about biting her new co-worker, and when he eventually forcibly kisses her, she finally feels she can get away with it. “That was awful,” she thinks following his attack. “Worse than being bitten. Truly grotesque. But then, she thought, oh right. Here’s my chance.” I was especially disturbed by how much I enjoyed that story, as some kind of demented #MeToo-era manifesto.“It’s hard to construct a scenario where South Carolina is not the gateway to the nomination,” said David Plouffe, former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign manager, describing it as a springboard into the most delegate-rich day of the primary and a proving ground for who can appeal to black voters. “If you don’t have the capacity to perform well in South Carolina, it likely means you’re not capable of performing well later in the primary.”
+[Read about Kamala Harris’s entry into the Democratic presidential race.]
+This state is poised to play an outsized role in 2020 because of a confluence of demography and timing. South Carolina will be the first contest in which a majority of those casting ballots will be African-American. In 2016, black voters made up roughly 60 percent of the South Carolina Democratic primary vote. (In the general election, they usually make up less than a quarter of the vote in a state that is reliably Republican.)
+The winner here will enter the March 3 Super Tuesday contests with a burst of momentum. South Carolina will mark the final clash before California, Texas and an array of similarly diverse states, comprising over 30 percent of the race’s total delegates, vote just three days later.
+While some of the nine Super Tuesday states allow early balloting, the Democrats who wait to vote on Primary Day itself will be heavily influenced by the South Carolina results.
+“People ask me if I’m concerned California has moved up, and I say: No, it just makes South Carolina more important, because all that people are going to be talking about on Saturday night, Sunday and Monday is who won South Carolina,” said Jaime Harrison, a former state chairman here, referring to California’s decision to move its primary from June to March.What’s most striking about Uruguay’s coastal towns is what they don’t have: high-rises (except in Punta, which even has a Trump Tower), chain restaurants and hotels, overdeveloped beaches. Each beach might have a parador, where you can buy a cold bottle of Zillertal, one of the national beers that’s big enough for two, but otherwise they’re mostly empty of commercialism. Someone might stop by your beach chair to try to sell you a sandwich, a pot cookie or some handmade jewelry, but because this is Uruguay, they’re never pushy, taking rejection with perfect equanimity and a smile.
+Get a glimpse of local life with a lunch stop 10 miles south of La Pedrera. On the edge of the Laguna de Rocha, separated from the Atlantic by a narrow strip of land, is a wooden deck dotted with plastic chairs and tables. This is Cocina de la Barra, a small restaurant run by the wives and daughters of the fishermen who make their living from the lagoon. The stock of fresh shrimp, crab and delicately fried fish come straight from the small fishing boats into the kitchen, a delightful community partnership that began three years ago. Lunch, eaten off plastic plates, is a bargain at around 800 pesos for two.
+If you want to truly get off the grid, Cabo Polonio is perhaps the country’s most desirable spot. Though it’s the least accessible coastal village in Uruguay, sitting within an undeveloped national park, it’s also one of the most beautiful. It requires some forethought to reach: trucks that can cross the sand dunes barring the way depart on regular schedules from a bus station off the main road (round trip 230 pesos, plus another 100 if you want to bring your surfboard), or you can walk along the beach the six or so miles from Valizas, the next town to the north.
+Cabo Polonio’s remoteness is treasured by its handful of year-round inhabitants. While the town’s hostels and bare-bones restaurants get busy in the summer, there’s virtually no Wi-Fi and electricity is minimal: Generators create enough refrigeration for a cold beer at an open-air restaurant, but not for a light in your dorm room (a bed in a dormitory in either the Viejo Lobo or Cabo Polonio Hostel costs around $30 a night, cash only). You can hear honking from the colony of sea lions gathered under the lighthouse, and it’s possible to see whales from September to November. This part of the coast can still feel wild, particularly in the off-season, when the only thing you’ll encounter on the beach is the occasional cow that has lost its way.When Cassie Dippo’s family moved from the city of New York to the slopes of Alta, Utah, in 1965, she was 9 years old. The snow was dry and white and famously light and often so deep it reached well past her (and her father’s) waist.
+There were four chairlifts. Lift tickets were $4.50. And lining the road up Little Cottonwood Canyon were five simple, family-run, ski-in/ski-out lodges, all opened between 1939 and 1962. All of which, a lifetime later, have remained essentially the same, in aesthetic and spirit and “modified American” meal plans.
+“Honestly, not much has changed here since I was a kid,” said Ms. Dippo, now 63, who remains an owner of the TV-free Alta Lodge, her family’s property .
+Until now. Fresh off a $50 million overhaul, the Snowpine Lodge reopens this week as Alta’s first-ever true luxury hotel. It appears to have everything any luxury ski hotel anywhere has — and a lot of things Alta, a world-class mountain with a $116 lift ticket and a whopping six chairlifts, intentionally, has never had.Like a bespoke suit tailored to flatter your body, custom-made built-ins can enhance the appearance of a home — elevating the design, offering creative solutions to everyday problems and disguising unsightly features like exposed pipes or air ducts.
+“If you do it right, the built-in becomes a hybrid of a work of art and a hardworking machine that should last a long time and be a sound investment,” said Robert Garneau, an architect in Brooklyn who has designed a range of imaginative built-ins, from storage concealed behind a kitchen backsplash to a guest room that folds out of a wall. “Investing in functionality will never go out of style — it should always work for you.”
+With that in mind, we asked Mr. Garneau and other designers for advice on how to think creatively about built-ins.
+Think About Your Daily Routine
+“Built-in storage should address your unique requirements and respond to your daily rituals,” Mr. Garneau said. “Think about how you move through and use various spaces, your daily actions, and what spatial modifications could increase functionality and joy of use.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+‘Intermission Accomplished’
+Jimmy Kimmel marked the exact midpoint of President Trump’s term on Monday with a special, satirical edition of his show, “Intermission Accomplished: A Halftime Tribute to Trump.”
+“We are here tonight to celebrate the midway mark of Donald Trump’s first term in office,” Kimmel said. “Because, let’s be honest, this is a man who is far too humble to celebrate himself.”“It’s almost as if I’m starting over again from a teenager,” said a woman who began delivering takeout dinners and groceries after being furloughed at the Department of Agriculture.
+The shutdown is also hurting some of the most vulnerable, including the homeless and those who depend on federal rent subsidies.
+Catch up: Over the weekend, President Trump proposed restoring temporary protections for the undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers in exchange for $5.7 billion for a border wall, an offer Speaker Nancy Pelosi immediately rejected. Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, could propose legislation today that would wrap Mr. Trump’s proposal into a package to reopen the government.
+News analysis: People who have done business with Mr. Trump say his current stance is consistent with negotiating tactics he used in the private sector: focusing foremost on claiming victory.“Queenstown is having to mortgage itself to the hilt for the rest of the country’s benefit,” he said, adding that growing local government debt to finance the area’s rapidly growing infrastructure and accommodation needs was driving up costs for local residents, many of whom struggled to find affordable housing in a rental market catering to wealthy tourists.
+“We don’t think that is fair,” he said.
+The boom is only expected to continue. In February, New Zealand will introduce a yearlong Chinese tourism initiative; China is the country’s second-largest source of tourists after Australia, and the fastest growing. The campaign aims to attract visitors during off-peak times and to lesser-known regions, and also to help businesses better cater to visitors from China.
+But Mr. Milne, the tourism professor, said not enough had been done to prepare New Zealand communities for an expected doubling in the number of Chinese visitors. He added that New Zealand had a history of overlooking local residents’ concerns as it sought to aggressively increase tourism.
+The British family accused of wreaking a trail of havoc down the North Island over the last month first came to public attention when a woman in Auckland, the country’s largest city, filmed a dispute over the family members’ refusal to pick up trash they had appeared to leave behind at Takapuna Beach.
+Three members of the family did not respond to interview requests. But Barbara Doran, one of the tourists, told The Daily Mail that her family had been “tortured” by New Zealanders and had done nothing wrong.
+Although the family members had been issued deportation notices by New Zealand immigration officials after an incident at a Burger King in the city of Hamilton, some remained in the country as of Tuesday. (New Zealand permits visitors to appeal deportation notices, and they cannot be deported until their appeals are complete.) One of the family members, Tina Maria Cash, was convicted of theft in the Hamilton District Court and ordered to pay 55 New Zealand dollars for stealing from a gas station.
+It is not the first time outraged New Zealanders have confronted tourists. In a spate of incidents in 2015, tourists had their car keys forcibly taken from them by locals who believed they were driving poorly.Last year, the southern Japanese city of Susaki created a position — honorary tourism ambassador — for a real-life otter with a large social media following.
+So far, so cute.
+Then Chiitan, an unsanctioned mascot based on the otter, began staging dangerous and non-child-friendly stunts around town, like swinging a weed whacker and tipping over a car. And some residents began confusing Chiitan with the city’s official mascot, Shinjokun, who is also modeled on an otter but is considerably more risk-averse.New: Among Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s goals in the coming year is for the Democrats who now control the State Legislature to ban single-use plastic bags. You can read my colleague’s piece on what we know about the governor’s proposal.
+Why it matters: One hundred billion plastic bags are used by Americans each year, according to a study cited by state officials.
+Would you be banned from personally using plastic bags? No. You could still use them in your personal life, to make art, stuff a pillow or design clothes.
+How soon could this happen? Perhaps this year. A version of the ban — which mirrors an earlier bill Mr. Cuomo has supported — is before the State Senate environmental committee.
+Would all plastic bags be banned? No. Plastic bags used for things like fresh meat or produce would be exempt. As would plastic bags used by restaurants for leftovers or takeout. And plastic bags used to deliver newspapers — yes, that still happens — would also be exempt.But redistribution alone will not be enough to address the inequality challenge of the 21st century. All societies that have successfully tamed inequality have done so mostly by curbing the concentration of pretax income — the inequality generated by the markets — for the simple reason that extreme market inequality undermines the very possibility of redistribution. Tolerating extreme inequality means accepting that it’s not a gross policy failure, not a serious danger to our democratic and meritocratic ideals — but that it’s fair and just and natural. It produces its own self-justifying ideology. It vindicates the “winners” of world markets. But vindicated winners, sure of their own legitimacy, seldom share much of their “just deserts” with the rest of society.
+An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power. Although many policies can help address it, progressive income taxation is the fairest and most potent of them all, because it restrains all exorbitant incomes equally, whether they derive from exploiting monopoly power, new financial products, sheer luck or anything else.
+A common objection to elevated top marginal income tax rates is that they hurt economic growth. But let’s look at the empirical evidence. The United States grew more strongly — and much more equitably — from 1946 to 1980 than it has ever since. But maybe in those years the United States, as the hegemon of the post-World War II decades, could afford “bad” tax policy? Let’s look then at Japan in 1945, a poor and war-devastated country. The United States, which occupied Japan after the war, imposed democracy and a top marginal tax rate of 85 percent on it (almost the same rate as at home — 86 percent in 1947). The goal was obviously not to generate much revenue. It was to prevent, from that tabula rasa, the formation of a new oligarchy. This policy was applied for decades: In 1982, the top rate was still 75 percent. Yet between 1950 and 1982, Japan grew at one of the fastest rates ever recorded (5.1 percent a year per adult on average), one of the most striking economic success stories of all time.
+Contrast Japan in 1945 with Russia in 1991. When Communism fell, Russia was also a poor country, with income and life expectancy well below that of Western economies. In lieu of 85 percent top rates, however, Russians got fast privatization and a top tax rate of 30 percent — again modeled on what was prevailing in the United States at the time (31 percent in 1991). That rate was replaced in 2001 by an even lower flat rate of 13 percent. That shock therapy created a new oligarchy, led to negative income growth for the bottom half of the population, fostered a general discontent with democracy and produced a drift toward authoritarianism.
+Progressive income taxation cannot solve all our injustices. But if history is any guide, it can help stir the country in the right direction, closer to Japan and farther from Putin’s Russia. Democracy or plutocracy: That is, fundamentally, what top tax rates are about.
+Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman are professors of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the authors of a forthcoming book about tax justice.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Despite the success of Kondo’s show, some aspects of it have come under scrutiny. Critics have homed in on its dramatization of ageless gender stereotypes and divisions of labor: The men can be imperious, the women submissive; the garage is often the domain of the husband, the kitchen the responsibility of the wife.
+At the end of the tidying process, Ischomachus reminds his wife that going forward, it will be her duty to maintain order. He assures Socrates that his wife did not resist but reacted “joyfully, like someone who’s found a path out of a difficult spot.” (“Spark Joy” is the title of Kondo’s second book.) Socrates is impressed. “My goodness!” he exclaims. “What a masculine intelligence you’ve described in your wife!” Yet his wife’s “masculine intelligence” is really the ultimate proof of her feminine submission.
+In Ischomachus’s household, it’s not just each object that has a proper place and becomes more vibrant when it is kept there — the wife does, too. Both Ischomachus and Kondo believe that to be in control of your life, you must be in control of your house. But control is limited for women in Ischomachus’s world, and little has changed in that regard.
+The comparison also prompts us to consider the notion of control itself. What does it say about the desires of neat freaks? The KonMari method puts forward a tempting bargain: If you organize your possessions, the rest of your life will magically fall into place. Xenophon’s characters seek even bolder rewards in “Oeconomicus,” which is often considered an allegorical blueprint for military success and good statesmanship. A city needs guardians in the same way that a household needs an overseer (i.e., a wife). Order among armies and on warships makes for a sight that is “fearsome to enemies and splendid to friends.” While Kondo focuses on individual desires and Xenophon on the well-being of society, they both think of tidying up as a way for a person to become someone greater and more powerful than their current self.
+Could there be something a little sinister to the lovable guru and her life-changing magic? Kondo skeptics may be interested in the “ironic” readings of Xenophon’s dialogue. These often see the domestic failure that Ischomachus puts right by “educating” his wife as a mark not of her incompetence but of his. In other words, the fantasy of perfect control that household organization offers may appeal most to those of us who feel that we need to have control over every aspect of our lives, even those that resist simple storage solutions. Perhaps the biggest mess is not in our closets but in our minds.
+Yung In Chae is a writer and editor at large of Eidolon, an online classics journal. Johanna Hanink is an associate professor of classics at Brown University. Her translation of speeches from Thucydides, “How to Think About War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy,” will be published next month.
+Join Peter Catapano, the editor of The Stone, at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Night of Philosophy and Ideas for a workshop on the editing process and readings by the winners of Library’s philosophical op-ed contest. To enter the contest, submit an Op-Ed of 750 words or less by Jan. 30 to jwhitney@bklynlibrary.org. Winners will be notified by email by Feb. 1.archived recording
+If there is one thing clear from Tuesday’s primaries, it is this — that women candidates are breaking all kinds of records.
+michael barbaro
+During this fall’s midterm elections —
+archived recording
+We have more women running for office at all levels.
+michael barbaro
+An unprecedented number of women ran for office, most of them Democrats.
+archived recording
+Women who had never run for anything before stepped up to put their names on the ballot. I don’t want anyone to elect me because I’m a woman. But we need to elect me because I’m better.
+michael barbaro
+By and large, they adopted the party strategy of talking about unifying issues.
+archived recording
+Overall, the two top issues are health care and the economy. The Affordable Care Act is here to stay. We must protect it as we must protect Medicare.
+michael barbaro
+And they played down what they saw as more polarizing issues, like abolishing ICE, “Medicare for All” —
+archived recording (senator kamala harris)
+Recently, people have been coming up to me, and they say, “Kamala, talk to us about women’s issues.” And I look at them, and I say, “I am so glad you want to talk about the economy.”
+michael barbaro
+And especially, they avoided talking about impeaching the president.
+archived recording
+Let’s see how the Mueller probe plays out and then go from there.
+michael barbaro
+And that strategy — it worked.
+archived recording
+Washington is about to get a lot more female. The midterm elections —
+michael barbaro
+Democrats took back the House of Representatives, and they embarked on an even more difficult second phase of the strategy, which is to actually govern in the same fashion.
+archived recording
+If they or the president want to get anything done the next two years, they will now have to work together.
+michael barbaro
+But among those winners this fall —
+archived recording
+Despite no attention, despite no media fanfare —
+michael barbaro
+Was this smaller wave of candidates, who were challenging longtime incumbents, often in reliably Democratic districts, and often without the party’s full support or blessing.
+archived recording
+Despite the fact that we were running against a 10-term incumbent, despite the fact that it was your first time running for office, despite the fact that I’m working-class — despite all those things, we won.
+michael barbaro
+And these new lawmakers did not stick by that strategy.
+archived recording
+You have called to abolish ICE. We don’t need to be protected from immigrants. We need to be protected from this president. As sometimes you see tax rates as high as 60 or 70 percent, as you climb up this ladder, you should be contributing more. Do you think that Trump should be impeached? I would vote yes.
+michael barbaro
+And even though their numbers are small, the fear is that they could push the entire Democratic agenda to the left, to the very places the party has been avoiding going.
+archived recording
+I think that unpredictability makes a lot of people nervous.
+michael barbaro
+So today, we’re going to meet one of those freshmen: Detroit’s Rashida Tlaib.
+archived recording
+Rashida Tlaib. She is poised to become the first Muslim woman in Congress in the country. Will you vote for Nancy Pelosi?
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+Probably not.
+archived recording
+Is she one of the people you’re referring to as a Democratic sellout?
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+Look, I don’t know. All I can tell you is she doesn’t speak about the issues that are important to the families of the 13th —
+michael barbaro
+Who, on her first day in Congress, made those theoretical tensions real.
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+When your son looks at you and says, “Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.” And I said, “Baby, they don’t. Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the [expletive].” [CHEERING]
+michael barbaro
+It’s Tuesday, January 22. Back in December, a few weeks before Rashida Tlaib left for Washington, producer Andy Mills and I went to her district in Detroit to meet her, her staff and her supporters. [DIAL TONE]
+andy mills
+I think that by pushing the five, you called.
+michael barbaro
+Well done, Andy.
+oscar
+Rashida for Congress.
+michael barbaro
+Hey, it’s Michael Barbaro from The New York Times. Amanda said we should come up?
+oscar
+Yeah, sounds good.
+michael barbaro
+Thank you. [BUZZER]
+andy mills
+Can you describe the building?
+michael barbaro
+So this is a four story building in the outskirts of downtown Detroit. There are some offices and non-profits in here. Oh, hey. Hey. Who’s the dog?
+oscar
+My dog.
+michael barbaro
+What’s her name?
+oscar
+Lola.
+michael barbaro
+(SINGING) Her name was Lola. Hi, Lola.
+oscar
+Oscar.
+michael barbaro
+Oscar, Michael and Andy.
+oscar
+Michael.
+andy mills
+Hey.
+oscar
+Andy, pleasure to meet you, man.
+andy mills
+Thanks a lot.
+oscar
+Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.
+amanda
+Hi. Amanda, nice to meet you.
+michael barbaro
+Hi, Amanda.
+amanda
+Hi.
+michael barbaro
+Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for letting us come by.
+amanda
+Yeah. So, I mean, we’re just in the process of packing up, so —
+andy mills
+Can you describe it for me?
+michael barbaro
+This looks like a campaign office being packed up. There’s boxes of folders, placards and brochures, trash bags, a giant “Rashida, Democrat for Congress” sign.
+amanda
+I don’t think Monica wants this so I think we can chuck it.
+andy mills
+May I ask how you came to work with the congresswoman?
+oscar
+Yeah, I volunteered online. I definitely wanted to get involved, and I was looking for districts that needed to be flipped. And I saw the video of Rashida at the Detroit Economic Club, where she was there yelling at Donald Trump.
+archived recording (president donald trump)
+Detroit tops the list of the most dangerous cities in terms of violent crime. [YELLING, BOOING]
+oscar
+She didn’t go quietly into the night, that’s for sure. She was dragged kicking and screaming.
+archived recording
+You were actually at an event, a Trump speech, and you, along with several others, were forcibly removed for heckling.
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+Absolutely.
+oscar
+So I said, you know, I was like, “Ooh, that’s the lady I need to volunteer for.” [CHANTING]
+andy mills
+And how about for you? Who is Rashida to you?
+amanda
+I don’t know if you’ve how much you read about her in the media and stuff like that, but, I mean, this is the person who carries a bullhorn to a protest, you know?
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+I think that was the most patriotic thing you could ever do, is disrupt somebody that doesn’t believe in our constitution, that doesn’t believe —
+amanda
+The person who’s joining her residents on the street to block traffic, you know, you don’t see so many politicians who are that hands-on in their community, and it’s really impressive.
+andy mills
+Test one. All right, so where are we, Michael?
+michael barbaro
+So we’re out front of a senior center in Detroit, where Congresswoman-elect Rashida Tlaib is going to meet with the residents who she’ll soon be representing. And her people, her staff, have told us that she’ll meet us inside.
+amira
+Hi.
+andy mills
+Hi there.
+amira
+You’re following Rashida, right?
+andy mills
+Yes. That’s us.
+amira
+Hi. Amira.
+michael barbaro
+Amira?
+amira
+Amira. Hello.
+michael barbaro
+Michael Barbaro. Very nice to meet you.
+amira
+Hi. She’s usually running a couple of minutes late. Well, no, she’s always late. So she’s on her way.
+andy mills
+Have you talked to Rashida before?
+speaker
+Oh, yes. I like her. I like her a lot. A lot of politicians just come when they want to be elected. Other politicians, they come back and check on us, see? So that’s how you know the difference in people, because if they just come when they want to be elected, then I have a problem with that. But when you come just to see how the seniors and the disabled and things that’s happening in the neighborhood, that’s a whole different —
+michael barbaro
+I guess it’s now about a month after the election, and she’s already back here.
+speaker
+Right. See what I’m saying? So that makes me feel good. [CHEERING]
+michael barbaro
+The congresswoman-elect has hugged every person in this room.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Hi. Hi, Michael. Nice to finally meet you. Hi, Andy. How are you?
+speaker
+You famous now, huh?
+represenatative rashida tlaib
+So I really want to hear from you all what you want. Think of this as an avenue for a lot of the issues that you might be facing right now. So just know, even though I’m on the congressional level, on the federal level, it does not mean that you can’t call me about some of the local issues. And the most incredible thing is, like, the power of your letterhead. Sometimes even me making a phone call — I can’t believe, like, if I call the EPA, they actually call me back now. You know what I mean? I know. But I just want you to know, I don’t take that lightly. But I want to hear from you all, what are some of your questions, concerns, issues. Yes, I want to impeach Trump. So I — [LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE] Yes.
+speaker
+I mean, is anything being done about the food stamps cuts and decreases? Because there’s some of us that actually need the food stamps to survive, you know, along with our income.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah. So one of the I keep telling people I have the third poorest congressional district in the country. Did you guys know that? We’re the third. And I don’t think we do enough around poverty and hunger. I think we have 42 million people, including children, that go hungry. And so we really need to
+michael barbaro
+This is basically a standard Q&A.
+speaker
+What about the mental illness situation?
+michael barbaro
+Big questions and rather small questions.
+speaker
+Gonna ask about snow removal.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah.
+michael barbaro
+But I learned a couple of things about her. She’s really personal.
+representative rashida tlaib
+You know, when my mom had a breakdown, it was really bad. And it was right around the holidays.
+michael barbaro
+She’s talking about very intimate, private things in her family drug addiction, mental illness.
+representative rashida tlaib
+But without going into too much details, because my brother kills me every time I do, but there was a situation where he was going to hurt himself — it’s like, I needed to get him in front of someone now.
+michael barbaro
+And the other thing is she’s basically encouraging these people to play a very particular role in this community.
+representative rashida tlaib
+And you know, I want you to know, most of the movement, you know, from getting women’s rights, from the Civil — all of those movements, they didn’t start in the White House or in Congress. They started outside of those buildings. So you need to demand it from me. And then I — that pushes me to demand it for my —
+speaker
+Well, we are demanding it today. Thank you.
+michael barbaro
+She’s saying to them, “You now have to be the activists. I was an activist once. Now it’s your job. You have to go out there. You have to make a bunch of noise. And then I will do my new part, which is I will respond to that activism now that I’m in Congress.”
+representative rashida tlaib
+I just want, you know — continue being active. Continue not only voting but pushing back against those that say, “Oh, that’s just not how it’s done.” They’ll always say that to you. That’s a lie. It is always a lie. So yeah, thank you. I really appreciate it. [APPLAUSE] You all have to keep connected to me. As they said, you know, people think now that you’re there that you’re too busy. So I am giving you all permission to call me, to reach out to me. Last time I gave you my cell — that number has not changed. Or I can put it in your phones.
+speaker
+O.K.
+michael barbaro
+She’s now going up to people’s phones, taking them from them, and putting her number, her contact information in their cell phone. Now she’s taking selfies and putting it into the contact.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Every time my face comes up.
+speaker
+C’mon, let’s take one together.
+representative rashida tlaib
+O.K., yeah.
+speaker
+It’s the right way. Let’s do that.
+michael barbaro
+How often do they call you?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I get some crazy calls, but not from my residents, but some people that get my phone number somehow. I don’t care. It’s worth it.
+michael barbaro
+You gave them a lot of yourself and your story in there. I was really struck by that.
+representative rashida tlaib
+I, like, try not to share. Usually you all are not there, though. [LAUGHS]
+michael barbaro
+So it’s day two in Detroit with Rashida Tlaib. And we are going to visit her in her office, talk to her there. We’re going to go to a party tonight and watch her mingle with people. But the first thing we’re going to do is meet her kids.
+representative rashida tlaib
+O.K., how are you?
+adam
+Hi, nice to meet you.
+michael barbaro
+What is your name?
+adam
+Adam.
+michael barbaro
+Adam? And you must be
+yousif
+Yousif.
+michael barbaro
+Yousif, great jacket.
+andy mills
+I’m Andy.
+adam
+Hi, nice to meet you.
+andy mills
+Can you just tell me what you’re doing right now?
+adam
+We’re walking right now to my mom’s car.
+yousif
+Here, Mama.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Here, baby.
+yousif
+Wait, do you guys post this on YouTube?
+michael barbaro
+On YouTube? No. Well, not exactly.
+yousif
+I want to be a YouTuber when I grow up.
+michael barbaro
+You want to be a YouTuber when you grow up?
+yousif
+A YouTuber!
+michael barbaro
+Do you mind if I ask the kids a couple of questions about —
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah, that’s fine.
+michael barbaro
+O.K.
+representative rashida tlaib
+I told them not to embarrass me, and I won’t embarrass them at school.
+yousif
+Mama, please don’t embarrass me at school.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Today, it’s my job to embarrass you.
+yousif
+Mama, why?
+michael barbaro
+What’s your sense of what just happened to your mother?
+adam
+I’m really happy that it actually worked out. I actually predicted that my mom wouldn’t win, to be honest.
+michael barbaro
+Wouldn’t win?
+adam
+Yeah.
+michael barbaro
+Are you being sarcastic?
+adam
+No, it just looked like that, because I took, like, records of what the voters were saying, and I just, you know —
+andy mills
+What were they saying about her?
+adam
+Like, 50 percent were with her and 50 percent were not. At least, that’s what I saw, because it was close. I knew it would be close.
+michael barbaro
+This is the primary?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Oh, yeah. We won by how many votes, Adam?
+adam
+800. Like, 800 votes. Anyway, so yeah, I’m actually really excited for my mom’s inauguration.
+michael barbaro
+Why?
+adam
+Just very — it’s going to be historical, I think. At least —
+yousif
+Yay, Mommy won.
+representative rashida tlaib
+What do you think Mama does?
+yousif
+Embarrassing.
+representative rashida tlaib
+You pretend you don’t like my music, but you do.
+yousif
+I do — I don’t.
+representative rashida tlaib
+We listen to Michael Jackson, and —
+yousif
+I like Michael Jackson. No, no. This is the thing I hate about her. She puts the song that girls rule the world. But Adam says it’s boys rule the world.
+representative rashida tlaib
+O.K., it’s called “Girls Run the World” by Beyoncé.
+michael barbaro
+(SINGING) Who run the world?
+michael barbaro and representative rashida tlaib
+Girls!
+yousif
+Why do boys like it? Because boys like girls and stuff, you know, you know. You know the drill.
+michael barbaro
+It’s kind of true, right? Your mom is about to go run the world.
+yousif
+Wait, no she’s not. She only has one vote.
+michael barbaro
+Is this your school? It’s beautiful.
+yousif
+Wish you could come.
+michael barbaro
+Well, that’s very sweet.
+yousif
+Bye.
+michael barbaro
+Bye. [PHONE RINGING]
+representative rashida tlaib
+Sugar Law Center. Mr. Gilmer is not in right now, but I can take down a message and have him give you a call. O.K. All right. Take care, bye.
+michael barbaro
+So we want to just situate ourselves in the moment we’re in a little bit. So, I mean, this has been your office for the past —
+representative rashida tlaib
+Three years.
+michael barbaro
+And now you’re leaving it.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah, I’m packing up, going from the nonprofit social justice organization, this place that, you know, kind of fueled my activism, to taking all of that with me to Congress.
+michael barbaro
+Is that you and Michelle Obama?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Oh, yeah. It’s so — isn’t that amazing?
+michael barbaro
+Is this your nameplate from the legislature?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah. Oh, so that’s the father of my children, Fayez. That him. He’s a great cook. There’s all my boys together. This is part of a fence. When I was a state representative, we went and tore down a fence that was illegally erected by a billionaire who just took one of our public parks. So a bunch of us went and cut it up and yeah, that’s part of the fence.
+michael barbaro
+How are you planning on — are you planning to move to D.C.?
+representative rashida tlaib
+So I don’t think of it as moving to D.C. I just am going to have a place to sleep there while I’m voting and doing work there. But my boys are going to stay here. I have an incredible partner. He’s such a great co-parent. Their dad is amazing. That’s why I don’t think of myself as a single mom as much, because he’s, you know, really stepped up and, you know, has been able to really be there every single day for the boys.
+michael barbaro
+Do you anticipate going back and forth every week?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Oh, yeah. Every week I’m coming back. And members of Congress do this a lot. I mean, I think, I just I cannot see myself so centered in D.C. being able to be effective on the things that have to be done for my residents. I can totally see myself completely disengaging in what’s happening at home.
+michael barbaro
+But how can you change Congress, which is one of your stated goals, if you’re flying to the capital to vote and then you’re kind of out and headed back to the district? How much of an imprint can you leave on the actual conduct of federal government?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah. I mean, I can tell you, I mean, look, the way you impact or change Congress is you get more people like me to run for office. Is it going to be with the current members there? I’m not hopeful.
+michael barbaro
+But what about legislatively? What do you want to get done in this first year? I mean, you have — if you go to your website, you have a $15 minimum wage, a college education that’s debt-free, environmental justice, on and on. I mean —
+representative rashida tlaib
+You know, all of those issues are at the forefront. And all these new members that have come in with me have run on those issues. It is going to be a top priority for us. But I don’t think we’re going to succeed unless we have the movement work and the things that we’re doing back home to connect it. Again, when we disconnect, we end up with something like Affordable Care Act, which people don’t understand is — insurance companies were in the room drafting it. And I feel like if that happens on Fight for 15, that happens with other — then we won’t succeed.
+michael barbaro
+Intriguing that you disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, because many Democrats would call it the signal achievement of the party in the last decade or so. I mean, people like the man you’re standing with in that photograph, Barack Obama. It’s imperfect, even by his own measure. But it got done.
+representative rashida tlaib
+I know. And that’s the thing, though. We had winners and losers. Not everybody got helped. [CROWD NOISE] How’s it going? Nice to see you. How’s it going? How are you?
+michael barbaro
+So we’re at a dinner in downtown Detroit. It’s this kind of large room, open bar. There’s a buffet. It’s mostly a room full of lawyers and advocates, social justice leaders. And in a way, they’re all saying goodbye to her, because she’s leaving that world and heading to Washington.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Oh my God. I can’t believe, Gwen — I can’t believe you came all the way down. This is so great.
+gwen
+So glad to be here. I’m so happy for all of us, for you and everybody.
+michael barbaro
+Why were you getting teared up?
+representative rashida tlaib
+She’s just known me for 10 years. And, like, I was just telling her, oh my God, we’re going to Congress.
+gwen
+Yes, yes, yes. I told her, so much for laying down in the street on 4th Street, blocking trucks, protesting Southwestern being closed.
+representative rashida tlaib
+I’m so glad you came.
+gwen
+I’m so glad I did. I told Simone I couldn’t miss it.
+speaker
+Have you met the members of the class, the other members?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah, of course. Yeah. I mean, I instantly connected with Sharice Davids, women like her, Lauren Underwood, all these incredible women.
+speaker
+How about Ocasio-Cortez?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah, of course. You know, a lot of people have all these things about her. But when you’re next to her, you feel, like, you just feel that energy. So yeah, it’s exciting.
+speaker
+And Pelosi must be in the courtship phase, right?
+representative rashida tlaib
+Oh, I don’t know what they call it. People told me to buy her chocolate and then she’ll like me. I mean, there’s crazy advice, really. You just nod, you know. O.K.
+gwen
+She’s a hard worker. She deserves this opportunity. I have every confidence that she’s going to do great things.
+speaker
+You know, she really tells it like it is. She’s not trying to play, like, a political game and dance around her words. Like, she’s very passionate about what she believes in. You know, it’s just every day we see, you know, she says something that’s pretty outside of the mainstream, outside of the Democratic mainstream, and it shifts the conversation a little. And so I’m very excited about it. [APPLAUSE] All right, all right, all right. Thank you all for coming. I want to make it clear to everybody who has doubt about the electoral process, doubt about whether things can be done — once something beautiful happens the way that it has happened with our own Rashida going to Washington, I feel it’s very important that you all — and I know there’s supposed to be some swearing-in in January — my dream, I think about it, is when Mike Pence has to swear her in on the Quran.
+michael barbaro
+Not to be a pill, but Mike Pence doesn’t actually swear in House members. He swears in the senators. It’s Nancy Pelosi who swears in House members.
+andy mills
+Good fact check.
+michael barbaro
+You’re welcome.
+speaker
+Before he swears her in, us to swear her in now. Us to do a people swearing-in, everybody. People swearing-in. All right, Rashida. You’re going to repeat after me. I, Rashida Tlaib, solemnly swear —
+representative rashida tlaib
+I, Rashida Tlaib, solemnly swear —
+speaker
+To fight for working people in their communities —
+representative rashida tlaib
+To fight for working people in their communities.
+speaker
+To fight against corporate welfare and handouts to millionaires.
+representative rashida tlaib
+To fight corporate welfare and handouts to millionaires.
+speaker
+To protect public education.
+representative rashida tlaib
+To protect public education.
+speaker
+To fight against bullies’ bullshit in all forms. To stick it to the man. I hereby declare you the people’s congresswoman, Rashida Tlaib. [APPLAUSE, CHEERING]
+representative rashida tlaib
+I always love you too. Thank you. Thank you. You know, what people said to me over and over again in different ways is, asking me, are you going to sell us out? And it broke my heart a little bit more and more, the more I have — are you going to be one of those, Rashida? Are you, you know, Sharida or some — whatever, they couldn’t pronounce my name. Then, like, you, are you going to be one of those that sells us out, that will forget about us? And so much of that is embedded in us not believing in the process anymore, not believing that government is about people. And we’re going to change that. We’re going to do it together. [APPLAUSE] You know, I started trying to start a hashtag about the man in the White House, you know, President Hamar. President Hamar is President Donkey. And it’s a way of saying [expletive]. [APPLAUSE] And when I think of President Hamar, I just think of this moment where, you know, he banned Muslims from coming in. He called my Mexican neighbors rapists, demonized my L.G.B.T.Q. neighbors. But words matter. And they do. And no matter what, I will not stand idly by and say, “I’m going to wait for an investigation. I’m going to wait” — no. And so, when people say to you, “You gotta wait,” and people e-mail me, say, “Wait,” I can’t wait, because these are years I can’t get back from my residents. This is hurt that I can’t get back from my residents. These are years that I can’t get back from my residents. So you stand with me and you say, accountability matters. Rule of law matters. I don’t care if it’s Matty Moroun, the Koch brothers, Marathon Oil refinery. I don’t give a [expletive] who it is. And if it’s president of the freaking United States that is not following the law, just like I do, just like all of us do in this country, then you’re going to get impeached. You’re going to be removed from office. It’s too much, and it’s too painful. We deserve better. Thank you for allowing me to be me, and really kind of charging me up. I mean, think about it, you guys. And now one of us is going to be in the United States Congress. [CHEERING]
+michael barbaro
+That was the real angry activist, casting off all the niceties of contemporary politics. She called our president a [expletive]. [CHATTER] Press gallery? We’re going to get the IDs?
+speaker
+Check in at that desk there.
+michael barbaro
+Thank you. So this is the big day. We are in Washington. We’re in the capital. It’s been three weeks since we met Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, followed her around. And today, she and all her colleagues are going to become Congress members officially.
+speaker
+So you can take audio in the chamber if it’s for your note-taking purposes only. It can’t be for rebroadcast.
+michael barbaro
+O.K., so we will just use C-SPAN and stuff.
+speaker
+Yeah. [GAVEL]
+archived recording
+Pursuant to law and precedent, the next order of business is election of the Speaker of the House of Representatives for the 116th McCarthy. Tipton. McCarthy. Titus. Pelosi. Tlaib.
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+For the future of our children, Nancy Pelosi.
+archived recording
+Pelosi.
+michael barbaro
+So I just walked out of the House chamber, where I saw Rashida Tlaib in her mother’s traditional Palestinian dress with her two sons. And one of the questions I had was, how was Tlaib and this crew of freshmen that she identifies with — what were they going to do when it came to voting for Nancy Pelosi as House speaker? They had made noises that they might oppose her. She is the very Democratic establishment that they ran against. And one by one, when it came time to stand up and cast a vote, they all went with Pelosi, including Tlaib. So on day one, so far it looks like they are falling in line.
+archived recording
+This has been a day of political pageantry and real change in the U.S. Congress.
+nancy pelosi)
+ARCHIVED RECORDING (REPRESENTATIVE We all have the privilege to serve with over 100 women members of Congress, the largest number in history.
+archived recording
+Democrat Nancy Pelosi has just been elected Speaker of the House, making history for the second time.
+nancy pelosi)
+ARCHIVED RECORDING (REPRESENTATIVE I look forward to working with you in a bipartisan way for the good of our country.
+archived recording
+Just hours last night after getting sworn in, Rashida Tlaib went on a profanity-laced rant while screaming for the president’s impeachment. Take a look.
+archived recording (representative rashida tlaib)
+And you win. And when your son looks at you and says, “Mama, look, you won. Bullies don’t win.” And I said, “Baby, they don’t. Because we’re going to go in there, and we’re going to impeach the [expletive].” [CHEERING]
+archived recording
+A freshman Democrat from Michigan using vile language in public to call for the impeachment of President Trump. So disgusting. And it’s horrible. No one should approve of that. And I hope she doesn’t talk to her son that way, either. What does that story tell us about this new class? Well, you know, she said on Twitter, “I’m unapologetically me.” You know, “I’m not going to say I’m sorry, and I’m not going to change.” You cannot accomplish very much of anything unless you have civility. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she doesn’t approve of the profanity but isn’t in the business of censorship.
+michael barbaro
+O.K. So just a few hours into her first day, Tlaib has found herself in the middle of this giant media maelstrom. And in front of her office, we spotted CNN and the AP. They’re basically staking her out, trying to get her to come out and say something about what she said about Trump. And we just got word that she’s actually not in that office where everyone’s waiting for her. She’s in a different office. And her staff just told us that they’re not talking to anybody. But they’re going to talk to us for just a little bit. And they’re going to let us ask her about this.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Somebody’s trying to get into my Facebook. Oh, hi. How are you? Yeah, you missed the boys yesterday.
+michael barbaro
+I saw them from the press gallery.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah, oh, did you? Yousif fell asleep at the beginning.
+michael barbaro
+I think I do just want to jump in to kind of the thing, the moment. I mean, you were a congresswoman, I guess by that point, for 12 or 13 hours. Did you kind of momentarily forget that cell phones were rolling at all times?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I think —
+michael barbaro
+Or did you mean to do it?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I think for me, that’s who I am. It’s something that I would have done if I wasn’t a member of Congress, right? I think, you know, as I was talking about, people like us running for office and not changing who we are, not one thing about who we are, how we act or anything, I think is really critically important. Because when we do lose that part of who we are, who we are in our soul, we start getting disconnected with the people back home. But at the same time, you just, you can’t really take the girl from Detroit out of me, I think. And back home in Detroit, MF is like — it’s like saying, “That guy.” We’re really —
+michael barbaro
+But is it — but let me ask you what may seem like a kind of a prissy New York Times-ey question, but like, but is that, is that befitting a congressperson?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I don’t know if it’s necessarily befitting of a congressperson. I think I need to focus on the issue. And I think that, for me, was a lesson learned, of understanding that I was really talking about this incredible historic class of folks that are ready to work.
+michael barbaro
+So I do want to understand what the consequences of this are. And I don’t want to belabor it. But do you think that in this moment, perhaps unintentionally, you created a reputation, not just momentarily for yourself, but for the broader new freshman class?
+representative rashida tlaib
+No. I don’t think so. I love that today I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dancing in front of her office, like, who cares what you all think about me? And I’m like, exactly. That’s how I feel.
+michael barbaro
+Did you hear from Democratic Party leaders like Nancy Pelosi? When we were in the room — I was in the room, you were in the room — you saw her speech, which was all about bipartisanship, being united. So I wonder if you’ve heard anything from her?
+representative rashida tlaib
+No. I mean, what she said, which was really great, is that there is a generational gap here. And there’s people that take this approach very differently. And I love that she respects that we all are different and that she doesn’t use it to divide us.
+michael barbaro
+So is there any part of you who might be a little proud of this? You started off by saying, “You can’t take the Detroit out of the girl.”
+representative rashida tlaib
+No, I don’t know if proud — proud is not the word. It is who I am.
+michael barbaro
+I guess my final question is, Congresswoman, now-Congresswoman Tlaib, do you —
+representative rashida tlaib
+I still can’t get used to that.
+michael barbaro
+Get used to it.
+representative rashida tlaib
+I know.
+michael barbaro
+Do you really think that you can stay like this?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I can. Look, I may not use the MF word every single day. And I will not use it on the House floor. I don’t think I would ever be me or effective or be the person — well, really be the person that my residents elected if I’m not who I am.
+andy mills
+Do you think you’ll continue to be the number-one congressperson trending on Twitter for very much longer?
+representative rashida tlaib
+I hope not.
+andy mills
+You hope not?
+representative rashida tlaib
+No.
+andy mills
+Thanks for taking time for us.
+representative rashida tlaib
+Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, thank you.
+michael barbaroBaye McNeil, an author who has lived in Japan for 15 years, said he didn’t understand why the ad would “erase her black features and project this image of pretty much the prototypical anime girl-next-door character.”
+Ms. Osaka’s rise into a beloved national figure has been particularly exciting for biracial people in Japan, known as hafus, who have long battled for acceptance, he said.
+“Making her look white just tells these people that what they are isn’t good enough,” Mr. McNeil said.
+Ms. Osaka was born in Japan to a Haitian-American father and a Japanese mother, and moved to the United States when she was 3. Although she isn’t fluent in Japanese, often responding to questions from Japanese reporters in English, she has tweeted about her love of manga and Japanese movies.
+Ranked fourth in the world at just 21, she’s already among Japan’s most accomplished tennis players ever. She became the first Japanese-born tennis player to win a Grand Slam singles championship in September when she defeated Serena Williams in the U.S. Open, a victory that supercharged her celebrity ascent.
+That win prompted a cartoon in an Australian newspaper that was criticized for its depiction of Ms. Williams, which many saw as a racist caricature. While most of the condemnation focused on how the Australian cartoonist drew Ms. Williams, critics also noted that Ms. Osaka was depicted with blond hair and light skin.
+Black characters aren’t frequently found in anime, but artists in the medium have successfully depicted their skin tones before.This review was updated by the reviewer on Feb. 14 to reflect questions that arose after the review’s publication.
+MERCHANTS OF TRUTH
+The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
+By Jill Abramson
+534 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
+In the early spring of 2014, A. G. Sulzberger, then an editor on the metro desk of The New York Times, handed Jill Abramson, the executive editor, a copy of the “innovation report.” Sulzberger and a team of colleagues had been working on the document for months, and they’d produced a vivisection of the paper. The Times had been slow to adapt to the emergence of new digital platforms; it had thumbed its nose at the internet and thus the future. The report was insightful, enlightened and tough. And it drove Abramson over the edge.
+She was upset because she didn’t think it credited her enough. Not a word of praise was offered for her having helped unite nytimes.com and the main newsroom. Worse, the report also encouraged The Times to loosen the barriers dividing the editorial and business sides. That, to her, was a road to perdition. “For me, it was an epic defeat,” she writes. She had wanted to be the executive editor who protected the newsroom from “crass commercialism”; she had wanted to avoid “metric charts influencing editors to promote stories according to their traffic.”Good Tuesday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+A bleak message reverberates in Davos
+An influential financier warned investors in a letter to pay heed to growing risks and social tensions — and the message is already resonating at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Andrew writes in his column.
+In his annual letter, Seth A. Klarman, the billionaire investor who runs the Baupost Group hedge fund, warns that social and political division risks economic calamity:
+“It can’t be business as usual amid constant protests, riots, shutdowns and escalating social tensions.”
+His message is likely to encourage hand-wringing of a sort usually seen in Davos, Andrew writes.
+Mr. Klarman says mounting debt in developed countries since the 2008 financial crisis could lead to a financial panic. He is especially worried about the debt load in the United States:
+“There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford. By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order.”
+More from Davos: Political turmoil has led several world leaders to skip the gathering. And less than a quarter of people attending are women.
+____________________________
+Today’s DealBook Briefing was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Stephen Grocer in New York, and Tiffany Hsu and Gregory Schmidt in Paris.
+____________________________
+China’s economy expands at its slowest pace
+The world’s second largest economy grew 6.6 percent last year, the Chinese government said on Monday — its most sedate pace in nearly three decades. The slowdown intensified in the last three months of 2018, and the official jobless rate increased to 4.9 percent last month from 4.8 percent in November.LONDON — Emiliano Sala, a soccer player who recently moved to the English Premier League, was aboard a small airplane that disappeared Monday night while crossing the English Channel, and he and the pilot are feared dead, the authorities said on Tuesday.
+John Fitzgerald, chief officer for Channel Islands Air Search, said that an air and sea operation would continue, but he did not expect to find either survivors or parts of the aircraft.
+“I think we’re sort of getting to that stage now that it would be difficult to find anyone alive,” Mr. Fitzgerald, 58, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. “The cold would have taken effect. The tide flows so fast, there’s the wind and a lot of white water — it’s more and more unlikely for the chance of survival.”
+France’s Civil Aviation Authority confirmed that Mr. Sala, 28, who was about to begin playing for the club Cardiff City, was on the plane along with the pilot. Edwige Leroy, a spokeswoman for the agency, said it was not yet sure whether anyone else was aboard.By Sunday, a fuller and more complicated picture emerged. Sarah Mervosh and Emily S. Rueb write:
+A fuller and more complicated picture emerged on Sunday of the videotaped encounter between a Native American man and a throng of high school boys wearing “Make America Great Again” gear outside the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.
+Interviews and additional video footage suggest that an explosive convergence of race, religion and ideological beliefs — against a national backdrop of political tension — set the stage for the viral moment. Early video excerpts from the encounter obscured the larger context, inflaming outrage.
+Leading up to the encounter on Friday, a rally for Native Americans and other Indigenous people was wrapping up. Dozens of students from Covington Catholic High School in Kentucky, who had been in Washington for the anti-abortion March for Life rally, were standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, many of them white and wearing apparel bearing the slogan of President Trump.
+There were also black men who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites, preaching their beliefs and shouting racially combative comments at the Native Americans and the students, according to witnesses and video on social media.
+Soon, the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, 64, was encircled by an animated group of high school boys. He beat a ceremonial drum as a boy wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat stood inches away. The boy identified himself in a statement released on Sunday night as Nick Sandmann, a junior.
+It was a provocative image that rocketed across social media, leading many, including the students’ own school, to condemn the boys’ behavior as disrespectful. But on Sunday, Mr. Phillips clarified that it was he who had approached the crowd and that he had intervened because racial tensions — primarily between the white students and the black men — were “coming to a boiling point.”
+“I stepped in between to pray,” Mr. Phillips said.
+In his statement, Mr. Sandmann said he did not antagonize or try to block Mr. Phillips. “I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves,” he said.
+The encounter became the latest touch point for racial and political tensions in America, with diverging views about what really had happened.PARIS — The R&B singer Chris Brown was released without charges on Tuesday after he was questioned by the Paris police over a rape accusation, according to the authorities and his lawyer.
+Shortly afterward, Mr. Brown said in a message on his Instagram account that the accusations were “false” and that his accuser was “lying.”
+Mr. Brown, 29, had been taken into custody on Monday for questioning about an accusation of aggravated rape and possible drug infractions. Reports in the French news media said that an investigation had been opened after a woman filed a complaint with the Paris police, accusing him of raping her at his hotel last week after they met at a nightclub in the capital.
+The Paris prosecutor’s office said on Tuesday evening that Mr. Brown had been released without charges but that the investigation was continuing. Mr. Brown’s lawyer in Paris, Raphael Chiche, confirmed that his client had been released but did not comment further on the allegations against him.My view is that Harris deserves to be treated as a front-runner. She has a fascinating personal story, and she has handled the national spotlight well in her first two years in the Senate.
+I’ll be interested now to see whether she can offer a compelling story about what ails the country — how we’ve come to suffer from fraying democracy, stagnant mass living standards and a violently warming planet — and what she will do to change our course.
+For more on her, see:
+Jim Geraghty in National Review, on “Twenty things you probably didn’t know about Kamala Harris,” which includes her handling of the mortgage crisis in California.
+Perry Bacon Jr. in FiveThirtyEight: “There may be no other candidate who better embodies how the modern Democratic Party has changed over the last few decades in identity and ideology … Post-Obama, the Democratic Party is increasingly the party of women and the ‘woke,’ and Harris’s biography and politics align well with where the party has moved.”
+Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post: “Harris’s policy positions — Medicare for all, progressive tax reform, raise in the federal minimum wage, green energy, etc. — are not unique in a field with many progressive candidates. She is unique because of her biography — a daughter of immigrants from India and Jamaica, and spent years as a prosecutor and then state attorney general — and her personal appeal. Of those candidates already declared, she might be the most engaging and dynamic.”
+Reader responses
+Several readers responded to my column yesterday about the shutdown by pointing out the connection to organized labor.
+Paul Wortman, from Providence: “The shutdown is not [about] ‘the weakness of the resistance,’ but the weakness of the American labor movement. Labor has been under constant attack since the Reagan era with the firing of [air traffic controller] union members. Despite the strong labor market, government pay and benefits are much better than the private sector and workers are unwilling to risk an illegal strike and the fear of being fired.”
+A reader from Atlanta: “Unions, unions, and more unions. Over the decades unions have been decimated by right-to-work laws. And until they’re resurrected nothing will occur. Those European countries that would demonstrate are all heavily unionized, including government employees. They don’t demonstrate, they go on strike, and their employers suffer.”
+If you are not a subscriber to this newsletter, you can subscribe here. You can also join me on Twitter (@DLeonhardt) and Facebook.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed this past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you'll find the answer.
+Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.My name is Alfonso Cuarón. I’m the writer director of “Roma.” This scene takes place deep into the movie. We see our main character, Cleo, who’s a domestic worker working for this middle class family in Mexico City, who’s pregnant. And she’s been taken to this furniture shop to buy a crib for the baby. It’s clear that there’s a lot of activity, and we establish that there is a student demonstration going on. So as they walk towards the furniture shop, they walk in front of riot policemen, but also, a lot of students. You can see them walking with excitement to join the demonstration. In the background, you can hear different chants in support of different affiliations and different universities around the country. And you’ll hear also how they sing the Mexican national anthem. And all of this is taken from historical facts. We see a shot of some window that has a lot of clocks for sale on display. And those are marking the time. And this is important because this is just five minutes before the historical events took place, and I wanted this to be the moment in which the personal and the social come together, and the historical context also then come together. There’s a certain part of existence that you feel that you’re under control. But in my point of view, there is a greater randomness that puts things together or pulls them apart. And finally, the camera reaches the window and looks down into the street to reveal that there’s a paramilitary group attacking the demonstration. And by the way, we shot in the place where the events took place. What you see down on the street, we rehearsed in a football field for many weeks before, because it was going to involve stunts and people running, and I didn’t want any accidents just improvising at the last moment. Because we have close to 1,000 extras down there. So it was a big, big, big operation for us. [speaking spanish]$2.2 MILLION
+247 Himrod Street (between Irving and Knickerbocker Avenues)
+Bushwick, Brooklyn
+A real estate investor has bought this three-story, 4,500-square-foot walk-up, which sold for $1.35 million in 2016. The 1931 building, with aluminum siding, features six apartments, each about 750 square feet. Four, with two bedrooms and two baths, have been renovated and are market rate, and two are not renovated, rent-stabilized railroad apartments with one bedroom. One unit has access to the 1,000-square-foot backyard. The hallways have new flooring, stairs and lighting. The cap rate was 5.9 percent. The building sold for 14 times the rent roll.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+For weeks, she’s been on a national tour promoting her memoir. This month, Politico reported that she shut down her state campaign committee and donated the rest of the money she raised for a California race, about $1 million, to causes including the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights and a foundation that helps firefighters.
+But only as of yesterday — not coincidentally, Martin Luther King’s Birthday — was it official: Senator Kamala Harris is running for president in 2020.
+She announced her run on “Good Morning America,” not in her hometown, Oakland, as a local radio station’s sources had predicted earlier. She will, however, hold a rally there on Sunday.
+“The core of my campaign is the people,” Ms. Harris said later in the day at Howard University, the historically black college she attended in the 1980s. “Nobody is living their life through the lens of one issue. And I think what people want is leadership that sees them through the complexity of their lives and pays equal attention to their needs. Let’s not put people in a box.”Mr. Whelan, wearing a sky blue shirt and dark pants, was locked in a glass docket, as is the custom in Russian courts. He did not speak to reporters before they were ushered out of the room. During the hearing he spoke for about 15 minutes in his own defense, the lawyer said.
+The judge denied a request for bail and ordered Mr. Whelan held in Moscow’s Lefortovo Prison for another month. If convicted of espionage, he faces up to 20 years in jail.
+In prison he has an English-speaking cellmate and has been able to check out English-language books from the library by authors like Jack London, Russian prisoner advocates have said.
+David Whelan, his twin brother, who lives in Canada, said in a statement that the family would not comment until it had heard more about the hearing from consular officials.
+Mr. Whelan has made numerous trips to Russia over a decade, traveling around the country by railroad and cultivating dozens of friends through Vkontakte, a Russia social media platform akin to Facebook. Many of those friends had military backgrounds, and relatives suggested that he might have been seeking out kindred spirits, given his own long service in the Marines.
+He had been given a bad conduct discharge in 2008 related to a larceny case.
+From the time Mr. Whelan’s arrest was made public, there has been speculation in Russia that he was imprisoned in order to exchange him for one or more Russians held in American jails. President Vladimir V. Putin has repeatedly expressed outrage at the United States’ detention of Russian citizens.
+Mr. Whelan might have been taken, for example, to exchange him for Maria Butina, who pleaded guilty on Dec. 13 in Federal District Court in Washington to a charge of conspiring to act as a foreign agent.The idea of the siblings performing together as a unit really came about only after a 2000 New York Times article about how all the children were attending Juilliard simultaneously. After the act got underway, Keith Brown became the business manager and put his children on a punishing schedule, keeping up the abuse for much of the time. Once the sisters revealed what was going on to one another, and to their brothers, Gregory and Ryan, there had to be a reckoning.
+And so there was, one that led to further trouble, and one inarguably just resolution: Keith Brown is serving a prison sentence. This story is in a sense confounding. I can’t imagine the bitterness of having to deal with one’s vocation and artistic calling being inextricably linked to a monstrous, criminal upbringing. And yet the movie is framed by scenes of the now adult Browns making a new record. For as much as they suffered, music was able to keep them sane, and united.
+The director and his editor, Amanda Larson, construct the movie in a fairly conventional way, but leave a single string dangling, which they pull tight to devastating emotional effect near the end. The five Browns are likable, admirable individuals; two of the sisters started the Foundation for Surviving Abuse, an advocacy group, and we see them at work with eloquence and compassion. Their trauma and their subsequent resolve, as depicted here, are also, finally, all-American.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”With its modular sofas, coffee tables and high ceilings, the new space is meant to be a comfortable and productive place for businesses that include not only the tech start-ups that might be expected, but also people like accountants, lawyers, graphic designers and architects.
+Mr. Ciccone said small businesses were better served in boutique co-working spaces than in national chains like WeWork, and would benefit from more amenities than in conventional office spaces.
+“If you are a four-person graphic design company, your options are usually substandard Class B office space with an old-school stodgy landlord that just doesn’t provide a lot of services for you and your employees,” he said.
+Mr. Ciccone’s clients include Courtney Watts, an employee of the I.T. consultant Infosys in Chicago, who moved back to her native Pittsburgh a year ago after about a dozen years away. She signed up with Beauty Shoppe with the aim of reconnecting with the city.
+Ms. Watts, 30, commutes to Chicago, where she usually works three or four days a week. The rest of her time, she alternates among three Beauty Shoppe locations. She connected with other workers there more easily than she had in bigger co-working spaces in Boston and Toronto, which she called “more cookie cutter.”
+“Of all the co-working spaces I’ve worked, I haven’t felt it as strongly as I have with Beauty Shoppe,” she said. “People want to talk to each other. People want to know what the other person is up to.”
+Benjamin Schmidt, chief technology officer for RoadBotics, a two-year-old technology company, said he and his fellow founders had chosen to rent space in the Pittsburgh Detective Building because its individual design, with exposed steel beams, was more attractive than the “office vibe” at some other co-working spaces they had looked at.He told the justices that prompt action was required to ensure that the Supreme Court could rule before its term ends in June. The alternative, he said, was to defer Supreme Court arguments in the matter to the term that starts in October, with a decision probably not coming until 2020.
+Kerri Kupec, a Justice Department spokeswoman, welcomed the Supreme Court’s revival of the policy.
+“We are pleased the Supreme Court granted stays in these cases, clearing the way for the policy to go into effect while litigation continues,” she said. “The Department of Defense has the authority to create and implement personnel policies it has determined are necessary to best defend our nation.”
+In a statement released Tuesday, a Pentagon spokeswoman said that the program was not a complete ban and that transgender troops would be treated with respect and dignity.
+“It is critical,” the spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Carla M. Gleason, said, that the Defense Department “be permitted to implement personnel policies that it determines are necessary to ensure the most lethal and combat effective fighting force in the world.”
+The department’s “proposed policy,” she said, “is based on professional military judgment.”
+Some veterans groups said the Supreme Court’s move would complicate the jobs of military commanders who lead transgender service members.
+“Based on earlier policy, they’ve openly declared themselves transgender, and now we’re going to kick them out for being honest, only to possibly see this ban reversed at a future time,” said Jon Soltz, an Iraq war veteran who is now chairman of VoteVets.org, a liberal veterans advocacy group. “The Supreme Court has made it harder for every commander in the military today. They’re literally going to have to look at some of the best troops we have and kick them out for being honest about who they are.”
+Aaron Belkin, the director of the Palm Center, a research and advocacy group that focuses on sexuality and the military, said the military officials retained discretion over personnel policies.“This is just the first case but not likely the last case where at least four justices open the way to a major ruling that could limit gun safety laws,” said Michael Waldman, the author of “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” referring to a Supreme Court rule requiring four votes to add cases to its docket.
+The New York City ordinance challenged in the new case allows residents with so-called premises licenses to take their guns to one of seven shooting ranges within the city limits. But the ordinance forbids them to take their guns anywhere else, including second homes and shooting ranges outside the city, even when they are unloaded and locked in a container separate from ammunition.
+The Supreme Court’s new majority seems ready to continue a project begun in 2008, when the court, by a 5-to-4 vote, established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense. That decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, was both revolutionary and in its way quite limited. Exactly what the Second Amendment protects has been in dispute ever since.
+Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion in the Heller decision included an important limiting passage that was almost certainly the price of Justice Kennedy’s fifth vote. “Nothing in our opinion,” Justice Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
+Since the Heller decision, lower courts have overwhelmingly upheld state and local gun control laws. The Supreme Court, in turn, has refused to hear appeals from those decisions. Justice Kavanaugh’s arrival changed that.WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court took no action on Tuesday on the Trump administration’s plans to shut down a program that shields some 700,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation.
+The court’s inaction almost certainly means it will not hear the administration’s challenge in its current term, which ends in June. The justices’ next private conference to consider petitions seeking review is scheduled for Feb. 15.
+Even were they to agree to hear the case then, it would not be argued until after the next term starts in October under the court’s usual procedures. A decision would probably not arrive until well into 2020.
+The move left the program in place and denied negotiating leverage to President Trump, who has said he wanted to use a Supreme Court victory in the case in negotiations with Democrats over immigration issues.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+A record number of Americans understand that climate change is real, according to a new survey, and they are increasingly worried about its effects in their lives today.
+Some 73 percent of Americans polled late last year said that global warming was happening, the report found, a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015 and three points since last March.
+The rise in the number of Americans who say global warming is personally important to them was even sharper, jumping nine percentage points since March to 72 percent, another record over the past decade.‘Black Panther’
+Nominated for: best picture, costume design, original score, original song, production design, sound editing, sound mixing
+How to watch: Stream it on Netflix; rent it on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play and YouTube.
+The first superhero movie to be nominated for best picture — for all its acclaim, even “The Dark Knight” missed the list — “Black Panther” goes further than any previous Marvel production in bringing thematic weight to escapist spectacle. Michael B. Jordan makes a particularly vivid contribution as Killmonger, a villain whose threat to T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), the newly crowned king of the techno-utopian nation of Wakanda, is rooted in competing notions of black identity.“If you don’t get it, it’ll get you,” she said, adding: “The more comfortable I feel about it, the better off I’ll be.”
+Ms. Williams is candid about her fears of relapsing. There are moments when the lifestyle calls to her, she said. She has tricks to staying the course, like never meeting people at a bar and always having a destination in mind when she leaves home.
+“You have to have somewhere to go. You have to have a life, a busy life to really do this sobriety thing,” she said.
+Now that Isabella is home with her in Cypress Hills, Brooklyn, Ms. Williams plans to spend time with her daughter, watching movies, drawing and singing together. “Ring Around the Rosie” is a particular hit. The bonding moments put Ms. Williams’s past in stark contrast.
+“It’s been a lot of bad days, mostly bad days, just trying to get through those days,” Ms. Williams said. “I saw how bad my life had gotten, and I don’t want to take myself down that road ever again.”Netflix makes history
+Though Netflix shows are regularly showered with Emmy nominations, best picture recognition at the Oscars has eluded the company until now. On Tuesday, “Roma” earned Netflix its first nomination for Oscar’s top prize, as well as a great many other nominations, including lead actress for Yalitza Aparicio and supporting actress for Marina de Tavira, both of whom had been snubbed by the Screen Actors Guild. One notable academy snub? Editing. Yes, Alfonso Cuarón’s film is mostly composed of languid long takes, but an editing nomination is often considered a key milestone on the way to a best picture win. Then again, “A Star Is Born” didn’t crack the category, either.
+A rough morning for Mister Rogers
+After a robust year for documentaries at the box office, many pundits assumed that “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?,” Morgan Neville’s documentary about the children’s show host Mister Rogers, would be the feel-good favorite. Well, don’t take your shoes off just yet: Neville’s film was one of this morning’s most shocking snubs. With “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” out, could the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary “RBG” become the new front-runner? In addition to its best documentary nomination, it also picked up a nomination for best song.
+After a big win, ‘Green Book’ does … fine
+This race-relations dramedy pulled out an upset win at the Producers Guild of America last weekend, so I wondered if it might show up in some unexpected categories on Tuesday, signaling real Oscar strength. While “Green Book” did score nominations for best picture and best original screenplay, as well as for the actors Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, it didn’t crack the lineups for director or supporting actress. The Producers Guild honor usually foretells the winner of the best picture Oscar, but will that still hold true this year? In a month, we’ll find out.Ms. Merkel herself has been a source of disappointment for Mr. Macron. Her natural caution has been cold water to his impassioned plans for European reform, especially for the countries that use the common euro currency. Most of his lofty visions, like a shared eurozone budget, have been watered down or have come to nothing. But Ms. Merkel also wants to support him and his commitment to Europe, especially when he is in difficulty at home.
+Each leader acknowledged the challenges, but drew on them as reasons for the new treaty.
+“Seventy-four years after the end of World War II — a lifetime — things considered self-evident are again being called into question,” Ms. Merkel said in remarks before the signing. “That is why we need, first, a re-establishment of the responsibility of Germany and France within the European Union and, second, a reorientation of our cooperation.”
+The new accord includes pledges to deepen economic integration through a joint “economic zone,” and to reinforce cooperation in military purchasing and coordination with the aim of improving Europe’s ability to act on its own. It includes a mutual defense pact, within the context of NATO membership, and would establish a joint defense and security council.
+Both Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel have called in their own ways for a European army capable of acting alone when NATO does not wish to be involved. Both have also said that Europe can no longer count on the United States, as it has in the past. That idea created anger and concern in Washington and set off a series of contemptuous remarks over Twitter from President Trump.
+“Europe is the protective shield for our people against the new storms in the world,” Mr. Macron said.There are certain recipes that are immediately appealing, beloved by most and attainable by all. They tend to be easy, comforting, delicious-looking no-brainers that don’t require much persuading for people to make them. Think giant bowls of gloriously cheesy pasta.
+Then there are the recipes that may not immediately inspire because they may seem unfamiliar or needlessly complicated, recipes that may require a bit more convincing. Perhaps approximately 600 words of convincing. Recipes like cooking a whole fish. With t he head.
+Cooking a whole fish is something many people would probably file under “not for me,” only ever ordering it at a restaurant, if that. I get it: If you didn’t grow up eating it, there are a lot of bones to navigate, and those milky white, beady eyes, which are definitely looking at you. But I promise that cooking and eating a whole fish in your home is not scary or complicated (and the fish is not looking at you).Booking.com, one of the world’s largest accommodations booking sites, surveyed 21,500 travelers this summer about their dream trips, and 40 percent reported that they wanted to take or had actually taken a trip based on the results of home DNA tests.
+Allegra Lynch, a member of the Travel Leaders Network who lives in Santa Rosa, Calif., said that she sold $1.5 million worth of such trips in 2018, primarily to Europe, compared with $800,000 in 2017. “The rise is 100 percent because of people wanting to go on trips after taking at-home DNA tests,” she said.
+An online video created for AeroMexico by the Ogilvy advertising agency last year played on the trend, offering discounts to Americans to fly to Mexico based on the portion of their heritage that a DNA test determined was from Mexico. Amid the debate around border security, the ad has recently gone viral on the Internet. John Raul Forero, the chief creative officer for Ogilvy Latam confirmed in an email that the ad had been created last year for the airline but had no further comment. The DNA promotion is no longer valid, according to Paula Santiago, a spokeswoman for the agency.
+Although some genetic experts question the accuracy of such tests to pinpoint geographical ancestry, the molecular genealogist Diahan Southard said that the results are usually on the mark, save for some exceptions. “The ethnicity breakdown you receive from a testing company relies heavily on the people the company is comparing you against,” she said. “If you are from France, but your company hasn’t tested very many French people, they aren’t going to do a very good job with your breakdown.”
+Still, accessibility and affordability are helping DNA-based travel take off, according to Sarah Enelow-Snyder, an assistant editor at the travel research company Skift. “You can buy one for less than $100, and it’s a price that has helped propel the popularity of these trips,” she said.Ultimately, the low-sugar diet was not terribly restrictive. It was not low-carb, nor was it limited in calories. The children could eat fruit, starches and pasta, for example, and they were allowed to eat as much as they wanted. But the goal was to get their added sugar intake to less than 3 percent of their daily calories — less than the 5 to 10 percent limit for adults and children recommended by the World Health Organization.
+After eight weeks, the low-sugar group had gotten their added sugar intake down to just 1 percent of their daily calories, compared to 9 percent in the control group. They also had a remarkable change in their liver health. They had a 31 percent reduction in liver fat, on average, compared to no change in the control group. They also had a 40 percent drop in their levels of alanine aminotransferase, or ALT, a liver enzyme that rises when liver cells are damaged or inflamed.
+“As a practicing hepatologist, I see children weekly with fatty liver, and I would love to see this kind of improvement in my patients,” said Dr. Vos. “The exciting part was not only did the fat go down, but their liver enzymes also improved. That suggests that they also got a reduction in inflammation.”
+The new study was funded in part by the Nutrition Science Initiative, a nonprofit research group that was co-founded by the science and health journalist Gary Taubes, a proponent of low-carb diets. The National Institutes of Health, the University of California, San Diego, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University also provided funding.
+Dr. Joel E. Lavine, an expert who was not involved in the study, said it was cleverly done and demonstrated “some important points about what a major constituent of diet contributes to this problem in terms of liver fat and inflammation and cell injury.” He said the ubiquity of unhealthy foods makes such a diet difficult to follow, but that as a general rule doctors should advise patients and their families to check food labels for added sugars and to avoid or eliminate juices.
+“The best diet, to make it very simple, is to shop the outside aisles in supermarkets and stay away from the middle aisles containing processed foods that come in boxes, cans and packages,” said Dr. Lavine, the chief of gastroenterology, hepatology and nutrition at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital of NewYork-Presbyterian.
+The members of the low-sugar group lost about three pounds during the study, which may have contributed to their improvements in liver health. But Dr. Jeffrey B. Schwimmer, an author of the study, said it was unlikely to account for the large changes.‘A Star Is Born’
+‘Review: “A Star Is Born” Brings Gorgeous Heartbreak’ [The New York Times]
+In her Critic’s Pick review, Manohla Dargis praises the classicism and modernism of a Hollywood fable continuously refreshing itself: “Like its finest antecedents, it wrings tears from its romance and thrills from a steadfast belief in old-fashioned, big-feeling cinema,” she writes. “That it’s also a perverse fantasy about men, women, love and sacrifice makes it all the better.” She also singles out Lady Gaga’s performance as the ingénue Ally, describing her as “touchingly vulnerable.”
+[Many of the major nominees are already streaming. Here’s where to find them.]
+‘How the New “A Star Is Born” Complicates an Old View of Womanhood’ [The New York Times]
+Aisha Harris, an editor at The Times, examines the gender dynamics of Bradley Cooper’s film and how they challenge hidebound archetypes about great men and the women who make sacrifices on their behalf. “On the surface, it feels antiquated, this persistent suggestion that only in her husband’s death can Ally become the star she is meant to be,” Harris writes. “Yet the more I consider how Cooper depicts the ebbs and flows of their relationship, the more I find this latest version intriguing in the way it complicates an already complicated narrative.”
+‘Is “A Star Is Born” Campy, or Have We Forgotten How to Feel?’ [The New York Times]
+The Times’s Kyle Buchanan ponders just how seriously audiences are supposed to take the towering emotions and multi-hankie pathos of this tale of showbiz tragedy: “Is the movie itself a new camp classic, now that it can be viewed in full? I keep seeing reactions that treat ‘A Star Is Born’ that way, or that dismiss it as ‘schmaltzy,’ and I have to confess that I’m surprised.”
+‘Why Are “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “Green Book” Still Oscar Frontrunners?’ [Buzzfeed]
+Buzzfeed’s Alison Willmore considers how the evolving profiles of two best picture competitors speak volumes about the industry’s moral compass: “If there are no professional consequences for [the director of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody,’ Bryan Singer,] or the film it becomes difficult to see this as something other than a major turning point, and maybe an endpoint, for #MeToo,” she writes. “The multiple controversies around ‘Green Book,’ though obviously very different, have also shown Hollywood’s willingness to overlook criticism that doesn’t serve its financial interests or flatter its self-image.”It wasn’t always this way. Before Roe v. Wade, those on both sides of the issue typically framed their arguments in constitutional terms, anticipating a showdown in the courts. And in the immediate aftermath of the decision, 46 years ago today, most still viewed abortion as a constitutional fight. Abortion foes pushed for an amendment banning the procedure and restoring what they saw as a fundamental right to life; abortion-rights supporters felt secure in the court’s conclusion that the 14th Amendment’s right to privacy encompassed a right to choose.
+The introduction of scientific claims to the debate came slowly at first. In the 1970s, anti-abortion activists wanted a way to keep abortion rates down while the campaign for constitutional change raged on. So they turned to contested science to argue for laws dictating how and when doctors performed abortions. Some insisted that fetal viability came earlier than the 24- to 28-week time frame set in Roe. Others claimed that abortion caused “severe emotional disturbances,” “sterility and miscarriage, and prematurity in subsequent pregnancies.” In the decade that followed Roe, dozens of laws restricting abortion were passed each year.
+By the 1980s, abortion foes had conceded that a constitutional amendment would not pass in the foreseeable future. Even with allies controlling Congress and the White House, there simply weren’t enough votes for an amendment banning all abortions outright, and absolutists saw any other form of constitutional change as cowardly and counterproductive.
+And so anti-abortion groups decided that their best bet would be passing yet more restrictions on when, where and how doctors performed abortions and persuading the court to uphold them. With that, arguments over what science had to say about the procedure took on even more importance. The 1980s saw the advent of arguments that stressed fetal pain — an issue on which there is very little consensus — and a continuing push to redefine fetal viability.
+While accusing opponents of peddling sham science, abortion-rights supporters insisted that the legality of the procedure should turn on its benefits for women seeking a more equal role in society. In 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the court agreed, declining an invitation to overturn Roe partly because “the ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives.”“I was going through my own thing at the time, and I think I remember telling him that he was going to have it a lot worse,” Coates laughed. He counseled that Jenkins embrace strategic ignorance in his creative life. “You’ve got to go in the box,” he told me. “What I had to realize is that not everything is up to you. You make the work that you want to make and then it goes out into the world and people are going to say what they’re going to say about it.”
+Shortly after his Oscar wins for “Moonlight” (Jenkins also took home the award for best adapted screenplay) but before he had gone into production on “Beale Street,” Jenkins received a lunch invitation from another high-profile interpreter of the African-American experience — Denzel Washington.
+He said the actor and director, who was unavailable for an interview, gave him a master class in how to navigate the thin air of his newfound celebrity.
+“He just sat me down and laid it all out for me,” Jenkins said. “He talked me through the whole evolution of his career — what happened when he was at the point where I’m at and all of the different ways that I could end up doing this thing or that.”
+At the lunch, Washington produced a satchel containing decades of personal memorabilia, Jenkins said, which the actor had kept to remind him of pivotal junctures in his life. In the wake of “Moonlight,” the director took this as an invitation to consider his own crossroads.
+“It made me feel like I didn’t have to veer just because of new access and privilege,” he said. “You’re already on the road — you just have to keep going.”The World Anti-Doping Agency’s executive committee declined on Monday to punish Russia’s antidoping watchdog even though the Russian Antidoping Agency missed an end-of-year deadline to hand over data on 10,000 suspicious doping samples.
+WADA’s team in Moscow was eventually allowed into the laboratory which held the data, and last week WADA announced that the team had successfully obtained all data.
+“Collecting the all-important data is a critical step, and it was not easy to achieve,” Craig Reedie, WADA’s president, said in a statement. “We are not yet at the finishing line and there is a lot more to do but undeniably we are much further along the track.”
+The data, assuming it has not been tampered with, is key to getting to the roots of Russia’s vast, decade-long conspiracy to corrupt the system of performance enhancing drug testing in international sports. The whistle blower Grigory Rodchenkov, the former leader of Moscow’s antidoping lab, exposed the corruption in 2015.#speakingindance
+Late to the Party? No Matter. It’s Your Party.
+In her solo in George Balanchine’s “Tschaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 2,” City Ballet’s Teresa Reichlen said, she shoos the other dancers aside “because it’s my turn to dance.”SYDNEY, Australia — In the soft afternoon light, men and women huddle in groups, their images reflected in floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Some kiss. Some fondle one another. Some touch fingertips, tension sizzling.
+This isn’t a nightclub or an orgy. The men and women are actors. And they’re taking part in an “intimacy workshop” — part of a growing trend to carve out safe spaces in the theater and film industries.
+At the helm is Ita O’Brien, a London-based “intimacy coordinator.” A former dancer and director, she — along with other intimacy coordinators and specialized stunt people — is emerging as a powerful influence in an industry grappling with the fallout of #MeToo.
+Ms. O’Brien, 53, has worked for the likes of HBO and Netflix. And her approach, increasingly in demand globally, has found particular resonance in Australia, where a laddish culture persists in a world of theater and film that tends to be insular and has recently come under fire for protecting the status quo.MOSCOW — An escort from Belarus who posted video online showing her on the yacht of one of Russia’s richest oligarchs along with a senior Russian official was released from detention in Moscow on Tuesday, her lawyer told the government news agency Tass.
+The escort, Anastasia Vashukevich, who is the author of a book titled “Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire” and also goes by the name Nastya Rybka, arrived in Moscow last Thursday after being deported from Thailand over her involvement in a sex-training seminar aimed at male Russian tourists, and was immediately arrested at the airport.
+Her lawyer, Svetlana Sidorkina, told Tass that Ms. Vashukevich and Alexander Kirillov, a self-described Russian “sex guru” also known as Alex Leslie, who was also deported from Thailand and detained upon arrival in Moscow, remained suspects in a case involving “enticement to prostitution” but had been released on their own recognizance.
+A video showing Ms. Vashukevich being manhandled by Russian police officers at Sheremetyevo Airport, which serves Moscow, stirred outrage among her followers on social media and those of Aleksei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption campaigner who posted video footage of the yacht trip on his website last year.The claim by Derek Hunt, the company’s culinary director, that bread like this doesn’t exist in New York doesn’t quite hold up: Claus Meyer has already whetted New Yorkers’ taste for traditional Nordic rye breads with the loaves and pastries he bakes and sells at his Great Northern Food Hall in Grand Central Terminal.
+But Ole & Steen is trying to be different, producing a number of items not often found in New York: a rye bread made with carrots to soften the sturdy grain; long, twisted pastries called socials with cinnamon, marzipan, custard or chocolate, to cut into sections; jaunty marshmallow-filled puff pyramids; and Danish smorrebrod open-faced sandwiches.
+The chain was started in Copenhagen in 1991, and it already has other New York locations lined up at 48th Street and Lexington Avenue and across 40th Street from Bryant Park, to open in coming months. A commissary in Maspeth, Queens, supplies some of the goods, but many of the breads and pastries are being baked on the premises in the Union Square flagship.The European Commission has fined Mastercard 571 million euros, or around $650 million, for breaching antitrust rules by raising payment-processing fees artificially, leading to higher prices for retailers and consumers.
+The penalty, announced on Tuesday after a six-year investigation by European antitrust regulators, involves the fees banks charge merchants when purchases are made with credit cards.
+Mastercard, regulators said, forced merchants to use only banks in their home countries when processing payments, a requirement that prevented them from shopping for lower fees at banks in other European countries.
+The retailers passed the cost of the higher fees on to consumers, leaving them to pay more for their purchases, the commission said .“If you actually want to make your house do half a dozen of these things, it’s a lot of work,” said Frank Gillett, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. “You need people to be patient and comfortable with working through multiple steps of instruction, and in my observation, a significant amount of the population is not comfortable or patient.”
+If you own a lot of different smart devices, it will mean many different apps on your phone. The process of opening and launching an app every time you want to control a device — or remember the exact phrases to get a voice assistant to do it — can be cumbersome and annoying.
+One company, Sevenhugs, simplifies this problem.
+The firm’s single remote allows a person to control a home’s smart TV, lights, entertainment system, and other connected devices simply by pointing the remote at them. It means family members and guests can access all the smart devices without having to use a personal phone or launch multiple apps, said Simon Tchedikian, founder of Sevenhugs.
+Ultimately Mr. Tchedikian wants to streamline content as well so that someone could ask for the latest season of the ‘Game of Thrones’ and it would pop up without having to know and specify which streaming service, platform or on-demand service was offering it.
+Beside ease of use, privacy and security are critical.
+Using smart cameras can be great for remotely monitoring an aging parent or checking whether a child got home from school, but they could be intrusive and even risky if the system is hacked.
+To lower risk and security concerns, experts suggest steps people should take when building a smart home.
+First, buy quality brands. While some big brands, like Samsung, are leaders in smart appliances, the rest of the smart device world is fragmented, with much of the innovation coming from focused start-ups and midsize companies.To the Editor:
+We were pleased to see John Engler, the interim president of Michigan State University, step down after his callous accusation that young women and girls abused by Dr. Larry Nassar appeared to b e enjoying the spotlight (news article, Jan. 18), but his remarks are disturbing nonetheless.
+His words demonstrate a very harmful viewpoint that continues to fuel sexual harassment and violence: that sexual assault survivors cannot be trusted and that their motives are improper. Brave women stayed silent during Dr. Nassar’s tenure because of a culture of victim-blaming, shaming and fear.
+Survivors face trem endous obstacles in reporting sexual assault, which is why an estimated three of every four assaults go unreported, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. That’s even more sobering w hen you consider that one in four girls will experience sexual violence before she turns 18.
+Sexual misconduct — whether harassment, assault or abuse — thrives in a culture of silence. It is imperative that we listen to, believe and protect young people who come forward. What they stand to gain is the support to heal, recover and look forward to the future.SYDNEY, Australia — A new law in Australia gives law enforcement authorities the power to compel tech-industry giants like Apple to create tools that would circumvent the encryption built into their products.
+The law, the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, applies only to tech products used or sold in Australia. But its impact could be global: If Apple were to build a so-called back door for iPhones sold in Australia, the authorities in other countries, including the United States, could force the company to use that same tool to assist their investigations.
+The Australian law went into effect last month. It is one of the most assertive efforts by lawmakers to rein in tech companies, which have argued for decades that unbreakable encryption is an imperative part of protecting the private communications of their customers.
+In recent years, law enforcement officials have complained that tough encryption has made it impossible for them to gain access to the online discussions of crime suspects, particularly in time-sensitive terror investigations.Richard Schlussel
+Englewood, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+I applaud Michelle Alexander in laying out a very articulate case for speaking up for Palestinian rights. I speak as an American Jew in saying that supporting the Palestinian struggle for rights is about the most “Jewish” thing I can do, as it aligns with values of universal justice. Fortunately, in greater numbers, Jewish communities are realizing this as a critical issue with which we must honestly wrestle.
+Speaking out, as Ms. Alexander has, can be difficult, as it will open up all sorts of attacks and criticism. But if we have learned anything from Martin Luther King’s legacy, in this world of many injustices, we need to speak up for the causes that are, as Ms. Alexander says, “the great moral challenges of our times .”
+Working for Palestinian rights goes hand in hand with working against racism, poverty, xenophobia and sexism. Thank you, Ms. Alexander, for reminding us so eloquently that we cannot be silent when such injustices occur.
+Maxine Fookson
+Portland, Ore.
+To the Editor:
+I agree with the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, whom Michelle Alexander quotes, that “the Palestinian child is as precious as the Jewish child .”
+I agree with Ms. Alexander that some of the current Israeli government’s policies toward its Arab population deserve sharp criticism. On this subject, hundreds of my rabbinic colleagues and numerous members of Congress have not been silent.Harris Wofford, a former United States senator from Pennsylvania whose passion for getting people involved helped create John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps and other service organizations and made him America’s volunteer in chief, died on Monday night in Washington. He was 92.
+His son Daniel said his death, at George Washington University Hospital, was caused by complications of a fall at Mr. Wofford’s Washington apartment several days earlier.
+By the time he became a senator in May 1991, appointed after his predecessor was killed in an aircraft accident, Mr. Wofford was already 65. He had been a lawyer, an author, a professor, the president of two colleges, a special assistant to President John F. Kennedy, an adviser to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., chairman of the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, the state’s secretary of labor and industry, a champion of civil rights and a leading force in America’s national and community service movement.
+A month after Senator H. John Heinz III, a Republican, died, Gov. Robert P. Casey was still searching for a replacement, having been turned down by Lee Iacocca, the chairman of Chrysler, and others. Whoever accepted would have to run in a special election in November against the United States attorney general, Dick Thornburgh, a popular former two-term governor who had signaled his intention to seek the seat.Slide 1 of 10,
+Chestnut Mont Blanc with yuzu-yogurt sorbet, a dessert from Gregory Marchand of Frenchie in Paris and London, is on the opening menu at Intersect by Lexus. In the spring, a new resident chef will take over the kitchen.The nice man who brought samples of the banoffee macaron to me and other customers one recent morning began, a few moments later, to gently buff the doors and windows of a new, rose-gold prototype car with a soft cloth. I could see this because the car and I were sharing a room on West 14th Street. The car was in the back and I was in the middle, sitting at one of the cafe tables near the stairs to the second floor, where there is a bar shaped like a wheel and a restaurant with a menu devised by Gregory Marchand, the chef of the Frenchie restaurants in Paris and London.
+The employees in all of these rooms work for the Union Square Hospitality Group, which I suppose means that Danny Meyer, the group’s founder and one of the world’s best-known restaurateurs, is now also in the business of polishing automobiles. The whole operation is called Intersect by Lexus, which gives you a good idea who made the car and was paying to keep it shiny and free of dust.
+Intersect by Lexus is one of those modern places where brands, instead of asking you to buy one of their products then and there, instead try to make you feel the kinds of emotions about the brand that may lead to a sale later on.
+This is a job formerly performed by advertisements. In fact, Lexus used to publish a print magazine and mail it to its customers, back when that seemed like a good way to persuade people to have emotions about a car. Now we live in the age of the “branded experience.” A toilet-paper manufacturer will send you a wheeled toilet on demand. A mattress company will encourage you to sleep inside a roaming “napmobile.” Makers of a crunchy orange snack open restaurants, lasting just a few days, where chefs put the crunchy orange snack into meatballs, tacos, cheesecakes and everything else.“We have seen over the last week something amazing happened,” Mr. Caputo-Pearl said. “We took on the idea of bargaining for the common good. Public education desperately needs attention.”
+The strike drew attention to how California, one of the wealthiest and most liberal states in the country, spends relatively little on its public schools. As they announced the outlines of the deal, Mr. Garcetti, Mr. Beutner and Mr. Caputo-Pearl declined to give specific details on how the district would pay for the changes, but school officials said that they would need more money from local voters and the state.
+“We’re spending every nickel we have,” Mr. Beutner said. “It’s all in for schools. This is the start, not the end.”
+Many of the changes — including class-size caps and full-time nurses at every school — would be phased in over time, officials said. Because those changes would occur over the next three years, the deal essentially punted on the question of how the district would come up with the $403 million needed to pay for the additional staff members. District officials said Tuesday that they expect to propose a local parcel tax in 2020, which would require the approval of two-thirds of voters in the sprawling school district. Mr. Beutner also made it clear that he expected the attention to now turn to Sacramento for increased funding.
+The state’s chronically constrained school spending is largely attributed to its property tax laws, and especially to Proposition 13, a ballot initiative passed in 1978 that drastically limits tax rates and makes increases difficult to enact. Affluent, fast-growing suburban communities have suffered less under the law than large urban systems like the Los Angeles Unified School District, where declining enrollment and rising costs for pensions and health care have created budget problems year after year.
+While many educators and local leaders have called the strike a watershed moment for California public schools, it is far from clear whether there is a political willingness to change the statewide property tax laws. The union and district officials are both backing a ballot measure that would increase taxes on commercial, though not residential, properties in 2020.
+The strike settlement is also a significant achievement for the Mr. Garcetti, who has no formal authority over the school system. Though he publicly supported the teachers, he acted as a mediator of sorts and helped broker the deal during days of negotiations at City Hall. Before the strike, Mr. Garcetti had largely shied away from involvement with the public schools, but with the national spotlight on the strike and the mayor considering a presidential bid in 2020, he appeared eager to get involved during the past week.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”For many cooks, January brings new resolve to an eternal goal: having a well-stocked pantry. You may crave shelf systems and bulk ingredients, and sparkling new containers to keep them in. But look more closely at those catalogs and Instagram posts, and ask yourself: Will my spice jars ever truly match? Do I really need to store apples in a hanging basket? Often, the ideas are about decorating, not cooking.
+A truly functional pantry may not look flawless. But it can be the key to more and better cooking — as long as the contents fit your real-world cooking style and skills, so that you actually use what’s in it.
+A traditional English or American pantry (in homes fortunate enough to have multipart kitchens and extra food to store) was a small room off the kitchen to protect everyday ingredients, like flour, sugar and bread, from the heat of the stove. Along with a larder (for cured meat, lard and the foods preserved in it), a buttery (for wine, cider and beer, stored in barrels or “butts”) and a storeroom for dried and preserved produce , a pantry produced not only meals but a self-reliant kitchen.
+A modern pantry can and should play all those parts. So we redefined the word to include the fresh and frozen staples that can make cooking easier and more productive. For example, whole-milk yogurt and lemons wouldn’t always have qualified as pantry ingredients. But now, those ingredients are used so often in recipes that it makes sense for cooks to keep them on hand. They last a long time in the refrigerator, and can often eliminate the need for a stop on the way home.Wait times for an appointment at Veterans Affairs hospitals have decreased since 2014 and are now, on average, shorter than those in the private sector, a new study shows.
+Researchers used V.A. data to calculate wait times for about 17 million appointments. The public sector data came from a survey conducted by a physicians’ search firm in nearly 2,000 medical offices in 30 major and midsize metropolitan areas.
+The study, in JAMA Network Open, covered four specialties: primary care, cardiology, dermatology and orthopedics.
+In 2014 the average wait time in V.A. hospitals was 22.5 days, compared with 18.7 in the private sector, a statistically insignificant difference. But by 2017, mean wait time at V.A. hospitals had gone down to 17.7 days, while rising to 29.8 for private practitioners.I wanted to demystify him as a rock god and discover his humanity. I could link myself to him in a way — I’m a first-generation American, he’s an immigrant. And he was struggling with his identity and his sexual identity at a time when it was very difficult and stigmatized and, quite honestly, still is stigmatized in many places to be anything other than heterosexual. Instantly, that’s a human being to me. And then you look at the songs he wrote. I used that almost as a diary as to what he was going through year after year.
+Did the songs do more for you than YouTube videos or footage of him?
+The music always grounded me. It was such a support to know that this man who at times felt very, very similar to me and very unusual, very distant from me at other times — I could always ground it in what I could hear him trying to reach in his music. He could hold everyone onstage in the palm of his hand, but the music sometimes made me feel that he just wanted to be held in someone’s hands as well.
+How much of a role did Bryan Singer play in your conception of the role?
+I’d been working on this for about a year prior, so it was all hands on deck with myself and with [his movement and dialect coaches] and all the archival footage that was out there. I exhausted everything that was online and everything written about him and every documentary — and I’m still watching them. I went back and watched the making of Live Aid the other day again.
+So Singer was less involved, then? It was more soaking up as much information as you could?
+Yeah. I asked Graham [King] to have this piece made — our producer — long before Bryan was even in conversation.
+Why did you feel so strongly about it?
+I thought if this movie ever does get made and someone does give it a green light, there’s no way I’m going to be ill-prepared. I thought the worst that happens is I learn how to inhabit Freddie Mercury and one day that could be something I share with my friends. If it did go forth and I was unprepared — that would be the most tragic thing.
+Do you have a favorite Queen song?
+I love them all, man, I really do. But I never thought I would like the deeper, older cuts, the earlier tracks as much as I do now. I keep listening to them. I think there are certain roles where you want to almost just walk right away from. And he is one that I never quite want to distance myself too far from.MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Tuesday dashed Japanese hopes of a settlement any time soon to a territorial dispute that has festered since 1945, declaring after a meeting with the visiting Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan that there was still much “painstaking work” ahead.
+In his remarks to reporters, Mr. Putin gave no sign that Russia might accede to Tokyo’s demand that it relinquish Japanese islands seized by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II. He said that any agreement must have support from the public, which in Russia, according to a November opinion poll, is strongly opposed to returning any islands to Japan.
+Mr. Abe, whose father, Shintaro Abe, spent years trying in vain to settle the territorial dispute with Russia while serving as Japan’s foreign minister, has made improving relations with Moscow a priority. But he, too, conceded on Tuesday that “resolving a problem left unresolved for over 70 years since the end of the war is not easy.”
+Mr. Putin had previously raised Japanese hopes of reclaiming at least a small portion of what it calls its “Northern Territories” and what Russians refer to as the Southern Kuriles, a chain of islands off Japan’s northern prefecture of Hokkaido.Look closely up in the trees of a shade-grown cacao plantation in eastern Costa Rica, and you’ll see an array of small furry faces peering back at you. Those are three-toed sloths that make their homes there, clambering ever so slowly into the upper branches to bask in the morning sun. You might also spot them munching on leaves from the guarumo tree, which shades the cacao plants.
+Scientists have long known that this tree is important to the diets of sloths. Its foliage is highly nutritious, available all year and easy for the creatures to digest. But in a new study published Tuesday in Proceedings of the Royal Academy B, researchers report that a population of sloths with more guarumo trees in their cacao plantation habitat had more babies and were more likely to survive.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+Their findings suggest that the tree’s presence can help ensure the health of sloth populations even in environments that have already been disturbed by humans, like farms. It also shows how animals that have a specialized ecological niche, while traditionally thought of as vulnerable, can persist in changed circumstances as long as the resource that they depend on is available.
+For almost ten years, Jonathan Pauli and M. Zachariah Peery, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and their colleagues have been tracking a group of sloths in Costa Rica. The animals are equipped with radio collars that transmit their location five or six times a month, so the team knows where each sloth’s usual territory is. The team has also taken DNA samples and figured out the sloths’ family tree, so they can tell which individuals are having the most babies.Wakanda forever, indeed. While “Black Panther” joins the small list of films with predominantly black casts to be nominated for best picture, it’s been less forever and more accurately never that an African-American has received a nomination in the production design category. On Tuesday, Hannah Beachler changed history with her nod for the rich African world she helped imagine for “Black Panther.” It’s a highlight in a career already filled with cultural touchstones, including Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” and Barry Jenkins’s “Moonlight.”
+[Read more about the nominations | Check out the full list of nominees | See the snubs and surprises.]
+Beachler found out about the nomination — one of seven for “Black Panther” — while working on set in Cincinnati for Todd Haynes’s latest feature. They were in the middle of a take when she got the call from her agent.
+“I had to run to the back of the warehouse where the catering was so I could yell,” she said, speaking by phone. “And then I cried.”
+The major Oscar categories like acting, directing and picture are the ones often most scrutinized for diversity or lack thereof, but the so-called below-the-line or technical categories have been even slower to recognize achievements for craftspeople of color.A British touring production of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was to start next month, has been canceled after Scott Rudin’s company Atticus — the firm behind the Broadway hit — threatened legal action.
+The British production was to use the playwright Christopher Sergel’s adaptation of Harper Lee’s book, a version that has long been popular in schools.
+Jonathan Church Productions, the Curve Theater in Leicester and London’s Regent’s Park Theater said in a statement that they had obtained a license for the production from Dramatic Publishing, an Illinois-based company that licenses Mr. Sergel’s adaptation.
+But on Jan. 11, Atticus’ lawyers threatened action if the tour was not canceled, saying it held worldwide rights for professional stagings of the book. The team at Atticus was “unwilling to consider any compromises which were proposed to resolve the situation without lengthy and costly legal action,” the statement added.We were standing in my kitchen in Brooklyn, where Ms. Hirayama was about to show me the secrets of her rye tarte Tatin, once she coaxed Aly down from her arms with a bowl of sliced plums. Mr. Koreitem was already at the stove, blanching Tuscan kale leaves to blend into a sauce for pan-roasted cauliflower. Mia was at the table with a book.
+After lunching at Mokonuts last summer, where I devoured white tuna crudo with chermoula and sorrel, and labneh cheesecake with nectarines and red currants, I asked the couple if they’d cook with me the next time they were in New York.
+Blanching completed, Mr. Koreitem spooned the tender kale into the blender with toasted almonds and a nutty young pecorino cheese. He sampled the three olive oils in my pantry before deciding which to add. Then he squeezed in lemon, and puréed everything to a bright green pesto, tasting it constantly to adjust the oil, citrus and salt.
+“I used to make this with Swiss chard,” he said, “but one day I couldn’t get it, so I tried cavolo nero, and it was just as good.”
+Like many chefs of small Parisian restaurants, Mr. Koreitem changes the menu every day, responding to what he can get directly from his small group of farmer-purveyors. But, unlike many of his peers, he’s still apt to rework each dish, even when he can get the same ingredients two days in a row and sometimes in the middle of service, playing with new combinations of spices and condiments.
+“I never stick with recipes,” he said as he seared cauliflower florets until charred on one side but barely golden on the other. “I like to cook by feel.”Headliner
+Il Divo
+The chef Massimo Sola has been involved in several New York kitchens , including Sola Pasta Bar in SoHo. The latest is in an intimate Italian restaurant owned by Antonio Sinesi and Claudio Della Monica. Mr. Sola and the chef Matteo Limoli are collaborating on the menu, which is more classic than creative. Among the offerings are eggplant parmigiana, fritto misto, linguine with cockles, fettuccine Bolognese, Milanese risotto with osso buco, chicken al mattone and a couple of pizzas, including one topped with black truffles. Il Divo refers to Rudolph Valentino, for whom Mr. Sinesi’s restaurant in Milan is named and who inspired the glamorous décor. (Opens Monday)
+1347 Second Avenue (71st Street), 212-380-8164, ildivo.restaurant.
+Opening
+Mint Kitchen
+A copper taboon oven for baking Middle Eastern pita and other specialties distinguishes this casual addition to the Union Square area. The chef and partner, Erez Komarovsky, is from Israel, and is known for his interpretations of Israeli cuisine. A warm roasted cauliflower salad, falafel-crusted salmon, herb and pine-nut matzo ball soup and goat-milk frozen yogurt are a few of the choices. (Thursday)
+83 University Place (12th Street), 646-905-3720, mintkitch.com.
+Niche
+Among the many ramens at his tiny restaurant Nakamura, Shigetoshi Nakamura serves a traditional mazemen ramen, which is made without broth, and a cold version for summer. Now he has opened a spot next door, sharing the same address, where the mazemen style is done with inventive twists. The Russ & Roe, in homage to Russ & Daughters nearby, is made with smoked salmon and salmon roe. Another mazemen is topped with grilled rib-eye, and yet another includes dashi and clams.
+172 Delancey Street (Clinton Street), 212-614-1810, nakamuranyc.com.
+St Tropez SoHo
+A SoHo branch of the West Village wine bar of the same name has similar farmhouse décor and a French bistro menu with a Provençal accent. (Saturday)
+196 Spring Street (Sullivan Street), 917-261-4441, sttropezwinebar.com.Across the country, Democrats made inroads in 2018 in suburban areas where they had long struggled. Near Minneapolis and St. Paul, two Republican congressmen lost their seats. Outside Chicago, Democrats took two congressional districts from Republicans and helped vote out Illinois’s Republican governor. And in suburban Orange County, Calif., one of the most famous Republican bastions of the 20th century, Democrats flipped four congressional seats.
+In Kansas, Mr. Trump is by no means the only force stirring political turmoil. Sam Brownback, the Republican governor who resigned last year to become a United States ambassador, was deeply unpopular in the state after pushing a philosophy of fiscal austerity over several years; his approach to school funding and a tax-cutting plan that led to revenue shortfalls and service cuts angered many residents.
+Last year’s Republican nominee for governor, Kris W. Kobach, who got his political start in Johnson County by serving on the Overland Park City Council, put off some suburban voters with his strident language about illegal immigration and his public embrace of Mr. Trump. (Mr. Kobach also raised eyebrows by showing up at a parade in Shawnee, in Johnson County, with a replica machine gun mounted on his Jeep.)
+All the while, a longstanding split between conservative and moderate Republicans in Kansas has grown increasingly contentious.
+“Conservatives, or the further-right faction of the Republican Party, have continued and continued and continued to try to force those of us of the moderate mind out of the party,” said State Senator Barbara Bollier, a retired anesthesiologist from Mission Hills who was the first of the four Johnson County legislators to announce that she was becoming a Democrat.
+Along with Ms. Sykes, Ms. Clayton and Ms. Bollier, the other Kansas lawmaker who changed parties was State Representative Joy Koesten, who lost the Republican nomination to a conservative challenger in last year’s primary. Ms. Koesten announced that she was becoming a Democrat a few weeks before her term ended.
+Some conservatives sounded untroubled by the exodus of moderate lawmakers, who had frequently voted with Democrats in the Legislature even before changing parties. Some conservatives even saw the switches as an opportunity, freeing the Republican Party to run more conservative candidates in those districts.Yalitza Aparicio had just finished her teaching degree and didn’t yet have a job when the Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón held a casting call in her home of Tlaxiaco, Oaxaca, for the lead role in his semi-autobiographical drama, “Roma.”
+It was actually Aparicio’s older sister, Edith, who was meant to audition for the part of Cleo, a housekeeper and nanny in 1970s Mexico City inspired by the woman who had raised Cuarón. But Edith was pregnant and insisted that the shy Yalitza, who’d never before acted, try out instead. Two years later, Aparicio has just earned a best-actress nomination, the first for an Indigenous Mexican woman and only the second for a Mexican actress, after Salma Hayek’s for “Frida.” Aparicio’s heart-rending and critically acclaimed debut is at once quiet and commanding, and her nomination is one of 10 for “Roma,” including best picture and supporting actress (for Marina de Tavira).
+[Read more about the nominations | Check out the full list of nominees | See the snubs and surprises.]
+Aparicio has also become a potent role model in a conversation about the treatment of Indigenous people in Mexico and the plight of domestic workers like her mother, whose experiences informed her daughter’s performance.
+“At that moment, when he offered me the role, all I could think about was that it was an opportunity to make my mother proud,” Aparicio, 25, said Tuesday morning, speaking through a translator. She had just learned of her nomination while surrounded in a hotel room by the team that accompanies her on her press tours. “And I assume my mom is even more proud at this moment.”On Monday, Kerry Washington announced on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” that her Broadway play, “American Son,” will be adapted by Netflix. She is set to reprise her role as Kendra, the concerned mother of a son who may be in great danger.
+The rest of the cast, including Ms. Washington’s co-star, Steven Pasquale, who plays Kendra’s estranged husband, Scott, will also return for the adaptation.
+In the interview with Mr. Fallon, Ms. Washington said: “We’re not just filming the play. We’re adapting it to kind of be this movie-play hybrid event.”
+Kenny Leon, who directed the Broadway production, will also direct the Netflix adaptation and act as a producer.The Oscar nominations are read in Los Angeles at just after 5 in the morning, a time when most late-to-wake Hollywood types would rather be slumbering underneath high-thread-count sheets. Still, the Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige wasn’t about to miss the televised announcement.
+“I watched them this morning for the first time in many years,” Feige told your Carpetbagger today by phone. “I set my alarm, and I haven’t done that since I was a film nerd in college.”
+His interest was well-rewarded: “Black Panther” became the first Marvel film to score a nomination for best picture, and the phenomenally successful superhero film picked up six more nominations to boot. “I’m feeing a sense of pride and humility and immense gratitude,” Feige said.
+[Read more about the nominations | Check out the full list of nominees | See the snubs and surprises.]
+And though the academy failed to nominate Ryan Coogler for directing and co-writing the film, “you’re going to hear me say the name ‘Ryan Coogler’ constantly on this phone call,” Feige said, emphasizing the importance of inclusive and diverse filmmaking. “To me, the best thing a producer can do is find a person with something to say, who has a story to tell and can tell it in a way that the world responds to. That’s what Mr. Coogler has done for us.”Watch a chef deftly toss a portion of potatoes or spaghetti with sauce, and chances are the pan the professional uses is a simple carbon-steel skillet. It’s the workhorse of a restaurant kitchen. Made In, a company that sells cooking utensils directly to consumers, has just introduced such a pan, in an all-purpose 10-inch size. It’s a good conductor (it can be used on an induction cooktop) and has heft; flipping a batch of vegetables takes muscle. The pan also requires seasoning at least once, an all-day process (instructions are included). The company plans to add a 12-inch skillet and a wok to the carbon-steel line.
+Made In Blue Carbon-Steel Pan, $69, madeincookware.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Michael Laiskonis, the former executive pastry chef at Le Bernardin, is now the creative director of the Institute of Culinary Education, but he says he missed turning out high-end restaurant-style desserts. So starting Sunday, he will run an evening dessert bar in an Upper West Side pastry shop, Récolte. It will be open Wednesdays through Sundays, starting at 7 p.m., after the shop closes. Three courses of elegantly fashioned sweets, like a version of s’mores with smoked chocolate, marshmallow and a graham cracker; or a verrine of passion fruit and chocolate in a glass, are $23. There’s also a savory cheese plate. Coffee, tea, chocolate and fruit drinks will be served, but as of now, no alcohol.
+Récolte Dessert Bar, 300 Amsterdam Avenue (74th Street), 347-207-3728, therecolte.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Senate leaders find possible path toward end of U.S. shutdown
+Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, offered the first glimmers of a potential resolution to the government shutdown, scheduling procedural votes Thursday on two competing bills to reopen the government.
+Details: One measure includes funding for President Trump’s border wall; the other is a short-term spending bill that would fund shuttered agencies through Feb. 8. Although neither is likely to pass, the compromise gives each party a chance to press its proposal. And the votes could prompt the two sides to negotiate a bipartisan compromise.
+Context: At the same time, Mr. Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi remained in a private standoff about whether he should be allowed to deliver his State of the Union address next week. Ms. Pelosi has yet to issue Mr. Trump a formal invitation.At the charming West Village teahouse Té Company — which the Portuguese chef Frederico Ribeiro runs with his wife, Elena Liao — you’ll find Taiwanese pineapple linzer cookies. They’re similar to linzer cookies, but they’re Mr. Ribeiro’s take on the Taiwanese pineapple cake that is presented for good luck (originally for engagements and newlyweds, but now, more generally). In the run-up to the Lunar New Year (the Year of the Pig begins on Feb. 5), you may want some cookies on hand for parties or gift-giving. The buttery hazelnut shortbread rounds are dusted with sea salt and enclose pineapple jam seasoned with yuzukosho, made from citrus zest, juice and chiles, to tweak the palate.
+Pineapple Linzer Cookies, $40 for 12 (two boxes) at Té Company, 163 West 10th Street, 929-335-3168, te-nyc.com, to order from linzercookie.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.A mighty slab of smoked brisket can make that Super Bowl gathering an easy success. At his pit joint, Truth BBQ in Brenham, Tex., between Austin and Houston, Leonard Botello IV smokes whole briskets from a nearby ranch for 18 hours. The briskets have been available nationwide, shipped frozen, since late last year. To get the succulent, flavorful meat party-ready, you’ll want to thaw it, then unwrap it, place it in a baking dish, wrap the whole thing, dish and all in foil and slow-roast it. It will serve 8 to 12. Be sure to have plenty of your own sides to serve like coleslaw, baked beans, cornbread, pickles and your favorite barbecue sauce.
+Truth BBQ, $230 for five to six pounds, including shipping, truthbbq.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.CARACAS, Venezuela — A group of soldiers turned against the government and declared allegiance to the opposition. Foreign officials say the government could soon run out of money to meet bare-bones needs. And countries across the region have called the president an illegitimate dictator.
+Conditions in Venezuela have deteriorated to a point where the opposition — gutted by the jailing and exiling of many of its leaders and discredited after several failed efforts to oust President Nicolás Maduro — is seeing an opportunity. Leading them is a virtually unheard-of 35-year-old, Juan Guaidó.
+His debut as opposition leader and head of the National Assembly this month has captured the attention of those within the country and outside of it — mainly for his striking claim that Mr. Maduro is not a legitimate ruler and his willingness to take charge of a transitional government.
+“The relationship between Venezuela and its state today is one of terror,” Mr. Guaidó said in an interview. “When this happens, the voices and hopes of the world, their messages, are the encouragement for the daily struggle to resist — to dream of democracy, and for a better country.”Union Square Cafe’s spiked market cider has seasonal allure, with a cider base and an attractive fan of apple slices for garnish. They make vats of it in the restaurant and keep it chilled, but the recipe is easy to reproduce at home. To make two drinks: In a jar or pitcher, mix a cup of sweet cider with three ounces of applejack, two of gin, a tablespoon of lemon juice, half a tablespoon of simple syrup (the cafe uses Demerara sugar) and a generous dash of bitters. Chill it for two hours, then pour it into two old-fashioned glasses filled with crushed ice and dust a little nutmeg on top. Poke a display of apple slices into the ice and serve.
+Recipe: Spiked Market CiderKaye Ballard, whose long career as a comedian, actress and nightclub performer included well-regarded runs in “The Golden Apple” and “Carnival!” on Broadway and a classic turn as a television mother-in-law, died on Monday at her home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. She was 93.
+Her death was announced by her lawyer, Mark Sendroff.
+Ms. Ballard wasn’t a top-flight singer, an Oscar-caliber actress or a drop-dead beauty — she once played one of Cinderella’s ugly stepsisters — but she made up for any shortcomings with determination and a sheer love of performing.
+Even after she became well known, Ms. Ballard was not above taking parts in touring shows and regional theaters, and she rode the nightclub circuit for years, though she found the pace exhausting. In 2000, in her mid-70s, she brought a cabaret show to Arci’s Place in Manhattan called “Another Final Farewell Appearance,” but there was nothing final about it: Later in the decade she was still hard at work, including in tours of “The Full Monty” and “Nunsense.”
+For the last 40 years or so of her performing career, wherever she was appearing people would mention one particular item from her lengthy résumé: “The Mothers-in-Law,” an NBC sitcom in which she and Eve Arden played neighbors whose children married, turning the newly minted mothers-in-law into partners in meddling.For centuries, Boleslawiec in southwestern Poland has been known for its pottery, decorated with traditional folk designs. In 2003, Elle Englander, a native of that city who moved to Suffield, Conn., near Hartford, started importing Boleslawiec pottery to the United States and opened a store selling it in nearby Enfield. Ms. Englander gradually expanded, and now her warehouse store has about 60,000 pieces, many of which are also sold on a website. The stoneware pottery — in bowls, platters, bakeware, teapots and more — is available in scores of patterns at prices starting at $15. The pieces can be used in an oven, microwave, dishwasher and freezer. New shapes and designs are frequently introduced.
+Janelle Imports, 7 Moody Road, Enfield, Conn., 860-749-7906, janelleimports.com.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.WASHINGTON — Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday declared the United States’ “unwavering support” for planned mass protests in Venezuela against President Nicolás Maduro, the most explicit backing yet by the Trump administration as opposition leaders try to unseat Mr. Maduro.
+The declaration, the first in which Mr. Pence used a video to directly urge Venezuelans to take action, came after months of statements by senior Trump administration officials, including several strongly worded ones from the vice president, that said Mr. Maduro’s rule was illegitimate.
+“We are with you,” Mr. Pence wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in both Spanish and English, adding, “We stand with you, and we will stay with you until Democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of Libertad.”
+The post, which came as Venezuelan opposition leaders were calling for citizens to take to the streets on Wednesday, was accompanied by a video in which Mr. Pence said he and President Trump were united with them in their “call for freedom.”A second vote could actually undermine faith in British democracy.
+One reason political scientists are so skeptical of referendums is that leaders tend to turn to them as a sort of political theater. They give the appearance of democracy happening when those leaders are unable to get what they want through the regular legislative processes.
+“A referendum is not a form of direct democracy,” Nadia Urbinati, a Columbia University scholar of democracy, said. “A referendum is used when a representative system decides that it wants to have the support of the people.” And usually, it’s for something the government has already decided to do.
+That can backfire, though, as Prime Minister David Cameron learned in 2016 when he called for a Brexit vote. Mr. Cameron did so not because he was curious what voters thought, but because he believed they would vote to remain, shoring up his position within the Conservative Party, political analysts widely believe.
+If a second referendum results in a narrow majority for remaining in the European Union, then the nearly half of the country that still wants to leave could reasonably conclude that the political establishment ginned up a new vote to suppress the popular will that was expressed in 2016.
+But if the public once again votes to leave, then the people who wish to remain — and thought that a second referendum would deliver that — may doubt whether the outcome was truly democratic. After all, polls have shown for some time that a slight majority favors staying in the European Union.It wasn’t where you would expect to find the composer Julia Wolfe shopping for musical instruments.
+The store she walked into one morning this fall, Steinlauf & Stoller, is one of New York’s garment district survivors. It’s a family business that has supplied the sewing industry since 1947 with pins and needles, buttons and snaps, threads and ribbons, and tools of the trade.
+Including Ms. Wolfe’s object that day: scissors.
+“The big thing is the sound,” she explained to the store’s manager, Sid Schwarzenberger. “I’m not really looking for how they cut.”
+Ms. Wolfe was in the market for scissors to be wielded by the women of the chorus in her new oratorio, “Fire in my mouth.” The work, which will be given its premiere on Thursday by the New York Philharmonic, explores the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911, which killed 146 garment workers, mostly immigrant women, including many who were trapped by locked exit doors. Their deaths helped change the way New York and the nation thought about safety, the labor movement and the struggle for women’s equality.My dad was highly, highly educated. He was a brilliant physician. My mom didn’t graduate from high school. They got married when they were 18 and my dad went off to the war. She had been brought up in the tradition that women basically were wives and mothers and dinner party organizers and all that. So it wasn’t in her DNA to feel that she should fulfill her personal talents, even though she had many. She really was there for my dad, but ultimately it didn’t fulfill her soul. Women are used to defining themselves through someone else, through their children and through their husbands. If you find that personally fulfilling and that’s all you need, that’s great. That’s part of what women do. But there’s something different. There’s another dimension that I think we need, which has to do with personal fulfillment, where you define yourself through yourself and not through anyone else.
+What do you think Joan’s role as a woman who takes a back seat to her husband means in the #MeToo era?
+I think what has resonated is that the film brought it down to a very personal, very specific level. The film is about a very complex relationship and I found that you can’t play generality. You have to play something specific, and the more true and the more human you could make that specific character, the more people can bring their own lives and their own baggage to it. I think you can intellectualize and say, “I agree with the movement,” but you have to make it personal. You have to find a place in yourself that makes you re-evaluate where your life is, and what you feel your personal contribution to society is.
+You’ve won many awards in your 45 years as an actor. Does an Oscar even matter at this point or are you happy just to be recognized for your part in “The Wife”?
+It’s thrilling to be recognized. If I, in my heart and soul, feel that I’ve fulfilled the challenges of a certain character, that’s where I find my personal fulfillment. I don’t feel like I need to be validated by some award, even though in the nature of our business, it does mean something. It’s not just for this role — I think I’m being recognized for the body of my work and that is deeply gratifying. So at this point in my career, that means a lot to me: That my work still matters.In 2012, the novelist Yiyun Li twice tried to take her own life. She wrote of the experience in “Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life,” a series of enigmatic essays in which she traced her depression and lifelong desire to disappear. “You should be very careful every day for the rest of your life,” she recalled a doctor warning her. “Things could sneak up on you.”
+There was no subtle creep of sadness to watch for, however. What happened was blunt and nightmarish. Months after the book was published, in 2017, Li’s 16-year-old son killed himself.
+In the months after his death, Li began writing a new novel. “Where Reasons End” imagines a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after he has been lost to suicide. It is aloof, angular and idiosyncratic, as Li’s personal pieces tend to be; her previous novels, like “The Vagrants” and “Kinder Than Solitude,” in contrast, are more conventional, majestically bleak portraits, often of the Communist China of her childhood.
+Li’s characters share the credo from a Marianne Moore poem that “the deepest feeling always shows itself in silence; / not in silence, but restraint.” (As a writer, Li has an avowed phobia of using the word “I” — too melodramatic, she says.) Mother and son in this novel rarely openly grieve. There is no rage or accusation; the question of why he killed himself is never explicitly raised, although the mother suspects it lies in his harsh perfectionism:
+“Who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?O.K., since you’re my … whatever you are, you know that I’m inclined to agree. But the whole point of the Scissor thing is that to escape it, you need to imagine how other people interpret the story. I can see that the kids were rowdy, too: A couple of them made tomahawk chops, and I’m sure some of them were being offensive in other ways. Also, it’s dumb to wear MAGA caps to a march against abortion; to lots of people they’re a symbol of white-identity politics and a justifiably unpopular president, and the adults from their Catholic school should …
+Oh, O.K., so if a teenager wears a cap associated with the president of the United States he’s asking to have media figures fantasize about punching him, to be doxxed and harassed, to have adults from his school temporarily stampeded into talking about expelling him, even to have half of Catholic Twitter, priests included, briefly damning him as a racist? Blame the victim much, do we?
+I’m not blaming the victim, I’m explaining why the path to media misinterpretation was greased by the kids’ own rowdy behavior and culture-war signaling …
+Are you listening to yourself? The path is always greased when it’s our tribe. The “nonpartisan” media took what felt like years to discover that some of the Women’s March organizers had an anti-Semitism problem, but some teenagers get rowdy at the March for Life — while they’re being yelled at by black nationalists, for God’s sake — and it gets covered like Kristallnacht. Pro-life activists get video of Planned Parenthood suits talking about chopping up unborn babies for their parts, and we have to hear claims about how they’re “selectively edited” repeated in the press forever — but a clip of an anonymous teenager smiling while someone drums in his face is a five-alarm “fascism in America” fire!
+You know I think the press has a serious problem with bias on anything related to religion and social issues. But a lot of the cultural right has spent the Trump era wallowing in conspiracy theories and race-baiting — it’s not entirely surprising that liberals are conditioned to expect that kind of stuff when MAGA hats show up. Have you watched any “Hannity” lately, or gone down other #MAGA rabbit holes?
+I’m in your head, so you know I have. So fine — keep being NeverTrump, be anti-Hannity, be a scold against your own side sometimes, whatever. Just don’t give me the both-sides piety when something like this happens — and what, just a week after the freakout over Karen Pence teaching art at an evangelical school with a traditional-Christian code of sexual behavior? Can’t you see that our opponents won’t be happy till every conservative religious school gets shamed or shuttered? Can’t you see that the supposed gatekeepers at “mainstream” institutions are happy to play along?
+Unlike some media figures on the right, and unlike our president, those gatekeepers also correct the record and walk things back when they get things wrong. And I like writing for people who disagree with me, which requires a little more charity than you seem capable of offering.A 489-day hunger strike, an international campaign and pressure from Washington helped me regain my freedom on May 30, 2015. I felt more solidarity from strangers than I did from some of my own blood relatives.
+A few months after my release, my uncle was severely injured in a suspected terrorist attack in Sinai, where he was stationed. My mother implored me to offer sympathy. I refused to call. I almost felt a sense of justice.
+Two years later, Uncle Anas was still unable to walk. It had been nearly a year since he had surgery for a spinal fracture he sustained as a result of the attack and his muscles had not recovered. Medical exams revealed a fatal diagnosis: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S., a degenerative illness.
+I still could not bring myself to call my uncle, but as I watched my mother grieve, I began to rethink. I came to realize that in my self-righteous pursuit of justice, I had committed injustice against myself and my loved ones. My resentment blinded me to what was truly important: my empathy and humanity. I had dehumanized one of my most beloved, just as he had dehumanized me. I was angry at him for abandoning me while I was in prison, yet when he became a prisoner of his own body, I was ready to abandon him.
+Last summer, I made peace with my uncle. It was the most difficult experience I have had since I left prison. I called him on the first day of Eid, and I could hear the slightly panicked excitement in his voice as we exchanged greetings. He spoke faster than usual, as if trying to make up for lost time. The weight of the resentment I carried vanished as soon as the conversation turned to kids, marriage, health and the famous feast that my aunt makes every Eid. As I ended our five years of silence, I felt the same sensation of freedom I had experienced when I was released. Soon after, my mom told me that the call had done wonders for his morale and that he had accompanied her on a visit to my father, who remains in prison.
+My father served in the Morsi government; I was imprisoned for my activism; my uncle was a police officer under successive regimes; many other family members were army generals or politicians under the government of the former president, Hosni Mubarak. Is my family unique? In many ways, not at all. Most Egyptian families are similarly split across the country’s political divides.
+With rampant state violence and the absence of any semblance of justice, Egyptian society is beyond polarized — it is broken. The targeting and dehumanization has extended beyond Islamists. Now anyone who dares to challenge the status quo is demonized. Families remain strained, political differences seem existential, dinner tables still have empty seats. Many weddings, birthdays and funerals are missed because of imprisonment, exile or exclusion. The hate, anger and vengeance have somehow overrun human decency.WASHINGTON — An American service member was killed by enemy fire in Afghanistan on Tuesday in the second United States combat death there so far this year.
+A brief statement by the American-led military mission in Afghanistan said the incident was under investigation and provided no further details.
+While it is unclear where the service member died, fighting has continued across the country. Taliban militants, American Special Operations troops and Afghan forces have been vying for territory as negotiations resume to end the 17-year war.
+Hours after a massive attack on Monday that killed dozens of Afghans at an intelligence base in Wardak Province, a Taliban statement said the militants had resumed discussions with American diplomats in Qatar.“I’ve been surprised at how generous audiences have been in kind of taking these two near-destitute, on-the-fringe criminals, full of loneliness and despair in early ’90s New York, that people have rooted for them and identified with them,” Grant said. Their misfit friendship struck a chord.
+His character, Jack Hock, is based on a real person, about whom very little is known; he was gay and had AIDS. “I think the assumption was, he’d been disowned by his family — there are no photographs of him. What little there is is featherweight information in Lee Israel’s actual memoir,” Grant said. His performance, he added, is “an homage to those men who died in the ’80s and ’90s, before there seemed to be any possibility of an antidote.”
+But Grant has brushed up against Israel’s contemporaries. “I met somebody at a Screen Actors Guild screening in New York last week, who said that in real life she was far grumpier and far more deadly than Melissa McCarthy portrayed her,” he said, “and that her apartment was an absolute pit of filth. He said it seemed quite sanitized in the film, but I don’t know that you could take an audience further into that Hieronymus Bosch territory.”
+Grant has been unusually – and hilariously — unfiltered on the awards circuit; even with McCarthy, he’s the uproarious one in the room. “I was born without that button, that filter in your brain that stops what comes into your brain from going out of your mouth — to my cost, sometimes,” he said.DAVOS, Switzerland — President Trump is the biggest no-show at this year’s meeting of the World Economic Forum. But Brazil’s new leader, Jair Bolsonaro, a man whose nickname back home is the “Trump of the Tropics,” stepped in to take up the populist mantle on Tuesday.
+Like Mr. Trump did when he came to Davos last year, Mr. Bolsonaro tried to smooth the edges of the insurgent message that vaulted him into the presidency last fall. He pitched Brazil to the well-heeled audience gathered in this Alpine ski resort as a good place to do business — a country committed to rooting out rampant corruption and rolling back regulations.
+But Mr. Bolsonaro also said Brazil would purge left-wing ideology from its politics and society, and he made no apologies for emphasizing economic growth, something his critics say will come at the cost of protecting Brazil’s environment.
+“We represent a turning point in the eyes of the Brazilian people — a turning point in which ideological bias will no longer take place,” Mr. Bolsonaro said in a brief address to a packed room, which was greeted with perfunctory applause. “Our motto is ‘God above all things.’ ”How do you move with innate wisdom? That was Michelle Boulé’s question to a group of 30 students in a contemporary dance class last week. They could rest, be in motion or land somewhere in between. The important thing was, as Ms. Boulé put it, “to experience your body as it is now, with no agenda.”
+And that, to her, takes courage. “We constantly distract ourselves from being in our bodies,” she said. “Being embodied is a radical act.”
+But something else about this experience was radical: holding a contemporary dance class in the busy atrium of the Museum of Modern Art. Thirty minutes before MoMA’s official opening last Thursday, participants began a two-hour class in which they meditated; integrated their actual brains with their “heart brains” and “gut brains” (that involved finger tapping on their heads and chests); and eventually moved on to spell-casting, or using the length of their limbs and the torque of their spirals to cast spells by responding to the architecture of the room. (It was probably more felt than visible.)
+“This is like, bring your witch out,” Ms. Boulé said, encouragingly.
+At that point, it seemed as though Movement Research, the daring downtown organization that investigates dance and movement-based forms, had officially infiltrated MoMA. As part of the exhibition, “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” Movement Research has been holding classes, workshops and discussions in the museum, and will continue through Friday.“All these norms that we see aren’t normal at all,” said Joe Talbot, the lead singer of the British band Idles. “It’s a giant lie. ”
+So what does “toxic masculinity,” or “traditional masculinity ideology ,” mean? Researchers have defined it, in part, as a set of behaviors and beliefs that include the following:
+Suppressing emotions or masking distress
+Maintaining an appearance of hardness
+Violence as an indicator of power (think: “tough-guy” behavior)
+In other words: Toxic masculinity is what can come of teaching boys that they can’t express emotion openly; that they have to be “tough all the time”; that anything other than that makes them “feminine” or weak. (No, it doesn’t mean that all men are inherently toxic.)
+[READ MORE: Many Ways to Be a Girl, But One Way to Be a Boy: The New Gender Rules]
+It’s these cultural lessons, according to the A.P.A., that have been linked to “aggression and violence,” leaving boys and men at “disproportionate risk for school discipline, academic challenges and health disparities,” including cardiovascular problems and substance abuse.
+“Men are overrepresented in prisons, are more likely than women to commit violent crimes and are at greatest risk of being a victim of violent crime,” the A.P.A. wrote.
+Wade Davis, a former N.F.L. player who now speaks to men about gender inequality and masculinity at companies like Google, Netflix and the N.F.L., said that there are no better messengers to help men confront these issues than other men .
+“I don’t think it’s the work of women,” he told me recently. “I think it’s the work of men like myself who need to be talking to our brothers, fathers, our friends.”
+It’s individual men, he continued, who are “going to have to, at some point, decide how to define manhood and masculinity for himself.”Can I Take Your Picture?
+When the days are so long and you finally get to the weekend and realize it’s been months since you have been out with your partner without your little one too (beloved though she is), a stranger asks, “Hey, when is the last time you took a photo together?” You smile because you can’t remember when the last time was, and you do find him pretty cute even if you two fight sometimes and say things you shouldn’t. The camera flashes, and you come back to each other and to the fact that love doesn’t fail even when you do. — Fantasia NorseThe star of one of the year’s biggest documentaries is a night owl, not an early riser, and probably had other things on her mind on Tuesday morning than her Oscar chances. So it fell to Betsy West and Julie Cohen, the directors of the documentary “RBG,” to tell Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the film was nominated.
+They called her at her Watergate apartment, where she is working from home. Justice Ginsburg congratulated the filmmakers and said the academy acknowledgment was “eminently well-deserved,” they reported, barely suppressing their glee at getting to share the news with her.
+“She sounded good, strong,” West said, as the justice recovers from her recent cancer surgery. “She was very happy.” And she has been following the blockbuster success of the film, so she couldn’t have been too surprised. (As a crowd-pleaser, it may even be the front-runner in the documentary category.)
+[Read more about the nominations | Check out the full list of nominees | See the snubs and surprises.]
+The directors and their spouses watched the nomination announcement together, at West’s Manhattan apartment, where her husband, Oren Jacoby, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker in his own right, made them all scrambled eggs for breakfast — a page from the supportive partner playbook of Martin Ginsburg, the justice’s late husband and the cook in their family. “Just like Marty Ginsburg, these are guys who had their own amazing careers,” said Cohen, whose husband, Paul Barrett, is a law professor and journalist. And in the last year, “they have been just supporting our journey.”Get the DealBook newsletter to make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them.
+__________
+Emmanuel Macron’s victory over the far-right National Front party in the French presidential election came only a few months after the ascension of Donald J. Trump to the presidency of the United States, and less than a year after Britain voted to leave the European Union. The outcome, installing a centrist leader, elicited a mixture of euphoria and relief from the establishment. A CNBC.com headline from the day captured this emotion: ”’Phew!’ World reacts as Macron becomes next French president.”
+Those hoping that Mr. Macron’s election would reverse the tide of nationalist and authoritarian leaders coming to power were disappointed to learn that his domestic popularity was fleeting. Anyone still rooting for a Macron comeback was rudely awakened by the scale and ferocity of the Yellow Vest movement, whose mass demonstrations began in November. One of the few consistent demands of the protesters has been the resignation of President Macron.
+The author Christophe Guilluy — who describes himself as a geographer, although he mostly served as a housing consultant after graduating from college in 1987 — has concerned himself with the growing cultural and economic fissures animating the recent protests. He has written four books on the topic since 2010, and the third of these, originally published in 2016, has just been translated by Yale University Press as “Twilight of the Elites: Prosperity, the Periphery and the Future of France.” Despite the hectoring tone, unfounded generalizations and conspiratorial allusions, the book still manages to provide an indispensable guide to understanding the fears and frustrations of an increasingly permanent underclass — not just in France, but throughout the world.Mr. Mueller’s team had no choice but to take the unusual step of publicly disputing the BuzzFeed article. Right now, figuring out how Russia compromised our elections is the job of Mr. Mueller’s team. Let’s stay out of its way.
+Christopher Thorpe
+Millbrae, Calif.
+To the Editor:
+Re “Russia Dealings Said to Continue Till Trump Won” (front page, Jan. 21):
+We shouldn’t be too hard on BuzzFeed. Because of its story, which still may prove true, Rudy Giuliani admitted that, despite President Trump’s public protestations to the contrary, negotiations on a Moscow Trump Tower continued throughout the 2016 election campaign until at least Election Day . (Mr. Giuliani has since claimed that his statements were “hypothetical.”) Mr. Giuliani further admitted that Mr. Trump might have talked to Michael Cohen before Mr. Cohen testified before Congress.
+When Mr. Cohen untruthfully told Congress that the Moscow deal terminated in January 2016, the president did not tell Congress or the American people that Mr. Cohen had not been truthful. A reasonable prosecutor might well conclude that such conduct corroborated the BuzzFeed story.
+Without organizations like BuzzFeed, Americans might know a lot less about the dangers to our democracy.
+Sharon Morrison
+Whitefish, Mont.
+To the Editor:
+It looks as if Robert Mueller just had a James Comey moment: He entered the public discussion when he should have continued to keep his mouth shut. Why in the world would he say anything about the BuzzFeed article about President Trump directing Michael Cohen to lie to Congress? All he does is show that he and his team are following the click-bait news like so many of the rest of us.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”“We used to say nine out of 10 people who report a penicillin allergy are skin-test negative. Now it looks more like 19 out of 20,” said Dr. David Lang, president-elect of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology and chairman of allergy and immunology in the respiratory institute at the Cleveland Clinic.
+Patients can get mislabeled as allergic to penicillin in a number of different ways. They may experience bad drug reactions like headaches, nausea or diarrhea, which are not true allergic reactions but are misinterpreted. Alternatively, they may develop a symptom like a rash, which is indicative of a real allergic reaction but could be caused by an underlying illness and not by the drug.
+And many people who have avoided penicillin for a decade or more after a true, severe allergic reaction will not experience that reaction again. “Even for those with true allergy, it can wane,” said Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal, the review’s senior author, who is an allergist and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “We don’t really understand this, but once you’ve proven you’re tolerant, you go back to having the same risk as someone who never had an allergy” to penicillin.
+It’s a good idea to find out if your allergy is real or not because penicillin antibiotics, which are part of a group of drugs called beta-lactam antibiotics, are among the safest and most effective treatments for many infections. Beta-lactams are the treatment of choice for Group A Streptococcus, which can cause pneumonia, toxic shock and other syndromes; Group B Strep, which causes meningitis; Staphylococcus aureus and other pathogens. Beta-lactams are used prophylactically to prevent infections during surgery, and studies have found that patients with penicillin allergies who are given second-line antibiotics before surgery had a substantially greater risk of a surgical site infection. Beta-lactams are also the first line treatment for syphilis and gonorrhea.
+Substitutes like fluoroquinolones, clindamycin, vancomycin and third-generation cephalosporins are available, but they are often both less effective and more expensive, and many are broader spectrum antibiotics, which can lead to the development of resistant organisms and other side effects, experts say. Studies have shown that patients with penicillin allergies are at increased risk for developing serious infections like Clostridium difficile, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and vancomycin-resistant enterococcus.
+Don’t challenge yourself to penicillin on your own, experts warn. Patients who have been told they’re allergic to penicillin should talk to their doctors, who should take a careful history and review the symptoms of the reaction.
+If the past reaction to penicillin included symptoms like headache, nausea, vomiting and itching, or the diagnosis was made based on a family history of the allergy, the patient is considered low risk and may be able to take a first dose of penicillin or a related antibiotic, such as amoxicillin, under medical observation.
+If the past reaction included hives, a rash, swelling or shortness of breath, patients should have penicillin skin testing, which involves a skin prick test using a small amount of penicillin reagent, followed by a second test that places the reagent under the skin if the first test is negative. If both tests are negative, the patient is unlikely to be allergic to penicillin, and an oral dose may be given under observation to confirm.On Jan. 5, some 150,000 people lined up in front of the St. Sophia Cathedral in Ukraine’s capital, Kiev. They came to see a single document called a tomos, issued a few days before by the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. There, on a piece of parchment, written in ornate Greek, English and Ukrainian, were words that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church had dreamed about for centuries: The document made the Ukrainian Church autocephalous, meaning it is now fully independent from Moscow.
+This declaration of independence came about despite months of behind-the-scenes attempts by the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church officials to dissuade Patriarch Bartholomew from issuing a tomos. When cajoling did not work, Kremlin-connected hackers (who were recently indicted in the United States) stole thousands of email messages from Patriarch Bartholomew’s aides. When blackmailing failed also, Moscow resorted to traditional bullying — issuing unspecified threats and denouncing the patriarch as an agent of the United States and the Vatican.
+Still he did not waver, and the split was accomplished.
+It is a serious blow, on several levels, to the ambitions of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, as well as the Russian Church. The Ukrainian Orthodox population accounts for about 30 percent of all Orthodox Christian believers under Moscow’s patriarchate. Dozens of parishes have already switched to the Ukrainian Church and hundreds more are likely to follow. Moscow stands to lose millions of the faithful and untold millions of dollars in church property.
+But those are not the most important losses. With autocephaly, a large portion of the Ukrainian population will now be under the influence not of Moscow on church matters but of an independent church in Kiev. In other words, Russia may have annexed Crimea, but it has lost Ukraine.Finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Awards include 31 books across six categories: autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Notably, the poet Terrance Hayes was nominated in two different categories for two different books. His collection “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin” is a poetry finalist, and his book “To Float in the Space Between: A Life and Work in Conversation With the Life and Work of Etheridge Knight” is a finalist for criticism.
+The 24 directors of the National Book Critics Circle typically name five finalists per category, but they cited an especially strong year for autobiography in naming six to that category this year. Those nominees include a graphic memoir (Nora Krug’s “Belonging: A German Reckons With History and Home”) and Tara Westover’s “Educated,” which The New York Times Book Review selected as one of its 10 Best Books of 2018.
+The organization’s lifetime achievement award will go to the independent publisher Arte Público Press, which specializes in Hispanic literature. The John Leonard Prize, for the best first book in any genre, will be awarded to Tommy Orange for his debut novel, “There There” (also one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books), which centers on a Native American gathering in Oakland, Calif. The NPR book critic Maureen Corrigan will receive a citation for excellence in reviewing.
+The complete list of contenders across all six categories is here.
+The awards will be presented on March 14 at the New School in New York City.A Bahamian restaurant owner who lost a fortune as a result of the Fyre Festival debacle has recouped nearly all of her losses after a GoFundMe campaign raised more than $177,000.
+The owner, MaryAnn Rolle, 55, was featured in the Netflix documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” one of two documentaries released this month that chronicle the 2017 music festival disaster, which left attendees stranded without food or drinking water and sleeping on beaches in makeshift tents. The other new film is Hulu’s “Fyre Fraud,” which also takes a critical look at the festival and its organizers.If you want your lipstick to last — and really endure for hours — it often means using a matte formula. These products have a dry finish that prevents smudges and wicks away moisture like face powder. But the downside is that many matte lipsticks feel like plaster on your lips and deplete healthy, essential moisture, making them especially unappealing in winter (why increase the risk of chapped lips?). But lately, makeup artists have been embracing matte lipsticks with renewed enthusiasm — no matter the season — thanks in part to a new crop of hybrid formulas.
+“Lipstick formulas have come so far,” says the Los Angeles-based makeup artist Rachel Goodwin, noting that many matte options now have “plumping and moisturizing effects as well as nourishing botanical oils.” The British makeup artist Amanda Grossman agrees, noting the “higher quality of ingredients,” including plant-based oils, behind the comfier, updated mattes. “The new generation has a smoother, more hydrating effect, the pigment is stronger — the staying power is far greater than it used to be,” she says.
+Goodwin stocks her kit with Sisley-Paris’s Le Phyto-Rouge ($57), which combines skin-care ingredients such as ultra-moisturizing hyaluronic acid with a smooth, gel-like texture. Chantecaille’s Lip Veil ($48) and Estée Lauder’s Pure Color Desire ($44) rely on hydrating oils (baobab, olive, caster seed), and Charlotte Tilbury’s Superstar Lips ($34) contains high-tech polymers that create a velvety finish without dulling the intensity of its color pigments. For a sustainable option, La Bouche Rouge’s matte shades ($160) replace potentially drying preservatives with healing antioxidants and come in chic, refillable metal and leather cases.
+A little prep work can prolong the wear of a lipstick, too. Goodwin buffs lips with a scrub (Bite Beauty’s Agave Sugar Lip Scrub, $18), to prevent flakes, and applies a moisturizing salve. And to remove a matte lip? “After years of trying different methods, I found that using an oil-based eye makeup remover and rubbing gently with a Q-tip really does the trick,” says Grossman. She cleans up any lingering residue with a dash of micellar water on a cotton pad and, to fight the cold air, finishes with generous “lashings of lip balm.”Under Audrey Azoulay, the director general who took up her post after Trump announced the decision to leave, Israel and Arab states have reached consensus on a dozen Unesco texts — a new development. A Holocaust education website was introduced along with the United Nations’ first educational guidelines to combat anti-Semitism.
+“Unesco was being used for things not strictly in its sphere, like issues of sovereignty,” Azoulay told me in an interview. “The debate about over-politicization was legitimate given how the organization was being used, especially in the last decade. There was a loss of credibility. I have tried hard to reduce the politicization and work for consensus.”
+She continued: “In the light of the progress made over the past 12 months, I deeply regret the withdrawal of the United States, a founding member, and Israel.”
+A Unesco conference on anti-Semitism was held on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last September. Netanyahu had shown serious interest in attending. But to offend Trump and Haley was, in the end, a bridge too far for the Israeli prime minister.
+In his speech, Secretary-General António Guterres did not pull punches. He said anti-Semitism was “expressing itself in attempts to delegitimize the right of Israel to exist” and used “the pretext of the situation in the Middle East to target Jews and Jewish symbols.” He denounced neo-Nazi and white supremacy groups and spoke of “tribalism run amok.” It was a conference that merited the highest-level Israeli attendance.
+Azoulay’s senior staff has tempered the language of Unesco resolutions on the Middle East through diplomatic mediation, relegating the most sensitive language about Israel to nonbinding annexes.
+The former Israeli ambassador to Unesco, Carmel Shama Hacohen, compared the atmosphere last April to “a wedding.” Last June he welcomed a “new spirit” and said that there was a “a need to re-evaluate, in full coordination with the U.S., the question of leaving.”Well, on the one hand it’s a little creepy, isn’t it? To know that so many people can relate to a show that’s really about the bloodiest worst-case scenario of modern dating. One thing we were all excited to do was get in the writers’ room and share our own stories. Accidentally dating potential actual serial killers aside, which is a fear I’ve always walked around with, we’ve all got horrible yet amusing stories, and we are all committed to grounding this story in some personal truth about how difficult this stuff can be to navigate. We put a lot of ourselves into the cringey details.
+I’m a horror writer in my heart, in that I always like to ask myself what scares me and what scares us universally when I’m approaching a story. To me there’s just about nothing scarier than the truth that we can never really know another person. And nowhere is that writ larger than in romance. We’re auditioning people to be the primary person in our lives, basically, and hoping that we somehow see into their true selves before we’re in too deep. It seems more or less impossible, right?
+And part of what makes Joe Goldberg so terrifying and resonant is that he sees himself as the good guy.
+For me, the most irksome phenomenon I’ve been observing lately isn’t that old-fashioned central-casting misogynist who says sexist, blatant stuff. There’s also a more insidious type of mansplaining that comes from men who declare themselves progressive and allies, who are, effectively, wearing a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt.
+Maybe the intention is good — one could argue that Joe’s intentions are good — but we all have to be careful anytime we think we know better than the person we’re talking to, especially about what that person needs or how they should act or behave as a member of whatever group they’re a part of. It’s a red flag. That’s what we get to explore through Joe, who genuinely believes he’s a feminist and a good man. His actions come from a deep place of entitlement because he’s confident that he should be helping Beck, though he hasn’t asked her if she wants help. And he, in fact, believes he knows better than she does what she actually needs.
+Right. He’s not killing for the thrill of killing. He thinks all his behavior is justifiable in the pursuit of love.(Frank Ning, the chairman of the Chinese chemical giant Sinochem, said during a different panel that there was a new awareness in China about worries outside the country over how its businesses make overseas investments. “I think the Chinese are quite confused, they thought they would be welcome in other countries,” he said.)
+The Belt and Road discussion was moderated by Tian Wei, a well-known anchor for the state-run China Global Television Network, making the absence of Chinese government officials, who typically shun panels with foreign moderators known to have criticized China, somewhat surprising.
+Ms. Tian repeatedly hinted at the resentment felt by some people in China about foreign criticisms of the Belt and Road program, which she said was helping to build roads in developing countries that need them. “Let’s talk about facts, let’s talk about case studies, and let’s talk about the real stories, not just hearsay,” she added.
+Wang Yongqing, the vice chairman of the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce, mentioned during the panel that China had helped build an industrial park in Ethiopia that makes leather products. But he and Mr. Xu avoided specifics about the hundreds of Belt and Road infrastructure projects already completed or underway. Critics say Chinese construction companies have moved so quickly partly because they bring in thousands of Chinese workers instead of training locals, and because they arrange special deals with local officials in developing countries that allow them to avoid paying tariffs on machinery that they ship in.
+Sitting in the audience was Xiao Yaqing, the government minister who oversees state-owned enterprises. Asked to speak by Ms. Tian, he suggested one possible reason for Chinese officials’ caution when he said the Belt and Road push was good for Chinese companies as well as for other countries.
+There have sometimes been criticisms on Chinese social media, quickly deleted by censors, that Beijing was spending money on overseas development that would be better spent at home, particularly when economic growth is slowing in the country.
+China has been rethinking two aspects of the initiative: how it decides on overseas spending, and how the initiative is presented to overseas audiences. In September, Mr. Xi promised a further $60 billion for projects in African countries, but he made a point of saying that China would not pay for what he called vanity projects.By 2016, a policy was in place for transgender people already serving. Two years later, the military put in place a process for new recruits, officer candidates and people on inactive status like myself. The day after that , I contacted my recruiter to begin the process of rejoining the military.
+Over the past year, I’ve had countless medical and psychological exams in my quest to return to the job I was trained to do: flying Blackhawk helicopters. This involved a lot of time off work and considerable travel, all at my own expense. At every turn, the people examining me reached the same conclusion: I was “aeromedically adapted” — fit to fly — and able to return to the service. There was, finally, a chance that I might be able finish my career after 16 good years of service.
+I was hoping against hope, throughout this process, that I’d be able to join my friends who had fought alongside me for the right to serve openly. Nearly every week I would see pictures of them in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. It gave me a thrill in December to see a picture of four of them together at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. One was an airborne ranger, and one was Special Forces.
+All of this makes the administration’s dogged attempt to undo everything achieved over the last few years even more baffling. The ban was developed in secret, without the sort of careful study that went into the policy it reversed. It does not reflect any current medical understanding of transgender people, and it has been denounced by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association.
+No one, including the lawyers for the Trump administration, has been able to show that inclusion of transgender service members or providing care to them has had any measurable negative impact on morale, readiness or unit cohesion. The chiefs of staff of all four service branches of the military have testified to Congress that there have been no issues.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In three short weeks in office, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shaped a national conversation on taxation, emerged as the face of a green jobs plan in Washington and elevated her initials into a worldwide brand.
+But she has not yet opened an office in her own New York City district — a delay that may give a sense of her priorities early in her tenure.
+During an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” on Monday, she blamed the government shutdown.
+“There’s a lot of things we can’t do as freshman members,” she told Mr. Colbert as they ate spoonfuls of ice cream. “We can’t properly set up our district offices. We can’t get laptops delivered. We can’t start doing the work that we were elected here to do.”The report was only six pages, but it painted a damning portrait of an egregious work environment where managers routinely retaliated against subordinates, rigged contracts and destroyed appliances meant for residents. They also clocked overtime without working extra hours, and drank alcohol and held on-site parties.
+A spokeswoman for the mayor said Nycha was seeking to dismiss the two managers accused of misconduct in the report. But critics said the findings were emblematic of widespread systemic failure at the housing agency and insufficient oversight of the city’s 325 housing projects where 400,000 people live.
+Below are some of the report’s most startling findings.
+Retaliation and threats
+The report described a hostile workplace where two managers, Brianne Pawson and Wallace Vereen , bullied and threatened employees, and openly boasted about the power they wielded.
+Ms. Pawson, the daughter of Charles Pawson, who was in charge of maintenance at Nycha-run buildings before retiring over the summer, began working at the Throggs Neck Houses in 2016, and once said in front of staff members that one worker “should rape” another worker, the report said. On a separate occasion, she said she wanted someone to break the legs of an employee whom she suspected of filing a complaint against her.
+The two would give better work assignments to employees “in their clique” and retaliate against those they did not like, once forcing a longtime groundskeeper into retirement. Mr. Vereen, who became the development’s housing manager in 2017, once said he ran Throggs Neck “like a jail,” according to the report.MELBOURNE, Australia — Ann Chisholm contemplated traveling from her Minnesota home to watch the main-draw debut of her cousin Danielle Collins at the Australian Open, but it seemed like a flight of fancy. Collins had lost in the first round of the three majors she played last year, and it made little sense for a relative to travel 10,000 miles to see what might be only one match.
+But Chisholm continued monitoring airfares after each of Collins’s first three matches in Melbourne, all victories. Then, in the fourth round, the unseeded Collins defeated Angelique Kerber, the 2016 champion and this year’s No. 2 seed.
+It was just past 11 on Saturday night in Grand Rapids, Minn., when Collins sealed the upset, and Chisholm’s inner voice, which had been nagging her for a week to hop on a plane, grew so loud she could hardly sleep.
+On Sunday morning, Chisholm reached out to Collins and said she was looking at flights to Australia. Chisholm didn’t want her arrival to surprise Collins in case, she said, it “messed up her mojo.”Iran said Tuesday it had formally protested the F.B.I.’s arrest of an American newscaster who works for the Iranian government’s Press TV, and her family said rallies in Washington and elsewhere were planned if she was not freed.
+The arrested American, Marzieh Hashemi, has been held for more than a week as a material witness in an unspecified criminal case and has appeared before a grand jury in Washington twice. She has not been charged with a crime.
+Iranian officials have seized on the arrest as a provocative new irritant in the tense relationship between Iran and the United States, which has worsened since the Trump administration renounced the Iranian nuclear agreement last May and reimposed severe sanctions on the country.
+Ms. Hashemi, 59, who has lived in Iran for more than a decade and travels back to the United States sometimes to visit family members, was arrested Jan. 13 in St. Louis and transferred by the F.B.I. to Washington.The stock market’s strong start to the year stalled on Tuesday, amid growing pessimism about the prospects for a deal to defuse trade tensions between China and the United States.
+The S&P 500, which had enjoyed its best start to a year since 1987 through the end of trading on Friday, ended Tuesday down 1.4 percent, the market’s second-worst loss of the year.
+Stocks slumped from the outset, and the selling worsened through the day after The Financial Times reported that the Trump administration had rejected an offer from China to hold preparatory talks ahead of high-level trade meetings in Washington later this month.1. Senate leaders offered the first glimmers of a potential resolution to the government shutdown, scheduling procedural votes Thursday on two competing bills to reopen the government.
+One measure includes funding for President Trump’s border wall; the other is a short-term spending bill that would fund shuttered agencies through Feb. 8. Although neither is likely to pass, the compromise gives each party a chance to press its proposal. And the votes could prompt the two sides to negotiate a bipartisan compromise.
+Above, Mexican migrants prepare to jump the border fence to get into the U.S. in December.
+At the same time, Mr. Trump and Speaker Nancy Pelosi remained in a private standoff about whether he should be allowed to deliver his State of the Union address next week. Ms. Pelosi has yet to issue Mr. Trump a formal invitation.Viacom, the once mighty cable giant behind pop culture confections like “Jersey Shore” and children’s fare like “Dora the Explorer,” is acquiring the streaming service PlutoTV for $340 million, the companies said in an announcement on Tuesday.
+This is Viacom’s most significant move into streaming, now the go-to strategy for media companies as more and more viewers forgo traditional cable subscriptions. The emergence of streaming services like Netflix and Hulu has hastened the decline of the pay TV business and has upended the media universe.
+Time Warner, once the largest media business in the country, sold itself to AT&T in an $85.4 billion deal last year, and Rupert Murdoch, who had built a giant entertainment conglomerate over decades, is selling the bulk of his empire to the Walt Disney Company for $71.3 billion after a bitter bidding war against Comcast. The impetus for both deals was to create entities capable of taking on Netflix and other tech companies by offering their own streaming plans. AT&T and Disney will unveil their services by the end of the year.
+Viacom’s deal for PlutoTV, while much smaller, shares some of that motivation. PlutoTV, founded in 2013 and led by Kenneth Parks and Tom Ryan, is a free, advertising-based service and has about 12 million active viewers a month. NBCUniversal also announced this month that it would start a streaming service largely supported by advertising.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+All flights bound for Newark Liberty International Airport were halted on Tuesday evening after two pilots reported seeing a drone flying nearby, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
+The drone was spotted about 3,500 feet over Teterboro Airport In New Jersey, a small airport about 17 miles north of Newark Liberty that handles private planes, the agency said. After the sightings, takeoffs from Newark were halted and inbound planes were held in the air.
+By 5:45 p.m., planes had resumed landing at Newark, but planes headed for the airport from other cities were blocked from taking off, the agency said. Newark is one of the three main airports serving New York City and the surrounding region.
+Brett Sosnik, a passenger on a flight headed for Newark, said his plane was forced to circle out over southern New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania during the halt in arrivals. He said the pilot said they were circling “due to drone activity.”Luigi Di Maio, an Italian deputy prime minister, took aim at President Emmanuel Macron of France this week, laying the blame for migration, a deeply divisive issue in Italy, on Mr. Macron.
+Citing a French-backed currency known as the C.F.A. franc that is used by 14 nations in western and central Africa, Mr. Di Maio accused France of using the currency to exploit former colonies.
+Mr. Di Maio, a member of the populist Five Star movement, which is skeptical of the European Union and Mr. Macron’s more internationalist views, set off the diplomatic spat with France when he said that Mr. Macron “first lectures us, then continues to finance public debt with the money with which he exploits Africa,” according to ANSA, the Italian press agency.
+But the currency, its history and the issues around it have had little to do with the debate over African migration to Europe until now. So what is the C.F.A. franc and how did it come to be at the center of diplomatic discord?The spring 2019 haute couture collections have glided across Paris’s runways, bringing the twice-yearly festivities to a close. Here, our favorite images from the shows as captured by T’s photographers.
+Wednesday, Jan. 23
+On the last day of couture week, Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino presented a collection that reportedly left Celine Dion in tears. Jewel-toned separates prefaced a parade of floral gowns — some richly printed, others cut from lace, embroidered, spangled or fringed. The finishing touch on a handful of the 65 looks came in the form of feather eyelash extensions, affixed by the makeup artist Pat McGrath.Dyson, the British appliances company founded by a vocal supporter of Britain’s departure from the European Union, has decided to leave for Singapore.
+The company, which makes vacuum cleaners and hair dryers and has an electric car in the pipeline, is moving its headquarters from Malmesbury, in southwest England, to Singapore in response to demand for its products in Asia, the company said Tuesday.
+“An increasing majority of Dyson’s customers and all of our manufacturing operations are now in Asia,” the company said in its financial report. “This shift has been occurring for some time and will quicken as Dyson brings its electric vehicle to market.” The company said it would also double the size of its technology center in Singapore.
+The company insisted the relocation of the headquarters would involve only two job moves: Jorn Jensen, the chief financial officer, and Martin Bowen, the general counsel, will move to Singapore. Over all, the company said, it employs more than 12,000 people around the world, with more than 4,500 in Britain.American and Chinese officials have tried to portray the arrest of Ms. Meng as separate from the trade talks, which are taking place against a March 2 deadline set by President Trump and President Xi Jinping of China.
+But the Trump administration has increasingly mixed talk of national security concerns related to Chinese businesses with its positions on trade. And American officials have tried to crack down on certain activities by Chinese telecom firms like Huawei, which is aiming to build next-generation cellular and data networks in countries worldwide.
+[Read more: How Huawei wooed Europe with sponsorships, investments and promises.]
+China has already expressed alarm about the detention of Ms. Meng, a Chinese citizen and a daughter of the founder of Huawei, whose arrest set off a diplomatic crisis involving the United States, Canada and China. Ms. Meng is currently living with her family at one of her homes in Vancouver. In December, a Canadian court ruled that Ms. Meng would not have to be held in jail, but said that the authorities could closely monitor her, and that certain parts of Vancouver were off limits.
+A senior official with Global Affairs, the Canadian Foreign Ministry, said the Canadian government expects the United States to proceed with the request to have her brought to the United States to face charges that she lied to American banks about Huawei’s efforts to evade Iran sanctions. Ms. Meng was arrested Dec. 1 in a Vancouver airport as she was stopping over between China and Latin America, and the treaty says the United States must make a formal extradition request within 60 days of an arrest.
+Once Canada gets the request, the process would move to the Canadian courts, which would determine whether Ms. Meng could be extradited. If they say yes, the minister of justice makes the final determination. The Canadian official said the process could take months or years because the first decision by a court can be appealed to a higher court.Does any part of you feel like it’s overdue?
+I mean, look, it’s no secret. 30 years is a long [expletive] time. But I’m not complaining! It’s a joyous day. I’m blessed for this day. Blessed for the recognition. And there’s a feeling that it’s not just the people that worked on this film [that have earned recognition], it’s the people that have been working on my films since 1986.
+You’ve made all kinds of films — some independent, some with studios, some that you wrote, some that were written by others — was there anything about “BlacKkKlansman” that you thought had the potential to resonate in a different way?
+Well, when Jordan Peele called me up and gave me the pitch “Black man infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan,” I was intrigued, because with the absurdity of that premise comes humor. Kevin Willmott [a co-writer of the film] and I knew that if we could use the movie to connect the past with the present, we could do something that connected with people. And it was a tough thing to do. But it was successful, and it speaks directly to the world we live in today with this guy in the White House. Today, when 800,000 Americans need a break as we go into another week of this temper tantrum about how this guy wants his money for his wall. A wall he wants to be built upon the border of a country that he says [is home to] rapists, murders and drug dealers. And that they’re gonna pay for! Which is not true.
+This film deals directly with the madness and the mayhem of this Looney Tunes, cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs world [laughs]. And I feel that many years to come, when historians search for a piece of art that clearly shows what is happening today, “BlacKkKlansman” will be one of the first things they look at. Because this film is on the right side of history.WASHINGTON — As the partial government shutdown enters its fifth week, the funding freeze has impeded F.B.I. efforts to crack down on child trafficking, violent crime and terrorism, according to a report issued Tuesday by the group that represents the bureau’s 13,000 special agents.
+“The resources available to support the work of F.B.I. agents are currently stretched to the breaking point and are dwindling day by day,” said Thomas O’Connor, the president of the group, the F.B.I. Agents Association.
+The report reflected the scope and seriousness of the shutdown’s effects, and came as President Trump and the leaders of the two parties on Capitol Hill maneuvered to find a path out of the impasse. The Senate scheduled procedural votes for Thursday on competing Republican and Democratic proposals, although neither appears likely to win sufficient support to pass.
+The Justice Department, which oversees the F.B.I., is one of the government agencies affected by the partial shutdown, along with the State Department, Transportation Department, Agriculture Department, Interior Department and others.In response to the deaths, ships in Canadian waters have slowed and shifted their routes, but fishing gear remains a problem, Mr. Hamilton said. In 2018, three right whales died in the United States and none in Canada, through mid-October, according to federal data.
+Changes in feeding patterns because of warming waters may also be affecting their fertility, Mr. Hamilton said. In the last eight years, the whales have been feeding much more in Cape Cod Bay, and less in some other habitats.
+“They’re having to search new places to feed,” Mr. Hamilton said. “The increased calving interval suggests many are not getting as much food as they need in order to support a calf,” which can cost a mother one-third of her body weight.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+To track North Atlantic right whale births, two teams fly over the Atlantic coastline from Savannah, Ga., to Jacksonville, Fla., every clear-weather day from December through March.
+A few weeks ago, looking out of the home they share on the coast, a Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission worker noticed the first mother of the season swimming with her calf, said Jennifer Jakush, a biological scientist with the commission’s North Atlantic Right Whale Project. That was whale 3317 and she had last given birth three years ago, suggesting that at least some female whales are getting the nutrition they need, Ms. Jakush said. “That in and of itself is a good sign,” she added.
+The calf born to 1204 was spotted by aircraft during its regular survey, near Amelia Island, north of Jacksonville, Ms. Jakush said. The mother hadn’t been seen earlier this season, so it’s not clear how old her calf is yet.All of this shapes how I think about Trump’s abrupt order to withdraw from Syria and desire to get out of Afghanistan. I think he is right on Afghanistan. We’ve defeated Al Qaeda there; it’s time for us to negotiate with the Taliban and Pakistan the best phased exit we can — and take as many people who worked for us as we can. Afghanistan has hard countries around it — Russia, Pakistan, India, China and Iran — and they have the ability to contain and manage the disorder there. We gave at the office.
+I’d keep our special forces in Syria, though, but not because we’ve yet to defeat ISIS. ISIS is a direct byproduct of the wider regional struggle between Sunnis and Shiites, led by Saudi Arabia and Iran. ISIS arose as an extreme Sunni response to the extreme efforts by Iran and pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq and Syria to ethnically cleanse and strip power from Sunnis in Iraq and Syria. As long as Iran pursues that strategy, there will be an ISIS in some form or other.
+That’s why the only peace process that could have a stabilizing effect across the Middle East today is not between Israelis and Palestinians — but between Iran and Saudi Arabia.
+What the small, not-all-that-costly U.S. force in Syria does that is most important is prevent the awful there from becoming the truly disastrous in a couple ways. It does so in part by protecting the Kurds and moderate Sunnis from the murderous Syrian government and Turkey. The mainstream Syrian and Iraqi Kurds have been, for the most part, forces for decency and Western values in that corner of the world. One day we might build on their islands of decency; they’re worth preserving.
+Our forces also help stabilize northeastern Syria, making it less likely that another huge wave of refugees will emerge from there that could further destabilize Lebanon and Jordan and create nativist backlashes in the European Union like the earlier wave did. To me, the European Union is the other United States of the world, and we and NATO have a vital interest in protecting the E.U. from being fractured over a fight over the influx of Mideast refugees.
+Finally, I’d take $2 billion of the $45 billion we’d save from getting out of Afghanistan and invest it regionally in all the cultural changes that made Tunisia unique — across the whole Arab world. I’d give huge aid to the American University in Cairo, the American University in Beirut, the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani, and the American University of Afghanistan.
+And I’d massively expand the scholarship program we once ran by which top Arab public school students were eligible for a U.S.-funded scholarship to any U.S.-style liberal arts college in Lebanon or anywhere else in the region.Mariano Rivera, the career saves leader whose elegant efficiency helped the Yankees win five World Series, on Tuesday became the first player ever elected unanimously to the Baseball Hall of Fame.
+Two other right-handed pitchers, Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina, also were elected, Halladay on his first try and Mussina on his sixth. Edgar Martinez, the longtime Seattle Mariners designated hitter, gained entry in his 10th and final year on the ballot. Halladay, a former ace of the Toronto Blue Jays and the Philadelphia Phillies, died in a plane crash in 2017.
+Rivera was named on all 425 of the ballots cast by members of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, eclipsing the previous record percentage, 99.3, by Ken Griffey Jr. in 2016. Halladay and Martinez both received 85.4 percent of the votes, and Mussina — a stalwart for the Baltimore Orioles and the Yankees — 76.7 percent. Candidates need 75 percent for election.
+“After my career, I was thinking that I had a shot to be a Hall of Famer,” Rivera said on a conference call with reporters. “But this was just beyond my imagination. I was amazed the way all this has been, through my whole career — and this being the pinnacle of every player that plays the game of baseball, to be unanimous.”Tiafoe — known as “Big Foe,” and one of the few black players on tour — could not come close to duplicating Tsitsipas’s effort. Before playing Nadal, the young American seemed to be playing with the form and confidence that would give him a chance for a monumental upset of his own. He had scored three straight surprising wins against higher-ranked players, including one over the No. 5 seed, Kevin Anderson. He had also gained an avid following with his vivacious on-court persona and post-match celebrations — taking off his shirt and pounding his chest, mimicking his favorite N.B.A. players.
+His hope against Nadal was that his young legs would push him past a champion who has won 80 tour titles in a career of nearly two decades.
+Add to that: Maybe, just maybe, Nadal would break down on the unforgiving hard court, a surface that has taken a toll on his body.
+After all, Nadal completed just one hard court event last year. At the Australian Open, he retired during the fifth set of his quarterfinal against Marin Cilic, because of an upper leg injury. At the United States Open in September, he retired again, this time because of a knee injury during a semifinal against Juan Martín del Potro.
+Nadal took the rest of the year off and had ankle surgery. Then, after he arrived in Australia, he withdrew from a warm-up event in Brisbane because of a left thigh injury.
+But at Melbourne Park this year, he looks refreshed. His movement is fluid. His ball striking has looked as crisp and powerful as ever.
+Tiafoe spoke to this, offering a view of what it’s like from the distressed other side of the court.According to the official accounts, the 27-year-old man who fatally attacked the mayor of the Polish port city of Gdansk at a charity event on Jan. 13 was deranged, violent and recently released from prison.
+What the terrified thousands who witnessed the stabbing, and the many thousands who turned out for Mayor Pawel Adamowicz’s funeral on Saturday experienced, was not simply the act of a crazed lone wolf. It was a consequence of the hatred and malice that have spread through Poland under the ultraconservative, nationalist and increasingly authoritarian Law and Justice Party. It is a fear not limited to Poland.
+Since taking power in 2015, the party, led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has actively curtailed the independence of the judiciary and the news media to promote its right-wing, anti-European Union, anti-immigrant agenda. One result has been a polarization that one Polish political scientist described as “absolutely horrifying,” broadly separating liberal cities like Warsaw and Gdansk from the conservative countryside and generating a climate of vicious hatred across the land.
+The governing party has tried to distance itself from the attack on Mr. Adamowicz, noting that the killer, identified so far only as Stefan W., was not known to be affiliated with any political movement, and that he was driven by his own demons. After stabbing Mr. Adamowicz several times, he seized a microphone and declared that he was seeking revenge against the opposition Civic Platform — a party to which Mr. Adamowicz previously belonged — for his imprisonment and “torture.”Which is not to say she didn’t quickly work her way through all those texts after being brought up to speed.
+“The ones that mean the most to me are the ones that come from my family,” said Gaga, whose real name is Stefani Germanotta. “These are not Oscar nominations for me, these are Oscar nominations for the Germanottas. I come from an Italian-immigrant family, and this feels like a very big win for them. This film was a lot of hard work, and I wouldn’t know that hard work if I didn’t know the hard work of the lineage of my family.”
+Though Cooper was denied a best-director nomination, Gaga was thrilled that he still scored nominations for producing, co-writing, and starring in the film, and Cooper is not the only Oscar-nominated multihyphenate “A Star Is Born” produced. “To be recognized as the lead actress and a musician at the same time, I can’t tell you what that means to me,” said Gaga, who co-wrote the film’s smash duet “Shallow,” which her character, Ally, sings onstage with Cooper’s dissolute rocker, Jackson Maine.
+How will she celebrate her Oscar nominations? “Well, tonight I’m very much looking to see my dear friend Elton John play here in Los Angeles for his farewell tour,” Gaga said. And before she returns to Las Vegas this weekend, Gaga will use the next few days to rest her voice and think more about how “A Star Is Born” has changed her life.
+“I don’t register this film in my mind as a time in my life when I ‘filmed a movie,’” she told me. “I register it as a time in my life when I became somebody else, and Bradley became someone else, and we lived those characters and fell in love.” A day like today, then, lets her recapture the magic of that time with Ally and Jackson Maine. “I feel them very much alive,” Gaga said. “And I think I always will.”WASHINGTON — America’s traditional adversaries will take advantage of the weakening of the postwar order and isolationist tendencies of the West to assert greater influence, a new strategy document from the director of national intelligence warned on Tuesday.
+Russian efforts to increase its influence are likely to continue, and China is continuing its pursuit of “economic and territorial predominance in the Pacific region,” the report said.
+The document, compiled every four years, is meant to guide the intelligence agencies’ broad strategic goals. While it outlines the threat to the United States in broad terms, it includes little in the way of details about specific threats from China, Russia or other countries.
+The leaders of American intelligence agencies are expected to testify to Congress in early February with a more fulsome assessment of the threats facing the country. Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, will most likely field questions at that hearing about China’s intensifying espionage activities and Russia’s continuing efforts to interfere in democratic institutions in the United States and the rest of the West.Industry estimates suggest the company mines just over 5 percent of all Bitcoins, although no one would say how much was being mined here.
+But competitors in Georgia reckon it was a fortune. Vakhtang Gogokhia, the chief executive of Golden Fleece, a small cryptomining start-up, said he was pulling in around 10 Bitcoins a month using one megawatt of energy, enough to light 1,000 homes. Bitfury says it constantly consumes at least 45 megawatts of energy, though Mr. Gogokhia suspected it was more.
+Critics say the government, by subsidizing operations like Bitfury, is ripping off taxpayers by forcing them to foot the bill for well-connected companies.
+Zurab Tchiaberashvili, a lawmaker from European Georgia, the largest opposition party in Parliament, said the government’s generosity toward Bitfury had deprived Georgians of millions in tax revenue.
+“It’s a huge conflict of interest,” he said.
+Mr. Urumashvili brushed off such concerns. “Bitfury has given our country many things, including a path to the future,” he said. “When you have a ticket to get onto the world map,” he added, “you should use it.”
+Still, as Bitcoin prices highlight the uncertain nature of cryptocurrencies, the government isn’t putting all of its eggs in one basket.
+“Georgia is interesting for cryptocurrency miners,” said Mr. Kobulia, the economy minister. “But would it be a major source of our economic growth? Maybe not.”Trump administrationpress briefings each month 15 briefings 10 5 Jan. 2017 July Jan. 2018 July Jan. 2019 15 10 5 Jan. ’17 July Jan. ’18 July Jan. ’19
+White House press briefings during the Trump administration have gone from must-see TV to practically canceled after just two seasons.
+On Monday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, took questions from the podium for the first time in 41 days. Fox was the only major cable news network to carry the briefing live.
+She appeared just once in September, November and December.
+Last Tuesday, President Trump said on Twitter that he told Ms. Sanders “not to bother” with briefings anymore because “the press covers her so rudely & inaccurately.”
+In an interview on Fox News shortly before Mr. Trump’s tweet, Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman, said that the briefings have not officially stopped, but that Ms. Sanders did not need to be at the podium every day because Mr. Trump regularly answers questions from reporters, for example, on his way to Marine One.
+Average number of press briefings per month, by year Clinton Bush Obama Trump 20 briefings 15 10 5 1993 1997 2001 2005 2009 2013 2017 Clinton Bush Obama Trump 20 15 10 5 ’93 ’97 ’01 ’05 ’09 ’13 ’17 Note: Each bar includes briefings beginning with Jan. 20 of that year through Jan. 19 of the following year.
+But Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project, analyzed the frequencies of press briefings and found that the press secretaries for former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush “held regularly scheduled briefings independent of whether their president answered reporters’ questions.”
+The Trump administration, she said, seemed to use the briefing as an instrument of the White House “to promote the president and his agenda rather than as a medium where reporters establish the subjects under discussion and call upon the White House to answer to the American public on topics of their choosing.”
+Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, stressed that being able to ask a president questions is not a substitute for a briefing.After Iowa and New Hampshire, the race moves to potentially favorable terrain for Ms. Harris: Nevada, which borders California and has a large Latino population, then South Carolina. Then, on Super Tuesday, California will be among the states voting, as will four southern states where black voters made up more than a quarter of the 2016 primary electorate.
+Even with these advantages, Ms. Harris still has plenty to worry about. Already, she’s fending off attacks on the “tough-on-crime” positions she took as a prosecutor in California. In her first remarks after announcing her campaign, Ms. Harris described the criminal justice system as “horribly flawed.” And her liberal bona fides may be found lacking by an insurgent wing that is ascendant in the party.
+Obviously Ms. Harris does not have anything locked down. (Need I take you back to the winter of 2007, when Hillary Clinton led primary polls by double digits.) We’re in the early stages of what will likely be a very, very long primary contest. A lot can happen.
+Just ask Howard Dean.
+____________________
+Talking Points for Biden 2020?
+Advisers to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. are circulating a document to his supporters that outlines a rationale for him to run for president and rebuts potential lines of attack — the latest indication that Mr. Biden is leaning toward a 2020 bid but has not yet fully committed.
+The talking points, which were sent to The Times’s Jonathan Martin by an ally of Mr. Biden, reflect some of his core arguments he would make if he does enter the Democratic primary. He and his advisers contend that his long experience in politics — he served in the Senate for over 35 years — would represent an appealing contrast to President Trump’s erratic style.
+“In a time of almost unprecedented political chaos under a President whose first and last thought every day is about himself, his image, and using the most powerful office in the world to enrich himself, Americans are reacting to — and looking for — the trustworthy, compassionate leadership that Joe Biden has brought to the national and international stage his entire career,” the document states.
+But what is more revealing about the 10-paragraph document is that Mr. Biden and his small circle of aides feel the need to sketch out his message before he announces his candidacy. It is, a Biden ally said, “a distillation of his thinking.” The decision to put these thoughts on paper while other Democrats are announcing full-blown campaigns indicates Mr. Biden is still eager to gauge reaction to his candidacy before taking the plunge.To glance at Twitter as the video of the Covington teenagers went viral over the weekend was to see each pundit one-upping the disdain of the pundits who vented before him or her. It was also to wonder about the degree of preening and performance involved. They weren’t merely spreading the word of what had supposedly happened in Washington. They were seizing the opportunity for a fresh and full-throated reminder of their own morality and politics. They were burnishing their brands. And that self-interest was — and is — the enemy of caution.
+I’m not going to single out any particular pundits and tweets, because there were many and because, under different circumstances, one of those tweets could easily have come from me. As it happens, I missed this pile-on. But I’m sure that if I scrubbed my Twitter history, I’d find that I’ve behaved in the fashion that I’m lamenting here.
+My focus on pundits may seem narrow, but we’re stand-ins for a much larger group of Americans, including politicians, many of whom denounced the Covington kids as prematurely and confidently as pundits did. Also, we’re visible, and our trade is influence. We’re sometimes called “thought leaders,” for heaven’s sake. Do we mean to be leading people toward overconfidence in their ingrained perspectives and a disposition to see all of life through one narrow lens? Should we be modeling snap assessments and press-a-button derision? The teenagers have received death threats.
+The rest of the media didn’t behave all that differently from how we did, and to some degree probably followed our example. Newspaper and television stories bought into preliminary versions of what happened in Washington, which encouraged readers and viewers to do the same. And we all abetted our detractors’ efforts to delegitimize us. Witness the way President Trump framed the initial condemnations of the Covington kids as “fake news.” We let him keep banging his drum.
+Some of the condemners counter that their essential point remains, that entitlement, cruelty and racism persist and even thrive in today’s America. That’s for sure. But when the evidence cited for that turns out to be inconclusive or wrong, their position is weakened. Their goal isn’t served.
+Some conservatives are gleeful about how this went down. But isn’t their vengeful joy its own rushed celebration, its own self-serving simplification of a complex sequence of events? We’ve realized the error of the first draft, but we’ll probably never produce a final, indisputable one. I wish more of us had the humility to concede that.
+I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni).[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A seemingly offhand remark in a high school lunchroom set off an investigation that uncovered an arsenal of weapons and a plot to attack a Muslim enclave in upstate New York, law enforcement officials said.
+The comment was made by a 16-year-old student at Greece Odyssey Academy in Greece, N.Y.
+On Friday, he showed classmates a photo of someone and said that person looked like a potential school shooter, authorities said.
+The statement alarmed fellow students, who reported it to school officials. The local police became involved and started interviewing people at the school to determine whether there was a potential threat.
+The threat, it turned out, came from the 16-year-old whose comments had triggered the investigation, authorities said on Tuesday. He and three young adults stockpiled 23 firearms and three homemade bombs as part of a plan to target the secluded Muslim enclave of Islamberg, a rural settlement about 150 miles northwest of New York City, authorities said.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The government shutdown continues to put extraordinary pressure on the nation’s air-travel system, with as many as one of every 10 transportation security officers failing to show up for work and reserve workers having to be flown in to bolster depleted ranks at some airports.
+The rate of unscheduled absences of airport screening agents dropped to 7.5 percent on Monday, down from 10 percent the day before, the Transportation Security Administration said. But the agency still had to deploy some backup officers to big airports, including Newark Liberty International in New Jersey, a spokesman for the agency said on Tuesday.
+The agency’s force of more than 50,000 officers learned on Tuesday that they, like the rest of the 800,000 federal workers who have not been paid during the monthlong shutdown, would miss another paycheck this week. The agency said that many of the absentees had cited financial troubles as their reason for not coming to work, a signal that the call-out rate is likely to continue rising until the shutdown ends. The absentee rate for Tuesday will be available on Wednesday.
+Transportation experts and elected officials have begun asking how much longer the air-travel system can continue running safely.Joseph Howze, the first African-American bishop appointed to preside over a Roman Catholic diocese in the 20th century and an advocate for blacks within the church, died on Jan. 9 in Ocean Springs, Miss. He was 95.
+His death was confirmed by Terrance Dickson, a spokesman for the Diocese of Biloxi, Miss., which Bishop Howze led from 1977 to 2001.
+Before Bishop Howze, the only bishop known to be of African-American descent to lead an American diocese was James Augustine Healy, who became bishop of Portland, Me., in 1875.
+Appointed by Pope Paul VI, Bishop Howze had the task of expanding a predominantly white diocese in the Deep South. Though he was apprehensive on arriving in Mississippi in the early 1970s, as an auxiliary bishop for the Diocese of Natchez-Jackson, most parishioners accepted him, he said, despite the state’s history of racial unrest.“The wall or the steel barrier. They can have any name they want. But we have to have it.” President Trump often repeats the same things when talking about why he wants a southern border wall. “The crime.” “Drugs.” “American jobs.” While there is little evidence these problems are caused by unauthorized immigration or that any of this will be helped by a wall, he has remained steadfast. “I will build a great, great wall.” “You need that wall.” “We can do without a wall.” But as the fight over border security has dragged on, here’s how he’s expanded his argument. He’s always said it was about securing the border. But recently, Trump has emphasized that he believes building the wall is the moral and compassionate thing to do. “This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end. ” And he says a wall will benefit people on both sides of the border, addressing what he is calling — “This is a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.” But Democrats say the current situation at the border was escalated by Trump’s policies. “A challenge that President Trump’s own cruel and counterproductive policies have only deepened.” So who does Trump think will benefit? Over time, Trump has named many groups that he says will benefit from a wall. It started as the — “American worker.” And then expanded to — “Legal residents.” And — “And our vets.” “Our immigrant communities.” “Asian-Americans.” “Hispanic-American communities.” “African-American workers.” “It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need.” How will Trump pay for the wall? After some discrepancies regarding the wall’s price tag — “$6 billion.” “Probably $8 billion.” “Maybe $10 or $12 billion.” “$18 billion.” “$5.7 billion for a physical barrier.” Trump has modified his claim that Mexico is going to pay for the wall. “Mexico —” “will pay —” “for the wall. 100 percent.” It’s gone from — “They don’t know it yet, but they’re paying for it.” To — “It may be through reimbursement, but one way or the other Mexico will pay for the wall.” And — “The border wall would very quickly pay for itself.” And finally, what will Trump’s wall look like? Trump’s vision for the wall itself has also changed over time. Early on, Trump said the wall would be — “It’s going to be a Trump wall. It’s going to be a real wall.” “An impenetrable, physical, tall, powerful, beautiful —” “A serious wall.” “This is a wall that’s a heck of a lot higher than the ceiling.” “It’s going to be made of hardened concrete and it’s going to be made out of rebar and steel.” Now, it’s sounding more like this: “I never said I’m going to build a concrete — I said I’m going to build a wall. Just so you know, because I know you’re not into the construction business.” “Steel is stronger than concrete.” “It’s a new design, highest technology.” “Walls that you can see through.” “It will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.” So, will his latest push end with a wall? There’s still a tough political fight ahead.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+If you have ever wondered how someone becomes the mistress of a drug lord, consider the cautionary tale of Lucero Guadalupe Sánchez López. It does not have a happy ending.
+Born in Cosalá, Mexico, a mining and farming town in the Sinaloa mountains, Ms. Sánchez started working at 8 years old selling empanadas in the street. At 10, she was spending her mornings in the fields, picking corn and tomatoes, and her afternoons in school. At 16 — after two years as an “early childhood teacher” — she got involved with a man from a pot-growing region of Durango. He beat her. She left him. She was barely out of her teens.
+Then, in 2010, Ms. Sánchez met one of the most famous men in Sinaloa — maybe all of Mexico — Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the notorious crime lord known as El Chapo. She was 21. He was in his 50s and married. But the following year, the two embarked on a troubled romance. The affair began with trysts at Mr. Guzmán’s marble-floored, ocean-view safe house in Los Cabos and ended eight years later with Ms. Sánchez, in dyed hair and prison clothes, appearing as a witness at his trial.
+From the start of the trial, in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Mr. Guzmán has been portrayed as a serial philanderer who was constantly juggling his many wives and girlfriends — often spying on all of them at once.“The British always had one foot in the E.U. and one foot out — now with Brexit they want the opposite,” a French legislator, Jean-Louis Bourlanges, joked. But Britain had strong allies among the other member states. Its first-class diplomatic personnel brought welcome expertise to Brussels. Even the French understood that the British were a powerful addition to this extraordinary supranational entity.
+Hence the idea, sold by the Brexiteers to their voters, that negotiating new terms with the Continent would be easy because the union had so much to lose in this divorce. It was even expected that other countries would follow Britain’s example. “Who’s next?” was the only question that President Trump put to the European Council president, Donald Tusk, in a phone call in January 2017, I was told by Anthony Gardner, the American ambassador to the European Union at the time.
+It didn’t turn out that way.
+The European Commission designated an affable Frenchman, Michel Barnier, as its chief negotiator and gave him a team of 60, drawn from 19 nationalities. A former center-right member of Parliament, government minister and union commissioner, Mr. Barnier viewed Brexit as “a lose-lose case” and was determined that the union would lose as little as possible. He understood early that unity would be crucial and repeatedly toured the remaining 27 member countries to brief their leaders.
+Doing so, Mr. Barnier observed “a new feeling of gravity” among European leaders, spurred by the realization that faced with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, Europe must not be weakened by Brexit. So instead of intra-European infighting and rivalry, London’s negotiators met a solid wall of unity and sense of purpose. The European Union became so relevant that exiting it is not an issue anymore, even among the most Euroskeptic governments.
+Some are more patient than others. Last month, President Dalia Grybauskaite of Lithuania tweeted her Christmas wish for Britain: “Finally decide what you really want and Santa will deliver.” On Twitter, Germany’s economy minister, Peter Altmaier, professed admiration for “the epic struggle of the British people,” and more than 20 German politicians and celebrities wrote Britons an emotional letter saying they “would always have friends in Germany and Europe.” Others secretly pray for Britain to finally leave, solve its domestic problems and come back in a decade or two.
+The ball is in Britain’s court, facing a March 29 date to exit with or without a deal. E.U. governments are accelerating preparations to face a no-deal catastrophe.
+There was another, less glorious lesson from the Brexit saga. The uprising that brought it in 2016 was not, it turns out, isolated.McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm whose conduct in bankruptcy cases has already drawn the attention of two judges, was accused before a third on Tuesday of improperly receiving and concealing payments from a client on the verge of bankruptcy. This raised the prospect that the judge overseeing the case could order the return of tens of millions of dollars in fees earned by the consulting company.
+Signs that something could be wrong at the client company, SunEdison, began to surface after its board hired an outside firm to investigate unrelated employee claims that managers were misstating cash flows. The outside company, FTI Consulting, described an email exchange between a McKinsey consultant and a SunEdison executive, discussing how McKinsey was going to be paid for the work it had already done for the company.
+Ultimately, there was an agreement that McKinsey would not keep billing SunEdison itself — instead, it would call back its unpaid bills and redirect them to four solar-energy projects that SunEdison had set up for various customers. But there was a problem: McKinsey had not done any work for them.
+“Acknowledge that this is not ideal,” the McKinsey partner wrote, adding that there had not been many options. “We should anticipate spirited opposition from some PMs that we will need to push through,” he added, in a reference to the project managers who would be asked to pay for consulting services they had not received.President Trump remains bullish that the North Korea nuclear threat can be contained. Speaking to reporters on Saturday, the president praised the “incredible meeting” he had the day before with a top representative of the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un, trumpeting the “tremendous progress” the two sides had made.
+The optimistic view is that the White House meeting with Kim Yong-chol, a former North Korean intelligence chief and now his government’s lead nuclear negotiator, was indeed productive, and Mr. Trump is on his way to resolving one of the world’s most complex and dangerous nuclear weapons problems.
+But a path to that outcome isn’t yet visible to the outside world. North Korea has forgone nuclear tests, missile tests and rhetorical attacks for more than 400 days. That’s an important development. At the same time, however, it continues to produce nuclear fuel, weapons and missiles. It has not denuclearized, as Mr. Trump has demanded.
+So, as the two leaders prepare for their second summit (reportedly next month in Vietnam ), the pressure is on the Trump administration to articulate a realistic strategy for achieving a mutually agreed upon outcome.[drumming] This image of a teen staring down a Native American man went viral. Additional videos posted online — and obtained by The Times — help show what happened. On Friday, Jan. 18, a group participating in the Indigenous Peoples March gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In this footage, we see Nathan Phillips, the Native American man who is seen drumming in the clip that spread online. Here, he was standing after the march had concluded. “You are the children of Israel!” “That’s right.” Nearby, five men, who identify as Hebrew Israelites, are preaching. They are shouting inflammatory and derogatory comments at the Native Americans — [inaudible] [expletives] “You worship the creations and not the creator.” — and at others passing by. “Why are you being an [expletive]?” “I’m not being an [expletive]. You’re —” “You’re being an — You’re getting too close. You’re being an [expletive].” “You’re getting too close.” “You’re spreading hate. “You’re spreading hate. You’re spreading hate. You’re spreading hate.” Meanwhile, a group of high school students is also gathering at the Lincoln Memorial. It was their meeting spot after attending the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally. Then the group of self-described Hebrew Israelites start to shout at the students. “A bunch of incest babies! A bunch of babies made out of incest!” The students, many of whom are wearing “Make America Great Again” apparel, start yelling and chanting back at them. [Boooooo] [shouting] One takes off his shirt. [chanting] “A bunch of Donald Trump incest children.” [shouting continues] [drumming] At this point, we see Phillips approaching the students playing a ceremonial drum. [drumming] He later said he was trying to defuse the situation between both groups. [shouting] [drumming continues] He walks to the middle of the crowd. Some students make the tomahawk chop, a gesture that’s considered offensive. Now here’s Nicholas Sandmann, the teen also caught in the viral video. [drumming continues] [chanting] Phillips and Sandmann stand in front of each other for several minutes. [crowd shouting] [drumming] There is yet another back and forth, this time with a Native American activist and the students. [inaudible] “So you want to make America great because for you white people — go back to Europe where you came from.” “Because we —” “This is not your land.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it’s not.” The whole interaction between Phillips and the students lasts for about 10 minutes. By now the crowd has dispersed. Sandmann gestures to a friend, and moments later, he steps out. [drumming] [shouting] Phillips tries to talk to the crowd. “Relatives! Let’s make America great. Let’s do that.”[drumming] This image of a teen staring down a Native American man went viral. Additional videos posted online — and obtained by The Times — help show what happened. On Friday, Jan. 18, a group participating in the Indigenous Peoples March gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In this footage, we see Nathan Phillips, the Native American man who is seen drumming in the clip that spread online. Here, he was standing after the march had concluded. “You are the children of Israel!” “That’s right.” Nearby, five men, who identify as Hebrew Israelites, are preaching. They are shouting inflammatory and derogatory comments at the Native Americans — [inaudible] [expletives] “You worship the creations and not the creator.” — and at others passing by. “Why are you being an [expletive]?” “I’m not being an [expletive]. You’re —” “You’re being an — You’re getting too close. You’re being an [expletive].” “You’re getting too close.” “You’re spreading hate. “You’re spreading hate. You’re spreading hate. You’re spreading hate.” Meanwhile, a group of high school students is also gathering at the Lincoln Memorial. It was their meeting spot after attending the March for Life, an annual anti-abortion rally. Then the group of self-described Hebrew Israelites start to shout at the students. “A bunch of incest babies! A bunch of babies made out of incest!” The students, many of whom are wearing “Make America Great Again” apparel, start yelling and chanting back at them. [Boooooo] [shouting] One takes off his shirt. [chanting] “A bunch of Donald Trump incest children.” [shouting continues] [drumming] At this point, we see Phillips approaching the students playing a ceremonial drum. [drumming] He later said he was trying to defuse the situation between both groups. [shouting] [drumming continues] He walks to the middle of the crowd. Some students make the tomahawk chop, a gesture that’s considered offensive. Now here’s Nicholas Sandmann, the teen also caught in the viral video. [drumming continues] [chanting] Phillips and Sandmann stand in front of each other for several minutes. [crowd shouting] [drumming] There is yet another back and forth, this time with a Native American activist and the students. [inaudible] “So you want to make America great because for you white people — go back to Europe where you came from.” “Because we —” “This is not your land.” “Yes, it is.” “No, it’s not.” The whole interaction between Phillips and the students lasts for about 10 minutes. By now the crowd has dispersed. Sandmann gestures to a friend, and moments later, he steps out. [drumming] [shouting] Phillips tries to talk to the crowd. “Relatives! Let’s make America great. Let’s do that.”As he said in his Off Broadway show “Unconstitutional” (from 2013, though in terms of American politics it feels like several lifetimes ago), he’s pro-guns, pro-choice, pro-death penalty and pro-marriage equality. He toes no one’s line, yet he comes across as the kind of guy you might like to have a beer with, which may be as much of a plus in a comedian as it is in a politician. Unlike a politician, though, he will almost surely make you laugh, and more than once.
+Directed by Bobby Moresco at the Minetta Lane Theater, “Red State Blue State” leaves the president out of the discussion for the first half of the performance. That frees Mr. Quinn up to talk about what ails us that won’t disappear with a change of Oval Office occupant — and how embarrassing Americans would look fleeing if the country collapsed into civil war: “Refugees in flip-flops and jorts, pulling coolers across the Canadian border.”
+When he does mention the president, whom he calls “a compulsively tweeting totalitarian psychopath,” Mr. Quinn lands an impressive one-two punch — first a defense of the economically beleaguered Americans who voted for Donald Trump, so evidently heartfelt that it quieted the room on Monday night, then an excoriating Trump bit that’s one of the tightest, funniest sections of the show.
+Mr. Quinn is a gruff presence, and he bristles like any comedian at the idea of watching his words. He must know, for example, that a good chunk of his audience will be unamused by a brief riff on how sexual harassment could be defended under the Constitution, even though he doesn’t mean it as an endorsement. But in other ways — like the show’s absence of ethnic humor, so plentiful just a few years ago in “Colin Quinn: The New York Story” — he seems not to want to inflame.
+That restraint is embodied in the show’s excellent design: warm lighting (by Aaron Copp) on a set (by Edward T. Morris) whose wooden-plank upstage wall is painted with a mottled map of the continental United States.When it comes to glamorous drag, men who impersonate women have traditionally had an unfair advantage over their female counterparts. Just think of the boundlessly flamboyant options available for guys to transform into gals: baubles, boas, high heels, bouffants, ad infinitum.
+As for women doing men, what’s their choice, really, beyond business suits and sloppy sweats?
+“Eddie and Dave,” the larky if bloated sketch of a bio-comedy that opened on Tuesday at Stage 2 of the Atlantic Theater Company, helps to correct that imbalance. Its title characters, based on the original guitarist and lead singer of the chart-topping band Van Halen, are indeed men portrayed by women.
+But these figures hail from the 1980s, a decade in which big hair and glam metal rock ruled the airwaves. The professional (and often offstage) attire of the male musicians who practiced this earsplitting art embraced a peacock panoply of baubles, boas, high heels and, yes, bouffant coiffures. And it was a look worn not with Dietrich-style elegance, but with swaggering and sweaty machismo.
+The female cast members of “Eddie and Dave,” written by Amy Staats and directed by Margot Bordelon, appear to be having a high old time finding the testosterone within their characters’ teased hair. Swathed in costumes (by Montana Levi Blanco) that might have come from a Ziegfeld girl’s trunk and wigs (by Cookie Jordan) that could house a family of squirrels, the angry young rockers of this rambunctious play demonstrate that wearing sequins and fishnets is no guarantee against bad-boy behavior.WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — Was this as tough for you as it was for me? I like to think of myself as an expert theme spotter, but today I needed help from one of the editors to figure out what was going on in Amanda Chung and Karl Ni’s puzzle.
+That stemmed, in part, from confusion about the revealer clue, but I’ll get to that.
+Tricky Clues
+Generally pretty easy for a Wednesday, but perhaps it was eased up so solvers could spend their time with the theme.
+32A: “Snake’s warning” has only three letters, so it can’t be HISS. What if it were a sort of onomatopoeia? The answer is SSS.
+65A: These morsels of deliciousness came on the scene a few years ago, and they usually consist of açai berries, a fruit mixture of some kind , yogurt and granola. Never heard of an AÇAI bowl? Solve it by working the gentle crossings.Something strange happened at the coffee shop the other day. The gentleman in line in front of me — mid-40s, suit, bad haircut — ordered a latte. “Whole milk,” he said before changing to half and half, then almond milk. “For here,” he mumbled, then shook his head. “No. To go.”
+I ordered an espresso. Our drinks arrived at the same time and I picked up mine, added sugar, sat, sipped. The latte remained at the counter, the barista calling his name over and over. But the man in the suit was gone. Why would someone order a drink and disappear?
+Ghosting — when someone cuts off all communication without explanation — extends to all things, it seems. Most of us think about it in the context of digital departure: a friend not responding to a text, or worse, a lover, but it happens across all social circumstances and it’s tied to the way we view the world.
+Asking for a beverage and then jetting may not seem equal to ditching an unwanted romance, but it’s really the same behavior. Uncomfortable? Just don’t respond. A ghost is a specter, something we think is there but really isn’t. We’ve all probably acted like this if we’re honest. We’ve all probably been ghosted, too, though sometimes we probably didn’t notice. These are supernatural times.Russell Baker, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose whimsical, irreverent “Observer” column appeared in The New York Times and hundreds of other newspapers for 36 years and turned a backwoods-born Virginian into one of America’s most celebrated writers, died on Monday at his home in Leesburg, Va. He was 93.
+The cause was complications of a fall, his son Allen said.
+Mr. Baker, along with the syndicated columnist Art Buchwald (who died in 2007), was one of the best-known newspaper humorists of his time, and The Washington Post ranked his best-selling autobiography, “Growing Up,” with the most enduring recollections of American boyhood — those of James Thurber, H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain.
+In a career begun in a rakish fedora and the smoky press rooms of the 1940s, Mr. Baker was a police reporter, a rewrite man and a London correspondent for The Baltimore Sun, and after 1954 a Washington correspondent for The Times, rising swiftly with a clattering typewriter and a deft writer’s touch to cover the White House, Congress and the presidential campaigns of 1956 and 1960.
+Then, starting in 1962, he became a columnist for The Times and its news service, eventually composing nearly 5,000 “Observer” commentaries — 3.7 million insightful words on the news of the day — often laced with invented characters and dialogue, on an array of subjects including dreaded Christmas fruitcake and women’s shoulder pads. The columns, which generated a devoted following, critical acclaim and the 1979 Pulitzer for distinguished commentary, ended with his retirement in 1998.“I don’t have any problem at all with locals throwing tourists in a lake when they leave their rubbish lying around or biff it out a window.”
+BRUCE SMITH, the mayor of Westland, New Zealand, a remote and sparsely populated area on the South Island that is increasingly popular with visitors, not all of whom respect the local environment.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Tuesday about the government shutdown’s impact on the Department of Housing and Urban Development and nonprofit groups dedicated to helping low-income renters misidentified the location of an apartment complex. It is in Newport, Ark., not Newton, Ark.
+INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Jan. 9 about the possibility of a “no-deal” Brexit quoted Martin Thornton, who was described as a driver for the Eddie Stobart trucking company. The company has since said it did not have a driver with that name. The Times was unable to confirm Mr. Thornton’s employment information and has removed his comments from the digital version of the article.
+NATIONAL
+An article Thursday about the confirmation hearing for Andrew Wheeler, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, misstated Molly Rauch’s position with Moms Clean Air Force. She is public health policy director for the group, not a volunteer.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Tuesday about the complexities of airlines’ frequent-flier perks misstated the medallion status that Delta Air Lines passengers achieve by flying 25,000 qualifying miles. It is silver, not platinum.“Then, suddenly, I got a chance too,” Pliskova said of her improbable victory after facing four match points. “That’s how it is in tennis. You need luck, of course, because this is — I think — not happening often. Maybe once in life. But I went for it.”
+Williams, who like all right-handers lands on her left foot when she serves, lost all 10 remaining points on her serve after the injury. While she said she would not know how bad her ankle injury was until a day later, she played down the effect of the injury on the outcome of the match, repeatedly giving Pliskova credit for playing “lights out” tennis as she surged back.
+“I think she just played well on my serve after that point,” Williams said. “I think she just kind of started playing really, really good. I don’t think it had anything to do with my ankle, per se. I just think she was just nailing and hitting shots. Obviously I made some mistakes, but she played really well after that.”
+Pliskova said she thought something might have happened to Williams, but that she remained focused on her own side of the court.
+“Whatever is happening on the other side, I just try to block it,” Pliskova said. “Either it’s positive or negative, whatever is there, it’s just not my business. I’m sorry, but that’s how it is. I know once I’m starting to think about that, it’s bad.”
+Pliskova won the next two games to complete the improbable comeback, winning after Williams hit a forehand into the net for an unforced error on her third match point.
+Pliskova, a former No. 1, had knocked Williams out of a Grand Slam event before, beating her in straight sets in the 2016 United States Open semifinals. She had looked on track for a similarly efficient victory when she broke Williams for a 3-2 lead in the second set.On the night of Jan. 10, someone walked into a home tucked near the forests that blanket Nevada’s northwest border and fatally shot 56-year-old Connie Koontz, the authorities said. Three days later, again under the cover of darkness, someone walked into another Douglas County home about a mile up the road and shot and killed Sophia Renken, 74.
+Then, three days after that, Washoe County sheriff’s deputies searched a home about 40 miles farther north on La Guardia Lane. There, they found 81-year-old Gerald David and his wife, Sharon David, 80, both with gunshot wounds; they, too, were dead.
+For nine days, law enforcement officials from across the region banded together to both reassure and ready residents who had been shaken by what prosecutors would call “brutal murders.” Lock your doors and windows, the authorities said; turn on outdoor lights; keep your cellphones handy.
+By Sunday — the 10th day of regionwide panic — they were able to deliver some calming news: A suspect was in custody; they believed the man, who they have varyingly identified as Wilbur or Wilber Martinez-Guzman, was responsible for all four homicides.How Huawei wooed Europe
+In Britain, the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei donated to top schools, held parties for political leaders and sponsored a charity founded by Prince Charles. In Germany, it sponsored the recent convention of the governing Christian Democratic Union.
+Europe is now Huawei’s biggest market outside China, generating $20 billion in revenue together with the Middle East and Africa in 2017 — about a quarter of its total business. That’s the result of a 15-year campaign to cultivate closer ties with European governments.
+Why it matters: Europe, like the U.S., is now beginning to turn on Huawei over concerns that its technology is being used for espionage. The U.S. plans to ask Canada to extradite a top Huawei executive within the next week. European officials are considering restrictions, companies are reassessing deals and organizations are returning donations.
+But untangling may be difficult, as Huawei’s equipment plays a crucial role in Europe’s wireless infrastructure. Severing ties could delay hyperfast 5G networks.
+Huawei’s response: The company has consistently denied wrongdoing. But as criticism mounts, it is working to ease concerns, including by allowing German officials to inspect its engineering and code.Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• The Senate will vote on Thursday on two separate bills that would bring an immediate end to the partial government shutdown and allow the State of the Union address to proceed.
+• One of the bills promoted as a compromise by Republican leaders to pair the president’s border wall with legal protections for some immigrants would also severely restrict migrants’ ability to claim asylum — and it’s drawing fierce opposition from immigration rights groups.
+• According to a report issued by the union that represents the 13,000 special agents of the F.B.I., the shutdown funding freeze has impeded the bureau’s efforts to crack down on child trafficking, violent crime and terrorism.Syfy’s risqué magic show returns for a fourth season. And the rapper Killer Mike hosts a documentary series on Netflix.
+What’s on TV
+THE MAGICIANS 9 p.m. on Syfy. Over three seasons Syfy’s fantasy show about students at a school for magic has differentiated itself from, you know, that other series you probably just thought of, through a potent mixture of killings, depression and magic-augmented sex. The magical youngish adults here, adapted from novels by Lev Grossman, use words like “vibe” and phrases like “pro tip”; the story centers on a graduate student, Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph), and some other magic students who struggle with both magical malefactors and mental health. In his review of the first season for The New York Times, Mike Hale wrote that the series “manages to be more engaging and credible than the usual basic-cable genre drama,” noting that it’s “different enough in its details that from moment to moment you can forget how derivative it is.” The fourth season, debuting Wednesday night, involves rebellion and memory loss.
+DROP THE MIC 10 p.m. on TNT. This musical competition series, birthed from a segment on “The Late Late Show with James Corden” and previously on TBS, returns on its new home network: TNT. The show pits celebrities against each other in rap battles. Previous guests have included Seth Rogen, Taye Diggs and Molly Ringwald. Wednesday’s episode has a pair of face-offs, with the “Saturday Night Live” alums Taran Killam and Rob Riggle going head-to-head before Boy George takes on Laverne Cox of “Orange Is the New Black.”What do you think this image is saying? How does it relate to and comment on our society? What is your opinion of its message?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this illustration is all about.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18. A runner-up from last year’s competition is shown above.
+intellect \ˈin-tə-ˌlekt\ noun
+1. knowledge and intellectual ability 2. the capacity for rational thought or inference or discrimination 3. a person who uses the mind creatively
+_________
+The word intellect has appeared in 180 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Dec. 29 in “Kansas Boy, 16, Is Set to Graduate in the Spring From High School — and Harvard” by Mihir Zaveri:
+From the time he was in middle school, Braxton has been studying at Harvard’s extension school, mostly taking classes online. His concentration was in government, with a minor in English. Early signs of Braxton’s advanced intellect came when he was a toddler, his mother, Julie Moral, said. She said the family would take him to his siblings’ school volleyball games and at the age of 2 or 3, he would sit in the bleachers and calculate the mathematical differences in the scores.Over the past four years, some of the most damning secrets of the professional soccer industry have been exposed by a deluge of leaks that have shined an unflattering light on some of the sport’s most popular clubs, players and coaches.
+Last week the man behind the leaks, a 30-year-old Portuguese citizen named Rui Pinto, was arrested in Budapest, Hungary. He faces extradition to his home country on the charges, which include an extortion attempt in 2015 on a secretive investment fund that had bet millions of dollars in the player transfer market.
+For the moment, though, Pinto’s fate depends on a far narrower matter: whether his team of lawyers can successfully argue that he is a whistle-blower under Hungarian law — a defendant whose actions to expose malpractice and, potentially, a raft of financial and other crimes in soccer outweigh any offenses he might have committed.
+In the view of the Portuguese authorities, Pinto is guilty of extortion and violation of secrecy in relation to his contact with the investment fund, Doyen Sports. They and Doyen have accused him of threatening to publish internal company documents — revealing transfer fees and secret payments — unless the fund paid him to keep the documents private.“The intention of his writing is clear — he wanted to educate people about democracy and universal values, and has influenced many young people,” said Weican Meng, a friend of Mr. Yang’s and the founder of Boxun News, a Chinese-language website in the United States.
+“Before he went back to China, we had a meal together and a number of friends told him it’s not a good time to go,” added Mr. Meng, whose pen name is Wei Shi. “The situation in China right now is a bit like during the Cultural Revolution: People are being punished for talking about very minor things.”
+On Thursday, China’s minister of public security, Zhao Kezhi, told a meeting of police commanders in Beijing to guard against political subversion and attempts to foment “color revolution” against the government.
+Mr. Yang’s family and friends believe Mr. Yang is being held in Beijing.
+Feng Chongyi, a friend of the writer’s and an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney who was himself detained by the Chinese authorities in 2017, said he had spoken to Mr. Yang’s relatives. They told him that Mr. Yang had landed in Guangzhou early Friday morning, but that he did not make his planned connection to Shanghai, Mr. Feng said.
+According to Mr. Feng, Mr. Yang went to China in part because his United States visa was to expire in a few months and he was waiting for a residence visa in Australia for his wife and stepdaughter. They had traveled with him to China on this trip.
+According to Mr. Feng’s conversations with the writer’s relatives, Mr. Yang and his wife were interrogated for over 12 hours — probably at the airport in Guangzhou — before Mr. Yang’s wife was then allowed to go to Shanghai to drop off her daughter.
+“At home in Shanghai,” Mr. Feng added, “she was in tears and asked relatives to not contact them again, but said she would post their whereabouts.”The uncertainty over the fare increase highlights the growing dysfunction at the authority, which has increasingly been subject to the whims of Mr. Cuomo and his allies. For years, subway leaders had been planning to close the L train tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn to repair damage from Hurricane Sandy. Then Mr. Cuomo abruptly called off the shutdown this month.
+Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat in his third term, has criticized the agency, complaining of its stodgy bureaucracy and saying he wants to “blow up the M.T.A.” The idea of calling off the fare increase — something Mr. Cuomo has supported for months — sounds good in theory. The subway is still far from reliable nearly two years after the system descended into crisis.
+But the transit agency’s financial plan relies on modest fare and toll increases, every two years, across its sprawling system of subways, buses, commuter railroads and paratransit service. The fare increase is expected to bring in an additional $316 million per year.
+The authority is working to make reforms and improve service with its existing resources, said Shams Tarek, a spokesman for the authority.
+“The M.T.A. board will have robust discussion and decide on the best course of action in the context of the M.T.A.’s dire financial position, which requires fare and toll increases as well as new, sustainable, adequate sources of funding in order to balance the budget while avoiding painful service cuts,” Mr. Tarek said in a statement.
+The authority’s board has been considering two options for fare increases of about 4 percent: The first would keep the base fare at $2.75, but end the bonus for buying a pay-per-ride MetroCard; the second would increase the base fare to $3 and double the bonus to 10 percent. A weekly pass would rise to $33, up from $32. A monthly pass could increase to $127, up from $121.
+Even with the fare increase, subway leaders say the system is in a grim financial situation. They have warned that without new revenue sources, their only options would be even higher fare increases or drastic cuts to subway and bus service. The agency expects to have a deficit of nearly $1 billion by 2022.TRENTON — [What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Every weekday, from the time when the sun starts to sink over the bridge that reads “Trenton Makes The World Takes” until long after the bustling downtown of New Jersey’s capital city has grown dark and empty, Rosy Herera scrubs floors, shines sinks and polishes sticky stains off conference tables. She is a custodian and a minimum wage worker.
+When Ms. Herera, 50, who provides for four children and two grandchildren, learned last week that lawmakers had agreed to gradually raise the wage from the current rate of $8.85 to $15 by 2024, she smiled broadly and looked up while clasping her hands in prayer.
+“Oh, thank you,” she said outside her workplace on East Front Street. “It’s been too much work, not enough money.”When was the last time you faced failure, rejection or adversity? How did you handle the situation? Does it still bother you or were you able to deal with it and move on?
+In “Talking About Failure Is Crucial for Growth. Here’s How to Do It Right.,” Oset Babur writes about how we respond to failure and how we can do it better:
+We’ve all flopped on a big presentation. After weeks of careful preparation and practice, you feel ready to knock it out of the park. But the day comes and, for whatever reason, every joke seems to fall flat, you bumble through all your numbers and your technology seems to be working against you. The embarrassment and blow to your self-worth can manifest in unlimited ways — and sometimes it feels like it’s manifesting in all ways — and our bodies’ response to failure can even mimic that of physical pain, Bradley Staats, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan Flagler Business School, writes in “Never Stop Learning: Stay Relevant, Reinvent Yourself and Thrive.” “We respond that way, and then we feel bad about responding that way, and so we try to cover it up instead of learn from it,” Mr. Staats said. “We shouldn’t be ashamed of the reaction. It is natural.” Even though most people prefer to process failure internally and quickly move on for fear of causing a scene or seeming unprofessional, taking the time to reflect on and communicate about unwanted outcomes can go a long way in creating more congenial, trusting and ultimately productive workplaces. But first, we have to talk about it.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— How resilient are you when it comes to dealing with setbacks or challenges? Are you able to accept the outcome, process it and move on? Or do you tend to dwell on what went wrong?
+— After reading this article, are you convinced that talking about your failures would make you happier and more productive in the future? Why or why not?
+— Have you ever shared your struggles with a friend or trusted adult, or has anyone ever opened up to you about their challenges? If so, what was this experience like? Did you learn anything from it? Did you find it helpful? Why or why not?
+— What role do you think social media plays in our inability to admit defeat? In your opinion, does social media make us more or less resilient? Why?
+— Can you recall a time when you were able to successfully overcome a failure or challenge? How did you do it? What advice do you have for others who are facing tough times?
+Related Learning Network Resource: Empathy and Resilience, Responsibility and Self-Care: Resources for Social and Emotional Learning From The New York TimesBefore reading the article:
+Do you know where your water comes from?
+Do you feel confident that you have easy access to safe, clean water?
+Scroll through the images and videos in the article depicting the shrinking of the Tuyuksu glacier in Central Asia and its impact on the water supply of millions: What do you notice? What story do these images tell?
+Now, read the article, “‘Glaciers Are Retreating. Millions Rely on Their Water.,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins: “On a summer day in the mountains high above Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, the Tuyuksu glacier is melting like mad. Rivulets of water stream down the glacier’s thin leading edge.” How do the authors try to draw you into the story of a distant geographic region? How do the authors’ language and images grab your attention in different ways? What words and descriptions are most effective?
+2. Maria Shahgedanova, a glaciologist, has studied the Tuyuksu glacier for over two decades. How do she and her team of researchers study and measure its glacial retreat? What recent evidence has alarmed them most?“Given where the world is today, it is absolutely critical,” he added. “My interest and that of the board is how the Holocaust applies today.”
+The Auschwitz installation, the first exhibition to feature major loans of artifacts from the former Nazi concentration camp in occupied Poland, is currently on display in Madrid and has drawn some 600,000 visitors. It will open in New York on May 8 — the date of the Nazi surrender in 1945.
+The idea originated with Musealia, a Spanish for-profit company and creator of traveling shows including a world tour of Titanic items. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, on the site of the former camp complex, is receiving a fee to help produce the exhibition and it authorized Musealia and host museums to charge admission, a prospect that initially stirred some unease. But many Jewish leaders have endorsed the fees, saying they help to underwrite a highly professional introduction to artifacts that teach people who cannot travel to Auschwitz about the human capacity for evil.
+In New York, the museum’s entry fee will rise $4 to $16, with free admission for Holocaust survivors, service members, police and firefighters and public school students and teachers. Leaders of the Heritage Museum said they hope the exhibition will heighten awareness of their institution, which two decades after opening continues to have lackluster attendance — 155,000 visitors a year — in a city with more than one million Jews. Part of the problem, officials suggested, stems from its conflicted identity.
+With the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington a huge success, the New York museum at its founding in 1997 tried to distinguish itself with its Jewish heritage branding. Though its subtitle, “A Living Memorial to the Holocaust,” always called attention to those horrors, and temporary exhibitions were typically about suffering during World War II, the museum’s identity seemed generic — about culture, not loss.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: Three decades ago, the Academy Awards gave its highest honor to a movie about a white passenger learning to love her black chauffeur. On Sunday night, it gave the same award to a film about a white chauffeur learning to love his black passenger. Times culture critic Wesley Morris on Hollywood’s obsession with fantasies of racial reconciliation. It’s Tuesday, February 26.
+archived recording
+Good evening, and welcome to the one millionth Academy Awards. We are not your hosts, but we’re going to stand here a little too long so that the people who get USA Today tomorrow will think that we hosted.
+michael barbaro
+So last night, I was watching the Academy Awards. I was struck that it was John Lewis, this congressman, but most importantly, this legendary civil rights leader, who introduced “Green Book” at the awards ceremony.
+archived recording (john lewis)
+I can bear witness that the portrait of that time and place in our history is very real.
+michael barbaro
+And basically endorsed it. And I haven’t seen the movie, but his stamp of approval made me think that I should have.
+archived recording (john lewis)
+Our nation bears the scars of that time, as do I. [APPLAUSE]
+michael barbaro
+And then after “Green Book” won best picture, later on in the evening, I’d read that Spike Lee, the black director, he walked out of the room in protest.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+michael barbaro
+And that the award generated a fair amount of controversy. So my question to you is, what exactly happened here?
+wesley morris
+O.K., well, where do you even want to start? How far back in history do you want to go?
+michael barbaro
+Wherever you think we should in order to really understand this.
+wesley morris
+Oh, man. Let’s go back to 1990, which is the Oscar year for the films that came out in 1989. And you have a best-picture slate that is full of movies that we still are with in some ways.
+archived recording
+If you build it, he will come.
+wesley morris
+“Field of Dreams” and “Dead Poets Society.”
+archived recording
+We are food for worms, lads. Because believe or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing.
+wesley morris
+“Born on the Fourth of July.”
+archived recording
+People say, if you don’t love America, then get the hell out.
+wesley morris
+And “My Left Foot,” which we don’t really talk about enough, but it made Daniel Day-Lewis a star, and gave him the first of his zillion Oscars. And —
+archived recording
+[CAR ENGINE STARTING]
+wesley morris
+“Driving Miss Daisy.”
+archived recording
+My mother’s a little high-strung. The fact is, you’d be working for me. She can say anything she likes, but she can’t fire you.
+michael barbaro
+And remind me what that film was about.
+wesley morris
+“Driving Miss Daisy“?
+michael barbaro
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+“Driving Miss Daisy.” “Driving Miss Daisy” is the story of an old Jewish lady played by Jessica Tandy, whose son insists that she’s too old to drive her car. So he hires a black guy to drive the car for her.
+archived recording
+Now, Miss Daisy, you need a chauffeur. Lord knows I need a job. So why don’t we just leave it like that?
+wesley morris
+His name is Hoke. He’s played by Morgan Freeman. And over the course of, I guess it’s maybe 30 years, this professional relationship deepens into a kind of friendship.
+archived recording (daisy)
+You’re my best friend.
+archived recording (hoke)
+No, go on now, Miss Daisy. You don’t have to —
+archived recording (daisy)
+No, really. You are.
+wesley morris
+It is a fantasy set during Jim Crow in the South about an impossible friendship that is based in work. And that makes us feel good, because you see this prejudiced woman in a racist climate become friends with this black man who just wants to drive her around. Basically, what happened that year was that Kim Basinger at some point comes out.
+archived recording (kim basinger)
+Hello, the world. We’ve got five great films here. And they’re great for one reason, because they tell the truth. But there is one film missing from this list that deserves to be on it, because ironically, it might tell the biggest truth of all.
+wesley morris
+And she says, oh, wait a minute, something’s not in this category. And it’s the movie that tells the biggest truth of all.
+archived recording (kim basinger)
+And that’s “Do the Right Thing.”
+michael barbaro
+So Kim Basinger comes in.
+wesley morris
+Kim Basinger.
+michael barbaro
+Famous white actress, and says, something’s amiss here. “Do the Right Thing” should be nominated.
+wesley morris
+Never met Spike Lee. She is dating Prince at this point. Spike Lee — one of Spike Lee’s favorite people on the whole planet. But I don’t think that really matters. Anyway, she comes out and says this, and it’s a controversial thing. The room is sort of unsure what to do about this.
+michael barbaro
+And what’s the basic plot?
+wesley morris
+The basic plot is —
+archived recording
+Fight the power! Fight the power!
+wesley morris
+It is a parable set on the hottest day of the year in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Who told you to walk on my side of my block? Who told you to be in my neighborhood?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+I own this brownstone.
+archived recording (speaker 3)
+Who told you to buy a brownstone on my block, in my neighborhood, on my side of the street?
+archived recording (speaker 4)
+I can’t even hear myself think!
+wesley morris
+And all kinds of racial tensions bring people to converge on this pizzeria. And you just have all this tension, and things boil over. There is a melee. Someone dies at the hands of the police. Then you have a riot.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Doctor.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+Come on. What?
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Always do the right thing.
+wesley morris
+It’s by Spike Lee. It’s his best movie.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+That’s it?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+That’s it.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+I got it, I’m gone.
+wesley morris
+It’s one of the greatest movies ever made in the history of American cinema.
+michael barbaro
+So in 1990, which film ultimately wins best picture?
+wesley morris
+Michael, I told you what they were. What do you think won?
+archived recording
+And the Oscar goes to “Driving Miss Daisy“!
+michael barbaro
+And what does it mean that “Driving Miss Daisy” won best picture in that year?
+wesley morris
+That it’s the continuation of a long trend of a kind of racial reconciliation fantasy.
+michael barbaro
+And what does that phrase mean?
+wesley morris
+Well, it’s this idea that you’ve got a white character who typically tends to be racist or bigoted or prejudiced or whatever. And that person is going on this journey, courtesy of this relationship to a black person who has no journey to go on, is just there to morally be a center that this white person can return to, or, like, make his or her way toward.
+michael barbaro
+And just to be clear, break down this word “fantasy” for me. What is the fantasy?
+wesley morris
+The fantasy is that prolonged exposure to a black person is going to cure you of your racism. The black person just has to sit there and take your money. And you’re basically buying a friend, who will then absolve you of every horrible thought, every racist deed you’ve ever had or done.
+michael barbaro
+And what does that look like? How does that fantasy, this dynamic you’re describing — how does that show up in pop culture over the next few years and maybe even decades?
+wesley morris
+Well, let’s just skip to the ‘80s.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+What do you give the kid who has everything?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+Daddy said anything I wanted. Anything in the store.
+wesley morris
+So there’s this one movie that I remember very clearly. It’s called “The Toy.”
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+For Eric Bates, it was the only toy in his father’s store —
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+I know what I want.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+— that wasn’t for sale.
+archived recording (speaker 3)
+What you’re offering me is not a job, sir. It’s an insult, and I’m insulted.
+wesley morris
+Richard Pryor, who, at this point, if people were taking a poll and saying, name the greatest living comedian, Richard Pryor would probably be at the top of almost everybody’s list. He’s recruited in this movie by Jackie Gleason to be the best friend of his estranged son. Pays him money.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+$2,000?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+With that kind of money, if Eric blows his nose, you wipe it.
+wesley morris
+And the idea is that he’s going to befriend this kid.
+archived recording
+If you want a friend, you don’t buy a friend. You earn a friend.
+wesley morris
+Who is initially pretty obnoxious. Meanwhile, the guy who — Jackie Gleason’s character is a bigot and a racist, and at some point has to be taught by Richard Pryor’s character that that’s not cool, and being a father is pretty O.K., too.
+michael barbaro
+Why would Richard Pryor take this kind of a role?
+wesley morris
+Your guess is as good as mine. But it’s like, why does anybody take any of these roles? Because there’s nothing else for them to do if they want to be in movies. You don’t have a lot of black people writing and directing movies. Most of the people writing these shows and directing and writing these movies are white people whose ideas about black people come from popular culture that existed before the popular culture they’re making. It’s usually not coming from actual relationships with actual black people. And if it is, it’s compromised by the idea that there’s only so much that they can imagine a black person doing in the first place. So this idea of behind-the-camera representation becomes important during this period, too. But I mean, for our purposes, it’s white people imagining black people, for white people. And then in the 2000s, you have a very easy, classic example of this problem.
+archived recording
+I got a job today writing for the Jackson Journal.
+wesley morris
+In a movie like “The Help,” another best picture nominee.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Aibileen, you spilled something.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+Forgive me, Lord, but I’m going to have to kill that woman, Aibileen.
+wesley morris
+And it is essentially the story of some maids in a southern town.
+archived recording
+You said to write about what disturbs me, particularly if it bothers no one else. I’d like to write something from the point of view of the help. I want to interview you.
+wesley morris
+Who wind up being written about as an exposé.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+I’m gonna help with your stories.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+We all are.
+wesley morris
+Of the poor treatment they receive at the hands of their white mistresses.
+archived recording
+It’s quite scandalous. Sounds like Jackson, if you ask me.
+wesley morris
+And the book becomes a hit. But it then winds up imperiling the lives and the safety and comfort of the women themselves.
+archived recording
+You tell Aibileen, do I have plans for her. You’re a godless woman.
+michael barbaro
+And what is the fantasy in “The Help“?
+wesley morris
+Well, the fantasy is that you can make the lives better for oppressed women during the Jim Crow era, in which, you know, black people were treated all kinds of horrible — death, dehumanization, any kind of inequity you can subject a person to black people faced under Jim Crow. And by writing this book, which is what the white main character of this movie does, it’s supposed to make these lives better. And the fantasy is that this woman can come in, interview these black women, they will give their stories to this white woman, who will write a book, sell a bunch of copies. And these black women are going to be left to fend for themselves. But the fantasy that this woman is allowed to have about her do-gooderness is that she actually is making a difference and is going to create a means by which these women can be treated better by the white women they work for.
+michael barbaro
+When in fact, in some cases, she makes it worse.
+wesley morris
+She makes it worse. The last shot of that movie is really kind of tragic.
+archived recording
+Mae Mobley was my last baby. In just 10 minutes, the only life I knew was done.
+wesley morris
+It’s just Viola Davis walking down a road — with no job, by the way.
+archived recording
+God says we need to love our enemies. It’s hard to do.
+wesley morris
+It kind of creates this sense that Emma Stone is kind of off the hook, and Viola Davis is on a hook. And the fantasy of the reconciliation is that the conscience-clearing and the act of expressing empathy or sympathy or something is enough.
+michael barbaro
+I guess I want to push you on this. Doesn’t inherently spending time with people who are different than we are make us more empathetic? And why would that be anything other than a good thing?
+wesley morris
+That’s a deep question. The immediate answer, though, is that it’s on the terms of white people. There’s nothing mutual about any of these movies, any of this work. It’s not mutual at all. You aren’t going into the houses and lives of these black characters. And they’re presented as so good as to have no agency. Now “The Help” sort of pushes back against that a little bit. But to be fair, I mean, if the movie works, and it works as a movie, it’s very easy to overlook a lot of these problems. A well-made movie is effective as a spell-casting mechanism, right? You know, you watch a movie like “The Help,” and you’re like, but she wrote the book. She got the truth out there about how bad it is for these maids. And what more can she do? What more do you want her to do? She did her job. I just feel like that is a great way to feel, but I’d love to see a black woman’s version of “The Help.” But I don’t think you’d ever see that, because black people don’t want to tell that story. And the other thing about these movies that’s really worth noting, especially the ones that get near the Oscars, these racial reconciliation fantasies are almost always set in the past. They’re all set during the Jim Crow-era, in the South for the most part, and involve something about the relationship between the white person and the black person being unequal, whether it’s the black person’s I.Q. in “The Green Mile” or the social standing of the black person in “The Help.” So these are movies that would say they believe in equality, but there’s nothing equal about the races in them. There’s an inherent imbalance. And the fantasy, of course, is just acknowledging that black people exist and giving them some lines and casting a good actor to play them is a kind of argument for an equality. But it’s not, if you look at the way they function within the system that the movie created for itself.
+michael barbaro
+So lay out for me specifically how you see this racial reconciliation fantasy playing out in “Green Book.” And I haven’t seen the movie, so keep that in mind.
+wesley morris
+You’re in for a treat, my friend. So here we are in 2019, and just imagine all this progress in 30 years. So this is the year where the movies have just never been blacker, and the black movies you get have never been this good, right, as a class of movies. You’ve got a movie like “Blindspotting,” “Sorry to Bother You,” “Black Panther,” “BlacKkKlansman.” You’ve got “If Beale Street Could Talk.” You’ve got “Widows.” this is coming a year after “Get Out” was a hit. And that’s coming a year after “Moonlight” won best picture.
+michael barbaro
+All having major black protagonists.
+wesley morris
+Major black protagonists? They were written and directed by black people. It’s a huge deal. It’s meaningful. So here we are, 2018. This movie called “Green Book” starts to make its way around the country. And it should be the story of a man named Don Shirley, a black musician who is no longer with us, and the trip he decides to take to the Deep South in 1962. 1962. Like, Jim Crow Deep South, 1962. And he needs somebody to be able to get him from place to place.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Some guy called over here, a doctor. He’s looking for a driver. You interested?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+I am not a medical doctor. I’m a musician. I’m about to embark on a concert tour in the Deep South. What other experience do you have?
+archived recording (speaker 3)
+Public relations.
+wesley morris
+It’s got to be somebody who’s tough, has a little bit of muscle, isn’t afraid of anything, but is also obviously white.
+archived recording
+Do you foresee any issues in working for a black man? You in the Deep South? There’s going to be problems.
+wesley morris
+So he decides that the man for the job is a guy named Tony Vallelonga, a kind of bouncer from the Bronx. Now what I just said to you is the opposite of what the movie actually is. The movie is actually the story of Tony Vallelonga, and how he gets a call one day from somebody for a job. And he goes and meets Don Shirley, who he sees and is like, I’m driving for you? No way, I’m not doing that. And Don Shirley, of course, is like, but I need you, you’re my man. You seem to be the most qualified person for the job. Please do it. Drive me. He consents. Thus begins a friendship almost completely from the vantage of Tony Vallelonga.
+michael barbaro
+The white guy.
+wesley morris
+Yes. Tony is the protagonist of this movie. We spend the first 25 minutes of it with him. And I saw the poster for this movie, and the poster is Viggo Mortensen in the front seat, Mahershala Ali, who plays Don Shirley, in the back seat. The first thing I thought was, oh my god, you gotta be kidding me.
+michael barbaro
+Why?
+wesley morris
+It’s “Driving Miss Daisy” all over again! This is 1989 all over again. I can’t believe this.
+archived recording
+Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Kentucky. When’s that ever going to happen?
+wesley morris
+I mean, it’s a comedy all in the service of making you feel good about the idea that racist Tony Vallelonga can become increasingly less racist by driving Don around a place that the movie wants you to understand is more racist than Tony.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+I got the bucket so you could have some.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+I’ve never had fried chicken in my life.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Who are you bullshitting? You people love the fried chicken, the grits and the collard greens. I love it too. Negro cooks used to make it all the time when I was in the army.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+You have a very narrow assessment of me, Tony.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Yeah, right? I’m good.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+No, no, you’re not good. You’re bad. I’m saying just because other Negroes enjoy certain types of music, it doesn’t mean I have to, nor do we all eat the same kind of food.
+wesley morris
+Tony is like a nice, friendly, lovable cartoon racist. But I mean, he’s nothing compared to these Jim Crow people. You know, these Confederate racists who use the N-word every 15 minutes and have Confederate flags everywhere and will beat Don up for coughing. We’ve never seen Tony do that. This entire movie is — oh my god, it’s a literal vehicle to get Tony from racism to reconciliation in under two hours.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Eat it. Come on. Take it, take it, take it. I gotta drive. 10 and 2 on the wheel. Come on, take it. Take it. Come on, come on. Here you go. Huh?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+I can’t do this, Tony.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Eat the [expletive] thing. Jesus.
+michael barbaro
+So this year’s Academy Awards happens on Sunday night, 30 years after “Driving Miss Daisy” wins best picture, and Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing” is not even nominated for best picture. What’s going through your head as the evening unfolds? I assume you’re watching it.
+wesley morris
+Yeah, I was. I was watching it. I mean, I have to watch it.
+archived recording
+Here are the nominees for best picture.
+wesley morris
+I mean, obviously, there’s a juiciness, right? There’s a kind of moral juiciness. You’ve got “Green Book” nominated for best picture and four other Oscars. And then you’ve got Spike Lee back at the Oscars in a competitive way for the first time since that Oscar loss in 1990 for “Do the Right Thing.” He was nominated one other time, but this is, like — this is the big boys’ table if you’re Spike Lee. So here we are. We’re having a little bit of PTSD, because a movie that’s just like “Driving Miss Daisy” is up against a movie in “BlacKkKlansman” —
+archived recording
+There’s never been a black cop in this city. We think you might be the man to open things up around here.
+wesley morris
+That features a black guy in the Colorado Springs Police Department, who basically, via telephone, infiltrates the K.K.K., pretending to be a white guy hoping to join.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Hello?
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+This is Ron Stallworth calling. Who am I speaking with?
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+This is David Duke.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, that David Duke?
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+Last time I checked. What can I do you for?
+wesley morris
+And it obviously is trying to depict a more accurate racial scene than “Green Book” is trying to depict.
+archived recording (speaker 1)
+We must unite and organize to fight racism.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+Are you down for the liberation of black people?
+archived recording (speaker 3)
+Power to the people.
+archived recording (speaker 2)
+All power to all the people.
+archived recording
+All power to all the people.
+archived recording (speaker 3)
+That’s right, sister.
+michael barbaro
+This is very much, in a sense, a rematch of 1989, 1990.
+wesley morris
+It is a spiritual rematch involving one of the actual participants, but in different categories, right? And so the stakes are this. If “Green Book” wins, and you’ve got a movie like “BlacKkKlansman” nominated for best picture, what on earth is that telling you about where the academy is as a body and what its priorities are in terms of whose point of view matters to the most people?
+archived recording
+And the Oscar goes to “Green Book.”
+wesley morris
+And so I feel like I really understand why that movie won. It really does believe that Don Shirley’s insisting that Tony Vallelonga be in his life makes Tony a better person. That feels good, right? It feels good to see a person make a positive change from a bad place to an arguably good one. And I don’t know, there’s just — it’s very hard to resist that. I mean, for the people who do like it, it is a really good movie. It’s entertaining, and it’s funny. And it’s made by Peter Farrelly of the Farrelly Brothers, the people who brought you “Something about Mary” and “Shallow Hal” and “Me, Myself and Irene.” These guys know how to make a comedy. That’s what they do. And that’s what this movie is, 100 percent — it’s a comedy. And I don’t think most people watch movies that morally. And there are people who — you bring this up, and I’m like, but who is Don Shirley to this movie? People get upset. Listen, it’s about interracial friendship. It’s about healing the divide between the races. How dare you? This is a good movie. And it’s saying something positive.
+michael barbaro
+Right.
+wesley morris
+Why do you want negativity in the world? And I never have a good answer for that, because those people — those people aren’t wrong. But I also feel like this movie is not the solution to anything. It is the perpetuation of the same problems our entertainment’s been giving us since it started.
+michael barbaro
+So Wesley, what is significant about this best picture award? What does it mean that the academy chose a film like this — one with, to use your words, this racial reconciliation fantasy as so central to its plot — as the best film of the year?
+wesley morris
+It’s a fantasy. And it does nothing to address or acknowledge the infrastructural problems that keep the races divided. If anything, the enthusiasm for a movie like “Green Book” only makes — it kind of makes the problem worse, in some ways. Because it makes it seem like the movies don’t care about the way racism actually works. They just want to make racism go away. I mean, let me just put it this way. I’ll put it in the most human terms I possibly can — personal terms. I have white friends. I see very little art about the kind of friendships I have with white people. I have friendships with white people that don’t involve making them feel better about their racism, to the extent that they have it. We talk about that stuff. Like, why did you say that? Why did you do that? These are not cataclysmic conversations. These relationships are about a mutual curiosity. These people want to know what my life is like as a black person. They want to know what my family is like, what my family history is like. There is a give and take. There is a real questioning of the larger systemic problems in this country that affect the relationship that I’m even able to have with these white people. And that is not the thing that you see discussed in these movies. I think that the movies have an obligation to entertain us, but I think they also have an obligation to be fair to certain aspects of social reality. Because people take lessons from this stuff. All I’m saying is, “Green Book” is another version of a movie we’ve been watching for 100 years.
+michael barbaro
+Wesley, I’m really struck that I think it was about a month ago, you wrote an essay for The Times in which you kind of laid out everything we’re talking about now. You reminded us that 30 years ago, “Driving Miss Daisy” won, and that this idea of the racial reconciliation fantasy remains prominent in Hollywood and was at the center of “Green Book.” And you seemed to kind of presciently suggest that that movie might win and that it might carry the day because of the power of this concept you were describing. And that is exactly what happened.
+wesley morris
+I mean, listen, there’s a part of me that’s like, I never am right about the Oscar winners. But I just felt this one. I felt this one. I felt like there was a way in which the thing that happened on Sunday does mirror whatever is happening in this country right now, where a segment of the population is feeling really paranoid and a little bit endangered and is worried about feeling displaced or unseated by change. And to the extent that the people who make our movies are a microcosm of the nation writ large, the academy is undergoing some changes, and it is becoming less white and less male. And I think they’re going to, like, cling even more tightly to things that feel safe and familiar. And this is a movie that feels safe, and it feels comforting in some way. Because it lets them believe that on the one hand, they can say they’re giving their top honor to a movie about an interracial friendship and about racial reconciliation.
+michael barbaro
+Right.
+wesley morris
+But to me, what that says about them is also a fantasy, right? It’s also a fantasy that says, this symbol of excellence, and this symbol of our tastes and our belief as a body, or at least the people who voted for it, really does sort of reflect what we should be as a nation. And that’s not what we are. So the aspiration that we can just make this racism go away by running out and finding the nearest black person to pay us to be better people is absurd. And I think that’s what happened on Sunday.
+michael barbaro
+Wesley, thank you very much.
+wesley morris
+Oh, my pleasure.
+michael barbaroSo now I no longer refer to Bartola as The Walking Petri Dish. I just call her The Fomite.
+Of course, these same trials plagued me, and all grandparents, when our own kids were small. At about the same age, Bartola’s mother also liked to kick at whoever was trying to put her shoes on. I remember being sick a lot, too, when she started pre-K.
+In fact, a pediatrician friend maintained that the true purpose of early childhood education was to confer immunity, so that our kids wouldn’t miss every fourth day when they started Real School.
+Parents, however, don’t have a choice about dealing with toddlers. They have to get their kids dressed, fed and bathed, even if those routine tasks produce shrieks and sobs. They have to live with their fomites and suffer the health consequences. They’ve signed up for exhaustion.
+But most grandparents don’t; our exposure is voluntary. I choose to trek from my New Jersey apartment to Brooklyn every week. I could, instead, claim that for the next few months (when do the Terrible Twos end, anyway?) I’ll be too snowed under by work, too sick or too weary.
+I could tell my daughter and son-in-law, “I did this once already.” I could say, “I need a break; see you in April.”
+I’m not going to say any of that, of course.
+On the day my daughter told me she was pregnant, I responded with a request to claim the name Bubbe (it’s Yiddish for grandmother) and an offer to serve as a weekly day care provider. I remembered the frazzled feelings of those early years, when two young parents can barely make time for anything besides working and baby-ing. My own parents and in-laws couldn’t help much; they all lived hours away.
+Now, I’m the only one of Bartola’s grandparents close enough to take on this role, where I don’t just sympathize with her parents’ attempts to help her kick her kicking habit, but join the campaign. I cherish the opportunity, even as I sometimes mutter about the particulars.LONDON, Jan. 22 (UPI). — The British government is soon to start a “rent a soldier” scheme to give idle troops something to do.
+What it means is that anyone will be able to hire a soldier for a day, a week or even a month to do any of the following:
+• Help out in disaster areas or during emergencies.
+• Work in construction and demolition and other specialized fields.
+• Drive special transport units.
+British Defense Minister Denis Healey said the move is being made because many British troops are coming back to Britain following withdrawals from foreign areas.
+Mr. Healey wants to stop potential boredom and also to help pay for the upkeep of the army.
+A 24-page leaflet gives employers full details and points out the troops are not “cheap labor” and cannot be used if there is a union conflict.“Does anger tend to make things in your life better or worse?” Raymond Chip Tafrate, a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of anger, asks. It is not inherently bad, but that’s no excuse to let it boil unchecked. The expression (and suppression) of anger is linked with increased health risks that include stroke, heart disease, pain and immune system problems. To learn new behavior patterns, first understand the existing ones. “Break your anger down into its component parts,” Tafrate says. Examine specific incidents and ask yourself, What was the trigger? What went through your head and body? What did you want to do in that moment? And what did you actually do?
+“Get off autopilot,” Tafrate says. Learn relaxation and mindfulness techniques, like concentrating on your breathing. Slow down to allow your brain activity to move from the neural systems, like the amygdala, responsible for reactive aggression, and into the frontal regions that regulate threat response. It often helps to practice being triggered with role-playing exercises and something called imaginal exposure homework, where you write an anger scene, record yourself reading it and then repeatedly replay it, practicing new ways of thinking and reacting. It helps to have a social worker or psychologist to guide you.
+Beware the myth of catharsis: Smashing things won’t help. Despite the popularity of so-called rage rooms, where customers pay to bash televisions with a bat or shatter dishware, research shows that such expressions of anger tend to increase anger. Nor can you rely on pharmacology; in fact, anger is not in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and Tafrate knows of no clinical drug trials for treating anger akin to diagnosable problems like anxiety and depression.
+Tafrate has spent most of his career working in criminal justice, where anger is often entangled with violence and substance abuse. Still, over and over, he has seen treatment work: parolees who stay out of prison by learning not to react to street provocations; abusive parents who become gentler. “These skills can save lives,” he says.As little as 20 seconds of brisk stair climbing, done several times a day, might be enough exercise to improve fitness, according to a pragmatic new study of interval-style training.
+The study finds that people can complete a meaningful series of insta-workouts without leaving their office building or even changing out of their dress shoes, offering hope — and eliminating excuses — for those of us convinced that we have inadequate time, expertise, income or footwear to exercise.
+By this point in January, many of us have begun to waver on our New Year’s fitness resolutions, often blaming jammed schedules for our neglected workouts.
+Such perceived time constraints have fueled interest in exercise that is short but strenuous, substituting intensity for duration. These types of workouts, structured as interval sessions, consist of brief spurts of high-intensity exercise, such as 20 seconds of all-out pedaling on a stationary bicycle, interspersed with periods of rest.Gomez insisted to me that he had never done anything unethical during an investigation, but he acknowledged that he “walked the edge” between what was permissible and what was not. “The ends justify the means,” he told me, summing up the wisdom he gleaned from Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” “Whatever I got to do,” he said, “I’m going to do it.”
+In the summer of 2016, Gomez took on what would become the biggest case of his career. He claimed that a ring of corrupt cops in the 42nd Precinct of the South Bronx was terrorizing an entire neighborhood, forcing kids to implicate one another in crimes, as part of a scheme he described as a “gargantuan nightmare of corruption.” At the center of the case was a teenager named Pedro Hernandez. Over the next 14 months, Gomez brought widespread attention to Hernandez’s story in the New York press, transforming the then 16-year-old into a cause célèbre. To Hernandez’s supporters, from Kerry Kennedy to the prominent activist Shaun King, his ordeal illustrated the most egregious failings and inequities of the system. In a long essay on Medium, King declared that Hernandez’s saga was “the most painful, traumatic, outrageous, outlandish, over-the-top story of government-sanctioned police brutality, wrongful convictions” and “widespread corruption” in “modern American history.”
+When Hernandez’s troubles started, he was living with his mother, Jessica Perez, and three siblings in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, a hilly neighborhood scattered with massive public housing complexes. As of 2015, Morrisania accounted for a higher percentage of the city’s jail population than any other neighborhood in New York. Hernandez’s older brother, Jesswill, was in jail, facing a murder charge for which he would later be convicted. Hernandez had been having his own run-ins with the law. Starting when he was 15, he had been arrested multiple times for a series of shootings and robberies, among other less serious offenses, and had spent time in a juvenile detention facility. But all his criminal charges were eventually dropped.
+As Hernandez and Perez would later repeat in court filings, they claimed he had been unjustly targeted and framed by a group of cops at the 42nd Precinct, among them a detective named David Terrell, who specialized in gang investigations. Perez told me she first met Terrell a few years earlier, when her sons began having problems with the authorities, and since then she had had a series of disturbing exchanges with him. On one occasion, she told me, Terrell called her at home and asked her to bring some “Spanish food” to the precinct. On another, she said, he drove up alongside her and her mother and ominously said he would “break into” her before laughing and driving away. Perez said she eventually “put him on zero,” admonishing him in front of another officer to leave her alone. After that, she said, she began seeing Terrell in the lobby of her building, talking to her neighbors in what she felt was an attempt to work up some bogus justification for arresting Hernandez. (In a continuing lawsuit, Terrell asserts that he never had any “personal involvement” with Perez, and his lawyer called the accusations “laughable”; a lawsuit Perez and Hernandez filed against Terrell, other officers, the City of New York and a district attorney was dismissed. Hernandez has since filed a new lawsuit.)
+In July 2016, Hernandez was charged in connection with another shooting and was sent to Rikers Island, where New Yorkers who can’t afford bail are typically jailed while awaiting trial. In the past, Hernandez’s family had been able to pool together enough money to bail him out. This time, the prosecutor, claiming that Hernandez was a violent gang member and a “scammer” with access to large amounts of cash, asked the judge to set the bail high enough to keep him inside. The judge obliged, settling on $250,000 — an unusually high sum for even a violent crime. On her next visit to Rikers, Perez had to tell her son that she couldn’t afford to bring him home. “That was the day that he first told me, ‘I can’t be in jail, this is making me feel like I want to die,’ ” she told me. “I came home, and I had two options. Have the same feelings with him — he wants to die, I want to die, too. Or get mad about it and do something about it.”
+Perez called Gomez, whom she had seen on television. Gomez says he was initially skeptical when Perez told him her son’s story. Would rogue cops really conspire to arrest the same kid again and again for crimes he didn’t commit? “It was too outrageous,” he said. “Too out there.” But after meeting Hernandez, Gomez was convinced of his innocence. “He didn’t have that street look, like a thug or criminal,” he told me. “He was just very family-oriented. You could see that. You could feel it.” Hernandez told me that he was “not a saint,” but he added, “I wasn’t the worst kid outside in the streets either,” and he insisted that he hadn’t committed any of the crimes for which he was charged.Hall, a professor of classics at King’s College London and the author of “Introducing the Ancient Greeks,” is not the first contemporary theorist to claim that philosophy — particularly ancient Greek philosophy — can change, and even save, a life. Twenty-five years ago the French classicist Pierre Hadot argued that the Greeks never intended the love of wisdom to end up as the most arcane of intellectual disciplines. Instead, according to Hadot, “philosophy appears as a remedy for human worries, anguish and misery.”
+Image
+In the last decade, the ancient Stoicism articulated by the Roman ruler Marcus Aurelius in the second century has re-emerged as self-help for the smart set — a way of regulating our passions, doing our duties and resigning ourselves to the things we cannot change. The Stoics are wildly popular among readers (predominantly men) who want to train their stiff upper lips. Silicon Valley moguls, N.F.L. stars and Olympians flock to “Stoicon,” an annual conference of modern-day Stoics who spend a week attempting to “think like a Roman emperor.” There are probably worse ways to spend one’s time, but according to Hall’s Aristotle there are also far better ways to approach life.
+In the end, according to Hall, Stoicism “is a rather pessimistic and grim affair. … It recommends the resigned acceptance of misfortune rather than active, practical engagement with the fascinating fine-grained business of everyday living and problem solving.” In short, an Aristotelian life is not solely about bearing the inevitable, but about identifying the particular talents or natural proclivities that each of us has, and then pursuing a path, consistently and deliberately, over the course of a life. This will make one deeply happy. In Hall’s assessment, “Stoicism does not encourage the same joie de vivre as Aristotle’s ethics.”
+As one who is perhaps not overly predisposed to dwell on the joys of life, I was skeptical. Cold showers have their virtues: They prepare an adult for the unavoidable tortures and small indignities of the day. But Hall’s treatment of Aristotle’s “Nicomachean Ethics” reveals that true virtue, the inner core of human happiness, is a matter of living in accord with “the ancient Greek proverb inscribed on the Delphic Temple, ‘nothing in excess.’” According to Aristotle, the first Western theorist to develop a moral system tethered to this principle, “character traits and emotions are almost all acceptable — indeed necessary to a healthy psyche — provided that they are present in the right amounts. He calls the right amount the ‘middle’ or ‘mean’ amount, the meson.”
+Hall suggests that her adult reader aim for this Golden Mean by first asking a number of diagnostic questions: What sort of moral being am I right now? Am I prone to envy or revenge, rage or lust, overblown confidence or secretive cowardice? Do I find acute pleasure in precisely the things that stand in the way of my long-term happiness? If you are unable or unwilling to answer these thorny questions, Hall writes, “you might as well stop reading here.” Hall excels when she is at her most frank. For Aristotle, there is latitude when it comes to which endeavors merit our pursuit, but authenticity and self-knowledge are nonnegotiable.In those years of reading self-help books, did Power turn her life around? No, she did not. Being human, she read and read and did nothing. But, she thought, what if she actually gave herself over to one solid year of self-improvement, following the tenets of a variety of her favorite books to the letter? Each month, she would follow a different book. So, while reading Susan Jeffers’s “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway,” she sky-dived, posed naked for a life-art class and tried stand-up comedy, arguably more terrifying than jumping out of a plane. With Kate Northrup’s “Money: A Love Story,” she decided to face her debt head on and get to the root of why she had overdrafts on all her credit cards. Trying to be serious about money was so difficult she then decided to follow “The Secret,” a book by Rhonda Byrne whose basic principle is that you don’t need to do anything but wish and visualize to make great things happen. So she goes from watching every penny to writing herself fake £100,000 checks and eating whatever she wants because, if you really believe, money (and men and houses and weight loss) will come your way. It’s surprising to discover that “The Secret” wasn’t written by a 5-year-old, but maybe not surprising to learn that it has sold millions of copies.
+Image
+And so it goes. Walking on hot coal with Tony Robbins. Rejection therapy. Something something with Eckhart Tolle that I, personally, will never understand, but it was good enough for Oprah and Paris Hilton, so what do I know?
+Still. The misery.
+“I started to see how self-help can be dangerous for someone like me,” Power writes. “I was too busy reading books, spouting affirmations and dreaming big to get on with silly stuff like earning enough money to pay the bills.”
+Power occasionally brings the funny; her description of one bad date was a genuine Bridget Jones moment. (“He sounded interesting. He thought so too. I spent two hours being run over by his voice.”) But the navel gazing and the guilt about the navel gazing make her go a bit mad about halfway through her journey; she pushes friends and family away, drinks excessively, bolts from perfectly lovely men and continues to avoid washing her hair. Some of those closest to her begin to avoid her. But all have an annoying way of showing up again to tell her that, despite her self-loathing, the rest of the world doesn’t see her the way she sees herself. As a writerly contrivance, you can do this once or twice; when you do it over and over the reader begins to think, Maybe she skimped on the self-help books about writing.A nicely tended pork shoulder slow-cooking in the backyard, which needs almost nothing of you once you get her going, nothing more than a little babysitting every so often, could be the national dish of my disappearing tribe. The ideal setup — no surprise to those of us who are bent this way to begin with — is to build not one but two fires, one behind you that I call my service fire, or my feeder fire, the pit in which I burn logs for my own pleasure, to stand near, to be warmed by and illuminated by and, on the practical side, to pull hot coals from to feed into the slow and low fire I have going in my grill in front of me. That slow and low one inside the grill — a mound of red, radiating warmth — will cook the pork.
+To experience the winter grilling phenomenon of thin, bone-dry wisps of smoke curling up unhindered to the sky in front and a crystal clean open feeder fire in back may in itself make a convert out of you. But the fact of the chile-paste-rubbed pork shoulder, nestled under the dome of the grill, slowly smoking away, its juices dripping down all afternoon and through the blue of evening, is sure to seal the deal. For me, honestly, the meat is almost beside the point. I wouldn’t mind if you took the easier path and cooked the pork shoulder in the kitchen in a standard oven all afternoon and just pretended to be out there maintaining a steady 300 degrees in the Weber. What I wouldn’t want you to miss out on is the muffled quiet of snowfall. Your pristine worktable nearby — which is just your patio furniture with a small half moon of snow cleared to set down your tongs and your potent bourbon Manhattan, two cherries. That silence. That solitude. That friendly and reasonable excuse to get out of the claustrophobic, overheated house, to manage your cabin fever, to leave the left-swiping, Duolingo shortcutting app-addicted citizenry inside and to go out back — alone — down the path you cleared and tend to the satisfactions of your smoking project in the yard.
+Recipe: Smoky Pork Shoulder With Chile PastePrivate clubs that open rooms to the public take measures to ensure that guests know the rules in advance; most have dress codes and other regulations. The Los Angeles Athletic Club sends its house rules in confirmation emails and on a card given guests at check-in that reads: “Conduct yourself with dignity, grace and courtesy at all times. Appropriate attire is expected. Smart casual, a collar shirt, no baseball caps, no shorts for evening use …"
+The privilege of exclusivity
+Though some competitive hotels (think the Ace) have out-clubbed the clubs by offering an elite feeling, rich aesthetics and social events, they are nonetheless not private. Expensive does not necessarily mean exclusive. “We like being members of a club,” said Jason Kaufman, author of “For the Common Good? American Civic Life and the Golden Age of Fraternity,” which examined blue-collar fraternal organizations between the Civil and First World Wars. “We’re liked and accepted, and we benefit from the kindness of strangers who share our affiliations.”
+“The reason people stay in private clubs,” said Mr. McCabe, the industry consultant, “is so they don’t have to be with the great unwashed masses, the proletariat. I was at the Four Seasons in Chicago for high tea and there was a man wearing a shirt that had the F word on it. And my grandchildren were with me.”
+For other travelers, the appeal is the attention to service. “Nobody is looking for a tip or a handout, and is really not supposed to take one,” said Marsha Goldstein, 73, a retired tour-company owner and member of the Union League Club of Chicago who has stayed at private clubs all over the world. “They have set the bar very high for service, and if you don’t get it, you need to be vocal. It’s critical to clubs’ success to have you be vocal if you’re unhappy.”
+The personal touch
+Private clubs also offer safety, a factor that deters some solo travelers from Airbnb, as well as networking opportunities. “I really think city clubs are going to explode in the next decade — at least the ones who decide to put business connections and security at the forefront,” Gabe Aluisy, who hosts a radio show about private clubs and wrote a book on private club marketing, wrote in an email. “You won’t get a personal introduction to a key business contact in a city from a hotel concierge, but you might from a private club manager or membership director who knows the membership intimately. And with security concerns all over the world, private clubs are a comfortable refuge where patrons have been vetted.”
+Robin Lee Allen, 34, a private-equity fund manager and Babson College alum who belonged to the Princeton Club of New York, moved from New York to San Francisco in 2016 and used reciprocal privileges at the 19th-century University Club of San Francisco, atop Nob Hill. He threw his 33rd birthday party in its red-walled Black Cat Bar, which features memorabilia from the now-defunct Press Club of San Francisco, and stayed over after his friends left. His room, he said, resembled “a Westin. But you’re paying for opening the door and knowing nothing weird will happen when you’re walking around the club in the middle of the night. It really isn’t about ostentatiousness or even showing off. It’s about knowing that as you walk in and out, people will recognize you by name and by face.” Mr. Allen is moving to France soon for a work assignment and switched to Harvard Club of Boston because of its wide reciprocal network.In 1968, decades before zombies laid waste to the American landscape in “The Walking Dead,” they imperiled Pittsburgh in “Night of the Living Dead.” Directed by George A. Romero, it was a game-changer in the horror-movie genre. Shot in low-budget black and white, it was a zombie film (the undead threaten a house full of strangers) with a social conscience (led by a black character, the era’s racial unrest is an ever-present menace). The movie is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
+The spirit of Romero’s flesh-eaters and imperfect heroes is what’s fueling Romero Lives!, a new citywide initiative aimed at celebrating Romero and drawing devotees to Pittsburgh. If a group of horror-movie fans have their way, Romero will be to Pittsburgh what John Waters is to Baltimore: a director whose visionary (and offbeat) filmography is a cultural tourism generator.
+It’s worth noting that Steel City already has two famous artistic sons, Andy Warhol and August Wilson, who are a draw for tourists. Warhol has his own museum, and Wilson is the namesake of an African-American cultural center. But George Romero? In this ambitious and unusual undertaking, organizers are convinced that the horror-movie director will have plenty of appeal for cultural tourists in a city of hills and often overlooked charms.This month, the president tweeted again: “The Fake News Media keeps saying we haven’t built any NEW WALL,” he wrote, apparently in reference to the barrier in Calexico. “Below is a section just completed on the Border. Anti-climbing feature included. Very high, strong and beautiful! Also, many miles already renovated and in service!”
+Amid a continuing national debate about the border, which has resulted in the longest government shutdown in history, many in this town of 40,000 have struggled to reconcile ominous warnings they see projected from the White House about life on the border with their own experiences living in the quiet agricultural community 120 miles east of San Diego.
+Calexico has long celebrated its interdependent relationship with Mexicali, its sister city directly across the line; the two cities’ downtowns are bisected by pillars where the border lies. Shoppers from urban Mexicali, which has a population of about 1 million, are vital to Calexico’s small-town economy and cross to shop at large outlet stores on the American side. Americans head to the Mexican side on weekends for cheap health care, entertainment and concerts.
+“We’re right up against each other. Each city depends on the other,” said Hildy Carrillo, the executive director of the Calexico Chamber of Commerce, who like Ms. Hurtado did not vote for Mr. Trump. “The families are on both sides of the border. The businesses are on both sides of the border. And the education, the entertainment and the culture are on both sides of the border. Punto.”
+[Read about how charities are stepping in to help released migrants.]
+Rather than a border wall, residents here express enthusiasm for modernizing the Calexico West Port of Entry, which they hope will expedite traffic and allow for a fluid flow of business between the two sides. The number of legal northbound crossers each day, leading to hourslong lines, is astounding: about 20,000 pedestrians and up to 20,000 vehicles, according to the General Services Administration.PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — First came the 8,900-pound sticky-rice cake, stuffed with mung beans and pork belly, displayed at Angkor Wat and heralded as “officially amazing” by Guinness World Records.
+Then, in rapid succession, came a series of record-setting feats: The largest-ever performance of Madison dancing, with 2,015 participants. The world’s longest scarf (3,772 feet), woven over the course of six months and paraded through the streets of Phnom Penh, the Cambodian capital.
+And in November, the world’s longest dragon boat (286 feet) was launched into the Mekong River and rowed by 179 oarsmen.
+While this streak of oddball achievements might seem unconnected, they are all part of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s push to get young people excited about his aging regime, which he appears to consider essential to maintaining his grip on power.The comedian Adam Conover has made a name for himself by upturning cultural norms and assumptions. His myth-busting television show, “Adam Ruins Everything,” is in its third season on TruTV.
+Mr. Conover’s episode on air travel led him to some interesting findings. “I, like so many people, a few years ago got sucked into the frequent flier-mile game,” he says. “I started getting credit cards and trying to figure out how to maximize my miles. And now I’m switching to all cash-back because I have recognized what a labyrinthine scam it is. The airlines have devalued all of their miles for economy travelers to such an extent that if you’re just the average person going to visit your family a couple times a year on an economy ticket, you’re going to earn so few miles it would take you decades to ever earn one of those mystical free first-class flights.”
+Another thing he learned while researching the episode is the illusion of the so-called Golden Age of flying. “Everyone uses ‘Mad Men’ as an example. You know: Don Draper taking his elegant cross-country flights, and the stewardess bringing him a neat scotch, and he looks all classy.
+“We dispel that image by sharing what flying really looked like back then. In the ’60s planes flew a little lower than they do now. In the ’30s and the ’40s, they flew much lower to the ground. It was a horrible experience. There was a lot more turbulence and it was a lot more dangerous. People were much more likely to die in a plane crash. But the cabins were also full of the smell of cigarette smoke and fuel fumes because they weren’t as good at separating the fuel fumes.Classifying things is tricky, especially when the things you’re trying to classify are people. The groups expand and contract, and the groupers don’t always get the memo. Maybe they missed that, in certain circles, Latino/Latina became Latinx, or that Native Americans also accept “indigenous,” or that L.G.B.T.Q. often takes an “I.A.” at the end.
+But the evolution of how a particular group identifies itself is one thing; how we group all those groups is something else. And in the United States, that grouping tends be an either/or that sums up how this country envisions who’s who. It’s a system that, at least superficially, doesn’t hurt too much, because it seems pretty simple: In the United States, you’re either straight and white (and so on), or you’re in the minority. In fact, you are a minority. And that can be awkward.
+Let’s say we’re having a conversation about the Oscars. We’re talking about how excited we are that this year’s Best Picture mix could include not only Alfonso Cuarón’s drama about a Mexican domestic worker (“Roma”), Spike Lee’s buddy movie about a black cop and the KKK (“BlacKkKlansman”) and Barry Jenkins’s family tragedy based on a James Baldwin novel (“If Beale Street Could Talk”), but also “Black Panther,” “Crazy Rich Asians” and a smash-hit biopic about the flamboyantly queer British-Zanzibarian Desi frontman of Queen (“Bohemian Rhapsody”). And in expressing all this excitement, I say the best part is that the Best Picture category could be mostly minorities.
+Now, there’s a version of this conversation in which you say: “I know. Right?!” and then confess that you don’t really like half of those movies, and we do battle over what terrible taste one of us has. But there’s also a version in which you hear me say “mostly minorities” and stop listening for a moment. You stop because my math makes no sense: mostly minorities? The Best Picture field has as many as 10 slots and as few as five. There’s no configuration in which the six movies above would constitute anything but a majority. So the question is: a majority of what?Something is missing here, and it’s not just all the people, though their absence is unmistakable from a deserted Fifth Avenue, a vacant New York Stock Exchange and along the West Side Highway, which is empty of all but a few ominous figures in uniform .
+In these New York Times photographs, taken during mandatory civil defense drills in the fervid early years of the Cold War, you can almost hear the absence of sound. All the rumbling, honking, chattering, clattering noise of everyday life has suddenly paused as the city goes into hiding — leaving the click-click-click of a traffic signal or the flutter of a pigeon at Penn Station audible now, in eerie relief.
+But even in the photos that show New Yorkers scrambling for cover in the streets or peering up from the shelter of a subway station, the terror that they’re running from is missing, like King Kong erased from the frame. It’s the threat of atomic annihilation, nebulous and unseen.Slide 1 of 11,
+Stony Brook is in the Three Village area on the North Shore of Long Island, which also includes Setauket and Old Field. Technically, it is not a village but a hamlet in the town of Brookhaven.For those who prefer modern conveniences, Stony Brook also has 20th- and 21st-century homes. Many date to the early 1960s, when William Levitt acquired 650 acres of woodland a mile south of the village center for his Strathmore development — 1,300 properties that were aimed at a more affluent market than the Cape Cods and ranches he built in Levittown, N.Y. Other houses have sprung up more recently on the sites of teardowns.
+The downsides of life in Stony Brook, residents say, are the twin Long Island devils of sludgy traffic and high property taxes. But you get more for your money than you will in neighboring Nassau County.
+“The taxes are as high in Nassau County as in Suffolk,” said Linda Hickey, the owner of Hickey and Smith Realtors in Stony Brook. “But you’re on a quarter of an acre in parts of Nassau, whereas you’re on an acre here.”
+What You’ll Find
+Stony Brook and its neighbors, Setauket and Old Field, form an entity known as the Three Village area within the town of Brookhaven.
+Although Stony Brook was settled in the late 1600s, the historic hamlet that presents itself today is largely the invention of Ward Melville, a shoe magnate who created Stony Brook Village Center, one of the country’s first planned retail developments, in 1941. Working with Richard Haviland Smythe, an architect, Mr. Melville rearranged vintage buildings, razing some and adding others, to produce a crescent of shops with shingles, parking spaces, a village green and views to the harbor. At the center of the development is a federal-style post office emblazoned with a mechanical eagle that still flaps its 20-foot wings every hour, on the hour.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Shorter Show, Same Conan
+Conan O’Brien returned after a long hiatus, sporting a more casual outfit (“This is how I dress in real life — I call my look ‘hip biology teacher’”), a new set backdrop (“It looks like a strip club in ‘Grand Theft Auto!’” his sidekick Andy Richter complained), and the same old self-deprecating sense of humor.
+The new version of his TBS show — which O’Brien decided to alter after hitting his 25th year in late night in 2018 — is just 30 minutes long. After the crowd’s welcoming applause died down, O’Brien joked, “Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. We did not have time for that. That’s it — good night, everybody!” He then squeezed in a quick monologue, a “This Is Us” parody skit with Richter as O’Brien’s worried wife, and a long, chummy interview with Tom Hanks.
+And O’Brien did something sneakily revolutionary in the Trump era of late night: He barely mentioned the president. (Although he did welcome his audience with an unveiled reference: “It is great to be back. I am happy to announce right now that the three-month ‘Conan’ shutdown is officially over.”)“Many people read it as a metaphor for the sickness of Europe on the brink of war,” she answered. “Well-heeled invalids gather indefinitely, for a cure that doesn’t necessarily come — perhaps deliberately. The longer they stay, the greater the owner’s profits.
+“They spend their days gossiping, pursuing love affairs and having abstract arguments that never reach any decisive resolution.”
+That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. — Chris
+Thank you
+Inyoung Kang helped compile today’s briefing, and Eleanor Stanford and James K. Williamson provided our break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.
+P.S.
+• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Today’s episode is about the encounter between high school students and a Native American man in Washington.
+• Here’s today’s mini crossword puzzle, and a clue: Genre for Philip K. Dick and N.K. Jemisin ( 5 letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
+• The Times first reported from Davos, Switzerland, in 1890 — covering a new railroad that cut travel time from London to only 30 hours.You all know that Peter Parker is your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. For many years, that neighborhood was officially Forest Hills, Queens.
+He even lived at a real address: 20 Ingram Street. And in 2001, a few months before the first Spider-Man movie came out, a reporter for The Queens Tribune discovered that a family named Parker was living there.
+Even more improbable, across the street lived a family named Osborne, nearly identical to the last name of Spider-Man’s archenemy, Norman Osborn.
+But that was a long time ago.
+Things have changed.
+A new Spider-Man movie hit theaters last month, and on Tuesday, it was nominated for an Oscar, for best animated feature. In the new movie, Spider-Man — who debuted in 1962 — has a new story line. Peter Parker, who is white, has been replaced, sort of, by a biracial teenager named Miles Morales who lives in Brooklyn.
+It’s part of a trend to diversify comic book characters to appeal to and better represent their audiences.Where do you currently reside?
+Somerville, Mass.
+Where and when was your first puzzle published?
+My first two published puzzles both ran in August 2008 — one in The New York Times and the other in The New York Sun. My recollection is that the Sun puzzle was accepted first and scheduled to run on Aug. 27, but the Times puzzle ended up running before that on Aug. 5.
+How did you get into puzzling? What is your first memory of solving?
+I was always into puzzles, games and solving as a kid, but I was more of a logic/math nerd than a word nerd. I “experimented” with crosswords in college. My roommate actually got me into cryptics back then, to the point where we collaborated on a pair of cryptics long before I was even a regular solver, let alone constructor, of standard crosswords), but didn’t really get addicted until after seeing the 2006 film “Wordplay.”
+What made you decide to try your hand at making a crossword puzzle?
+Again, seeing the movie “Wordplay.” In the movie, the constructor Merl Reagle made it look so easy. I just figured, “I can do that.” Well, it turns out I’m not Merl, and it’s not nearly as easy as he made it look, but my instinct was right — I could do that.
+Why do you do this to yourself?
+I have a highly addictive personality. I’ve gone through a number of competitive hobbies (math contests, tournament bridge, competitive quizzing, board games), and when I get into them, I really get into them. I think that pretty well explains the solving addiction.Ms. Jacobs, now 71, and Mr. Pringle, 80, had each lived a similar nightmare — she in the United States and he in Ireland — both caught in the slow wheels of their nations’s criminal justice systems. They were both dragged onto death row, where they spent a decade and a half awaiting execution, before their convictions were overturned for the murders that they steadfastly maintained they did not commit.
+“It was an extremely dark time in our lives,” Mr. Pringle said.
+On Jan. 29, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle will be at the United Nations headquarters to attend a screening of “Fallout,” a documentary that will shine an investigative light on those dark times.
+Mark McLoughlin, who directed and produced the film, which follows the lives of Ms. Jacobs, Mr. Pringle and two others in the difficult aftermath of their exonerations, said he was “concerned by the fact that a victim of the state becomes classified as an enemy of the state as they fight to establish their innocence.”
+“I was specifically interested in the trajectory of their lives after prison,” Mr. McLoughlin said, “which in most longer term cases have been destroyed.”
+To avoid such plight, Ms. Jacobs and Mr. Pringle — who were married in November 2011 in New York and were the subjects of a Vows feature — have created the Sunny Center Foundation, which is based at their home in Ireland and at a donated property in Tampa, Fla. They welcome men and women who have been wrongfully incarcerated, providing them with spiritual, emotional and physical support to ease them back into society.Were you born between
+1 9 9 5 and 2 0 1 0 ?
+The data says Generation Z is the most diverse yet. But how does it feel to be a part of it? If you live in the U.S., we want to hear from you for an upcoming project. Fill out the form below and send us a self-portrait.✨
+Any image of you. Don't overthink it.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today — over the course of three days, the narrative has gone from a young man in a “MAGA” hat harassing an older Native American veteran to a pick-your-side story where who holds power and who’s at fault are all up for debate. What can actually be said about what happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? It’s Wednesday, January 21st.
+elizabeth dias
+In Covington, Kentucky, everything was normal on Friday night. [CHANTING] The Covington Catholic high school boys had their big game against the St. Xavier Bombers in basketball.
+michael barbaro
+Elizabeth Dias covers religion for The Times.
+elizabeth dias
+And they lost the game, and it was a big upset because Cov Cath ended up losing 55 to 45. And for Cov Cath, sports is everything. I mean, their identity is wrapped in state championship titles and the all-male brotherhood of this Catholic school. That’s what they’re really known for. But the next day, the whole conversation changed. And that school in northern Kentucky was thrust into the middle of a fiery national debate on everything from racism to white privilege to the president.
+michael barbaro
+So Elizabeth, how does this story explode over the weekend?
+elizabeth dias
+Everyone first heard of this when a video popped up online on social media, and quickly was being shared because it showed this group of teenage white boys who’d been in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life, an annual protest against abortion in America. It’s very common for Catholic schools across the country to send busloads of kids. Sometimes they give them the day off of class so that people can go and protest.
+archived recording
+A group of teenagers, some Catholic high school students, seen wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, appearing to face off with Nathan Phillips, a 65-year-old Native American as he pounds his drum near the Lincoln Memorial during an Indigenous Peoples March.
+elizabeth dias
+And you have this image that the world sees of an older Native American man drumming and a young white boy from this Catholic high school, wearing a bright red “Make America Great Again” hat, who appeared to be asserting his dominance over this older, not-white man.
+archived recording (nathan phillips)
+When I was there and I was standing there and I seen that group of people in front of me, and I seen the angry faces and all of that, I realized I had put myself in a really dangerous situation, you know.
+elizabeth dias
+The white boy is not moving, and this older Native American man continues to drum.
+archived recording (nathan phillips)
+It was like, here is a group of people who were angry at somebody else, and I put myself in front of that. And all of a sudden, I’m the one who’s — all that anger and all that wanting to have the freedom to just rip me apart, you know, that was scary.
+elizabeth dias
+Almost immediately, media outlets from the entire political spectrum, from the right to the left, condemned this video.
+archived recording
+Now to the outrage over a video showing an encounter between teenagers and a Native American veteran near the Lincoln Memorial. This video has sparked outrage toward Covington Catholic High School.
+elizabeth dias
+Everyone was pointing out, like, “Look how disrespectful these kids are being, doing these cheers or mocking Native American communities. And look at this entitlement of these young kids who are on this field trip to D.C. Look at this racist behavior from these kids.”
+archived recording
+Newly elected congresswoman Deb Haaland is among the first Native Americans elected to Congress, and she reacted on Twitter, writing, “This veteran put his life on the line for our country. The students display a blatant hate, disrespect and intolerance. It’s a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking.”
+elizabeth dias
+And the immediate narratives seem to all make sense. And at this point —
+archived recording
+The dioceses of Covington issued a statement saying, quote, “We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically. This behavior is opposed to the church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”
+elizabeth dias
+Fox News and even the boys’ school and their diocese, the Catholic Church leadership in the area, was condemning the boys’ behavior. I mean, the school and the diocese issued a statement at first saying that they were taking the boy’s behavior very seriously and would consider the necessary punishment, up to and including expulsion.
+archived recording
+It represented a behavior and an attitude that certainly does not reflect the values that we here in Covington, Kentucky have and promote.
+michael barbaro
+But then what happens?
+archived recording
+We are here to tell you to wake up to the four corners of the Earth.
+elizabeth dias
+Well, then all these new videos start to appear, and some of them are longer, and you see different angles of all these encounters from different people’s cell phones. And the whole thing gets more complicated because there are new people involved. There’s this small group of African-American men who identify with the Hebrew Israelites.
+archived recording
+Before you started worshipping totem poles, you was worshipping the true living God. That’s right. Before you become an idol worshipper, you was worshipping the true and living God. And this is the reason why this land was taken away from you.
+elizabeth dias
+It’s the type of thing that in Washington, you know, you might see them on a street corner preaching something, and most people walk by, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
+michael barbaro
+They’re rabble-rousers.
+elizabeth dias
+Yeah, they’re rabble-rousers.
+archived recording
+The most high God, his name is Jehovah. You’re not supposed to worship eagles, buffaloes. That’s right. Rams. Right. All types of animals. That’s right. This is the reason why the Lord took away your land. Why are you so angry? Why am I so angry? Give me your Proverbs 7:7.
+elizabeth dias
+And they’re, you know, going after the boys —
+archived recording
+They touch us if you wanted to.
+elizabeth dias
+And instigating conflict between them. [CROWD NOISE] And at one point, one of them, you know, starts bringing up the N-word and says to the kids, you know, “You only have one N-word in your group.” And then you see one of the kids, like, turn around and flash two fingers and say, “We got two.”
+michael barbaro
+Wow.
+archived recording
+Look at this fool here. [CHANTING] Look at his head.
+elizabeth dias
+So the whole thing becomes much more layered. Everyone starts picking sides. And on the right —
+archived recording
+Overnight, new video calling into question just how this encounter began. They say Phillips forced his way into the center of their group. Phillips telling ABC News he still believes he was the victim. He initially told the media that Sandmann’s fellow students were yelling, “Build that wall.” But so far there is no evidence of those claims.
+elizabeth dias
+The narrative started to change to, look at this. All of the boys are absolved of any wrongdoing.
+archived recording
+A chaperone who was on the trip says students were targeted for wearing “MAGA” hats and describes what happened. I think that was one of the reasons they were targeted, and I think they were also targeted for what they stood for, which is Christianity. The president tweeting, “Looking like Nick Sandmann and Covington Catholic students were treated unfairly with early judgments proving out to be false, smeared by the media.”
+michael barbaro
+So suddenly there are so many complicated details to all these interactions here that you can sort of see what you want to see in whatever angle and version you’re looking at.
+elizabeth dias
+Right. The entire encounter becomes basically this Rorschach test for the country. People see exactly what they want to see.
+archived recording
+The kid with a red hat, who looks like he has a smirk on his face, so he must be a racist. This was a left-wing fantasy. You had the perfect villains, right? Yep. With “MAGA” hats, white kids. You had the perfect — Catholic. Catholic at a pro-life — perfect law and order suspect, right? You know. They just needed to have super-rich parents who were architects. And then you had the perfect victim, Native American, Vietnam vet. And it’s almost, Glenn, the kind of profiling that the left accuses police of doing regularly. But they’re doing it. Like, everybody’s profiling each other, like snap judgments, without taking a breath, without saying, O.K., let’s look at really what happened here.
+elizabeth dias
+They identify with the characters in this video that most align with them and with the narrative that seems to fit with their political or cultural identity.
+archived recording
+So what happens with a story like that, it’s too good to check. And between this story and the BuzzFeed story, the media’s in worse shape than my liver after spring break. I don’t know how you’re going to come back from this. Pretty bad. Because it’s so bad. Is it that we just instantly say, “That’s what it is,” based on what we see in that moment, and then have to walk stuff back when it turns out we’re wrong? Why is that? Why do we keep making the same mistake? Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. [LAUGHING] I think that that’s the reason. I think our press jumps the gun a lot because we just — we have so much circumstantial evidence against this guy that we basically are hoping that, you know, Cohen’s got the goods, and what have you. And so it’s wishful thinking.
+michael barbaro
+Well, Elizabeth, you report on religion for The Times. So why did it come to be that you were trying to make sense of what happened at the Lincoln Memorial?
+elizabeth dias
+Well, whenever there is an event that catches the nation’s attention on anything related to religion, that’s where I want to be. Like, that’s the story that I want to dig into and better understand the context for this, and the religious and kind of cultural and political underpinnings around, in this case, this group of Catholic students. And for me it was especially interesting because the last time that the country was really fixated on a Catholic high school and Catholic high school boys was during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And so now that that same demographic of kid was in the news again, I wanted to better understand the Catholic school environment that they’re coming from in northern Kentucky. You know, why were they there to march in the March for Life and in this kind of conflict to begin with?
+michael barbaro
+And how did you do that?
+elizabeth dias
+So I got on a plane on Sunday morning and flew from D.C. to Covington, Kentucky. And I landed in Covington and drove straight to the school. It’s not very far from the airport. You go down the Dixie Highway, on a sloping hill towards the Ohio River. And on the left, as I was approaching, there’s Covington Catholic High School. And you know, it’s the kind of place where when they say the Pledge of Allegiance, they actually change the end so it says, “With liberty and justice for all, born and unborn.” In other words, this is a very conservative Catholic community, and those values are really instilled in the young men at the school. I spoke with one parent, a dad of one of the kids who was actually at the March for Life, was in the scene at the Mall, and he immediately used an expletive with me to describe what he thought was really unfair coverage by the media of the incident. And he said, you know, “It should be reported how great these young men did in the face of these protesters who were trying to bait them.” Things like, “The left has an agenda, and facts don’t really matter to them if it goes against their agenda.” So it was very clear that for the immediate community of parents and Cov Cath students, they were under attack, and they felt like they were under siege. Then that evening, I went to Mass at the basilica in Covington, which is the main church for the Catholics in that area. It’s where the bishop is. And during the Mass, the priests talked about the importance of the March for Life and fighting abortion rights. And then at the end, one of the priests got up and made a short announcement, saying, you know, “I’m sure everyone’s heard what’s going on at Cov Cath, and please pray. Please pray for the community. Please pray that the truth will become known. It’s really hard when you see your loved ones up in the media. And we trust that God will work all of this out.” And on the way out of Mass, there was the man who was really angry with the priests and with the bishop. And he pulled one of the priests aside and said, “How dare the bishop apologize for the students’ behavior with that first statement that the dioceses and the school did?”
+michael barbaro
+So even though ultimately, the Catholic diocese there was at this Mass, speaking about protecting these boys, these members of the community and this man in particular felt that the church had betrayed these families and this town by ever questioning them in the first place.
+elizabeth dias
+Yes. And the dad told me, “We trust the school and we trust the dioceses that they will protect their flock.”
+michael barbaro
+And what do you think he meant by that — “protect their flock“?
+elizabeth dias
+As a religion reporter I hear that phrase, “protect the flock,” and it reminds me of everything else going on in America right now with religious conservatives and this broader idea that white Christians seem to feel under attack, right? And that they’ve needed a defender, which really has become President Trump. And so in Covington, with the Cov Cath kids — you know, this isn’t about President Trump, right? I mean, all that they’re doing is wearing the “Make America Great Again” hats. But it is about who protects you and who will be your champion when you feel under attack? And how do you band together to defend your traditions?
+michael barbaro
+It’s fascinating, Elizabeth, that you were drawn to this story with the Brett Kavanaugh story in mind. Because hearing this all reminds me of a story that I haven’t been able to forget that The Times published following Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. He actually returned to his alma mater, Georgetown Prep, an all-boys high school, Catholic, like Cov Catholic, for an alumni event. I think it was a homecoming football game. And when he got there, he was applauded and treated as kind of a heroic figure by the current students and their parents, by the school. And he’s described as being sort of engulfed at this event by his former classmates, these very same men whose names had come up over and over again as witnesses and character testimonials during the confirmation hearing — Tobin, Timmy. And when you talk about this visual of “protecting the flock,” it feels to me kind of like the same image.
+elizabeth dias
+It does. It’s almost like there’s this transition from villain to hero. I mean, that’s what’s happening at Covington right now, I think. Covington Catholic is pretty similar to Georgetown Prep, except maybe it’s not known in quite the same elite way. It’s a bit more suburban, maybe the families aren’t quite as wealthy. But that brotherhood and that cultural pride of, you know, sticking with your brother in the midst of distress and outsider attacks — that’s very similar to what’s going on on the ground right now.
+michael barbaro
+But isn’t the notion of protecting the flock, isn’t that kind of true of any community in the country? Isn’t that in some ways —
+elizabeth dias
+Yeah.
+michael barbaro
+In fact maybe even a good thing for a community to circle around its own members when they feel they’re being attacked.
+elizabeth dias
+Of course it is. And so what’s so interesting is it now becomes the question of, well, which of those groups have power, and which of those groups need protecting?
+archived recording
+What’s so interesting about the coverage of Friday’s videos was how much of it mentions something called “privilege.” What’s so fascinating about all of these attacks is how inverted they are. These are high school kids from Kentucky. They’re far less privileged, in fact, than virtually everyone who has called for them to be destroyed on the basis that they have too much privilege.
+elizabeth dias
+And so for the people of Cov Cath and the Catholic community there in northern Kentucky, the aggressor is the big, bad liberal media.
+archived recording
+And the media don’t pause for a moment before casting judgment. CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers suggested one of the boys should be, quote, “punched in the face.” Longtime CNN contributor Kathy Griffin seemed to encourage a mob to rise up and hurt these boys — quote, “Name these kids. I want names. Shame them. If you think these f’ers wouldn’t dox you in a heartbeat, think again.”
+elizabeth dias
+The left that is determined to attack President Trump and conservative politics and policies and ideals and traditions as much as possible.
+michael barbaro
+To attack the white male identity.
+elizabeth dias
+Yes, to attack the white male identity. And then on the other side —
+archived recording
+So a high school in Kentucky took a field trip to Washington, D.C., and in the middle of it decided to take a racist detour to the Indigenous Peoples March.
+elizabeth dias
+People say, “Well, wait a minute, is there any better example of white Christian power in America right now than President Trump’s election?” And so both sides genuinely believe that their side should have power, that they don’t, and that the other side is trying to rob them of their power.
+michael barbaro
+And in that case, the outcome seems kind of preordained. Everybody will go to their corner, they will be angry, and no one will have a meaningful conversation about, say, what happened on the steps of the monument in Washington.
+elizabeth dias
+Right. Nuance disappears, and the realities that different communities face disappear. Everyone has their own community and their ideas about how to protect your own flock. And so what happens is when communities become so busy protecting their own flock, the facts about the situation or the more unseemly parts of it that are harder to confront for either side, those become obscured.
+michael barbaro
+Elizabeth, thank you very much.
+elizabeth dias
+Thanks so much, Michael.
+michael barbaroSteven Romalewski, who runs the mapping service at the CUNY Center for Urban Research, wrote me by email that “Ocasio-Cortez did best in areas such as Astoria/Steinway and Sunnyside, which happen to be more white than other parts of the district,” a point he elaborated upon in a story quoting him posted on The Intercept:
+You can also see that most of her votes, the strongest vote support, came from areas like Astoria in Queens and Sunnyside in Queens and parts of Jackson Heights that, number one, were not predominantly Hispanic, so they’re a more mixed population, and are areas where — this is kind of a term of art — are in the process of being gentrified, where newer people are moving in,
+Grace Segers, writing in July on the City & State website, noted that Crowley
+fell victim to gentrification and that force may upend expectations in Democratic primaries throughout Manhattan and western Brooklyn and Queens. And the rise of younger voters who are newer to their districts and unattached to incumbents could power insurgent candidates throughout New York City.
+David Freedlander, writing in Politico Magazine, captured the unanticipated voting patterns that gave rise to Crowley’s defeat. “Ocasio-Cortez’s best precincts,” Freedlander wrote, were
+highly educated, whiter and richer than the district as a whole. In those neighborhoods, Ocasio-Cortez clobbered Crowley by 70 percent or more.
+Conversely, Crowley did best in “the working-class African-American enclave of LeFrak City, where he got more than 60 percent of the vote.” In fact, Crowley
+pulled some of his best numbers in Ocasio-Cortez’s heavily Latino and African-American neighborhood of Parkchester, in the Bronx — beating her by more than 25 points on her home turf.
+Jerry Skurnik, a New York political consultant, describes gentrifying communities outside Manhattan as experiencing an influx of “people who really want to live in Greenwich Village but can’t afford to.”
+This younger, well-educated constituency — predominately but not exclusively white — is hostile to cautious establishment Democrats, especially to older white men, and they are determined to engineer an intraparty cultural and ideological insurgency.
+The emergence in force in 2018 of these insurgent Democrats grows in part out of the Sanders presidential campaign. Sanders mobilized millions of voters, many of whom did not want the Democrats to nominate a candidate with deep ties to party regulars and to the major donor community.
+Maps of primary voting patterns in 2016 and 2018 produced by CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and the Center for Urban Research show that Sanders beat Clinton in just a handful of New York City neighborhoods. Many of those Sanders neighborhoods are in Ocasio-Cortez’s district and they are the communities that provided her biggest margins of victory.
+Sanders also carried Somerville in 2016, 12,247 to 9,016, where support for Capuano imploded two years later.
+If the turnout patterns in the Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley districts are even modestly predictive, the Democratic Party may be changing in significant ways.
+Tom Kiley, who conducted polling for Capuano, described in an email the shifting makeup of the Democratic electorate in the Seventh District of Massachusetts:
+Mike did best among older, white, non-college educated Democrats who, for the most part, still described themselves as liberals or moderate liberals.
+Pressley’s base, Kiley wrote,
+was overwhelmingly made up of liberal, college-educated, white voters, especially those under 45 who did not have a history of voting in off-year elections. We were expecting what we considered a robust turnout of 75,000 for the day after Labor Day. In fact it ballooned to over 100,000, largely on the strength of this younger white cohort.
+While the Boston-Cambridge-Somerville district is far more liberal than the national average, Kiley argued that trends there are likely to be replicated in many regions of the country. “These new voters will have a major impact in the Democratic nomination process in many states,” he wrote:
+The desire for change in general is huge, and Trump is a powerful accelerant. I have to believe these new voters aren’t going to just retreat after electing new members of Congress; they’ll come out in droves in the primaries next year. And they’ll be voting for change.
+While primary voters are normally predominately committed partisans with a long history of voting, in the Pressley-Capuano contest more than half of the voters had no record of previous primary voting (24 percent) or were recorded as voting in only one previous primary (29 percent).“It’s getting to that stage now,” he said in a telephone interview. “There’s a lot of people still on the hunt,” he added, but hopes of finding survivors are “very much plucking at straws.”
+While in the air, as the plane was battered by harsh weather, Mr. Sala, speaking in Spanish, sent an audio WhatsApp message to a group of friends, said Diego Rolán, a Uruguayan player, who told a radio station in his home country that he was among the recipients of the message. Argentine news organizations obtained and posted on their websites what they said was Mr. Sala’s recorded message.
+The man speaking sounds calm, asking his friends how they are doing, looking forward to joining his new team, complaining of being tired, and even yawning. But he also returns several times to his concern about the flight.
+“If, in an hour and a half, you have no news from me, I don’t know if they are going to send someone to look for me, because they are not going to find me,” he says.SEOUL, South Korea — A former senior South Korean prosecutor was sentenced to two years in prison on Wednesday on charges of banishing a junior prosecutor to an obscure posting after she tried to expose his sexual misconduct.
+The case of the former senior prosecutor, Ahn Tae-geun, drew particular attention in South Korea because the accusations of the junior prosecutor, Seo Ji-hyeon, helped fuel a nascent #MeToo movement in this deeply male-dominated society.
+Ms. Seo recounted during an interview with a cable channel in January 2018 how she had been sexually molested by Mr. Ahn. Her decision to make public her accusations was an all but unprecedented move in South Korea, where victims of sexual violence have been afraid to speak out for fear of shame and retaliation.
+Ms. Seo’s action helped encourage a steady stream of women to come forward with accusations of sexual abuse against an array of prominent men, including theater directors, politicians, professors, Roman Catholic priests and a former national speedskating team coach. Many of the accused men have since apologized for sexual misconduct and resigned from their positions, several of them facing criminal charges.Good Wednesday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Trade talks in peril?
+Negotiations between Washington and Beijing seemed to be in a precarious place on Tuesday, after the FT reported that the Trump administration had canceled meetings with Chinese vice ministers.
+The officials had offered to come to Washington to prepare for meetings scheduled later this month between China’s trade czar, Liu He, and the U.S. trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, the FT said.
+Larry Kudlow, the head of the National Economic Council, denied the report to CNBC. He added that negotiations would only be successful if the Chinese honored their commitments:
+“Promises are great but enforcement is what we want — things like deadlines and timetables and full coverage of the various structural issues. Will this all be solved at the end of the month? I don’t know. I wouldn’t dare to predict.”
+China may agree to buy up to seven million tons of American wheat. But Chinese officials are reportedly chafing at U.S. requests for regular reviews of changes to their trade policies. And two influential American business groups still see reason to be unhappy, saying China is engaged in “a deep, concerted and continuing effort” to establish dominance in technologies such as robotics and electric vehicles.
+Beijing is also trying to play down Belt and Road, its vast infrastructure initiative spanning Asia, Europe and Africa: Senior government officials have avoided the topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the NYT reports.[boat motor] [yelling] [radio chatter] - [inaudible] [yelling] [radio chatter] November 6, 2017, around 150 migrants leave Tripoli aboard a flimsy raft desperate to reach Europe and start new lives. Many of them will drown, the result of decisions made by politicians far away in European capitals. Most are fleeing violence and economic desperation in sub-Saharan Africa. And once in Libya, they face new dangers like torture and human trafficking. But to escape to Europe and to safety, they must first cross the Mediterranean Sea. Smugglers forced them onto dangerously overcrowded and fragile rafts. Over the next eight hours, the sea becomes rougher, and the raft starts taking on water. Many passengers fall into the sea, some without jackets. The migrants’ best hope for rescue is their satellite phone. They call the Italian Coast Guard for help. The Italians then alert all ships in the area to the raft’s approximate location. They also contact their go-to partner, the Libyan Coast Guard, and by the time anyone arrives, the migrant craft is just outside of Libya’s waters. In 2016, the European Union and Italy made an abrupt decision to outsource rescue operations here to a new partner, the Libyan Coast Guard. It’s a policy with deadly consequences. Together with the research groups Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture, we reconstructed the events of November 6 to show you how this one decision cost at least 20 lives on a single day. Two hours after being contacted by the Europeans, the Libyan Coast Guard vessel arrives first on scene. We have blurred the migrants’ faces to protect them from retaliation. Watch how close the Libyan vessel gets to the raft, ignoring standard rescue tactics. Some migrants are pulled under. [yelling] We obtained footage from this Libyan’s phone. [screams] [yelling] This is Sea-Watch, a German humanitarian rescue operation. They’ve also been contacted by the Italians and arrive a few minutes after the Libyans. Sea-Watch positions themselves at a safe distance. Sea-Watch is also recording with nine video cameras and photos because the Libyan Coast Guard has a history of violence towards volunteer rescue groups. They quickly dispatch their small speedboats to reach victims. “Everything started quite early in the morning. We got a first message about this situation. They also warned us about the presence of the Libyan Coast Guard. They told me that I should tell the crew to be careful and that we should take all measures against aggressions from the Libyan Coast Guard. Of course, the first things coming to my mind are like, O.K., what are their intentions? Are they letting us rescue the people, or are they going to threaten us? Are they even going to attack us with weapons? Is my crew safe from this moment?” Sea-Watch immediately starts making split-second decisions about who to rescue first. Migrants are scattered in every direction. It’s impossible to reach everyone at once. [yelling] “It was such a chaotic rescue situation. There are a lot of different things in the water, and then you see, O.K., it’s a body. So we have to go there directly. We have to be there, now.” “These people normally can’t swim. Drowning is like a thing of 30 seconds or maybe a minute.” “There was so much people in the waters. We tried to rescue all of them, but there were — there were a big distance between them.” At this moment, the frame shows at least nine people in immediate need of assistance. Many more are out of view. Amidst the chaos, Sea-Watch notices a desperate hand that is nearly within reach. One of the rescued migrants jumps in to save him, but it’s too late Meanwhile, the Libyans continue to hinder rather than help the rescue operation. And if you’re wondering why the Libyans even show up at all, it’s mainly to fulfill a deal with the EU that keeps funding and resources coming their way. Saving lives doesn’t seem to be at the top of their list. “There were like 12 soldiers. They were just standing there and were screaming. We tried to communicate with them that they should just be silent. When they’re silent, you can at least hear what other people are screaming.” As the rescue continues, the Libyans turn increasingly confrontational. It’s part of a longstanding pattern of threatening humanitarian workers. This is Europe’s preferred humanitarian partner in action. The Libyans have even boarded other NGO ships by force and fired on them. [gunfire] These past incidents are on the minds of Sea-Watch as they approach the Libyans on November 6. “I think that altogether the threat level in the minds of our crews is very high. The driver of the speedboat said that they are facing big aggressions from the Libyans. They said they’re threatening to shoot us. They made signs like this and like holding like weapons like this.” Suddenly, the Libyans began hurling hard objects and potatoes at the Sea-Watch group. “It’s not only a potato. It’s like a very physical attack on — on one of our crew members, and that makes me very angry.” The threats escalate. “Anybody onboard?” Sea-Watch is forced to retreat for their own safety. Without Sea-Watch filling in the gaps, the incompetence of the Libyans’ rescue efforts is on full display. “They can’t do anything because they have no capability of taking people who are already in the water to the ship.” This man begins to sink. His life could be saved if the Libyans deployed the raft mounted on their vessel. But they claim it’s broken. They throw life jackets, but it’s not enough. He drowns. “The Libyan Coast Guard, it’s — they’re — it’s not a rescue boat. It’s just a warship, but they don’t have the speedboats. They don’t have a medical treatment area. They don’t have doctors. There’s no chance for a good rescue.” Botched rescues like this were almost unimaginable just a few years ago when European countries were still leading rescue efforts. Between 2013 and 2014, Italy alone saved more than 100,000 lives. But then everything changed. Nationalism and anti-immigrant fervor spiked. So Europe decided to stop the flow of migrants at any cost without getting its hands dirty. It’s a cynical solution, outsourcing the responsibility to the coast guard of what is essentially a failed state. The EU provides the Libyans with millions in equipment and training. Italy even helped repair the very ship used in this rescue and paraded it in front of the media to make it seem like they solved the crisis. But they haven’t. 8 of the 13 Libyans manning the November 6 rescue received EU training, including on human rights. Yet they blatantly abused the migrants onboard their vessel. Many migrants frantically jump back into the water, even though some can’t swim. [yelling] After being beaten, this man jumps from the ship. He clings to the ladder. The Libyan ship still takes off, ignoring all pleas to stop. [yell] [music] An Italian Navy helicopter realizes their partners have gone too far and intervenes. Only then do the Libyans pull him back onboard. The fate of those who survive hinges on which boat they end up on. Those rescued by Sea-Watch will be taken to safety — [music] — while those on the Libyan boat are taken to detention centers, where migrants are often beaten, raped, held for ransom, or sold for slave labor. We tracked down two of the migrants who were brought back to Libya, and we interviewed them by phone. These two Nigerians, a student and a waiter, later escaped the detention camp. They spoke to us from a secret location, where they were hiding. One of the migrants eventually escaped and reached Europe. The other remains trapped in Libya. “The Libyan Coast Guard is not rescuing these people. They’re endangering these people in the moment, and they’re killing people. It’s an act of murder in the end. In Europe, we know we can’t kill people at our border, but if Libyans do that, it’s Libya. And it’s Africa, and then, yeah, Africa is a sad story, and then we can live with that. But still, it’s European money who’s leading to people drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. Every European citizen should be very upset actually with this kind of approach.” Europe likes to think it is a beacon of tolerance and human rights. But its actions tell a different story. [music]Together, those pieces lay out what are the three basic options for House Democrats:
+1. Wait, and beat him. That’s the case Tomasky makes. “While impeachment is clearly a valid exercise of power, so is another method of removal, also prescribed by the Constitution: an election,” he writes. Beating Trump in 2020, Tomasky explains, would have more legitimacy among his supporters and also “do more long-term damage to the Republican Party.”
+2. Impeachment now. The House of Representatives, Appelbaum writes, “must immediately open a formal impeachment inquiry into President Trump, and bring the debate out of the court of public opinion and into Congress, where it belongs.” He argues that impeachment will increase the chances that Republicans eventually abandon Trump, by focusing attention on his misdeeds.
+3. Wait, because it increases the chances of removal. This third option — the one I prefer and that Democratic leaders seem to be pursuing — falls in between the two others.
+I’m not comfortable with Tomasky’s idea of waiting until 2020 (although I agree with him about the benefits of doing so), because I think it ignores all the potential damage Trump could do over the next two years as president.
+And I’m not persuaded by Appelbaum’s case that the start of impeachment hearings will sway Republicans. Given the current political polarization, I think impeachment is more likely to unite Republicans behind Trump. The process will inevitably focus the public on the actions of House Democrats like Nancy Pelosi. Faced with a choice between Team Trump and Team Pelosi, Republican voters and senators would choose the president.Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., announced on Wednesday that he was entering the Democratic presidential primary, embarking on a long-shot campaign that may test the appeal of a youthful, Midwestern profile over more traditional qualifications for the presidency.
+In an email to potential supporters, Mr. Buttigieg (he pronounces it BOOT-edge-edge) said he was forming an exploratory committee and cast himself as a candidate of the future, stressing his generational identity and calling for policies “untethered to the politics of the past” on issues like climate and economic opportunity.
+“What will America look like in 2054, when I reach the age of the current president?” Mr. Buttigieg said. “How will we look back on 2020?”As a self-described political conservative, Reagan Larson might seem to be a natural fit for the Republican Party. The 19-year-old college student from South Dakota grew up in a Catholic household that objected to same-sex marriage, and she remains firmly opposed to abortion.
+But in many ways, that is where the ideological similarities end. Ms. Larson, a dual major in biology and Spanish at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., does not oppose the legalization of marriage equality. She views climate change as undeniable, believes “immigrants make our country richer,” and disagrees with her parents on the need for a border wall.
+Ms. Larson is part of Generation Z, one of the most ethnically diverse and progressive age groups in American history. People born after 1996 tend to espouse similar views to the age cohort just ahead of them, the Millennials, but they are far more open to social change than older generations have been, according to the findings of a new report by the Pew Research Center. The findings mark a shift that could substantially reshape the nation’s political and economic landscape.MELBOURNE, Australia — Time did not freeze, like a televised sporting event placed on pause, during the 13 months Serena Williams spent away from tennis. The absence of Williams, who has averaged one title in every three majors played, allowed younger players to wade deeper into the draws and grow their games and their confidence.
+Karolina Pliskova, 26, was already on the rise when a pregnant Williams took her leave from tennis after winning the 2017 Australian Open. The previous year, Pliskova had graced the final of the United States Open, beating Williams on the way. But it was the only Grand Slam event where she advanced past the third round in 2016.
+With Williams out of the picture from February 2017 to March 2018, the ascent of Pliskova continued apace. Advancing to the quarterfinals or better in 15 of 20 tournaments in 2017, Pliskova assumed the women’s world No. 1 ranking that July, two months after Williams’s last stay there.
+In the eight majors contested since Williams’s last Grand Slam title, at the 2017 Australian Open, Pliskova has made it to the quarterfinals or better in five. With her 6-4, 4-6, 7-5 defeat of Williams on Wednesday in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open on Wednesday, Pliskova avenged a two-set quarterfinal loss to Williams at last year’s U.S. Open.Slide 1 of 24,
+A 1906 New Orleans house with four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms is on the market for $1.365 million.New Orleans | $1.365 Million
+A 1906 Mediterranean-style house with four bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms
+This Uptown home is four and half blocks from Audubon Park and the streetcar line on St. Charles Avenue. Freret Street’s revitalized restaurants, bars and art market are within easy walking distance, as are the campuses of Tulane University and Loyola University New Orleans.
+Size: 4,073 square feet
+Price per square foot: $335
+Indoors: In their 32 years of residence, the owners have made many improvements, beginning with the enclosure of an upstairs back porch to create a master-bedroom suite in the late 1980s and continuing through to the renovation of a guest bathroom in 2016. Within the last five years, the house has received fresh paint and storm-resistant, energy-efficient windows, and a cistern has been installed and connected to the irrigation system to maintain the extensively landscaped property.
+Among the home’s greatest charms are its many original leaded-glass windows. Examples fill and surround the front door and are positioned above a window seat in the foyer and along the wall next to the staircase. The windows also flank the living room fireplace and rise as high as the hip-roofed red-tile dormer.
+Turning left from the front door and passing through glass-paned pocket doors you enter the living room, with its 11-foot ceilings, fireplace with gas starter and hardwood floors. Another pair of pocket doors opens to the formal dining room, which also has a fireplace. Beyond is an eat-in kitchen with Saltillo tile floors, an upholstered banquette, extensive storage and ceilings that top nine feet. There is a powder room under the staircase.Eric Garcetti: I have a good relationship with the school district and the union knows me and trusts me, so it seemed clear that I could do things other people weren’t able to do. The depth of the lack of the communication took my breath away. Everybody had an excuse to say, ‘We’re not going to sit down.’ There’s plenty of blame, but I think I can help people get to know each other. In August, I started these conversations and then got more involved in December, saying you should be sitting down with each other and offered City Hall or even my office. There was just a lot of mistrust at the beginning. I laid down some ground rules: no surprises, positivity, confidentiality and a commitment — nobody was going to walk away from the table.
+You called this a “new day” for public schools in Los Angeles — do you think this will significantly change the public’s attitude about public education?
+Absolutely. For 10 or 15 years, it’s just been: Are you pro-charter or pro-union? There hasn’t been a culture of cooperation. I said from all along, I will only stay involved if we move beyond that.
+The final round of negotiations stretched into dawn Tuesday morning. Did you ever think a deal might not happen?
+It almost all fell apart this morning. It had gone over the cliff. We had done all the other items — I think there were 27 other issues that had been resolved by then. But we still had a disagreement about the class size cap. The teachers have for so long seen class size as an unachievable, never-enforced ideal. Superintendent Austin Beutner really wanted to hold on to the prerogative to change it if he needed to. I said it was time for a new day on this, because I think it’s the right thing to do.CARACAS, Venezuela — President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela faced the most direct challenge to his hold on power on Wednesday, when an opposition leader stood in the streets of the capital and declared himself the legitimate president, cheered on by thousands of supporters and a growing number of governments, including the Trump administration.
+Mr. Maduro responded furiously by cutting diplomatic ties with the United States. He gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave the country, ordering them out with a derisive “be gone!” and accusing the Trump administration of plotting to overthrow him. The United States said it would ignore the deadline.
+The fast-moving developments convulsed Venezuela, a once-prosperous country that has been devastated by years of political repression, economic mismanagement and corruption. But they also appeared to give new momentum to the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old National Assembly leader who stepped onto the national stage just recently.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today — over the course of three days, the narrative has gone from a young man in a “MAGA” hat harassing an older Native American veteran to a pick-your-side story where who holds power and who’s at fault are all up for debate. What can actually be said about what happened on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial? It’s Wednesday, January 21st.
+elizabeth dias
+In Covington, Kentucky, everything was normal on Friday night. [CHANTING] The Covington Catholic high school boys had their big game against the St. Xavier Bombers in basketball.
+michael barbaro
+Elizabeth Dias covers religion for The Times.
+elizabeth dias
+And they lost the game, and it was a big upset because Cov Cath ended up losing 55 to 45. And for Cov Cath, sports is everything. I mean, their identity is wrapped in state championship titles and the all-male brotherhood of this Catholic school. That’s what they’re really known for. But the next day, the whole conversation changed. And that school in northern Kentucky was thrust into the middle of a fiery national debate on everything from racism to white privilege to the president.
+michael barbaro
+So Elizabeth, how does this story explode over the weekend?
+elizabeth dias
+Everyone first heard of this when a video popped up online on social media, and quickly was being shared because it showed this group of teenage white boys who’d been in Washington, D.C., for the March for Life, an annual protest against abortion in America. It’s very common for Catholic schools across the country to send busloads of kids. Sometimes they give them the day off of class so that people can go and protest.
+archived recording
+A group of teenagers, some Catholic high school students, seen wearing “Make America Great Again” hats, appearing to face off with Nathan Phillips, a 65-year-old Native American as he pounds his drum near the Lincoln Memorial during an Indigenous Peoples March.
+elizabeth dias
+And you have this image that the world sees of an older Native American man drumming and a young white boy from this Catholic high school, wearing a bright red “Make America Great Again” hat, who appeared to be asserting his dominance over this older, not-white man.
+archived recording (nathan phillips)
+When I was there and I was standing there and I seen that group of people in front of me, and I seen the angry faces and all of that, I realized I had put myself in a really dangerous situation, you know.
+elizabeth dias
+The white boy is not moving, and this older Native American man continues to drum.
+archived recording (nathan phillips)
+It was like, here is a group of people who were angry at somebody else, and I put myself in front of that. And all of a sudden, I’m the one who’s — all that anger and all that wanting to have the freedom to just rip me apart, you know, that was scary.
+elizabeth dias
+Almost immediately, media outlets from the entire political spectrum, from the right to the left, condemned this video.
+archived recording
+Now to the outrage over a video showing an encounter between teenagers and a Native American veteran near the Lincoln Memorial. This video has sparked outrage toward Covington Catholic High School.
+elizabeth dias
+Everyone was pointing out, like, “Look how disrespectful these kids are being, doing these cheers or mocking Native American communities. And look at this entitlement of these young kids who are on this field trip to D.C. Look at this racist behavior from these kids.”
+archived recording
+Newly elected congresswoman Deb Haaland is among the first Native Americans elected to Congress, and she reacted on Twitter, writing, “This veteran put his life on the line for our country. The students display a blatant hate, disrespect and intolerance. It’s a signal of how common decency has decayed under this administration. Heartbreaking.”
+elizabeth dias
+And the immediate narratives seem to all make sense. And at this point —
+archived recording
+The dioceses of Covington issued a statement saying, quote, “We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students towards Nathan Phillips specifically. This behavior is opposed to the church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person.”
+elizabeth dias
+Fox News and even the boys’ school and their diocese, the Catholic Church leadership in the area, was condemning the boys’ behavior. I mean, the school and the diocese issued a statement at first saying that they were taking the boy’s behavior very seriously and would consider the necessary punishment, up to and including expulsion.
+archived recording
+It represented a behavior and an attitude that certainly does not reflect the values that we here in Covington, Kentucky have and promote.
+michael barbaro
+But then what happens?
+archived recording
+We are here to tell you to wake up to the four corners of the Earth.
+elizabeth dias
+Well, then all these new videos start to appear, and some of them are longer, and you see different angles of all these encounters from different people’s cell phones. And the whole thing gets more complicated because there are new people involved. There’s this small group of African-American men who identify with the Hebrew Israelites.
+archived recording
+Before you started worshipping totem poles, you was worshipping the true living God. That’s right. Before you become an idol worshipper, you was worshipping the true and living God. And this is the reason why this land was taken away from you.
+elizabeth dias
+It’s the type of thing that in Washington, you know, you might see them on a street corner preaching something, and most people walk by, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
+michael barbaro
+They’re rabble-rousers.
+elizabeth dias
+Yeah, they’re rabble-rousers.
+archived recording
+The most high God, his name is Jehovah. You’re not supposed to worship eagles, buffaloes. That’s right. Rams. Right. All types of animals. That’s right. This is the reason why the Lord took away your land. Why are you so angry? Why am I so angry? Give me your Proverbs 7:7.
+elizabeth dias
+And they’re, you know, going after the boys —
+archived recording
+They touch us if you wanted to.
+elizabeth dias
+And instigating conflict between them. [CROWD NOISE] And at one point, one of them, you know, starts bringing up the N-word and says to the kids, you know, “You only have one N-word in your group.” And then you see one of the kids, like, turn around and flash two fingers and say, “We got two.”
+michael barbaro
+Wow.
+archived recording
+Look at this fool here. [CHANTING] Look at his head.
+elizabeth dias
+So the whole thing becomes much more layered. Everyone starts picking sides. And on the right —
+archived recording
+Overnight, new video calling into question just how this encounter began. They say Phillips forced his way into the center of their group. Phillips telling ABC News he still believes he was the victim. He initially told the media that Sandmann’s fellow students were yelling, “Build that wall.” But so far there is no evidence of those claims.
+elizabeth dias
+The narrative started to change to, look at this. All of the boys are absolved of any wrongdoing.
+archived recording
+A chaperone who was on the trip says students were targeted for wearing “MAGA” hats and describes what happened. I think that was one of the reasons they were targeted, and I think they were also targeted for what they stood for, which is Christianity. The president tweeting, “Looking like Nick Sandmann and Covington Catholic students were treated unfairly with early judgments proving out to be false, smeared by the media.”
+michael barbaro
+So suddenly there are so many complicated details to all these interactions here that you can sort of see what you want to see in whatever angle and version you’re looking at.
+elizabeth dias
+Right. The entire encounter becomes basically this Rorschach test for the country. People see exactly what they want to see.
+archived recording
+The kid with a red hat, who looks like he has a smirk on his face, so he must be a racist. This was a left-wing fantasy. You had the perfect villains, right? Yep. With “MAGA” hats, white kids. You had the perfect — Catholic. Catholic at a pro-life — perfect law and order suspect, right? You know. They just needed to have super-rich parents who were architects. And then you had the perfect victim, Native American, Vietnam vet. And it’s almost, Glenn, the kind of profiling that the left accuses police of doing regularly. But they’re doing it. Like, everybody’s profiling each other, like snap judgments, without taking a breath, without saying, O.K., let’s look at really what happened here.
+elizabeth dias
+They identify with the characters in this video that most align with them and with the narrative that seems to fit with their political or cultural identity.
+archived recording
+So what happens with a story like that, it’s too good to check. And between this story and the BuzzFeed story, the media’s in worse shape than my liver after spring break. I don’t know how you’re going to come back from this. Pretty bad. Because it’s so bad. Is it that we just instantly say, “That’s what it is,” based on what we see in that moment, and then have to walk stuff back when it turns out we’re wrong? Why is that? Why do we keep making the same mistake? Because we’re desperate to get Trump out of office. [LAUGHING] I think that that’s the reason. I think our press jumps the gun a lot because we just — we have so much circumstantial evidence against this guy that we basically are hoping that, you know, Cohen’s got the goods, and what have you. And so it’s wishful thinking.
+michael barbaro
+Well, Elizabeth, you report on religion for The Times. So why did it come to be that you were trying to make sense of what happened at the Lincoln Memorial?
+elizabeth dias
+Well, whenever there is an event that catches the nation’s attention on anything related to religion, that’s where I want to be. Like, that’s the story that I want to dig into and better understand the context for this, and the religious and kind of cultural and political underpinnings around, in this case, this group of Catholic students. And for me it was especially interesting because the last time that the country was really fixated on a Catholic high school and Catholic high school boys was during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And so now that that same demographic of kid was in the news again, I wanted to better understand the Catholic school environment that they’re coming from in northern Kentucky. You know, why were they there to march in the March for Life and in this kind of conflict to begin with?
+michael barbaro
+And how did you do that?
+elizabeth dias
+So I got on a plane on Sunday morning and flew from D.C. to Covington, Kentucky. And I landed in Covington and drove straight to the school. It’s not very far from the airport. You go down the Dixie Highway, on a sloping hill towards the Ohio River. And on the left, as I was approaching, there’s Covington Catholic High School. And you know, it’s the kind of place where when they say the Pledge of Allegiance, they actually change the end so it says, “With liberty and justice for all, born and unborn.” In other words, this is a very conservative Catholic community, and those values are really instilled in the young men at the school. I spoke with one parent, a dad of one of the kids who was actually at the March for Life, was in the scene at the Mall, and he immediately used an expletive with me to describe what he thought was really unfair coverage by the media of the incident. And he said, you know, “It should be reported how great these young men did in the face of these protesters who were trying to bait them.” Things like, “The left has an agenda, and facts don’t really matter to them if it goes against their agenda.” So it was very clear that for the immediate community of parents and Cov Cath students, they were under attack, and they felt like they were under siege. Then that evening, I went to Mass at the basilica in Covington, which is the main church for the Catholics in that area. It’s where the bishop is. And during the Mass, the priests talked about the importance of the March for Life and fighting abortion rights. And then at the end, one of the priests got up and made a short announcement, saying, you know, “I’m sure everyone’s heard what’s going on at Cov Cath, and please pray. Please pray for the community. Please pray that the truth will become known. It’s really hard when you see your loved ones up in the media. And we trust that God will work all of this out.” And on the way out of Mass, there was the man who was really angry with the priests and with the bishop. And he pulled one of the priests aside and said, “How dare the bishop apologize for the students’ behavior with that first statement that the dioceses and the school did?”
+michael barbaro
+So even though ultimately, the Catholic diocese there was at this Mass, speaking about protecting these boys, these members of the community and this man in particular felt that the church had betrayed these families and this town by ever questioning them in the first place.
+elizabeth dias
+Yes. And the dad told me, “We trust the school and we trust the dioceses that they will protect their flock.”
+michael barbaro
+And what do you think he meant by that — “protect their flock“?
+elizabeth dias
+As a religion reporter I hear that phrase, “protect the flock,” and it reminds me of everything else going on in America right now with religious conservatives and this broader idea that white Christians seem to feel under attack, right? And that they’ve needed a defender, which really has become President Trump. And so in Covington, with the Cov Cath kids — you know, this isn’t about President Trump, right? I mean, all that they’re doing is wearing the “Make America Great Again” hats. But it is about who protects you and who will be your champion when you feel under attack? And how do you band together to defend your traditions?
+michael barbaro
+It’s fascinating, Elizabeth, that you were drawn to this story with the Brett Kavanaugh story in mind. Because hearing this all reminds me of a story that I haven’t been able to forget that The Times published following Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court justice. He actually returned to his alma mater, Georgetown Prep, an all-boys high school, Catholic, like Cov Catholic, for an alumni event. I think it was a homecoming football game. And when he got there, he was applauded and treated as kind of a heroic figure by the current students and their parents, by the school. And he’s described as being sort of engulfed at this event by his former classmates, these very same men whose names had come up over and over again as witnesses and character testimonials during the confirmation hearing — Tobin, Timmy. And when you talk about this visual of “protecting the flock,” it feels to me kind of like the same image.
+elizabeth dias
+It does. It’s almost like there’s this transition from villain to hero. I mean, that’s what’s happening at Covington right now, I think. Covington Catholic is pretty similar to Georgetown Prep, except maybe it’s not known in quite the same elite way. It’s a bit more suburban, maybe the families aren’t quite as wealthy. But that brotherhood and that cultural pride of, you know, sticking with your brother in the midst of distress and outsider attacks — that’s very similar to what’s going on on the ground right now.
+michael barbaro
+But isn’t the notion of protecting the flock, isn’t that kind of true of any community in the country? Isn’t that in some ways —
+elizabeth dias
+Yeah.
+michael barbaro
+In fact maybe even a good thing for a community to circle around its own members when they feel they’re being attacked.
+elizabeth dias
+Of course it is. And so what’s so interesting is it now becomes the question of, well, which of those groups have power, and which of those groups need protecting?
+archived recording
+What’s so interesting about the coverage of Friday’s videos was how much of it mentions something called “privilege.” What’s so fascinating about all of these attacks is how inverted they are. These are high school kids from Kentucky. They’re far less privileged, in fact, than virtually everyone who has called for them to be destroyed on the basis that they have too much privilege.
+elizabeth dias
+And so for the people of Cov Cath and the Catholic community there in northern Kentucky, the aggressor is the big, bad liberal media.
+archived recording
+And the media don’t pause for a moment before casting judgment. CNN legal analyst Bakari Sellers suggested one of the boys should be, quote, “punched in the face.” Longtime CNN contributor Kathy Griffin seemed to encourage a mob to rise up and hurt these boys — quote, “Name these kids. I want names. Shame them. If you think these f’ers wouldn’t dox you in a heartbeat, think again.”
+elizabeth dias
+The left that is determined to attack President Trump and conservative politics and policies and ideals and traditions as much as possible.
+michael barbaro
+To attack the white male identity.
+elizabeth dias
+Yes, to attack the white male identity. And then on the other side —
+archived recording
+So a high school in Kentucky took a field trip to Washington, D.C., and in the middle of it decided to take a racist detour to the Indigenous Peoples March.
+elizabeth dias
+People say, “Well, wait a minute, is there any better example of white Christian power in America right now than President Trump’s election?” And so both sides genuinely believe that their side should have power, that they don’t, and that the other side is trying to rob them of their power.
+michael barbaro
+And in that case, the outcome seems kind of preordained. Everybody will go to their corner, they will be angry, and no one will have a meaningful conversation about, say, what happened on the steps of the monument in Washington.
+elizabeth dias
+Right. Nuance disappears, and the realities that different communities face disappear. Everyone has their own community and their ideas about how to protect your own flock. And so what happens is when communities become so busy protecting their own flock, the facts about the situation or the more unseemly parts of it that are harder to confront for either side, those become obscured.
+michael barbaro
+Elizabeth, thank you very much.
+elizabeth dias
+Thanks so much, Michael.
+michael barbaroHARARE, Zimbabwe — Maybe the scarf was just a scarf after all.
+Soon after ousting Robert Mugabe from power, Emmerson Mnangagwa, Zimbabwe’s president, started wearing a colorful scarf wherever he went, on cold and hot days alike, as part of a broader makeover.
+Sure, Mr. Mnangagwa had long served as Mr. Mugabe’s hatchet man and was known by the fearsome nickname the Crocodile. But the scarf, with the warm and fuzzy colors of the nation’s flag, appeared to signal a gentler leader and government. It became part of the political discourse and a trending topic on social media.
+A little more than a year after Mr. Mugabe’s downfall, Mr. Mnangagwa is now showing his true colors, many Zimbabweans are saying. As demonstrators filled the streets of Harare, the capital, to protest the deteriorating economy, Mr. Mnangagwa reacted in the past week with the same authoritarian reflexes as his predecessor: deploying soldiers and the police to crack down on demonstrators — resulting in the deaths of as many as a dozen individuals — and shutting down the internet.
+On Monday night, Mr. Mnangagwa, who had been on an official trip to Russia during the crackdown on protesters, returned to Zimbabwe after aborting a trip to Davos, Switzerland, where he had planned to promote the new Zimbabwe as being open for business.Slide 1 of 14,
+This 19th-century estate is in the small of town of Susudel, Ecuador, about 50 miles south of the historic city of Cuenca. It includes three buildings, with a total of nine bedrooms. The main house was originally a factory for producing sugar-cane liquor. The property is priced at $720,000.Three Houses and a Lake in Southern Ecuador
+$720,000
+This 19th-century hacienda is in Susudel, Ecuador, a small town about 50 miles south of Cuenca, a city in the Andes Mountains whose many historic buildings have made it a Unesco World Heritage Site.
+The estate, which covers about 62 acres, has been owned by the same family since the late 1800s, said Veronica Arpi, the owner of Cuenca’s Best Properties, which has the listing. It comprises three buildings, with a total of nine bedrooms and nine bathrooms: a six-bedroom main house, including an adjoining chapel; a two-bedroom guesthouse; and a one-bedroom building currently used as servants’ quarters.
+All are built from adobe, using local methods, accented with eucalyptus beams, flooring and windows. Traditional elements can be found throughout the property, including antique light fixtures, painted tile floors, gothic windows and terra-cotta roofs. The main house was once used as a factory to produce sugar-cane liquor.
+A short dirt road leads from the highway to the property, which is fronted by a covered terrace. The two-story main house underwent an extensive renovation in recent years, and has a new kitchen and bathrooms, as well as new electric and gas lines, Ms. Arpi said.KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghanistan’s intelligence agency said on Wednesday that the mastermind of a bloody attack on the agency’s base this week had been killed in an airstrike, but residents and local officials in the area said the airstrike had in fact targeted a group of hunters on a hilltop.
+In a daring attack on Monday, the Taliban used an armored Humvee it had seized from Afghan forces, packing it with explosives and driving it onto an Afghan intelligence base to detonate. At least 40 intelligence personnel were killed and 60 others were wounded.
+The intelligence agency, the National Directorate of Security, said in a statement on Wednesday that its forces had traced the mastermind of that attack, a man they identified as Commander Noman. The agency said it had targeted him and seven others it described as terrorists on Tuesday with an airstrike in Maidan Shahr, in the center of Wardak Province.
+“He was targeted in the provincial capital,” the statement added.
+The agency did not say who had executed the strike, though Afghan forces often rely on the American military to carry out airstrikes. A spokesman for the American military in Afghanistan said that United States forces had carried out a strike in Wardak, without providing further details.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”The play also allowed her to talk about race in a small American city “with big city issues.” New Haven’s population of 130,000 is 34 percent black, 31 percent white and 27 percent Hispanic.
+Over four years of research, Ms. Hartman — who lived in New Haven in the ’90s while a graduate playwriting student at Yale School of Drama — sat in on training sessions at the fire academy, rode in fire trucks and hung out among first responders.
+“The conversations were revelatory,” she said. “They were charged and real and honest in a way that I’ve never seen before in conversations about race. What I want the play to convey is the possibility of communication around race and fairness and, to some degree, class in an American city. Those are the big themes.”
+The play is presented as a series of “chats” — Ms. Hartman’s deliberately chosen nonthreatening word — in the years following the verdict, centering mainly around four first-name-only characters: two African-American firefighters, a white firefighter and a white female lawyer, with a fifth character representing the playwright.
+“I am, in a sense, the audience — someone trying to figure things out, following my nose and going with what was interesting to me,” Ms. Hartman explained.
+She knew she would be initially seen as an outsider: a liberal white woman artist “swanning in with all of the assumptions that come with that,” and her expectations were not mistaken. But concern about how Ms. Hartman’s narrative will be presented came from both sides.For many people, the term “net art” might conjure specific associations from a certain era — the ’90s, hackers, Berlin, Web 1.0.
+These things are part of the story of digital-born art, but only part of it. Net art was never a specific scene: It was born before the internet existed and continues to be created today, worldwide, in disparate media.
+A project called Net Art Anthology, curated by Rhizome, an affiliate of the New Museum, was an attempt to tentatively create a historical understanding of net art. Unveiled online over the course of two years, the effort involved the archiving and restoration of 100 digital artworks — often a laborious process because browsers that could display the pieces no longer existed, or other aspects of the technology had to be preserved or emulated.
+“It was intended really as a way of filling in major gaps in public understanding of and access to net art’s past, to make it more of a resource for the present for artists and people interested in internet culture and how we got here,” said Michael Connor, artistic director of Rhizome.For Luisa Estefany Jimenez, silence is elusive, sleep even more so.
+At all hours, her eldest daughter, Jasleen, 9, emits screams and moans that echo through their apartment, threatening to wake the neighbors. The clangs and bangs of thrown objects don’t help.
+Ms. Jimenez said caring for Jasleen, who is deaf and has trouble communicating, has made her feel perpetually unsettled. She has two other daughters, as well, and is candid about feeling overwhelmed.
+“It’s hard, hard, hard, hard,” said Ms. Jimenez, 31, last month at her apartment in the East Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn. “Everywhere we go, she cries like that or screams or throws herself on the floor.”Mr. Biden has continued to pursue commercial activities while he is in the final stage of making a 2020 decision; he is scheduled to give a talk in Grand Prairie, Tex., a suburb of Dallas, on Thursday, as part of an extended tour promoting his 2017 book, “Promise Me, Dad.”
+The speaking contract for Mr. Biden’s October appearance in Michigan suggests that the popular Democrat would have known he was addressing a Republican-leaning crowd. The speaking series was underwritten in part by organizations connected to Mr. Upton’s family: Among the biggest sponsors listed on the Economic Club’s website are the Whirlpool Corporation, which was co-founded by Mr. Upton’s grandfather, and the Frederick S. Upton Foundation, a family charity named for the same man.
+The contract for Mr. Biden’s visit shows he was paid $200,000 for his appearance, including a $150,000 speaking fee and a $50,000 travel allowance. It also specifies that the audience would be “primarily older, conservative Republicans and local community members.” The document was disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information request made by America Rising, a Republican group that conducts research on Democratic candidates.
+It is unclear whether the fees Mr. Biden received in this case are standard for all his speeches. Mr. Biden’s aides have declined to confirm what his rates are for paid appearances, including the appearance in Michigan, or how much he has earned through paid speaking since leaving office. In at least one instance, his speaking bureau, Creative Artists Agency, offered a reduced rate of $100,000, plus travel expenses, to the University of Utah.
+If Mr. Biden were to have charged a similar range of fees for all his comparable speeches since leaving office, he would most likely have collected between $4 million and $5 million through speeches over the last two years.
+Representatives of Lake Michigan College, which recently took over management of the Economic Club speaker series, and the Fredrick S. Upton Foundation confirmed that the Upton organization was a major sponsor of the series. Both organizations said Mr. Upton had no role in proposing or choosing the speakers. Lisa Cripps-Downey, president of the Berrien Community Foundation, a nonprofit that administers the Frederick S. Upton Foundation, confirmed that the organization had given substantial funding to the Economic Club, with an annual grant of $80,000 over the last three years — a total close to a quarter-million dollars.
+“When we see the speakers, we’re just as surprised as everybody else,” Ms. Cripps-Downey said.
+Mr. Russo said Mr. Biden’s team had been aware that the Frederick S. Upton Foundation helped fund the Economic Club. He said Biden aides had vetted the funding sources for the speaking series and concluded they met his standards.Good morning. It was cold in the Catskills where I was staying for the holiday just past, the slate sky dumping snow and wind pushing it sideways across the river, icing at its sides. It was good weather for snowshoeing in the woods, for catnapping under blankets on the couch, for plotting no-recipe pizzas to make in the outdoor oven humming hot amid the swirling powder in the yard.
+My friend Jamie had some Taleggio and a small bowl of mushrooms he’d roasted in the raging oven. There was clotted cream in the fridge and a heel of mozzarella, too. I had a small tin of foie gras. So there it went: a Taleggio, cream and mozz-topped pie, with an absolute riot of mushrooms across it. The oven did its work and the sourdough rose and went leopard-spotted in the heat. The cheese bubbled and ran, surrounding the crisp-skinned meaty pop of the mushrooms. Some might have run adrift of grated Parmesan across the top. We dotted the pie with foie and served the slices with a defibrillator warming up beside us.
+True fact: That’s a good pizza, and here’s a recipe for dough so you can make it some time. I bring it up today in part because on Wednesdays I generally offer a no-recipe recipe for you to cook, and in part because of that little can of foie gras and the clotted cream. Those items are what my colleague Julia Moskin might call pantry inessentials, insofar as no one actually needs to have foie gras and clotted cream on hand at all times. But it’s awfully nice to, all the same.
+Julia’s new and wildly sensible guide to pantry essentials is worth running through today, in advance of some Marie Kondoification of your cabinets and fridge this evening, and perhaps a series of pantry meals to run out the week: miso chicken; spaghetti with fried eggs; one-pot rice and beans; tomato-Parmesan soup; tuna-macaroni salad.Former President Bill Clinton is writing a new book about his post-presidential life, according to people familiar with the project, which was also confirmed by his spokesman.
+While Mr. Clinton has been out of public office for nearly two decades, he and Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee, have remained fixtures on the national political scene. The former president’s standing was in decline during the 2018 midterm elections, however, with few Democrats seeking to campaign with him because of controversy over policies like the 1990s crime bill and his personal misconduct with women, which has come under a new spotlight because of the #MeToo movement.
+It is unclear how much of the book, if any, will deal with Mrs. Clinton’s two campaigns for president, or if Mr. Clinton will address the criticisms of his policy record or his personal behavior. He has mostly avoided those topics in his public appearances.
+Paul Bogaards, an executive vice president for the publisher, Knopf Doubleday, said there was still no timetable for publication and that while the book is about Mr. Clinton’s post-White House life it is still too “early to assess what ground will be covered.” Angel Ureña, Mr. Clinton’s press secretary, declined to comment on the contents of book.On Sunday and Monday, those in the Western Hemisphere with clear skies were fortunate enough to see the last total lunar eclipse of the decade. As the moon took on a distinctly redder shade just before midnight Eastern Time, livestreams of the phenomenon showed a flash of light suddenly and briefly emanating from the lunar surface.
+Anthony Cook, an astronomical observer at Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory which streamed the eclipse, thought it could have just been the camera’s random electronic noise. Then astronomers and citizen scientists started to share their detection of the flash on Reddit and Twitter.
+The only explanation was that something slammed into the lunar surface and obliterated itself.
+[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
+The moon is a multi-billion-year-old library of impact events, with fresh collisions still taking place frequently today. Capturing a lunar impact on video is rare enough, but this event — a collision during a total lunar eclipse — may be a first.He had me there . Since 2014, I’ve spent January through May in the classrooms of Barnard College of Columbia University; I made my annual migration back to Manhattan last week, in fact, and have spent the last few days doing the things I can’t do in Maine: attending services at Riverside Church, seeing Elaine May on Broadway, getting lunch from the halal truck.
+So, sure, New York is a great place to be in January. But I get homesick anyhow — for my wife, for our dogs, for my friends.
+And I miss the sounds.
+In Maine, when it gets as cold as it is right now, the lakes begin to sing. If the ice is clear, a single stone tossed onto the surface can make a sound like a Jedi light saber. If there’s snow on top, what you hear is the ice expanding, the water moving beneath. It’s an unworldly music, like whale sounds, or the groaning of a wooden ship at sea.
+Then there is the clunk of an ax head hitting a log. When I’m home, I like to split wood in the driveway on cold afternoons, trying to find just the right place in the grain to chop. I love wielding an ax, as if I am an elderly, willowy version of Gimli the Dwarf. I’m not a very good wood chopper, though. Sometimes I miss, or get the ax head stuck. Then I have to pry it out and try again.
+I love the somber sound of ice falling from a tall pine tree and shattering like crystal on the frozen ground. Twenty-one years ago, during the ice storm of 1998, our family was without power for almost two weeks. We spent that time melting snow on the wood stove so we could have enough water to flush the toilet, and reading books out loud by the light of flashlights and candles. At night my children shined a light on the dead television, and I sat in that light, imitating their favorite shows.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The actor Alec Baldwin pleaded guilty to harassment in Manhattan Criminal Court on Wednesday and agreed to take an anger management course in a deal with prosecutors to dispose of charges that he assaulted a man during a dispute over a parking spot in November.
+Mr. Baldwin entered his plea before Judge Herbert Moses, speaking just enough to signal he understood the deal being offered. He had been charged with misdemeanor assault as well, but prosecutors let him plead to only harassment instead.
+Mr. Baldwin, known for his work on “30 Rock” and his withering portrayal of President Trump on “Saturday Night Live,” was ordered to pay a fine of $120 and return to court in March to verify that he completed the anger management course. He left the courthouse without speaking to reporters, and his lawyer, Alan Abramson, declined to comment.
+Mr. Baldwin, 60, was arrested Nov. 2 on charges that he had punched a man in a dispute over a curbside parking spot outside his building on East 10th Street that both men were claiming.Unable to complete a race on Sunday because of injuries to both knees, a tearful Lindsey Vonn announced she was considering an immediate retirement from ski racing.
+But on Wednesday, Vonn said she hoped she could overcome her injuries and continue racing.
+“I am taking things day by day, and we will see what happens,” Vonn wrote on her Instagram account. “I know that I might not get the ending to my career that I had hoped for, but if there is a chance, I will take it.”
+Last weekend in Italy, in her first races since injuring her left knee in a November training session, Vonn, who has already had several surgeries on her right knee, struggled to find her form. She finished 15th and ninth in consecutive downhills, and in Sunday’s super-G, she skied off the course without finishing the race after a mishap halfway down.
+With heavy braces on both knees, Vonn conceded it might be time to end her career.
+“I’ve had four surgeries on my right knee; I’ve got no L.C.L. on my left knee, “ Vonn said, referring to her lateral collateral ligament. “There’s only so much I can handle, and I might have reached my maximum.”Do you deliberately devote classroom time to social-emotional learning, or SEL? Does your school address it building-wide? How?
+In a 2015 piece about the need for schools to focus on these skills to “improve grades and lives,” The New York Times’s Fixes columnist introduces the movement this way:
+[There is a] growing body of evidence — including long-term studies drawn from data in New Zealand and Britain — that have profound implications for educators. These studies suggest that if we want many more children to lead fulfilling and productive lives, it’s not enough for schools to focus exclusively on academics. Indeed, one of the most powerful and cost-effective interventions is to help children develop core social and emotional strengths like self-management, self-awareness and social awareness — strengths that are necessary for students to fully benefit from their education, and succeed in many other areas of life.
+Because we know more and more schools are incorporating strategies to bolster these strengths, we have collected recent Times writing that seems to us to speak especially well to the five SEL “core competencies” as defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (Casel).
+Our list is long, yes, but we also know it’s not nearly complete: We’d love to hear what books, articles, podcasts or videos you’ve read, watched or listened to that have been especially helpful. Please post ideas in the comments, or write to us at LNFeedback@nytimes.com, since we hope to add a section of educator-recommended sources to this post.
+One additional place we can recommend ourselves, however, is Little Free Library’s Action Book Club that will run from January 29 through July 30 and focus on the theme of “Moving Forward.” There you’ll find novels from “Genesis Begins Again” by Alicia D. Williams to “In Every Moment We Are Still Alive” by Tom Malmquist, as well as nonfiction like “(Don’t) Call Me Crazy” edited by Kelly Jensen, all of which focus on themes of growth and well-being.Did Shyamalan really do that to Casey Cooke?
+Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) was, to borrow the horror terminology, the “Final Girl” of “Split,” kidnapped by Kevin, terrorized and tortured, but alive at the end to tell the tale. Her survival was thanks to keen survival instincts that were partly a response to a lifetime of sexual abuse by her uncle. The trauma of her experience with Kevin prompts her to confront that other monster in her life, and by the time we get to “Glass,” she has reported him to the police and found a new home with a foster family.
+It is especially troubling, then, that “Glass” makes her into a sympathetic shoulder for a man who literally almost ate her — the good woman who will bring out the best in poor Kevin just as long as he can “stay in the Light.” Casey’s journey was part of what made “Split” more than just another monster movie. Her regression in “Glass” is an outright betrayal.
+And how powerful would those videos actually be?
+Although our three marquee stars are wiped out by the end of “Glass,” its concluding scene assures us that their legacy will live on thanks to Mr. Glass, who ingeniously preserved the security camera feed of the events at Raven Hill. And thus, the world will see Kevin (as the Beast) galloping and transforming; they’ll see David bending steel; and they’ll see those evil agents drowning him to death. And those images will change the world!
+But would they? The videos look like the kinds of manipulated content that pops up on Facebook feeds every day. And videos capturing police abuse, sad to say, rarely create lasting change.A nurse at a Phoenix nursing home who had been assigned to care for a woman in a vegetative state who was raped and later gave birth to a child was charged on Wednesday with sexual assault, the police said.
+Detectives at the Phoenix Police Department took the nurse, Nathan Sutherland, 36, in for questioning in the case on Tuesday, the police said, and collected a DNA sample from him that matched that of the child, a boy who was born on Dec. 29. Mr. Sutherland was booked on Wednesday morning at the Maricopa County Jail on one charge of sexual assault and one charge of vulnerable adult abuse, the police said.
+“Through a combination of good old-fashioned police work, combing through evidence, talking to people and following up on information, combined with the marvels of DNA technology, we were able to identify and develop probable cause to arrest a suspect,” Jeri L. Williams, the Police Department’s chief, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
+Detectives started to focus on Mr. Sutherland because he was among the medical staff members at the nursing home, Hacienda HealthCare, who were assigned to care for the woman around the time last year that the police believe she was assaulted. The woman had been at the nursing home since 1992 and since then had been in the same condition, unable to communicate or move, according to medical records. A lawyer for the family on Wednesday said they were aware of the arrest but had no comment.But Ms. Jackson Lee’s case most resembles that of Representative Elizabeth Esty, a Connecticut Democrat who did not seek re-election last year over what she called her failure to protect women on her staff from sexual harassment and threats of violence from her former chief of staff.
+As laid out in the complaint, the case dates to October 2015, when the woman, then 19 and a student at Howard University in Washington, spent the fall semester as an intern at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, an influential nonprofit linked to the Congressional Black Caucus that promotes African-American career advancement through internships, seminars and policy research. She says that the internship coordinator took her out drinking one night and then back to his apartment where he forced her to perform oral sex and other unwanted sexual acts. The woman could not remember parts of what occurred during the encounter, the filing says.
+The woman spoke with the internship coordinator the next day, who denied they had sex. When she met with representatives of the foundation, they placed him on leave. A foundation official, speaking under the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing legal case, said the foundation fired him after the 2015 incident for drinking with a minor. The internship coordinator denied to the foundation that he had any inappropriate sexual contact with the woman.
+The woman initially pursued legal action, but did not bring a lawsuit at the time, and police did not bring charges, according to the complaint.
+About two years later, after she graduated from Howard, the woman was hired by Ms. Jackson Lee’s office, where she helped manage the congresswoman’s communications and drove her around the capital, among other duties. When it appeared that Ms. Jackson Lee might hire the former internship coordinator to work in the office, the woman told her chief of staff, Glenn Rushing, that she had a “prior situation” with the prospective colleague, the complaint says. Mr. Rushing indicated he would not be hired.
+A short time later, the woman saw a text message to Ms. Jackson Lee from A. Shuanise Washington, the foundation’s chief executive, saying that she had learned of the woman’s position with the congresswoman and had some “background on her” to share with the congresswoman, the complaint says. The woman saw the text messages as a “clear reference” to the earlier claims she had made to the foundation.
+In March 2018, the woman told Mr. Rushing that she planned to resume legal action against the foundation and asked to speak with Ms. Jackson Lee about it. The meeting never took place, and the woman claims Ms. Jackson Lee refused a personal request to speak. Two weeks later, she was fired.A Fringe Moment
+Swingy fringe hung from foreheads, elbows and hips at the haute couture shows in Paris.Despite the United States’ rejection of the Russian offer, Moscow went ahead Wednesday with its show-and-tell for a wider audience.
+Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister who deals with arms control, said at the event that the United States had yet to present any data to prove its contention that the missile violates the treaty. He also accused the United States of going through the motions of talks rather than trying to save the treaty.
+“The treaty must be preserved,” Mr. Ryabkov said at the briefing, which was broadcast live on national television.
+After he spoke, the military rolled one missile and its mobile launcher into a cavernous, otherwise empty convention center. A soldier wearing combat fatigues and a helmet used a green laser pointer to indicate various parts of the missile as General Matveyevskiy described them.
+Although there have been some modifications from the previous version of the missile, the 9M728, he stressed that the booster, cruising engine and fuel tank are identical. The older version can fly up to 490 kilometers, he said, and the range of the new one is actually 10 kilometers shorter because its control systems and warhead are heavier.
+United States officials have also accused Russia of seeking to undermine the treaty while painting Washington as the boogeyman who wants to destroy it. That sentiment is echoed by some analysts in Russia and elsewhere, while others suggested that American hard-liners feel constrained by the treaty.
+At the time the pact was negotiated by the United States and the Soviet Union, the two superpowers had a near monopoly on such weapons, and the treaty led to the destruction of more than 2,000 of them.MELBOURNE, Australia — To show a fuller picture of the sport, women’s tennis is shining the spotlight on the coaches who travel the tour with its players.
+For 10 years, the WTA has allowed on-court coaching at regular tour events. At this year’s Australian Open, coaches have given news conferences of their own, following their players to the podium after matches. Last season, for the first time, the WTA awarded a Coach of the Year Award, which went to Naomi Osaka’s coach, Sascha Bajin.
+But nothing drew more attention to tennis coaches than one getting in trouble. Coaching during a match is not allowed at Grand Slam tournaments, and Serena Williams was assessed a code violation in the women’s final at the United States Open in September when the chair umpire, Carlos Ramos, spotted her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, gesturing toward her from his seat. His hand movements were replayed as much as any shot from the tournament.
+Williams’s ire over the penalty, which she felt was akin to calling her a cheater, set off a series of penalties that overshadowed the match, which was won by Osaka.Alice Merton closes her debut album, “Mint,” with “Why So Serious,” a song full of questions like “When did we get like this?” It’s a wish for a more carefree, less calculating spirit, sung by her overdubbed, call-and-response posse of female voices over a bouncing bass line. And it’s the counterbalance, in some small part, to an album that takes everything extremely seriously, from career ambitions and lovers’ quarrels to the placement of every hook.
+Merton has a hearty, natural voice that stays plush while echoing the power of singers like Adele and Florence Welch. It’s a voice made for larger-than-life declarations; the first lines she sings on “Mint,” in “Learn to Live,” are “They’ve got fire/Well, I’ve got lightning bolts.” In more than one song, she sings about her fears and inhibitions, even as her voice leaves no question that she will conquer them.
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+Merton, 25, was born in Germany, grew up mostly in Canada and moved back to Germany in her teens, and she has also lived in England and the United States. Now based in Berlin, she has had a dozen addresses in 24 years. She propelled her pop career in Germany with a single released in 2016, the partly autobiographical “No Roots,” a song about constant relocation that speaks, perhaps, to listeners whose connections are digital, not terrestrial. “I’ve got memories and travel like Gypsies in the night,” she exults over a 4/4 thump, a stop-start bass line and clanky rhythm-guitar chops hinting at 1980s hits by INXS. “I’ve got no roo-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-oots,” Merton sings, with the kind of nonsense-syllable hook she also brings to other choruses on the album.As another N.F.L. season winds to a close, the New England Patriots find themselves in a familiar position: favorites in the Super Bowl. But it wasn’t certain they would hold the honor until nearly the last minute.
+For much of the season, the Patriots were considered a tier below the best teams; for months, that group included the Saints, the Chiefs and the Rams. Throughout the season, bookmakers offering early Super Bowl wagering made the N.F.C. entrant — whomever it turned out to be — a 3-point favorite over a generic A.F.C. representative.
+As the big game got closer, however, oddsmakers began offering odds on hypothetical Super Bowl matchups. The Rams were generally listed as a 1-point favorite over the Patriots as recently as a week ago.
+Then the teams played their conference championship game.
+“Everything is about public perception: What have you done for me lately?” said Scott Cooley, a spokesman for the online gambling site BetDSI. “As we saw the Rams game unfold, they were down the entire game, they benefited from an egregious miscall. Maybe this team is not as strong as we thought they were.From The New York Times Magazine, this is Behind the Cover. I’m editor in chief Jake Silverstein. Gail Bichler is off this week. Our cover story is a profile of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, a politician who finds himself at the center of pretty much every major story in American governance right now. Damon Winter photographed leader McConnell in December, and then again in January during the shutdown. We ended up with a series of good portraits, but a cover like this of a political figure, who’s at the center of a hot debate, has to have a good cover line. Part of the process is that you try lines that probably aren’t going to succeed. First, we thought it would be kind of funny to use “He Persisted,” which some people in the office thought was funny and some people in the office thought was horrifying. And then some more boring lines: “The Art of Dysfunction,” “The Opportunist.” In the end, we settled on this line that we liked very much, “Mitch McConnell Got Everything He Wanted.” And it’s hard to argue with that. He got two Supreme Court justices, tax reform, a lot of things that he, I know, is very proud of. But in the midst of a government shutdown, one has to wonder, is this what he wanted? [music]Renault installed temporary leadership but kept Mr. Ghosn officially at the helm even as Nissan and Mitsubishi fired him as chairman.
+“We now must move to a new phase,” Mr. Le Maire said last week.
+After replacing Mr. Ghosn, Renault plans to intensify efforts to repair the acrimonious rift that opened with Nissan, the dominant partner in the alliance, after his arrest. Since then, each company has viewed the other as trying to seize the opportunity to tip the balance of power in its favor.
+Mr. Ghosn was the dominant personality who held the alliance together, overseeing the operation and performance of the three companies simultaneously.
+Addressing the leadership crisis may fall mainly to Mr. Senard, a veteran industrialist known in France for his no-nonsense management style. He will need to “install a climate of confidence between all the parties,” said Ollivier Lemal, the managing director for France of the management consulting firm EIM.
+“The key issue is not so much the leadership of Renault, but who is going to lead, manage and develop the alliance,” Mr. Lemal said. “And for that, you need someone who is going to devote all his time and energy to restore dialogue between the manufacturers.”
+The replacement of Mr. Ghosn at Renault will be a turning point in the dramatic saga of one of the most powerful executives in the auto industry. Over two decades, he built one of the world’s most successful groups in the sector by reviving Nissan and Renault, an alliance that later expanded to include Mitsubishi.
+A Japanese court declined again on Monday to release Mr. Ghosn on bail, meaning that he is likely to remain in jail for months until his trial.The Michael Jackson musical is taking its first steps onto the dance floor.
+The show’s producers announced Wednesday that the project, now titled “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough,” will have an initial production this fall in Chicago, running Oct. 29 to Dec. 1 at the James M. Nederlander Theater.
+The musical will focus on the period of time leading up to Jackson’s “Dangerous World Tour,” which began in 1992, according to a spokesman, confirming details first reported by The Chicago Tribune. It will feature a book by Lynn Nottage, a two-time Pulitzer winner for the plays “Ruined” and “Sweat,” and direction and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who won a Tony Award for the choreography of “An American in Paris.”
+The musical is being produced by the Michael Jackson Estate and Columbia Live Stage, and the producers said they are aiming to bring it to Broadway next year.
+Jackson’s life has been the subject of numerous examinations, some less flattering than others. Up next: “Leaving Neverland,” a documentary about abuse allegations against the pop star, which is screening at Sundance, and which the Jackson estate has denounced.Late Wednesday night, President Trump said he would deliver his State of the Union speech when the shutdown is over. Read the updated story here.
+WASHINGTON — President Trump said he would look for alternative venues for his State of the Union address on Tuesday, appearing to capitulate after Speaker Nancy Pelosi again told him she would not invite him to deliver it at the House until the government reopens.
+The decision came after a tit-for-tat between Mr. Trump and Ms. Pelosi over the State of the Union address. Mr. Trump told Ms. Pelosi on Wednesday that he would deliver the speech in the Capitol next week as originally scheduled. Ms. Pelosi fired back that he was not welcome unless the government was fully open.
+It had concluded, at least by late afternoon, with Mr. Trump declaring at the White House, “The State of the Union has been canceled by Nancy Pelosi because she doesn’t want to hear the truth.”[The show did not open as scheduled on Thursday. Read more here.]
+Exhibition efforts have been plagued by problems. The debut was initially planned for Berlin in September — intended as the first stop of a three-city tour that would then travel to Paris and London. It was canceled weeks before it was supposed to open, when city administrators rejected a proposal to build a concrete wall around the interactive spectacle. The wall was intended to be 1.5 miles long and painted by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, encircling the event until its final night, the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it would be torn down.
+Once announced, the wall began to divide people (as walls do), stirring up debates about painful historical events that are never far from the surface in Germany. “I don’t believe in reconstructing a totalitarian system as an experiment,” said Sabine Bangert, a politician from the Greens party, who, like many Berliners, felt that the construction of a concrete barrier just meters from where the Berlin Wall once stood was an insult to those whose lives had been torn apart by it.He hated black men. He wanted to kill one, and he did.
+In a videotaped confession, James Harris Jackson, a white Army veteran from Baltimore, told investigators that he spent several days two years ago stalking black men in Manhattan before he spotted a 66-year-old man sifting through trash for recyclables.
+And in an undeniable testament of his hate, Mr. Jackson said he pulled a short sword from his coat and repeatedly stabbed the man, Timothy Caughman.
+The killing, Mr. Jackson said, was “practice” for a larger attack he had planned for Times Square where he intended to murder young black men who were with white women because he loathed interracial dating.
+Mr. Jackson, 30, pleaded guilty on Wednesday to rare state charges of murder as terrorism and murder as a hate crime, accepting what is certain to be a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. His dramatic plea to all counts against him came four months after the video of his interview with police was presented at a pretrial hearing in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.Dr. Arash Akhavan, a board-certified dermatologist at the Dermatology and Laser Group in Midtown Manhattan says people are more cognizant now about how their hands look, thanks to social media. He treats about five brides each month for hand-related cosmetic upkeep. Before a filler appointment this past October, one of Dr. Akhavan’s patients placed her engagement ring on a friend’s finger to take pictures. “Brides are trying to stage the best possible photo they can, of their engagement ring,” he said. “All for Instagram.”
+Injectables aren’t the only available treatment.
+Before Heather Hart, 30, a registered dietitian in Southampton, N.Y., wed this past November, she consulted her board-certified dermatologist, Dr. Kenneth Mark, about her hands’ skin inconsistencies and received a series of chemical peels.
+“The ring’s really pretty, so everybody always looks at it asking, ‘Can I see? Can I see?’,” Ms. Hart said. “I noticed some sunspots. I feel conscious of it.”
+Hand treatments have become a regular part of customized wedding plans, according to Dr. Mark, who has offices in New York City, Southampton, N.Y., East Hampton N.Y. and Aspen, Colo. “It’s not like every patient is getting the same thing,” he said.
+A variety of hand treatments are offered in Dr. Chilukuri’s Texas office. Each week, three to five of his engaged patients request lasers, (consisting of one focused wavelength of light), IPL, (Intense Pulsed Light, which uses multiple wavelengths of light), chemical peels, and fillers.
+“It’s pretty routine, especially now that we see so many people getting married later in life, as well as second marriages and sometimes third marriages,” he said.In the first episode of the final season of “Broad City,” BFFs Abbi (Abbi Jacobson) and Ilana (Ilana Glazer) celebrate Abbi’s 30th birthday by walking the length of Manhattan, Inwood to the Battery. They shoot video of dirty water — “city juice” — on the subway tracks. They visit the stately Morris-Jumel Mansion. They get chicken and waffles at Red Rooster in Harlem. They get their hair braided on the sidewalk.
+Then Ilana falls into a manhole. (Or as she calls it, a “womanhole.”)
+The episode, an ingenious love letter to friendship and the city in the form of an Instagram Story, perfectly encapsulates the relationship of “Broad City” with the second half of its title. Its New York City is a frenemy that charms you and grosses you out, embraces you and picks your pocket, shows you a good time and tries to break your foot.Andy de Groat, a dancer and choreographer best known for his collaboration with the director Robert Wilson, died on Jan. 10 in Montauban, France. He was 71.
+The cause was heart failure, said Catherine Galasso, a family friend whose father, the composer Michael Galasso, collaborated frequently with Mr. de Groat.
+Mr. de Groat was a significant presence on the New York downtown dance scene and in Paris in the 1970s and ’80s. Introduced to audiences through his work with Mr. Wilson, he later formed his own company and built a distinctive choreographic identity through his use of spinning, a technique he began to develop for Mr. Wilson’s work.
+Mr. de Groat’s path into the dance world was unconventional. Born in November 1947 in Paterson, N.J., he grew up in a working-class family with little involvement in the arts. His father, a truck driver, was unsupportive of his interests, and Mr. de Groat had little contact with his family after leaving high school. He was studying painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York when he met Mr. Wilson in late 1966 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village, where Mr. de Groat had a part-time job.Looking back on your wedding day, you may have done a few things differently had you known what you know now about wedding planning. Like, the importance of choosing the right space, hiring the perfect makeup artist and even selecting a legal officiant.
+We’d love to hear what you wish you had known before planning your day.
+Please share a photo from your wedding day and a brief description of what you learned from your experience — and maybe you’ll help prevent another couple from making your mistake.
+We may publish a selection of the responses.
+Wedding Album is a series of wedding-themed photos and stories from readers. Previous installments have focused on pets as wedding party members, unusual engagement rings, and marriage proposals.BREAKING NEWS
+The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
+By Alan Rusbridger
+440 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $30.
+A deathwatch beetle is an insidious insect, eating away at furniture or homes, capable of destroying them if left undetected. “The structures look sound,” Alan Rusbridger writes, “but have been hollowed out from within and, if you’re really unlucky, turn to dust.”
+The destructive beetle is the dark metaphor conjured by Rusbridger, the former editor of the British daily The Guardian, to describe the impact of Craigslist on the newspaper industry. He recalls the day a colleague returned to Fleet Street from a trip to the United States, carrying news of the free advertising site’s booming success and the resulting decline in paid newspaper classifieds, long a revenue life force. The Craigslist website “looked like nothing” and had “no editorial content at all,” but here was a publishing revolution not playing a journalist’s game. Underscoring the point was a slide accompanying his colleague’s report: an image of The New York Times’s new 52-story Manhattan skyscraper alongside a photo of Craigslist’s San Francisco headquarters — a frame house with room for the staff’s 18 desks.
+Rusbridger’s 20 years as editor of The Guardian — 1995-2015 — parallel a period of dramatic transformation in the newspaper industry, arguably the most dramatic since the invention of the printing press. The staggering changes are illustrated by his efforts to explain the predigital publishing cycle to an Oxford class of phone-dependent 18-year-olds. He draws a set of stick figures starting with a reporter working on a manual typewriter and ending, 18 stick figures later, with carriers delivering a newspaper to subscribers’ front doors. “The group look as if I have been relating how cave dwellers created fire by rubbing dry twigs together.”Fannie used her profits to provide for her family, but as Davis movingly shows, the proceeds allowed for something more. The family home wasn’t just a roof over their heads; it became “our armor against a world designed to convince us, black working-class children of migrants, that we didn’t deserve a good life.” Davis remembers how abundance afforded her “the indulgence of daydreams” and a first-rate education. Fannie also put some of her profits into the local community, supporting black-owned businesses and giving out “a little piece of money” when someone needed it.
+Davis links her mother’s generosity with the bigger outlays of the established numbers operators, some of whom used their profits to fund Detroit’s civil rights movement. “This makes me wary of the charge that numbers had a negative impact on the black community,” she writes. “If there were disadvantages, if some folks gambled too much, and if others spent coins and dollars on the numbers that could’ve gone to more so-called honorable means, then in my mind that is completely offset by the invaluable ways numbers money was used.”
+“Completely offset”? Is such an exacting calculation possible, or even necessary? Gambling can be a source of hope and pleasure; it can also be grinding addiction. Anyone ruined by it, or duped by a proprietor less scrupulous than Fannie, might feel like a discounted item in Davis’s ledger. Not to mention that Fannie herself took risks that were bigger than many people would willingly hazard. She kept a gun in the linen closet and another in her purse. One of Davis’s older sisters became so anxious that she wrote pleading letters to God.
+The private philanthropy that Davis commends leaves it up to the people with means to apportion the money as they see fit — an individual solution to what is arguably a structural problem. But then Fannie’s experience taught her not to put much stock in public forms of redistribution. “Black folks,” Davis writes, “had many, many reasons not to trust the government.” She describes her mother’s politics as “a blend of progressive and conservative,” girded by a firm belief in self-reliance. Davis herself calls the Michigan state lottery, legalized in 1972 as a way to bring in government revenue, a “usurping.”
+Yet the novelist in Davis knows that Fannie’s whole story was more complicated than a daughter’s protectiveness will allow. The state lottery ended up being a mixed bag for Fannie. It was a competitor, yes, but Davis concedes that it injected new energy into Fannie’s business by taking some of the stigma away from gambling. Fannie started to use the daily lottery as her source for three-digit numbers, shrewdly turning the state into her backup bank; she could offset a customer’s heavy bet by playing the same number in the lottery, which meant she no longer had to depend on the big numbers men for cash flow.
+“Nice irony,” Davis writes, though her mother might have called it something else. Like so many other times in her remarkable life, Fannie had found a way beat the odds.ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The Pakistan Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the acquittal of a man accused of stabbing a woman 23 times, nearly three years after the attack prompted a national debate on violence against women.
+Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa, leading a three-member panel, reinstated the conviction of Shah Hussain, accepting an appeal from Khadija Siddiqi, who survived the attack in Lahore in May 2016. Ms. Siddiqi said that Mr. Hussain, a former classmate, had attacked her after she rebuffed his romantic overtures. Mr. Hussain was rearrested in the courtroom on Wednesday.
+Ms. Siddiqi, a 24-year-old law student, said on Wednesday that she felt vindicated by the court’s decision.
+“Today is a victory for all women,” she said. “I think this case will serve a steppingstone for the future cases of women in Pakistan.”UNITED NATIONS — When António Guterres was selected over seven female candidates to lead the United Nations, deflating hopes for a first woman secretary general, he promised that the organization would move more forcefully to honor its ideals of gender equality.
+“Do not let us in the U.N. off the hook,” Mr. Guterres, a Portuguese statesman and longtime United Nations diplomat, said in pledging to change what he acknowledged was a male-dominated world, including within the far-flung reaches of a patriarchal United Nations system. “Keep our feet on the fire.”
+The International Center for Research on Women, a Washington-based rights and advocacy group that advises the United Nations, has been seeking to do just that. It devised recommendations for measuring what progress Mr. Guterres has made in shaping a more feminist United Nations, and translated them into letter grades.
+After 2017, his first year, Mr. Guterres got a C-plus. On Wednesday, the group issued the secretary general’s second-year grade. It was only marginally better: B-minus.Russell Baker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New York Times columnist, died on Monday night at his home in Leesburg, Va. The Times’s obituary, which called Baker “one of the best-known newspaper humorists of his time,” noted that his “whimsical, irreverent ‘Observer’ column appeared in The New York Times and hundreds of other newspapers for 36 years and turned a backwoods-born Virginian into one of America’s most celebrated writers.” If you’ve never read any of his 15 books — or if you’d like to rediscover some old favorites — these six books are a fine way to start.
+[Read The Times’s obituary of Russell Baker.]
+Image
+“Have a nice day has replaced ‘This is a stickup’ as the most frequently spoken four-word sentence in the American language.”
+So This Is Depravity
+Baker’s collection of columns from 1973 to 1980 is simply this: “observations on the foibles and peccadilloes of the human race.” In 1979, he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for this “good-humored commentary.”
+Image Credit... Congdon & Weed
+“Writing a book is quite different from telling amusing anecdotes over the second bottle of Bordeaux, as I discovered.”
+Growing Up
+Baker’s memoir, published in 1982, would go on to win the 1983 Pulitzer for biography. In the Times’s review, Richard Lingeman called the book “touching and funny, a hopeless muddle of sadness and laughter that bears a suspicious resemblance to real life.” A year later, Edwin McDowell wrote a column about the book’s success.Slide 1 of 11,
+PEN America held its New Year New Books party on Jan. 17 at the Sean Kelly gallery. From left, Jennifer Egan, the group’s president; Ahmed Naji; and Suzanne Nossel.To usher in the new year, PEN America invited writers last week to raise a glass to their favorite books of 2018. It’s was a classic writers’ party, full of insecurity and awkward moments, but on a grander scale.
+Rather than drawing people to a cramped East Village walk-up, it was held at Sean Kelly, a cavernous gallery on 10th Avenue near the Hudson Yards. Bowls of popcorn were more numerous, the cheese plates of better quality, and the wine came out of bottles, not boxes.
+But all the same types were there, starting with bubbly book lovers like Glory Edim, the founder of Well-Read Black Girl, a hip reading club turned literary festival.
+There was the aggrieved guy, who stormed over to ask why The New York Times doesn’t “review more books from independent publishers.” Then there were the writers who seem both younger and more successful than everyone else in the room, like Crystal Hana Kim, the author of “If You Leave Me.”MADRID — Taxi drivers protesting against Uber and other ride-hailing services clashed with the police in Madrid on Wednesday, cutting off a highway that rings the capital and picketing the opening of an international tourism fair.
+The capital’s taxi drivers are in the third day of an indefinite strike, and intensified their protests in response to an apparent victory for their counterparts in Barcelona, who began striking on Friday. The regional government there said late Tuesday that it would ban ride-hailing companies from carrying passengers who booked less than an hour in advance, a proposal that has left Uber and others threatening to suspend services.
+By noon, the authorities in Madrid said that 11 people had been injured in clashes in the capital on Wednesday, including five police officers.
+King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia were ushered into the opening of Madrid’s annual tourism fair though a side entrance under heavy escort, as police officers charged against drivers who burned tires and containers to block road access.Michael Cohen’s relationship with President Trump went from this: “I’ll do anything to protect Mr. Trump. They say I’m Mr. Trump’s pit bull. I’ve stood by him, shoulder to shoulder.” To this: “He’s a weak person.” So, why did Trump’s former personal lawyer flip? Cohen was Trump’s fixer and biggest defender for more than a decade. “If there’s an issue that relates to Mr. Trump that is of concern to him, it’s, of course, of concern to me. And I will use my legal skills within which to protect Mr. Trump to the best of my ability.” In April, the F.B.I. raided Cohen’s office after he became a target in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Trump was quick to come to Cohen’s defense. But once the investigation zeroed in on Cohen, the lawyer began to change his tune. “My wife, my daughter and my son have my first loyalty and always will. I put family and country first.” In July, Cohen released audio from a conversation with Donald Trump that he secretly recorded two months before the 2016 election. The two appear to be discussing payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump. Cohen: “When it comes time for the financing, which will be —” Trump: “What financing?” Cohen: “Well, I have to pay … No no, no, no. I got — no, no no.” Here’s when things between Trump and Cohen began to publicly fall apart. In a tweet he said: “What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad!” “I expected something like this from Cohen, he’s been lying all week. I mean, for two — he’s been lying for years. There’s nobody that I know that knows him that hasn’t warned me that if his back is up against the wall, he will lie like crazy, because he’s lied all his life.” On Aug. 21, Cohen pleaded guilty to violating federal campaign finance laws. And then on Nov. 29, Cohen made a surprise appearance in a Manhattan courtroom where he confessed to lying to Congress. He admitted he’d been negotiating to build a tower in Moscow for Trump well into the 2016 presidential campaign. Prosecutors in the special counsel investigation have interviewed Cohen repeatedly over the past several months. “Mr. Cohen has cooperated. Mr. Cohen will continue to cooperate.” Trump tried to minimize the admission. “What he’s trying to do is get a reduced sentence. So, he’s lying about a project that everybody knew about. I mean, we were very open with it.”Pouille, who had never won an Australian Open match before last week, now faces a nearly impossible task. The final is within his reach. But to get there he must beat Novak Djokovic, who currently rules men’s tennis with an iron grip.
+Not long after Pouille and Raonic left Rod Laver Arena, Djokovic breezed into the final four, his quarterfinal match done in just 52 minutes when the eighth-seeded Kei Nishikori, of Japan, retired with a leg injury. Djokovic led by 6-1, 4-1 at the time, and had never been pushed. It was a gift. A match that short and stress free will help Djokovic, seeking his seventh Australian Open title, keep his body fresh at the stage in this tournament when he most needs it, especially since he had struggled through a bruising, four-set win over Daniil Medvedev earlier this week.
+Pouille, 24 years old and seeded 28th, burst onto the scene in 2016, with quarterfinal showings at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, where he beat Nadal.
+Last season, however, was tennis purgatory. True, his ranking did rise briefly to a career-high No. 10 in March. But he also failed to get past the third round of any of the major championships. He lost to players ranked outside the top 100. And as the year ended, he suffered through a string of early tournament defeats.
+“I lost that joy being on the court,” he said, reflecting on last year after his quarterfinal match, which he won behind strong serving and a steady dose of returns that left the 6-5 Raonic off balance. “For some reason, I don’t know really know why it happened. I t did. You lose one match, two matches, three matches, then you lose confidence.”A Sustainable Label Hits Its Stride
+This may just be the year of Cienne. Though the label was introduced in 2014 by Nicole Heim and Chelsea Healy, it really hit its stride in 2018, becoming a semifinalist in the International Woolmark Prize and appearing on the backs of Gigi Hadid and Gwyneth Paltrow.
+There’s little mystery why. Its sustainable business model is welcome today, and, for many of us, its subversive staples and fuss-free design fill a smidgen of the hole left by Phoebe Philo’s departure from Celine.
+Cienne cotton-linen pants with slit-front detail, $640; silk crepe dress with smocking detail, $780; textured linen shirt, $560; at shop.ciennenewyork.com.“I’m not a high-paid salary, federal bureaucrat in Washington. I’m an air conditioning mechanic.” “My husband is an electronics technician in the United States Coast Guard.” “I work at the United States Department of Agriculture.” “My husband is an attorney for the Department of Commerce.” “We work for the U.S.D.A. in rural housing.” “My husband is active duty.” “I’ve been a government employee, now, for 29 years. Today, was the first time in my life that I actually filed for unemployment insurance. It was quite a moment.” “It’s just my husband and I. I’m coming to the point to where I don’t know if I should just go ahead and apply for unemployment. If I should look for, maybe, temporary work. We’re going to need another income pretty soon.” “The prospect that, for no reason at all, I may have to find another permanent job is very frustrating and it speaks to a kind of waste. You know, the taxpayers would have to fund the whole hiring process for my replacement.” “I have an autoimmune condition that causes severe nerve pain and made the decision to cut back work hours so I could focus on my health and get more treatment. But we can’t now get on my husband’s plan because my husband works for the federal government and they’re not processing the special enrollments right now.” “I was due to retire from the government on Dec. 30. The lady that was processing my, my pension has been furloughed. I can’t even retire.” “My husband is working without pay. We’re very stressed about our bills and how we’re going to manage them. There’s a food pantry that was started by the spouses club and that is helping every single family here.” “And we’re just, we’re conserving really. You know, the food pantry is great. You know, we’re trying to, you know, make meals that last. No spending in excess. You know, as much as I want that Starbucks it’s not happening.” “My medicine is getting low. I have diabetes and I’m a breast cancer survivor. Some of my medications are getting low.” “If the shutdown keeps going on, then I can’t delay my care anymore. I’ll get a lot worse. So, it really means my husband is not going to have a paycheck. I’m going to have a paycheck that’s a lot lower than it was and we’re going to be paying a lot more.” “We need to come together and realize that this hurts all of us.” “And it’s going to start hurting everyone pretty soon. So, please stop and put your petty differences to the side and open us back up. If the issue’s with the wall, deal with the wall later. But open us back up. We want to work.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Harvey Weinstein has started to cast his new “dream team” of lawyers to represent him against sexual assault charges in Manhattan, and two of them recently represented one of his most vocal accusers, the actress Rose McGowan.
+Mr. Weinstein, the movie mogul who became a symbol of the #MeToo movement after dozens of women accused him of sexual misconduct, has assembled a team including a former Manhattan prosecutor and three litigators with a history of representing celebrity clients, a person familiar with the discussions said.
+Two of the lawyers, Jose Baez and Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., also represented Ms. McGowan when she faced drug possession charges in Virginia. Ms. McGowan has been an outspoken critic of the movie producer and was one of the first women to come forward and accuse him of sexual misconduct. (She said Mr. Weinstein assaulted her in 1997, but charges were never filed.)
+Still, Mr. Sullivan said he and Mr. Baez did not believe that representing Mr. Weinstein after handling Ms. McGowan’s defense would pose an ethical issue because the cases are unrelated. “We are certain no conflict of interest exists,” he said.To the Editor:
+Re “A Year Without Tom Brady” (Editorial Observer, Jan. 19):
+Alex Kingsbury makes the case that despite the scientific evidence supporting the link between repeated head trauma and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., and a decline in youth football participation, America’s sport shows no signs of slowing down. And yet the conversation continues to lack a real investment in treatment options for athletes living with the condition or who will go on to develop it.
+While efforts to improve diagnosis and prevent C.T.E. are critical, there is an even more urgent need to develop treatments for survivors to improve cognition, restore behavioral control, stabilize mood and reduce the impulsivity that can lead to acts of violence, rage, addictions and suicide.
+A better understanding of the molecular changes in the brain that result from repeated concussion will lead to innovative and effective treatments that will help rebuild lives, families and maybe even brains.
+It’s not enough to simply not tune in to the games; we must do more for the athletes and their families living with this insidious brain disorder.ADÈLE
+By Leila Slimani
+Translated by Sam Taylor
+240 pp. Penguin Books. Paper, $16.
+To be a recovering addict is to admit that your highest purpose is to avoid your worst impulses. Whether you regard this as a practical fact of life or a tragedy depends on your relationship to pleasure, and whether your particular pleasures are endorsed or reviled by your social environment. In the case of Adèle Robinson, the pleasure is risky sex and the social environment is upper-middle-class Paris. Adèle pounds champagne, eats potted yogurt, wears scarves and destroys lives. You in yet?
+“Adèle” is the first novel by Leila Slimani, the French-Moroccan author of “The Perfect Nanny,” which won one of France’s most prestigious literary awards, the Prix Goncourt, in 2016 and was translated into almost three dozen languages. In the wake of nannymania, Slimani’s debut novel has been made available in English, albeit with a title downgrade from its original “In the Garden of the Ogre.”
+Adèle is 35 years old, beautiful, a newspaper reporter who has been married nine years to a successful doctor. Despite her good fortune she harbors some Madame Bovary tendencies, aching for a life of pampered thrills and finding her own existence — a spacious apartment, luxury vacations — shabby. Her family’s money “smells of work, of sweat and long nights spent at the hospital,” she determines. “It is not a passport to idleness or decadence.”
+Image
+So she finds decadence by compulsively seducing strangers, co-workers and acquaintances, loathing the sex but finding comfort in the immediate aftermath, when she is “suspended between two worlds, the mistress of the present tense.” That interim of numbness might seem like an underwhelming reward, but to someone as miserable as Adèle it offers reprieve. Her descent is marked by the usual signs of addiction: an eroding sense of limits, a stream of banal lies, a metabolic incapacity for contentment. “Nothing ever happens fast enough,” Adèle thinks. Her life becomes a frenzied scheme to avoid boredom.Before his death in 2001, Herbert Lawrence Block, the political cartoonist better known as Herblock, spent his decades-long career calling out corruption and hypocrisy at the hands of world leaders in his witty work for The Washington Post, winning three Pulitzer Prizes for editorial cartooning and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the process. Now his rich body of work, which also touched on civil rights, the environment and war, is getting new life alongside work from other politically minded artists at a new exhibition at the Library of Congress.
+“Art in Action: Herblock and Fellow Artists Respond to Their Times” opens on Jan. 31 and pairs 15 Herblock editorial cartoons with 24 works from others whose art responded to major political and humanitarian issues from the 17th century to the modern day, all pulled from the library’s collection.
+“It’s really striking when you look at Herblock’s major themes that these are human conditions, kinds of concerns that reach back centuries and are so much still on our minds today,” said Katherine Blood, the curator of fine prints at the Library of Congress. “We were really looking for kindred spirits, artists who were looking at his themes as an organizing principle.”
+“It’s a mixture of artists who are very celebrated and well-known, like Kerry James Marshall, and lesser-known artists,” she said.NAPLES, Fla. — When each member of a couple serves on a different museum board, and they divide their time among several houses, they are likely to have more than one art collection, too.
+In the case of Gerald and Jody Lippes, their large and light-filled apartment here — with an expansive view of the Gulf of Mexico — encompasses gleaming Biedermeier furniture, African art made before World War II and some 130 works of contemporary art (a small portion of their total collection, which numbers more than 700 pieces.)
+Within the latter category, this residence is more focused on established and midcareer artists; their house in southern Ontario features up-and-comers; in New York City, it’s all about midcentury Color Field abstractions.
+“We live to collect,” Mr. Lippes, 78, said.
+Both hail from Buffalo, and Mr. Lippes came to art first. As a lawyer in that city in the early 1980s, he was approached by Seymour H. Knox Jr., a patron of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, who asked him to be a trustee of the museum. Mr. Lippes accepted, with trepidation.New York City Ballet opened its winter season on Tuesday with the birth of a god. Or, rather, since the company uses the version of George Balanchine’s “Apollo” that skips the birth scene, the season began with the young god figuring out what he can do. At least, that’s what the dance is about. Taylor Stanley, making his debut as Apollo, seemed fully formed from the start.
+That’s not a criticism of Mr. Stanley’s acting. The 1928 work, the oldest Balanchine piece in City Ballet’s repertory, imagines Apollo as a youth, still a little raw and vulnerable, experimenting with three muses, discovering music and dance. And Mr. Stanley did not ignore that exploratory aspect of the role.
+But, from his first motion, strumming his lyre with Pete Townshend-style arm-circling, Mr. Stanley was elegantly forceful. He was calm, confident, divinely cool. He gave the sense, fitting for a god, of already knowing what he was doing even as he was learning how to do it. This was a thrillingly authoritative debut.SEOUL, South Korea — A former chief justice of South Korea’s Supreme Court was arrested early Thursday on charges of conspiring with the nation’s disgraced former president to manipulate its ruling on a case that threatened to upset relations with Japan.
+The ex-justice, Yang Sung-tae, 71, is the first former or sitting chief justice to be arrested on criminal charges in South Korea. He was taken into custody shortly after a court in Seoul, the capital, issued an arrest warrant early Thursday.
+Mr. Yang’s arrest is expected to be followed by a formal indictment. Although Mr. Yang has vehemently denied all charges against him, prosecutors in South Korea seldom fail to indict criminal suspects they have arrested.
+Mr. Yang, who served as chief justice from 2011 until 2017, is also accused of discriminating against judges considered unfriendly to his leadership and to the former and impeached president, Park Geun-hye, by influencing job postings and promotions.Background: Last year, Ms. Seo accused Mr. Ahn — once a rising star at the Justice Ministry — of sexually molesting her. She said she had been so traumatized by the abuse that she had a miscarriage. But she said that when she lodged a formal complaint, Mr. Ahn used his influence to have her transferred to an obscure posting in a small provincial city.
+Mr. Ahn has denied the charges against him.
+Why it matters: Ms. Seo’s decision to make her accusations public was a highly unusual move in a country where victims of sexual violence have been afraid to speak out, and it encouraged a steady stream of other women to break their silence about alleged sexual abuse.
+In other South Korea news: A former chief justice of the country’s Supreme Court was arrested on charges of conspiring with the ousted and impeached president, Park Geun-hye. He is the first former or sitting chief justice to be arrested.Ben Pederson
+Through Feb. 3. Ortega y Gasset Projects, 363 Third Avenue, Brooklyn; oygprojects.com.
+Entering Ben Pederson’s solo exhibition, “Some Stuff You Forgot About,” at Ortega y Gasset Projects, feels like stepping into a dream world: You see familiar forms, but they don’t adhere to a logic you understand. There’s a pair of jean shorts (part of a work called “Jorts,” from 2017) dangling upside dow n and fitted on painted cardboard stumps that look like cactuses. In another work, “Sup?” (2017), a short, speckled ladder hangs in midair. Recurring rectangles covered with bright streaks and blobs of color look like miniature abstract paintings or clay tablets or even photo frames.
+Many of these objects are sculptural remnants from Mr. Pederson’s studio. They’re connected by hooks, chains and strands of beads in a series of dazzling mobiles that fill the hallway leading to the gallery’s main space. Hanging floor to ceiling and obstructing the path, the mobiles form a kind of web that seems to evoke Mr. Pederson’s wacky artistic subconscious. Visitors are both invited and forced to navigate it .
+The tone in the main gallery is more sober. A book displays 28 watercolors, each one a distinct shape awash in pattern and color. Mr. Pederson, who says ideas often come to him from an “Alien Platonic Realm,” created the forms while in a meditative state. They reappear in three dimensions in a set of sculptures suspended from the ceiling and a line of “Shape Trees” (2018) displayed on pedestals, where they seem to sprout from artificial branches. Mr. Pederson’s work can seem purely playful — but at his best, he mines the limits of recognizability to challenge our perception. His shapes and sculptural scraps are like pictographs in an artistic language that’s still unfolding. JILLIAN STEINHAUERJERUSALEM — He kept quiet for months, his poll numbers creeping up against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But Benny Gantz, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces who is offering himself up as a savior to the opposition, is finally making some noise.
+In three hypermacho new campaign videos, Mr. Gantz, a three-star general who fought two wars in Gaza, flaunts the numbers of “terrorists killed” and “targets destroyed.”
+[Who’s who and what’s what in Israel’s elections.]
+Palestinian neighborhoods are shown in ruins. A Hamas military leader is mocked as his car is seen exploding in an assassination by airstrike. The soundtrack wouldn’t be out of place in a “Call of Duty” commercial. Nor would the tagline: “Only the strong prevail.”
+The body-count braggadocio horrified leftists, who asked acidly why the 500-plus Palestinian children killed hadn’t rated a mention. And it failed to mollify right-wing rivals who say that Mr. Gantz’s reluctant-warrior hesitancy and command miscalculations had actually cost Israeli soldiers’ lives.Don’t fret, dear reader. As a technology critic who tests dozens of gadgets a year, I’m in a unique position of having to wrestle with extraordinary amounts of tech products and accessories every day. (Last year, I brought nine new smartphones, two tablets, four smart speakers and 14 power accessories into my home.) So here’s a guide to tidying up your technology physically and digitally, including tips from professional organizers.
+How to declutter your power cables
+The No. 1 culprit of tech clutter in every household, professional organizers say, is the power cable. Part of the problem is that we typically need different wires for products like smartphones, battery packs, cameras and laptops. These then accumulates into one tangled mess.
+Here’s how to solve power cable overpopulation in a few simple steps:
+Gather them all together and purge the ones you don’t need.
+This sounds easier said than done, but here’s a good rule of thumb: “If you don’t know what it goes to, get rid of it,” said Marissa Hagmeyer, an organization consultant and co-owner of Neat Method. Among the wires you keep, if there are extras, cap them at two, such as two Micro USB cables, she said.
+In the process, you may end up discarding a wire that you later need. But don’t beat yourself up. “You can buy a new one if it turns out you needed it,” Ms. Fortin said. That’s better than wasting space on something you might hypothetically need.
+The same approach can be applied to other tech gadgets, like the obsolete smartphone that is living in your sock drawer. If you haven’t used it for six months, get rid of it. Unwanted tech accessories and gadgets can be discarded responsibly through donation centers or e-recycling programs like Best Buy’s.Time is of the essence. A deal must be struck soon to avoid irreparable harm to the federal government.
+Todd J. Schwartz
+Wall, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+The Democrats should seize on this chance to end the shutdown. There’s no downside for them. It is not a question of bargaining anymore but of the suffering of the country. But even so, it’s a good deal. The Dreamers will get something they would otherwise have not gotten. And President Trump has learned his lesson.
+His approval ratings have gone down. His base is unhappy. There will be no more Trump shutdowns. And Democrats will avoid the risk of a shift in blame to them for their intransigence.
+And, the clincher: Ann Coulter doesn’t like it.
+Howard Rachlin
+New York
+To the Editor:
+How about this? Democrats put forward a bill in the House for border security of $12 billion. This would be for more border patrol officers, upgraded equipment, improved facilities, etc., but not a wall.
+This would allow Democrats to show that they are tough on border security by more than doubling President Trump’s proposed funding. The bill must focus purely on border security — no other Democratic wish list items or conditions.Friends, reporters, fam: It’s time we journalists all considered disengaging from the daily rhythms of Twitter, the world’s most damaging social network.
+You don’t have to quit totally — that’s impossible in today’s news business. Instead, post less, lurk more.
+“Never Tweet” is an ironic meme on Twitter, a thing people in media say to acknowledge how futile it is to consider ever leaving this place where all news happens first. I want to suggest another meaning: “Never Tweet” should be an aspiration, a necessary step toward improving the relationship between the media and the digital world.
+[Farhad Manjoo answered your questions about this column on, yes, Twitter.]
+Of course, I’ve climbed onto this very high horse because we just witnessed a terrible week on the internet. Over the weekend, thanks largely to amplification on Twitter, MAGA-hatted high-school kids from Kentucky — and whether they did or did not harass a Native American elder during a march in Washington — eclipsed all other news. At first, the Twitter mob went after the kids from Covington Catholic High School. Then, as more details of the incident emerged, a mob went after the people who’d gone after the kids. No one won; in the end the whole thing was little more than a divisive, partisan mess.We have repeatedly emphasized that the Y.P.G. has left Manbij and that our forces pose no threat to Turkey’s national security. We believe that Mr. Erdogan fears not the presence or the absence of any given military force but the peaceful and democratic coexistence of Arabs, Kurds, Christians and others in northeastern Syria.
+Mr. Erdogan cannot exploit such coexistence. He plans to use the Turkey-backed Islamist opposition in Syria to invade Manbij, just as he used it in the nearby Azaz, Jarabulus and Afrin areas.
+While Turkey claims to be returning these territories to their “true owners,” Mr. Erdogan is instead dooming Syrians to foreign occupation and militia rule and making the prospect of peace after eight brutal years of war even more elusive.
+Nowhere is this more evident than in Afrin, where Turkey has been accused of enlisting former members of the Islamic State and militias with ties to Al Qaeda to decimate the peaceful region and its autonomous administration. Turkey’s incursion into Afrin in northern Syria displaced around 300,000 people, and the militias backed by Turkey seized, looted and destroyed property of Kurdish civilians.
+If the United States allows Turkey to attack Manbij, that will be our fate, too.
+Unfortunately, it seems that global powers are still willing to play Turkey’s games. Mr. Erdogan’s “road map” for Manbij does not serve and reflect the interests of its people. He also proposes the establishment of a “safe zone” in the wake of an American withdrawal, a plan that Mr. Trump appears to have, in some form, agreed to.
+We are not opposed to the concept of a safe zone. We believe that it is possible for the United States to withdraw its forces from our region without abandoning our people. However, we will not accept any Turkish incursion into the areas we have liberated, no matter the words used to describe it.
+Any “safe zone” in northeast Syria must be guaranteed by international forces and not by the Turkish troops and jihadist militias massing at our borders. An international safe zone would ensure that Turkey’s borders are protected, without subjecting the people of northeast Syria to the mercy of Mr. Erdogan’s proxies. It would also facilitate the continuing reconstruction efforts taking place in our region, which are key to peace and stability.Before the L.H.C. started operation, particle physicists had more exciting predictions than that. They thought that other new particles would also appear near the energy at which the Higgs boson could be produced. They also thought that the L.H.C. would see evidence for new dimensions of space. They further hoped that this mammoth collider would deliver clues about the nature of dark matter (which astrophysicists think constitutes 85 percent of the matter in the universe) or about a unified force.
+The stories about new particles, dark matter and additional dimensions were repeated in countless media outlets from before the launch of the L.H.C. until a few years ago. What happened to those predictions? The simple answer is this: Those predictions were wrong — that much is now clear.
+The trouble is, a “prediction” in particle physics is today little more than guesswork. (In case you were wondering, yes, that’s exactly why I left the field.) In the past 30 years, particle physicists have produced thousands of theories whose mathematics they can design to “predict” pretty much anything. For example, in 2015 when a statistical fluctuation in the L.H.C. data looked like it might be a new particle, physicists produced more than 500 papers in eight months to explain what later turned out to be merely noise. The same has happened many other times for similar fluctuations, demonstrating how worthless those predictions are.
+To date, particle physicists have no reliable prediction that there should be anything new to find until about 15 orders of magnitude above the currently accessible energies. And the only reliable prediction they had for the L.H.C. was that of the Higgs boson. Unfortunately, particle physicists have not been very forthcoming with this information. Last year, Nigel Lockyer, the director of Fermilab, told the BBC, “From a simple calculation of the Higgs’ mass, there has to be new science.” This “simple calculation” is what predicted that the L.H.C. should already have seen new science.
+I recently came across a promotional video for the Future Circular Collider that physicists have proposed to build at CERN. This video, which is hosted on the CERN website, advertises the planned machine as a test for dark matter and as a probe for the origin of the universe. It is extremely misleading: Yes, it is possible that a new collider finds a particle that makes up dark matter, but there is no particular reason to think it will. And such a machine will not tell us anything about the origin of the universe. Paola Catapano, head of audiovisual productions at CERN, informed me that this video “is obviously addressed to politicians and not fellow physicists and uses the same arguments as those used to promote the L.H.C. in the ’90s.”It’s not just airport security lines and control tower workers that are affected by the federal government shutdown. Airlines, too, are being hit.
+The industry as a whole lost about $105 million in revenue in the first month of the shutdown, according to data from the consulting firm ICF. That figure represents only the loss of revenue from some government employees not taking work trips.
+The shutdown began more than a month ago, on Dec. 22, and legislators have largely remained deadlocked over how to end the impasse. Dueling bills in the Senate and other proposals in the House seem unlikely to restore funding to reopen the government in the immediate future.
+“In the context of the airlines’ total revenue, this is a drop in the bucket,” said Samuel Engel, a senior vice president and lead of the aviation practice at ICF. “One major storm can cut airlines’ revenue more than a month’s lost government travel, but a storm doesn’t continue month after month,” he added in an email.America’s corporate leaders are shrugging off a monthslong trade war, a protracted government shutdown and other looming economic threats, projecting that revenue growth in 2019 will be strong largely on the assumption that President Trump will reach a deal with China.
+They seem to be increasingly isolated in that view.
+In earnings calls and interviews, executives at some of the largest companies in the United States have played down what many economists and analysts see as possible obstacles to economic expansion both at home and abroad. In addition to the shutdown and the trade war, the challenges include recent signs of weakness in manufacturing data and slowing growth in China and Europe.
+Business leaders are instead expressing confidence that the Trump administration and Chinese officials will strike a trade agreement before midnight on March 2, when tariffs on Chinese imports are set to more than double, and keep the economy humming.
+“We think the trade talk is going to be winding down over the next two or three months, the government shutdown will be figured out,” Kelly King, the chief executive of BB&T Corporation, said last week while discussing the bank’s fourth-quarter earnings in a conference call with analysts.For all that, I have no doubt that a true privacy expert reading this article will laugh at all the things I’m missing. And that’s kind of the point: In the United States, and in some other countries, the deck is stacked against consumers.
+Have you changed your use of social media after writing about some of the data practices of Facebook?
+When I started reporting on Big Tech, a lot of the public criticism about social media focused on Twitter, a relatively small platform that happens to be popular among the American political and journalistic elite. Two years later, a lot of the criticism focuses on Facebook and Google — and Twitter is by far the social media platform I use the most.
+That’s partly because I don’t find the Facebook experience all that engaging or fun. But partly it’s for security. Once I started reporting deeply on Facebook, I deleted all Facebook-owned apps from my phone, including Instagram. I don’t know exactly who has access to the data those apps collect, but while meeting with confidential sources, I don’t want to risk that an app on my phone might be sending Facebook my location.
+The social media app I really miss is Instagram. I always had a private account, and I accept requests only from real-life friends and family. So it’s an ocean of sanity and genuine relationships compared with Twitter, which is a hell of random angry people. But when I log in — once or twice a week at most, usually on my wife’s phone — I’m now hyper-conscious that every like, thumb click and scroll may go into my permanent Facebook record.
+Is deleting Facebook an effective way to protect privacy?
+Not in the slightest.
+It may interfere with Facebook’s ability to track you as a consumer. But almost every website you visit or app you have on your phone is to some extent tracking where you go and what you do.“When you lose a leg, you don’t just lose a leg — you lose a piece of heart, you lose a piece of mind, you lose a piece of self-confidence,” Mr. Cairo said on Wednesday at the center in Kabul, one of seven rehabilitation centers that he leads across the country. “All this has to be restored, and all together it makes dignity.”
+Mr. Cairo, who grew up in Turin before moving to Milan, had studied to be a lawyer. But drawn to relief work, he retrained in physical therapy. One of his first postings with the I.C.R.C. took him to a Kabul that was under siege. What has kept him here, he says, is the daily reward of empowering people ostracized for their disabilities.
+Ferozuddin Feroz, Afghanistan’s minister of health, said he first ran into Mr. Cairo when he was finishing his residency as a surgical medical student. He repeatedly referred to Mr. Cairo as a hero.
+“He has dedicated himself to Afghanistan, and for us it is about how can we learn from him,” Mr. Feroz said.
+When Mr. Cairo first arrived in Afghanistan, the program catered exclusively to war victims. In a country where 3 to 5 percent of the population, by the health minister’s count, suffers from some disability, Mr. Cairo quickly realized that was not fair. The program expanded in the mid-1990s to include anyone with a disability affecting their mobility.Jonas Mekas, a filmmaker, curator, archivist, critic and all-around evangelist for independently made movies in general, and for those variously known as experimental, underground or avant-garde in particular, died on Wednesday at his home in Brooklyn. He was 96.
+His son, Sebastian, confirmed the death.
+It is rare to have consensus on the pre-eminence of any person in the arts. But few would argue that Mr. Mekas, who was often called the godfather or the guru of the New American Cinema — his name for the underground film movement of the 1950s and ’60s — was the leading champion of the kind of film that doesn’t show at the multiplex.
+A Lithuanian immigrant who, with a younger brother, Adolfas, arrived in New York City in 1949 speaking little English, he became within a handful of years an effective spokesman for avant-garde film. (Adolfas, who died in 2011, became an influential filmmaker, writer and educator in his own right.)
+In addition to making his own movies and writing prolifically about the movies of others, Mr. Mekas was the founder or a co-founder of institutions that support and promote independent filmmakers, including, in New York, the influential journal Film Culture, published quarterly from 1955 to 1996; Film-Makers Cooperative, a distribution network; and Anthology Film Archives, the leading library and museum for experimental film. (The critic Andrew Sarris published his influential essay on the auteur theory in Film Culture.)To the Editor:
+Re “Russell Baker, 1925-2019: ‘Observer’ With Pulitzer-Grade Wit and Whimsy” (front page, Jan. 23):
+Having just finished reading one of Russell Baker’s columns mentioned in his obituary, I am happy — and not at all surprised — that I found them as wry and exquisitely observational as they were when I first read them decades ago (the image of Mr. Baker having to blot “with a paper towel to remove cat hairs” from the canned pear that had escaped his spoon made me laugh out loud ).
+Mr. Baker was a must-read, and his voice, particularly in the absurd time in which we now find ourselves, would have been invaluable. Rest in peace, sir.
+Stephanie Nicholas Acquadro
+Westfield, N.J.
+To the Editor:
+In the early 1980s, I was fresh out of college, working for an environmental nonprofit. Russell Baker had accepted an invitation to speak at a gala fund-raiser, and I had been assigned to guide him through the throngs and introduce him to the key players in the room. He arrived haltingly, looking dapper but somewhat discomfited by the tuxedo he had been expected to wear.
+He was obviously pleased that a sympathetic someone would accompany him during the evening, and quickly made clear his gentle skepticism of the purported intent of the gathering. It was, like all galas, perhaps somewhat more about the attendees than the cause, and he communicated, at least to me, that he felt out of place among New York’s glitterati. Far sooner than either of us had expected, he was sheared from me, but not before expressing some dismay and, I like to think, disappointment at our separation.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+One of the busiest airports in the country was closed to arriving flights on Tuesday evening by reports of a drone flying nearby, showing how a single electronic toy could wreak havoc on an air-travel system already lagging in adopting technology to protect the skies.
+Newark Liberty International Airport, one of three main airports that serve New York City, halted all landings and diverted planes for more than an hour after two pilots on different planes spotted a drone nearby as they came in for landings. Law enforcement agencies were still investigating the sightings, but so far no drone has been located, a federal aviation official said on Wednesday.
+The disruption was all the more alarming because it came just one month after reported drone sightings caused the shutdown of Gatwick Airport in London, one of the busiest in Europe.
+The upheaval at Newark illustrated how vulnerable the air-travel system is to the proliferation of inexpensive drones that can weigh as much as 50 pounds and are capable of flying high and fast enough to get in the path of commercial jets, experts on aviation safety and drone technology said. It also raised questions about whether airports are prepared enough to identify drones and prevent them from paralyzing travel and leaving passengers stranded.DAVOS, Switzerland — A month before President Trump is scheduled to meet for a second time with Kim Jong-un of North Korea, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan appealed to Mr. Trump to keep him in the loop as he seeks a disarmament deal with the North.
+Mr. Abe, speaking in an interview Wednesday at the World Economic Forum, said he was confident that he was in sync with Mr. Trump on North Korea. But privately, Japanese officials and analysts worry that the American president will make a deal with Mr. Kim that leaves Japan vulnerable to a missile strike from the North.
+“I would like to make sure that both of our national security councils, as well as national security advisers and relevant teams, would collaborate as we move forward,” Mr. Abe said, “so that we will be able to meet the goal of denuclearization of North Korea.”
+The first time Mr. Trump and Mr. Kim met, in Singapore last June, the two leaders agreed to a vague commitment to work toward the “complete denuclearization of North Korea.” Left unsettled was the status of North Korea’s arsenal of medium- and short-range missiles, which are capable of striking Japan.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+The last time the atmosphere contained as much carbon dioxide as it does now, birdlike dinosaurs roamed what was then a verdant landscape. The earth’s lushness was at least partly caused by the abundance of CO₂, which plants use for photosynthesis. That has led to the idea that more CO₂ in the atmosphere could create a literally greener planet.
+Today, plants and soil around the world absorb roughly a quarter of the greenhouse gases that humans release into the atmosphere, helping the Earth avoid some of the worst effects of climate change. In an ideal situation, as levels of carbon dioxide increased, plants would soak up more of these emissions, helping to fuel their growth.
+But in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers found that under a warming climate, rather than absorbing more greenhouse gas emissions, plants and soil may start absorbing less, accelerating the rate of change.
+“We have this image of the planet getting very, very green as we move into the future,” said Pierre Gentine, a professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Engineering at Columbia University and an author of the study. “But it may be the opposite .”Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
+Mabel Stark was taking a walk one evening in Venice, Calif., around 1911 when a sound lured her to the grounds of the Al G. Barnes Circus.
+Though the site was locked, “She found a rattletrap, unsecured gate and squeezed herself through,” Roger Smith, a close friend, said. “There she found herself face to face with a mature Bengal named King.”
+The sight of the caged tiger in twilight transfixed her. She had been working as a nurse and a carnival hoochie coochie dancer but now, all she could think about was being around tigers. Al Sands, the circus’s manager, hired the eager woman as a horseback rider, but her burning ambition to work with tigers led her to the circus’s wild animal trainer.
+Within a couple of years, she was one of the world’s top big cat trainers, never happier than when she was behind steel bars with a dozen or more tigers, commanding them in her chirpy voice to leap through fiery hoops, walk on wires, roll large balls and arrange themselves in a pyramid.At Tomorrow’s Paris showroom, the box concept was made literal — clothes hung in and on a giant trunk, and piles of recycling boxes — to pique the imagination of store buyers. (Some interested stores have asked for the displays as well as the clothes.)
+It is the first iteration of a new project organized by the Japan External Trade Organization (Jetro), Daisuke Gemma (an all-purpose connector and sounding board for Japanese brands) and the consulting arm of Tomorrow, which runs showrooms and offers business development services.
+Mr. Kogi chose pieces from designers less known outside of Japan, including suiting by Auralee (he was wearing it himself, underneath a white leather Louis Vuitton harness as he showed visitors through the offerings); T-shirts by Midorikawa with stipple portraits of the minimalist avant-garde composer John Cage; and sweatshirts from Mr. Kogi’s own Poggy the Man collection embroidered with the letters L-O-V-E in a familiar-but-unplaceable bubbled logo.
+“Do you know Devo?” he said. Ah, yes — there it is.This is hardly consolation to Chanel, which in November sued the RealReal in federal court, charging that the consignment company has sold fakes and misleads consumers into believing it has an affiliation with the French fashion house. Only Chanel personnel can tell what is truly Chanel, says Chanel.
+“They are trying to stop the circular economy,” responded TRR in a statement, adding a motion to dismiss the suit, still pending.
+“Chanel is holding on to old ways,” Ms. Wainwright said. She has collaborated extensively with Stella McCartney, a label known for its ecological consciousness, and has cordial relationships with Kering, which owns Gucci, Saint Laurent and Alexander McQueen , as well as the Parisian behemoth LVMH (Celine, Dior, Marc Jacobs etc.). “No other brand is so afraid to embrace us,” she said. “I don’t think they understand: The secondary market supports the retail market. When people sell things on our site, they go buy new. You wouldn’t buy a car if you couldn’t resell it!”
+From Flops to Fops
+Ms. Wainwright is herself a model of personal refurbishment.
+For a long time she was best known in Silicon Valley as the C.E.O. of Pets.com, with its jabbering sock-puppet mascot the most mocked of e-commerce 1.0 failures. “It was as dark as it can get,” Ms. Wainwright said of that period, which included her then-husband asking her for a divorce. “People were horrible, just horrible.”
+Realizing the internet wasn’t going away, she began a short-lived online magazine for women over 35 called SmartNow (“I’m not good at naming,” she said, “but I’m good at setting objectives.”) and mulled ventures related to cosmetics or health care. “It’s like, ‘Do I want to be in the natural-food business?’” she remembered thinking . “No.”
+Then one day Ann Winblad of the venture capital firm Hummer Winblad, a mentor, took her along on a shopping trip to Head Over Heels, a consignment boutique in Menlo Park, Calif. With tasteful merchandising, the owner had managed not to “break the romance of the brand,” the way that other cut-rate outlets did, Ms. Wainwright observed. “Whenever I would give stuff to Goodwill it always made me sad,” she said. “You don’t want to see your beautiful things in a heap or wrapped up on a hanger.”To meet multiyear membership goals intended to make the academy more diverse, the group has increasingly reached out to artists who hail from other countries, and that’s begun to have a profound effect on the nominations.
+After the Screen Actors Guild failed to recognize the Mexican cast of “Roma,” the academy delivered in a big way, nominating Yalitza Aparicio for best actress and Marina de Tavira for best supporting actress. That’s only the second time a film has received two acting nominations for foreign-language performances; the first was “Babel,” which was recognized for supporting actresses Rinko Kikuchi and Adriana Barraza but was still toplined by Hollywood actors Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett and contained plenty of English-language sequences.
+The directors branch has been among the most profoundly diversified by the academy’s push, and though this year’s crop of best-director nominees still lacked a woman, it notably eschewed homegrown Hollywood auteurs like “A Star Is Born’s” Bradley Cooper and “Black Panther’s” Ryan Coogler in favor of Alfonso Cuarón for “Roma” and the Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski for “Cold War.” Germany’s foreign-language contender, “Never Look Away,” even managed a cinematography nomination, one of Tuesday morning’s most surprising inclusions.
+With #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo, there is still work to do
+These two hashtag-driven campaigns for social change became major movements in part because of award season. Do this year’s nominees indicate that Hollywood has taken their lessons to heart?
+Yes and no. On the #OscarsSoWhite front, several actors of color were nominated, and “BlacKkKlansman” director Spike Lee earned his first long-overdue nominations for best director and best picture. In the less prominent categories, nominees of color included “If Beale Street Could Talk” writer Barry Jenkins; “Black Panther” production designer Hannah Beachler — the first African-American ever nominated in her field; and Domee Shi, who directed the animated short “Bao” for Pixar.Elevated blood pressure in p eople under 40 is associated with reduced brain volume, a new study has found. The effect was apparent even in people with blood pressure readings in the range generally considered normal.
+The analysis, published in Neurology, included 423 adults between 19 and 40 who had their blood pressure measured and underwent M.R.I. examinations of the brain. Researchers divided the blood pressure findings into categories increasing in four steps from under 120/80 to greater than 140/90.
+They found that higher blood pressure readings were directly correlated with lower gray matter volume in several parts of the brain. Even in the groups with pressure within a range widely considered normal — between 120 and 140 systolic (the top number) — brain volumes were smaller compared with those with readings under 120.
+Some have assumed that changes in brain volume emerge only in older people and after many years of hypertension, but these results suggest that the changes can begin even in people in their early 20s.Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
+Two major new polls are in, and they both found that Americans are more attuned to the threats of climate change than ever before.
+My colleague John Schwartz wrote about one of the big surveys, which was conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. It found that about 73 percent of Americans believe global warming is occurring, a record high and a jump of 10 percentage points from 2015. Another record: The percentage of Americans who said global warming is personally important to them was 72 percent, an increase of nine points since March.
+Those results mirrored a separate survey, from the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, that found 71 percent of Americans believe climate change is happening. About half of those people said they found the science of climate change to be more conclusive than it was five years ago and the vast majority cited extreme weather as the main reason .
+And the science remains dire. A new study, which my colleague John also wrote about, found that Greenland is losing ice at a pace never before seen. The authors found that the ice loss in 2012, more than 400 billion tons per year, was nearly four times the rate in 2003. It’s part of a growing body of research, John noted, that shows the effects of rising global temperatures are mounting.For all its flaws — and they are legion — “King of Thieves” wraps you in a fuzzy blanket of familiarity. Like the Cockney-crime-caper genre the movie calls home, its over-the-hill leads are showing their age. Yet there’s something cheering about their refusal to be sequestered in doddery grandpa roles: When you were once known for playing heartbreakers, leg-breakers or wide boys who lead with their fists, the slippers-and-sweaters ghetto must hold little appeal.
+No less than the third film to be based on the 2015 Hatton Garden heist, in which four retired ex-cons masterminded what one prosecutor called “the largest burglary in English legal history,” “King of Thieves” is unabashed old-school entertainment. The tone is jaunty and the patter thick as Brian (Michael Caine), recently bereaved, medicates his loneliness by planning one last job: robbing a vault in the jewelry district. Roping in his old pals Kenny (Tom Courtenay), Terry (Jim Broadbent) and Danny (Ray Winstone) — a geezer jackpot of deafness, diabetes and hip replacement — Brian also includes a young protégé (Charlie Cox) to deactivate the vault’s alarm system.
+Communicating in rough insults and rhyming slang, these artful codgers are, for a time, fun to watch. Jokes about knee liniment, disability payments and insulin jabs pepper Joe Penhall’s script, and characters called Frankie the Fence and Billy the Fish bob and weave in the movie’s margins. If you’re in the right mood, this will all go down as easily as a warm brew in an East End pub; otherwise, you’ll begin to notice the sketchy plotting and slack pacing. Relying too often on blasts of on-the-nose vintage pop music from the likes of Tom Jones and the Turtles, the director, James Marsh, struggles to inject an excitement that no one is feeling. And when a vein of nastiness opens beneath the banter (who knew Broadbent could be so wickedly threatening?) as ancient resentments swell and burst, the backstabbing menace feels jarringly out of place.Get the DealBook newsletter to make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them.
+__________
+Shareholders haven’t been successful in holding companies accountable for data breaches.
+That changed in the first month of 2019.
+The former officers and directors of Yahoo agreed to pay $29 million to settle charges that they breached their fiduciary duties in their handling of customer data during a series of cyberattacks from 2013 until 2016. Three billion Yahoo user accounts were compromised in the attacks. The settlement ended three so-called derivative lawsuits filed in Delaware and California against the company’s former leadership team and board, including Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s former chief executive. Insurance coverage will pick up the tab.
+The settlement, approved this month by a Superior Court judge in Santa Clara, Calif., marked the first time that shareholders have been awarded a monetary damages in a derivative lawsuit related to a data breach. There have been very few breach-related derivative lawsuits, and all had been dismissed by the courts or settled without a payment to the shareholders.When John Ashbery died in 2017, he left behind more than 30 collections of elliptical, often collagelike poetry, including “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” which won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize.
+He also, like most writers, left behind another cache of books: an eclectic personal library of some 5,000 volumes, which will now be getting space on the shelves at Harvard University, his alma mater.
+The university’s Houghton Library, which began acquiring the poet’s manuscripts and other papers in 1986, has announced the acquisition of the John Ashbery Reading Library, which includes more than 5,000 books of poetry, art criticism, architectural history, philosophy, religious history and cookbooks collected over the poet’s lifetime.
+The collection, which was donated by Ashbery’s husband, David Kermani, convey the traces of the poet’s thought, and also of his hand. There are annotated editions of books by Boris Pasternak, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzsche and others, as well as the copy of the “Oxford Book of American Verse” he used as an undergraduate, with pressed flowers used as bookmarks.Bernardo Benes, a Cuban exile who helped persuade Fidel Castro to free 3,600 political prisoners in the 1970s but became an outcast in Miami’s anti-Castro community for negotiating with him, died on Jan. 14 in Miami. He was 84.
+His son Edgar confirmed the death but did not give a cause.
+Mr. Benes was a prominent businessman and activist in Miami when he first met with Mr. Castro in early 1978. He had risen to a major job at a savings and loan and later helped found a bank in the Little Havana section of the city. He had helped raised money to build a monument to the soldiers who died in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and worked on various causes to help Cuban refugees.
+“Until 1977, 1978, I was The Cuban in Miami,” Mr. Benes told the writer Joan Didion in an interview for her book “Miami” (1987). “There was nothing important happening in Miami that I wasn’t involved with. I was the guerrilla in the establishment.”
+His business and civic activities shifted into a higher gear in 1977, when two high-level Cuban government officials approached him in Panama while he was on vacation with his family. Cuba at the time was apparently interested in improving relations with the United States and believed that Mr. Benes, who been the Florida director of Hispanic affairs during Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential campaign, might be helpful.Ms. McDonald has collaborated with Mr. McNally several times previously — she won Tony Awards for “Master Class,” a play he wrote, and “Ragtime,” a musical for which he wrote the book; did a reading of “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” another musical for which he wrote the book, and appeared in “Every Act of Life,” a documentary about his work. The “Frankie and Johnny” revival is pegged to Mr. McNally’s 80th birthday, and Ms. McDonald said she saw it as a tribute to a man she called “one of our great American playwrights.”
+Mr. McNally said in an interview that the play would be staged as a period piece (“we’re going to have to find a VCR”) but that, even though it originally opened at the height of the AIDS crisis and was viewed as a comment on the effect of that condition on intimacy, it continues to feel relevant. “I’m very proud of this one, and think it has stood the test of time,” he said. “It still seems to be about the ferocious need we have to connect, and how hard it can be, and how we can go through our lives never hitting the bull’s-eye.”
+He noted this production will be the first to involve an intimacy director — a recent innovation in the theater world introduced to protect actors in dramas involving nudity or simulated sex. The previous Broadway production of “Frankie and Johnny” was noted for its nudity; Mr. McNally said the amount of nudity in the revival is still to be determined. “That’s for the director and the actors to negotiate,” he said. “But no one is going to come see this show because of the nudity. The ‘Oh! Calcutta!’ days are over.”
+Ms. McDonald agreed.
+“I want to do what is right for the characters, and they are in a very raw, vulnerable state,” she said. “I don’t think anything needs to be gratuitous, but I’m open to whatever needs to be. It will only be what’s necessary to serve the play.”
+The new production, directed by Arin Arbus in her Broadway debut, will begin performances in May, making it a part of the 2019-20 Broadway season. The producers are Hunter Arnold, Debbie Bisno and Tom Kirdahy; Mr. Kirdahy is Mr. McNally’s husband, and suggested Ms. McDonald consider the role. The producers said the play would be presented at a Shubert theater, but did not say which one; they said the run would be limited to 16 weeks.Ms. Way and Mr. Stewart met in September 2015 at the National Black M.B.A. Conference in Orlando, Fla., while both waited to be interviewed by the same company for the same job. At the time, she was working in marketing for Southwest Airlines in Dallas and he was studying for his M.B.A. at Emory in Atlanta.
+“She was gorgeous,” Mr. Stewart said. “I was completely taken with her beautiful, confident smile.”
+Ms. Way was looking at things a bit differently: “I saw him as the competition for a job I wanted.” She said she thought he “seemed funny and confident and sure of himself, and he was very handsome.”
+But she was not to be distracted by small talk. At day’s end, the company invited all of those who had been interviewed to nearby happy hour, where Mr. Stewart and a few of his classmates from Emory gathered, along with Ms. Way, who had gone to the conference alone.
+When Mr. Stewart tried reapproaching Ms. Way, all he got was that smile again.
+“She kind of ignored me,” he said with a sigh. “She was too busy talking to recruiters, still trying to get that job.”
+He retreated back to his classmates, one of whom said, “Oh man, Charles, that was rough.”
+As the happy hour wound down, Mr. Stewart and his fellow classmates were milling around and discussing plans for later that evening to attend what was billed as a “Southern hip-hop dance party” at a nearby events space called Grits & Biscuits.
+When Mr. Stewart turned toward the door, he found Ms. Way standing directly in front of him.
+“Are you ready to go?” she asked him, flashing that confident smile once more.LONDON — South Africa’s president said Wednesday that his corruption-ridden party, the African National Congress, had lost its founding values and now faced a “Damascus moment” in trying to regain the people’s confidence and support.
+“We have said to ourselves: ‘We cannot carry on like this. We have deviated from the values and the principles that have always defined the A.N.C.,’” President Cyril Ramaphosa said in an interview with The New York Times in Davos, Switzerland, where he was attending the World Economic Forum.
+“People have lost confidence in us,” said Mr. Ramaphosa, who will lead his party in national elections that will most likely be held in May.
+Repeating the message he was pushing at the forum, Mr. Ramaphosa said efforts to clean up the African National Congress were already underway. And he pledged to return the party of Nelson Mandela to its past glory.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The newly emboldened Democratic-led New York State Legislature waded into the battle over immigrants’ rights on Wednesday, approving a bill that for the first time offers undocumented students access to state financial aid and scholarships for higher education.
+Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has confirmed he will sign the measure into law.
+The Dream Act is the latest in a wave of state-level protections for immigrants as blue state legislatures increasingly seek to act as a counterbalance to President Trump’s federal immigration policies. These issues are also expected to play a prominent role in the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential primary, with candidates who are courting liberal activists supporting the state measures.
+After New York Democrats won control of the State Senate in November for the first time in a decade, protections for immigrants became a legislative priority. They included permitting undocumented residents to obtain state driver’s licenses and reducing maximum jail sentences for certain misdemeanors that could otherwise lead to deportation.
+“It took us almost a decade to get the Dream Act, and it’s going to take another five, 10, 20 years to undo the damage that Washington is causing our families,” said Assemblywoman Catalina Cruz of Queens, who was born in Colombia and came to New York as an undocumented child.Want to find out how your marriage is faring? Step onto a tennis court with your spouse. On this week’s modern love podcast, Connie Nielsen reads “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” a story about the evolution of one couple’s ultracompetitive relationship.
+Ann Leary, who wrote the 2013 Modern Love essay, is also the author of the memoir “An Innocent, a Broad” and three novels.
+Ms. Nielsen appeared in the 2017 film “Wonder Woman.” She also has a recurring role in the TV mini-series “I Am the Night.” Stay tuned after the reading to hear from Ms. Nielsen, Ms. Leary and the Modern Love editor Daniel Jones.
+To read past Modern Love columns, click here. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.In 2015, Phoebe Philo showed slouchy leather carryalls (some accented with zebra prints) for Celine — and variations have cropped up on catwalks ever since. But this season, brands including Burberry, Versace and Hermès gave the accessory a new spin by adorning it with their own iconic logos. Chloé’s leather version pairs an embossed logo with cream and burgundy stripes that recall vintage luggage, while Christian Dior and Fendi offer carryalls covered in their classic monogram motifs. Here, 10 timeless logo-printed totes.Read Thursday’s story on the shooting at a bank in Florida that police say left five dead.
+The call came in at 12:37 p.m. Wednesday. A 21-year old gunman, clad in a T-shirt that bore the image of four scythe-wielding grim reapers on horseback, wanted the police to know that he had just opened fire in a bank in the small city of Sebring, Fla., the police said.
+“I have shot five people,” he told a dispatcher, according to a police statement. There were only five people in the bank at the time, the police said, and they all died.
+When the Sebring Police Department and the Highlands County Sheriff’s Office responded to the SunTrust Bank branch on U.S. Route 27, they said, they found the shooter barricaded inside. What followed was a tense standoff with police negotiators that ended when an armored police vehicle rammed into the bank doors, shattering their glass, video footage shows.
+The police said in a statement that negotiators and members of the SWAT team “persuaded the suspect to surrender.” Video from the scene shows officers inching toward the broken glass with their firearms drawn. They soon emerged with the suspect in handcuffs.#speakingindance
+Spinning Into a Storm of Her Own Making
+Watch part of a solo that Bianca Berman, 14, choreographed and will perform as part of Ellen Robbins’s “Dances by Very Young Choreographers.”Watch Giuliani on TV and you see a man being devoured by egomania. Lawyers are supposed to serve as a screen between their clients and the outside world. If said client is being accused of a crime, their mission is to make the whole matter sound as boring as humanly possible.
+It’s no problem for us that Trump picked an attorney who’s so wildly hungry for attention that he can’t follow the rules. Really, it’s great that we’re getting to hear so much unfiltered information. The depressing part is that this is just one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump surrounds himself with people who have both terrible judgment and terrible aptitude for the jobs they’re supposed to be doing.
+Whatever shred of credibility Giuliani still retains is connected to his role as mayor on Sept. 11, when the whole world saw him walking through the dust of the World Trade Center collapse. He needed to get uptown since the city’s emergency management center had been destroyed by the attack. That’s because Giuliani had it located in the W.T.C. — a place that had been targeted for bombing by terrorists in the past — despite vigorous objections from his security advisers. He just sort of wanted it close to City Hall.
+Later, the mayor would take dignitaries to the disaster site, sometimes shielded from the deadly asbestos floating through the air by a face mask. And, it appeared, totally ignoring the fact that most of the workmen had no protection whatsoever.
+Giuliani had already begun to evolve from competent city official to hapless big-time political candidate before the attack occurred. He tried to run for Senate against Hillary Clinton in what was undoubtedly one of the most disaster-ridden campaigns in history. That was the time he held a news conference to announce he was leaving his wife, without mentioning the matter to the spouse in question.
+His unharnessed libido has been part of his story ever since. Last summer, after Giuliani bragged to a reporter about his new girlfriend, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to declare that she was “not today or tomorrow or at any point ever going to comment on Rudy Giuliani’s love life.”
+And the beat goes on. During his parade of super-strange comments over the last week, he volunteered that he’s afraid “it will be on my gravestone: ‘Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump.’”There was no consensus on what a global architecture might look like.
+The United States has largely deferred to the tech behemoths of Silicon Valley, which have favored some kind of international understanding among governments on data standards, but want those standards to impose few restrictions on how companies use that data.
+European governments have advocated much greater limits on how companies can use data, notably through the European Union’s imposition last May of strict data privacy rules, the General Data Protection Regulation.
+China has not accepted any limits on the government’s ability to access people’s personal information. The Chinese government has wide access to electronic communications and employs indoor and outdoor facial recognition and other monitoring and people-tracking technology.
+The rapid spread of digital technology in daily life and the implications that has on the future of work and data security will require more international cooperation, not less, Ms. Merkel said. But she acknowledged that nobody knows how to write the rules.
+Neither the American nor the Chinese approach would work for Europeans, who place a high value on privacy and social justice, Ms. Merkel said.
+“I still have yet to see any global architecture that deals with these questions,” she said.
+Mr. Abe said Japan wanted to move fast on data governance during its leadership this year of the Group of 20. But he provided only a general indication of what a new architecture might look like.
+“We must, on one hand, be able to put our personal data and data embodying intellectual property, national security intelligence, and so on, under careful protection, while on the other hand, we must enable the free flow of medical, industrial, traffic and other most useful, non-personal, anonymous data to see no borders, repeat, no borders,” he said.The fear isn’t just that genetically-edited babies could develop unintended health problems that could be inherited by subsequent generations, or that there could be attempts to produce designer babies, genetically altered for physical features, intelligence or athletic prowess.
+Scientists also worry about a backlash against less-controversial gene editing that doesn’t involve embryos and has more potential to treat or prevent disease.
+Not only did some American scientists know about Dr. He’s intentions, one may have supported him. His former doctoral adviser at Rice University, Michael Deem, told The Associated Press he was present in China during the informed consent process with couples participating in the embryo-editing project.
+Rice is investigating and declined to comment. Lawyers for Dr. Deem, who also told the A.P. he had “a small stake” in Dr. He’s genomics companies, said: “Michael does not do human research and he did not do human research on this project.”
+Dr. He and Dr. Deem haven’t responded to emails from The New York Times.
+Dr. He, who is in his mid-30s , went public about his work in a video announcement in November, after it was revealed by MIT Technology Review just before a conference on genome editing in Hong Kong.
+“I was just horrified; I felt kind of physically sick,” said Jennifer Doudna, a Crispr inventor, who first learned what Dr. He had done when he emailed her on Thanksgiving with the subject line “Babies Born."After the season, the Liberty’s future is unknown. The team could play alongside the Nets at Barclays Center. The Long Island Nets, an N.B.A. developmental team, play at the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, so that is a possibility. The team could also remain in Westchester or elsewhere in the New York metropolitan area.
+It is also not yet known whether Tsai will seek to change the team’s name, or what plans he may have to revive interest in the Liberty, whose attendance fell to last place in the league last season. The Westchester County Center was configured to hold 2,319 people, but the Liberty averaged just 1,886 fans for its 15 games there, according to The Associated Press. Before the move to Westchester last season, the Liberty were regularly averaging more than 9,000 fans per game at the Garden.
+A spokeswoman for Tsai declined to make him available for an interview.
+The W.N.B.A.’s release announcing the sale came from Mark Tatum, the deputy commissioner of the N.B.A. who is serving double-duty as the W.N.B.A.’s interim president. Lisa Borders, who led the league for three seasons, left in October to become the chief executive of Time’s Up, an advocacy group for women.
+Three weeks after Borders left, the union representing W.N.B.A. players announced it was opting out of the league’s collective bargaining agreement, which was set to expire in 2021. Instead, the agreement will terminate on Oct. 31 of this year, after the season, and negotiations are expected to be contentious.
+Players have been vocal about their low pay and wanting to improving working conditions in the next collective bargaining agreement. Many W.N.B.A. stars play in Europe during the off-season, where they earn more money. The Las Vegas Aces pulled out of a game last season after they were forced to spend 25 hours traveling.Nonetheless, you squint to understand what you’re looking at, and scramble to keep up with the associative momentum of Godard’s mind. What’s on that mind, mostly, is violence, which emerges not only as a frequent subject of cinematic representation over the years but also as an essential component of the form’s genetic material. “The Image Book” implies a disturbing connection between the industrialization of killing and the mass production of moving pictures.
+Depictions of combat and slaughter, excised from narrative or political context as they are here, also lose their moral and aesthetic bearings. The spectacles that thrill us and the documentary evidence that horrifies us are hard to tell apart. Are we looking at cruelty or heroism? Fact or fiction? Justice or barbarism? And if those distinctions collapse, what about the narrower — but to Godard, utterly vital — distinction between cinema as an art and the ubiquitous and disposable images that threaten to swallow it, and us?
+No answers are forthcoming, and those are far from the only questions this film provokes. Further research is suggested by an implied syllabus that includes texts by Victor Hugo and Montesquieu, and films by (among many others) Nicholas Ray, Roberto Rossellini, Ridley Scott, Abderrahmane Sissako and Godard himself. What you remember may not be pictures or ideas so much as his voice, roughened by age and tobacco, fragile but still hectoring, melancholy and indomitable.
+Reaching the end of his ninth decade on earth and his sixth behind the camera, Godard resembles his near-contemporary Clint Eastwood, who similarly perseveres without regard for the vicissitudes of fashion or reputation. They still make movies because they still know how. To take issue with either man’s political or artistic commitments may be irresistible for younger viewers, but it’s also missing the point. Do you think Eastwood cares what a couple of millennial goofballs on “Saturday Night Live” think of “The Mule?” Do I think Godard gives a damn about this review? Certainement pas.As fate would have it, word of Russell Baker’s death came the same day as a Manhattan screening of a new HBO documentary, “Breslin and Hamill: Deadline Artists.” Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill were archetypes of a New York brand of columnizing that they all but invented more than half a century ago. They came at writing with chins out and fists clenched, crafting sentences taut and devastating.
+Mr. Baker, 93 when he died, was a deadline artist, too. But he approached the world at a 45-degree angle, tending toward whimsy and japery in some 5,000 “Observer” columns that he wrote for The Times across 36 years. His approach was no less shattering than that of the New York brawlers. He punctured those who were pretentious, satirized that which was foolish, lamented what was distressing and pondered the endless inanities of daily life. He did it three times a week for much of his career, in 750-word offerings graced with the effortlessness of a Ted Williams swing.
+Like Breslin and Hamill, Mr. Baker grew up poor, in his case in rural Virginia. An impoverished childhood may not be indispensable to becoming a great columnist, but it sure doesn’t seem to hurt. In their heyday, Mr. Hamill and Mr. Breslin were widely imitated by big-city newspaper writers everywhere. Mr. Baker not so much. Maybe that’s because copying a Swiftian sensibility doesn’t come easily. I know, because I tried in my own years as a city columnist. Russell Baker was my ideal. But I never amounted to more than Beatlemania to his Beatles. Face it, you can’t match an original.
+His reflections on journalism remain as valid as ever — these days, more valid than ever. In a memoir, he despaired of the life of a young reporter, sitting outside a closed Senate meeting and “waiting for somebody to come out and lie to me.” Yet he also appreciated the importance of showing up and hanging in there. He told of an afternoon in Washington when he was walking to The Times’s offices with the paper’s bureau chief, James Reston. They heard a car crash not far away. Let’s take a look, “Scotty” Reston said. Why bother? Mr. Baker replied. Because, his boss said, you never know; a cabinet secretary might be in the car.1. Following a tit-for-tat between President Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi over the State of the Union address, the president said he would look for alternative sites for the speech on Tuesday.
+This morning, Mr. Trump told Ms. Pelosi that he would deliver the speech in the Capitol next week as scheduled. But Ms. Pelosi fired back and told Mr. Trump he wasn’t welcome to give the address in the House until the government reopened.
+By late afternoon, Mr. Trump declared, “The State of the Union has been canceled by Nancy Pelosi because she doesn’t want to hear the truth.”The Public Theater on Wednesday announced the 2019 class of the Joe’s Pub Working Group, supporting five young performing artists whose careers are on the rise.
+This year’s honorees include the songwriter and performer Migguel Anggelo; the vocalist and composer Trevor Bachman; the comedian, playwright and performance artist Becca Blackwell; the saxophonist Yacine Boulares; and the singer-songwriter Treya Lam.
+Now in its fifth year, the Working Group functions as a residency for standout artists who have previously played at Joe’s Pub, a small performance space tucked inside the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan. All five artists receive a $4,000 stipend, but because their work ranges widely, additional services vary for each honoree. They include access to rehearsal space, assistance with video production and consultations with industry experts.
+“Joe’s Pub Working Group was created to help make the business of being an artist in New York a little easier,” Alex Knowlton, the director of Joe’s Pub, said in an email. “We’re interested in the working life of an artist and have seen so many common needs among the huge spectrum of performers here.”Edward A. Morrison, a former New York deputy mayor whose avowal that John Lennon was a valuable cultural asset to the city helped Lennon avoid deportation in the 1970s, died on Saturday in Ocala, Fla. He was 85.
+His son Andrew said the cause was congestive heart failure.
+Mr. Morrison, a lawyer, was among the advisers to Lennon and his wife, the artist and singer Yoko Ono, when Lennon’s residency in the United States was challenged by the Nixon administration in 1972.
+He was also a friend of the couple’s; Lennon and Ms. Ono had attended Mr. Morrison’s swearing-in as deputy mayor in 1972.
+Lennon had been living with Ms. Ono in New York for about a year when his immigration troubles began. They stemmed from his pleading guilty to a misdemeanor charge of cannabis possession in London in 1968. The White House contended that American immigration law barred the admission of convicted drug offenders. In 1973, the United States issued a deportation order.On a toxic planet where virtually all of humankind has been either wiped out or slung to a faraway space station, only allegories thrive in the willowy vapors of the Netflix science-fiction film “IO.”
+References to poems like W.B. Yeats’s “Leda and the Swan” and T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding” provide a literary framework for the acts of creation and survival that sustain the last two people on Earth, which is in the process of evolving past the species that ransacked it. But at heart, “IO” is mostly a lugubrious Adam and Eve story, staked on the chemistry between scientists who are almost too swamped in ennui to tend to the garden.Eating fried foods may increase the risk of heart disease and death in women over 50.
+Researchers used health and dietary data on 106,966 postmenopausal women enrolled in a large health study between 1993 and 1998, and followed their health through the beginning of 2017.
+They found that compared with women who ate none, those who ate fried chicken once a week or more had 12 percent increased risk of premature death from any cause and an 11 percent increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Women who ate fried fish that often had a 7 percent increased risk of mortality and a 12 percent increased risk of cardiovascular death compared with those who ate none.
+The study, in BMJ, controlled for age, race, education and many diet, health and behavioral characteristics.
+“These are modest associations,” said the senior author, Dr. Wei Bao, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa. “And fried food is just one component of an overall diet. But it is probably a good idea at least to reduce portion size and frequency of consumption of fried food.”BuzzFeed, often hailed as the future of publishing and a leading producer of digital content, plans to lay off 15 percent of its work force, or around 200 employees, according to a memo sent to the staff on Wednesday night.
+The company’s management team, led by the chief executive, Jonah Peretti, has been working on the staff cuts over the past few months, two people with knowledge of the plans said. They asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter. The cuts will affect the international and web content departments, including the news division.
+Mr. Peretti sent a note to employees at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time with the subject line “Difficult Changes.”
+“Hello BuzzFeeders,” he wrote. “I’m writing with sad news: we are doing layoffs at BuzzFeed next week. We will be making a 15% overall reduction in headcount across the company. I’m sending this tonight because I wanted you to hear it from me directly instead of from the press.”The number of Americans without health insurance plunged after Obamacare started. Now, early evidence suggests, it’s beginning to climb again.
+New polling from Gallup shows that the percentage of uninsured Americans inched up throughout last year. That trend matches other data suggesting that health coverage has been eroding under the policies of the Trump administration.
+Gallup estimated that the uninsured rate for adults increased by 1.3 percentage points. That would mean an increase of more than three million people without insurance between the first quarter of 2018 and the end of the year. Gallup said this was a four-year high, although a major methodology change a year ago may make such longer-term comparisons less precise.
+“There’s no question that some of the reductions in the uninsured rate that we have measured over the course of Obamacare has now been given back,” said Dan Witters, the research director for the survey.Juan Guaidó has just sworn himself in as the president of Venezuela. He mobilized tens of thousands of his supporters. And won the backing of a powerful ally, the Trump administration. But how did Guaidó go from virtually unheard of to a U.S. supported opposition figure? The 35-year-old got involved in politics as a student leader in Caracas. He led protests against then-president Hugo Chávez. But it wasn’t until earlier this month when he was sworn in as the new leader of the National Assembly that Guaidó became a household name. President Nicolás Maduro tried to dissolve the National Assembly in 2017 and has since sidelined the legislative body. But Guaidó has been outspoken in his defiance. He was briefly detained on Jan. 13 by Venezuela’s intelligence service. He relayed his experience to his supporters. Guaidó called on Venezuelans to come out and protest on Jan. 23 in an effort to get rid of Maduro. “Hola. I’m Mike Pence.” Vice President Mike Pence has voiced his support for Guaidó and the opposition. “The United States supports the courageous decision by Juan Guaidó, the president of your National Assembly, to assert that body’s constitutional powers, declare Maduro a usurper.” This is how Maduro responded to the administration’s support of his rival. However, there is no indication that Maduro is going to resign. Canada and the Organization of American States have also joined in recognizing Guaidó as the legitimate head of state. Guaidó has launched the most direct challenge to Maduro’s government so far, with thousands of people and the U.S. government at his side.Mary Boyd Higgins, the product of a privileged youth in Indianapolis, was living comfortably in New York in the 1950s when she volunteered to manage the trust of Wilhelm Reich, a highly controversial psychoanalyst who coined the phrase “the sexual revolution.”
+An Austrian-born Marxist who had linked fascism with sexual repression, Dr. Reich had the rare distinction of having his writings ordered destroyed by both the Nazis in Germany in the 1930s and the United States government in the 1950s, during the McCarthy era.
+When she volunteered to become his trustee, Ms. Higgins was familiar with his work but had never met Dr. Reich, who died in federal prison in 1957. Little did she know that by the time she died, on Jan. 8 at 93, she would have devoted nearly 60 years of her life to carrying out his elaborate last wishes.
+Dr. Reich had appointed one of his daughters, Eva Reich, trustee, but after a year she desperately sought someone else to take on that responsibility.When Mr. Trump fires off a tweet, the president gets visibly excited when he comes up with a message he believes will go over well with his base — he peers over his phone with a “watch this” expression, according to two people who have observed such a process.
+The wall rhyme appears to fit into that same bull’s-eye category. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment about the origin of Mr. Trump’s latest catch phrase on Wednesday. But a senior aide to the president said that Mr. Trump came up with it himself, and credited the new slogan to his “marketing genius.”
+There are a few hitches: Mr. Trump’s rhyming sales pitch that a border wall will reduce crime is not credible, and the facts he uses to bolster his claims are often correctable.
+First, despite the president’s repeated claims, construction has not yet started on the border wall: The “under construction now” in his morning tweet needs more context. Customs and Border Protection has begun or completed several projects to replace old fencing with new barriers, but no additional miles of wall have been added yet. Construction to build a new levee wall system in Texas is scheduled to begin in February, the first extension of existing barriers.
+Second, Mr. Trump’s rhyme that a wall will lead to falling crime rates may be catchy, but it’s at odds with what data shows about the influence immigration has on crime.The Supreme Court has decided that it’s so vital to let President Trump keep transgender people out of the military that it has allowed his ban on their service or enlistment to go forward before even hearing arguments on the validity of his discriminatory decision.
+The president announced the ban on Twitter in July 2017, surprising even the Joint Chiefs of Staff and his own defense secretary. The Pentagon later tried to get around injunctions that prevented the ban’s implementation by reverse-engineering the policy to suit Mr. Trump’s demands. In a pair of orders on Tuesday, the court lifted two of those injunctions.
+One American Civil Liberties Union lawyer called the new and ostensibly improved transgender ban “transphobia masquerading as policy.” And a former naval aviator, reacting to the Supreme Court’s latest move, wrote in a Times op-ed that her career in the armed forces was just dealt a punishing blow.
+The justices provided no explanation for their decision, which puts on hold rulings that have been in place for well over a year and that have allowed transgender troops to continue to serve openly under a directive by the Obama administration that was years in the making.Cuba is changing, albeit too slowly. About one-third of its labor force is now in the private sector, and this is just about the only part of the economy that is thriving. I stayed in one of the growing number of Airbnbs in Havana, and people were friendly, even if governments are not: When I said I was from the United States, I inevitably got a big grin and a reference to a cousin in Miami or New York or Cleveland.
+Plus, extra credit goes to a country that so lovingly preserves old American cars. I rode in from the airport in a pink 1954 Cadillac.
+In another sign of flexibility, Cuba recently hammered out a deal with Major League Baseball that will allow Cuban players to travel legally to the U.S. and play on American teams.
+Yet, sadly, the Trump administration is threatening the deal.
+Consider the persistence of North Korea and Cuba, and there’s an argument that sanctions and isolation preserve regimes rather than topple them. China teaches us not to be naïve about economic engagement toppling dictators, but on balance tourists and investors would be more of a force for change than a seventh decade of embargo.
+Moreover, trade, tourism, travel and investment empower a business community and an independent middle class. These are tools to destabilize a police state and help ordinary Cubans, but we curtail them. America blames the Castros for impoverishing the Cuban people, but we’ve participated in that impoverishment as well.
+Cuba’s government is not benign. It’s a dictatorship whose economic mismanagement has hurt its people, and Human Rights Watch says it “routinely relies on arbitrary detention to harass and intimidate critics.” But it doesn’t normally execute them (or dismember them in consulates abroad like our pal Saudi Arabia), and it tolerates some criticism from brave bloggers like Yoani Sánchez.(unclear) “Oh (expletive)” “Dude, they just ripped the door open.” “They just ripped the door open with the damn truck.” (unclear) “Holy (expletive)” “Oh (expletive)!” (unclear) “He’s going to have to send that to me. His camera’s real good.” “C’mon.” “There he is, boys.” “There he is. They didn’t kill him, they’re just arresting him.” “They got him.”Islanders goalie Robin Lehner heard his name chanted loudly at Nassau Coliseum in the closing minutes of Sunday’s 3-0 win over the Anaheim Ducks, another sterling performance in a renaissance season for him and his team. He clapped in appreciation and smiled toward the sellout crowd.
+Ten months ago he had reached rock-bottom. As he wrote in an essay for The Athletic in September, Lehner was drinking a case of beer a day and taking pills to sleep. He thought about suicide. Then in March he had a panic attack during a game with the Buffalo Sabres. Soon he entered the league’s substance abuse recovery program and received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder with manic episodes.
+Now, he is 10 months sober and an integral part of the Islanders’ stunning turnaround under their new coach, Barry Trotz.
+Lehner, 27, is 11-1-1 mark since mid-December and entered Wednesday’s games leading the league in goals-against average (2.02) and save percentage (.931).It is beyond time for this pernicious shutdown to end. With each passing day, more Americans are feeling the pinch of having the federal government thrown into chaos by a political standoff over President Trump’s demand for a wall on the southern border.
+The continuing battle increasingly resembles an episode of “Real Housewives,” with the attendant name-calling and hair-pulling. On Jan. 16, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, sent Mr. Trump a letter suggesting that he postpone his State of the Union address until the government reopened. The following day, Mr. Trump hit back, withdrawing military support for a congressional delegation that Ms. Pelosi was preparing to lead to Afghanistan.
+Come Saturday, Mr. Trump introduced a new immigration plan that he touted as a grand compromise but that, in reality, included enough poison pills to gag all but fervent hard-liners. On Wednesday, he followed up with a letter to Ms. Pelosi, declaring his intention to deliver his big speech as planned in the House chamber, shutdown or no. The speaker promptly announced that she would not allow the president to speak on the House floor for the duration of the shutdown.
+“The State of the Union speech has been canceled by Nancy Pelosi because she doesn’t want to hear the truth,” Mr. Trump told reporters.MONTREAL — Canada’s ambassador to China came under sharp criticism on Wednesday for appearing to politicize a high-profile legal case by saying publicly that the Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou had a good chance of avoiding extradition to the United States.
+Speaking at a news conference for Chinese-language news media on Tuesday in Markham, Ontario, the ambassador, John McCallum, surprised seasoned observers of diplomatic protocol by offering an assessment of the case against Ms. Meng, who was arrested in December by Canadian authorities in Vancouver at the request of the United States.
+Referring to comments that President Trump made this year that he was willing to intercede in the case if it would help secure a trade deal with China, Mr. McCallum said that Mr. Trump’s intervention, among other factors, had buttressed Ms. Meng’s case to avoid extradition.
+“I think she has quite good arguments on her side,” Mr. McCallum said in remarks broadcast in the Canadian news media. He also cited “the issue of Iran sanctions which are involved in her case, and Canada does not sign on to these Iran sanctions.”Paul Manafort’s lawyers on Wednesday strongly disputed claims by prosecutors working for the special counsel that Mr. Manafort repeatedly lied to them, including about the transfer of campaign polling data to a Russian citizen with ties to Kremlin-run intelligence services in spring 2016.
+The lawyers argued in a new court filing that the prosecutors had wrongly interpreted honest memory lapses and innocent misstatements by Mr. Manafort as deliberate attempts to deceive them about his interactions with the Russian citizen, Konstantin Kilimnik, who received the polling data in 2016 as Donald J. Trump was closing in on the Republican presidential nomination.
+“Failure of memory is not akin to a false statement,” Mr. Manafort’s lawyers said.
+If the federal judge in Washington who is overseeing the case, Amy Berman Jackson, decides that Mr. Manafort intentionally misled the prosecutors working for the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, after agreeing to cooperate with them, she would presumably be less likely to show leniency on March 5, when she is to sentence him on two conspiracy charges.
+But as a practical matter, Mr. Manafort, 69, stood little chance of receiving less than 10 years for those crimes even before prosecutors accused him of breaching his plea agreement by lying to them about his dealings with Mr. Kilimnik and other matters. He is also awaiting sentencing for eight other felonies.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+On paper, a 31-year-old man found to have serious mental illnesses was released from a New York state prison in September 2017 after serving 10 years behind bars for two robberies.
+But in reality, the man, who asked to be identified by his initials C.J., still wakes up each day inside a maximum-security prison in Stormville. Though he is technically free, he is still confined to a cell because of a Kafkaesque bureaucratic dilemma: The state requires people like him to be released to a supportive housing facility, but there is not one available.
+Lawyers for C.J. and five other mentally ill men filed a federal lawsuit in Manhattan on Wednesday seeking to force Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to address a shortage of housing for people with serious mental illnesses who need help adjusting to life outside prison walls.
+The men are no longer being held in prison because they committed offenses, their lawyers argue, but because the state has determined they are likely to become homeless once released — a practice they contend amounts to discrimination under federal civil rights laws.SAN FRANCISCO — Lawmakers are investigating the Twitter account that first shared a video of a group of white teenagers taunting a Native American protester in Washington, a collision of racial groups and politics that went viral.
+The House Intelligence Committee asked Twitter on Tuesday to provide information about how the video took off so fast. The committee said it was also awaiting information about the account that first uploaded the video and accounts that helped spread it by retweeting it.
+Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia, separately asked Twitter to provide more information about the video. A spokeswoman for Mr. Warner said Twitter had found that the account originated in the United States.
+Twitter declined to comment on the video, on the requests from the Intelligence Committee and Mr. Warner, and on whether the account was domestic.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A hedge fund billionaire has purchased a Central Park penthouse apartment for $238 million — the most anyone has ever paid for a home in the United States.
+The sale, which closed Wednesday, was confirmed by a spokesman for the buyer, Kenneth Griffin.
+The unit, a nearly 24,000-square-foot combination of two apartments, is at the top of 220 Central Park South, an under-construction tower developed by Vornado Trust Realty and designed by the firm of Robert A.M. Stern.
+The sale dwarfs the previous record-holder in New York City, a $100.5 million duplex sold in 2014 at One57, a nearby high-rise that helped rechristen a sleepy strip of Midtown across 57th Street as “billionaires’ row.”
+The previous United States record-holder was a $137 million East Hampton home that sold in 2014.
+The Wall Street Journal first reported the closing.More than a year before the Mexican drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera pulled off one of the most notorious prison breaks in history, he got word to his associates of how he planned to escape through an unlikely source: his wife, Emma Coronel Aispuro.
+The strategy that Mr. Guzmán crafted — and Ms. Coronel passed on — was as daring as it was ingenious: Laborers staged near the prison would dig a mile-long tunnel into his cell. To pinpoint his exact location, someone would sneak a watch with a GPS transmitter past the guards and into the crime lord’s hands.
+Like Mr. Guzmán’s flight from the authorities in 2014 through a secret tunnel hidden under his bathtub, the audacious escape from the Altiplano prison in Almoloya, Mexico, one year later is one of those almost unbelievable tales that have helped transform him into the criminal figure known as El Chapo. And as with other legends surrounding him, this was one was told again on Wednesday — with astonishing new details — at his trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.The State of the Union is, well, unclear.
+Adding to the unprecedented nature of the longest government shutdown on record, Speaker Nancy Pelosi again revoked her invitation for President Trump to deliver his annual address in the House chamber.
+In a tit-for-tat exchange, Ms. Pelosi said Wednesday that she would not grant Mr. Trump access to address a joint session of Congress until the government had reopened. After suggesting that he would look for an alternative venue, the president said late Wednesday that he would delay his speech until after the federal government reopened.
+Here’s what we know about the precedent for the State of the Union — and what could happen next.
+Does there have to be a State of the Union?
+Yes, according to the Constitution.
+In outlining the framework for the executive branch, the founding fathers determined that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union.”Martinez was 8 for 9 off Rivera until 1997, when Rivera discovered his signature cutter while playing catch with Ramiro Mendoza before a game in Detroit. After that, things normalized between Martinez and Rivera — 3 for 10, including the one encounter that still bothers Martinez.
+In the 2000 American League Championship Series, Martinez came up as the tying run with two outs in the top of the ninth inning of Game 6.
+“I’m like: ‘O.K., he’s going to throw the cutter. I’m going to look middle-away like I always said.’ And then the first sinker I’ve seen off Mariano my whole career, he put a sinker in,” said Martinez, who grounded out meekly to short. “Game over, we’re going home. I would have traded all those hits just for that at-bat.”
+The Mariners have not come that close to the World Series since; they lost to the Yankees again in the next A.L.C.S., in five games. Mussina won his start in that series, but Martinez usually confounded him.
+“I could have a different order of pitches, I could try fastballs first, breaking balls first, get ahead in the count, get behind in the count — it didn’t matter,” Mussina said.
+“When you’re as good a hitter as he was, then you just say, ‘Listen, I’m going throw it in the middle and hope he hits it really hard right to somebody, because if I try real hard and he still gets a hit, is this going to make me mad?’ And honestly, sometimes you do that. You say: ‘I’m going to throw a sinker right down the middle, man. J ust hit it in the first two pitches and let’s move on, because you’re going to get a hit anyway.’ ”
+Mussina dominated many sluggers by reading their swings and serving up a pitch they could not handle. David Ortiz, Rafael Palmeiro, Alex Rodriguez and Jim Thome — who combined for more than 2,400 home runs — batted a combined .240 off him.The museum’s director, Lisa Phillips, declined a request to be interviewed.
+In a statement on Wednesday the museum said, “We fully respect our employees’ right to self-organize, and we will respect whatever decision they make.”
+“We don’t believe unionization is the best way to preserve what is special about our culture or advance change,” the statement said, describing the New Museum as a relatively small institution where staff members are used to working closely and collaboratively.
+The statement said the museum had hired Adams Nash for “an initial consult” to provide information on the unionization process, adding that some employees had expressed interest in joining a bargaining unit, while others were not interested or unsure. The statement said that now that the information has been provided, the museum no longer employs the firm.
+The United Auto Workers already represents employees at the Museum of Modern Art, the Bronx Museum of the Arts and the New-York Historical Society.
+Employees who support a union at the New Museum said it is needed to ensure that they receive competitive salaries and have clear roles going forward as the institution carries out a planned $85-million expansion. Organizers said they have identified 74 museum employees who will form a bargaining unit. The museum has contested some of those selections.
+Ms. Kopel said some museum employees earn as little as $35,000 a year to start. She said the museum told employees that the median income for the staff members contemplating joining a union was $52,000, and that $51,000 is considered a living wage. The New Museum spokesman confirmed in an email that $52,000 is the median income for the workers the museum says are eligible to be in a union.SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, praised President Trump’s “unusual determination and will” to settle their nuclear arms dispute through a second summit meeting, saying that he would move “step by step” to achieve his goals in negotiations with the Americans, the North’s official news media reported on Thursday.
+Mr. Kim made the remarks during a briefing with North Korea’s senior envoy and nuclear negotiator, Kim Yong-chol, who visited Mr. Trump at the White House last week. At that 90-minute meeting in the Oval Office, the envoy delivered a personal letter from Mr. Kim to Mr. Trump, and afterward the White House announced that the two leaders planned to hold their second summit meeting, in late February.
+The envoy returned home with a letter from the American leader, and on Thursday the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported that, after receiving “the good personal letter sent by President Trump,” Mr. Kim expressed “great satisfaction.”
+“He spoke highly of President Trump for expressing his unusual determination and will for the settlement of the issue,” it added.Nicolás Maduro has overseen Venezuela’s worst economic disaster in recent times. Nine out of 10 people here can’t afford enough food to eat. And yet he was re-elected by a landslide. Few signs point to anything getting better here, so how will he be able to run this country? To answer this, let’s look back and see how he was elected. It’s the day before the presidential election, and I’m here in a leaky basketball court in a neighborhood that voted heavily for Maduro in the last election. There’s no stump speeches, no candidates, no flags for any party. But there are eggs and frozen chickens subsidized by the government. Maduro’s campaign has been widely criticized for dangling food in front of the poor in exchange for votes. Brigid is a Maduro party supporter, a community leader in charge of food distribution for 100 or so families in the barrio. This isn’t new. Handing out food and promising benefits have been popular “get out the vote” tactics here since Hugo Chávez’s time. What is new is the level of desperation. Maduro has turned this need into a not-so-subtle pitch: “I give and you give.” Now it’s the morning of the election and Maduro supporters are out in force. This neighborhood has been hit hard by the economic crisis and you still have die-hard supporters of the president turning out the vote. For years now, they’ve benefited from this party’s welfare system. Yasmín is a community leader. She’s going around the barrio knocking on doors, making sure people vote for Maduro. Some here don’t blame the president for their hunger. They blame the U.S. Others don’t buy that line. But Maduro’s critics don’t have many other choices. He’s already banned or jailed his most popular rivals. If anything, this election seemed to be about perfecting a system in which his party always wins. Not 50 yards away from the voting station is a punto rojo, or a red station, the color of Maduro’s party. They’re writing down the number of your benefit card, what’s called the Fatherland Card, to make sure that you voted, and promising a special bonus if Maduro is re-elected. A hungry country should be a weakness. But in this election, it was Maduro’s strength because his government owns the food. Is this how it’s going to be from now on? Walking around the streets of Caracas it feels like we’ve passed a crossroads, one where the president had everything going against him, and yet he still wins.An American journalist for Iran’s Press TV was freed in Washington by federal law enforcement officials on Wednesday, her son said, ending a detention that began on Jan. 13 when the F.B.I. took her into custody as a material witness.
+The arrest of the journalist, Marzieh Hashemi, 59, had become a flash point of tension between Iran and the United States for more than a week.
+Ms. Hashemi had been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington but was not charged with a crime. Her family and Iranian leaders accused American officials of disrespecting her Muslim faith while she was under arrest, forcing her to remove her hijab, or head scarf, and offering her only non-halal food.
+The F.B.I. has declined to talk about Ms. Hashemi or the grand jury case in which she had been required to testify.BANGKOK — It began with a political jest and culminated in a shocking prison sentence.
+On Thursday, Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a former governor of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, was released from prison after serving nearly two years for blasphemy against Islam.
+An ethnic Chinese Christian in a country with the world’s largest Muslim population, Mr. Basuki, 52, ran afoul of Indonesia’s blasphemy law when he tried to counter suggestions that faithful Muslims should not support non-Muslim politicians.
+As Muslim supporters cheered him on during a public event in 2016, Mr. Basuki said in a joking manner that a particular verse in the Quran was being misused to dissuade Muslims from voting for him.
+The off-the-cuff comment, which was later edited online to sound dismissive of the Muslim holy book, incensed hard-line Muslim groups, some of which have called for an Islamic caliphate to replace Indonesia’s secular democracy.With Bing, Microsoft tried to play by China’s rules. For example, a search for the Dalai Lama, the religious leader, would turn up state media accounts within China that accused him of stirring up hatred and separatism. Outside the country, it would point to sites like Wikipedia.
+Other searches, like for Tiananmen Square or the Falun Gong religious group, were similarly scrubbed, though over the years users reported that using coded language could help turn up posts about some topics that were generally controlled.
+Blocking Bing would brick over one of the last holes in a wall of online filters that has isolated China’s internet from the rest of the world. Although not widely used in China, Bing has remained an option of last resort for some in China looking for an alternative to the dominant local search engine, Baidu. While it continues to dominate search traffic in China, Baidu has been at the center of complaints about poor search results and advertisements for questionable medical treatments.
+Earlier this week, a former journalist, Fang Kecheng, accused Baidu of largely returning search results that were links to its own products instead of those from external sites. The accusation, which Mr. Fang posted on social media with the headline “Baidu the Search Engine is Dead,” went viral in China.
+Baidu said in a statement that less than 10 percent of its search results included one specific Baidu product that Mr. Fang had singled out, and that its practices of using its own products in search results helped speed up download times.
+In an interview, Mr. Fang said the Chinese internet was developing into a series of walled gardens, rather than the sprawling forum for ideas that makes online life appealing to many, thanks to censorship and to the rise of big Chinese internet companies like Tencent and Bytedance that dominate the online experience on mobile phones. Blocking Bing would only make it worse.
+“Bing compromised in order to have a Chinese version to get into the country,” said Mr. Fang, a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at University of Pennsylvania. “It would be pathetic if even this can’t exist. We have one less alternative.”In Kabul, where I lived on and off as a journalist for eight years, disabled men are a ubiquitous sight in the streets, begging alongside women and children at busy intersections, where traffic slows to a crawl. With sleeves or pant legs rolled up to show naked stumps or withered limbs, they weave between the cars on crutches or hand-cranked wheelchairs, navigating the unpaved streets and open gutters that, when rain or snow comes, turn into rivers of mud and sewage. Warlords and Taliban commanders sometimes have noms de guerre (which tend to be things like Mullah Rauf or Commander Ibrahim) with a peculiar suffix: “lang,” or “the Lame,” a testament to the injuries accumulated over decades of war. Whenever I visited a trauma hospital, the sight of patients resting quietly with their white-bandaged stumps — many of them children — made me think that what is most difficult for us to imagine is not tragedy but the prospect of living in its aftermath. Life after suffering a permanent injury is particularly harsh for people in Afghanistan, where agriculture still employs nearly two-thirds of the working population and many of the few jobs available in the cities involve manual labor.
+As with American soldiers who lost limbs in the country, these Afghan victims were often casualties of explosive devices. In the days when they still went on joint patrols, international medevac crews would routinely fly wounded Afghans to a coalition military base, where they would receive state-of-the-art trauma care. Eventually, though, their fates would diverge from the foreign soldiers in the beds beside them, who would be sent back home to receive rehabilitation and follow-up treatment.
+In the United States, the number of service members who lost limbs in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly 1,720, has driven advancements in prosthetic technology. Researchers are developing artificial limbs that can be controlled by the brain and that restore a sense of touch through neural feedback. Prosthetics that simulate the balancing motions of regular appendages using small motors controlled by microprocessors are becoming more available. With them, patients can regain their ability to do things like walk backward or jog up a flight of stairs. Like conventional prosthetics, they have to be replaced every three or four years, though they can be 10 times more expensive. The cost to the Department of Veterans Affairs to provide a cutting-edge artificial knee starts at $30,000.
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+By contrast, the limbs seen in this series of photos taken in 2012 by Ross McDonnell would have seemed primitive 100 years ago. Left behind by patients who received new prosthetics from the International Committee of the Red Cross after it opened its center in Jalalabad, a city in eastern Afghanistan, in 1995, many of the limbs bear signs of having been painstakingly repaired in order to extend their life. Others have been fashioned from scrap metal and clothing. They hang on the clinic’s walls as remnants of a time when Afghans had to travel to Pakistan or Iran to receive medical care — a trip that many could not afford. In that sense, they are part of the patchwork ingenuity on display throughout the country, where discarded Western goods from ancient Toyotas to castoff T-shirts are given long second lives. “In the beginning, I remember people going to blacksmiths and making limbs out of stovepipes, or wood,” Najmuddin Helal, who has worked for the I.C.R.C.’s physical-rehabilitation program in Afghanistan since it began in 1988, told me. “Sometimes I’ve even seen them made from shell casings.”
+Today the limbs that patients receive from the I.C.R.C. are made with deliberately simple technology, as the program is meant to be largely self-sufficient. An above-the-knee prosthetic costs the I.C.R.C. $420, on average. All of its prosthetics are provided free of charge to the patients. Most of the components are manufactured in Kabul, by an entirely Afghan staff, using a polypropylene-based technology designed by the I.C.R.C. that is now in widespread use in developing countries around the world. First, a technician makes a “negative” cast of the patient’s stump, which is then used as a mold to create a white plaster model. A sheet of polypropylene plastic, baked until soft in an oven, is draped over the plaster cast and suctioned onto it with a vacuum, forming a custom-fit socket to which the rest of the prosthetic is attached. Patients usually spend a week or so doing rehab and adjusting to their limbs at the center before returning home with them.
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Ross McDonnell Ross McDonnell
+Since the start of its program, the I.C.R.C. has supplied 109,303 prosthetics to replace limbs — some lost in the fight against the Soviets, others during the civil war that destroyed Kabul in the 1990s, some during the subsequent war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, others during the current conflict, whose end remains nowhere in sight. Many of the patients lost their limbs to roadside bombs, airstrikes, old land mines or stray American cluster munitions, as well as to other injuries and diseases like diabetes. With more than 10,000 Afghan civilians — a third of them children — killed or injured by war in 2017 alone, the demand for the I.C.R.C.’s humanitarian programs continues unabated, as it does in dozens of other conflicts around the world. The I.C.R.C.’s work is not without its own risks. The organization reduced its footprint in Afghanistan after seven staff members were killed in three different incidents in 2017.
+McDonnell’s photographs are moving for what they do not show. Looking at these prosthetics, we can envision the hands that made them and the bodies that they joined. On each we see the traces of a person, the nicks and scars of their daily struggles, the decorative flourishes that perhaps remain engraved in memory to this day. We imagine the crinkle of cellophane tape as it enters a shoe, or the strain of laces against flesh each morning, the way that leather becomes damp with sweat by midday, and the sudden weightlessness, at once a relief and a pang, each night before bed. They testify at once to a world radically different from our own and to the common form that we all share.THURSDAY PUZZLE — The comedian Emo Philips used to tell a joke that went something like this:
+A man goes to a psychiatrist for help, and the doctor gives him a chocolate Easter Bunny.
+“What’s this for?” the man asks.
+The doctor says: “I can tell a lot about a person by the first thing they eat off the Easter Bunny. For example, if you bite off the ears first, you are an easygoing person who is open to receiving help. If you bite off the feet first, you are averse to change and might not be that open-minded.”
+The man thinks about this for a moment and asks, “What if I bite out the eyes and scream, ‘Stop staring at me!’?”
+This is the complete antithesis of Stu Ockman’s sweet Thursday puzzle, of course, but I’ve always loved that joke and wanted to tell it. Also, the punchline is a hint but not a spoiler.The unions that represent the nation’s air traffic controllers, pilots and flight attendants issued a dire warning on Wednesday, calling the government shutdown an “unprecedented” and “unconscionable” safety threat that is growing by the day and must end.
+In a joint statement, the heads of the unions, which represent more than 130,000 aviation professionals, said that on Day 33 of the shutdown, major airports were already seeing security checkpoints close, and more closings could follow; safety inspectors were not back on the job at pre-shutdown levels; and analysts’ ability to process safety reporting data and take critical corrective action had been weakened.
+“We have a growing concern for the safety and security of our members, our airlines and the traveling public due to the government shutdown,” the joint statement said. “In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break.”
+[Here is our guide to the government shutdown and updates on where things stand.]
+The admonition came as the partial shutdown continued to put extraordinary pressure on the nation’s air-travel system. Already, as many as one of every 10 transportation security officers is not showing up for work and reserve workers are being flown in to bolster depleted ranks at some airports — a point the union presidents raised in their statement.SOUILLAC, France — At 9:23 p.m., after nearly six hours of talk, President Emmanuel Macron took up the subject of nursing homes. At 9:48 p.m., into the seventh hour, he was speaking about France’s “food independence.” Past 10 o’clock, with some of his listeners visibly wilting on plastic chairs, it was on to the French minimum wage.
+The president in his crisp white shirt and tie — shedding the suit jacket in the fifth hour was his only concession — showed no such sign of weakness. “We’re going to favor organic farming,” he told his audience of local mayors as the night wore on. A half-joke from a small-town mayor about breaking Fidel Castro’s record for marathon speechifying had long since been forgotten.
+So it was that the youthful French president revealed his strategy for overcoming the crisis of the Yellow Vest uprising: talk, or at least a series of town hall-style meetings around the country. For now, at least, it may be working to blunt the momentum of his opponents, even as it tests their patience.
+Early indications — opinion polls slightly on the rise, violence on the decline, his party overtaking the far right in surveys for the European elections in May — suggest Mr. Macron, 41, may finally be turning a corner after weeks of stunned retreat.INTERNATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia misidentified the affiliation of a group of protesters who held up a large banner at a demonstration. They were members of The Other Russia, not the Left Front.
+NATIONAL
+An article on Wednesday about the effects of the government shutdown on F.B.I. operations incorrectly described the F.B.I. Agents Association. It is a professional association, not a union.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Wednesday about cryptocurrency mining in Georgia misstated the nation where Bitfury, a blockchain technology company, is based. It is incorporated in Britain, not the United States. The error was repeated in a photo caption. The article also misstated the position that George Kikvadze holds at Bitfury. He is the executive vice chairman, not the vice president.
+ARTS
+An article on Monday about the Showtime comedy “Black Monday” described incorrectly the car owned by Don Cheadle’s character. It is known as a “Limbo,” not a “Lambo.”“People die in Venezuela every day. It might as well be for freedom.”
+RUBEN GRABADOS, a 71-year-old protester, dismissing the risks of marching against the government given that the last round of large demonstrations, in 2017, was met with a deadly crackdown.Scientists warned osteoporosis patients on Thursday to avoid two common procedures used to shore up painful fractures in crumbling spines.
+The treatments, which involve injecting bone cement into broken vertebrae, relieve pain no better than a placebo does, according to an expert task force convened by the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research.
+The task force noted that the pain goes away or diminishes within six weeks without the procedure. Patients should take painkillers instead, the experts said, and maybe try back braces and physical therapy.
+Patients also should take osteoporosis drugs to slow bone loss, said Dr. Peter Ebeling, head of the department of medicine at Monash University in Australia and lead author of the new report, which was published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research.What’s at stake: Scientists fear that genetically edited babies could develop unintended health problems that could be inherited by subsequent generations. They also worry about attempts to produce designer babies, genetically altered for physical features, intelligence or athletic prowess.
+What’s next: The World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is set to discuss the issue today.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Davos: World leaders from Japan, China, Germany and South Africa announced a greater need for global oversight of the tech sector at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, although there was no consensus for what such a system might look like.
+U. S. shutdown: House Democratic leaders said they were prepared to offer President Trump $5.7 billion for border security — but not for a wall, and not until he agreed to end the government shutdown. Separately, Mr. Trump said he would deliver the State of the Union address after the federal government reopens, following a tit-for-tat with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”
+Russia: Officials put a new cruise missile on display for a foreign audience for the first time, in an attempt to rebut American accusations that the weapon violates a key nuclear arms accord. But the U.S. argued that inspecting a stationary missile would not prove compliance.
+Madrid: Taxi drivers who have been protesting Uber and other ride-hailing companies in the Spanish capital clashed with police officers, leaving many injured. Their strike efforts further intensified after their counterparts in Barcelona won concessions that could force Uber to suspend service.“Of course that’s a very big deal for me,” Osaka said, adding, “I’m just really happy that I’m in the position that I am now, and I’m not going to take it for granted.”
+Kvitova, who rose as high as No. 2 in 2011, didn’t know that No. 1 was within her reach here. “I don’t really care, to be honest,” she said.
+Pointing to her head, she added, “I don’t think there’s any room here to think about it.”
+She feels especially blessed to be playing for another major title. This is her first Grand Slam final since she fought off a knife-wielding burglar in her Czech Republic apartment in 2016. She sustained nerve and tendon damage in all five fingers of her dominant left hand in the attack, requiring hours of surgery to repair and sidelining her from competition for five months.
+“I didn’t know even if I was going to play tennis again,” Kvitova said, adding, “It wasn’t only physically but mentally was very tough, as well. It took me really long while to believe.”Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump said he would deliver his State of the Union address after the federal government reopens, capping a day of brinkmanship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi. His apparent capitulation came even as House Democrats said they were prepared to give him a substantial sum of money for border security — but not for a wall, and not until he agreed to reopen the government.
+• Michael Cohen, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer, indefinitely postponed his congressional testimony. His lawyer cited the president’s attacks on Mr. Cohen’s family.
+• Lawyers representing Paul Manafort strongly denied claims by the special counsel’s prosecutors that Mr. Manafort repeatedly lied to them, stating that the prosecutors had wrongly interpreted honest memory lapses and innocent misstatements.“Broad City” returns for its fifth and final season on Comedy Central. And the Amy Schumer vehicle “I Feel Pretty” runs on Showtime.
+What’s on TV
+BROAD CITY 10 p.m. on Comedy Central. It began with a dispute over some spare change. When the “Broad City” web series started nearly a decade ago as a no-budget sendup of 20-something life in New York City, it did so with an episode in which the characters played by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer — now household comedy names — argue over whether asking a beggar to make change for a $10 bill is “disrespectful.” The show comes to an end with its fifth and final season, which starts on Thursday. The fourth season featured psychedelic mushrooms, a racy leotard and bedbugs; the new one involves Abbi making a new friend (despite Ilana’s disapproval) and embarking on a new kind of relationship. “We knew what the end would be,” Jacobson recently told The New York Times. “I’m not going to tell you it. But we want you to leave the characters and feel O.K.”
+I AM LEGEND (2007) 5:55 p.m. on AMC. A year after surviving financial turmoil in the San Francisco-set drama “The Pursuit of Happyness,” Will Smith crossed coasts to survive a different kind of ruin in this sci-fi movie, set in a postapocalyptic New York. Smith plays an Army virologist in a deserted Manhattan — well, deserted save for the hairless cannibals that come out at night (they’re essentially zombies). Directed by Francis Lawrence, the film “mixes dread and suspense with contemplative, almost pastoral moods,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. He called the movie’s digitally desolate New York “downright uncanny.”BEIJING — An Australian writer who was detained in China last week is suspected of “endangering national security,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday, confirming that he is the third foreigner to have been detained on that ominous charge since last month.
+The writer, Yang Hengjun, arrived in the southern city of Guangzhou on Friday on a flight from New York, despite warnings from friends about the risks of returning to China, where he was born, at a tense time. Officers took him away before he and his wife and child could catch a connecting flight to Shanghai, according to friends of Mr. Yang who spoke to his family.
+The Australian government confirmed on Wednesday that Mr. Yang, 53, had been detained. But the severity of the charges against him was unclear until Thursday, when Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman for the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told reporters in Beijing that Mr. Yang was suspected of crimes related to “state security.” She referred to Mr. Yang as Yang Jun, and later said that was his officially registered name.
+Beijing’s state security bureau detained Mr. Yang “on suspicion of criminal activities endangering national security,” Ms. Hua said at a regularly scheduled news briefing. “Currently, the case is still under investigation under the law.”Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18. A runner-up from last year’s competition is shown above.
+loquacious \lō-ˈkwā-shəs\ adjective
+: full of trivial conversation
+_________
+The word loquacious has appeared in 32 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 19 in “John Bercow, Shouting for ‘Order’ Amid Chaos, Is Brexit’s Surprise Star and Villain” by Ellen Barry:
+Even in the hyper-loquacious environment of British politics, Mr. Bercow stands out for his love of ornate language and withering insult. “He could never say, ‘It’s great to see you’ ”; instead he would say, ‘It gives me inestimable pleasure to meet you for the finest condiments created by Mrs. Twinings,’ ” a colleague told Mr. Friedman, his biographer. A sitting lawmaker told The New York Times in 2013, “It’s as if he goes to bed every night, reads a thesaurus, inwardly digests it and then spews it out the next day.”… where they would join more than 800,000 other cases waiting to be resolved. Each dot on this page represents one case in the immigration court system.
+More than any border wall, the wait to have their cases heard is the largest barrier many migrants will face to settling in the United States. Lawyers, advocates and even some judges say that the immigration courts are in crisis.
+A growing backlog
+The backlog in the immigration courts has been growing for the past decade, and pending cases have increased by nearly 50 percent since Mr. Trump took office in 2017.
+Pending cases in immigration court 809,041 800,000 cases 400,000 2008 2019 809,041 800,000 cases 400,000 2008 2019 809,041 800,000 cases 400,000 2008 2019 Note: Fiscal year 2019 data is through November 2018.
+The backlog is made up of all kinds of immigration cases. Most involve people waiting for a judge to determine whether they should be allowed to stay in the United States or should be deported.
+About one in every 40 cases is criminal or related to national security or terrorism.
+The rest are civil immigration cases. They can include migrants arrested for crossing the border illegally, people who overstayed their visas and many asylum seekers.
+Three in four of the pending cases involve Mexicans or Central Americans.
+Nationalities of immigrants in pending cases Mexico 161,614 pending cases Guatemala 158,935 El Salvador 153,689 Honduras 121,874 India 26,511 China 26,090 Others 160,328 Mexico 161,614 pending cases Guatemala 158,935 El Salvador 153,689 Honduras 121,874 India 26,511 China 26,090 Others 160,328 Mexico 161,614 Guatemala 158,935 Honduras 121,874 Others El Salvador 153,689 India China Note: Nationality data was not available for 227 cases, counted here as “others.”
+Asylum seekers tend to come from the Central American countries known as the Northern Triangle — El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras — and they make up a growing share of the backlog. All together, asylum seekers accounted for about half of new immigration cases last year, at a record 159,590 cases.
+Immigration cases and asylum applications 400,000 cases 305,899 total new cases 200,000 159,590 asylum cases 2008 2018 400,000 cases 305,899 total new cases 200,000 159,590 asylum cases 2008 2018 300,000 cases 305,899 total new cases 159,590 asylum cases 2008 2018
+The Trump administration has viewed this increase with alarm, and has said that migrants are abusing the system. As part of broader efforts to tighten immigration policy, officials have sought to narrow the path to asylum and limited processing of these cases at the border. The White House’s most recent proposal to end the standoff over border security and to reopen the government included several provisions aimed at restricting asylum claims.
+But current United States law says that those who can demonstrate a fear of persecution have the right to petition for asylum — if they can stand the wait.
+A lengthy process
+As the backlog has grown, so has the wait time for hearings and decisions. The average case now takes 578 days to complete.
+Average length of immigration cases 578 days 400 days 200 2008 2018 578 days 400 days 200 2008 2018 578 days 400 days 200 2008 2018 Note: Data shows the average number of days between the recorded filing date and the closure date for cases completed in a given year.
+Cases that result in relief, like a grant of asylum, last on average nearly three years — or nearly twice as long. That’s partly because these cases are more complicated.
+While asylum seekers wait, they can remain in the country but are in legal limbo. “No one benefits from this current system,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, a nonprofit in Washington.
+A long wait can hurt asylum seekers in particular, he said. Cases may be harder to prove years down the line if conditions change at home or if witnesses become unavailable.
+And where people are forced to wait makes a difference. The White House has sought to detain immigrants whose cases are pending rather than follow a policy Mr. Trump derides as “catch and release.” Under Mr. Trump, parole rates for asylum seekers fell to less than 4 percent from 92 percent, according to a complaint filed last year by the American Civil Liberties Union. (A federal judge in July blocked the administration’s blanket detention of asylum seekers.)
+Mr. Reichlin-Melnick said detention can be physically and mentally harmful and impede migrants from accessing legal representation, lowering their chances of winning a case. Lengthy stays in detention can drive asylum seekers to abandon their claims and choose deportation instead.
+Citing the low grant rate in asylum cases, the Trump administration says that many claims are “meritless” and that migrants are abusing the asylum process to gain entry into the United States.
+Under Mr. Trump, a greater proportion of grants have been denied, but many cases are closed for other reasons, including when an applicant gets relief in some other way.
+Asylum grant and denial rates 100% 21% granted 38% closed for other reasons 50% 41% denied 2009 2018 100% 21% granted 38% closed for other reasons 50% 41% denied 2009 2018 100% 21% granted 38% closed for other reasons 50% 41% denied 2009 2018
+About one in five asylum cases completed last year ended in a grant, a rate that has mostly held steady over time.
+Complicating factors
+The surge in asylum seekers has added more cases to the overall backlog. But two policies stemming from Mr. Trump’s hard-line stance on immigration are significant contributors as well.
+A month into his presidency, Mr. Trump rescinded an Obama-era policy that relaxed prosecution for some immigrants who were in the country illegally. At the same time, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ramped up arrests, adding new cases to the docket.
+Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests Trump ends prosecutorial discretion 14,068 arrests 10,000 arrests 5,000 Feb. 2017 May 2018 Oct. 2014 Trump ends prosecutorial discretion 14,068 arrests 10,000 arrests 5,000 Oct. 2014 Feb. 2017 May 2018 15,000 arrests Trump ends prosecutorial discretion 14,068 5,000 Oct. 2014 Feb. 2017 May 2018
+Previously, ICE prioritized arresting immigrants with a criminal record, who are often ineligible for relief. Now, anyone who is caught in the country illegally gets a court date. Since the end of 2016, the backlog has grown by more than 293,000 cases.
+The other major move from the Trump administration had to do with how the courts manage their caseloads. Unlike in other courts that act as independent judiciaries, immigration judges are appointed by the United States attorney general and are part of the Justice Department.
+Different administrations often shuffle judges’ dockets based on certain priorities. The Obama administration moved unaccompanied children seeking asylum to the front of the line, and the current administration instructed judges to prioritize cases involving families.
+Although such moves are meant to speed up the most urgent cases, they can add to overall processing times because judges need to reschedule court dates and familiarize themselves with the facts, said Ashley Tabaddor, an immigration judge and the president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
+In May, Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, eliminated an option for judges to temporarily suspend immigration proceedings in certain cases through a process known as administrative closure. At the same time, he moved to reopen more than 300,000 cases that had previously been closed. All together, those would stretch the court docket to more than one million pending cases.
+No end in sight
+Immigration courts have been hiring more judges to handle the caseload, bringing the current number of judges to 395. And last year, the Justice Department set a new quota for judges: They each must complete 700 cases per year.
+Average number of cases completed per immigration judge Current quota of 700 cases per judge 800 cases per judge 495 400 2010 2018 800 cases per judge Current quota of 700 cases per judge 495 400 2010 2018 800 cases per judge Current quota of 700 cases per judge 495 400 2010 2018
+Since 2016, however, judges have completed 495 cases per year, on average. At that rate, it would take about four years to get through the current backlog.
+The judges’ union opposed the new quota, arguing that the practice would lead to more appeals and ultimately longer wait times. In addition to the pressure that the quota imposes on judges, Judge Tabaddor explained that some cases simply take more time to process.
+Along with other directives from Mr. Sessions, judges say they feel pressured to align themselves with the administration’s policy goals of aggressive prosecution. Since Mr. Trump took office, more cases have resulted in deportation.
+Outcomes of deportation proceedings 100% 33% allowed to remain in the U.S. 50% 67% ordered deported 2008 2018 100% 33% allowed to remain in U.S. 50% 67% ordered deported 2008 2018 100% 33% allowed to remain in U.S. 50% 67% ordered deported 2008 2018 Note: Cases in which the immigrant is allowed to remain in the country include those where relief is granted and cases that are closed or terminated.
+The factors that drove the backlog’s growth during the first two years of the Trump administration show no signs of abating. Aggravating the situation, at least for now, is the partial government shutdown that began in December and halted most immigration court proceedings.What story could this image tell?
+Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story, poem or memoir inspired by this photo.
+Post it in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this image is all about.As a result of such changes, students on some campuses said they felt shut out of computer science while others said they faced overcrowded classes with overworked professors.
+Aafia Ahmad, a sophomore computer science major at U.T. Austin, had hoped to take an elective course in computer security this semester. But when she tried to sign up during early registration in November, the course was already full. She said that was the case for nearly every computer science elective she wanted. She is now 79th on a waiting list for the security course.
+“It’s a cutthroat race to register for classes,” she said.
+Some university leaders said they were concerned that certain measures taken to address surging student demand may disadvantage people who are already unrepresented in computer science — including women, African-Americans, Latinos and low-income, first-generation college students.
+Some universities now require incoming students to get accepted into computer science majors before they arrive on campus — and make it nearly impossible for other undergraduates to transfer into the major. That approach can favor incoming students from schools with resources like advanced programming courses. It can also favor male students — because women on average are less likely to have taken a computer science course in high school.
+“When you put any kind of barrier in place in terms of access to computer science majors, it tends to reduce the number of women and students of color in the program,” said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, a private college in Claremont, Calif., that has become a national model for diversity in computer science.LOS ANGELES — “Do you know what today is?” asked Patty Jenkins on a rainy Tuesday in January. Chris Pine shook his head.
+It was a morbid anniversary: Seventy-two years before, Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress known later as the Black Dahlia, was brutally murdered and dismembered, possibly in the bowels of the mansion where they sat — the Sowden House, built by Lloyd Wright (a son of Frank’s). It was home briefly to George Hodel, a prominent gynecologist who was widely suspected of the murder.
+Mr. Pine was familiar with the story. Fresh off their success with “Wonder Woman,” in which Mr. Pine starred under Ms. Jenkins’s direction, the two of them had filmed a TV project here in 2017 tied to the Black Dahlia murder of 1947.
+“I got a little nauseous,” she said about visiting the house’s basement. “And dizzy.”
+A dizzying setting, perhaps, but appropriate for the project she was filming, which debuts Monday: “I Am the Night,” a six-episode limited series on TNT starring Mr. Pine that is loosely based on the 2008 memoir “One Day She’ll Darken” by Mr. Hodel’s granddaughter, Fauna Hodel. A noir-soaked mystery set in 1965, the series is a return to TV for Ms. Jenkins and the realization of a passion project over a decade in the making.Ms. Liminowicz has documented Honorata and Agnieszka’s lives ever since, as they have blended families, moved apartments and changed countries. The women, together since 2011, share similar Roman Catholic backgrounds in a conservative country where right-wing nationalism has been on the rise while the government has denied them the right to marry.
+Still, Ms. Liminowicz is amazed by the family’s openness and directness. “They are without masks, without pretense,” she said. “Their intimacy is as verbal as it is physical: ‘I love you’ is not reserved for special occasions.” Beyond labels — or voyeuristic images — she was determined to show them as neither aberrant nor abhorrent, but sharing an admirable, enviable love. “I want to show them as ordinary people living ordinary lives with extraordinary love.”
+Honorata had once planned to become a nun. She knew she was attracted to women, but was advised to sacrifice that part of herself. She began seeing a Catholic psychologist who was to “cure” her homosexuality. In her second session, she was given homework: to go and do something good for herself. “So I went and I did,” she said. “Never going back to that office was the best thing I could do for myself.”A couple of years ago, songs made by the rapper Kodak Black as a young teenager began to recirculate online. The most striking was “Ambition,” a precociously skeptical and wounded song. “I’m 14 and already thinking ’bout death,” he rapped. “Damn, I was raised by the dead end.”
+For the rest of his teenage years, Kodak continued on this path, returning time and again to themes of hopeless circumstances, existential frailty, perseverance blended with nihilism. They ground all of his albums and mixtapes, right up through “Dying to Live,” his second studio album, which was released last month and debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart.
+But Kodak’s success comes under a lingering cloud, one familiar to any observer of hip-hop in the past few years. The 21-year-old Florida rapper is scheduled to stand trial this spring on charges of criminal sexual conduct, stemming from a 2016 incident in South Carolina in which he is accused of sexually assaulting a young woman at a hotel following a concert. According to the Florence County Sheriff’s Office incident report, he bit the victim and told her “that he could not help himself.” She reported the attack to her school resource officer. A condition of the consent order setting Kodak’s bond is that he cannot discuss the case publicly, nor can anyone representing the defense or the prosecution, according to Beattie Ashmore, one of his lawyers.
+Of the many rappers who in recent years have experienced explosive popularity while facing horrific criminal allegations, none is as contemplative or introspective an artist as Kodak Black. 6ix9ine is a taunter. XXXTentacion wrestled with pain, but rarely with ethics. Neither arrived at a place in which morality was a recurrent theme of his work.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+The Shutdown Standoff Continues
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi scored a minor victory on Wednesday in her standoff with President Trump: She refused to back down on her demand that he forgo delivering his State of the Union address in the House chamber while the government is partly closed. Seth Meyers was impressed with her tenacity.
+“Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent a letter to the White House today saying she will not allow President Trump to deliver the State of the Union address next week if the government is still shut down. Damn! If Trump really wants a strong wall on the Mexican border, he should build it out of Nancy Pelosi.” — SETH MEYERS
+Stephen Colbert and Samantha Bee were less impressed with the president. Even after Pelosi told him that he was not welcome to speak to Congress, he tried to move ahead with planning the speech anyway.
+“Over the weekend, ‘the White House asked for — but was denied — a walk-through by the House of Representatives’ sergeant-at-arms to prepare for the speech. In other words, after Pelosi nixed the speech they tried a time-honored tactic used by kids everywhere. ‘Mom, can I have a State of the Union? No? Dad, can I have a State of the Union?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT, quoting a CNN reportEmily writes: My boyfriend, Nicky, grew up being “woozled” at bedtime: His parents would pick through his hair for imaginary creatures, which they then pretended to feed to his dog. Now Nicky asks me to do this for him. It puts him to sleep instantly, but I would prefer to read before bed.
+“Woozling” stands unsteadily between adorably sweet and off-puttingly weird. But what tips it to nauseating is that, while you are a very loving girlfriend, you are not his mommy. Asking your romantic partner to replicate your childhood sleep rituals would be odd enough even if it didn’t involve fantasy lice. And it’s certainly intrusive upon your own (normal) ritual. If you personally derive some pleasure from this, fine. But you are absolutely entitled to limit the practice. Nicky can woozle himself from time to time.Mitch McConnell, the Republican senator from Kentucky and current Senate majority leader, has had a complex relationship with President Trump. McConnell has been “the principal enabler of the Trump agenda,” as McConnell’s longtime adviser J. Scott Jennings describes him, and much of his enduring legacy has been established during Trump’s presidency. But McConnell, a man of institutions and establishments, has also found himself in the position of supporting a president who seems hellbent on burning both to the ground, and is now trying to navigate a prolonged shutdown of Trump’s making. “I’m perplexed,” he said earlier this month, “as to how this ends.”
+For the profile of McConnell in this week’s Times Magazine, Charles Homans interviewed McConnell for several hours over the course of two months, and also spoke to several dozen of his past and present staff members, Republican and Democratic senators, and Trump and Obama White House officials and cabinet members. Here are some key takeaways:
+McConnell takes credit for the Trump win in the 2016 election.
+When the Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, McConnell blocked President Obama from filling his seat — a decision that McConnell describes as “the most consequential thing I’ve ever done.” He takes credit for Trump’s election on the grounds that some exit polling shows that voters were heavily motivated by the Supreme Court vacancy that McConnell kept open.
+McConnell’s other decisions during the campaign, intentionally or otherwise, may have helped Trump.
+After the C.I.A. alerted congressional leaders of both parties — McConnell, the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, the House speaker Paul Ryan and the House minority leader Nancy Pelosi — to evidence of Russian meddling in the election in August 2016, several weeks passed before the leaders issued a statement. Denis McDonough, President Obama’s chief of staff at the time, blames the delay on McConnell, who he says had concerns with the wording of the statement. McDonough says that even Ryan, who broadly agreed with McConnell, nevertheless complained to him about the holdup. “At the time,” McDonough said, “the speaker evinced to me considerable frustration.”
+McConnell also chose not to distance Republican Senate candidates from Trump after the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump bragged about sexually assaulting women, was published by the Washington Post. “He said, ‘Do you see any evidence that it would make any difference for candidates to distance themselves?’” Josh Holmes, a campaign strategist close to McConnell who spoke to him at the time, recalled. After speaking with Republican candidates, McConnell decided that a broader denouncement of Trump was likely to hurt them, and instead made a statement speaking only for himself.Wattpad, the storytelling application with which millions of users upload original stories and fan fiction, is creating a publishing division, Wattpad Books. The company has worked with other publishing or media companies in the past to adapt stories from the platform into books and movies. “After” by Anna Todd is a standout, and the popular Netflix film “The Kissing Booth” is based on a story written by Beth Reekles, who uploaded the story to Wattpad in 2011, when she was 15. Now, Wattpad will cull the platform for stories to publish as books under the new imprint, starting with six young adult titles this fall.
+The company will use what it calls Story DNA Machine Learning technology to take “the guesswork” out of the publishing equation, said Allen Lau, the company’s chief executive and co-founder. Whereas traditional publishing is based on individual editors’ tastes, Wattpad’s technology will scan and analyze the hundreds of millions of stories on the app to find themes or elements that might determine a story’s commercial success, Lau said. Wattpad will combine this “data driven” approach with human editors’ critical eye.
+“We’re able to take the opinions of 70 million users and what are they reading and what’s resonating with them as a starting point,” said Ashleigh Gardner, who will head the publishing division.
+The initial list of books were written by users whose ages range from late teens to mid-30s. “What Happened That Night,” by Deanna Cameron, is a teen psychological thriller about a girl who kills the boy next door without a clear motive, which Gardner compared to “Gone Girl.” Another book, “Trapeze,” by Leigh Ansell, is about a girl who grew up in the circus and suffers a life-changing injury. All the books have already been successful on Wattpad, where they will remain after they are published. The writers will be paid advances and royalties that Gardner said are competitive with industry standards.Jennifer Truesdale, a professional organizer based in Charleston, S.C., thinks there’s a more practical reason. “Many people don’t like to buy higher-end products without knowledge of them or their worth, so they feel excited to be able to try something new and different from what they typically might buy.” (Hence the rise of subscription “boxes” stuffed with small sizes.)
+Our intentions are good. We grab travel-size toiletries from hotels because we can think of all the ways we’ll use them but, Ms. Truesdale said, “the follow-through is usually where the problem lies.”
+But why aren’t we using these precious items that we’re all so lovingly collecting? Ms. Wischhover blames our tendency toward fantasy and wishful thinking, “Samples represent possibility. We pin our hopes on them — it’s fun to imagine that maybe finally you’ve found The One, so you delay trying it to prolong the experience.”
+One day, I’ll take that vacation and need 76 mini bottles of body wash.
+Tip #2: Donate the samples you don’t want or need.
+Beauty samples are ripe for donation, which is great news for those of us staring down an angry mob of foundation samples in every shade but the one of our actual skin. But! Endeavor in all things to be responsible, especially when it comes to donations. (This is a polite way of saying that you shouldn’t dump all your unwanted junk on charitable organizations. Please stop doing that.)
+Emergency shelters are more likely to want sample-size products, whereas long-term stay organizations will generally prefer full-sized product donations. The best way to determine this, duh, is to call or email organizations before making donations. Mindy Godding, a decluttering expert from Richmond, Va. also suggests thinking about how the new user will experience the product; does someone in an emergency shelter especially need an Urban Decay lip gloss sampler? Probably not.
+Ms. Truesdale said toiletries like shampoo, body wash and lotion are generally welcomed at shelters (homeless and cold-weather shelters in particular), orphanages, Ronald McDonald House and children’s hospitals, where volunteer groups often put together comfort kits. Makeup can be donated to playhouses and school drama clubs, teen and youth development centers; makeup and perfume samples are also welcome at many Dress For Success chapters.The robot future is here. From automated personal assistants, like Siri and Alexa, to security bots, self-driving cars, algorithms and holograms, robots and other artificially intelligent machines are already embedded in our daily lives.
+What day-to-day interactions do you have with robots? How do you feel about the presence of artificial intelligence in your personal life, community or society at large? Why?
+In “Why Do We Hurt Robots?,” Jonah Engel Bromwich writes about a wave of violence against intelligent machines:
+A hitchhiking robot was beheaded in Philadelphia. A security robot was punched to the ground in Silicon Valley. Another security bot, in San Francisco, was covered in a tarp and smeared with barbecue sauce. Why do people lash out at robots, particularly those that are built to resemble humans? It’s a global phenomenon. In a mall in Osaka, Japan, three boys beat a humanoid robot with all their strength. In Moscow, a man attacked a teaching robot named Alantim with a baseball bat, kicking it to the ground, while the robot pleaded for help. Why do we act this way? Are we secretly terrified that robots will take our jobs? Upend our societies? Control our every move with their ever-expanding capabilities and air of quiet malice? Quite possibly. The specter of insurrection is embedded in the word “robot” itself. It was first used to refer to automatons by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek, who repurposed a word that had referred to a system of indentured servitude or serfdom. The feudal fear of peasant revolt was transplanted to mechanical servants, and worries of a robot uprising have lingered ever since. … But Agnieszka Wykowska, a cognitive neuroscientist, researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology and the editor in chief of the International Journal of Social Robotics, said that while human antagonism toward robots has different forms and motivations, it often resembles the ways that humans hurt each other. Robot abuse, she said, might stem from the tribal psychology of insiders and outsiders. “You have an agent, the robot, that is in a different category than humans,” she said. “So you probably very easily engage in this psychological mechanism of social ostracism because it’s an out-group member. That’s something to discuss: the dehumanization of robots even though they’re not humans.” Paradoxically, our tendency to dehumanize robots comes from the instinct to anthropomorphize them. William Santana Li, the chief executive of Knightscope, the largest provider of security robots in the United States (two of which were battered in San Francisco), said that while he avoids treating his products as if they were sentient beings, his clients seem unable to help themselves. “Our clients, a significant majority, end up naming the machines themselves,” he said. “There’s Holmes and Watson, there’s Rosie, there’s Steve, there’s CB2, there’s CX3PO.”
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Have you ever felt anger, fear or hatred toward robots, like that described in the article? Have you ever witnessed someone abuse, or have you yourself abused, a machine?
+— The article gives several explanations for why humans hurt robots. Which are the most convincing to you and why? What theories do you have for why humans may mistreat machines?
+— How do you feel about an automated future? Do you fear countless professions becoming obsolete, the merging of humans and machines, an age of artificial intimacy or a potential robot uprising? Or are you excited about all the possibilities such a future could hold? Explain why you feel the way you do.
+— Some say that anthropomorphizing robots — for example, giving them names and getting to know them — encourages humans to be kinder to them. Do you think we should treat robots like people? What are the benefits of doing so? What are the dangers?
+— How do you think relationships between robots and humans should be governed? Should people be imprisoned for robot abuse? Should artificially intelligent machines be protected under the law in the same way we are? Where do we draw the line between human and machine — if we draw one at all?[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Like the L train repairs, it is a necessary but deeply unpopular project to rebuild a vital link in New York City’s transportation network.
+It would upend lives, worsen congestion and temporarily close for years a cherished landmark — the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — that is known the world over for its sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline.
+Now the project’s critics are taking a cue from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who called off the L train shutdown after assembling outside experts to come up with an alternative. Residents of Brooklyn Heights, one of the city’s most historic and affluent neighborhoods, are leveraging their skills, connections and considerable resources to find a less painful way to fix a crumbling stretch of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway that runs past their homes and serves as the base of the promenade.6) 2 p.m. Author! Author!
+Jorge Amado is Salvador’s favorite literary son, his novels often doubling as portraits of 20th-century Salvador and the state of Bahia. The house he shared with his second wife, Zélia Gattai — also a writer of renown — until he died in 2001 is now a museum. A Casa do Rio Vermelho (20 reais), named after its seaside neighborhood, houses their quirky art collection, heavy on the frogs, as well as his library, letters to other famous authors and a multimedia display of famous Brazilians reading passages of his work. (“Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands” would be a good pick to prepare for your trip, either in print or Golden Globe-nominated film form.)
+7) 7 p.m. Family dinner
+The Guerra family’s restaurant and nearby bar have turned a homey little plaza in the Garcia neighborhood into an eating and drinking destination. First came Larriquerrí, serving what his son Gabriel calls “affective memory cuisine:” family recipes he and his brother, Guilherme, grew up eating from their mom’s (Rosa) kitchen. Trouxinhas de carpaccio, bundles of thin-sliced beef stuffed with ricotta cream and topped with pesto and Parmesan, explode in your mouth with modest decadence. The apricot-and-Brazilian-cheese-filled mezzaluna pasta in Gorgonzola sauce is gloriously unsubtle. So is the atmosphere, a bit chaotic as Romildo, the father, races around, attempting to charm every guest (and succeeding). Dinner for two with wine is about 250 reais. Nearby Larribar is one of the few spots in town that takes cocktails seriously. Watch as your bartender traps smoke from a burning cinnamon stick in the glass that will soon be filled with your Ventura (25 reais), essentially a smoked cachaça sour.
+8) 10 p.m. Red River soiree
+Walkable Rio Vermelho, on the ocean side of the city, is one of Salvador’s night life hubs. You might start at Chupito, or Shot, where the specialty is, predictably, shots. Not tequila shooters; they’re more like mini-cocktails, with seemingly infinite choices posted on the wall, and a D.J. commanding a tiny dance floor. A short waterfront stroll away, Teatro Sesi has live Brazilian music on the “veranda” (cover 20 to 30 reais). Or sit outside with a beer at the festive Praça da Dinha, or Dinha’s Square, named for the former owner of a stand selling acarajés, black-eyed pea fritters with or without shrimp (another Salvador classic).Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+WASHINGTON — I had a flight to Palm Beach booked for the day after Christmas. President Trump was scheduled to spend 16 days at his Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, over the holidays, and our White House team had divided up the hardship assignment, with most of us taking three-day shifts in the sun. (Last year on the gig, Michael S. Schmidt scored an unplanned interview with the President.)
+Destination Mar-a-Lago was a big reason many people close to the president predicted, at first, that the shutdown might be short-lived. Unaccustomed to spending winter weekends in Washington, the president would be eager to resume his more familiar, golf-all-afternoon routine, his friends and allies said. He wouldn’t let the fight with Congress over a border wall ruin that.
+But my flight came and went, and I was not on it. New Year’s Eve came and went, and no one on our team ever had to travel to Florida, because the president didn’t.Dining
+The developers clearly mean for the Elysian Bar, in the old rectory space, to be a destination of its own, and have partnered with the stalwart Bywater neighborhood wine shop, restaurant, and music venue Bacchanal. The food is inventive and solid: smoked gulf fish with pickled mustard seeds and avocado on toast ($11); chorizo with kale and mixed grains topped with a fried egg ($15); and confit chicken leg over excellent braised white beans ($15) all impressed. The bar is situated toward the back of the rectory building, with several warm and inviting spaces to drink or nosh, and the Thursday night crowd was lively. It felt like a discovery.
+You’re on your own for breakfast, however. The “café” that opens at 7 a.m. offered only some puny muffins and a single cheese biscuit. The barista endorsed Cake Café a few blocks away. That’s further than I wanted to walk while starving, so I had a perfectly pleasing eggs, sausage, and biscuit with house jam combo ($7) at Who Dat Coffee Cafe, across the street. The hotel menu, which kicks in at 10:30 a.m., includes some brunch-y options, including a duck egg omelet with “Cajun caviar beurre monte” ($13).IN MY MIND’S EYE
+A Thought Diary
+By Jan Morris
+320 pp. Liveright Publishing. $24.95.
+Jan Morris had a ringside seat at many of the most significant world events of the second half of the 20th century. She is the same age as Queen Elizabeth II and like that remarkable monarch she still seems, in her early 90s, to be completely engaged with the world, understanding of its foibles and appreciative of what life has to offer. She has witnessed extraordinary changes that it has been her job to report: She went to Nepal with Edmund Hillary to cover the first successful ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, then a feat of immense difficulty and now a climb that can be done by any amateurs who can afford the fee, following permanently fixed ropes as one might use a banister to climb the stairs.
+Morris has seen empires fade. She has witnessed the advances and retreats of armies. She covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She courageously carried through her own change of gender from James to Jan in 1972, when such things were very much more of a challenge. So it’s not surprising that “In My Mind’s Eye,” her highly engaging collection of daily diary entries, should have change as the leitmotif that runs throughout.
+Image
+It would be surprising if there weren’t a tinge of regret in such an enterprise from the pen of a nonagenarian. No matter how willing you may be to adjust to new conditions, when you’re looking back from that end of life you must have a fair amount to feel nostalgic about. In this collection, then, among the 188 entries, there’s considerable reflection on things that have gone from our world — and gone, the author rightly observes, rather quickly and dramatically. Reading these beautifully written pages, one is struck by the gentle note of lament they host for two countries — or civilizations, perhaps — whose fate Morris has observed at close quarters. These are the United States, the colossus of the 20th century, and the United Kingdom, which still had, within living memory — just — the greatest empire the world had ever seen.DENVER — The Denver Nuggets’ worst loss of the season was less than 48 hours old when Tim Connelly, the team’s president of basketball operations, found himself courtside before a game against the Chicago Bulls assessing some lessons of the defeat.
+“A loss is never a positive,” Connelly said, “but we have to be realistic about where we stand. We’ve done nothing, and that team has done everything several times over.”
+He was referring to the Golden State Warriors, a superstar collective that has demolished its share of opponents in recent years. But what the Warriors did to the Nuggets one night last week was particularly gruesome, in part because Denver had entered the game with a slim lead over Golden State in the N.B.A.’s Western Conference standings.
+But then, on Jan. 15, in front of a briefly enthusiastic crowd here, the Warriors scored 51 points in the first quarter and sailed to a 142-111 victory that sent a message to everyone on the opposing bench, inside the building and across the league: We are not going anywhere.Many respondents could not seem to recall crucial details. For example, 76 percent said they were familiar with Anne Frank, but only 23 percent of Canadians said the Holocaust took place in the Netherlands, where she lived. (Less than 25 percent of Dutch Jews survived the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) And just 23 percent of Canadians said they were familiar with Elie Wiesel, who described Auschwitz in his memoir “Night” and won the Nobel Peace Prize.
+The study did include some heartening points: 85 percent of respondents said it was important to keep teaching about the Holocaust so that it does not happen again. Ms. Azrieli said that focusing on older high school students, who have more maturity and knowledge to understand the Holocaust in historical context, was most effective. Her foundation will focus on providing educational resources and teacher support.
+Education about the Holocaust involves crucial lessons about civic responsibility and action in the face of atrocities, but it can be challenging for even the most experienced educators because it raises difficult questions, Ms. Azrieli said. And it is all the more urgent as the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, because they are the most powerful narrators of their experiences, she added.
+Most people who directly survived concentration camps or ghettos are now in their 80s or 90s, Mr. Schneider said. His organization uses a broader definition of survivor, including anyone who fled, or was hidden or rescued as a child, which includes more people in their 70s.
+Using that broader definition, the number of Holocaust survivors has fallen to about 400,000, Mr. Schneider said. About 80,000 of those survivors live in the United States, and about 10,000 in Canada.
+Canada inaugurated its first national Holocaust monument in Ottawa in 2017, though its opening was marred by the realization that a plaque placed outside failed to mention Jews or anti-Semitism. The plaque was replaced.How do you organize your books?
+My office is always in disarray, but my books are in order. My fiction is alphabetical. I’m a lapsed public librarian, and I can’t imagine it any other way. My nonfiction is broken up into the following categories: memoir, essays, poetry, plays, biographies of comedians, biographies of other Hollywood types, comic books/strips/graphic novels, assorted books about Elvis Presley, art books, assorted books about tattoos, cunningly small books, burdensomely large books. Then there are the piles, which are arranged in three categories: shelve, donate, and books I will never read again and don’t really want but which are inscribed to me by the author.
+What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?
+I have a lot of oddball books on my shelves, many of them presents from my brother, Harry, including a book of candy recipes written by the comedian ZaSu Pitts.
+Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?
+The Wolf in Catherine Storr’s “Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf” is a spectacular character, intent on devouring Polly but always outsmarted. I suppose he is stupid, but mostly he’s just driven by hunger. Every time I reread it I’m struck by how dear and awful and filled with carnal longing he is. New York Review Books reprinted all the Polly and the Wolf stories recently; my children love them. I feel a kinship with the Wolf, who wants things and is so filled with intentions even he cannot tell whether those intentions are good or bad.
+What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?
+I grew up in old house whose ceiling was mostly held up by bookcases built by my father, or perhaps the bookcases were kept upright by the house. The books I remember reading fit mostly into four categories: books my parents loved — Nora Ephron’s “Crazy Salad”; Calvin Trillin’s “Alice, Let’s Eat”; a quantity of Wodehouse (my father loved Wodehouse though my mother didn’t); creepy books of all sorts, including “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and New England ghost stories; reference books, both ordinary (Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) and outré (The People’s Almanac, The Book of Lists). Comic books, which belonged to my brother: I particularly loved an enormous anthology of Superman comic books, and still prefer the surreality of that world to any other superhero’s — Lois Lane with a cat’s head! The Bizarro World! Jimmy Olsen as the Turtle Boy of Metropolis! — but I also loved old collections of Crockett Johnson’s “Barnaby”, Walt Kelly’s “Pogo,” Al Capp’s “Li’l Abner” and a wide variety of Harvey comic books (particularly Little Dot and Little Lotta) bought at Mac’s Smoke Shop down the street.
+If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?
+The first draft of his ghostwritten prison memoir, in his cell. Totally fine if it’s in bullet point form.
+You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?
+Anyone who’s met me knows these two things: I don’t believe writers should have the right to free assembly, and I will do nearly anything to avoid meeting my literary heroes. (Recently I sidestepped a chance to meet Edward P. Jones, probably my favorite living writer.) Myself, I’m not such a great conversationalist, so I’d like to invite people for their company. I’ve always been fond of Lord Timothy Dexter, author of “A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress,” who in his second edition printed a page of punctuation for readers who felt there wasn’t enough in the body of the book. Then Julia Child, who was a wonderful writer and perhaps would put to use her other skills — culinary, conversational — as well. Kathleen Hale, the author and illustrator of the Orlando the Marmalade Cat books, whose splendid memoir “A Slender Reputation” makes me think she’d be a good dinner guest. Finally, I’d give my own place at the table to my mother, Natalie Jacobson McCracken, who died in November, a fine writer who loved a good party and would gleefully take my seat. Also, I’m going to be honest, and I know I’m stretching the guest list, but I would invite Kelly Link, who is not only a thrillingly great writer and charming and present and hilarious and an author whose name I shamelessly drop to consistently fine effect, but also is to date the only person who has mentioned me in a By the Book. Fair’s fair. Give her Lord Dexter’s seat. (But only if the dinner doesn’t interfere with her finishing her novel.)
+Whom would you want to write your life story?
+I don’t even like having my photograph taken. If somebody must write my life story, let it be in rebus form.“It’s very hard. It’s hard to go in there and do my job 100 percent like I’m supposed to, knowing that I’m not going to get paid.” “Having to go back to work is going to be an expense that I simply can’t afford. It’s going to require, you know, getting gas for my car to go to work. I can’t afford that right now.” “I’ve got to try to keep the lights on or keep the water on and I got to keep my phone on and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to do all of that.” “Like, It’s not our fault. We’ve done our job up to this point. You know, we were working overtime before all this, to be able to meet the taxpayers’ needs.” “I’m under the impression that we are not eligible for unemployment because we are still working. And my employees, many of them are struggling to have money for fuel to come to work.” “You know, I just bought a house. Nov. 13, 2018, and five weeks later, we have a shutdown. So, you know, I was able to make my first payment. We didn’t ask for any of this. We didn’t want to be — we just wanted to go to work and do our job. Period.” “Well, there’s all of this coverage about people in the D.C. area who are getting free lunches and going to food banks and that there is some level of community support there. But out here in, you know, sort of Middle America, out here in Mississippi, we don’t have that network.” “I think to secure the border is important. I guess I can understand where the president’s coming from. But at the expense of 800,000 people’s livelihood? I don’t.” “I think a lot of people just don’t realize that the food that’s on their table, you know, for the most part is inspected by one or another governmental regulatory agency. And so this really is having an impact on everyone’s life, just not on these 800,000 federal employees.” “Get us back to work. Get us our paycheck, and you guys continue your issues. You know, it shouldn’t affect the smaller people in this.”Noon Walk across campus to attend a talk by the university’s current Hodder fellow, the artist Mario Moore. His project while at Princeton is to paint portraits of African-American blue-collar employees in facilities, dining services, etc.
+2 p.m. Meet with thesis student to discuss new poems and a lyric essay.
+4:30 p.m. Meet with Helena, a thesis student in literary translation. Because I don’t speak the languages she’s translating from (German, French and Flemish), what we mostly discuss are the choices she’s made in English — areas where the language feels stiff, overly taxed or unclear. I’m urging her to bring her literal translations into a more vivid and robust English. It’s a process that requires listening to the work out loud, and deciding on subtle shifts in tone and emphasis. I’m currently co-translating a Chinese poet’s work into English, and so I have a lot of investment in how this process is going for Helena.
+9 p.m. Bedtime with boys. No school tomorrow, so everyone stayed up a little later than usual.
+12:15 a.m. I need to pack for a trip to Yale tomorrow — I’ve been invited to the Yale Divinity School to read.
+Thursday
+5:50 a.m. Up early to catch a train to New Haven.
+7:20 a.m. I find a seat on the train and send a few delinquent emails. I spend most of the ride revisiting parts of “My Bright Abyss,” by Christian Wiman, who’ll be my host at Yale. I mark a passage in which Wiman quotes the last words of Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.”
+11:30 a.m. We attend chapel services at the Divinity School. It is mostly exquisite and moving song, but Chris speaks briefly about my visit. After a tear-inducingly powerful version of the gospel song “Wade in the Water,” it is my turn to read a poem. I was planning to read something else, but I decide to read my own poem of the same title.
+1:30 p.m. We head to campus for Chris’s undergraduate English class on poetry and faith. The students have a great many questions about my poem and collection “Wade in the Water.” They want to talk about the sense of the holy that the book seeks to conjure, and how I’m consciously drawing upon the traditional spiritual of the same title. I’m thoroughly moved and impressed by the thought they’ve brought to the reading of my poems.
+5 p.m. We head to the English department building for my reading. I’ve read in this room before, several years ago. This time it is too small. Students line the aisles, and a group is clustered in the hall. Because of the shooting in California, I open with an excerpt from “They May Love All That He Has Chosen and Hate All That He Has Rejected,” a poem written in response to a series of hate crimes from the spring of 2009. The poem helped me to recognize that this is an American problem, something we must view as an extension of something alive at the center of our culture rather than something at its fringes.I’ve been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 2017, writing mainly about politics, ideology and gender. These days people on the right and the left both use “liberal” as an epithet, but that’s basically what I am, though the nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency has radicalized me and pushed me leftward. I’ve written three books, including one, in 2006, about the danger of right-wing populism in its religious fundamentalist guise. (My other two were about the global battle over reproductive rights and, in a brief detour from politics, about an adventurous Russian émigré who helped bring yoga to the West.) I love to travel; a long time ago, after my husband and I eloped, we spent a year backpacking through Asia. Now we live in Brooklyn with our son and daughter.
+David Leonhardt
+Image
+I’ve worked at The Times since 1999 and have been an Op-Ed columnist since 2016. I caught the journalism bug a very long time ago — first as a little kid in the late 1970s who loved reading the Boston Globe sports section and later as a teenager working on my high school and college newspapers. I discovered that when my classmates and I put a complaint in print, for everyone to see, school administrators actually paid attention. I’ve since worked as a metro reporter at The Washington Post and a writer at BusinessWeek magazine. At The Times, I started as a reporter in the business section and have also been a Times Magazine staff writer, the Washington bureau chief and the founding editor of The Upshot.
+My politics are left of center. But I’m also to the right of many Times readers. I think education reform has accomplished a lot. I think two-parent families are good for society. I think progressives should be realistic about the cultural conservatism that dominates much of this country. Most of all, however, I worry deeply about today’s Republican Party, which has become dangerously extreme. This country faces some huge challenges — inequality, climate change, the rise of China — and they’ll be very hard to solve without having both parties committed to the basic functioning of American democracy.Who is on the board? Who picks the members?
+Most board members are not household names. But each one has at least a few friends in politics.
+In addition to the members nominated by the governor and the mayor, there are three delegates from Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk Counties. There are four suburban members from Orange, Dutchess, Rockland and Putnam Counties — a group known condescendingly as “quarter-pounders” because they share one vote.
+There are also several nonvoting members who represent workers and riders.
+Here are a few of the board’s notable members:
+Acting chairman: Fernando Ferrer
+Image Mr. Ferrer Credit... Metropolitan Transportation Authority
+Mr. Ferrer, a former Bronx borough president, is a co-chairman at Mercury, a public strategy firm. (He has taken an unpaid leave of absence while he is chairman.) He rose to the top job in November when the previous chairman, Joseph J. Lhota, resigned. Mr. Ferrer, a friendly Cuomo loyalist, acts as a pinch-hitter of sorts: He has served as acting chairman twice before. Mr. Cuomo’s office said it would appoint a new chairman, which requires confirmation by the State Senate, in “the coming weeks.”
+David R. Jones
+Mr. Jones, who was recommended by Mayor Bill de Blasio, is president of the Community Service Society of New York, an antipoverty nonprofit. He has been a fierce champion for the “Fair Fares” program to offer discount MetroCards to poor New Yorkers.
+Charles G. Moerdler
+Mr. Moerdler, a Cuomo appointee, is a partner at the law firm Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Perhaps the most quotable board member, Mr. Moerdler has spawned the moniker “First Degree Moerdler” on Twitter for his fiery screeds. He has decried “fake news.” He recently declared, “We are not empty suits.” Mr. Lhota once challenged him to “be a man” during a tense exchange, and Mr. Moerdler responded by saying, “Bring it on.”
+Lawrence Schwartz
+Mr. Schwartz, a former top aide to Mr. Cuomo, is an executive at OTG, an airport concessions company. He is known as being Mr. Cuomo’s enforcer on the board and wants to present his own fare proposals aiming to tie higher fares to service improvements.When he went inside the bar to tell the women he had pulled up the car outside and was ready to go, a drunk man jumped in the Maserati and took off. Mr. Novak was “terrified,” he said. Within a few minutes, though, the car thief returned. He just wanted to take such a nice ride for a spin, apparently. “If I’m honest, I was really upset,” Mr. Novak said, “but I tried to be jovial about the whole thing.” Why didn’t he call the police? “There’s no cell service in Vermont. It would be a great state to commit a murder in for that reason.”
+Though there was also a shoulder injury serious enough to leave Bill Novak (the actual invitee) heading back to Brooklyn with his arm in a sling, things had a way of working out. And, Mr. Novak (the stranger one) was nearly deafened by fireworks his fellow partygoers set off upon his arrival.
+Angelo Onello, the groom-to-be being celebrated, incidentally will end up $3,000 richer as another result of the email mistake made by his brother, Devin Onello, the bachelor party’s organizer.
+By the time of Mr. Novak’s flight from Arizona to Vermont, the GoFundMe had raised almost $5,000, much more than he needed to fund the trip. So he is donating the surplus to Mr. Onello, of Midland Park, N.J., and his fiancée, Devon Cianciaruso, who is four months pregnant.
+“We both work full-time, but we’ve got a lot of expenses with the wedding and renovating our house. So we can use that money for the baby’s college fund, and it was extremely nice of him to do that for us,” said Mr. Onello. They plan to marry Feb. 1 in Wyckoff, N.J.He found a handful of options, knowing it was likely the friends would need to split a one-bedroom. They were aiming for something with a good kitchen, convenient laundry and a well-equipped gym. Their price range was $3,500 to $4,500; anything less for a home within walking distance of Juilliard seemed unrealistic.
+The first place, at 180 Riverside Boulevard, was in the former rail-yard neighborhood sometimes called Riverside South. Ms. Pineda liked the river views and calm sidewalks, traffic noise from the highway notwithstanding.
+Image A one-bedroom at 180 Riverside Boulevard had river views and calm sidewalks, but also an unworkable layout. Credit... Katherine Marks for The New York Times
+One-bedrooms there were in the $3,000s and $4,000s, and only one was available. It had a rectangular bedroom, but the rest of the apartment was an unusual “not-square, not-even-triangle shape,” Ms. Pineda said. It seemed impossible to make it workable for two.
+A sunny corner unit in a condominium building on West 47th Street, west of 10th Avenue, was farther from school but had great appeal. It had two large bedrooms, two bathrooms and four closets — and it came fully furnished. The rent was $4,475 a month.
+But the owner wanted to sell the unit, meaning the roommates would need to let prospective buyers in for viewings. And if the apartment sold, they would have to vacate. They appreciated the agent’s honesty in explaining the limitations, and knew that they couldn’t risk a month-to-month lease, with the possibility of being booted out. (The apartment is currently for sale for $1.075 million, with monthly charges of around $1,700.)
+Image A sunny corner unit in a building on West 47th Street had two large bedrooms, two bathrooms and four closets. But the unit’s owner was eager to sell it. Credit... Katherine Marks for The New York Times
+Finally, they came to the Max, on West 57th Street near 11th Avenue, a 15-minute walk from the school. When Ms. Pineda visited, “I was in awe,” she said. “I had never seen a New York apartment like this in my dreams, ever. There is that huge lobby, and it was just so welcoming. I was, like, ‘This cannot be an apartment building. This is a palace.’”Wendy MacNaughton is a graphic journalist based in San Francisco. You can find her via website and Instagram.One of the tenets of neurosurgery, perhaps the principal tenet, is the Monro-Kellie doctrine: that the cranium, the bone that encases the brain, can fit only so much . Though it affords our brains a home and remarkable protection, that comes at a cost. If its tenant gets too big, the pressure inside rises, and there’s nowhere for the brain to go but down, a harbinger of death. When our patient bled, the blood that seeped into his cranium occupied space he didn’t have.
+We can try to treat this pressure medically, but in an emergency like this, the definitive treatment is to place an external ventricular drain. Since the French surgeon Claude-Nicolas Le Cat first performed it in 1744, placing this fine tube into the brain has been used as a swift and durable way to drain some of the cerebrospinal fluid that buoys and nourishes the brain, creating space and relieving pressure.
+It was my job to place it.
+We calmed and sedated him, his cardiac monitor periodically reminding us of his starving heart muscle. I carefully shaved the little hair he had. I scrubbed his scalp with a soapy sponge, cleaned it with rubbing alcohol, and painted it with bactericidal iodine. The room was soon clad in hospital blue drapes, with him at the center, a light illuminating his crown. The light beamed hot over my mask and gown.
+As I cut into his scalp, his blood spilled forth , as thinned blood does. That familiar scent immediately filled my nostrils. I scraped away the subcutaneous tissue revealing his ivory white cranium. I started drilling a hole, to break the cerebral seal we are all born with. Once through, I cut his dura mater, the rubbery sheath of tissue that encases the brain. He was now exposed. Using external anatomic landmarks as my guide, I gently passed the tube into his brain. You can’t help but to notice the brain’s jellylike consistency.
+Crimson cerebrospinal fluid gushed out. Success.
+With such insults to the brain, it isn’t as much a race against time. Yes, time is tissue. But really, this was a race against space. He now had a little more room to suffer his bleed.
+I sutured the tube into place, and closed his incision. We took him upstairs to the neurological intensive care unit. Between his brain and his heart, the former was the priority. Remarkably, his heart never stopped beating.
+Later that evening, his family and friends trickled into the unit to visit him. “What are his chances?” is always the first question. It was difficult to be certain, but his prognosis was poor. Even with our best efforts, he was now comatose, reacting very little to the world around him.House Democrats have said they are prepared to roughly double the amount of money they had previously offered for border security, but not for a border wall and not until the government reopens.
+Explainer: We answered some common questions about the State of the Union address, including when and where it’s usually delivered.
+What’s next: The Senate plans to vote today on two competing proposals to end the shutdown, although neither is expected to pass. It now seems all but certain that 800,000 federal employees will miss another paycheck on Friday.
+Another angle: The unions representing 130,000 aviation workers called the shutdown an “unprecedented” and “unconscionable” safety threat.Najib Razak, the former Malaysian prime minister who was ousted at the polls last year and now faces dozens of corruption-related charges, pleaded his case this week. But not before a judge.
+Standing before a microphone in a recording studio with more than a dozen young backup singers, he delivered a baritone intro to a reworked, Malay-language version of “Kiss and Say Goodbye,” the 1970s R&B hit by the American group the Manhattans.
+“This is the saddest day in my life,” Mr. Najib laments in the spoken intro, in a video posted on a Facebook page for his political party.
+“On May 9, 2018, I was ousted,” he croons. “All this while I fought relentlessly for the people whom I loved and are dear to me. But what can I do?”Here’s the catch: Even if fares go up, the M.T.A. has said there is no guarantee it will prevent service cuts.
+Then on Tuesday, a nearly 6-foot monkey wrench landed in the M.T.A.’s machinery.
+Mr. Cuomo told my colleague Emma Fitzsimmons he does not believe the M.T.A. needs to raise fares at all. “I have no faith in what they say,” he said of the agency.
+Not even to prevent service cuts?
+“No. Tighten your belt. Make the place run better,” Mr. Cuomo replied.
+And with that, Mr. Cuomo continued what one website called his “reign of terror on the M.T.A.”
+They plan, he disrupts. Remember the L train shutdown?
+So why is Mr. Cuomo doing all of this?
+One obvious answer: It’s popular. Stop a shutdown, prevent a fare increase, bask in glory.
+More substantively, it is part of the governor’s carefully executed strategy to, as Emma wrote, “humiliate” the M.T.A. into (somehow) improving.
+The board meets at 9 a.m.
+Best of The Times“At the end of the summer, Margit and I heard he was getting married. He’s the best teacher, and he’s got this great energy, and he makes every school function fun. We thought, wouldn’t it be awesome to do something for his wedding?” said Ms. Foraste of Hingham. The women emailed their fellow choir parents, asking if their sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade singers were up for participating in a surprise appearance to celebrate Mr. Landis’ wedding, and making sure they felt no pressure to be involved.
+“We hoped we’d get at least 15 kids to do it,” said Ms. Foraste, who was worried about availability during the busy run-up to Christmas. Instead, 50 of the 70 choir members committed. Four weeks of secret Sunday evening rehearsals at the James Library in Norwell, under the direction of Dona Maher, a colleague of Mr. Landis’s who gives private piano and voice lessons, resulted. Students had to finagle their partial absence from school that Friday with the principal, some of them missing lunch to be excused.
+“I was flabbergasted by how much they cared,” Mr. Landis said. “As a middle-school teacher, I see students struggling so much with trying to figure out who they are,” he said. “Some of the students singing have inner struggles, and things I know about going on at home. I was so glad they were there, feeling the love in the room and knowing everything’s going to be O.K., that things do work out.”
+“I Doozy” is an every-so-often feature highlighting people, places or things related to Weddings.Nationwide, donations to hospitals exceeded $10.4 billion in 2017, up from $6 billion in 2004, according to the Association for Healthcare Philanthropy.
+“Grateful patients have always been there, but we did not always do as good a job of inviting them to be part of our missions as we are now doing,” Alice Ayres, the trade group’s chief executive officer, said. She attributed the increased fund-raising to grateful patients programs as well as to a shift away from event-driven efforts, a focus on larger gifts and overall economic growth in the United States.
+A 2013 change in federal health privacy law made it easier for hospitals to target their patients for donations. It enabled hospital records departments to share with staff fund-raisers some personal details of patients, including their health insurance status, the department treating them, the name of their physician and the outcome of their care.
+When patients are admitted, they typically sign a raft of papers that include permission for the hospital to use this information for fund-raising. While the 2013 law required hospitals to inform patients that they could decline to be solicited by fund-raisers, few patients are aware of this, said Deven McGraw, a former deputy director of health information privacy at the federal Department of Health and Human Services. And, she said, few appear to realize that their wealth may be assessed for fund-raising.
+Many hospitals send solicitation letters to all of their insured patients, including those with little desire — or ability — to make donations.
+St. Clair Hospital in Pittsburgh treated Marcy Grupp in its emergency room for three hours in May for a painful kidney stone, providing a computerized tomography scan, among other tests. Medicare paid the bill.
+A month later, the hospital sent Ms. Grupp, a retired television engineer, a letter asking for a donation to honor a doctor or other caregiver. “We encourage you to please consider honoring their efforts with a ‘gift of gratitude,’ by making a donation to St. Clair Hospital,” the letter said.The five-domains approach can reveal the logic behind behaviors that may look like nothing more than teenage recklessness or delinquency. “All behavior meets a need,” Linda Snyder, a deputy juvenile officer in the family services unit of the St. Louis County Family Court, said. “So whether that behavior is adaptive or maladaptive, you have to understand the need it is filling.”
+A juvenile, she said, may persist with behaviors that keep her in detention because it meets her need for safety better than being at home. Or a student may continue cursing out a teacher because getting kicked out of class serves to avoid the embarrassment of having to read in front of his peers. Or a youth who uses drugs may do so mainly to satisfy the need for social connectedness.
+“At the end of the day, negative consequences don’t change behavior,” Ms. Snyder said. “Change comes through teaching competencies, and incentivizing and celebrating accomplishments. What the Full Frame does is teaches a process for developing interventions that are going to create competencies that will decrease the likelihood that kids will continue to be system involved.”
+The officers in the family court can act with confidence on their insights because they are working in a system where everyone shares a common language, Mr. Burkemper said.
+In Massachusetts, the Full Frame Initiative has been working for eight years with five state agencies, with the goal of preventing survivors of domestic and sexual violence from becoming, or remaining, homeless. “Often for victims of domestic violence, there’s a forced trade-off,” said Tammy Mello, the former executive director of the Governor’s Council to Address Sexual and Domestic Violence in Massachusetts.
+Several years ago, Ms. Mello and other department heads who focused on children and families, transitional assistance, housing and homelessness, public health and victims’ assistance began meeting periodically to figure out how their systems could become better aligned. In particular, they wanted to stop making things harder for people who were trying to stabilize their lives.
+For example, if a mother experiencing domestic violence lost temporary custody of her children because the child welfare department determined that they had to be removed for safety, it would automatically trigger her loss of housing benefits. “It was crazy,” Ms. Mello said. “Then you couldn’t return the kids to the mom because she’d lost her housing. And the mother would say, ‘I can’t get housing assistance unless I have my kids back.’”Those early years also saw the rise of an army of gover nment trolls who flooded the comments sections of homegrown sites that were critical of the Communist Party with revolutionary slogans. Under pseudonyms they attacked dissenters with epithets and rumors and questioned the moral standing of those who disagreed with them. They no longer needed the courts or bullets to assassinate reputations; a simple tweet punch would do the trick.
+The revolutionary commander Ramiro Valdés stood out during this time for launching brutal ideological battles to fight new technology. As minister of information and communication, Mr. Valdés defined in harsh words the relationship between Cuba’s “historic generation” of older revolutionaries and the new era brought about by mobile phones, USB memory sticks and computers built by Cubans using parts bought on the black market.
+The internet is a “wild colt” that “can and must be controlled,” Mr. Valdés once said. Digital spaces were simply strongholds that needed to be overrun, and this would remain the government’s attitude for over a decade.
+Independent blog pioneers were accused of being “cyber-mercenaries” who were trained by the Central Intelligence Agency, and a project called Operation Truth began at Cuba’s University of Information Sciences to back the official position. The first Cuban Twitter users were portrayed on national television as pawns in the new offensive by the United States against the revolution.
+From that fierce battle for digital expression I came away with some social scars.
+Though I no longer need to fake an accent to get internet access, the government’s intolerance of free expression has barely eased, and independent journalists are still targets for the police.
+The digital plaza — a virtual space made up of social networks where Cubans who cannot physically meet can express their political views — offers a more holistic view of Cuba, one from a pluralistic perspective. Access to 3G mobile technology has allowed activists to call for a no vote in the referendum on the new Constitution, to strongly condemn Decree 349, which limits artistic freedom, and to protest how Miguel Díaz-Canel was elevated to the presidency without the people’s consent.
+But in Parliament, in public places and at the centers of power, only one side of the argument can still be heard.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: More than 99 percent of the territory once controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has been liberated, and the few remaining villages under its control are soon expected to fall. Rukmini Callimachi on how the U.S. government may be misunderstanding what that means. It’s Thursday, January 24th.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We’re destroying the bloodthirsty killers known as ISIS — almost gone.
+rukmini callimachi
+As the reporter at the New York Times who covers ISIS day in, day out, I’ve been struck by how the White House in recent weeks and months has been so black-and-white in its description of ISIS.
+michael barbaro
+We reached Rukmini at a hotel in Iraq.
+rukmini callimachi
+They have described the Islamic State as —
+archived recording (president trump)
+We’ve wiped out ISIS in Iraq. We’ve wiped out ISIS.
+rukmini callimachi
+Wiped out.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We’ve essentially—
+rukmini callimachi
+As absolutely obliterated.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Obliterated ISIS.
+archived recording
+We’ve also defeated the ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq.
+rukmini callimachi
+As in its final throes.
+archived recording (vice president pence)
+The caliphate has crumbled, and ISIS has been defeated.
+rukmini callimachi
+And as defeated.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We’ve beaten them, and we’ve beaten them badly. We’ve taken back the land. And now it’s time for our troops to come back home.
+rukmini callimachi
+And all I can think when I hear those phrases is that I’m having an episode of déjà vu.
+archived recording (president obama)
+Good evening. Tonight, I’d like to talk to you about the end of our combat mission in Iraq.
+rukmini callimachi
+In 2010, the Obama administration effectively declared the group defeated.
+archived recording (president obama)
+The Americans who have served in Iraq completed every mission they were given. They defeated a regime that had terrorized its people.
+rukmini callimachi
+And began the accelerated pullout of American troops from Iraq.
+archived recording (president obama)
+So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended. Operation Iraqi Freedom is over.
+rukmini callimachi
+And at that point in time, the estimates that we had were that the group was down to its last 700 fighters — that U.S. forces managed to pick off and either arrest or kill three-quarters of the group’s top leaders. And in a history of that period of time that ISIS itself put out, they described how the emir of the group had lamented to his fighters that they were so exhausted, so weak and so depleted that the Islamic State could only hold ground for 15 minutes at a time. Anything longer than a quarter of an hour, and they would be overrun. So it really did look like this group was on its last legs. But, in fact, what we saw is that every year since that — 2011, 2012, 2013 — the number of attacks that this group was doing per month started to spike. So in 2011, according to a database that is maintained by researcher Michael Knights, they were doing 358 attacks per month just in Iraq. By 2012, it was 539 per month. By 2013, it was 804 per month. So in a very short period of time, a group that I think legitimately looked like it was defeated — I agree with the assessment of the Obama administration that the group appeared to be on its way out — it was very quickly able to regenerate itself and become a deadly force in the absence of American pressure.
+michael barbaro
+So what was happening that allowed that to occur?
+rukmini callimachi
+Well, for one, American forces pulled out. And unfortunately, our partners in the region, they weren’t able to keep fighting this group at the same intensity that had happened under a coalition effort. And so they went from this ragtag insurgency of just 700 militants to carrying out insurgent tactics all over Iraq. They began doing targeted assassinations, where they were assassinating village elders in small localities and small villages. You would think that that would not be a tactic that would help them, but in fact what it was doing is in that village where the village elder was killed, immediately people understood that the most important game in town was ISIS — not the Iraqi security forces who had failed to protect that village leader. So they carried out these targeted assassinations and, in so doing, they began to have more recruits. And in really three, four short years, they were so strong that in 2014, they were able to blitz across Iraq and Syria and take a territory that was literally the size of Great Britain. That was, of course, the declaration of the caliphate.
+michael barbaro
+So this idea that ISIS was defeated and that it was time to pull out — which was the calculation of the Obama administration — this was a complete miscalculation.
+rukmini callimachi
+It was clearly premature. But to be fair to them, the metrics look good when they made the decision. On paper, it looked like the group was really on its way out. And that’s where the declarations that the White House has been making now are so puzzling.
+michael barbaro
+Why?
+rukmini callimachi
+Because if you just compare the history of them to now, the numbers now are so much more worrying. So according to three different studies that have just been done — including by the Pentagon inspector general, by the United Nations, by C.S.I.S. — ISIS is now estimated to have between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters just in Iraq and Syria.
+michael barbaro
+Wow.
+rukmini callimachi
+So that’s more than 20 to 30 times what they had in 2010 — more than 20 to 30 times. So obviously, if it was not actually defeated in 2010, why in the world would we be saying that it’s defeated now, when it has many magnitudes more fighters than they had previously?
+michael barbaro
+I just want to be clear about those numbers. There are 20,000 to 30,000 ISIS fighters in Iraq and Syria —
+rukmini callimachi
+Yes.
+michael barbaro
+Compared to 700 in 2010.
+rukmini callimachi
+Yes. Now the caveat to that is these are, of course, estimations. There’s no national registry of ISIS fighters. There’s no census of ISIS fighters. And there are people that have criticized the 20,000 to 30,000 number, saying, “Wait, this is way too large.” But what I find significant is that three different groups, independent of each other — the United Nations, the Pentagon inspector general and C.S.I.S., the Center for Strategic and International Studies — they have all come independently to the same conclusion. All three of them are saying that the group is now between 20,000 and 30,000 fighters in reports that they published late last year.
+michael barbaro
+So, Rukmini, if there are that many more ISIS fighters now than there were in 2010, what would lead the United States and all of these leaders in the Trump administration to make this declaration that ISIS is defeated?
+rukmini callimachi
+So, Michael, let me give you the most innocent explanation for that. Most people became aware of ISIS when ISIS declared its caliphate — its so-called state — and blitzed across this region and took this enormous territory. So for as long as people in the general population have known ISIS, it’s been associated with holding territory. And it is true that the territory that it had in Iraq and Syria is almost all gone. It has less than 1% of the territory it once held. I’ve just been checking in with sources on the ground. The group is now down to three villages just in Syria. And I believe that one of those three is about to fall. So, really, it’s down to two. So what people have done is they have mistaken the territory-holding group with the group itself. What they’re forgetting is that ISIS is just another name of a group that has been in Iraq since 2002, 2003. And only since 2014 and, really, till around 2017 did the group really hold a lot of land. And at that point in time, they were imposing taxes on people, they were issuing birth certificates, they were fixing potholes and fixing the electricity grid. You suddenly saw a terrorist group that, for all of our attempts to downplay them and to call them a so-called state, really were acting like a proto-state. And that was a frightening prospect. And for a couple of years, it just seemed like there was no way to dislodge them. So I think that there is a reason why people are equating these two things. But what they’re missing is the history of this group. This is a terrorist group that only held land for the last couple of years of its more than 15-year history. And for all of those 15 years, the group has been incredibly deadly and incredibly destructive — most of those years without holding any territory at all.
+michael barbaro
+So what you’re saying is that the U.S. justifiably started to think of ISIS as a territory — as you said, a proto-state.
+rukmini callimachi
+That’s right, yeah.
+michael barbaro
+But now that that territory has shrunken, the U.S. hasn’t quite adjusted to that reality in thinking about the group’s overall strength and danger.
+rukmini callimachi
+Certainly that is what is being reflected in the decision to pull out of Syria. I’ll tell you, I’m in Iraq right now, and this is a country I’ve been to many times, covering the effort against ISIS. When I was coming here in 2016, in 2017, even in parts of 2018, we knew exactly where the front line against ISIS was. First it was in this city, then it was in that city, then in this town, then in that village. And I knew that I had a reasonable expectation that if I was on the coalition side of that front line, that I was protected. Right? Now ISIS is technically gone as a territorial entity from Iraq, but I’ll tell you — recently I went to the birthplace of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — the leader of the Islamic State. This is a place that was liberated many months ago. And the security forces who took me there stopped our convoy three different times on the way to this little village. And we had to have lengthy negotiations with them about whether we should continue, because they were too scared to advance.
+michael barbaro
+Why?
+rukmini callimachi
+Because they themselves know that ISIS is there, but it’s like you’ve kicked the hornet’s nest, right? They’re no longer in one specific place. They’ve basically bled into the population. They’re hiding amongst civilians. They’re now everywhere and anywhere, and so they can strike at any time.
+michael barbaro
+So as you’ve explained, there are significant numbers of ISIS fighters, and they’re hiding in the general population of Iraq and Syria, basically blending in now that the territory has been shrunken. So what are we seeing from them that signals how strong ISIS really is there?
+rukmini callimachi
+So what we’ve seen is in areas that were declared liberated by the coalition, and which looked stable, we’re seeing ISIS do counterattacks and push back into those areas. And in some instances, they’ve been able to retake areas that had just been declared liberated. And we’ve seen that both in Iraq and in Syria. More worrying than that is the attack that happened last week in the Syrian town of Manbij.
+archived recording
+News out of Syria — we’re following reports of a car bombing in Syria that has killed U.S. troops. Two soldiers, one civilian and one contractor were killed, and three more servicemen wounded. The bomb went off near a restaurant where a delegation of American and European visitors was having lunch. The patrol was likely in that area providing security for the —
+rukmini callimachi
+This was a place that was considered so safe that American forces were openly walking around this market and going to a popular lunch spot to have their daily meal. Just as a data point, in the four years that American troops have been in Syria, before this incident, only two other Americans had died in combat. So in a matter of moments, that one incident more than doubled the American death toll for this operation in Syria.
+michael barbaro
+I wonder if, in some ways, what happened in Syria inside this restaurant feels like kind of a metaphor for this larger issue you’re describing, which is that it appeared the area was safe, and yet ISIS was still able to carry out an attack — which feels a bit like the U.S.’ overall assessment, which is it feels like ISIS’s land is gone, so ISIS is not that big a threat.
+rukmini callimachi
+Right. I think you’re spot on, Michael. I mean, I think that what we’re seeing is a White House that thinks that because the territory has now been removed, that the group is no longer a threat. And, unfortunately, four Americans came back in body bags last week in part because of this assumption.
+michael barbaro
+Rukmini, given what you explained about 2010 and the Obama administration assessment, which turned out to be a miscalculation, and knowing that the Trump administration and its military leaders must know that lesson as well as you do, why does it feel like the U.S. isn’t learning the lessons of that era when it comes to thinking about ISIS being on its last legs now?
+rukmini callimachi
+You know, Michael, I’ve been thinking about this a lot. And I think part of it is that really since 2014, we have been working in such a conscientious way to beat this group back from the cities that they held. What analysts have told me is that as monstrous as the caliphate seemed, and as big as their territory was when that military operation began in 2014 and 2015, in a way, that was the easy part. That was the conventional war phase of this conflict. You had a front line, and you had advancing troops. And you were basically moving towards the incoming fire from ISIS. And they would identify — that building, we’re taking incoming fire from ISIS, let’s call in an airstrike. O.K., that building, now that building. They were rolling in tanks into cities and fighting an army that was, in some ways, acting like a conventional army. They were firing rockets and artillery and going around in Humvees. Now, the coalition and the coalition partners — the Kurds in Syria and the Iraqi security forces — they have to do something that, in a way, is harder, which is they have to fight an insurgency, which is hiding among the population. And the only ethical way to do that is very carefully, because otherwise you’re going to kill tons and tons of civilians. It’s much harder to weed them out when they’ve cut off their beards, they’re dressing like normal people, and they’re basically just hanging out in some farmhouse in the middle of some village.
+archived recording
+Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch ally of President Trump, has been harshly critical of the president’s strategy in Syria. Says he’s concerned the president’s statements about Syria have emboldened ISIS. President Trump’s national security adviser, John Bolton, is now contradicting President Trump’s comments about military action in Syria. Bolton says United States troops will not leave the country until ISIS is destroyed and until our Kurdish allies have protection.
+michael barbaro
+I’m struck that over the past couple of weeks the Trump administration — or at least certain members of it — seem to be having second thoughts about pulling out of Syria. John Bolton, for example, when in Israel, suggested that the pullout would be much, much slower. And it feels as if people are grappling with this question you are, of — maybe ISIS is stronger than we think, and we should slow this all down. What do you make of that?
+rukmini callimachi
+Well, I think from the reporting that The New York Times has done, what we know is that the people around Trump — his senior generals, his top advisers — are all telling him that this is a bad idea. In the several weeks that have passed since his announcement of the withdrawal in December of last year, I’ve actually seen a change in Trump’s language regarding this issue.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Another reason I’m here today is to personally thank you and every service member throughout this region for the near-elimination of the ISIS territorial caliphate in Iraq and in Syria.
+rukmini callimachi
+He’s no longer talking about the defeat of ISIS overall or even the defeat of ISIS in Syria. So it’s as if he now understands that the territorial caliphate and defeating that is not the same thing as the overall defeat of the group. However, his overall stance remains the same.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We’re pulling our soldiers out, and they will be pulled back in Syria, and we’re getting out of Syria. Yeah, absolutely. But we’re getting out very powerfully.
+rukmini callimachi
+We don’t know when, but they’re going to pull out. And what his own advisers are telling him is that there’s no partner that they see that is reliable and that can step in on America’s behalf to do this job. And so our pullout means that we’re going to leave a vacuum. And we know that ISIS historically has done very well in vacuums.
+michael barbaro
+Rukmini, thank you very much.
+rukmini callimachiDiana Athill, an Englishwoman who wrote a series of critically lauded memoirs chronicling her romantic and sexual liaisons over much of the 20th century, but who attained international literary celebrity in her 90s with the publication of an installment about the waning of desire, died on Wednesday in London. She was 101.
+Her death, at a hospice, was confirmed by Granta, her British publisher.
+Ms. Athill’s renown came with “Somewhere Towards the End,” the sixth — though by no means the last — volume of her autobiography. Published in 2008, the year she turned 91, it is a meditation on the inevitable pains, and unexpected pleasures, of aging.
+Jenny Diski, reviewing the volume, wrote in The Sunday Times of London, “Such a book is in itself a rare enough thing, but a book about old age written by a woman with a cold eye for reality and no time for sentimental lies is as rare as — well, as rare as a thoughtful discussion about a woman’s sexuality after the age of 60.”
+Ms. Diski added, “When the wish for sex goes, Athill says cheeringly, there is space at last to gain a glimpse of who you really are apart from erotic desire.”Nadal, 32, has won 17 major championships and was playing his 30th Grand Slam semifinal.
+Tsitsipas, 20, has just a single tour title. Though he enthralled crowds and flashed his talent throughout the tournament — including an upset of the two-time defending champion Roger Federer — he is still relatively new to pro tennis. He had never previously advanced past the fourth round of a major.
+Despite the chasm in experience, it seemed Tsitsipas was playing well enough to have a chance.
+Instead, it was never close. Nadal came out sharply, targeting lethal, down-the-line groundstrokes to seize momentum with a break in the third game. From that moment, his power suffocated the young Greek.
+As much as Tsitsipas tried to inflict damage with flat returns, Nadal rarely seemed rushed. He was never broken. The first set was over in 31 pragmatic minutes. The second took 44. The third, another 31. By the standards of professional men’s tennis, those sets were sprints.
+Not long after the match was done, Tsitsipas, who was seeded 14th, looked dazed at his news conference, lacking any of the optimistic energy he’d exuded after previous matches. On Tuesday, he had explained how he’d learned from losing to Nadal last summer in the final of the Rogers Cup in Toronto. He had remembered coming off the court there feeling he would do much better next time against the Spaniard, because now he had a sense of Nadal’s game, “especially on hardcourt.”
+Two days later, there was no such gumption.
+“He plays just a different game style than the rest of the players,” Tsitsipas said, dolefully.
+It looked as if he had just been pummeled in a boxing ring.
+“He has this, I don’t know, talent that no other player has,” Tsitsipas added. “His game style has something that it kind of makes the other half of your brain work more than it usually does. I’m trying to understand, but I cannot find an explanation.”Good Thursday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Shutdown Day 34: Dueling votes and a presidential capitulation
+The matter of where and when President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address appears to be settled for now, after an extended face-off with Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
+Ms. Pelosi disinvited Mr. Trump from speaking in the House chamber while the shutdown continued. Late yesterday, after talking of making his speech somewhere else, he tweeted a decision to delay:
+This is her prerogative - I will do the Address when the Shutdown is over.
+Other shutdown developments:
+• The Republican-controlled Senate votes today on two partisan proposals to end the shutdown. Neither is expected to advance.
+• Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has declined to testify to a House committee about how the shutdown will affect tax refund processing. Senate Democrats also raised concerns about federal employees losing some health benefits and about the Trump administration’s continued work on offshore drilling.
+• Most of the 800,000 federal workers going unpaid are unionized, but they’re not speaking with a unified voice. Some labor groups have supported the shutdown, but aviation unions called it an “unconscionable” safety threat and said they could not “predict the point at which the entire system will break.”In 2016, France restricted viewing of the documentary “Jihadists” (there called “Salafistes”) over fears that it provided a platform for Islamic extremists to spread propaganda.
+The version opening here, said to have been updated and re-edited, begins with remarks from one of the directors, François Margolin, who gratuitously invokes relatives killed in the Holocaust as a reason for making the movie, which features interviews from over several years with militants and extremists in Mali, Tunisia and Mauritania. Margolin defends the importance of listening to them. “They are not crazy,” he says, as if madness were the sole reason for withholding a soapbox. “They have not escaped from psychiatric wards.”
+Exactly what Margolin thinks is educational about showing unfiltered extremist ideology, however, is unclear. In an early moment in Mali, Oumar Ould Hamaha, a militant allied with Al Qaeda who was killed in 2014, claims that there has been no more theft “since we started stonings” and “cutting off thieves’ hands.” As the film proceeds, subjects praise the Sept. 11 attacks and the Charlie Hebdo shooting in 2015 and inveigh against women, gays and Jews.“The Invisibles,” which tells the astonishing stories of four of the thousands of German Jews in Berlin who tried to escape deportation to the camps in World War II, is two movies spliced into one. The first records interviews with the four — Cioma Schönhaus, Hanni Lévy, Eugen Friede and Ruth Gumpel (née Arndt) — conducted in 2009. The second uses these testimonies as the basis for a scripted drama that the director, Claus Räfle, weaves around interview segments like extended re-enactments.
+What results is neither fish nor fowl, but a disappointingly stilted hybrid that gathers momentum only to hit one roadblock after another. No sooner are we gripped by a character’s imminent capture than the action is paused for commentary. We would rather stick beside Hanni (Alice Dwyer), a 17-year-old orphan, as she dyes her hair and haunts the city’s movie theaters, often sleeping on the streets. Or have uninterrupted time to wonder at the breathtaking inventiveness of Cioma (the excellent Max Mauff), who forges passports in exchange for food stamps and even buys himself a sailboat.As animation has trended toward the precision that comes from working with computers, it has become refreshing to encounter throwbacks to less “perfect” styles.
+The adventure plot in the Brazilian feature “Tito and the Birds,” directed by Gustavo Steinberg, Gabriel Bitar, and André Catoto, is no great shakes — it wouldn’t be out of place on a Saturday-morning cartoon — but visually, the movie leaves room for the viewer to synthesize, and to dream. Combining work in oil paint with digital artistry, the film is unafraid to let brush strokes or impasto show. It blends backgrounds and effects that look vaguely post-Impressionist with character features that suggest a demented, taffy-stretched “South Park.”
+In a sense, even the movie’s subject is imagination. The plot finds the world gripped by an epidemic: A virus is paralyzing people with fear, shrinking them into blobs and eventually turning them into rocks (or so we’re told). Although it’s not clear to everyone, the disease’s spread appears to be abetted by a steady diet of news-media scaremongering. A self-interested real estate developer (voiced by Mateus Solano) is pulling the strings.In 2011, the British writer-comedian Joe Cornish delivered a promising feature directing debut with “Attack the Block,” a wild, irreverent science-fiction action-comedy about an alien invasion thwarted by a gang of tough teenagers. That film, which also gave us the screen acting debut of the future “Star Wars” favorite John Boyega, was not a huge hit, but gained cult status over the years, prompting speculation about what its talented writer-director might do next.
+It’s taken eight years for Cornish to release another feature, and it may feel strange at first to see him at the helm of a modest children’s adventure about a modern-day King Arthur. But “The Kid Who Would be King” still has some of the wit and sweep that distinguished Cornish’s earlier work.
+The film’s setup is simple. The meek 12-year-old Alex (Louis Ashbourne Serkis), chased into an abandoned construction site by the school bullies, comes upon a sword stuck in a hunk of stone and pulls it out. A Latin inscription on the weapon suggests that it may well be Excalibur, the legendary sword of King Arthur, although Jack and his best pal, Bedders (Dean Chaumoo), initially decide that’s a ridiculous notion.There’s some foreboding imagery at the beginning of “Heartlock,” a crime drama-romance set in a prison: A shot of a black cat striding through an air vent. Doesn’t sound like much, but it was enough to make me expect a more exciting movie than this one ends up being. The cat’s around for more than companionship; it’s moving illegal drugs around the prison.
+Turns out, though, that having a cat move drugs is not the best idea. The cat gets sick from those drugs, and its nasty inmate owner, Continental, then compels Lee, an inmate who works in the infirmary, to save it. Lee, in return, wants Continental to help him escape.
+Continental advises Lee to find a “duck.” This is what used to be called a “cat’s paw” or “stooge”: an unwitting party you can manipulate into an accomplice for wrongdoing. This ends up being Tera, a female prison guard and daughter of a former warden who was a schoolmate of Lee.Before reading the article:
+On Jan. 10, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in for a second term as the president of Venezuela. However, his re-election last year was widely denounced by other countries as fraudulent.
+The article “Venezuela Is in Crisis. So How Did Maduro Secure a Second Term?” describes the current state of the country:
+Daily life in Venezuela has become unrecognizable from what it was just a few years ago. Where once the government built homes, clinics and schools for the poor as part of its socialist policy, people now find themselves without the most basic necessities. The country’s health system has collapsed, leaving many without access to lifesaving medicine. Hunger is common, and the shelves of grocery stores lie bare. And there is no sense conditions are improving. The International Monetary Fund anticipates that Venezuela’s inflation rate will reach 10 million percent in 2019, becoming one of the worst cases of hyperinflation in modern history.
+On Wednesday, the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, swore himself in as interim president before thousands of anti-Maduro protesters. Watch this three-minute video on his rise from relative obscurity to self-declared president of Venezuela.
+What do you imagine will be the consequences of Mr. Guaidó’s action? What questions do you have?
+Now, read the article, “After U.S. Backs Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s Leader, Maduro Cuts Ties” and answer the following questions:
+1. How has Mr. Maduro responded to Mr. Guaidó declaring himself president? What is meant by his statement, “We do not want to return to the 20th century of gringo interventions and coups d’etats?”
+2. What has been the U.S. government’s role in the unfolding events in Venezuela? How have President Trump and his administration reacted to Mr. Maduro’s threat of expulsion?PARIS — In 1996 André Leon Talley, then a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and famously often the only black person on the front row at fashion shows, styled a shoot for the magazine titled “Scarlett ’n the Hood.” It reimagined “Gone With the Wind” with the races reversed: Naomi Campbell, then one of the few black supermodels, played Scarlett; John Galliano, then at Givenchy, played a maid.
+“We wanted to temporarily turn the pages of history around,” Mr. Talley told The New York Times afterward. On Wednesday in Paris, not quite 23 years later, Pierpaolo Piccioli, creative director of Valentino, echoed those words.
+“When it started, couture was made for white women,” Mr. Piccioli said, standing before a mood board pinned with photographs of different versions of a Black Madonna , works by the contemporary artist Kerry James Marshall and the famous 1948 Cecil Beaton shoot for Vogue of nine white models in Charles James couture gowns, all juxtaposed with photos from Ebony and Franca Sozzani’s 2008 “Black Issue” of Italian Vogue.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+“I think a lot about intergenerational justice,” Pete Buttigieg, the latest Democrat to enter the presidential race, said recently. Buttigieg is 37 years old. His generation, as he points out, has endured school shootings, post-9/11 wars, climate change, rising debts and the prospect that it will fail to earn more than its parents.
+Buttigieg — pronounced “BOOT-edge-edge” — doesn’t have the typical résumé of a presidential candidate. He is a successful two-term mayor of South Bend, Ind., who has never held higher office. He will need to persuade voters that he has the experience and judgment to clean up Donald Trump’s mess. But I find his candidacy intriguing.
+He has fully embraced the idea that the United States needs to focus on its future.
+As Ben White of Politico tweeted, Buttigieg “running an explicitly generational campaign as a millennial screwed by boomers who wrecked the earth and destroyed the nation’s finances is super interesting.” An Atlantic piece yesterday by Edward-Isaac Dovere ran under the headline: “Pete Buttigieg Thinks All the 2020 Democrats Are Too Old.” Buttigieg himself says in an announcement video: “We can’t look for greatness in the past. Right now, our country needs a fresh start.”LONDON — There’s been a gathering head of steam about “When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other,” the Martin Crimp play that returns Cate Blanchett to the London stage for the first time in nearly seven years.
+Tickets have been impossible to come by for this sold-out production, which opened Wednesday night at the National Theater and runs through March 2. (You either get in by ballot or by standing in line for returns — or not at all.) To add to the anticipatory fever, the word during previews was of an evening so startlingly in-your-face that one spectator had fainted because of the play’s extreme scenes of sex and violence. There were warning signs in the foyer.
+Alas, the reality — hardly for the first time in the theater — proves something less exciting: so much so, in fact, that the advance noise feels like a conscious ploy to generate controversy. Mr. Crimp’s play, directed by Katie Mitchell, comes dressed up with modern themes aplenty, but these barely register. It feels like a staged conceit, not an exploration of character.
+Yes, you get spatterings of blood, some unconvincing stage violence, and numerous sex acts. The final scene finds the twice Oscar-winning Ms. Blanchett lubricating a strap-on dildo which she is preparing to use on her (excellent) co-star, Stephen Dillane, as the curtain falls.Updated: Jan. 31, 2019
+Students
+1. The graph above shows how the combined market share has changed for the top two companies in several industries. It originally appeared elsewhere on NYTimes.com. After looking closely, think about these three questions:
+• What do you notice?
+• What do you wonder?
+What are you curious about that comes from what you notice in the graph?
+• What might be going on in this graph?
+Write a catchy headline that captures the graph’s main idea. If your headline makes a claim, tell us what you noticed that supports your claim.
+The questions are intended to build on one another, so try to answer them in order. Start with “I notice,” then “I wonder,” and end with “The story this graph is telling is ….” and a catchy headline.
+2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment. Teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say, or they can have their students use this same activity on Desmos.)
+3. After you have posted, read what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting a comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.I’m no actor, but I’d like to think if a script ever came my way with lines like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if nobody knows anything?,” and “Just how many years have I been here, Jack?,” and “How dare Old Joe feed my cat,” I’d know that the movie would probably open in the middle of January when the studios leave their garbage on the curb. But I’m just me, so it’s possible that Matthew McConaughey was sent the pages for “Serenity” and saw something more fit for April or May, when the movies don’t need quite as much cologne.
+It’s also possible that he read the script — with its tale of a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, sweat-soaked fishing boat captain, his ex, her battering new husband and the elusive tropical tuna that haunts the captain’s every waking hour — and recalled the last time he was on the high seas then said aloud, “I miss ‘Fool’s Gold.’” More than half the reason I went to see this movie is because I miss “Fool’s Gold,” too. But that movie is 11 years old. And the days of low-stakes thingamabobs with some stars and even a little bit of writing are gone.
+Instead of a caper with Kate Hudson, McConaughey has got a mess written and directed by Steven Knight. The captain — his captain, Baker Dill — has unsexy sex with Diane Lane’s character. He tries to catch that fish alongside his dutiful first mate (Djimon Hounsou). He puts up with the nerdy, White Rabbity stranger (Jeremy Strong) chasing after him and managing the return of Karen, this ex of his and mother of his son. She’s played by Anne Hathaway, as a blonde, and her arrival at the local bar appears to be an event so momentous that the camera has to sprint-swoop around her to gawk. I laughed when it did. Baker Dill is a lousy character name. But that camera pivot is lousier.Persuading people to use the e-Golfs stationed at low-income apartment buildings could be a challenge. They cost 15 cents a minute or $9 an hour to use. Mr. Ayala cited obstacles to adoption in his organization’s car-share program, which is free. He said many residents don’t have driver’s licenses or credit cards, which are needed to activate the service.
+I paid three visits to the Whispering Pines apartments, which was included in the service by Electrify America on Nov. 1. Each time, I found leaves collecting in the charging ports of the two cars, as if they had not been moved for several days. Envoy Technologies, which operates the program, declined to share usage rates for the cars at Whispering Pines.
+In yet another Sacramento-based experiment financed by Electrify America, a program called Gig this month started to put the first of 260 all-electric Chevrolet Bolts on city streets in a 13-square-mile zone between downtown and midtown. Seventy percent of residents in this zone are considered low income.
+Users can locate a Bolt via a mobile app, unlock the door, start it up and drive for $2.50 a mile or $15 an hour. When the ride is completed, members can park the car in any legal spot in the designated zone, lock the door and move on.
+These activities, which have turned Sacramento into a test bed for equitable access to E.V.s, are being conducted in the first $200 million cycle of the Electrify America investment. The company says these programs have taken about a year to develop and won’t bear fruit until later this year.
+Even with few of those services fully in operation, Electrify America went back in December to the California Air Resources Board to get approval for the second $200 million cycle. The meeting became contentious when two board members, Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia and the former State Senator Dean Florez, both hailing from rural districts, accused Electrify America of primarily focusing on profits, which it is entitled to earn under the Volkswagen settlement.
+“They plan to invest $95 million to $115 million in places like San Francisco, Beverly Hills or La Jolla, where projected demand is high for electric vehicles, rather than building charging stations in lower-income communities where the market will take longer to grow,” they wrote in a Sacramento Bee editorial. “Comparatively, only $2 million would be spent for community charging in rural areas badly in need of investment and opportunity.”Avoiding caves is clear-cut advice, but other routes of infection may be harder to block: People in many parts of the world eat bats, and may be infected while catching or preparing them for cooking. Hunters and cooks may not be able to tell one bat species from another.
+The researchers said the findings did not mean that bats should be exterminated. They protect humans and crops by eating insects and pollinating fruit trees. Disrupting complex ecosystems by slaughtering bats could even make disease outbreaks worse.
+Zaire ebolavirus is the cause of the current epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with more than 700 cases and more than 400 deaths. The outbreak, which has spun out of control in a war-torn region, is the second largest ever. The largest, caused by the same Ebola species, occurred in West Africa from 2013 to 2016, infecting nearly 30,000 people and killing 11,000.
+The West African epidemic, in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, is thought to have begun with a small boy in Guinea handling an infected bat, but the origin is not known for sure.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+A Liberian team in full protective gear — Tyvek suits, gloves, masks, goggles, hoods, boots — trapped and released 5,000 bats from about 10 species. They took samples of blood, urine and feces, and oral swabs.
+Dr. Anthony’s lab at Columbia found genetic material from the virus in a mouth swab taken from just one bat, captured in Liberia’s northeastern Nimba District. That animal was a greater long-fingered bat, from the species Miniopterus inflatus, a furry beast the size of a small mouse, weighing half an ounce, with a 12-inch wingspan. It eats insects.Slide 1 of 15,
+Upper West Side Co-op • $1,295,000 • MANHATTAN • 545 West End Avenue, No. 10D
+A two-bedroom, one-bath apartment with prewar bona fides, large rooms and a washer and dryer in a 1920s mid-rise with a doorman. John A. Kane, Douglas Elliman, 212-350-2227; elliman.comSlide 1 of 17,
+Grandview Five-Bedroom • $1,999,000 • Rockland • 245 River Road
+A five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath expanded and renovated 1790 house with 5,016 square feet, a wraparound porch, formal living, sitting and dining rooms, an eat-in kitchen and breakfast room, five fireplaces, an in-ground pool and a detached four-car garage with a storage/work space, on 1.37 acres with boating access to the Hudson River. Richard Ellis, Ellis Sotheby’s International Realty, 914-393-0438; ellissothebysrealty.comIn Grandview, N.Y., a five-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath expanded and renovated 1790 house with 5,016 square feet, a wraparound porch, formal living, sitting and dining rooms, an eat-in kitchen and breakfast room, five fireplaces, an in-ground pool and a detached four-car garage with a storage/work space, on 1.37 acres with boating access to the Hudson River.
+In West Norwalk, Conn., a three-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath house with 3,600 square feet, four fireplaces, a study, a new eat-in kitchen with a pantry, an open living and dining area with two sets of French doors to a stone terrace, and an attached two-car garage and potting shed, on 2.33 manicured acres with old-growth shade trees and stone walls.Click on the slide show to see this week’s featured properties:
+In Park Slope, Brooklyn, a three-bedroom, two-bath, prewar condo with 1,188 square feet, a combined living and dining room, and a contemporary kitchen in a walk-up building around the corner from Prospect Park.
+On the Upper West Side, a two-bedroom, one-bath apartment with prewar bona fides, large rooms and a washer and dryer in a 1920s mid-rise with a doorman.Still, analysts predict there will be plenty of money to be made.
+A report from Arcview Market Research and BDS Analytics recently estimated that spending growth on legal cannabis will speed up this year, hitting almost $17 billion worldwide, and ballooning to $31.3 billion in 2022.
+In its annual State of Cannabis report, the cannabis delivery platform Eaze highlighted that the market is rapidly expanding beyond young men — even if, as Peter Gigante, the company’s head of policy research, noted, one in five people surveyed admitted to buying from an unlicensed source in the last three months. “I think there’s a lot of focus on getting consumers into the legal market,” he said.
+Part of that will certainly involve tailoring products especially to new consumers, who may not have been willing to try out cannabis when it wasn’t legal. So who are those new customers? Here are some of the stats from Eaze’s report, which was based on data from 450,000 buyers and about 4,000 survey respondents.
+25 percent
+That’s how much the number of baby boomer — or age 50 or older — consumers grew last year, making them one of the fastest growing demographics for cannabis use.
+$95.04
+That’s how much baby boomers spent each month, on average — the most of any age demographic. (By comparison: Generation X-ers spent $89.24, millennials spent $72.94 and members of Generation Z spent $62.35.) Millennials are still the biggest group of Eaze customers, though.
+38 percent
+That’s the percentage of cannabis consumers who are women. Mr. Gigante predicted that by 2022 it’d be 50-50.
+Female and baby boomer cannabis consumers, the report found, are driving a surge in CBD oils and more wellness-oriented products.
+In fact, the report found, here’s the share of consumers who primarily use CBD products who are baby boomer women: 21 percent.PARIS — Renault announced new leadership on Thursday after Carlos Ghosn resigned as chairman and chief executive from his jail cell, ending his reign as one of the world’s most powerful industrialists and opening a crucial new chapter for the world’s biggest auto alliance.
+The quick transition — within hours of Mr. Ghosn’s departure — is aimed at rebuilding ties between Renault and Nissan. Their relationship has festered since Mr. Ghosn was arrested in Tokyo in November, after an internal investigation at Nissan, on charges that he vastly understated his earnings to financial authorities.
+Company officials said Renault would accelerate efforts to smooth tensions over the future governance of the global car alliance, which also includes Mitsubishi Motors of Japan and which Mr. Ghosn oversaw for more than a decade. Renault and Nissan have each viewed the other as trying to capitalize on the leadership vacuum since Mr. Ghosn’s arrest to tip the balance of power in its favor.
+How easily they can turn a page remains to be seen. Renault, which holds a 43 percent stake in Nissan, has been the dominant partner even though Nissan sells more cars, a state of affairs that has rankled executives in Japan.jenna wortham
+I’m Jenna Wortham.
+wesley morris
+I’m Wesley Morris. We’re two culture—
+jenna wortham
+No, no, no. That was— what? You sound like you have a hernia, or like you’re on the toilet.
+wesley morris
+All right, all right, all right. Try it again.
+jenna wortham
+I’m Jenna Wortham.
+wesley morris
+And I’m Wesley Morris. We’re two culture writers at the New York Times. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+jenna wortham
+And this is “Still Processing.” [MUSIC PLAYING] OK. So Wesley, all week I’ve been watching this new show called Sex Education.
+wesley morris
+Oh.
+jenna wortham
+And I’m obsessed with it.
+wesley morris
+It’s got a really sexy billboard, I can tell you that.
+jenna wortham
+I know. And the show does not disappoint. It’s about this kid named Otis. He is the son of a sex therapist, who is played by none other than Agent Scully, Gillian Anderson. She makes me excited to age. She’s so refined. Her outfits are so good. She’s so sexy. But basically, he’s being therapized by his mom. And so he starts therapizing at his school with the help of the local badass. Her name is Maeve. And that’s the premise of the show. But it actually turns into this really gut-wrenching, beautiful meditation on sexuality, sexual expression, sexual relationships. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - Tanya’s my best friend. She was really supportive of me when I came out and everything. So when she came out, too, I thought, you know, we could just— - You might as well be in a relationship with her. - Well, we’re so close, I thought it would be the perfect relationship. But when we have sex, it just feels wrong. [END PLAYBACK] There’s this one delicious little scene in episode 4 where the main character, Otis, is giving sex advice to one of his classmates. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - I don’t know what to do. - You have to tell Tanya the truth. - It would kill her. - You can’t choose who you’re attracted to. You can’t. You can’t engineer a relationship. [END PLAYBACK] And it’s all in the interest of having, at the end of the day, a healthy sexual relationship to yourself and to your partner— like, mind blowing.
+wesley morris
+That it exists.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+There’s so little popular culture right now that is devoted to sex. And I don’t mean where people have sex, the way Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga have sex in A Star is Born.
+jenna wortham
+Burn.
+wesley morris
+No, but that movie just isn’t about the sex they have. It’s about something else.
+jenna wortham
+Right. The sex is just a thing that happens.
+wesley morris
+Right. And it isn’t even done interestingly.
+jenna wortham
+Traj.
+wesley morris
+I feel like the thing that’s great about this show is that it isn’t just that there’s sex on TV. It’s a show about the sex we have and the insecurities that we have about that sex, who we are as owners of these sexual organs, all the mysteries of the body this show gets into.
+jenna wortham
+And all of this is super important, because if we aren’t seeing those conversations on TV, then we definitely aren’t seeing them anywhere else. Look at social media. On Instagram, there is this notorious ban on nipples and all kinds of nudity. Tumblr, cracking down on adult content.
+wesley morris
+RIP adult content on Tumblr.
+jenna wortham
+So all of that’s gone. The places where we spend time talking online are becoming so sanitized and ruled by these invisible, super prude, and puritanical algorithms that don’t want you to talk about sex anything. So if it’s not happening on TV, where the heck is it going to happen? Nowhere.
+wesley morris
+I think there’s something going on with us where we just can’t talk about the parts, the labor— can’t talk about any of it. I just watched The Upside a couple weeks ago.
+jenna wortham
+Good Lord.
+wesley morris
+Kevin Hart cannot say—
+jenna wortham
+Trigger warning, please.
+wesley morris
+I’m sorry. But Kevin Hart, in that movie, can’t say the word “penis.” The joke is, he can’t even say it. And I feel like that’s where we have wound up.
+jenna wortham
+That’s the problem.
+wesley morris
+And we are so far away from how things used to work 30 years ago.
+jenna wortham
+We’re going to take a quick break, and we’ll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] OK. All right, Bloogle, break this down for me— my black Google, Professor Morris.
+wesley morris
+I would say we probably have gone from having too much sex in popular culture to having virtually none.
+jenna wortham
+So I know that you’ve been watching movies since you were in utero. So can you break it down for me, like, how we got from there to here?
+wesley morris
+I would just go back to the 1980s—
+jenna wortham
+Relatively recent history.
+wesley morris
+—because I think that was a real turning point in terms of the sex you saw and how easy it was to find, because that was the point at which you could begin to watch movies in your own home. And obviously, if you’re going to be able to take home entertainment to your bedroom, what you going to do with it?
+jenna wortham
+Let me guess what they were watching.
+wesley morris
+Uh-huh.
+jenna wortham
+Porn.
+wesley morris
+Yeah. So you had these mass audiences eager to go to the movies. People were going to the movies all the time. And then you had these studios that were like, we got to get people staying in the movies instead of being at home, watching Skinemax.
+jenna wortham
+Got it.
+wesley morris
+So no X-rated Cinderella for these people. We got to get them into the theaters and watching sex in the story. So people like the great Joe Eszterhas would build entire movies around actual sex.
+jenna wortham
+OK.
+wesley morris
+So that begat the genre known as the erotic thriller.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, interesante. OK. OK.
+wesley morris
+Basically, my equation for an erotic thriller— good, bad, indifferent— is, if you take the sex out of the movie, do you still have a movie? If the answer is no—
+jenna wortham
+Got it.
+wesley morris
+—erotic thriller. You need the sex.
+jenna wortham
+OK. So what’s the most classic example from this genre?
+wesley morris
+I would say this whole thing exploded in 1987 with Fatal Attraction.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, yes.
+wesley morris
+So Michael Douglas cheats on his wife with Glenn Close. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m going to tell you, it’s going to stop right now. - No, it’s not going to stop. It’s going to go on and on until you face up to your responsibilities. - (SHOUTING) What responsibilities? - I’m pregnant. I’m going to have our child. - Alex, that’s your choice, honey. That has nothing to do with me. - I just want to be a part of your life. - Oh, this is the way you do it, huh? Showing up at my apartment? - Well, what am I supposed to do? You won’t answer my calls. You change your number. I mean, I’m not going to be ignored, Dan. [END PLAYBACK] Glenn Close does not like that he’s going back to his wife, flips out, and kidnaps the kid, boils her bunny, pours acid on his Volvo. And the reason that movie was such a important cultural touchstone was, you had never seen the Hollywood thriller so explicitly married to all the sex that Michael Douglas and Glenn Close are having for narrative purposes.
+jenna wortham
+As a kid, that movie freaked me out. But as an adult, I’m like, right on, sister. Like, go off. Anyway, go on.
+wesley morris
+That is a high point of the erotic thriller as a genre. Another high point, also starring Michael Douglas, I would say— king of the erotic thriller, by the way— Basic Instinct.
+jenna wortham
+I just re-watched this. Yes.
+wesley morris
+Ooh, how’d that go for you?
+jenna wortham
+It’s so upsetting. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - Did you kill Mr. Boz, Miss Tramell? - I’d have to be pretty stupid to write a book about killing and then kill somebody the way I described it in my book. I’d be announcing myself as the killer. [END PLAYBACK]
+wesley morris
+Michael Douglas wants to know if Sharon Stone murdered her boyfriend. And she wants to know if he wants to have sex with her. That’s basically the plot. But she’s using him for her book, obviously.
+jenna wortham
+Yes, love it.
+wesley morris
+So when she’s done with him, she’s like, buh-bye. And he’s like, what? I can’t believe it. We were just having such great sex. Don’t you want to have sex with me some more? And she’s like, I really don’t.
+jenna wortham
+She’s like, I really don’t.
+wesley morris
+I really don’t. I got a girlfriend over here. We were having a good thing. But the girlfriend goes crazy, because she’s jealous.
+jenna wortham
+These movies were not kind to these women. But they’re icons, though, in hindsight. They’re amazing.
+wesley morris
+In Basic Instinct, he also rapes his co-worker, who’s a shrink.
+jenna wortham
+And they never address it.
+wesley morris
+She goes, you weren’t normally like that, is what I think she says. And then she gets mad at him.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god.
+wesley morris
+But then she continues to help him catch Sharon Stone, who she used to sleep with.
+jenna wortham
+Right. That’s the twist. But the problem is, that movie made all sexuality seem crazy. And there weren’t a lot of gay people in mainstream movies to begin with. So having the few that you do see on-screen be mentally ill is something of a problem. And yes, of course, people, myself included, really wanted to see Sharon Stone naked. But you also had that coupled with the fact that we don’t know how much of that nudity was consensual. So it just layers the problem even more.
+wesley morris
+Let’s just go to the bottom of the barrel and talk about Color of Night from 1994, where Bruce Willis is basically a depressed shrink who takes over the group therapy of another murder shrink.
+jenna wortham
+What? [LAUGHS]
+wesley morris
+I know. Sounds like a setup for a sitcom. But no, it’s the premise for an erotic thriller. Why? Because he’s sleeping with some strange woman who lives near him. And she comes over. And she’s naked in the pool.
+jenna wortham
+It’s so weird.
+wesley morris
+But we find out later that she’s up to something. That’s all I’ll say about that. But this is one of the craziest movies you’re ever going to see. It pretty much kind of ended the genre, because it was too crazy.
+jenna wortham
+It sounds like these movies felt really scandalous and radical at the time. But they were actually just really portraying all these women in terrible lights and giving the men terrible license to do whatever they wanted to these women.
+wesley morris
+Yes. We were so over-the-top horny in the 1980s and 1990s that even Jesus was getting busy.
+jenna wortham
+What?
+wesley morris
+He did with Mary Magdalene in The Last Temptation of Christ.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god. OK.
+wesley morris
+And Jack Nicholson was having sex with Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon in the same movie. And he was the devil.
+jenna wortham
+I remember that. The Witches of Eastwick, right?
+wesley morris
+Yep. And it wasn’t uncommon for people to wake up either dead or next to somebody else who was over and over again. That was a plot point. Shrinks had sex with their patients. Lawyers had sex with their clients. Defense attorneys had sex with jurors. And there was this whole erotic thriller about how Demi Moore raped Michael Douglas.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my gosh. OK.
+wesley morris
+Disclosure, yes. And the peak of the erotic thriller lasted basically until like the mid ‘90s.
+jenna wortham
+I know we’re going to talk some more about movies. But I got to jump in here with an example from TV. [“SEX AND THE CITY” THEME MUSIC PLAYING] So on the tail of all these erotic thrillers comes Sex and the City. And it’s a real departure from the films of that time in that it depicted sex and sexuality as something to be explored, enjoyed, and discussed over brunch. And I couldn’t help but wonder, what did women do before Carrie and Charlotte, Miranda and Samantha?
+wesley morris
+Oh, my. I don’t know, Carrie. What did they do?
+jenna wortham
+Look, I came late to that show. The show kind of embarrassed me when I would catch glimpses of it on HBO. And I didn’t grow up in a household where we really talked about sex or sexuality or anything. And I remember the one time I did watch it in real time, my mom came in. And somebody was getting oral. And she was just like, what is this? And I was like, I don’t know— turn the TV off and never— I was just so freaked out. But my friends in college loved it. And when I moved to New York, I really started watching it. I used to think I was a Samantha. But now I know I’m a Miranda. You probably think you’re a Carrie. But I’m here to tell you that you’re a Charlotte.
+wesley morris
+[LAUGHS]
+jenna wortham
+And it’s not a perfect show. I don’t love the way they treat characters of color, which is to say, not at all, or they render them in totally stereotypical ways. But until that show came into my life— and this is pre L Word, full disclosure. But before that show came into my life, I’d only ever really watched sex on TV through Taxicab Confessions and the sort of black, sexy, erotic show, Zing. And even after the L Word came out, it didn’t really have the same resonance in my group of friends until much later in life. I was pretty much watching the L Word alone, in secret, by myself, as a lot of queer women did. But Sex and the City was the thing that broke through to the mainstream cultural conversation. These women were constantly having conversations about sex, and not just sex acts. They were talking about how to have an orgasm, how to give someone an orgasm, what’s anal like, what’s it like doing other things that involve the booty with men?
+wesley morris
+And does that make that man gay?
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+There was a whole plot point.
+jenna wortham
+For the most part, it was so sex positive and just treated the body as something to explore. It treated sex as something that was expansive and not something that was shameful. It was the kind of thing that you would have your rendezvous and your escapades, and then you would share. It’s not something that you had to keep from your friends, because they were going to think you were a slut.
+wesley morris
+Yeah, yeah.
+jenna wortham
+And the arguments, they mostly have to do with the frustration about how much space men and the drama with men take up in their lives. Everyone is super excited when other people are getting off.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+And to be honest with you, those are real conversations that I was having with friends of all orientations and all genders. It’s not uncommon for someone to be like, I had sex six times last night. That’s not a weird thing for someone to say.
+wesley morris
+No. Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+And you were seeing it on TV and—
+wesley morris
+Can I pause you for one second?
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+Because if Sharon Stone had said that in Basic Instinct, she’d have to wind up in the shrink’s office.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+Do you know what I mean? That’s the way the erotic thriller worked. Like, I like sex, therefore you have to go to jail. You have to die, or go to the shrink. I became an adult when this show started on HBO. This was the beginning of what they call the golden age of TV. But the show never gets credit for being golden age TV.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, interesting.
+wesley morris
+Wonder why?
+jenna wortham
+A show about four successful single women— geez.
+wesley morris
+Yeah. So I can remember wanting to go out and have the sex they were having.
+jenna wortham
+It felt possible. There were so many storylines and plot twists for these women that I still don’t really see on TV. So you have a woman in her 40s, having all kinds of crazy sex, and loving her aging body.
+wesley morris
+Hi, Kim Cattrall.
+jenna wortham
+Holler.
+wesley morris
+And I will say that, talking about this in the context of Sex Education, there was a whole, what, two seasons of Charlotte not having any sex?
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+Because she didn’t know how to have it with Trey.
+jenna wortham
+Who couldn’t get it up.
+wesley morris
+Right. If only Otis were there to talk her through that instead of Carrie or instead of her mother-in-law, it would’ve gone a lot different.
+jenna wortham
+Definitely needed Otis over Carrie or Bunny.
+wesley morris
+But anyway, Sex and the City was an anomaly at the time. But bad sex on screen, off screen, that was still the norm. And as all this sex on screen was building, we started to see the negative consequences of sex spill into real life. You had this culture that is increasingly inflamed with what I can classify only as erotic thriller sex. So let’s see. You’ve got the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas sexual harassment case. You have Gianni Versace murder. This is all in the ‘90s.
+jenna wortham
+So you’re saying you think that’s a direct outgrowth of all of the, quote, “bad sex” and bad sexual dynamics that were inherent to all the erotic thrillers of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
+wesley morris
+I just think that from, like, 1984 to 1999, we were all just living in an erotic thriller.
+jenna wortham
+Wow. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+bill clinton
+But I want to say one thing to the American people. [END PLAYBACK] And it felt normal.
+wesley morris
+Except it also didn’t feel normal. [AUDIO PLAYBACK]
+bill clinton
+I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time. Never. These allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. [END PLAYBACK] And I think the point at which we snapped out of it was the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal. There was something about the idea that it would be in the White House. I think there was a kind of moralism. And the culture sort of started to crate it a little bit during that period. So by the time you get to the 2000s, you’re not seeing Fatal Attraction anymore. Bye-bye, because we just lived it. Hillary didn’t boil a bunny.
+jenna wortham
+That we know of.
+wesley morris
+But it was like, we were going to see erotic thrillers at the movies, and we were living one in real life. If you take the sex out of any of these things I just mentioned, there’s nothing there.
+jenna wortham
+That’s really depressing.
+wesley morris
+Yeah. And I think that all that sexual hysteria created a kind of sexual panic by the end of the decade.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, that’s right. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - Oh, Jim. - Dad? - Hi, I was just looking at the old family portrait out here. Well, that was a fun day, wasn’t it? - Oh, yeah. Yeah. - Jim, I want to talk about masturbation. [END PLAYBACK]
+wesley morris
+My personal, honest-to-God belief is that is what American Pie is about. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - And I have to admit, you know, I did a fair bit of masturbating when I was a little younger. I never did it with baked goods. [END PLAYBACK]
+jenna wortham
+Hold on a second. You’re blowing my mind, actually, because when I was growing up, I remember feeling like that was my Porky’s. Like, that was raunchy. It was super fun. The girls were super emboldened. It was just really direct— all the band camp stuff. But in hindsight, though, that movie did treat every single kind of sexual encounter as a cautionary tale.
+wesley morris
+Yes. Everybody just went into this correction mode. And the culture freaks out. Now, Carrie and the girls are doing this thing over here. But at the movies, I think part of that freak-out just leads to something like people being afraid to have the sex.
+jenna wortham
+It’s like every single plot point in that movie ends up, to some degree, in public shaming or some kind of embarrassment.
+wesley morris
+But that also is a really interesting movie because of the gender split.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+It begins, what I would say, is this sort of post-erotic thriller, post-culture wars era, splitting of the genders. And that, in a weird way, was the Judd Apatow project.
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+Now, in the Apatow movies, you’ve got these young adult men. They’re not in school anymore, who’d rather just hang out and look at women on the internet.
+jenna wortham
+So now you’re talking about films like Knocked Up. That’s a really raunchy film about two pretty mismatched young adults who have a one-night stand. The girl gets pregnant, and they decide to co-parent. [AUDIO PLAYBACK] - I don’t have to tell them. It’s illegal for them to fire me over it, anyway. And I get three months maternity leave if I stay. So I’m just, you know, not going to tell them. - That’s a good plan. - Yeah, I like it. - It is a good plan until her water breaks all over Robert De Niro’s shoes. (IMITATING DE NIRO) My shoes, eh. There’s all this baby goo on it. - Isn’t it weird, though, when you have a kid and all your dreams and hopes just go right out the window? - Wait, what do you mean? [END PLAYBACK] And that movie spits us out in the late 2000s.
+wesley morris
+And so the women are really serious. They’re no fun.
+jenna wortham
+They’re all—
+wesley morris
+They’re stopping the boys from doing their thing.
+jenna wortham
+—daycare attendants. They’re all babysitters. They’re all nannies.
+wesley morris
+I was going to say zoologists, but OK. At the same time that this Apatow thing is happening, you also have the beginning of what we’re now living in, which is the dominance of the superhero movie.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god.
+wesley morris
+So X-Men comes out in 2000. And it just begins this whole—
+jenna wortham
+A whole wave that’s a slow build. And now it’s a full-on tsunami. And none of those people ever have sex. They’re wearing sexy clothes. They’re all wearing gorgeous graphic [INAUDIBLE], more or less. And they’re really good at exchanging a misty look or a meaningful glance in a hallway. But when it comes down to actually getting down, it doesn’t happen at all.
+wesley morris
+They’re flying up.
+jenna wortham
+They’re too busy fighting crime and saving the world. For the vast majority of those characters, they don’t do the deed.
+wesley morris
+Not only is that true, but you also— think about who gets locked up in superhero movies. All the stars that pass— no, they don’t pass through these movies. They get trapped. It’s all they’re doing. Sexy people— that first X-Men movie— Hugh Jackman, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, Halle Berry. What are they doing?
+jenna wortham
+Wow, that’s a good point.
+wesley morris
+Not each other. And those movies did so well.
+jenna wortham
+When the fate of the universe is at stake, Wesley Morris, you can’t be worried about getting it on.
+wesley morris
+But that’s not true in actual comic books. The biggest thing sitting out there waiting for some brave— not that brave, but in 2019 brave— producer to do would be to take Halle Berry, let her be Storm again, find some guy to play Forge— this man that she winds up stranded with— and do that series from the X-Men, and just have it be a love story— like, a love and sex story between her and this sexy white man.
+jenna wortham
+Storm still looks as good. Halle Berry can do the 10, 20, 30-year challenge. She still looks as good. So they should definitely make that movie. But you know what? You’re really onto something here, because even in Black Panther, everybody’s hot in that movie. Those characters have more fun in their Instagram stories as their characters than they do in the movie. They make out. They grind on each other. It’s not making the final cut. But they’re still having fun.
+wesley morris
+And the crowning thing about the superhero age, in relation to the sex we don’t see anymore, is that these have to be products that speak to 100 different constituencies.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+You have to be able to take your kid to see it.
+jenna wortham
+That’s right, and your grandkids.
+wesley morris
+And your grandparents.
+jenna wortham
+Right. [LAUGHS]
+wesley morris
+And you’ve got to take your Chinese kids and your Chinese grandparents, your Brazilian kids and your Brazilian grandparents, your antarctic kids and your antarctic grandparents. Everybody’s got to be able to see this movie and understand what the hell is going on.
+jenna wortham
+They have to have mass appeal and not include moments where you have to shield either your baby’s eyes or your mother-in-law’s eyes.
+wesley morris
+Right. Yeah. No nipples on the costumes anymore, no codpieces. Nobody’s dressing sexy. Even Deadpool is basically wearing an S&M costume.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, my god. It makes no sense.
+wesley morris
+It’s very confusing. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+jenna wortham
+Just to think about where we’ve been— OK, so we had all of these hypersexual erotic thrillers that treated sex as something that was only used to obtain and wield power. Then we went to kind of a weird, freakish anomaly of Sex and the City, where sex and feelings were discussed— rare— which overlaps with films like American Pie, which seems to give teens and young people the message that sex is something to be afraid of. It is something that will bring you lots of shame and lots of internet infamy— something to be avoided at all costs, pretty much. We get all these Judd Apatow movies where sex is just something that boys do for fun, and the girls are just nags. And right now— great, Into the Spider-Verse. Love it, but there’s no time for hanky-panky, because we’re too busy making sure that the multi-verse doesn’t collapse. The dearth of properties that depict healthy sexual dynamics and entanglements have given us unhealthy expectations and ideas about how relationships are supposed to look, which pretty much leads us directly into this Me Too moment that we’re sitting in right now.
+wesley morris
+And in addition to all of that stuff we’re not seeing, we’re also in this moment where all the ways in which our relationship to different sexualities and different genders is also not being reflected in a way that I think is satisfying or even remotely reflective of all the options there are.
+jenna wortham
+That’s a good point, too, because I actually do think there are a lot more characters who are queer and have different orientations and have different genders than you had in previous years. But those characters aren’t necessarily involved in healthy sexual entanglements. They might be non-binary, but they’re probably not the love interest.
+wesley morris
+Right. You do have these blips. I would consider the Magic Mike movies, for instance, a major blip.
+jenna wortham
+Right. OK.
+wesley morris
+I would consider aspects of Transparent a major blip.
+jenna wortham
+Vida— a blip as well, but a small blip.
+wesley morris
+Right. There is definitely culture that is good about sex and what sex is. And if you take the sex out, you don’t have a property anymore.
+jenna wortham
+Right. But in terms of the things that are occupying the most oxygen or the most capital currency—
+wesley morris
+It’s the opposite of sex.
+jenna wortham
+It’s the opposite. Yeah.
+wesley morris
+The culture is now at this point where it has to really rethink what it is to have a healthy sexual relationship. We’ve got to rebuild everything, because for so long, a lot of the sex we were being sold as entertainment, it was rape.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. It was bad. And the cultural properties that we do currently have that purport to be about sex, it’s a smokescreen. They’re really not.
+wesley morris
+Wait, what are you thinking about?
+jenna wortham
+The entire Fifty Shades franchise, for starters.
+wesley morris
+Oh, yes.
+jenna wortham
+And as someone who read all the books, saw all the movies in theaters, I will say, though, that that entire series is about one man’s kink and how he gets this woman to be involved. And not to totally reduce her agency, but there’s never any narrative in the books or the films about what her kink might be and if it’s in conflict with his and how the two come together. It’s all absent, which, for me, they don’t pass the smell test.
+wesley morris
+We deserve better.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. Well, what about something like Bohemian Rhapsody, which you’ve seen and I haven’t seen? Freddie Mercury, sex god— does it translate on screen?
+wesley morris
+No.
+jenna wortham
+That’s too bad.
+wesley morris
+Because the movie doesn’t care about him sexually. There’s this total energy disjunction between the life of the man you’re watching and the music you see him perform.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, wow.
+wesley morris
+And it isn’t like the life you see him live has anything to do with how powerfully sexy he sounds and how powerfully sexual he sounds on a lot of these records. There’s just no connection between these two things. The movie is asexual. And you’re listening to the music of a man who was exactly the opposite of that. So no.
+jenna wortham
+That’s a no. And I would also argue that even a film like The Favorite— which I think is getting a lot of attention for its depiction of Queen Anne, played by Olivia Colman, and two women in her court, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, who are competing for her affection— there is a lot of sexual tension. There are a couple of really dynamic sex scenes. But the whole film is so campy. And they don’t really deal with the entanglements that it causes, other than it’s part of the competition. I don’t know. I just feel like it’s not really a good example of what that dynamic could have been like. It just didn’t really do it for me. It felt like such an aside.
+wesley morris
+Well, it’s a movie that’s not about sex. It’s about power.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+And the sex is a means to an end, right?
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. That’s right. That’s exactly it.
+wesley morris
+That’s what’s so shocking and depressing and hilarious about that final shot. That is a depiction of a kind of sex, but that’s not the kind of sex you and I are talking about.
+jenna wortham
+Right. So in some ways, Sex Ed is actually a correction to all the over-correction and missteps of the past. It’s the beginning of maybe, hopefully, a wave of cultural content on screen that’s informed in part by the Me Too moment.
+wesley morris
+Right.
+jenna wortham
+Me Too really showed us that as a culture we have a huge problem with figuring out what is OK sexually and what’s not OK sexually. And maybe this is the beginning of a really healthy opportunity to re-imagine the kind of sex we want to be having.
+wesley morris
+One of the things I love about Sex Education is that it’s so specific about what’s going on between people. Like, they don’t always know what’s wrong with their bodies, but they know that something is wrong. And the great thing about Otis is, he is able— it’s like a magic power. And he’s just able to figure out what’s going on with these people and get them closer to understanding themselves, even if, in some cases, they don’t understand what the gift is he’s given them. And it’s especially interesting in this Me Too moment, where it seems like people only know how to explore sex in these oppressive and inappropriate ways.
+jenna wortham
+It’s very much a show that takes sexual expression and sexuality serious. No one is the butt of any joke. And the dilemmas they deal with are never as simple as, I don’t know why my part’s not working. It’s usually tied into some psychological problem. It has to be untangled or dealt with in order to get to the physical satisfaction.
+wesley morris
+He’s actually being a sex therapist.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, it’s pretty great.
+wesley morris
+It’s not like some CBS show where God sent this kid down to help these high school kids become better people through sex. He’s just trying to help them understand who they are as sexual creatures.
+jenna wortham
+And it’s also messy. And it’s confusing. And sometimes it’s weird. And sometimes it’s funky. And it’s sticky. But that’s how it is in real life.
+wesley morris
+Maybe we just have to learn how to have sex again. We have to learn how to be appropriate with each other without also being robots. It’s messy, and it’s confusing, and it’s weird. But it’s also the best thing in the world.
+jenna wortham
+Yes. I personally want to live in a world where, instead of Fatal Attraction, we have a movie called— wait for it— Mutual Attraction.
+wesley morris
+Oh, no. [LAUGHS] Who’s in Mutual Attraction?
+jenna wortham
+Well, since you’ve asked— [MUSIC PLAYING] Better Porter, a.k.a. Jennifer Beals, my fave babe, Indya Moore, Mishel Prada from Vida, Letitia Wright, a.k.a. Shuri from Black Panther.
+wesley morris
+Wait, wait, wait. I’m sorry. This movie’s called Mutual Attraction. This sounds like “Mutuall” Attraction. And so if it’s “Mutuall” Attraction, let me throw some mute in that “all.”
+jenna wortham
+Go for it.
+wesley morris
+John David Washington, Jake Tapper, Markieff and Marcus Morris, ‘cause you got to have some NBA men in there, the Rock.
+jenna wortham
+OK. All right. All right.
+wesley morris
+It’s a big mattress.
+jenna wortham
+OK, I see your Rock, and I’m going to raise you Nico Santos and his cute boyfriend, Zeke Smith, Constance Wu. Actually, to be honest, let’s just get the whole cast of Crazy Rich Asians up in here, and— why not— the entire cast of Are You the One season 7, because there were some cuties up on there.
+wesley morris
+“Still Processing” is a product of the New York Times.
+jenna wortham
+It is produced by Neena Pathek.
+wesley morris
+Our editors are Sasha Weiss and Larissa Anderson.
+jenna wortham
+We have editorial oversight from Lisa Tobin and Samantha Henig.
+wesley morris
+And our engineer is Jake Gorski.
+jenna wortham
+Our theme music is by Kindness. It’s called “World Restart” from the album “Otherness.”
+wesley morris
+And you can find all our episodes and other things at nytimes.com/StillProcessing.
+jenna wortham
+And always, if you like what you hear, feel free to leave us a review on Apple Podcasts.
+wesley morris
+Melissa McCarthy.
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+RJ Mitte, the son from Breaking Bad— sexy.
+jenna wortham
+Trace Lysette, Jada Pinkett Smith.
+wesley morris
+Hrithik Roshan, Bollywood superstar, the New Day from the WWE— all three of them. Just put them in.
+jenna wortham
+All right. All right. Let me get my girl Robin Wright up in here. Oh, my god, the cute, cute, cute Stephan James, Regina King, and Regina Hall. All the Reginas are welcome.
+wesley morris
+All the Reginas. J Balvin, Steven Wen, Halle Berry, the trainer from my gym, the entire cast of Magic Mike XXL.
+jenna wortham
+Yes. [LAUGHS] OK, give me a little Gillian Anderson. I want a reunion between Antonia Thomas and Iwan Rheon.
+wesley morrisMaintaining a healthy lifestyle is easier in some neighborhoods than others. But which ones?
+To determine the healthiest places to live in New York City, StreetEasy recently analyzed data from its listings, along with information from Yelp and the city’s Open Data portal.
+For each neighborhood, the company considered the number and availability of bike rooms and bike lanes; gyms, pools and other fitness facilities; medical offices and health centers; and parks, community gardens and athletic fields. (All of the information was weighted per capita, and neighborhoods with fewer than 3,000 residents were excluded.)
+The company also partnered with Seamless, the takeout-food app, to find out which areas had the most restaurants that would accommodate requests for healthy food — things like specifying brown rice over white.WASHINGTON — The Senate Intelligence Committee has issued a subpoena to compel Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, to appear before the panel next month to formally correct false testimony that he delivered last year about a proposed Trump Organization project in Moscow, one of his lawyers confirmed on Thursday.
+The subpoena was disclosed a day after Mr. Cohen pulled out of a public hearing scheduled for Feb. 7 before the House Oversight and Reform Committee, citing in a letter from his lawyer, Lanny J. Davis, verbal attacks by Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Cohen’s initial agreement to appear before the Oversight Committee had been voluntary, but he will have little choice in complying with the Senate request. Democrats in charge of the House Oversight and Intelligence committees have signaled in recent days that they may follow suit and issue subpoenas of their own, despite acknowledging Mr. Cohen’s safety concerns.
+Unlike the Oversight session, Mr. Cohen’s return to the Senate Intelligence Committee will almost certainly be behind closed doors. The panel has conducted a wide-ranging investigation of Russia’s election interference campaign, and possible ties to the Trump campaign, for roughly two years now largely out of the public eye.CARACAS, Venezuela — The embattled government of Venezuela struck back against its opponents on Thursday, winning strong support from the country’s armed forces and the solid backing of Russia, which warned the United States not to intervene.
+The events put Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, at the center of a Cold War-style showdown between Russia, an ally that has shored up his government with billions of dollars, and the United States, which has denounced him as a corrupt autocrat with no legitimacy.
+The Trump administration pressed its case on Thursday, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo calling on all countries in the hemisphere to reject Mr. Maduro and “align themselves with democracy,” setting up a test of wills with the Kremlin.
+Only a day before, Mr. Maduro’s political nemesis, the opposition leader Juan Guaidó, seemed to have the momentum. During nationwide protests against the government, he proclaimed himself the country’s rightful president, earning endorsements from President Trump and several governments in the region.LONDON — Alex Salmond, the former first minister of Scotland who for years led a campaign for Scottish independence, has been arrested and charged with two counts of attempted rape and several counts of sexual assault, a public prosecutor said on Thursday.
+He was released on bail after a brief initial court appearance Thursday afternoon. The hearing was held in private.
+Outside the court in Edinburgh on Thursday, Mr. Salmond said to reporters: “I refute absolutely these allegations of criminality, and I’ll defend myself to the utmost in court.”
+Police Scotland began investigating Mr. Salmond, 64, after the Scottish government looked into complaints by two women who said he had sexually harassed them several years ago, an accusation he denies. The outcome of the government’s inquiry was not made public.Written by Lupino and Young, “Never Fear” is a tough-minded, modest, yet memorable film about a profound existential struggle. The arc of its rehabilitation narrative is largely familiar; it was released amid a clutch of movies about disabled veterans like “The Men” (1950), Marlon Brando’s big-screen debut. For inspiration, Lupino drew on a physiotherapist she had known at the real rehab center where the movie was set, the Kabat-Kaiser Institute in Santa Monica, Calif. She also probably borrowed from her life, having contracted polio when she was 16 and under contract at Paramount. (Because of a set accident during “Never Fear,” she directed from a wheelchair.)
+“Never Fear” has an attractive no-frills look that fits the story and its modesty, and is in keeping with Lupino’s embrace of documentary realism. Working with a cast that includes actual patients and largely avoiding glamour (except in the hair and makeup), she whittles the story down to basics and mainly focuses on the rehabilitation and Carol’s emotions. Although never less than sympathetic, Carol isn’t picture perfect; she doesn’t suffer beautifully or pacifically. She frets and fights, and lashes out at Guy and often at herself. She also starts a needy flirtation with another patient, Len (a suave Hugh O’Brian in the film’s strongest performance), whom she clings to as her worries about her progress escalate.
+Much of “Never Fear” unfolds indoors, which gives it a claustrophobic quality that dovetails with Carol’s sense of feeling trapped, and comes out in jolts of anger, panic and self-pity. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Lupino, a tough number — and a memorable, complicated presence in noirs like “High Sierra” — has little patience for Carol’s despair. The movie’s attitude toward its protagonist is fiercely devoid of sentimentalism and, at times, flat-out disapproving. In one bracing scene, Carol, now in a wheelchair, shrieks “I’m a cripple!” at Guy, an explosion that provokes a withering rebuke from two lovers, one a man on crutches who firmly puts that self-pity in its place.
+Forrest and Brasselle are never quite as good as you want them to be, though both have their moments, especially when their characters are most tightly wound. (From some angles and in certain lights, Forrest can resemble Lupino, who cast her in other films.) Some of the more haunting performances happen around the edges: The look of contempt that the woman with the man on crutches gives Carol resonates long after the scene has ended, deepening the story’s emotional colors. And an aching sequence with Guy and another woman, a would-be fling (a touching Eve Miller), condenses a movie’s worth of adult desire and regret into the melancholy that settles in her face.
+“Never Fear” is sprinkled with scenes shot outdoors that deepen its textured realism, including a picnic for the patients, their friends and others. (While Lupino was directing her first film, she admiringly spoke about the neorealist god Roberto Rossellini.) Here, as elsewhere, Lupino underscores the ordinariness of these men and women, some of whom are in wheelchairs while others relax next to them. She matter-of-factly conveys disability in intimate moments of rehabilitation — in close-ups of Carol’s body moving and being coaxed to move — and when she goes big and wide for an exuberant square dance in which the revelers do-si-do in wheelchairs, joyously independent.LONDON — Prince William, who has long spoken publicly about his emotional struggles, has taken his campaign for mental health awareness to Davos, Switzerland, urging global leaders to help break the stigma.
+Prince William, the Duke of Cambridge, who is second in line to the British throne, spoke candidly on Wednesday about the difficulty he faced in trying to get celebrities to sign on to his cause, revealing — without naming names — that not one had initially offered to join the mental health campaign that he has run since 2016 with his wife and his brother.
+It was only once they went public with their Heads Together campaign and “people realized that Catherine, Harry and I put our necks on the line here,” he said, that well-known names began supporting the effort. Its advocates now include the actress Judi Dench.
+At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, Prince William interviewed David Attenborough, the film producer of nature programs and a respected voice on climate change, on Monday. But he also spoke of the silence about mental health that was common in his parents’ and grandparents’ generations, and he called for people to be more open about their emotions.The vote to delay the fare discussion was unanimous, including “yes” votes by three board members appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio. Mr. de Blasio, a frequent adversary of Mr. Cuomo when it comes to the subway, said on Thursday that delaying the vote was “smart.”
+Board members want assurances that state lawmakers will approve new funding for the transit agency during the current legislative session, Mr. de Blasio said.
+“The thing we need to focus on is a solution in Albany,” Mr. de Blasio said.
+Subway riders are likely to cheer the fare reprieve. But the delay also brings further uncertainty for commuters who are grappling with unreliable service and questions over Mr. Cuomo’s recent decision to call off the L train shutdown. The board has raised fares every two years, but this is the first fare increase to be considered since the subway descended into crisis in the summer of 2017.
+Without a fare increase, the authority expects to lose about $30 million in anticipated revenue each month. If the board votes on a fare proposal next month, it is unlikely to take effect before April.
+It is unclear what fare options the board might consider. Mr. Schwartz has not revealed the details of his plan, though he said it could require subway leaders to show improvements in the on-time rate for trains.
+The board was considering two options for fare increases of about 4 percent: The first would keep the base fare at $2.75, but end the bonus for buying a pay-per-ride MetroCard; the second would increase the base fare to $3 and double the bonus to 10 percent.
+A weekly pass would rise to $33, up from $32. A monthly pass could increase to $127, up from $121.
+The fare and toll increase was expected to bring in an additional $316 million per year.Outside is the tiny orange neon sign (in the early days there was no sign at all, as if to say if you can’t find it, you don’t belong). Inside are potted palms, the bar area with rattan chairs and sofas, wallpaper with big green palm fronds, and you feel as if you are on a Hollywood set for a French colonial house in Vietnam, the movie scripted by Marguerite Duras. In the air, the odor of lemongrass. Farther back along the right wall are the four big green vinyl booths where I’m trying not to stare at Deneuve. “This is our theater,” Houmard notes, looking at these tables.
+Indochine is the only place I’ve ever felt famous; it has a je ne sais quoi that lingers like a rare air freshener. In the 1980s, Indochine’s heyday, everyone came — everyone: Madonna, Warhol, Basquiat, Schnabel, Mick and Bowie, all the supermodels, and Fran Leibowitz, of course, who has said that she never shares her dumplings. For a while the real action was downstairs, where, allegedly, the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll really took place.
+I went with Andrée Putman, the French interior designer, whom I’d interviewed and who became a friend. She would arrive in her Saint Laurent tuxedo dress, the stilettos, the slash of blonde hair over one eye, the red mouth, the utter lack of pretension, the cigarettes and red wine. She was probably in her 60s then; nobody was ever as cool. It made me feel cool, and famous; this was my historical contribution to the downtown ’80s.“In the beginning, MPs were targeted with threatening messages. Then with posters. Then came the assault squads at Parliament. And now we have arson attacks on MPs’ homes,” Mr. Tsipras wrote on Twitter. Politicians who do not condemn violence, he added, “bear a huge responsibility.”
+Despite the upheaval, Mr. Tsipras is all but certain to gain approval for the Macedonia pact with the support of a few opposition and independent legislators. Some of his support is expected to come from lawmakers who have broken ranks with Panos Kammenos, the leader of a junior coalition partner, the Independent Greeks, who quit as defense minister this month in protest of the Macedonia deal.
+Mr. Kammenos’s withdrawal prompted Mr. Tsipras to call a confidence vote, which he won.
+Mr. Tsipras has insisted that his government would remain in power until October, when its four-year term is set to end. Analysts believe, however, that he is likely to call elections earlier, possibly in May.
+So many lawmakers asked to speak on the deal that Parliament postponed the vote, which had been expected to take place after midnight on Friday, to midafternoon.
+One of the lawmakers’ main contentions is that debate on the deal is “inconceivable” without a revised version of Macedonia’s Constitution, reflecting the changes agreed to by the two sides.
+The version of the Constitution presented to the Greek Parliament has those changes listed at the end, but Deputy Foreign Minister George Katrougalos insisted on Wednesday that they would be enshrined in the body of the Constitution after the deal’s ratification by Greece.
+Macedonian lawmakers approved the name change this month, contingent on Greek approval.
+A conservative former prime minister, Kostas Karamanlis, who was in power when Greece blocked Macedonia’s NATO bid in 2008, said in a written statement that the deal was sealed “in undue haste,” adding that the government “should have respected the sensitivities and listened to the legitimate concerns of the large majority of citizens.”Of the many wonderful transformations that have characterized the last decade in wine, perhaps the most heartening has been the stylistic swing back toward balance and nuance.
+This shift comes after a long period in which exaggerated red wine ruled. Ultraripe, jammy fruit bombs — lacking freshness and structure (other than the tannins contributed by new oak barrels) — seemed for too long to epitomize what powerful critics sought and what many producers were all too willing to provide.
+These overblown wines surged to become prominent in many different regions, but none more so than Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in the southern Rhône Valley of France.
+Châteauneuf has always been a big, powerful, rough- hewed wine, capable of majesty yet always a bit tattered. As I was learning about wine in the 1980s, I drank a lot of Châteauneuf, which back then was a more affordable great wine than Bordeaux or Burgundy.As evidence of vote rigging, Mr. Fayulu’s supporters pointed to two cities in the east, considered to be his stronghold, that were excluded from voting because of what the government said was instability and an Ebola crisis.
+Officials deny the vote was rigged, and insist that it was the country’s best ever.
+The Catholic Church, an influential and widely respected body that sent 40,000 election observers across the country, backed Mr. Fayulu’s claims to victory. Credible opinion polls before the vote had also shown him to be the winner. Suspicions over the results were reinforced after the Southern African Development Community, an intergovernmental regional bloc, called for a recount.
+So, too, did the African Union, which last week expressed “serious doubts” about the vote count. But after a flurry of behind-the-scenes negotiations this week, most of the government’s critics backed down, and by Thursday were prepared to accept the outcome.
+The African Union members “are undoubtedly all aligned on avoiding any potential flare-ups in violence in the D.R.C. to spread across their own borders,” said Adeline Van Houtte, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, using the initials for the Democratic Republic of Congo.
+“So the question that remains is, ‘What caused the internal divisions that forced them to back down on the D.R.C. post-electoral crisis?’ ” A possible answer, she said, is that a lot of elections are planned in Africa in the coming year, including in South Africa.
+With that in mind, she said, “some African leaders are probably wary of opening the door to every opposition leader to contest elections results that could lead to a recount.”Yet staged in the Royal Academy’s dimmed and vaulted galleries, the show is something like a religious experience.
+“Michelangelo is obviously working within and from the dominant tradition of his era: a very strong official tradition of Christianity,” said Ronald Bernier, chairman of the humanities and social sciences department at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston. Mr. Viola, he said, was working from a “tradition of technology and lack of belief. Yet they’re getting viewers to ask some of the same questions.”
+Mr. Bernier, whose 2014 book describes Mr. Viola’s oeuvre as “a theological enterprise,” said he wouldn’t call Mr. Viola a “religious artist,” because he had an “openness to interpretation that doesn’t tie him to a religious tradition.”
+That ambiguity makes it possible for Mr. Viola to address the issue of faith at a particularly secular moment in the West, when religion is shunned as a subject in art. “It’s almost as if he’s sneaking it in through the back door,” Mr. Bernier said.E. L. James, the author of the best-selling “Fifty Shades” erotica trilogy, is coming out with a new novel, with a new story and new characters — but still plenty of romance.
+The novel, “The Mister,” will be released worldwide April 16, Vintage Books, an imprint of the publisher Penguin Random House, announced on Thursday.
+“The Mister” tells the story of Maxim Trevelyan, a privileged and aristocratic Englishman, and Alessia Demachi, a mysterious young woman with musical gifts and a dangerous past who has recently arrived in London.
+“It’s a Cinderella story for the 21st century,” Ms. James said in a news release. “Maxim and Alessia have led me on a fascinating journey and I hope that my readers will be swept away by their thrilling and sensual tale, just as I was while writing, and that, like me, they fall in love with them.”Joseph R. Biden Jr. defended his decision to praise an embattled Republican lawmaker during a paid speech in Michigan last fall, telling a group of mayors on Thursday morning that it reflected his philosophy of how to “get things done.”
+The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Mr. Biden had earned $200,000 for an October speaking engagement in Benton Harbor, Mich., three weeks before the midterm elections. During that speech, Mr. Biden gave a glowing commendation to Representative Fred Upton, a powerful Republican who joined with Mr. Biden to increase funding for cancer research and, separately, helped forge legislation to gut the Affordable Care Act.
+In Washington Thursday, Mr. Biden offered a forceful defense of his supportive remarks about Mr. Upton, signaling that he has no intention of blunting his instinct toward bipartisanship and compromise in the event that he runs for president. The former vice president has told allies in recent weeks that he is leaning toward running against President Trump in 2020.
+“I read in The New York Times today that I — that one of my problems is if I ever run for president, I like Republicans,” Mr. Biden said, according to a video posted by the public-affairs network C-Span.1 00:00:06,740 —> 00:00:10,550 A FILM BY 2 00:00:12,320 —> 00:00:15,820 PRODUCED BY 3 00:00:20,960 —> 00:00:28,300 MEXICO CITY 4 00:01:16,790 —> 00:01:19,620 It’s been 32 years since the devastating 5 00:01:19,730 —> 00:01:23,010 Mexico City earthquake of 1985. 6 00:01:23,210 —> 00:01:26,720 A drill will be carried out at 11 a.m. 7 00:01:27,710 —> 00:01:30,550 Five states will be exempt. 8 00:01:30,660 —> 00:01:34,710 The State of Mexico, Michoacán, Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Puebla 9 00:01:34,930 —> 00:01:41,050 suffered serious damages in the recent September 7th earthquake. 10 00:01:43,470 —> 00:01:48,070 Let us listen to what Mayor Miguel Ángel Mancera has to say. 11 00:01:48,390 —> 00:01:50,690 ...the dream of reinventing a Mexico City 12 00:01:51,020 —> 00:01:56,810 that may provide better protection for its inhabitants, 13 00:01:57,360 —> 00:02:01,190 and keep strengthening the rules which will allow us to have 14 00:02:01,520 —> 00:02:04,580 a city capable of facing and successfully overcoming 15 00:02:05,010 —> 00:02:08,300 the tests it is subjected to on a daily basis. 16 00:02:16,200 —> 00:02:17,800 ON THE RADIO THE MEXICO CITY MAYOR 17 00:02:17,930 —> 00:02:21,110 Seven and a half million people 18 00:02:21,210 —> 00:02:24,380 participated in the drill. 19 00:02:24,490 —> 00:02:27,550 If we’d known how to act 32 years ago... 20 00:02:27,650 —> 00:02:30,280 Where were you 32 years ago, doctor? 21 00:02:30,390 —> 00:02:32,910 I was at the university, 22 00:02:33,020 —> 00:02:35,750 shocked at the way the lamp posts were shaking. 23 00:02:36,000 —> 00:02:39,280 The lamp posts at what we call Las Islas. 24 00:02:39,720 —> 00:02:45,620 I was wondering about this emergency app called Zello. 25 00:02:46,180 —> 00:02:50,870 It’s an app that allows you to be in touch with groups 26 00:02:51,090 —> 00:02:53,170 through a communications channel, 27 00:02:53,600 —> 00:02:56,450 which may be used for... 28 00:02:56,560 —> 00:02:59,190 In fact, we’re having another quake, doctor. 29 00:02:59,300 —> 00:03:01,810 -Doctor... -The seismic alarm went off. 30 00:03:02,030 —> 00:03:03,990 We’re having an earthquake right this moment. 31 00:03:04,430 —> 00:03:06,510 -We’re going to cut this short. -The seismic alarm. 32 00:03:06,620 —> 00:03:08,370 -It’s very strong. -I’ll hang up now. 33 00:03:08,470 —> 00:03:09,680 Of course, thank you. 34 00:03:09,900 —> 00:03:13,080 Just ass we’re having our drill. It’s moving a lot. 35 00:03:13,300 —> 00:03:15,810 You know what you have to do right now. 36 00:03:16,300 —> 00:03:17,830 Keep calm and... 37 00:03:19,070 —> 00:03:21,140 I’m going towards the door. 38 00:03:21,990 —> 00:03:23,550 It’s an earthquake. 39 00:03:23,880 —> 00:03:25,410 Don’t run! 40 00:03:29,570 —> 00:03:31,540 No shit, something just fell. 41 00:03:31,640 —> 00:03:33,580 SEPTEMBER 19th 42 00:03:35,680 —> 00:03:38,090 Something collapsed over there too! 43 00:03:51,530 —> 00:03:54,270 It’s risky! 44 00:03:54,370 —> 00:03:56,010 Cordon off the area! 45 00:03:56,660 —> 00:03:59,620 We’re still broadcasting... 46 00:03:59,840 —> 00:04:02,250 We have reports of two schools which have suffered damages, 47 00:04:02,350 —> 00:04:05,090 one on the corner of Guanajuato and Orizaba, 48 00:04:05,200 —> 00:04:07,050 and the other is Rebsamen School... 49 00:04:09,940 —> 00:04:12,460 We don’t know how many people are trapped... 50 00:04:12,570 —> 00:04:14,760 The students are... 51 00:04:18,690 —> 00:04:23,070 There are about 25 people trapped beneath... 52 00:04:53,200 —> 00:04:55,000 They’re all inside the house. 53 00:04:55,000 —> 00:04:57,510 But, do you think I can enter? I’m thinner. 54 00:04:59,800 —> 00:05:01,300 There are two more inside yet. 55 00:05:08,000 —> 00:05:10,690 Bucket, bucket, bucket. 56 00:05:13,800 —> 00:05:16,650 Two buildings have collapsed in this area, 57 00:05:16,970 —> 00:05:19,380 and we can hear people inside. 58 00:05:20,100 —> 00:05:24,260 Many people have come to help. 59 00:05:24,360 —> 00:05:26,120 Anybody else? 60 00:05:28,080 —> 00:05:33,010 They’re passing blankets, dolls, lamps... 61 00:05:33,110 —> 00:05:36,280 It’s remarkable how compassionate people are. 62 00:05:36,310 —> 00:05:38,580 Move the car over here! 63 00:05:39,020 —> 00:05:42,300 We need orange and blue catheters 64 00:05:42,410 —> 00:05:44,930 number 14, 16 and 18. 65 00:05:45,040 —> 00:05:48,210 We need antiseptics, paracetamol, alcohol. 66 00:05:48,430 —> 00:05:50,730 We can’t work any faster. 67 00:05:50,950 —> 00:05:53,350 We must move one stone at a time 68 00:05:53,460 —> 00:05:56,520 in order to know where there are survivors. 69 00:05:56,740 —> 00:06:00,240 It’s exasperating to hear people calling out 70 00:06:00,350 —> 00:06:02,980 and being unable to pull them out immediately. 71 00:06:12,970 —> 00:06:16,030 ...control of the most critical part of the disaster. 72 00:06:16,140 —> 00:06:20,190 Right now, firefighters are on top of collapsed buildings, 73 00:06:20,620 —> 00:06:22,590 where it’s more dangerous. 74 00:06:22,810 —> 00:06:26,640 All the same, during the time it took them to respond, 75 00:06:26,850 —> 00:06:30,240 people reacted admirably. Unfortunately, in this area 76 00:06:30,360 —> 00:06:32,000 we’ve seen some pretty strong scenes, 77 00:06:32,110 —> 00:06:34,400 and regardless of the numbers who’ve come out to help, 78 00:06:34,530 —> 00:06:36,700 it hasn’t been possible to pull everyone out. 79 00:06:40,750 —> 00:06:44,250 The authorities have activated their emergency plans, 80 00:06:44,360 —> 00:06:46,880 and now we’ll see how the army 81 00:06:46,990 —> 00:06:48,400 coordinates their work with civilians. 82 00:06:48,510 —> 00:06:52,010 Because civilians have been out working for quite a while now. 83 00:06:53,500 —> 00:06:55,410 Are you alright? 84 00:06:57,080 —> 00:06:59,710 Juan, there are children here! 85 00:06:59,810 —> 00:07:02,220 There’s kids here! Come help! 86 00:07:02,440 —> 00:07:03,970 There’s children here! 87 00:07:04,080 —> 00:07:06,480 -In the back! -Be careful. 88 00:07:06,600 —> 00:07:10,530 Someone small can crawl in and get the kids. 89 00:07:15,300 —> 00:07:17,490 Help this man! 90 00:07:18,810 —> 00:07:20,230 Careful! 91 00:07:20,780 —> 00:07:25,150 Got it, I got it! He’s almost out! 92 00:07:28,300 —> 00:07:30,160 Be quiet, guys, please! 93 00:07:30,270 —> 00:07:31,800 Be quiet! 94 00:07:37,930 —> 00:07:40,550 Look, they’re in. There’s a light. 95 00:07:40,890 —> 00:07:42,520 They went in through the other side. 96 00:07:42,910 —> 00:07:44,780 It might collapse, though. 97 00:07:44,890 —> 00:07:48,050 They shouldn’t move too much up there. 98 00:07:50,920 —> 00:07:53,120 Give me your hand. 99 00:07:54,650 —> 00:07:56,950 Hold on, honey. 100 00:07:59,490 —> 00:08:06,690 Come here, kid. Come, come here, kid. 101 00:08:07,460 —> 00:08:10,190 It’s alright, kid, don’t cry. 102 00:08:10,410 —> 00:08:13,030 Get the other one. There was another one. 103 00:08:13,140 —> 00:08:14,340 There was another one! 104 00:08:18,370 —> 00:08:20,450 Please! 105 00:08:20,780 —> 00:08:22,420 We’re here! 106 00:08:22,640 —> 00:08:24,820 Your family’s here! 107 00:08:25,260 —> 00:08:30,180 We’re not moving until you get out! 108 00:08:32,260 —> 00:08:34,780 Your daughter is fine! 109 00:08:34,890 —> 00:08:36,970 Your wife is fine! 110 00:08:37,300 —> 00:08:40,030 Your parents are very worried. 111 00:08:40,140 —> 00:08:42,540 You know I love you! 112 00:08:43,530 —> 00:08:47,250 God be with you. 113 00:08:50,420 —> 00:08:51,840 -Yvonne? -Yes. 114 00:08:51,950 —> 00:08:54,580 -How are you? -I’m here. 115 00:08:55,020 —> 00:08:57,750 It’s alright. Yvonne and... what’s your name? 116 00:08:58,510 —> 00:08:59,390 Patty. 117 00:08:59,490 —> 00:09:01,580 Patty. My name is Ismael. 118 00:09:01,800 —> 00:09:04,640 -We’re gonna get you out. -Yes. 119 00:09:05,080 —> 00:09:07,480 -What level were you in? -Two. 120 00:09:07,590 —> 00:09:10,440 Second level, okay. We just need to— 121 00:09:10,550 —> 00:09:12,410 -Are these Yvonne’s legs? -Yes. 122 00:09:12,520 —> 00:09:14,380 Okay, Yvonne, keep calm. 123 00:09:16,500 —> 00:09:20,010 Let me clear some... so you can breathe... 124 00:09:22,110 —> 00:09:24,740 See? It help some. 125 00:09:28,350 —> 00:09:29,990 A bit more! 126 00:09:31,440 —> 00:09:34,500 -Ask her if she can reach out. -It’s gonna hurt a little, 127 00:09:34,610 —> 00:09:36,370 but keep going, you’re doing fine! 128 00:09:36,480 —> 00:09:38,880 You’re almost there. We’ll catch you here. 129 00:09:38,990 —> 00:09:40,530 -Don’t worry. -A bit more. 130 00:09:40,630 —> 00:09:44,460 -Come on, come on! -Good, good, good. 131 00:09:54,080 —> 00:09:56,150 Well done, Yvonne, good job! 132 00:09:57,040 —> 00:10:00,310 Make way for the medics! Make way! 133 00:10:31,270 —> 00:10:35,750 It is heart-wrenching that, on the anniversary 134 00:10:35,970 —> 00:10:39,470 of the earthquake of ‘85, Mexico should be reliving 135 00:10:39,580 —> 00:10:42,310 it all over again with this terrible earthquake. 136 00:10:43,190 —> 00:10:46,030 There are many people working to remove rubble 137 00:10:46,140 —> 00:10:50,960 during this emergency. Let’s get to work. 138 00:10:51,070 —> 00:10:54,560 There are lives to save. 139 00:10:57,620 —> 00:10:59,810 Let’s do things right. 140 00:11:00,140 —> 00:11:04,520 Let us clear the street for the crane to come through. 141 00:11:04,630 —> 00:11:07,470 The earthquake of september 19th, 2017 142 00:11:07,580 —> 00:11:09,990 was 7.1 on the Richter Scale. 143 00:11:10,100 —> 00:11:13,050 Its epicenter was 120 km from Mexico City, 144 00:11:13,160 —> 00:11:15,890 too close for the alarm to go off in advance. 145 00:11:17,860 —> 00:11:20,260 The results of the earthquakes of September 7th and 19th: 146 00:11:20,370 —> 00:11:23,110 over 12 million people were somehow affected across the country; 147 00:11:23,320 —> 00:11:26,280 more than 250 thousand families lost their homes. 148 00:11:26,390 —> 00:11:31,310 471 persons died. 149 00:12:03,360 —> 00:12:05,870 DIRECTED BY 150 00:12:09,270 —> 00:12:13,200 PRODUCED BY 151 00:12:14,840 —> 00:12:19,220 DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY 152 00:12:20,860 —> 00:12:24,900 EDITOR 153 00:12:26,430 —> 00:12:31,030 SOUND 154 00:13:10,400 —> 00:13:13,150 Translation: Ana Cecilia Lagomarsino 155 00:13:13,250 —> 00:13:16,400 Say the SAME Subtitles www.subtitles.com.mxAs I got off a train in Manhattan on Wednesday, I paid little attention to a flutter out of the corner of my eye on the subway. Then another passenger told me that I had dropped some money.
+“That isn’t mine,” I told her as I glanced at what turned out to be $90 on the ground.
+I realized the flutter had been the money falling out of the coat of a man standing near me who had just stepped off the train.
+The doors were about to close, and no one was acting, so I grabbed the cash and left the train. But I was too late. The man had disappeared into the crowd. I waited a few minutes to see if he would return, but he was long gone. I tried to find a transit employee or police officer, but none were in sight.
+I was running late, so I left. But now what? What are you supposed to do with money that isn’t yours?No mammal may be more perplexing than the platypus.
+Attached to its furry, otter-like body are four webbed feet, several sharp claws, a beaver tail and, of course, that iconic duckbill. The females lay eggs and males sport venom-secreting spurs on their hind legs. One could only imagine how dumbfounded the first people to stumble upon these creatures were.
+But if you were to wager a guess, they probably had a similar expression to that of Ryosuke Motani when he initially encountered the fossilized remains of the extinct marine reptile called Eretmorhipis carrolldongi.
+Like the platypus, this recently discovered prehistoric creature had a duckbill. But then nature made it even weirder, adding plates on its back like a stegosaurus, a long tail like a crocodile, large paddle-like limbs and a tiny head with teeny eyes.
+“It’s a pretty strange chimera of features,” said Dr. Motani, a paleobiologist at the University of California, Davis. “When I first saw it, I just said ‘What?!’ and didn’t speak for a while.”You don’t need satellite photos to know that Sears is failing. Companies like Orbital Insight are typically tight-lipped when it comes to more important data — as are their customers — mainly because they see this information as a competitive advantage.
+But the line graph showed how Mr. Crawford and his start-up can target the performance of individual businesses. Orbital Insight tracks activity in more than 260,000 retail parking lots across the country, and it monitors the levels of more than 25,000 oil tanks around the world.
+Not surprisingly, Orbital Insight and SpaceKnow said, some of their customers use this satellite data to track the progress of their direct competitors, though those customers and their competitors are very reluctant to talk about it.
+Mr. Crawford believes the satellite analysis will ultimately lead to more efficient markets and a better understanding of the global economy. Fred Abrahams, a researcher with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch, sees it as a check on the world’s companies and governments.
+Mr. Abrahams and his team use satellite imagery to track everything from illegal mining and logging operations to large-scale home demolitions. “This is why we are so committed to these technologies,” he said. “They make it that much harder to hide large-scale abuses.”
+All of this is being driven by a drop in the cost of building, launching and operating satellites. Today, a $3 million satellite that weighs less than 10 pounds can capture significantly sharper images than a $300 million, 900-pound satellite built in the late 1990s. That allows companies to put up dozens of devices, each of which can focus on a particular area of the globe or on a particular kind of data collection. As a result, more companies are sending more satellites into orbit, and these satellites are generating more data.This feature is meant to send you into the weekend with a smile, or at least a lighter heart. Want to get The Week in Good News by email? Sign up here.
+Here are seven great things we wrote about this week:
+They are unlocked and free to use, offering little more than a roof, four walls and perhaps a wood-burning stove. The shelters, called bothies, allow for prolonged access to Britain’s rugged corners, which might otherwise prove unforgiving as destinations for the casual hiker.
+Many of the structures have been salvaged by the Mountain Bothies Association, a charitable organization whose aim is “to maintain simple shelters in remote country for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places.”Marc Newson
+Age: 55
+Occupation: Designer
+Location: London
+His favorite room: Mr. Newson and his family live in a converted Royal Mail sorting office. The library’s nubby stone wall, inspired by ski chalets, was installed to “soften the atmosphere” of the cavernous Victorian-era space. For Mr. Newson, the complete reworking came naturally. “I’m compelled to transform everything around me,” he said.
+There’s so much luscious color. The couch. The art. Even your socks are bold red.
+I’m genetically deeply programmed to respond to color — I grew up in Sydney. It’s like California, the light is incredible. I suppose it’s a nostalgic desire to remind myself of my childhood. Everything I do has to do with childhood.Mr. Trump’s proposal paired $5.7 billion in wall funding with temporary legal protections for some immigrants and measures to make it more difficult to claim asylum in the United States. Only one Democrat, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, crossed party lines to vote for the measure. Two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Tom Cotton of Arkansas, voted against it, considering it too lenient to immigrants.
+Mr. Trump’s plan was loosely modeled after an idea that was the centerpiece of quiet bipartisan talks to strike a compromise over the past several weeks to end the shutdown. Among the ideas discussed was legislation that would pair money for border security with permanent legal status for Dreamers, the immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children who stand to lose their deportation protections and work permits after Mr. Trump rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, created by President Barack Obama in 2012.
+While it included some of those components, the measure that failed on Thursday was dismissed as a nonstarter by Democratic leaders because it substantially narrowed DACA eligibility, and extended it for only three years, while making major changes to asylum law that would make it harder for migrants fleeing violence and persecution, including children from Central America, to find refuge in the United States. It would also extend three-year reprieves for those living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status — granted in times of conflict or natural disaster — who stand to be removed after Mr. Trump ended their protections.
+Senator Doug Jones, Democrat of Alabama, said he had considered supporting the president’s proposal after he described it in a televised address from the White House, but found the asylum provisions “unacceptable.”
+“When I saw what the president had added to the plan he announced just five days ago, particularly as it pertains to the limitations and additional hardships placed on families and children who are legitimately seeking refuge in this country from violence in their own countries, and doing so through the legal asylum process, I could not vote for it despite my consistent support for stronger border security,” Mr. Jones said in a statement.
+House leaders had kept their chamber in session through the afternoon to leave room for the possibility that the Democratic measure would prevail in the Senate, and they could call a vote on it later Thursday and send it to the White House. But that never happened, and rank-and-file Democrats, many of whom had marched across the Capitol to the Senate chamber to witness the votes for themselves, spent the afternoon instead highlighting the stories of people devastated by the shutdown.
+The House took separate action earlier Thursday to pass legislation to fund the Department of Homeland Security through Feb. 28, with all but five Republicans voting “no.” One freshman Democrat, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, also voted against it because it would reopen Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which she wants closed.Sixty years later, it is melancholy to recall all that optimism gone awry. The love fest faded quickly; within a year, the United States and Fidel Castro had become mortal enemies, and would remain so for decades.
+But Cuban history goes in 60-year cycles, it seems, creating symmetries that a novelist could not invent. An even more symbolic anniversary to recall now is the New Year’s Day exactly six decades before: It was on Jan. 1, 1899, that the Stars and Strips were raised over Havana after the Spanish-American War. Almost forgotten today, it was the formal beginning of the military occupation of Cuba that would shape its fate, and complicate the two countries’ relations, to this day.
+Six months earlier, the United States had intervened in the bitter Cuban war of independence that had been dragging on since 1895, plucking its hard-won victory (in Cubans’ eyes) at the last moment. Cubans soon found that they had traded one colonial master for another. During the campaign, American officers had treated the ragtag, mixed-race local forces with contempt, despite their long resistance. A huge amount of resentment was created when the Americans refused to let Cuban soldiers attend the Spanish Army’s surrender ceremony in Santiago. Even their commanding general was turned away at the gates.
+By the time Cuba gained official independence from the United States, on May 20, 1902 , Cuba had been transformed into a vassal state, which many Americans hoped would one day be annexed into the Union. The occupiers had built some fine public works, fixing sewerage systems and paving roads — the Spanish had left the island a ruin — but they also gave American carpetbaggers free rein. Much of the best farmland in Cuba was soon owned by companies based in the United States, as were many of the railways, and nearly all the electrical and telephone systems . The Platt Amendment, added to a United States Army appropriation bill and incorporated in the Cuban Constitution in 1901, even gave Washington the right to intervene militarily in the island’s politics, which it did twice in following years, and gave the United States its permanent lease on the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.This is Jamelle Bouie’s debut column.
+The wall of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency has always operated both as a discrete proposal — an actual structure to be built under his leadership — and as a symbol with a clear meaning. Whether praised by its supporters or condemned by its opponents, the wall is a stand-in for the larger promise of broad racial (and religious) exclusion and domination.
+It’s no surprise, then, that some Americans use “Build the wall” as a racist chant, much like the way they invoke the president’s name. And it’s also why, despite the pain and distress of the extended government shutdown, Democrats are right to resist any deal with the White House that includes funding for its construction.
+That’s not to say there aren’t practical reasons for Democrats to resist the proposals on hand. The president calls his most recent bid a major compromise, but its headline provision — protections for immigrants covered by either Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or Temporary Protected Status — are short-term and limited. It also puts a cap on the number of Central American migrant children and teenagers who can receive asylum, requiring them to apply in their home countries, while also eliminating automatic court hearings for minors who arrive at the border in order to streamline the deportation process. Together with its $5.7 billion for “the wall,” it’s less a compromise than a near capitulation to the president’s vision for immigration policy — a vision he could not get through Congress when he had Republican majorities in both chambers. A border wall also just won’t work — erecting a barrier does nothing to solve the political conflicts and economic pressures that drive migration to the United States.
+Agreeing to this deal — or any deal beyond a straightforward bill to end the shutdown — would only validate the president’s extortion tactics, adopted after conservatives pressured him at the end of last year to reject a so-called clean bipartisan bill to fund the government. To agree to wall funding in these circumstances would guarantee a repeat performance the next time President Trump wants to secure a legislative “win” without the difficult work of negotiating with Congress, much less his opposition.KIEV, Ukraine — Former President Viktor F. Yanukovych committed treason by inviting Russia to invade Ukraine and reverse a pro-Western revolution that ousted him from power, a court in Kiev ruled on Thursday, sentencing Mr. Yanukovych to 13 years in prison.
+The former president is a widely reviled figure in Ukraine for his over-the-top corruption — he lived in a palace with a private zoo — and because the police shot dozens of antigovernment demonstrators during an uprising in 2014. He has also been widely characterized in Ukraine and the West as pro-Russia — and even as a puppet of the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.
+The court’s ruling was the first to formally determine that Mr. Yanukovych was serving Russian interests while president of Ukraine.When Collins, who is based in Cambridge, England, began translating “The End of Loneliness” she said she assumed Wells had been through some kind of experience with someone close to him dying. “I have; and I recognized the emotions and the responses to it, which I felt he portrayed absolutely beautifully,” said Collins, whose translation of Robert Seethaler’s “A Whole Life” was shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. “It turned out that he hadn’t had that experience and it was him empathizing with the situation and trying to imagine what it would be like.”
+At boarding school, Wells was keen on the storytelling of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, best-known for her saga about a headstrong young girl, Pippi Longstocking. Recently Wells enjoyed seeing “Becoming Astrid,” the director Pernille Fischer Christensen’s movie biopic about the writer. “Later I talked to old school friends who also liked the movie,” he said. “But while all of them talked about the lighter novels that Lindgren wrote, I only remembered the dark ones where she wrote about heroes who didn’t have any parents.”
+After leaving school at the age of 19, Wells went to the registry office and had his surname officially changed from von Schirach to Wells. He chose his new name on account of Homer Wells, the orphan hero of “The Cider House Rules,” whose author, John Irving, remains one of his favorites. “Of course boarding school is something very different from an orphanage because I always had loving parents in the background,” Wells said. “But nevertheless I always felt connected to stories about orphans.”
+Originally Wells managed to keep his private life out of the public eye but that changed in 2011 with the success of his third novel “Fast Genial,” which led to a German newspaper uncovering the story of his family’s Nazi past. “At least I had the chance to be an independent writer for three books,” Wells said. “My fear now that I have my first book published in America is that everything will arrive at the same time: Me, my book, my family and my family’s past.”The American Bankers Association has a list of more than 100 banks offering special help to furloughed workers, but each institution’s offer is different. SunTrust is offering a loan with no interest or payments for 90 days. Alpine Bank in Colorado is offering a no-interest loan up to $8,500 with no payments due until six months after the shutdown ends. Others, like US Bank and USAA, are offering low-rate loans.
+Credit unions are typically more generous: Navy Federal Credit Union, for example, will allow workers who have direct deposit to take interest-free loans of up to $6,000 that will be automatically repaid when the shutdown ends. But that offer is open only to existing members who have already set up direct deposit.
+The idea of a loan is hard to swallow for some employees. Interest or no, it is an obligation they would take on while uncertain when they could pay it back.
+“A loan, even a zero-interest loan, is taking on additional debt based on a hope that someday the furlough will end,” said Moses Milazzo, a furloughed employee of the United States Geological Survey whose wife is also a federal employee. “What good is a loan going to do us if we can’t make the first payment next month because we are still not receiving a paycheck?”
+Some workers said they worried that back pay would not be included in their eventual paychecks, despite Mr. Ross’s assurances.
+“One or the both of us has been affected by every furlough since the 1995-1996 furloughs,” Mr. Milazzo said. “This is the first time we’ve been uncertain that the government will live up to its promise of offering stability and reliability.”
+Mr. Pfeifer, who wanted to be clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the Forest Service, moved with his wife this month across the state of Washington, from Walla Walla to Republic. They immediately faced new expenses while still paying down credit card debt: His wife needed to buy school supplies before starting a new teaching job, and her car needed winter tires for the mountain town’s heavy snows.Mr. Pompeo played an important role during a trip early this month to Brazil and Colombia, said a person with connections to opposition leaders in Venezuela. Mr. Pompeo signaled to leaders in both countries that if Latin American nations came up with a reasonable plan on Venezuela, the United States would stand with them, this person said. That was one factor that contributed to Canada and 12 Latin American nations issuing a statement on Jan. 4 that said they would not recognize Mr. Maduro’s presidency.
+The statement was stronger than even American officials had expected, the person said. Mr. Pompeo has also been in close contact with Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian foreign minister, who has played a leading role in rallying global criticism of Mr. Maduro. On Jan. 16, the two spoke by phone about Venezuela, among other issues.
+Mr. Trump’s tough stand this week drew some bipartisan support. Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and one of the president’s strongest critics, called the recognition of Mr. Guaidó “an appropriate step to support the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people.”
+But like others, Mr. Schiff noted the disparity between Mr. Trump’s approach to Mr. Maduro and other autocrats. “We must also remember that America’s support for democracy and human rights must apply universally if it is to be credible,” he said.
+That was not Mr. Trump’s view when he came to office. In his first foreign trip as president, Mr. Trump told an audience in Saudi Arabia that he would not dictate how other countries treat their own citizens. “We are not here to lecture,” he said. “We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be or how to worship.”
+Just last month, Mr. Trump abruptly ordered the withdrawal of troops from Syria, arguing that the United States’ only interest there was fighting the Islamic State. He offered no criticism of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has waged war against his own citizens, resulting in hundreds of thousands of casualties and millions of displaced people.
+“Does the USA want to be the Policeman of the Middle East,” Mr. Trump asked then on Twitter, denouncing the notion that the United States had a role to play “protecting others” in the region.“Magic Mike” could always dance. Now he’s going to sing.
+The seductive stripper saga, born as a film in 2012, is now the basis of a new stage musical that will have a first production in Boston starting this fall, the producers said Thursday.
+The stage show is being billed as a prequel to the film — whereas the film told the story of an established stripper, Mike Lane, who trains a new recruit named Adam, the stage musical will tell the story of how Mike Lane became a stripper. (This is how a news release describes the show’s narrative tension: “Can Mike follow his dreams without losing more than his clothes?”)
+Magic Mike is already a bit of an empire. The 2012 film, which was a hit, spawned a sequel, “Magic Mike XXL,” and a nightclub show, “Magic Mike Live,” that began in Las Vegas and is now also running in London. All told, the brand has already sold more than $335 million in tickets, the producers said.
+[Check out our Culture Calendar here.]
+The stage musical will feature an original score by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, who won the Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award for “Next to Normal.” The book is by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa (“American Psycho”), and Trip Cullman (“Choir Boy”) is directing.Under the first full moon of 1985, the psychedelic punk band Meat Puppets shredded in the depths of the Mojave Desert, powered by a generator and surrounded by incandescent cactuses. Some 500 pink-haired, leather-clad punks had traveled — many in a caravan of yellow school buses — from downtown Los Angeles to what was advertised only as a “remote desert location.” Those who came to the gig, called the Gila Monster Jamboree, in cars were given hand-drawn maps directing them to a checkpoint in Victorville, Calif., where they received a second guide, pointing three miles down a dirt road to a dry lake bed. Many were on acid.
+“It all seemed like a cartoon,” the Meat Puppets guitarist Curt Kirkwood said in an interview. “It was someplace no one was supposed to be.” In her memoir, the Sonic Youth bassist and singer Kim Gordon called her band’s performance that day — its first on the West Coast — one of her “favorite shows ever.”
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+The spectacle was a part of Desolation Center, a series of guerrilla punk shows in Southern California that set an adventurous precedent that lingers today. Fifteen years before the world’s highest-grossing festival started, Gary Tovar, the founder of Goldenvoice, which produces Coachella, attended a Desolation Center gig. Perry Farrell, who helped mastermind Lollapalooza, played the Jamboree with his pre-Jane’s Addiction group Psi Com. These anarchic desert happenings didn’t last long — they ran from 1983 to 1985 — and have rarely been celebrated, but now their history is chronicled in a documentary called “Desolation Center” that premieres this week at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. Its director is the Desolation Center organizer Stuart Swezey, who began booking shows in 1982 as a 21-year-old college dropout.For many Atoms, the club was a refuge from broken homes and lives of poverty, as well as a path to education and upward mobility. In time, despite financial and logistical obstacles and a lack of the public support that flows readily to football, basketball and baseball, the club became a symbol of inner-city success as its runners won regional, national and finally Olympic recognition.
+Its stars included Cheryl Toussaint-Eason, a silver medalist at the 1972 Munich Olympics in the 1,600-meter relay and a gold medalist at the Pan American Games; Diane Dixon, who won Olympic gold in Los Angeles in 1984 in the 400-meter relay and was an 11-time national indoor champion; and Grace Jackson-Small, the silver medalist in the 200-meter sprint at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Mr. Thompson was an assistant coach of the United States track team in Seoul.
+Many of the Atoms’ victories could not be clocked by stopwatches. In its first 15 years, the club produced 50 college graduates, a remarkable record given the economic status of their families. They became teachers, lawyers, nurses, psychologists, entrepreneurs — and mothers. “One’s a doctor now, and another runs a study program in a state college,” Mr. Thompson told The Times in 1979.
+“But we’ve lost some, too,” he added. “We had a little girl we called Cricket who still holds the 100-yard dash record for 12- and 13-year-olds. But the streets got her. She stopped coming to practice. Another girl, a shot-putter named Diane, they found her dead from an overdose of drugs. I made all my girls go to her funeral. It wasn’t easy. They were crying. They took it hard. But I thought it was something they should see.”
+The coach often sounded like a father, although he was a bachelor and had no children. “I’ve always been single,” he told the Times sportswriter Gerald Eskenazi in 1985. “I came close to getting married twice. I miss not having a kid. People say, ‘You have many kids,’ but it’s not the same.”
+Frederick Delano Thompson was born in Brooklyn on May 21, 1933. When he was 5, his parents, Hector Joseph Thompson and Evelyn Cethas, split up, and Fred and his brother, John, were sent to live with an aunt, Ira Johnson, who had a deep influence on the boys.The court noted that at the time she was accused of killing Ms. Kercher, a Briton, Ms. Knox “had been particularly vulnerable, being a foreign young woman, 20 at the time, not having been in Italy for very long and not being fluent in Italian.” Her statements during the interrogation “had been taken in an atmosphere of intense psychological pressure,” the court said.
+The case made headlines for years in Italy, the United States and Britain.
+During her interrogation in 2007, Ms. Knox accused her boss, a pub manager, of killing Ms. Kercher, but he was subsequently exonerated. A court later found that she had committed slander, and the European court decision concerned the process leading to that conviction.
+On Thursday Ms. Knox, who is 31 now and lives in Seattle, wrote on her blog that she had “spent years wracked with guilt over those statements I signed in the interrogation room.”
+Ms. Knox, her boyfriend at the time of the killing, Raffaele Sollecito, and a third man, Rudy Guede, were found guilty of Ms. Kercher’s murder in 2009. But in 2015, Italy’s highest court not only overturned the conviction of Mr. Sollecito and Ms. Knox, who had served four years in prison, it took the rare step of fully exonerating them. Mr. Guede is still serving a 16-year sentence.
+In lodging her complaint with the European court, in 2013, Ms. Knox said she had not been assisted by a lawyer during the all-night interrogation, and had not been provided with a professional interpreter. She also claimed to have been subjected to extreme psychological pressure, an allegation the court would determine was unfounded.To the Editor:
+Re “Flurry of Voting Laws Signifies a Party’s Comeback in Albany” (front page, Jan. 15):
+Albany should get two cheers for finally enacting early voting and taking the first step to amend our state Constitution to permit same-day registration and unrestricted mail-in voting — reforms that dozens of other states have had for years.
+While they are at it, members of the Legislature should also enact more robust election reform: a statewide public matching funds program like New York City’s, to level the playing field and encourage working- and middle-class candidates; primaries for special elections to give voters a choice in one-party districts instead of having party insiders determine who is elected; and a streamlined Election Law, to eliminate onerous eligibility and deadline requirements that too easily disqualify candidates and thus narrow the choice of voters.
+Serious reform should also include the creation of an independent and professionalized board of elections so that voting is more efficient and election outcomes are verifiable .
+If these reforms are passed, Albany will deserve a full-throated three cheers.
+Jerry H. Goldfeder
+New York
+The writer, an election lawyer, served as special counsel for public integrity to Andrew M. Cuomo, who was then New York’s attorney general.What to do as an independent dance artist in New York, a city that is in many ways increasingly hostile to art-making? The answer, for some: Move to Berlin.
+The choreographer Jen Rosenblit is among those who, in recent years, have slipped away to that less frenetic, more artist-friendly metropolis, where space and time aren’t such scarce commodities. On Wednesday, she visited the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens with her new movement- and text-based solo, “I’m Gonna Need Another One.”
+Built around acts of crumbling, disintegration and dispersal, “Another One” is not exactly serene. But it does feel like the product of a more relaxed environment, a project that has had time to breathe, roam around, get comfortable in its own skin. Even as Ms. Rosenblit assumes various guises and, quite literally, tears her world to pieces, she cultivates a grounded energy, adapting to havoc of her own invention.
+As we enter the theater, she is already ensconced in work, arranging a set of foam blocks on the floor, sliding and stacking them. Leaving trails of green dust, these prove easily crushable with the impact of a heeled shoe or even bare hands, though Ms. Rosenblit also applies heftier tools — a stockinged horse hoof that she wears for a time, a gleaming pocketknife — to the intermittent task of demolishing them.LONDON — The authorities announced on Thursday that they had ended the search for the Argentine soccer player Emiliano Sala and his pilot after their aircraft vanished over the English Channel on Monday.
+“We reviewed all the information available to us, as well as knowing what emergency equipment was on board, and have taken the difficult decision to end the search,” David Barker, the harbormaster captain of the island of Guernsey, a self-governing British dependency off the coast of France, said in a statement posted by the police on Twitter.
+The search, which involved three planes, five helicopters, two lifeboats and the assistance of passing ships and fishing boats, covered an approximately 1,700-square-mile area, according to Mr. Barker.
+The police examined mobile phone data and satellite imagery, but no trace of the aircraft, Mr. Sala or the pilot, David Ibbotson, could be found.There are streamers and glitter cannons and air dancers. The game kicks off 10 minutes late, in fact, because the display was so lavish that nobody seemed to have taken into account that all of the paraphernalia would have to be removed from the field. For much of the first half, players on one flank have to dodge not only opponents but the bright red streamers left littering the halfway line, too.
+The game, almost inevitably, feels something of an afterthought. IJsselmeervogels — historically the more successful of the two teams, and chasing a championship again this season — takes the lead. Spakenburg equalizes a few minutes later. Early in the second half, the host is reduced to 10 men, its midfielder Maikel de Harder sent off for lashing out at a Spakenburg player. It peters out into a feisty, full-blooded tie.
+By the end, the noise has abated a little. Fans start to filter out, clutching their masks as mementos. Perhaps the result has left everybody dissatisfied. Perhaps thoughts are drifting, now, to the lifting of the alcohol ban at 5 p.m.
+A few fans confide that this has been a more low-key affair than they had been expecting, that the previous encounter this season — also a tie — was a little more colorful, a little more of an occasion. They wonder if the novelty has worn off, or if the reputation now weighs too heavily, if the expectations are impossible to match.
+A few minutes after the game, the road out of Spakenburg is choked with traffic. Those who came from much further afield to watch the derby of derbies are starting to leave. They have had their weekend road trip, seen the world’s biggest amateur derby, ticked another item off the bucket list, devoured another experience. The locals walk home, to the houses with their names etched outside and the flags hanging from balconies, to clear up the detritus of the parties they hosted. Spakenburg will be quiet again soon, the same as ever. The game that defines it, though, is changing, an occasion that used to be exclusively local irrevocably altered, somehow, by its contact with the global.In “Black Earth Rising,” new Friday on Netflix, everyone is sick. The African president? Seizures. The war criminal? Brain tumors. The American official? Ovarian cyst. The war-crimes lawyer? Prostate cancer.
+What they’ve really got a case of, though, is that favorite malady of art house movies and their prestige-television offspring: the modern world. In the unlikely event that you’re not clear on this, the writer and director Hugo Blick spells it out toward the end of the eight-episode BBC series. “Is everyone in my world ill?” one of the sickies asks, to which another replies, “Call it a symptom of collective guilt.”
+The source of that guilt, in this case, is the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the conflicts it generated. The larger indictment is of colonialism and post-colonial condescension and exploitation, though from a Western angle in which the doughty, underappreciated British do what they can to set things right. (The Americans and the French, not so much.)
+Michaela Coel stars as Kate Ashby, a genocide survivor raised in Britain who now works as an investigator for Michael Ennis, an American lawyer in London who specializes in war-crimes cases and is played, slyly and effervescently, by John Goodman. They become involved in the attempt to extradite an accused genocidaire back to Rwanda, a case whose complications provide a varied assessment of the region’s history and prospects while stringing out a murderous conspiracy plot and eventually revealing the dark secrets of Kate’s childhood.Senators rejected two competing bills to end the government shutdown on Thursday. There were signs of bipartisanship: Six Republicans supported the Democratic bill for two weeks of funding. One Democrat voted for President Trump’s proposal for a border wall.Douglas M. Costle, who helped draw up the blueprints for the federal Environmental Protection Agency and served as its administrator when it tackled toxic waste sites and fluorocarbons and monitored radioactivity from the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, died on Jan. 13 at his home in McLean, Va. He was 79.
+His wife, Elizabeth, said the cause was complications of a stroke.
+Appointed to head the agency by President Jimmy Carter in 1977, Mr. Costle (pronounced KOSS-tul) recruited 600 scientists and other professionals within two months of taking office at what was already the government’s largest regulatory body. He was instrumental in creating the so-called Superfund to decontaminate toxic waste sites after the Love Canal health crisis near Niagara Falls, N.Y., and oversaw a $400 million agreement with United States Steel to curtail air pollution.
+At his first news conference, Mr. Costle announced the recall of 135,000 Cadillacs because they had failed to meet minimum standards under the newly minted Clean Air Act.
+“Clean air is not an aesthetic luxury,” he said when he became E.P.A. administrator. “It is a public health necessity.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+New York City has agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a lawsuit on behalf of the estate of Kalief Browder, the young Bronx man whose detention on Rikers Island became a symbol of the breakdown in criminal justice in New York and fueled the drive to ban solitary confinement for youths in the city’s jails.
+Mr. Browder, who was 16 years old when he was arrested in 2010 and accused of stealing a backpack, was detained on Rikers Island for three years — about two of which were spent in solitary confinement — without being tried or convicted of a crime. In 2015, at age 22, he hanged himself at his parents’ home in the Bronx.
+The settlement, which is cited in a court document, was confirmed by the city and the family’s lawyer.
+In a statement, the city’s Law Department said, “Kalief Browder’s story helped inspire numerous reforms to the justice system to prevent this tragedy from ever happening again, including an end to punitive segregation for young people on Rikers Island.El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. ¿Lo mejor? It’ll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tía, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone).
+On trips back to the campo where my parents grew up, and where I spent the first few years of my life, I rarely need to introduce myself. Many stop me on my way to the colmado or a relative’s house to ask, “¿Y es que tú no te acuerdas de mi?” But I never do recognize them. I left when I was a toddler, so while they see a lineage in my face — my mother’s eyes, my father’s nose — they are strangers to me.
+And while my aunts, who grew up carrying bath water in buckets from the river and walking around barefoot in the grass, can name all the flowers (framboyán, buganvilla, cayena) in the vast, lush backyard of their childhood , I have to ask questions, taking notes on my iPhone so I can learn to describe this place .
+For an immigrant (or a descendant of one) growing up in America, it can be difficult to determine when or where one’s story begins. Many feel groundless and displaced, existing between two cultures and languages. The Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa described this feeling as a third space, the “borderlands,” in her groundbreaking work of feminist and cultural theory, “Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” A common refrán puts it more plainly: ni de aquí, ni de allá (neither from here, nor from there).In “One Good Meal,” we ask cooking-inclined creative people to share the story behind a favorite dish they actually make and eat at home on a regular basis — and not just when they’re trying to impress.
+The guitarist and men’s wear designer Freddie Cowan wasn’t exactly expelled at age 15 from his prep school in the English Midlands, but he wasn’t exactly welcome to stay either. “I was obsessed with playing music and drinking and just doing everything but studying,” says Cowan, guitarist for rock quintet the Vaccines and founder of minimalist men’s wear brand Basic Rights. “So they kind of asked me to leave. Which I was very happy about, because I wanted to leave anyway.”
+Before he left, he befriended a classmate whose family lived in Bangkok. “We went to Thailand and it was wild,” Cowan says. “The first thing we did, we got there and I had a haircut and got a pedicure, which was really weird, and then got a fake driving license.” Along the way, Cowan ate a “very, very common, very, very simple Thai street food — and I just fell in love with it.” At the time, he simply called this dish “the chicken,” but he eventually came to know it by its Thai name, pad kra pao, a sweet-and-spicy mix of minced poultry and chopped chiles that he’d devour twice a day with teenage gusto.While walking the picket line of the Los Angeles teachers’ strike last Wednesday, Linda Bieber and her friend Jessica Rhee carried signs that outlined a primary grievance of their labor union, United Teachers Los Angeles: overcrowded classrooms.
+“I can TEACH 43, but I can’t REACH 43,” said the sign that Mrs. Rhee held.
+Ms. Bieber and Mrs. Rhee, along with more than 30,000 other Los Angeles Unified School District teachers, went on strike last week, demanding, among other things, decreased class sizes. The strike ended Tuesday with the district agreeing to cap class sizes, as well as to other resolutions.
+Middle and high school math and English classes will be capped at 39 students — as elementary school classes already are — effective immediately. By 2022, academic classes at all grade levels will be reduced by four students.
+When we asked teachers to tell us what it’s like to teach their largest classes, we heard from a wide range of them, some of whom teach classes of 60 or more students.My husband and I are in our early 30s. We are both lucky to have well-paying careers. With no children or major obligations yet, we’re happy to pick up the check most of the time we’re out to dinner with our families. My in-laws rarely offer to pay, even though they usually invite us. This is mildly annoying, but O.K. What’s really frustrating is that after the meal they only thank my husband — and never me! I wish my in-laws would recognize that, as a working woman, I am contributing financially to our dinners — and thank me, too. Is this something I need to get over?
+ANONYMOUS
+Yes, get over it — but after you handle it. (I freaked you out there for a second, didn’t I?) Grant me two assumptions about these dinners with your in-laws: Your husband is probably the one who whips out his credit card at the end of the evening. (Because how bizarre would it be if you visibly paid the bill, and they still didn’t thank you?)
+I would also guess that you and your husband have never had a conversation with your in-laws about your finances — whether they are joint or separate, for example — because why would you discuss that with them? In the absence of such knowledge, thanking the person who hands over the money is a pretty safe bet. It also conforms to the outdated notion of husbands as primary wage earners.Rita Vidaurri, who became famous across Latin America as a ranchera singer in the 1940s and ’50s and stopped performing at the height of her renown, only to rekindle her career when she was nearing 80, died on Jan. 16 in San Antonio. She was 94.
+Her death, at a care facility, was confirmed by her daughter, Linda Alvarado.
+Ms. Vidaurri, who was nicknamed La Calandria, or the Lark, belted out songs with a powerful voice, often making risqué wisecracks during her performances. Based in San Antonio, she sang in Mexico, Cuba and other parts of Latin America, performing with artists like Nat King Cole, Eydie Gorme & Los Panchos and Celia Cruz. By the 1950s she was mentioned alongside such famous Tejana entertainers as Eva Garza and Lydia Mendoza.
+Ranchera, traditional Mexican country music, often features wistful love ballads or boisterous paeans to places in Mexico and Texas.
+Ms. Vidaurri retired from the stage in the late 1950s at the insistence of her husband and former booking agent, Hillman Edward Eden. (They later divorced.) She performed rarely until 2001, when Graciela Sánchez, director of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center in San Antonio, invited her to sing at an 85th birthday celebration for Ms. Mendoza.“It’s almost an idea,” one of Kurt Barnert’s fellow students at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf says of Kurt’s latest effort. It’s meant as both criticism and encouragement, and a reminder of the aesthetic rules at this WestGerman outpost of the early ’60s avant-garde. Artistic practice among the young Düsseldorfers is not about form, tradition or technique. It’s about the invention and execution of concepts that shed light on the arbitrary nature of art itself, and on the absurdities of the society that produces it.
+Kurt — the fictional protagonist of “Never Look Away,” who bears a close biographical resemblance to the actual German painter Gerhard Richter — is a recent arrival from the East German city of Dresden, where they do things differently. (The complicated relationships between Kurt and Richter, and between Richter and the film’s director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, are explored by Dana Goodyear in a fascinating recent New Yorker article.)
+Back home, thanks to his skill as a draftsman and his compulsive productivity, Kurt found success as a socialist realist, producing large-scale murals of heroic workers and peasants and portraits of bureaucrats. Like their Nazi precursors, the Communist rulers of East Germany scorn the subjectivism and decadence of modernist art. According to Kurt’s mentor in Dresden, in the west it’s all about “ich, ich, ich” rather than about the collective struggles and triumphs of the people.
+In following Kurt (played as an adult by Tom Schilling) from his boyhood in the 1930s to his career breakthrough 30 years later — a journey that occupies more than three hours of the viewer’s time — von Donnersmarck comes tantalizingly close to having an idea. “Never Look Away” bristles with half-formed thoughts and almost-heady insights, and hums with an ambition that is exasperating and exhilarating in equal measure.The opening night of New York City Ballet’s winter season was hours away, and several dancers were trying to perfect their lines onstage at the David H. Koch Theater. As they danced, a work crew just outside the auditorium struggled with another kind of line.
+The crew was covering the floor of the theater’s airy promenade with a 127-foot-wide line drawing by Shantell Martin, the featured artist in City Ballet’s annual art series, which transforms the theater and aims to attract new audiences to dance.
+Line is at the heart of Ms. Martin’s work. And line, in another sense, forms the core of ballet. As the dancers and the artist got ready on Tuesday afternoon, they tried to explain.The misunderstanding that arose in these good faith interactions read to me like another layer of the dangers of social media that the show explores.
+I agree. It’s not every project that I think it would be interesting for the actors to be engaging in this way. For this show it made sense, because Joe is such a singular character, and because [in the show] we live so much in Joe’s head. It’s an interesting way to keep the conversation going. I think everybody who was a part of this show was very aware we could fall on our faces here. If we don’t get the tone right, this could be irresponsible and too problematic to be forgiven, and we’re pretty certain that in this climate we won’t be forgiven. So my engagement online made a lot of sense as a way of making ourselves vulnerable.
+[Read an interview with the showrunner of “You” here.]
+Part of the brilliance of the character of Joe is that he thinks he’s an ally to women. How do you hope self-identifying progressive men reflect on some of their convictions while watching the show?
+It would be awesome if any man watching this show could have any degree of the experience that I’ve had playing him. Personally, it’s been extremely enriching because, just look at the level of conversation we’re having now. You’re not always forced to think about the social forces in this way. We’re encouraged to some degree to “Netflix and chill” and we use television often to check out — I think there’s something about this show that forces you to check in, even though you are using it to consume and disconnect.
+In my experience, it tends to be men who are more horrified by Joe. I’ll go out on a limb and wonder if that is because it’s less of a novel idea to women. He’s like a nightmare that you’ve repeatedly had, whereas men are like, “This isn’t real!” Women are like, “Of course it isn’t real, but it’s extremely representative of something.”And: “You have to trust your angels.”
+And I recently learned, from an interview that he recorded for the National Holocaust Memorial Museum, that the proper pronunciation of his last name was not MEEK-us, as the people who didn’t know him said, or MECK-us, as those who considered ourselves in the know said, but MACK-us. Who knew?
+Strange relationship. Somebody you know dies, you think about all your old conversations. What did you both say, really? But with Jonas all my conversations are recorded and transcribed, searchable. What did he say about wine? Oh, yeah, from an email dated Dec. 15, 2016:
+“What keeps you young? they ask me. And I say, it’s wine, women and song. But at the same time I am a monk, I live like a monk.”
+So his death is different. It’s not loss, because our conversations are still there; it’s a door closed on future gain — the talks we will not have, the guidance he will not give. The magnitude of this change is a measure of the man at 96.
+We were not friends. Jonas had a close inner circle but was remarkable for being present to countless outer circles. On the other hand, he did not distinguish between work and life. I was documenting a part of his life that a real biographer would condense or skip, his life after he had done all the things that made him a subject for biography.
+But what a life.
+You see this photo?
+Image Madame Blavatsky Credit... Corbis, via Getty Images
+That’s Madame Blavatsky, the 19th-century Russian theosophist. Jonas brought out that photo in December 2017 to explain something: when he saw Greta Gerwig in New York magazine, he thought, aha, same person!In the particular case of Afghanistan, and South Asia more generally, the newest concern is ISIS-Khorasan, or ISIS-K. In recent years, it has probably become the strongest and largest ISIS affiliate outside Syria and Iraq, and has set up shop in the mountain ranges of Afghanistan. Its stated ambitions, however unrealistic, are to establish a broader caliphate stretching from Iran to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia to India and Pakistan. These ambitions give rise to the worry that ISIS-K could someday collaborate with Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistani group that carried out the Mumbai attacks of 2008, or another apocalyptic anti-India group.
+Given the foreboding geography and weak Afghan government, squelching ISIS-K might be less realistic than defeating ISIS in eastern Syria or Iraq. But with the bases we have now, we can watch and listen to this group and strike when we get a good lead on the movement of a key leader or when it gets too comfortable in any one location. As many as three of its top leaders have already been removed from the battlefield by coalition forces in the last couple of years.
+This platform in South Asia complements other United States counterterrorism capabilities in the broader Middle East, especially in places where local governments are weakest and threats are greatest. American military facilities in Qatar and Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as ships in or near the Persian Gulf, support operations in Iraq and Syria. United States bases in Djibouti help us maintain vigilance over Yemen, Somalia and other parts of the Horn of Africa and Gulf of Aden region. The Sixth Fleet, and American assets in Italy, provide a watchful eye over Libya and the rest of northern Africa.
+A presence in Afghanistan in effect completes the web. Few major areas of likely terrorist concentration or activity are more than a few hundred miles away from America’s eyes and ears — and, if necessary, its commandos, drones and other tactical assets. All of this is expensive, but not inordinately so — perhaps costing roughly 30 billion to $70 billion a year, based on an analysis of estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. That’s still less than 10 percent of the Pentagon’s budget for 2019.
+Today the Afghan government controls only some of its own country — about 55 percent of all administrative districts, where about 65 percent of all Afghans live, according to C.I.A. estimates. Yet it does hold all the major cities and most major roads. For narrow American counterterrorism purposes, that is probably adequate, assuming it can be sustained.To the Editor:
+Re “Even With Packed Trains, PATH Will Lose $400 Million This Year” (news article, Jan. 3):
+Commuter railroads keep the region moving in a safe and reliable manner. And it’s no secret that, like all major passenger railroads in the United States, they operate at a deficit and require significant subsidies. PATH is no different, and the amount of expenses it recovers through fares is on par with other American transit systems.
+But the benefit it provides goes well beyond an affordable ride in or out of New York and to Newark, Harrison, Jersey City and Hoboken, 24/7.
+In 2017, PATH’s yearly ridership numbers approached 83 millio n, compared with 73.7 million in 2014 , an 11 percent increase in just three years. That’s because major new building developments were built precisely because of their proximity to a PATH station. The residents who have since flocked to them and become riders are a true testament to the system’s value.
+As these communities grow, we must continue to invest in infrastructure built more than 100 years ago — from station upgrades, to critical repairs, to modern signaling systems and safety technology. The region depends upon it.The gunman who burst into a SunTrust Bank in Florida on Wednesday made the five women he found inside lie facedown on the floor before he shot them each in the back of the head, killing them, according to an affidavit released on Thursday. And when he was done, he called the police to tell them what he had done.
+On Thursday, the police released the identities of three of the five victims — four female bank employees and one female customer — and said for the first time that a sixth person inside the bank in Sebring, Fla., escaped when he heard the shooting begin around 12:30 p.m.
+The suspect, Zephen A. Xaver, 21, was arrested on Wednesday and charged with five counts of first-degree premeditated murder. Nathaniel Heitkamp, a friend who said in an interview that he met Mr. Xaver five years ago at a mental health facility in Indiana, said, “He had an obsession with violence.”
+Chief Karl Hoglund of the Sebring Police Department identified the customer who was killed as Cynthia Lee Watson, 65, and one of the employees as Marisol Lopez, 55.A global push for safeguards in gene editing
+Almost two months after a Chinese researcher, He Jiankui, announced that he had created the first genetically edited babies, scientists are trying to devise international standards that would prevent such experiments in the future.
+While most researchers agree that major health and science institutions should act quickly, they differ on the best approach.
+Background: Some U.S. researchers said Dr. He told them beforehand about his experiment — in which he disabled a gene in the embryos that allows a person to become infected by H.I.V. — but they were unable to stop him, in part because China’s system is so complex that the scientists didn’t know who to alert. A global system would ideally eliminate that problem.
+Why it matters: Scientists fear that genetically edited babies could develop unknown health problems that could be inherited by subsequent generations. They also worry about attempts to alter genes for physical features, intelligence or athletic prowess.
+What’s next? The World Health Organization is assembling a panel to create global standards and the World Economic Forum also had a discussion on the issue.To the Editor:
+Re “A Gamble Fails, Overcrowding Migrant Shelters” (front page, Jan. 5):
+The Trump administration is committing flagrant human rights violations by deliberately making the legal process of obtaining asylum unnecessarily unbearable and drawn out.
+There is no doubt that there is a human rights crisis at the border, but it is largely a crisis of the administration’s own making. Our own research shows that in some instances, American officials have gone so far as to falsely tell people that they couldn’t seek asylum even at designated ports of entry, in violation of both United States and international law.
+By slowing the processing of applications to a crawl and imposing overly burdensome administrative measures, the situation has become untenable both for families waiting to apply for asylum, and for unaccompanied children trapped in limbo even when they are allowed entry .
+Last autumn I saw for myself the warehousing of thousands of children in a tent city in Texas, essentially jailed for months under the supervision of staff members who had not been thoroughly vetted rather than being reunited with waiting family members and sponsors.The Jamaican visionary John Dunkley (1891-1947) is the latest artist to decimate the distinctions between self-taught and trained, outsider and insider and folk and not folk . Th e first large museum survey in the United States devoted to the work of this gifted autodidact is now at the American Folk Art Museum, after originating at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2017, with Diana Nawi, now an independent curator, heading the organizing team.
+Containing several vivacious carved wood figures and more than 30 dense, luminous landscapes, the show is a revelation. As its subtitle accurately acknowledges, the canvases are seen by “Neither Day Nor Night,” but bathed in a third light, that of full moons, dreams or faith.
+Dunkley, who has long been cherished in his homeland, is the second important self-taught Caribbean artist to be introduced here recently. He follows Frank Walter (1926-2009), whose work was shown by Hirschl & Adler at the 2017 Outsider Art Fair, on its way to representing Antigua at the Venice Biennale that year. While Walter sometimes pushed his landscapes to the brink of jewel-toned abstractions, Dunkley aligned the expressive powers of natural form and painted textures into a recognizable but uncanny, highly symbolic world . In stylization and mood, his efforts relate to the art of the American painters Edward Hicks, Albert Pinkham Ryder and Henri Rousseau.Until he recounts writing his coming-out essay for The South Bend Tribune, I had begun to wonder if Buttigieg had decided to airbrush his life story, with an eye to some future opposition researcher combing through these pages. This lends a cautious, sanitized feeling to some episodes. When he writes about dealing with Mike Pence (who was then the governor) as Pence championed a “religious freedom” bill that critics argued would let organizations discriminate against gays and lesbians, Buttigieg comes across as just another player at the table. I would have liked to learn, for example, if he ever wondered whether Pence was aware that this unmarried eligible bachelor was actually gay.
+But the book lifts off as he returns from Afghanistan and decides it was “time to get serious about sorting out my personal life.” He recounts in satisfying detail the complexities of coming out when you are the mayor of South Bend. “The scenario of a 30-something mayor, single, gay, interested in a long-term relationship and looking for a date in Indiana must have been a first,” he writes. The story of his meeting a man (you guessed it: online) is all the more moving for its understatement and delayed delivery. Buttigieg represents a new generation of gay Americans, one whose sexuality is not intrinsic to their identity.
+No one would ever accuse Buttigieg of being an evocative writer, but the story is told with brisk engagement — it is difficult not to like him — without sinking into the kind of prose one might fear from someone trained in writing reports for McKinsey. He writes with particular clarity when it comes to the subject of romance:
+“I was in my 30s, but my training age, so to speak, was practically 0. On my 33rd birthday, I was starting my fourth year as the mayor of a sizable city. I had served in a foreign war and dined with senators and governors. I had seen the Red Square and the Great Pyramids of Giza, knew how to order a sandwich in seven languages, and was the owner of a large historic home on the St. Joseph River. But I had absolutely no idea what it was like to be in love.”
+When Obama wrote his memoir, the idea that the nation would soon put an African-American in the White House seemed beyond the realm of the possible. After reading this memoir written 25 years later, the notion that Buttigieg might be the nation’s first openly gay president doesn’t feel quite as far-fetched.“Wait —” is a weekly newsletter in which Caity Weaver investigates an unanswered (and possibly unasked) question in the news and pop culture. Catch up on the past two columns and sign up here to receive it in your inbox going forward.
+One thing I am curious to know is what made Donald Trump bleed two weeks ago. His bleeding hand is a footnote on a footnote on a footnote of history as, in the foreground, the vital machinery of government continues to rust from non-use. The facts of how and why he incurred a minor hand injury are likely not important enough that they should be wondered about weeks after the fact for even one second by any but the person with the absolute most time on his or her hands, which, unfortunately for me, is me.
+For everyone else: On Jan. 10, the president traveled to Texas, where he was seen wearing a blood-soaked adhesive bandage on his right hand, as captured in this image on Sean Hannity’s Instagram account.
+When the president stopped to speak with reporters outside the White House that morning before departing for Texas, he already had a clean bandage on his right hand. Because blood was visible during his appearance at Anzalduas Dam (scheduled for 3:30 p.m. E.S.T.), we may infer that an initial wound was somehow reopened in the intervening six hours.KABUL, Afghanistan — American and Taliban negotiators are making headway on a deal in which the United States would withdraw troops from Afghanistan in return for a pledge by the Taliban not to allow the country to host terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, senior Taliban officials and Western diplomats said Thursday.
+The possibility of an agreement came after a fourth day of face-to-face talks between a delegation led by the American peace envoy, Zalmay Khalilzad, and Taliban officials in Doha, Qatar, where the insurgents have long maintained an office.
+But many of the details remained to be ironed out, including how many American troops would be pulled out and over what period of time.
+Though Afghan officials did not publicly criticize the emerging outlines of the agreement, they said any end game to the war would have to be finalized in direct negotiations between the government and the Taliban, which the insurgents have so far spurned.It wasn’t so long ago that people talked about the “digital divide” as the omen of a careening and permanent inequality. In this corner, all of us walking around with more computing power in our pockets than the entire federal government had at its disposal just a generation ago; in that corner, those rural or impoverished or underdeveloped communities doomed forever to live off the grid without Twitter.
+That was before we learned that our technology is spying on us, manipulating us and eating us alive. These days, the off-the-gridders seem like the lucky ones. Book publishers have taken note, and our recommended titles this week include a substantial new argument against the intrusions of Big Tech (“The Age of Surveillance Capitalism”) as well as the fascinating account of a tribe of hunter-gatherers living on a remote Indonesian island (“The Last Whalers”).
+Our fiction selections also consider the romance and the dangers of old-fashioned privacy, with a feminist dystopia about three sisters raised off the grid (“The Water Cure”) and two novels about tumultuous emotions beneath placid surfaces (“Unquiet” and “Late in the Day”). We round things out with a memoir by a journalist who was imprisoned in Iran, the true story of a civil rights photographer who was also an F.B.I. informant, a history of the electric guitar, and a political study tracing the roots of right-wing populism. One sentence from that book brings things full circle: “Researchers have shown that lies travel faster on Twitter than established facts.”
+Gregory Cowles
+Senior Editor, Books
+THE LAST WHALERS: Three Years in the Far Pacific With a Courageous Tribe and a Vanishing Way of Life, by Doug Bock Clark. (Little, Brown. $30.) The journalist Doug Bock Clark, in order to write his first book, spent years with the Lamalerans, a tribe of 1,500 hunter-gatherers who live on a remote volcanic Indonesian island in the Savu Sea. The story Clark returned with is made up of births and deaths, terrible injuries and old rituals, furtive love affairs and intertribal rivalries. “The Last Whalers” is an “immersive, densely reported and altogether remarkable” book, our critic Dwight Garner writes. It has “the texture and coloring of a first-rate novel.”The government shutdown has caused museums in Washington to close and has put exhibitions like the National Gallery of Art’s Tintoretto show, originally scheduled to open on March 10, at risk. It has also endangered an artist’s project nowhere near the Beltway: “Orbital Reflector,” a sculpture by Trevor Paglen that was recently launched into orbit.
+The sculpture is not lost in space as much as stuck in a holding pattern before activation, pending clearance by the Federal Communications Commission. According to the artist, it might not survive the wait while F.C.C. workers are on furlough.
+A 100-foot-long mylar balloon coated with titanium oxide, “Orbital Reflector” was designed to be visible to the naked eye at twilight or dawn while in orbit for a couple of months. It would then incinerate upon entering the Earth’s thicker atmosphere.
+But although it was sent to space, the balloon was never inflated as planned. The small satellite carrying the sculpture and its inflation mechanism went into orbit on Dec. 3 as part of a larger load launched by the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. Mr. Paglen said that afterward, his team did extensive “orbital analysis” to ensure a collision-free trajectory and secure F.C.C. clearance to inflate. But communication from the F.C.C. soon ceased because of the shutdown.Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi, on their own, aren’t among the top handful of the world’s auto manufacturers. Together, in a unique alliance, however, they outmatch the sales of giant automakers like Volkswagen.
+But the happy confederation has been threatened since its leader, Carlos Ghosn, was arrested on suspicion of financial wrongdoing. He’s no longer in power, and sits in a Tokyo jail cell.
+Mr. Ghosn personified the alliance, drawing together disparate auto cultures by the force of his personality. Can it survive without him?
+What has happened since Mr. Ghosn was arrested?
+A leadership vacuum has opened since Mr. Ghosn’s arrest. Without their longtime leader, Renault and Nissan have blamed each other for trying to tip the balance of power.CAIRO — As chaotic antigovernment demonstrations engulfed Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, a young doctor emerged from his hiding place and strode down a deserted street, his hand held high.
+An eyewitness said the doctor, Babiker Salama, approached a group of security officials gathered around a truck last week and issued a plea. A protester had been injured and was badly bleeding, he said. Would the officers permit his evacuation?
+Exactly what happened next is hotly disputed by Sudan’s president and the protesters seeking his ouster, but the result is not. A gunshot rang out. Dr. Babiker, 27, fell to the ground, grievously injured. An hour, later he was dead.
+The death of Dr. Babiker, an idealistic young man from an affluent family, has emerged as a signal moment in a powerful tide of protest that has roiled Sudan over the past five weeks, posing the greatest threat yet to the country’s ruler of 30 years, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.The R&B singer Chris Brown filed a false accusation complaint in Paris on Thursday against a woman who accused him of rape last week.
+On Tuesday, Mr. Brown was released without charge following questioning by the Paris police over an allegation that he raped a woman at a hotel in the city.
+The one-page complaint, submitted by Raphael Chiche, Mr. Brown’s lawyer, asks the Paris Public Prosecutor’s office to investigate the claim as a criminal matter. The charge carries a penalty of five years in prison and a fine of around $50,000. Mr. Chiche did not respond to a request for further comment.
+Mr. Brown, 29, was taken into custody on Monday and questioned about an accusation of aggravated rape. A woman filed the complaint with the Paris police on Jan. 18, accusing him of raping her at his hotel after they met at a nightclub.Soon after Jayme Closs, 13, disappeared in Wisconsin in October, officials offered a $50,000 reward for information that would lead to her safe return. Now Jayme, who escaped from a kidnapper after she was abducted and her parents were killed, will receive at least half of it.
+That $25,000 was donated by Hormel Foods, the Minnesota-based company that owns Jennie-O Turkey Store, where Jayme’s parents had worked in Barron, Wis., for 27 years.
+“First and foremost, Jennie-O Turkey Store is a family,” Steve Lykken, a senior vice president of Hormel and the president of Jennie-O, said on Wednesday. “Here in Barron, our Jennie-O family is dealing with a very tragic situation.” The goal, he added, is to set up a trust fund for Jayme.
+The girl’s parents, James Closs, 56, and Denise Closs, 46, were killed on Oct. 15 when an intruder entered their home, shot them and kidnapped their daughter. Jayme was held for 88 days in a cabin 70 miles from her home by a man, identified as Jake T. Patterson, who forced her to hide under a bed whenever he left, trapping her in with heavy items, the authorities said.The family of Trammell and Margaret Crow has donated the entire collection of the Crow Museum of Asian Art to the University of Texas at Dallas, along with $23 million in support funding to help build a structure on the university campus to show more of the artworks.
+The Crow Museum’s permanent collection consists of more than 1,000 works from Asia that the Crows had amassed since the 1960s. Since the death of Trammell Crow in 2009 and Margaret Crow in 2014, the museum’s staff members had been planning how to better sustain their legacy.
+“Part of our secret is that 85 percent of our collection is in storage,” Amy Lewis Hofland, the executive director of the Crow Museum, said. “There are works that have never been shown.”
+Those works will find a new home in the campus museum, where the majority of the collection will live. The current, smaller museum will remain in Dallas’s arts district.To the Editor:
+Re “Venezuela Cuts Ties With the U.S. After a Challenge to Maduro” (front page, Jan. 24):
+Nicolás Maduro must be scared. He is facing the biggest challenge in six years, and still his ways are not changing. By blaming the American government and ignoring what happened this week, he is only accelerating his destiny.
+But this is just the beginning. The Venezuelan people are feeling hopeful, but a lot of work still needs to be done internally — by us — and internationally. A young charismatic leader like Juan Guaidó , head of the National Assembly, is what we need to leave our differences behind.
+He is assuming a historic position and a big responsibility. Our duty as citizens is to accompany him and model the love he is showing for Venezuela.
+I can’t wait until the day we can call our country free again. Today, we are closer.
+Isabella Dao Boschetti
+BostonKenneth Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, broke a real estate record on Wednesday when he closed on his purchase of a penthouse at 220 Central Park South for $238 million. It’s the highest price anyone has paid for a home in the United States, and $100 million above the previous record.
+Mr. Griffin went to contract on the apartment, in a building that was still being developed, in 2015 amid a real estate buying spree that includes a London mansion he bought this week for 95 million pounds, or about $122 million.To the Editor:
+Re “President Delays His State of Union Amid a Shutdown” (front page, Jan. 24):
+Finally, President Trump (or someone around him) has shown some smarts. The decision to postpone the State of the Union speech is a savvy maneuver.
+Of course, Mr. Trump intends to use the speech to ballyhoo the tremendous job he is doing and to extol how great everything is in the country. He can hardly say such things while there is so much suffering caused by his shutdown of the government without further exposing himself as cruel, out of touch and tone deaf.
+By postponing the speech he avoids having to give a defensive, low-key address, and while appearing conciliatory and rational, he preserves for later the opportunity for his grand and delusional self-promotion.
+Gerald Harris
+New York
+To the Editor:
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stooped to the lowest of the lows by denying President Trump the opportunity to give the State of the Union address from the House chamber. Since when do we as Americans stoop to such antics as she has displayed?[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+By the standards of ultraluxury Manhattan real estate, the building proposed for West 66th Street was relatively modest. At 1,800 to 3,000 square feet, the apartments in it would approximate the size of dressing rooms or wine cellars in an oligarch’s Midtown crash pad.
+This would not be a tower for foreign billionaires who spend three and a half days a year in New York as a stopover between trips to Davos and Bill Gates’s house and polo matches in Argentina — though they wouldn’t be turned away. It would, instead, be marketed to “regular” families, which is to say families with two or three privately schooled children, $7 million or $8 million to spend on an apartment and the inclination to shop at Citarella without the help of staff.
+Though you could imagine a scenario in which this might have generated a modicum of local good will or at least shrugging acceptance, a neighborhood preservation group known as Landmark West in September formally opposed the building. Set to stand at 775 feet, its footprint had grown over the years with the developer’s acquisition of properties adjacent to the original site.
+The results of the challenge to keep the building from going up have revealed absurd gaps in the city’s zoning regulations, showing us how residential towers like this one manage to grow so tall that they command obscene prices and cast shadows that are both literal and figurative.BAGHDAD — Along two sharp curves of the Euphrates River in northeastern Syria, the Islamic State is fighting to hold on to the last speck of the vast territory it once controlled.
+At its height, the group enforced its brutal version of Islamic rule over more than 60,000 square miles in Syria and Iraq. It is now squeezed into two villages occupying six square miles. There, its foot soldiers have been engaged in heavy clashes with the American-backed and Kurdish-led militia Syrian Democratic Forces who are battling to take back the turf, according to a spokesman for the militia and observers in the area.
+While some of the extremists are fighting to the end, local officials say the militants have been surrendering by the dozens, repeating a pattern observed in other cities shortly before the group was overrun.
+Even with the end of the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Syria and Iraq within view, Western officials caution that this is not the end of the violent threat posed by the group. It has continued carrying out devastating attacks as it reverts to its insurgent roots, including a suicide bombing that killed four Americans in Manbij last week.I think that Nick Sandmann and many of the other boys in the group are innocent. This was my view when I first heard about the incident, and after reading his statement, I am only more convinced that he did not do anything rude or offensive. In his statement, Nick said that he had no desire for tensions to escalate, and wanted to remain peaceful the entire time. I think that that is respectable, justifiable and the right thing to do. The video clearly shows him simply standing there as Phillips bangs a drum in his face, doing nothing rude. The public is being way too harsh on an innocent kid who got caught up in a conflict that he wanted nothing to do with … I admire what Nick said in his statement about how he has no hard feelings toward Phillips, and respects his rights to protest, despite the fact that he rudely banged a drum inches from Nick’s face.
+— Sivan Frankel, Masterman School, Philadelphia, Penn.
+After reading the article from the Times and watching the video showcasing the incident, I feel extremely appalled at the students’ behavior at the Lincoln Memorial. However, the new information that Mr. Phillips approached the mob of students rather than the other way around is very important and significantly changes things. If the students had approached Mr. Phillips, than it would appear as if the students had hostile intentions. But since Mr. Phillips had supposedly stepped in between the students and the Israelites to diffuse the situation, the students aren’t necessarily to blame for the confrontation with the Native Americans. This being said, I do not approve of the way the white students were acting in the presence of Mr. Phillips. Even if the white students did not cause any physical harm, it seems as if the white students were continuously mocking the Native Americans. They showed no respect for Mr. Phillips or his race. I can only hope that more awareness of unfair and rude treatment towards minority races results from this incident.
+— Brian E., Masterman, Philadelphia, Penn.
+Once I got my information on the event, I felt that the two sides, the MAGA students and the African American Israelites were at fault but mainly the MAGA students, because the conflict between the two groups became so tense that Nathan Phillips felt it upon himself to intervene to stop the two. However, when he did do this, the students took it upon themselves to disrespect him, they were seen screaming, yelling, dancing, and mocking him, when all he tried to do was diffuse the situation. I know that Nathan Phillips intervened just to resolve the conflict, but it wasn’t the best idea, considering that the two groups had very strong beliefs and weren’t going to back down.
+— Sarayah W, Masterman, Philadelphia
+At first, while watching the video I saw extreme ignorance with only the actions of the high school boys. But when you continue to watch through you can hear derogatory remarks being shouted from all groups. The Israelite men shouting words of hate towards the Native American group, as well as the obvious obnoxious behavior of the students. But what really made me have this change of mind were the words being expressed from one of the Native American men. He tells some of the students to go back to Europe and that they don’t belong here. Maybe these are just words spouted in the heat of the moment, but nevertheless, they have a strong racist tone. Nathan Phillips, however, is the only person I see in the video who is actually trying to spread a peaceful message. It is evident in his peaceful nature that he is only trying to avoid further conflict and his actions are actually rooted in goodness. This is yet another video that is often taken out of context in order to push one’s own agenda. I think this video highlights a multitude of issues rather than just the conflict between Phillips and Sandmann.
+— Henry Wojciechowski, Hoggard High School, Wilmington, N.C.
+… New video emerged of a few students from that school verbally harassing a group of girls as they walked by before the incident with Native American, Nathan Phillips. Shouting things like “MAGA” at the girls. This completely disproves their innocent, we-could-never-do-anything-bad, cover. As the girl stated in a tweet, “I’m tired of reading things saying they were provoked by anyone else other than their own egos and ignorance.” I couldn’t have said it better myself. These young and impressionable boys at Covington Catholic High are being taught ways of life that should no longer be acceptable, this kind of disrespect to other cultures and even to girls is only something boys who do not know no different would do. I personally put the blame on their parents’ beliefs and where they live as well as well who represents their home state politically.
+— Angela Xhori, Julia R. Masterman, Philadelphia
+The roles of race, power, privilege and politics
+Despite all of the attention surrounding the teen and the Native American alike, the incident personifies the politically divisive nature of our society at this moment, and it goes to show just how easily it is to force blame upon an individual based on the way they look or even what they wear.
+— Conner Knight, Houston
+Going into this situation, because of my personal political and moral opinions, I immediately assumed that the white male wearing the Make America Great Again hat was in the wrong. Because I disagree with him and because of the situation of a minority vs an non-minority I already had preconceived notions about who was in the right and who was not. As I watched the video and learned more about the situation, the more confused I got. The man wearing the MAGA hat in the video was certainly not being respectful, but he didn’t seem to be doing anything inherently hateful (as I had assumed). The more information I got that was from more than one side of the story the more I began to see that I jumped to conclusions based on appearances, which is the very thing I stand against.The Knicks have made Tim Hardaway Jr. and Courtney Lee available via trade in advance of the N.B.A.’s Feb. 7 trade deadline, according to three people familiar with the team’s stance.
+The team’s motivation in both cases is largely financial, according to the people, who were not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.
+Finding a trade before the deadline to shed either Hardaway’s or Lee’s contract without taking salary back that extends beyond this season would ensure that the Knicks have the requisite salary-cap space in July to pursue top-tier free agents such as Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and Kemba Walker.
+It remains to be seen, however, if the Knicks will be able to find a trade partner for Hardaway or Lee without attaching an additional asset to the deal, such as future draft compensation or their 2017 first-round pick, Frank Ntilikina.“The devastating and unprecedented wildfires of 2017 and 2018 have had a profound impact on our customers, employees and communities,” the utility said. “Regardless of today’s announcement, PG&E still faces extensive litigation, significant potential liabilities and a deteriorating financial situation, which was further impaired by the recent credit agency downgrades to below investment grade.”
+At least one of the company’s investors, the New York-based hedge fund BlueMountain Capital, said PG&E ought to reconsider a bankruptcy filing in light of the state’s conclusions about the Tubbs Fire. The hedge fund said earlier on Thursday that it would seek to replace PG&E’s board, which it accused of failing the company’s shareholders, customers and employees.
+“The news from CalFire that PG&E did not cause the devastating 2017 Tubbs Fire is yet another example of why the company shouldn’t be rushing to file for bankruptcy, which would be totally unnecessary and bad for all stakeholders,” Omar Vaishnavi, head of fundamental credit at BlueMountain Capital, said in a statement.
+Investors and analysts who are skeptical that the company needs bankruptcy argue that PG&E has access to plenty of assets it could borrow against or sell to meet its wildfire liabilities, including its headquarters building in San Francisco and its gas business. Selling such assets would still leave the company as the primary electricity utility to much of Northern and Central California.
+Stocks of companies that are on the verge of filing for bankruptcy often trade for pennies because investors believe that shareholders will get wiped out in a court-ordered reorganization. The Thursday rally in PG&E’s stock could further undermine the case for a bankruptcy. The company’s stock outstanding was worth more than $7 billion at Thursday’s closing price.
+But PG&E’s board might still decide to seek bankruptcy because it could conclude that is the most expedient way to resolve the thousands of wildfire claims against the utility. A filing could also protect the company in case its liabilities turn out to be much higher than current estimates.
+California officials have not yet determined the cause of the November 2018 Camp Fire, the state’s most devastating. That wildfire killed at least 86 people and destroyed the town of Paradise. It could be months more before investigators reach a conclusion about its cause. Mr. Newsom said the state expected to determine the cause of the Camp Fire within the first half of the year.For generations, his name struck fear in Manhattanites’ hearts.
+Year in and year out, with fatalistic regularity, envelopes bearing that name would invade the homes of the unwary, the unwilling and the unready.
+On each of them, a printed signature loomed sternly over the upper-left-hand corner: “Norman Goodman,” the name appended to the borough’s jury summonses for nearly half a century.
+“There are signatures that are more famous,” Mr. Goodman once said. “But mine is notorious.”
+Mr. Goodman, who died at 95 on Thursday at his home on the Upper East Side, was for 45 years the clerk of New York County — Manhattan, by any other name. Though the clerk’s office juggles myriad duties, from handling local business filings to operating a passport service, it was as a summoner of jurors that he was most widely, if not most fondly, known.
+A lawyer, Mr. Goodman was one of the city’s longest-serving public employees, as redoubtable an institution as the Automat and even more enduring. He held the county clerk’s post, in principle a lifetime appointment, from 1969 until his retirement on Dec. 31, 2014, the day after his 91st birthday. During those years, he issued between 11 million and 12 million jury summonses.ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Pakistani judge on Thursday formally dismissed terrorism charges against a man whose killing in a police encounter last year threw a spotlight on extrajudicial killings and police brutality in the country.
+A judge of the antiterrorism court in Karachi dropped five cases against Naqeebullah Mehsud, an aspiring model with a large social media presence whose death prompted widespread protests. The judge also posthumously cleared three other men who were killed with Mr. Mehsud.
+The court acted in the wake of a police inquiry that found that the supposed shootout in which the four men died in Karachi last January had been staged, and that their killings were extrajudicial.
+The operation was led by a prominent police commander named Rao Anwar, who was known for his harsh tactics. Mr. Anwar initially claimed that the four men were part of a militant group that had been involved in attacks on security forces in Karachi, considered the country’s financial and commercial hub.THE FALCONER
+By Dana Czapnik
+278 pp. Atria Books. $25.
+Toward the end of “The Falconer,” Dana Czapnik’s electric debut novel, 17-year-old Lucy Adler looks up from Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Second Sex” at the Japanese maple on her Upper West Side neighbor’s terrace. It’s difficult to read the passage and not think of beloved Francie Nolan peering out another window in another New York City borough, almost 100 years earlier. Yet whereas in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” both Francie and the Tree of Heaven grow up amid an unforgiving, concrete urban setting, Czapnik’s maple has been coaxed and cared for, its leaves treated with a protective coating. Lucy, a middle-class Manhattanite attending an elite private school, has battled none of the Nolan family’s hardships, nor is she plagued by the acerbic ennui that Holden Caulfield gave voice to in “The Catcher in the Rye,” but comparisons to both classic New York bildungsromans nonetheless seem inevitable. That is, until you realize that what binds them — all tell of a determinedly independent young hero’s quest for selfhood catalyzed by the crucible of New York City — is also what makes them so resistant to comparison. Like Francie and Holden before her, Lucy, a street-smart, superlative basketballer vulnerable to the perils of approaching womanhood, is too carefully drawn to be equated with anyone else.
+Lucy’s fierce first-person point of view is as confident and fearless as she is on the court; she narrates her story with the immediacy and sharpness of a sports commentator, mixed with the pathos and wisdom of a perceptive adolescent charting the perils of her senior year of high school. A self-described “pizza bagel — a Jewish and Italian mutt-girl,” Lucy grapples with the rigid expectations of others, especially her harshly critical high school peers who have rendered her an outcast. “Isn’t it just so much easier for everybody when a girl fits into a nice little girl category — good girl slut tomboy girly girl smart girl ditz — instead of being a fully fleshed-out person who is in constant conversation … with all the various fractious parts of herself,” Lucy wisely observes. We watch that conversation unfold in real time through her adventures with her best friend, Alexis, a tough-talking Dominican sage tethered to Lucy through basketball and their shared outsider status; Lucy’s forays into the navel-gazing Downtown arts scene of her painter cousin, Violet; and, most pulverizing, her unrequited love for her emotionally unavailable scrimmage partner Percy, a self-proclaimed nihilist from a neglected but moneyed family who goes through girlfriends like Kleenex and is referred to by friends as the “Virgin Surgeon.”
+Image
+But it’s arguably the nonhuman characters that give true shape to Lucy’s evolution: basketball and New York. (The novel’s opening line, “The ball is a face,” confirms the game’s significance and anthropomorphism for her.) Only with ball in hand does Lucy feel invincible and most herself, even as that self changes: “I ought not to imbue a ball with so much magic, but when I’m holding one I go from Lucy Adler, invisible girl … to Lucy Adler, Warrior Goddess.” Her self-descriptions on the court are as visceral and vivid as any sex scene, and when the actual sex scene does eventually unfold it is against the backdrop of a Rangers game on television, the commentators’ play-by-play mirroring Lucy’s own disembodied narration of her experience.And at the University of Oklahoma, students involved in filming and posting a video showing a woman applying blackface were expelled this week.
+Mr. Ertel, 49, had been the supervisor of elections for Seminole County since February 2005 when Mr. DeSantis, a Republican, appointed him secretary of state in December. Before resigning, he had testified before a state legislative committee on Thursday about election lawsuits.
+A few days after President Trump was inaugurated, Mr. Ertel publicly disputed Mr. Trump’s claims of rampant voter fraud.
+“To be clear: voter fraud is likely one of the least-committed felonies in America,” he wrote on Twitter, using an account that has since been deactivated. “Barring system-wide collusion, it is simply not the case that ‘millions voted illegally.’”
+But Mr. Ertel also acknowledged that there were flaws in the system that could be manipulated, and that he was committed to “non-arduous provisions” that would allow the most citizens to cast their vote.
+As part of his duties as secretary of state, Mr. Ertel was in charge of the state’s effort to restore voting rights to 1.4 million ex-felons, which Florida voters approved in November.
+He had received many awards for his work on increasing voter registration, including the Martin Luther King Jr. Good Citizenship Award given by the city of Longwood in Seminole County.Our guide to new art shows and some that will be closing soon.
+‘HILMA AF KLINT: PAINTINGS FOR THE FUTURE’ at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (through April 23). This rapturous exhibition upends Modernism’s holiest genesis tale — that the male trinity of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian invented abstract painting starting in 1913. It demonstrates that a female Swedish artist got there first (1906-7), in great style and a radically bold scale with paintings that feel startlingly contemporary. The mother of all revisionist shows regarding Modernism. (Roberta Smith)
+212-423-3500, guggenheim.org
+‘BLUE PRINTS: THE PIONEERING WORK OF ANNA ATKINS’ at New York Public Library, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building (through Feb. 17). An intimate, exquisite show of a pioneer of photography and natural science. In the early 1840s, Atkins, a seaweed-loving Englishwoman, began documenting aquatic plants through the new technique of cyanotype (or blueprint, as architects would later call it), and sewed her spectral images into the very first books of “photographical impressions” — albeit ones made without a camera. Atkins, perhaps assisted by servants, placed hundreds of specimens of seaweed or algae on coated paper, left them in the sun, and then washed the exposed sheet to produce white shadows of the plants against rich Prussian blue backgrounds. Each one is a little miracle, with neuronlike roots winding across the page, the leaves revealing every branching vein. (Jason Farago)
+917-275-6975, nypl.org
+‘CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876-1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum’s own collection. But these days, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi’s little-known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost-living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik)
+212-708-9400, moma.org
+‘EMPRESSES OF CHINA’S FORBIDDEN CITY’ at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass. (through Feb. 10). Every emperor of the Qing dynasty had dozens of wives, concubines and serving girls, but only one of them could hold the title of empress. The lives of women at the late imperial court is the subject of this lavish and learned exhibition, which plots the fortunes of these consorts through their bogglingly intricate silk gowns, hairpins detailed with peacock feathers, and killer platform boots. (The Qing elite were Manchus; women did not bind their feet.) Many empresses’ lives are lost to history; some, like the Dowager Empress Cixi, became icons in their own right. Most of the 200-odd dresses, jewels, religious artifacts and scroll paintings here are on rare loan from the Palace Museum in Beijing — you will not have a chance to see these again without a trip to the People’s Republic. (Farago)
+978-745-9500, pem.orgOur guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.
+Previews and Openings
+‘ALICE BY HEART’ at the Newman Mills Theater at the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space (previews start on Jan. 30; opens on Feb. 26). Curiouser and curiouser. For MCC, Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, creators of the beloved rock ’n’ roll weepy “Spring Awakening,” have teamed with Jessie Nelson of “Waitress” for a riff on “Alice in Wonderland,” set during the London Blitz. Molly Gordon stars as the girl gone down the rabbit hole.
+212-727-7722, mcctheater.org
+‘BY THE WAY, MEET VERA STARK’ at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on Jan. 29; opens on Feb. 19). The Signature revives Lynn Nottage’s incisive, underrated, time-skipping comedy of race and fame. Set in golden age Hollywood and in less lustrous decades, too, the play examines stardom and the stories we tell about the icons we love. Kamilah Forbes’s production stars Jessica Frances Dukes.
+212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.orgANNE TERESA DE KEERSMAEKER/ROSAS at Baryshnikov Arts Center (Jan. 30-Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 3). In the New York premiere of “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”), De Keersmaeker takes inspiration from Arnold Schönberg’s score, which is based on a poem by Richard Dehmel. Originally a group work from 1995, the choreographer has given it an intimate makeover: Now performed by three dancers, it is predominantly a duet in which a woman reveals to the man she loves that she is pregnant with another man’s child. It’s full-on drama.
+866-811-4111, bacnyc.org
+[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
+GRUPO CORPO at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House (Jan. 31-Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m.). This 22-member Brazilian troupe, formed by Paulo Pederneiras in 1975, returns to BAM with two works by Rodrigo Pederneiras: “Bach” and “Gira.” (The two are brothers; Paulo is Grupo Corpo’s artistic director, and Rodrigo is its choreographer.) In the 1996 work “Bach” — set to Marco Antônio Guimarães’s homage to the composer — the dancers, wearing gold, black and blue, hang and descend from steel tubes. For “Gira,” the mood shifts dramatically as Grupo Corpo collaborates with the São Paulo punk-jazz-rock band Metá Metá and draws on the rhythms and movement rooted in the rites of the Umbanda religion.
+718-636-4100, bam.org
+JUDSON DANCE THEATER: A COLLECTIVE SPECULATION at MoMA PS1 (Jan. 27, 2-6 p.m.). As part of the current MoMA exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done,” which looks at the experimental collective formed in the 1960s, MoMA PS1’s VW Sunday Sessions performance series hosts a symposium exploring the group’s influence on the current generation. Programming includes discussions and sound improvisations by an impressive array of artists, scholars and critics. The lineup features Fred Moten; K. J. Holmes and Ramsey Ameen; Malik Gaines; André Lepecki; Marina Rosenfeld with Eli Keszler and Greg Fox; Clare Croft; and Gus Solomons Jr.
+718-784-2084, moma.org
+NEW YORK CITY BALLET at the David H. Koch Theater (through March 3). The company gives its winter season an extra glow with debuts, notably Gonzalo Garcia in “Apollo” and Teresa Reichlen in “Orpheus” on Saturday evening. Later in the week, as part of the annual New Combinations Evening on Thursday, the company’s resident choreographer, Justin Peck, unveils his latest, “Principia,” set to a commissioned score by the composer Sufjan Stevens. Featuring 24 dancers led by Tiler Peck and Taylor Stanley, the premiere is the fourth time Peck and Stevens have collaborated at City Ballet. The program will be rounded out by William Forsythe’s “Herman Schmerman” and Kyle Abraham’s “The Runaway.”
+212-496-0600, nycballet.com
+THUNDERBIRD AMERICAN INDIAN DANCERS at Theater for the New City (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.; Jan. 26, 3 and 8 p.m.; Jan. 27, 3 p.m.; through Feb. 3). For its 44th annual performance and powwow, this Native American dance company, formed in 1963, offers a program of dance, stories and traditional music from the Northeast, the Southwest and the Great Plains tribes, along with “Silent Echoes of Time,” a contemporary work by Michael Taylor-Dancing Wolf. Inspired by Vietnam veterans, it will be shown at select performances. Other highlights include storytelling by Matoaka Eagle, a hoop dance by Marie Ponce and a deer dance from the Yaqui tribes of southern Arizona. The company’s director, Louis Mofsie, will serve as the M.C.
+212-254-1109, theaterforthenewcity.netOur guide to the city’s best classical music and opera happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+AMERICAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA at Carnegie Hall (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). Who else but Leon Botstein and his ensemble would come up with a program like this, filled with orchestral music by New York composers from the middle of the last century. The most famous work is probably Schuman’s Symphony No. 3, preceded by Robert Mann’s “Fantasy for Orchestra,” Vivian Fine’s “Concertante for Piano and Orchestra” and Jacob Druckman’s “Prism.” Charlie Albright is at the keyboard.
+212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org
+‘DON GIOVANNI’ at the Metropolitan Opera (Jan. 30, 7:30 p.m.; through Feb. 20). Despite its rather downbeat reception, Michael Grandage’s production returns again, for the first of two runs this season. (There are five performances in April.) Luca Pisaroni is Don Giovanni, with Ildar Abdrazakov as his Leporello. Rachel Willis-Sorensen sings Anna, Federica Lombardi sings Elvira and Aida Garifullina is Zerlina, with Stanislas de Barbeyrac as Ottavio, Brandon Cedel as Masetto and Stefan Kocan as the Commendatore. Cornelius Meister conducts.
+212-362-6000, metopera.orgKIDS ’N COMEDY: ‘THE NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION SHOW’ at Gotham Comedy Club (Jan. 27, 1 p.m.). Promising to face life with a sense of humor is always a good New Year’s resolution, and it will be even easier to keep with the help of these talented young stand-ups. All tweens and teenagers, the comics here have studied with professional comedians and graduates of the Kids ’N Comedy programs, so they know how to make adolescence funny (even if it has never seemed that way to you). At this show, for audiences 9 and older, the group will tackle hopes and dreams for 2019 with cleverness but no crudeness. You can also buy lunch — there’s a kids’ menu — while enjoying the laughs.
+212-877-6115, kidsncomedy.com
+[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
+MIL’S TRILLS NINTH ANNUAL WINTER BASH at ShapeShifter Lab (Jan. 27, 3-4 p.m.). Concerts presented by Amelia Robinson, a.k.a. Mil, are among the few at which children can expect to perform almost as much as the headliner. Robinson, who plays an electric ukulele and leads a band, habitually invites young listeners to bring their own instruments to her events. This time, though, the kids will do more than jam; working with 7- to 9-year-olds who have participated in her Musical Playdates web series, audience members will improvise original songs. Robinson’s concerts are also unusual for offering the crowd a yoga warm-up; Bend & Bloom will do the honors on Sunday in Brooklyn.
+646-820-9452, milstrills.com
+‘THE PAPER BAG PLAYERS: STAND UP AND CHEER, WE’RE 60 THIS YEAR!’ at the Kaye Playhouse (Jan. 27, 2 p.m.). Elementary school students at a recent performance of this show needed no prompting to follow the directions in the title. Then again, the Paper Bag Players — Ted Brackett, Marisa LaRuffa, Lily Emilia Smith, Kevin Richard Woodall and their composer and keyboard player, John Stone — always encourage children to shout, jump, dance and sing during their hourlong musical revues. This latest celebrates their 60th anniversary with 12 vignettes in which the sets, props and sometimes even the characters are made of the troupe’s signature paper and cardboard. (Jonathan Peck is the scenic designer.) The sketches include such classic hits as “The Cactus and the Balloon” and “Lost in the Mall,” as well as inspired new works like “Shipwreck Island,” in which a brave female pirate outwits bumbling men. Another fresh standout, “Mister Mix-Up,” features a magician who puts ordinary things (e.g., a rain cloud, a hair bow) into a hat and extracts a lovely result (a rainbow). The piece captures this wonderful company’s whole aesthetic: transforming the mundane into the marvelous.
+212-772-4448, thepaperbagplayers.org
+SPOOKTACULAR: BONEYARD BOOGIE at the Queens Museum (Jan. 26, 2-4 p.m.). If you can have Christmas in July, why not Halloween in January? That’s essentially what you can expect at this annual winter fund-raiser, which supports the museum’s education department. Featuring designs by the artist and museum educator Gregory Corbino, the frolic will turn the building’s second floor into a haunted cityscape inspired by the disco era. Children are encouraged to come in costume, ready to dance, bowl, make art, go on a scavenger hunt and play tick-tack-toe on a life-size board. The Circus Amok band and the Savvy Soul Line Dancers will also perform.
+718-592-9700, queensmuseum.orgOur guide to stand-up, improv and variety shows happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+THE BIRD LUGER EXTRAVAGANZA at the Bell House (Jan. 25, 7:30 p.m.). This showcase is an all-star tribute and fund-raiser for the late Kevin Barnett, who died suddenly this week at the age of 32. Barnett was a writer for and star of the sketch comedy series “Friends of the People” and one of the creators of the new Fox series “Rel.” The Lucas Brothers host this memorial for Bird Luger, as he was called on his podcast, “Roundtable of Gentlemen,” and guests include Hannibal Buress, Michael Che, Ilana Glazer and Michelle Wolf.
+718-643-6510, thebellhouseny.com
+DUDES AGAINST VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN BECAUSE DUH at Gotham Comedy Club (Jan. 30, 7:30 p.m.). As the title suggests, funnymen such as Travon Free, a writer for “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee,” and the SiriusXM host Pete Dominick are allies on this fund-raiser for the nonprofit human rights organization Let’s Breakthrough, which aims to change the culture so that women face ever-diminishing incidents of violence and discrimination. Kerry Coddett hosts.
+212-367-9000, gothamcomedyclub.comOur guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.
+THE COMPLETE LONE WOLF AND CUB at Japan Society (Jan. 25-26). After being set up, a former shogun executioner (Tomisaburo Wakayama) strikes out as a roving, freelance assassin. He offers his infant son a choice between a sword and a ball to play with, and the child, too young even to speak, reaches for the shiny weapon — sealing his fate to tag along. Japan Society is screening this run of six films, adapted from a blockbuster manga series and a clear inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill,” in marathon form.
+212-715-1258, japansociety.orgBRAXTON COOK at Baby’s All Right (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). A gifted young alto saxophonist and vocalist, Cook is both a graduate of Juilliard’s notoriously traditionalist jazz program and a veteran of Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah’s genre-bending ensembles. In his increasingly acclaimed solo projects, Cook builds a contemporary, jazz-pop identity that draws from 1970s fusion, ’80s R&B and contemporary Los Angeles hip-hop. Through it all, he finds a way to let his bebop-rooted saxophone improvisations shine. At this concert, featuring a guest appearance from the trumpeter Theo Croker, he will draw material from “No Doubt,” an album he released late last year.
+babysallright.com
+ANTONIO HART QUINTET at Smoke (Jan. 25-26, 7, 9 and 10:30 p.m.). Hart, a stellar alto saxophonist who burst onto the New York scene alongside Roy Hargrove in the early 1990s as part of the Young Lions generation, has always worn his debt to Cannonball Adderley on his cuffs. Here he presents a tribute to Adderley, an iconic hard-bop saxophonist, in a quintet that features Freddie Hendrix on trumpet, Caili O’Doherty on piano, Alex Ayala on bass and Cory Cox on drums.
+212-864-6662, smokejazz.com
+VIJAY IYER at Jazz Standard (through Jan. 27, 7:30 and 9:30 p.m.). Iyer’s sextet has been one of the hottest commodities in jazz since the release of its debut, “Far From Over,” in 2017. A version of that band will play on Friday and Saturday, presenting Iyer’s beaming, rhythmically interleaved original music. Then on Sunday, Iyer will perform with a newer group that features some of his colleagues and students at Harvard University, where he teaches. (He’s also a MacArthur fellow.) That band is called the Ritual Ensemble, and it features Ganavya Doraiswamy on vocals, Yosvany Terry on saxophones and Rajna Swaminathan on mridangam, an Indian percussion instrument.
+212-576-2232, jazzstandard.com
+AVA MENDOZA ET AL. at H0L0 (Jan. 31, 7 p.m.). A conclave of young avant-garde improvisers will descend on this darkened basement in Ridgewood, Queens, for a night of free playing. It’s hard to know where things will go; if you go, steel yourself for a wide variety of musical textures and temperaments, most of them liberated from standard time and harmony. The performers include the thrashing, post-metal guitarist Ava Mendoza; the pensive tenor saxophonist Ingrid Laubrock; and the bassist Brandon Lopez, who uses his instrument in a variety of nontraditional ways.
+h0l0.nyc
+‘THE MUSIC OF ANTHONY BRAXTON’ at Roulette (Jan. 25, 8 p.m.). One of the premier — and most prolific — living American composers, Braxton continues to release reams of new music, typically drawing on improvisation and built around his own complex musical systems. On Friday his 12-disc collection titled “GTM (Syntax) 2017,” featuring his Tri-Centric Vocal Ensemble, comes out. Here an 11-person version of that group performs in celebration of the record’s release. Afterward, the electronic musician Carl Testa and the pianist Cory Smythe will play music from a different part of Braxton’s repertoire, using a compositional system of his called Echo Echo Mirror House Music.
+917-267-0368, roulette.org
+WADADA LEO SMITH at the Appel Room (Jan. 26, 7 and 9:30 p.m.). Every recording Smith releases feels apt to be called a “landmark.” It’s the awe-inspiring, wide-screen breadth of his trumpet sound, the slowly accruing power of his compositions, and his way of making even small ensembles sound spacious — and ancient. “America’s National Parks,” his widely acclaimed 2016 release celebrating the natural wonders of North America, stands out in particular for its tumultuous melodic beauty and the bristling, mutating forms of its compositions. At Jazz at Lincoln Center, Smith presents the New York City debut of this work, joined by the personnel from the album: the pianist Anthony Davis, the cellist Ashley Walters, the bassist John Lindberg and the drummer Pheeroan akLaff.
+212-721-6500, jazz.org
+GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOWant climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+As the fight continues over President Trump’s demand to extend the border wall between the United States and Mexico, one thing is clear: Whatever the wall’s effect on immigration might be, it would have an impact on the environment of the borderlands.
+About 650 miles of border wall already exist along the 2,000-mile boundary between the two countries. Most of it has been built on federal land where the terrain provides no natural barrier. Mr. Trump has called for a 1,000-mile wall, which would extend farther across land that includes important habitats for wildlife.
+A Customs and Border Protection policy says the agency “will integrate environmental stewardship and sustainability practices into operations and activities.” But Congress has given the agency the power to waive environmental protections like the Endangered Species Act. Such laws could require the government to produce an in-depth environmental impact analysis of a new project, develop less-damaging alternatives and perform environmental monitoring after construction.
+A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection was unavailable because of the partial government shutdown, a result of the political standoff over funding for the wall.The art of the Argentine-Italian modernist Lucio Fontana looks like it comes from another planet, and it might as well, given how seldom we see it in New York. The exhibition “Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold,” at the Met Breuer, with spillovers at the Met Fifth Avenue and El Museo del Barrio, is the artist’s first museum survey here in more than 40 years.
+This wouldn’t be especially notable — plenty of his Latin American peers never get seen at all — were Fontana, who died in 1968, not so influential a figure. The “threshold” of the title refers not only to the early phase of his career, which the show highlights, but also to his position as a forebear of contemporary art as we know it. Things we take for granted — installation, new media and the poly-disciplinary impulse that defines so many 21st-century careers — Fontana pioneered in the 1950s.
+Part of the reception problem lies precisely in his breadth. When an artist toggles between figurative sculpture and television art, where do you land? Then there’s the pretty-ugly look of the work. Some of it is just weird as hell. Painting surfaces are punched or slashed through, or ooze as if with eruptive disease. Some of his ceramic sculptures suggest fecal deposits; others, pods swollen with alien life. His colors can be crazy: screaming pink, bruisy blue. Pictures in one series are all starchy white; those in another glint with chunks of colored glass, embedded like jewels on reliquaries.At the Met Breuer, concurrent with the Lucio Fontana retrospective, comes the New York solo museum debut of another Argentina-born modernist, Julio Le Parc.
+Born in 1928 in the city of Mendoza, Mr. Le Parc was an art student in Buenos Aires in the late 1940s, and he lucked out in having Fontana as a teacher. Master and pupil were on the same beam: Both were formally omnivorous, anti-academic and futuristically minded. When Fontana spoke of aligning art with scientific technology, and using light, space and movement as aesthetic materials to make art accessible to new generations of viewers, his ideas fell on the right young ears.
+[Read Holland Cotter’s review of the Lucio Fontana retrospective.]
+In 1958, Mr. Le Parc moved to Paris. There he met Victor Vasarely and a group of artists associated with what would be called Op Art and Kinetic Art, movements geared to audience interaction. Their populist potential was of particular interest to the younger artist, who took a history of political activism —- Anticapitalist, anti-authoritarian — with him to Europe. (In 1968, he was expelled from France for five months for participating in protests.) His resistance politics extended to the art establishment. He was diffident about engaging with it, and as a result, his career, after a much-noticed start in the 1960s — biennials, prizes — slowed way down outside of France where, at 90, he still lives.Mr. Saez and Mr. Zucman’s work shows that the wealthiest 0.1 percent of families — roughly the group that would be hit by Ms. Warren’s proposed tax — now hold 20 percent of all wealth in the United States. Their share of the nation’s wealth has doubled since 1985. In a recent sign of billionaire prosperity, the hedge-fund manager Kenneth Griffin paid $238 million for a Central Park apartment this week, more than doubling the previous record for a home purchase in the United States.
+The bottom 90 percent of Americans by net worth hold 25 percent of all wealth, combined, according to Mr. Saez and Mr. Zucman’s work. That is down from nearly 40 percent of all wealth in 1985.
+While the idea of taxing wealthy Americans is resurgent, it is not unique: The top marginal income tax rate in the United States was as high as 91 percent in the early 1960s. Today, the top marginal income tax rate is 37 percent, down from 39.6 percent during Mr. Obama’s second term.
+Ms. Warren appears to be the first declared Democratic candidate to release a plan for a wealth tax, but the idea is quickly gaining steam among liberal activists and policy experts. Two left-leaning think tanks, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, released wealth-tax-themed policy briefs this week in Washington.
+In a sign of the idea’s rising currency with the Democratic establishment, Ms. Batchelder and another former economic adviser to Mr. Obama both praised the plan on Thursday. “The incidence of extreme wealth inequality — as well as the magnitude of never-taxed wealth — is just so obscene at this point in our nation that I think there is simply no choice but to explore a wealth tax like this,” said Gene Sperling, who directed Mr. Obama’s National Economic Council.
+The projected revenue from Ms. Warren’s proposal would be enough to pay for several policy initiatives that she and other Democrats have proposed, including universal prekindergarten, a $1 trillion federal infrastructure spending push and widespread debt relief for student loans. But increasingly, liberal activists see taxing the incomes and the wealth of the rich as a policy goal in and of itself — in order to combat what they see as dangerous levels of inequality.
+“Democracies become oligarchies when wealth is too concentrated,” Mr. Saez said in praising the plan. “A progressive wealth tax is the most direct policy tool to curb the growing concentration of wealth in the United States.”SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new far-right president, stepped onto the international stage this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a pitch that had resounded with voters back home: He was committed to eliminating entrenched corruption in his country.
+But a series of questionable episodes just three weeks into his term has left Mr. Bolsonaro, who rode to power by denouncing elitist privilege, fending off charges that his administration is engaging in more of the same.
+Three ministers as well as some midlevel directors implicated in corruption investigations have been hired by the administration, despite Mr. Bolsonaro’s stated policy of zero tolerance. The son of the vice president was promoted and given a threefold raise at a state-owned bank. Even a fine levied against Mr. Bolsonaro for fishing in protected waters back in 2012 was voided by the authorities.
+Mr. Bolsonaro and his allies have also continued using legal but much-despised political privileges, such as accepting the moving allowances granted to federal lawmakers and officials — even when they already live in the capital.Just weeks ago, there was virtually no hope that Venezuela’s economic and humanitarian crisis would soon be eased. President Nicolás Maduro seemed to face no serious challenge to his increasingly repressive and corrupt rule. Despite some discontent in the armed forces, high-level officers appeared to stand with him. Today, with the appearance of a credible rival to Mr. Maduro, Venezuela’s future hinges on those very same officers.
+Until now, Mr. Maduro has been particularly lucky that his political foes have been unable to cohere into an effective resistance with a clear strategy and forceful leadership. His opponents’ weakness was in part the result of repeated government crackdowns that instilled widespread fear. But on Wednesday it was evident that Mr. Maduro’s luck had run out and that void was being filled in dramatic fashion by a relatively unknown leader who declared himself the country’s legitimate president before thousands of supporters in Caracas.
+His name is Juan Guaidó, and he is the 35-year-old president of the National Assembly who led the broad-based nationwide protests that demonstrated ordinary Venezuelans’ anger over Mr. Maduro’s rule. Mr. Guaidó, who was elected the assembly’s president only a few weeks ago, has been largely untainted by Venezuela’s tired political squabbles.
+His messaging stands in sharp contrast to that of previous opposition figures, who castigated Mr. Maduro and, before him, President Hugo Chávez, and were unable to connect with Venezuelans who approved of Mr. Chávez’s left-leaning policies. Strikingly, the rally on Wednesday featured protesters from across the socioeconomic spectrum, including some from areas that had once been Chavista strongholds. They seemed to be drawn to Mr. Guaidó’s refreshing style and vision of taking the country forward and not returning to the pre-Chávez era, an elite-dominated period of social inequality and economic collapse.1. The Senate failed to pass two competing proposals to reopen the government, sending lawmakers back to the drawing board for a bipartisan solution to end the impasse.
+The Republican proposal included $5.7 billion in funding for President Trump’s border wall, paired with legal protections for some immigrants. The Democratic proposal would have temporarily reopened the government until Feb. 8, but it omitted wall funding. A half dozen Republicans voted for it, but the tally still fell short of the 60 votes it needed to advance.
+Lawmakers and aides in both parties expressed hope that the double-barreled losses would break the logjam that has gripped Washington since the partial shutdown began. House Democrats said they were considering giving Mr. Trump as much as $5.2 billion for border security — but not for a wall.SÃO PAULO, Brazil — An openly gay federal lawmaker in Brazil who has frequently clashed with the country’s new far-right president said on Thursday that he was giving up his seat because of death threats.
+The lawmaker, Jean Wyllys, a fierce advocate for gay rights who was due to be sworn in for a third term in February, said in an interview with the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo that “this environment isn’t safe for me” after the assassination of a political ally last March and violence that followed the election of the president, Jair Bolsonaro, in October.
+“For the future of this cause,” Mr. Wyllys said, “I have to stay alive. I don’t want to be a martyr.” He added that he was currently on vacation abroad and did not plan to return to Brazil.
+Mr. Wyllys called Mr. Bolsonaro, a former colleague of his in the lower house of Congress, “a president who always vilified me, who always openly insulted me, who was always homophobic with me.”SEATTLE — Microsoft said its Bing search page was back online in China after being inaccessible for part of this week. It appeared to have been blocked by government censors.
+Users in parts of China were unable to access Bing on Wednesday and Thursday, and it remained unclear what led to the shutdown.
+While Bing is not widely used in China, it has been one of the few remaining portals to the broader internet as the government isolates China’s internet from the rest of the world. Bing has survived in part because Microsoft has worked to follow the government’s censorship practices around political topics. It has also cooperated with the government in developing other parts of its business, such as working with a state-run firm that supplies the military to produce a government-approved version of its Windows 10 software.
+“There are times when there are disagreements, there are times when there are difficult negotiations with the Chinese government, and we’re still waiting to find out what this situation is about,” Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, said in an interview with Fox Business Network at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch.
+This Weekend I Have … a Half-Hour, and It’s a Miracle
+‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
+When to watch: Starting Friday, on Netflix.
+The final six episodes of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s eccentric, terrific comedy are here, and the show is as unpredictable and impressive as ever. Kimmy (Ellie Kemper) continues to work on her bizarre children’s book, Titus abbreviates touché as “toosh,” there’s an amazing detour about “Cats,” Ronan Farrow appears as himself — it’s all here, all at once, and all with the show’s unique sunny edginess. It’s never easy to say goodbye, but “Kimmy” comes in for a smooth landing.
+… an Hour, and I Miss ‘Meerkat Manor’Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
+For the first two years of his presidency, it seemed like Donald Trump could, as he famously put it during his campaign, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose his voters.
+Republican majorities in the House and the Senate negotiated his agenda on Capitol Hill. The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and House Speaker Paul Ryan protected him from serious Congressional investigations, and passed a sweeping tax bill, the president’s major legislative accomplishment. G.O.P. lawmakers largely lived in fear of angering the president’s still-loyal base if they challenged him.
+Times have certainly changed. Mr. Trump spent the Christmas holidays complaining that he was all alone in the White House. Now, with the government in the middle of its longest-ever shutdown, his State of the Union address has been delayed indefinitely. Even his G.O.P. armor shows some tiny cracks, with a half dozen Republican senators voting on Thursday afternoon in favor of a Democratic proposal to reopen the government.
+So far, divided government hasn’t been a good look for Mr. Trump. And a batch of new polls released over the past few days tells a pretty unflattering story for him.If you are wondering why Venezuela is back on the front pages, why the Trump administration is making such a big fuss about it, and why observers seem so anxious about the country’s political crisis, then this primer is for you.
+Why is Venezuela in the news right now?
+There are three immediate reasons, all related to a political crisis that has been building in the country for years.
+First, there were nationwide protests against the government on Wednesday. They were the first large-scale demonstrations since the president, Nicolás Maduro, reacted to the last round of large demonstrations, in 2017, with a deadly crackdown.
+Second, an opposition lawmaker named Juan Guaidó declared the current government illegitimate and announced that he would be willing to lead a caretaker government. On its own, Mr. Guaidó’s statement can’t force any real change. But it has heightened speculation that the military could push out the government.Dozens of employees at the New Museum in Manhattan voted on Thursday to join a union, capping a tense few weeks during which museum management had argued that such an action could be detrimental.
+The measure to join the national autoworkers union, which represents employees at some other New York City museums, was adopted 38-8, according to Dana Kopel, a senior editor and publications coordinator at the museum.
+“We’re so excited about what this means for us as employees and for what it means for the future of the museum,” she said. “This could be a harbinger of really profound change.”
+In a written statement Thursday the museum said: “The eligible employees considered the pros and cons of unionization and decided in favor of a union. We respect their decision, and will move forward in good faith.”I get in trouble. I read in The New York Times today that I — that one of my problems is if I ever run for president, I like Republicans. O.K., well, bless me father, for I have sinned. [laughter and applause] But, you know, from where I come from, I don’t know how you get anything done — I don’t know how you get anything done unless we start talking to one another again.In the four years after Britain’s referendum, the number of Europeans migrating to the country for work plunged, and British companies sent employees to Paris and Frankfurt to set up toeholds on the continent. But despite their preparations, businesses braced themselves for considerable difficulties after Jan. 1.
+British food distributors, spared the calamity of a no-deal separation, nevertheless scrambled to prepare the first of hundreds of thousands of new export certifications to allow their meat, fish and dairy to be sold to the bloc. Once exempt from such burdensome checks, they now face the same inspections as European imports from countries like Chile or Australia.
+Britain is short of customs agents to deal with the tens of millions of customs declarations that are now needed, and even veterinarians to carry out new health assessments, industry experts said.
+The deal also did little to assuage fears about how the country’s new immigration rules could complicate the lives of E.U. citizens living in Britain. People from other European countries have been allowed to apply for “settled status” in Britain, the right to stay indefinitely, and more than two million of them have been granted that status.
+But few provisions were made for those unable to complete the process online, much less for those who don’t realize they need permission to stay somewhere they have lived for decades.Trade war: Over the past few decades, businesses around the world invested vast sums based on the belief that old-fashioned protectionism was a thing of the past. But Donald Trump hasn’t just imposed high tariffs, he’s demonstrated a willingness to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of existing trade agreements. You don’t have to be a doctrinaire free-trader to believe that this must have a depressing economic effect.
+For now, corporate leaders reportedly believe that things won’t get out of hand, that the U.S. and China in particular will reach a deal. But this sentiment could turn suddenly if and when business realizes that the hard-liners still seem to be calling the shots.
+The shutdown: It’s not just the federal workers not getting paid. It’s also the contractors, who will never get reimbursed for their losses, the food stamp recipients who will be cut off if the stalemate goes on, and more. Conventional estimates of the cost of the shutdown are almost surely too low, because they don’t take account of the disruption a nonfunctioning government will impose on every aspect of life.
+As in the case of a trade war, business leaders reportedly believe that the shutdown will soon be resolved. But what will happen to investment and hiring if and when corporate America concludes that Trump has boxed himself in, and that this could go on for many months?
+So there are multiple things going wrong, all of which threaten the economy. How bad will it be?
+The good news is that even taking all these negatives together, they don’t come close to the body blow the world economy took from the 2008 financial crisis. The bad news is that it’s not clear what policymakers can or will do to respond when things go wrong.
+Monetary policy ­— that is, interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve and its counterparts abroad — is normally the first line of defense against recession. But the Fed has very limited room to cut, because interest rates are already low, and in Europe, where rates are negative, there’s no room at all.
+Fiscal policy — temporary hikes in government spending and aid to vulnerable workers — is the usual backup to monetary easing. But would a president who’s holding federal workers hostage in pursuit of a pointless wall be willing to enact a sensible stimulus? And in Europe, any proposal for fiscal action would probably encounter the usual German nein.The man the F.B.I. said Thursday was the “traveling bandit” responsible for a string of seven bank robberies in six states was not even supposed to leave Kentucky, his home state.
+The suspect, Jason Lee Robinson, of Pikeville, Ky., was released from federal prison in November and had been instructed by his parole officer not to leave the state, according to an affidavit. But the authorities maintain he traveled quite widely, logging over 3,000 miles as he carried out at least seven robberies in three weeks.
+He was arrested in the small city of Fruita, Colo., on Thursday and charged with robbing a Capital Bank in Aventura, Fla., a well-to-do suburb about 20 minutes north of Miami, on Dec. 28 — the first in a string of heists the F.B.I. said ended Jan. 17.
+According to the affidavit, Mr. Robinson entered the bank, which sits among luxury condos, an upscale mall and yacht clubs, at about 3:30 p.m. that day. He passed a teller a note demanding money and indicating that he was armed. The teller handed the suspect about $1,900, which he quickly grabbed and fled. The teller then pressed the bank’s silent security alarm.Last week, the F.A.A. announced it was bringing back furloughed inspectors and other employees in order to ensure safety. Its revised shutdown plan called for having 3,113 employees responsible for aviation safety designated as essential to protect life and safety, meaning that they would work without pay during the shutdown rather than be furloughed.
+The F.A.A.’s original shutdown plan called for only 216 aviation safety positions to be considered essential for life and safety. The union representing inspectors had warned that furloughing those workers was hurting the safety of the air travel system.
+There are still plenty of F.A.A. employees who have been sidelined. Over all, about 14,000 of the F.A.A.’s 45,000 employees are furloughed under the revised shutdown plan.
+What about airport security?
+More than 40,000 transportation security officers — employees of the Department of Homeland Security who screen passengers at the airports — have worked through the shutdown. But they have been failing to show up for their shifts at a rising rate — about one in 10 were absent on Sunday. On average, they make less than $40,000 a year and many of them have had to borrow money, seek side jobs or turn to food pantries to get by.
+Despite reassurances from Transportation Security Administration officials, the agency did have a lapse in early January that frightened travelers. A woman passed through a screening checkpoint at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport with a gun that she carried onto a flight that landed Jan. 3 in Tokyo.
+The agency later said that any perception that the shutdown caused the failure to detect the gun, which was in a carry-on bag, “would be false.” No similar lapses have been reported during the shutdown.
+Why are air traffic controllers so worried?
+Staffing was already an issue even before the shutdown, their union said.
+The number of certified controllers is at a 30-year low, according to the National Air Traffic Controllers Association. The centralized radar facility for the airports that serve New York City, which is known as a Tracon, has only about 130 controllers, far short of its full complement of 228, said Rich Santa, a regional vice president of the controllers’ union. And 50 of them are eligible to retire now, he said.For the midterms, I devised a new forecasting model informed partly by this new paradigm of voter behavior. It was as accurate as the best in the forecasting business, and my predictions were made months ahead of the others. That’s important, because it is already telling us what we can expect from the 2020 election.
+For the 2018 midterms, my model predicted a large partisan surge for Democrats. I identified America’s suburbs as ground zero for a political realignment away from Republican House candidates. The realignment was fueled by two things: One was conventional — the movement of disaffected independent, or swing, voters away from the president’s party, which has happened in every midterm election since 2006.
+The other can be tracked to the mobilization of negative partisanship in driving turnout from Democrats who usually sit out midterm elections. By identifying Republican-held districts with both a reasonably competitive partisan electorate and a large number of college-educated voters who could form a Democratic turnout swell, I predicted — in July 2018 — that negative partisanship would allow Democrats to pick up 42 House seats and sweep “Reagan country” in Orange County, Calif. At first, my model was an outlier, but by Election Day, the FiveThirtyEight “classic” forecast, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and the Cook Political Report all agreed with my forecast.
+Motivated by the threat posed by the Trump administration, casual Democratic voters, especially college-educated women, have been activated since Mr. Trump’s election and will remain activated so long as the threat he presents to them remains. And the complacent Democratic electorate of the 2010 and 2014 congressional midterms as well as the 2016 presidential election is gone (for now). It has been replaced by a galvanized Democratic electorate that will produce the same structural advantage for Democrats that manifested in the 2018 midterms.
+The surge won’t be uniform. Democrats will win big in more urban, more diverse, better-educated and more liberal-friendly states and will continue to lose ground in other states like Missouri. Although Mr. Trump may well win Ohio and perhaps even Florida again, it is not likely he will carry Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in 2020. Look at the midterm performance of statewide Democrats in those states. And his troubles with swing voters, whom he won in 2016, will put Arizona, North Carolina and perhaps even Georgia in play for Democrats and effectively remove Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and New Hampshire from the list of swing states.The rest? Well, good luck: Secrecy, it seems, is another common theme.
+Perhaps because this is year 27 of uninterrupted economic growth, public money is sometimes treated like a toy for political toddlers (the ferry-naming contest that briefly yielded Ferry McFerryface comes to mind) and demands for details tend to produce answers only after the cash is spent.
+This was also the week, for example, when the Great Barrier Reef Foundation announced its first project since it received A$443 million from the government last year. That’s a giant pool of money. It was doled out at record speed, with barely any oversight and no competitive bidding.
+And the foundation’s first project — setting aside A$574,000 to finance a survey of remote parts of the Great Barrier Reef — has done little to douse the flames of outrage. It came on the heels of an audit that found the administration costs associated with the A$443 million grant could be as high as A$86.4 million.
+But it would be a mistake to look only at the winners.
+Even a wealthy country still has to make choices so to make sure I wasn’t overly distracted by all that generosity, I looked around a bit for what’s being cut.
+The first thing I noticed was the value of scrutinizing spending in context.
+Both the Liberal and Labor leadership scrambled this week to take credit for a A$60 million hospital expansion plan in Cairns, but that increase looks less impressive when you consider that the government — with Mr. Morrison as treasurer — shifted more of the health care burden to states in what Labor sometimes describes as a A$715 million cut for Australia’s public hospitals from 2017-2020.
+The second and more obvious thing that jumped out at me: cuts to higher education.
+This was already on my radar — many of our stories have examined Australia’s dependence on full-fee-paying foreign students — but the numbers are staggering.
+In December 2017, the federal government announced it would cut A$2.2bn from universities, mostly through a two-year freeze in grants funding.To improve a Mets team that has not made the playoffs since 2016, the new general manager, Brodie Van Wagenen, has made a flurry of moves this winter, like trading for second baseman Robinson Cano and closer Edwin Diaz and signing catcher Wilson Ramos, infielder Jed Lowrie and reliever Jeurys Familia.
+On paper, the Mets are already better and deeper than last season’s 85-loss squad. But have they done enough to contend for a playoff spot in a crowded National League East? If they intend to be as bold as the confident Van Wagenen has said, should they not pounce on Manny Machado or Bryce Harper, the prize free agents who remain unsigned with spring training less than three weeks away?
+Don’t count on it.
+Speaking to reporters on Thursday, the Mets’ chief operating officer, Jeff Wilpon, and Van Wagenen lauded the front office’s off-season, said the bulk of the work had been done and essentially ruled out any pursuit of Machado and Harper, superstars who have not found as rich a free-agent market as once expected.
+“From a price-to-value point of view, I don’t think they’ve come to me to say, ‘Listen, we really need to do this because it’s come down to the point where we think the cost has value,’ ” Wilpon said of the front office.[The Nets Are Looking Really Good, Even From London]
+Dinwiddie, 25, was a second-round pick of the Detroit Pistons in 2015, but after failing to catch on in stints with the Pistons and the Chicago Bulls — and after several stints in the N.B.A.’s development league — he signed with the Nets as a free agent in December 2016.
+His first season in Brooklyn was fairly uneventful, with an average of 7.3 points a game in a bench role, but last season was thrust into a starting role as a result of injuries to D’Angelo Russell and Jeremy Lin, and he thrived with career-high averages of 12.6 points and 6.6 assists.
+He came into this season still unsure of his future, talking openly about feeling a lack of security with his place on the team, but he blossomed as the team’s first man off the bench, essentially alternating big games with Russell and serving as his team’s closer in tight games. Ten times this season he has scored 25 or more points off the bench, with his high mark coming on Dec. 12 when he poured in 39 in a win over the Philadelphia 76ers.
+Dinwiddie’s play has generated some buzz around a potential All-Star appearance. More important, it inspired the team to sign him to a three-year, $34 million contract extension in December.[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
+In an interview that aired two weeks ago on PBS, Kevin Hassett, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, suggested that furloughed workers were fortunate not to have to use vacation days over the Christmas holidays. “And then they come back, and then they get their back pay. Then they’re — in some sense, they’re better off,” he said.
+Trump himself has been unable to feign empathy for the 800,000 federal employees who haven’t been paid in more than a month, or the hundreds of thousands of government contractors who likely won’t be paid at all. Earlier this month he retweeted a Daily Caller piece, ostensibly by an anonymous member of his own administration, arguing that the work of most federal employees is worthless. “We do not want most employees to return, because we are working better without them,” it said. On Thursday afternoon, Trump told reporters that grocery stores will “work along” with people who can’t pay for food.
+One effect of this government shutdown, now in its second month and without immediate end in sight, is to reveal the sham of Trump’s purported populism. It’s true, he’s able to connect culturally with some economically precarious parts of America. Despite being expensively educated, his worldview is basically that of Archie Bunker. He eats fast food, likes pro wrestling and has the terrible taste in interior design common to arriviste dictators. His vulgarity creates a kinship with people who purport to hate elites.
+Yet in purely financial terms, Trump is as elitist as they come. Though he campaigned as a candidate of (white) workers, he has governed as a shameless oligarch. He has proudly surrounded himself with millionaires and billionaires, seeing their wealth as evidence of their worth. At a rally in 2017, speaking of his economic advisers, he said, “But in those particular positions, I just don’t want a poor person.” He has gone out of his way not to hire anyone who would actually understand the plight of the workers he’s holding hostage.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+President Trump, his eldest son, and his former lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, were among a roster of rich and powerful people who received gun licenses from the New York Police Department in return for special favors, a former lieutenant has claimed in court papers.
+The former lieutenant, Paul Dean, said the men received permits to carry guns in New York City without the proper paperwork after donating to two charities with close ties to the department. They were among a list of other well-connected people who Mr. Dean said benefited from a “systematic culture of corruption” that stretched from the department’s gun licensing division to the upper echelons of the department.
+The police commissioner, James P. O’Neill, said the allegations by Mr. Dean, who has pleaded guilty to approving gun licenses in exchange for bribes while he was the second-in-command of the department’s licensing division, are “highly suspect.”
+“These claims were investigated thoroughly by our I.A.B. — internal affairs — the F.B.I.’s public corruption unit and overseen by federal prosecutors,” Mr. O’Neill said on Thursday, a day after Mr. Dean made the allegations. “These investigations found no credible basis to charge any other individuals.”My embrace of the Nets began seven years ago when the Knicks — the only team I had ever rooted for — shunned a gift from the basketball gods by letting Jeremy Lin leave town. It was the final indignity after years of atrocious basketball. I dumped my Knicks season tickets and adopted the fledgling club whose arena had just risen over my Brooklyn neighborhood.
+I did not do so lightly. As a born-and-bred New Yorker, I saw abandoning a team as a serious breach of the tribal code. I disdained fans from other cities who rooted for two teams in the same sport. I was unremittingly harsh to the worst transgressor of all: the bandwagon fan. (If that Steph Curry jersey you own was the first Warriors gear in your closet, yes, I’m talking about you.)
+But I was hopping on no bandwagon. With the exception of a pair of distant trips to the N.B.A. finals, the New Jersey-turned-Brooklyn Nets were a pathetic franchise. I was living in Brooklyn. My father had grown up in Queens and traveled on a streetcar to watch the Dodgers at Ebbets Field. I was not abandoning my tribe. I was returning to it.
+This is what I told myself as I began reading about the odd collection of players I was now rooting for, trying to divine the narrative that would make it real. I fought through a sense of exile in the slick, new Barclays Center, which was full of fans for whom the game itself appeared peripheral to the cool Brooklyn food, the dancing during timeouts, and whatever fascinating things were happening on their phones.
+Yes, it was a gorgeous arena with excellent sightlines and welcoming staff. The season tickets I bought the day the Knicks said goodbye to J-Lin put me in seats that were a 10-minute walk from my house in Prospect Heights. Madison Square Garden was a cramped dump reached via a creaking subway and a walk through the bowels of Penn Station.
+Yet there was something about the Garden, even as the Dolan era yielded a lost decade of basketball. The crowd understood. Hustle plays drew appreciation in an arena that had revered Charles Oakley. The energy was electric.
+In Brooklyn, the mostly mercenary fans got what we deserved: a team of past-their-prime castoffs imported by the bombastic Russian magnate, Mikhail Prokhorov, who had brought the franchise to Brooklyn. Vowing to spend whatever it took to eclipse the Knicks — a low bar — he built a bonfire of money at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic.MEXICO CITY — The United States’ support this week of an opposition leader as Venezuela’s interim president seemed to follow a pattern familiar to Latin America, reawakening suspicions of Washington’s intentions in the region and calling to mind American interventions in recent decades.
+“Don’t trust the gringos,” President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela said this week, listing United States-backed military coups in the region. “They don’t have friends or loyalties. They only have interests, guts and the ambition to take Venezuela’s oil, gas and gold.”
+But where in the past the United States might have felt isolated in Latin America, this time it has company. Many of the nations in the region have denounced Mr. Maduro and instead recognized the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s legitimate president.
+Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Guatemala, Chile, Canada and other nations have joined the Trump administration, concerned by the economic and humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and its destabilizing effect on the region.A huge bonfire was burning at Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s mountain hide-out one night when the crime lord’s bodyguards brought him two enemy soldiers slumped across the backs of two A.T.V.s. The men — members of the Zetas, a rival cartel — had been tortured for hours and many of their bones had already been broken. The soldiers, as listless as “rag dolls,” according to a gunman who was there, could barely move.
+In the glow of the firelight, Mr. Guzmán ordered the Zetas to be placed beside the flames and then approached them with a rifle. Pressing its barrel to the first man’s head, the kingpin cursed the soldier’s mother and abruptly pulled the trigger. After he had done the same to the second, he ordered his assassins to dispose of the bodies.
+“Put them in the bonfire,” the gunman recalled Mr. Guzmán saying. “I don’t want any bones to remain.”
+This morbid story was recounted on Thursday by Isaias Valdez Rios, a former cartel killer, at Mr. Guzmán’s drug trial in New York. Though dozens of murders have been described in court since the trial began 10 weeks ago, Judge Brian M. Cogan has sought to keep a tight leash on the gore. But Mr. Valdez’s testimony was exceptionally gruesome and marked the first time that jurors heard explicitly graphic examples of the bloodshed that Mexican cartels have long been known for. It was also the first time that evidence was shown that depicted the violence personally committed by the defendant, known to the world as El Chapo.If you enabled the Allow Calls From setting, you’ll need to add contacts to your Favorites group. Open the iPhone’s Contacts app, tap on the person in question, and scroll down to Add to Favorites. Once you have the right people on your Favorites list and the above settings enabled, they’ll be able to call you even when Do Not Disturb is on.
+iOS does allow you to allow text messages and iMessages from certain contacts, even though in most cases people will call you if it’s urgent. If you want to enable this feature, head to the contact’s info, press Edit, and under the Text Tone options, choose Emergency Bypass. You can also assign certain vibration patterns to your most important contacts so you don’t even need to look at your phone to know who’s texting. Just tap the Edit button, and under Text Tone, choose Vibration and assign something recognizable. This isn’t specific to Do Not Disturb, but it’s a handy feature that serves a similar purpose: helping you know when certain people are texting so you can judge when something is important and when it can probably wait.
+On Android Phones
+Image The Do Not Disturb settings in Google’s Android mobile operating system let you customize vibrations for your contacts and allow repeat calls to come through even when your phone is set to silent. Credit... Whitson Gordon
+If your phone runs Google’s Android operating system, the Do Not Disturb settings may be laid out a bit differently depending on which phone you use. But here’s the gist of how they work, which should point you in the right direction.
+First, open the Settings app and head to Sound > Do Not Disturb. From here, you can customize a few aspects of the feature, including:
+Sound, vibration, and visuals : You probably want audible notifications turned off when Do Not Disturb is turned on, but you can allow your phone to continue lighting up when notifications come through — though I imagine most people would prefer to have this off.
+Exceptions : This is the really useful part. Here, you can choose to allow calls or messages (or both) from your “starred” contacts, even when Do Not Disturb is on. This allows you to block most notifications but allow those from your spouse, mother or other important people. You can also allow “repeat callers” so that if someone calls you twice within 15 minutes — as would be common in emergency situations — it bypasses Do Not Disturb.
+Schedule: Finally, this is where you can schedule Do Not Disturb to automatically turn on and off at specific times, like when you go to bed. You’ll absolutely want to enable this.
+I highly recommend turning on an exception for repeat calls and starred contacts, letting you block most notifications in Do Not Disturb mode but allowing the ones you know won’t be sent unless they’re urgent or important. If you do that, make sure to star the right contacts in Android’s Contacts app — just tap on a contact to bring up their info, and tap the star in the upper right corner to mark them as important.“The loyal man serves. That is, he does not merely follow his own impulses. He looks to his cause for guidance. This cause tells him what to do,” Royce wrote in “The Philosophy of Loyalty.”
+The cause gives unity and consistency to life. The cause gives fellowship, because there are always others serving the same cause. Loyalty is the cure for hesitancy.
+Of course, there can be good causes and bad causes. So Royce argued that if loyalty is the center of the good life, then we should admire those causes, based on mutual affection, that value and enhance other people’s loyalty.
+We should despise those causes, based on a shared animosity, that destroy other people’s loyalty. If my loyalty to America does not allow your community’s story to be told, or does not allow your community’s story to be part of the larger American story, then my loyalty is a domineering, predatory loyalty. It is making it harder for you to be loyal. We should instead be encouraging of other loyalties. We should, Royce argued, be loyal to loyalty.
+Before Martin Luther King Jr. used it, Royce popularized the phrase “the beloved community.” In the beloved community, political opponents honor the loyalty the rival has for a cause, and learn from it.
+In such a community, people submit themselves to their institution, say to a university. They discover how good it is by serving it, and they allow themselves to be formed by it. According to Royce, communities find their voice when they own their own betrayals; evil exists so we can struggle to overcome it.
+Royce took his philosophy one more crucial step: Though we have our different communities, underneath there is an absolute unity to life. He believed that all separate individuals and all separate loyalties are mere fragments of a spiritual unity — an Absolute Knower, a moral truth.Ms. Ernst’s story drew expressions of shock and support from lawmakers of both parties.
+“My heart goes out to her,” Representative Debbie Dingell, Democrat of Michigan, said on CNN on Thursday.
+A conservative favorite, Ms. Ernst was interviewed as a potential running mate for Donald J. Trump during the 2016 campaign. She declined to be considered, citing family concerns, the court documents showed.
+“I understand it’s newsworthy, but this is a huge violation of her privacy,” said Karen Kedrowski, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women and Politics at Iowa State University. “It would not surprise me if some people would see a disconnect between her personal experience and public positions and see this as hypocrisy. But I think that undercuts the human capacity to compartmentalize and see personal experience in a different frame of reference.”
+The release of the court documents meant Ms. Ernst lost control of her own story. But her decision to speak publicly put her in the company of other women who have had to balance forthrightness and transparency about traumatic experiences against the potential loss of privacy and other negative effects on their lives and careers.
+In Congress, Ms. Ernst and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, have advocated on behalf of victims of sexual assault in the military. On a visit to Iowa last spring, Ms. Ernst promised to seek more reliable federal funding for Iowa’s Rape Victim Advocacy Program, whose leaders complained that state budget cuts had defunded the state’s 24-hour sexual abuse hotline and forced the advocacy program to cut staffing.
+But Ms. Ernst was also among female legislators casting doubt on the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, the educator whose allegations of high school sexual assault by Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh nearly derailed his Supreme Court nomination.
+“I’m glad that she is here, and it’s important that we hear from her,” Ms. Ernst told reporters at the time. “However, the other statements provided by those witnesses have contradicted what she is stating.” Ms. Ernst voted to confirm Justice Kavanaugh.At the time of his assassination in 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was living in a brick home on Sunset Avenue in an Atlanta neighborhood known as Vine City.
+The civil rights leader had moved there in 1965 — the year after he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize — and the house was a refuge for him, his daughter Bernice King said Thursday. It was a place where the entire family would gather around the dining room table to eat and talk, where family portraits hung on the wall, and where Dr. King and his children used to play games and watch television.
+This month, the house became the property of the National Park Service, in preparation for opening it up to the public.
+“With greater access to Dr. King’s life and legacy, we can learn more about this country’s past and how his work continues to echo through time,” said Will Shafroth, the president of the National Park Foundation, the National Park Service’s charity arm.Venezuela’s political and economic crisis took a fateful turn on Wednesday when the 35-year-old head of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president and was promptly recognized by the United States, Canada, the Organization of American States and most Latin American governments. A mass demonstration called by Mr. Guaidó brought out throngs waving flags and chanting, “Get out, Maduro!”
+But the embattled incumbent, Nicolás Maduro, defiantly stood his ground, railing against “coups” and “gringo interventions,” cutting ties with the United States and urging the armed forces to stand with him. Russia, Mr. Maduro’s ally and benefactor, weighed in with blistering warnings to the United States against any intervention. The Venezuelan defense minister declared that the armed forces, long a bastion of support for Mr. Maduro, remained behind him, but much depends on whether the rank and file will follow.
+That Mr. Maduro must go has been obvious for some time. Since he succeeded the leftist strongman Hugo Chávez in 2013, his mismanagement, cronyism and corruption, exacerbated by the drop in the price of oil, Venezuela’s dominant source of revenue, have brought the country to ruin. Hyperinflation has rendered wages virtually worthless, people are dying of starvation and lack of medical care, and millions have fled to neighboring countries.
+The question has been how to pry Mr. Maduro out without a blood bath. Mr. Maduro, with the opposition divided and the armed forces behind him, tenaciously clung to power, largely blaming a hostile United States for the country’s woes. He packed the Supreme Court with allies, created a parallel legislature, suppressed mass demonstrations by force and orchestrated his own re-election last May.Others have been considered by Intel’s board but rejected, according to five current and former Intel executives. These people, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the process, said Intel directors seemed divided on what to do.
+Inexperience with Intel’s business could be a factor. Five of nine directors have joined the board since 2016, while three longtime members stepped down last May. An Intel spokeswoman declined to comment.
+A new chief executive would take the helm at an unusual time for the industry pioneer. Intel has recently reported some of its strongest-ever financial results, with revenue for 2018 soaring 13 percent to top $70 billion. Mr. Swan vowed rapid progress in entering new markets, while analysts have praised some forthcoming chips.
+Yet Intel’s fourth-quarter results were worse than analysts expected — as was its financial projection for 2019 — while the company faces long-term questions about maintaining its dominance. Last year Intel gave up the lead in creating ever-tinier transistors on chips, the pattern observed by the Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that drives down computing and data storage costs.
+Intel has repeatedly missed deadlines to deliver its next production recipe for smaller circuitry. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which manufactures chips designed by other companies, grabbed the lead in the Moore’s Law race with chips that first appeared in Apple iPhones.
+The delayed production process actually boosted Intel’s bottom line last year by allowing the company to put off spending on new manufacturing equipment. But the technology stumble is eventually expected to aid other chip designers, a list that now includes Advanced Micro Devices, Nvidia and major customers such as Google and Amazon.
+After missing the huge market for smartphone processors, Intel recently supplanted Qualcomm in supplying cellular modems for Apple iPhones. But those sales lose money, a problem underscored in trial testimony this month by Aicha Evans, a veteran Intel executive who resigned days later to lead the start-up Zoox.After the hearing, Ms. Clark said Mr. Burton may not have been convicted on the same evidence today, given advances in interview techniques and evidence gathering. “Today his name has been cleared and now he can continue with the rest of his life,” she said at the Bronx County Hall of Justice.
+The exoneration followed a collaborative investigation started in 2016 by the Innocence Project and the Bronx district attorney’s Conviction Integrity Unit, led by Gina Mignola. Both parties filed a joint motion on Thursday asking Justice Barrett to reverse the conviction and dismiss the original indictment.
+Justice Barrett said he had presided over another homicide case in 1988 in which the same detectives who had elicited a false confession from Mr. Burton had coerced phony statements from two men, who implicated a third man in the murder. It later came out the third man was in jail at the time of the killing and could not have been involved.
+Justice Barrett said he dismissed the idea at the time that the confessions were erroneous. The case went to trial and a jury acquitted the men in an hour. On Thursday, he acknowledged his mistake in that case, and apologized for what Mr. Burton had experienced.
+Mr. Burton’s lawyers asked the Bronx district attorney’s office to participate in an audit of other cases handled by the detectives — Sgt. Frank Viggiano, Det. Stanley Schiffman and Det. Sevelie Jones — who are now retired from the police department but had served for decades.
+Efforts to reach the three retired officers were unsuccessful.
+Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, a nonprofit that uses DNA evidence to exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners, said the actions of the detectives in Mr. Burton’s case was reminiscent of Louis Scarcella, a Brooklyn detective who has been linked to several wrongful convictions.
+“When you have three false confessions within two-and-a-half months by the same set of detectives, it looks to me like Scarcella on steroids,” he said.The producer of the coming film “Red Sonja” said on Thursday that he was keeping the director Bryan Singer at the helm of the movie, suggesting that newly detailed allegations of sexual misconduct against Singer were “fake news.”
+Singer, 53, is a prominent Hollywood director, with credits including “The Usual Suspects,” “X-Men” and “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Singer was fired from “Bohemian Rhapsody” for not showing up at work, but still received a directing credit on the movie, which is nominated for a best picture Oscar.
+“The over $800 million ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ has grossed, making it the highest grossing drama in film history, is testament to his remarkable vision and acumen,” Avi Lerner, the chairman of Millennium Films and executive producer of “Red Sonja,” said in a statement. “I know the difference between agenda driven fake news and reality, and I am very comfortable with this decision. In America people are innocent until proven guilty.”
+The pointed statement came one day after The Atlantic published an investigation into Singer, documenting years of allegations that included molesting a 13-year-old boy on the set of the movie “Apt Pupil” and having sex with underage boys.Over the last two years, Amazon has aggressively marketed its facial recognition technology to police departments and federal agencies as a service to help law enforcement identify suspects more quickly. It has done so as another tech giant, Microsoft, has called on Congress to regulate the technology, arguing that it is too risky for companies to oversee on their own.
+Now a new study from researchers at the M.I.T. Media Lab has found that Amazon’s system, Rekognition, had much more difficulty in telling the gender of female faces and of darker-skinned faces in photos than similar services from IBM and Microsoft. The results raise questions about potential bias that could hamper Amazon’s drive to popularize the technology.
+In the study, published Thursday, Rekognition made no errors in recognizing the gender of lighter-skinned men. But it misclassified women as men 19 percent of the time, the researchers said, and mistook darker-skinned women for men 31 percent of the time. Microsoft’s technology mistook darker-skinned women for men just 1.5 percent of the time.
+A study published a year ago found similar problems in the programs built by IBM, Microsoft and Megvii, an artificial intelligence company in China known as Face++. Those results set off an outcry that was amplified when a co-author of the study, Joy Buolamwini, posted YouTube videos showing the technology misclassifying famous African-American women, like Michelle Obama, as men.SAN DIEGO — A year ago, Tiger Woods was ranked No. 647 in the world when he arrived at Torrey Pines Golf Course. He was coming off career-threatening spinal-fusion surgery, had not won on tour in almost five years and was happy just to be playing after another long layoff.
+The operation to fuse two vertebrae in his lower back, he said this week, was “the last-ditch effort to give me quality of life” even if it did not allow him to compete at the highest level of professional golf again. That is why he had low expectations heading into 2018 and said he was “pleased” to make the cut and finish tied for 23rd at the Farmers Insurance Open.
+A year later, much has changed, including Woods’s expectations. He made his season debut Thursday, again at Torrey Pines, but this time coming off a season of steady progress that culminated in his September victory at the Tour Championship in Atlanta — his 80th PGA Tour title, but his first since 2013. He had also climbed to No. 13 in the world rankings.
+Woods shot a two-under-par 70 in the opening round on the South Course, putting him eight shots behind the leader, Jon Rahm, in a tie for 53rd, but he seemed anything but discouraged. He has winning on his mind again.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration said Thursday that it would start blocking a small number of asylum seekers from entering the United States from Mexico, using the San Ysidro border crossing near San Diego as the first location to turn back immigrants applying for refugee status.
+The policy to block asylum seekers was first announced last month by Kirstjen Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. It will gradually be expanded over the next two weeks at border crossings with heavy foot traffic in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, according to a senior United States official briefed on the move, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
+The move is intended to dissuade immigrants, mostly from Central America, from making the long and dangerous journey through Mexico to the southwestern United States border. The policy is likely to intensify pressure on the Mexican authorities, who are already struggling to deal with thousands of Central American immigrants who have applied for humanitarian visas in Tapachula, near the border with Guatemala.MIAMI — In his 16 years living in the United States, José Antonio Colina, a former Venezuelan military officer living in South Florida, did not get married, have children, or collect too many belongings.
+“I own a minimal number of things, so that the moment I can, I can leave without any impediments,” he said. “When there is a new president in Venezuela, and the conditions exist, I will be back there the next day.”
+For the first time since he fled his home country in 2003 after turning against Venezuela’s former government, Mr. Colina, 44, thinks that day could be coming soon.
+Venezuela is in the throes of a political crisis that has for the first time in years offered some hope to the tens of thousands of people from that country who have migrated to the United States — a number that has nearly doubled since 2010. The United States is now home to more than 300,000 Venezuelans, and the numbers seeking asylum have been soaring.On Thursday, he appeared to be watching the news conference where Ms. Pelosi made her reference to Marie Antoinette. As she was speaking, he cherry-picked a snippet of her criticism as a real-time rebuttal for his Twitter feed — one that seemed to miss her larger point about his administration being too out of touch to understand the problem.
+“Nancy just said she ‘just doesn’t understand why?’” Mr. Trump tweeted, paraphrasing her remarks about the administration not understanding economic hardship. “Very simply, without a Wall it all doesn’t work. Our Country has a chance to greatly reduce Crime, Human Trafficking, Gangs and Drugs. Should have been done for decades. We will not Cave!”
+For Mr. Trump, the promise of repaying federal workers may be acknowledgment enough. As a book-writing businessman, Mr. Trump cited his disgust for a city worker on the job who “seemed to be on break,” and gained a reputation for treating workers on his construction projects poorly. As president, he has churned through advisers, especially those who have allowed any daylight to show between his public thoughts and theirs.
+Mr. Trump’s allies have maintained that he cares about federal workers, but experts have not seen this in practice. Ken Jacobs, the chairman of the Center for Labor Research and Education at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview that the president’s response to the shutdown appeared to reinforce his pattern of treating workers as disposable.
+What was “highly unusual,” Mr. Jacobs added, was that so many members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and administration have appeared to share those views.
+“When you have a cabinet filled with so many people who are as wealthy as this cabinet is,” Mr. Jacobs said, “it just seems like they just do not understand or can’t comprehend how your average person lives.”
+Other members of the Trump administration have stumbled into unfortunate optics and delivered clumsy sound bites in recent weeks. Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, was in Cabo San Lucas when the shutdown began, and flew to Los Angeles this month on the private aircraft of Michael R. Milken, the billionaire “junk bond” king who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990 and served two years in prison.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In Manhattan, where multimillion-dollar real estate sales are downright routine, a hedge fund tycoon has managed to set a new standard for conspicuous consumption by paying a fortune for an unfinished piece of property in the sky.
+The billionaire, Kenneth C. Griffin, spent $238 million for a penthouse at 220 Central Park South that is still under construction, making it the most expensive residential sale in United States history.
+What’s more, in a New York tale that is not entirely uncommon, the 79-story building where Mr. Griffin’s penthouse will soon exist was built after the landlord evicted dozens of middle class tenants from their rent-stabilized apartments in what was a fairly modest, white-brick building with 20 floors.
+With a net worth estimated at $10 billion, Mr. Griffin, founder and chief executive of the global investment firm Citadel, is among the richest people in the world. And in recent years, Mr. Griffin has become increasingly willing to flaunt his wealth, spending lavishly on modern art, philanthropy and trophy real estate, even as income inequality is roiling the national political debate.Nancy Pelosi has led the Democrats in the House for the last 16 years. She’s been in power for the party’s highs … … and lows. “Sweeping, stunning Republican victories all across the country.” “… the president of the United States.” Now she is again Speaker of the House, and leading an impeachment battle in a big election year in 2020. “I couldn’t be more honored.” So what are the tactics that have kept her in power for so long? “Good morning.” Pelosi’s affinity for politics may be genetic. “Well, I was born into a political family in Baltimore, Md. My father was in Congress when I was born, and he was mayor my whole life from when I was in first grade to when I went away to college.” But despite being raised in political circles, Pelosi didn’t jump in right away. Instead, she moved to San Francisco with her husband in the late 1960s and raised their five children as a stay-at-home mom. But as they grew up, Pelosi decided to enter the fray. Pelosi quickly rose through the ranks of the California Democratic Party, earning a reputation as a star fund-raiser, and in 1987 she won a seat in Congress. Through the ’90s Pelosi navigated the party in Washington, becoming leader in 2003. “Thank you all very much.” Since then, she’s raised millions for the Democrats. Over the years, Pelosi has earned a reputation as a shrewd legislator, especially when it comes to corralling votes. Her tactic: rewarding loyalty with good roles and coveted assignments, and punishing those who cross her. Exhibit A: when Representative John Dingell didn’t support Pelosi for Democratic whip, she eventually backed someone else to take one of his committee seats. Pelosi has never been shy about how she feels about her leadership. “Well, I’m a master legislator. I think I’m the best person to go forward to unify. I have a strong following in the country. Thank you.” And while her confidence has likely paid off, it also provides a counter to her other public persona: Democratic bogeywoman. Pelosi’s long tenure has made her an easy target for the right. “Amy McGrath is a Nancy Pelosi liberal —” “… whose name is Conor Lamb, but in Washington he’d be one of Nancy Pelosi’s sheep.” And occasionally for the left. “I didn’t support Nancy Pelosi for any leadership position. “We need some new leadership.” But when asked, she just shrugs it off. “I think I’m worth the trouble, quite frankly.” Pelosi is no stranger to a fight or a quick retort. “Please don’t characterize the strength that I bring to this meeting.” She’s battled President Bush and recent G.O.P. leaders. “Mr. President, ‘stay the course’ is not a strategy it’s a slogan.” “Say one nice thing about Paul Ryan —” “There’s a big difference between the president and me: He has very thin skin, and I have very thick skin.” And with a challenging year ahead, there are inevitably many more fights to come. “So, help us God.”A group of San Francisco Bay Area philanthropists has pledged to spend half a billion dollars to protect and expand affordable housing in the region, according to an announcement on Thursday. A central player in the project is the philanthropy founded by Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Dr. Priscilla Chan.
+The effort, called the Partnership for the Bay’s Future, is meant to combat the dizzying ascent of home prices that has run parallel with Silicon Valley’s latest expansion. In November, the median sale price for a home in the Bay Area was $815,000, according to the research firm CoreLogic.
+The money will seed an investment fund that will work to preserve housing for 175,000 families and add capacity for 8,000 new homes over the next decade through loans and other assistance to community groups. A separate $40 million fund will make grants to local governments and other groups trying to devise policies to protect affordable housing on a large scale.
+In a news release announcing the partnership, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, called the move a “bold action.” Mr. Newsom, who has criticized tech companies for not doing enough to help solve a problem they are widely believed to have exacerbated, praised the project’s collaboration of private companies, nonprofits, government agencies and community leaders.“New Eden,” of course, is not the first time “Star Trek” has made religion a central part of its plot. The franchise has historically mostly leaned toward the belief in established science over the supernatural. In “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier,” the Enterprise is hijacked by Sybok — the original undiscovered Spock sibling — in a quest to find Sha Ka Ree, as well as God. The movie is a disappointment, but did include one of the all-time great Kirk lines: “What does God need with a starship?” In “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the episode “Rightful Heir” grapples with Worf’s faith in the return of Kahless, the closest thing Klingons have to a God. Kahless was a clone.
+But there are exceptions: John de Lancie’s portrayal as Q is as much part of the Trek legacy as any warp core breach. And “New Eden” reminded me more of the heavy use of religion in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” which made Benjamin Sisko an Emissary of the Prophets. Audiences often saw his battles — emotionally and physically — with the non-corporeal Pah-wraiths.
+Is God real in Discovery? Is there some deity that’s pulling all the strings? Even the logical Burnham is beginning to wonder.
+This first two episodes this season have featured more self-contained stories, but the “Discovery” writers are also leaving some interesting larger mysteries. We don’t know why Spock needs mental help or how he was able to predict the signals. And we also don’t learn how exactly the humans escaped World War III, except from a recovered video clip that shows the same angelic figure Burnham saw in the season premiere. It’s suggested that all these puzzle pieces fit somehow, and someone — perhaps Spock — wants the Discovery to piece them together.
+The unanswered questions remain compelling, but there were some problematic aspects of the episode. There’s no point in harping on many of the canon inconsistencies in “Discovery.” Technologically, the ship seems way more advanced than the most recent version of the Enterprise we’ve seen, even though it existed several centuries before. As a viewer, you have to not sweat the small stuff.NATIONAL
+An article on Tuesday about the Supreme Court’s decision to hear a case related to vulgar trademarks referred incorrectly to the etymology of the “most versatile” curse word. It is of Middle English origin, not Anglo-Saxon.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Wednesday about cryptocurrency mining in Georgia misstated the energy price paid by Bitfury. It is 5 to 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, not per hour.
+ARTS
+An article on Wednesday about the 91st Academy Awards referred imprecisely to the filming of “The Artist.” Although it was a French film, and production took place in France, it was filmed in the United States.
+SCIENCE TIMES
+An article on the cover on Tuesday about increasing noise levels in the oceans from shipping and oil exploration misstated the decibel levels of underwater seismic blasts, and miscalculated the comparison to sounds in the atmosphere made by container ships. Underwater, the seismic blast would register at about 200 decibels, not 260 decibels. By comparison, that seismic blast would then be 10 times more intense than the sound of a container ship, not 10 million times more intense.Plays about women’s can-I-have-it-all conflicts too often resemble a Crate & Barrel catalog in both décor and decorum. So it’s a relief to find that there isn’t a sofa in sight in “The Convent,” nor even a pouf or a pew. Instead, Jessica Dickey’s new drama, which opened on Thursday evening in a handsome, sometimes hysterical production directed by Daniel Talbott at A.R.T./New York, swims vigorously (if then laboriously) against the tide of contemporary domesticity.
+At first, “The Convent” doesn’t even seem to take place in the present, let alone in a living room. As we file into seats on either side of the long, narrow playing space designed by Raul Abrego, we see two women in homespun robes sitting in what looks like a medieval cloister, complete with flagstones, plantings and, in evocative projections by Katherine Freer, forever views of lavender and wheat.
+The illusion of eternity is shattered by the very first (unquotable) words spoken, as a third woman arrives breathless after climbing to the site. We quickly discern that this woman, Jill (Margaret Odette), and the other two, Dimlin (Annabel Capper) and Bertie (Amy Berryman), are contemporary pilgrims who have come to the restored convent, in the south of France, for a weeklong feminist spiritual retreat. Soon, three more — Tina (Brittany Anikka Liu), Wilma (Lisa Ramirez) and Patti (Samantha Soule) — show up panting, more or less eager to surrender their unhappiness along with their cellphones.
+But it will not be so easy, as Mother Abbess (Wendy vanden Heuvel) soon tells them. “Women cannot follow men,” she explains; they must in some way follow themselves. “We could say you are here because a kind of fog has rolled in between you and your leader, and so your life has become frightening, even hostile, disoriented.”Sam Shepard’s wild West just got a lot scarier.
+I’m talking about that shadowy, shifting desertscape occupied so disharmoniously by the two brothers of Shepard’s 1980 masterwork, “True West,” which has been given a ripping revival by James Macdonald at the American Airlines Theater. As embodied by a brilliant Ethan Hawke, in full-menace mode, and a tightly wired Paul Dano, everyday sibling rivalry has seldom felt this ominous.
+[Read more about Paul Dano, and his reflections on acting and directing.]
+It’s not that you worry that one’s going to kill the other, in the time-honored tradition of Cain and Abel, although that looms as a possibility. What’s really threatening in this Roundabout Theater Company production, which opened on Thursday night, is its creeping, gut-knotting insistence that family is no fortress against a darkness that erases all sense of a separate self.
+On the contrary. When it comes to getting lost in the gloaming of existential nothingness, there’s no place like home.
+Anyone who knows the work of Shepard, who died in 2017, will be familiar with this discomfiting perspective. “A Lie of the Mind,” the name of his 1985 portrait of a family in fission, could well be an umbrella title for the series of domestic dramas that preceded it, including his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Buried Child” (1978). (Footnote: Mr. Hawke has Shepard cred, having appeared in the 1995 Steppenwolf revival of “Buried Child” in Chicago and directed a first-rate “Lie of the Mind” in New York in 2010.)“They’re relying on the pure good intentions of the higher skilled work force. And that’s what they drain down the most quickly in these stupid shutdowns.”
+MATT LINTON, a computer security specialist who left NASA after the 2013 shutdown, on fears that highly skilled employees will leave government work.FRIDAY PUZZLE — Hand up if you feel even just a bit intimidated by Friday puzzles. That’s O.K., I was scared of them in the beginning, too. So I’m putting my hand up with you.
+I know. There are a lot of solvers in the comments who talk about how easy the puzzles are, but I’m going to tell you a secret: at one point, they were beginners, too.
+Don’t ever let anyone else’s solving experience interfere with your own joy and hard work. Comparing yourself to others gets you nowhere. It certainly doesn’t make you a better solver. Your puzzle is yours, and you don’t have to measure up to anyone else. We’re playing here, remember? The whole point is to have fun and learn something.
+But I still hear from a lot of solvers who are certain, absolutely sure, Deb, that they cannot manage a Friday puzzle. Maybe you can’t. But maybe you can.A third person has died from his injuries after a man wielding a hammer entered a Brooklyn restaurant last week and attacked its employees.
+The manager of the Seaport Buffet, Tsz Pun, 50, died Thursday morning at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn, the police said.
+His death came nine days after a man entered the Chinese restaurant in Sheepshead Bay and began beating employees, the police said. A chef at the restaurant, 34-year-old Fufai Pun, died the same night at a hospital. A 60-year-old owner, whom The Associated Press identified as Kheong Ng-Thang, died from his injuries on Friday.
+The suspect in the killings, Arthur Martunovich, 34, of nearby Brighton Beach, was arrested within blocks of the restaurant after the Jan. 15 attack, and the hammer was recovered. A police official said he remained hospitalized in a psychiatric ward.Ukraine: Former President Viktor Yanukovych was found guilty of treason for inviting Russia to invade his country and reverse a pro-Western revolution five years ago.
+Georgia: The former Soviet Republic has been fashioning itself into a global hub for bitcoin mining. About 200,000 Georgians have gotten into the game, even selling cars and cows to buy equipment, and about 10 percent of the country’s energy goes into the cryptocurrency endeavor.
+$238 million: That’s what a hedge fund billionaire paid for an apartment in New York City — the highest price ever paid for a home in the U.S. — heightening debate about income inequality.
+Prince William: Long outspoken about his own emotional struggles, the British royal has taken his campaign for mental health awareness to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, urging global leaders to help break the stigma.
+Brazil: Just three weeks into his term, Jair Bolsonaro, who rode to the presidency denouncing corruption and elitist privilege, is now trying to fend off charges that his far-right administration is exhibiting just that.
+Currency: Claims by an Italian deputy prime minister, against expert consensus, that a French-backed currency used by 14 African nations was accelerating migration have highlighted a long-running debate over whether the currency is stabilizing or neocolonial.Good Friday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• Two Senate bills to end the government shutdown — one with border wall funding, one without — failed, sending lawmakers from both parties into frenzied efforts to forge a compromise. Federal workers are about to miss a second consecutive paycheck on Friday.
+• The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a subpoena to compel Michael D. Cohen, President Trump’s former lawyer, to formally correct false testimony he gave last year about a proposed Trump Organization project in Moscow.
+• Democrats are making the most of gaffes about the shutdown from Trump administration officials, some of whom have been less than careful about their messaging.Always described as “laid back” and an “eternal optimist” by those who knew him, he was now quick to anger, especially when his things weren’t where he expected them to be. A once successful and busy urban planner, he could no longer do professional work, nor could he keep pace with carpenters or handymen, jobs he had excelled at previously.
+Before his accident, he was often the life of the party, cajoling friends into dance competitions. He designed an obstacle course for my birthday, made a glow-in-the-dark hula hoop to use at our annual big group camping trips and organized 10 grown men to dance to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” for my bachelorette party. Now he tired easily in social situations and would nap in a quiet room or sit with his eyes closed in the corner.
+Our marriage suffered, mostly because our once shared burdens of work and home now fell so much more on me. But there were also surprising upsides. Early in our relationship, Christian had resisted getting a dog, even though I wanted one, because of how it would tie us down and hamper our travel. Neither of us wanted children and he’d happily gotten a vasectomy. Now he expressed a desire for both dogs and children, and talked about reversing his vasectomy, making me second guess my decisions.
+Eventually we were able to resume our long bike rides, with him on a recumbent tricycle (lacking the balance for a two-wheeler). He used to ride in front, acting as my wind block, guide and protector. Now he trails behind. I look down at his helmet, at the person on the bright yellow recumbent tricycle and wonder, “Who is this stranger?”
+His sense of humor has remained more or less intact, if differently delivered. For the first Halloween after his crash, he dressed up as a person with a head injury, wrapping his head in gauze upon which he’d dribbled red food coloring. Around his neck he wore a sign that read: “Too soon?”
+Yes, too soon, his friends said. (But it was funny.)
+What does it mean to grieve someone who is alive, but who walks, talks, thinks, acts and looks different from before? The experts call this kind of loss “ambiguous grief” or “unconventional grief.” People with loved ones who fall prey to Alzheimer’s may experience this, as may parents whose children become alcoholics or drug addicts.PARIS — A new couture collection was not the only unveiling masterminded by Giorgio Armani this week. On Friday , the Italian fashion designer — who was on the 2018 Forbes list of the world’s billionaires — was scheduled to announce plans to redevelop his Giorgio Armani boutique at 760 Madison Avenue in New York City, creating not just a new flagship but, above it, the interiors for 19 new luxury apartments.
+It will give fresh meaning to the phrase “living above the shop.”
+The deal, in partnership with SL Green, New York’s largest commercial property owner and the building’s owner, is hardly Mr. Armani’s first foray into the world of property development and interior design. The Armani/Casa Interior Design Studio arm of the Armani empire was introduced 16 years ago, and has been behind a host of blockbuster projects, including the Armani Hotel in Dubai (opened in 2010) and residential offerings in cities including Miami, Istanbul, London, Mumbai and Beijing.
+However, the latest project in New York is one of the most significant yet, and reflects the shift by many wealthy shoppers away from luxury handbags and gowns and toward experiences. Global spending on the so-called experience economy, which is being driven primarily by millennial consumers, is expected to reach $8.2 trillion by 2028, according to the market research firm Euromonitor.
+Image Giorgio Armani
+The latest Armani announcement came six weeks after LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury group, said it would buy Belmond, owner of such storied properties as the Hotel Cipriani in Venice, Copacabana Palace in Rio de Janeiro and the Orient Express rail service. The deal, valued at $2.6 billion, further underscores the growing importance that opulent experiences are expected to play in what traditionally has been a product-driven market.Ryan Coogler’s “Rocky” reboot airs on Paramount Network. And Paul Schrader’s bleak, rhythmic “First Reformed” streams on Kanopy.
+What’s on TV
+CREED (2015) 8 p.m. on Paramount Network. He may not have been nominated for an Academy Award for best director this week, but Ryan Coogler is still making history. His “Black Panther,” which he directed and co-wrote, is the first superhero movie to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture. And it’s only Coogler’s third feature. “Creed,” his second, resurrected Rocky Balboa for a new generation through a story centered on a young boxer, Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), the son of Rocky’s enemy-turned-comrade Apollo Creed. An older, weathered Rocky (Sylvester Stallone, of course) takes Adonis under his wing. We also see the blossoming of a relationship between Adonis and a Philadelphia musician (Tessa Thompson) and a scene on those Philadelphia Museum of Art steps Stallone ran up about 40 years earlier. The movie manages to be “self-aware without being cute about it,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. He said that Coogler “looks at the Rocky story and the tradition of Hollywood pugilism through a fresh prism” and that the film itself is at once “soothingly old-fashioned and bracingly up-to-date.”
+ROY WOOD JR.: NO ONE LOVES YOU 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Roy Wood Jr., a correspondent on “The Daily Show,” tackles the N.F.L. national anthem controversy, the challenges faced by black superheroes and many other subjects in this hourlong comedy special, filmed at the Vic Theater in Chicago. “America is a restaurant that sells equality,” he observes from the stage. “Some of you all had some delicious equality, it was good, you had great service. And some of us need to speak to a manager.”Some trekking operators, which act as brokers and take a percentage of rescue fees from helicopter companies, make more money through evacuations than they do charging for hikes. The typical profit margin for each hiker heading to Everest might be just a few hundred dollars. Participating in the scam could net operators thousands of dollars in kickbacks.
+The investigation last year by Traveller Assist found evidence of fraud by four hospitals and 13 helicopter, charter and rescue companies. The separate investigation by Nepal’s government identified most of those same companies. A few dozen more trekking companies are thought to be involved.
+“To say this is a complex problem is an understatement,” said Danny Kaine, head of assistance at Traveller Assist. “Fraud and corruption in the helicopter rescue industry in Nepal are so ingrained in some companies. It has become an accepted way of doing business.”
+Insurance companies initially struggled to track the fraud, though it has been occurring since at least the early 2010s. But over the last few years, the number of insurance claims from Nepal shot up dramatically.
+Alarmed at the increase, travel insurance companies created internal blacklists of Nepali helicopter companies and hospitals, posted advisories warning trekkers of the scam and raised premiums.
+Traveller Assist found that about 1,600 helicopter rescues had occurred in Nepal from January to August 2018, out of which 35 percent were considered fraudulent, costing insurers some $4 million in losses.
+In September, Nepal’s government introduced a new monitoring program that required companies to submit bills to the department of tourism to ensure that they were genuine.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.
+_________
+The word hoary has appeared in 29 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 17 in the theater review “Glenn Close Raises a Saint in ‘Mother of the Maid’” by Ben Brantley:
+The premise of “Mother of the Maid” is smart, simple and encapsulated in its high-concept title. Ms. Anderson — whose credits include the play “Defying Gravity” and the HBO series “Olive Kitteridge” — revisits the well-plowed terrain of Joan’s path to martyrdom from the point of view of her proud but understandably fearful mom.
+.... Isabelle’s story doesn’t need meta-theatrical touches. And as Joan marches on to predetermined glory and doom, the revised script avoids irony for a more conventional account guaranteed to push the emotional buttons of any parent who has felt equal elation and terror as she watches her child grow up. Ms. Anderson doesn’t break new ground in exploring those reactions. But sometimes context can make the hoary feel bracingly fresh.Do you think it’s a good idea for parents to use smart devices — like spy cameras, location tracking devices or other alert systems — to keep tabs on their children when they’re home alone? Why or why not?
+Do your parents monitor you when you’re home by yourself? If so, how do you feel about it? It not, how would you feel if they did?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to find out one mother’s opinion on the matter.Smoke blinded the security guards inside a warehouse at a nuclear weapons facility in Nevada. Clangs and shouts filled the air.
+Amid the din, a guard named Jennifer Glover was thrown to the ground, handcuffed and hit across the face with the butt of a gun. One man ran his hands up her legs, she said, then grabbed her buttocks and groin. Another flipped her over, reached into her top to grab her breasts and ripped out her nipple ring.
+By the time the smoke cleared, they had disappeared.
+Ms. Glover could not identify her attackers. But she said she knew they were her colleagues, fellow guards taking part in a training exercise at the Energy Department’s highly classified Nevada National Security Site, where researchers and scientists conduct top-secret nuclear experiments and develop responses to chemical, biological and nuclear emergencies.
+The encounter in November 2017 followed months of sexual harassment that she said began soon after she was hired. Her troubles worsened after she reported the attack: Men continued to harass and intimidate her, she said, and they accused her of informing on them. She was reprimanded for calling out sick, which she said she did to avoid her attackers, and was ordered to undergo psychiatric evaluations.Businesses have been sounding the alarm over Britain’s impending departure from the European Union ever since its approval in a 2016 referendum. But this week, with lawmakers unable to agree on any sort of orderly plan as the March deadline for a deal nears, their warnings rang louder — and some decided to act.
+Airbus and Bentley called the prospect of Brexit without an agreement a “killer” and a “disgrace.” Sony, concerned about Brexit-generated disruptions, said it would move its European headquarters from Surrey to the Netherlands. Other companies are furiously stockpiling supplies, while civil servants are scrambling to prepare for emergency arrangements.
+While politicians may yet pull together a deal before March 29, analysts say businesses have run out of time. The precarious state of affairs is already damaging the economy.
+“Until the middle of last year, it was a slow burn — we lost about 2 to 3 percent of output,” said Amit Kara, head of British macroeconomic research at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research. “My feeling is it has gathered a little bit of pace since then.”1 of 11
+(Editors’ note: After this quiz was published, President Trump signed a bill to fully reopen the government for three weeks while negotiations continued over how to secure the U.S. border with Mexico. The original question is below, but the answer has been updated to include links to the latest Times coverage.)
+The Senate voted Thursday on two measures to end the partial government shutdown. Both failed.
+One included the $5.7 billion for a wall on the southern border that President Trump has called for, in exchange for protections for roughly 700,000 young undocumented immigrants.
+How long would those immigrants, known as Dreamers, have been shielded from deportation under the terms of Mr. Trump’s deal?[music] “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” first published in 1936, was a critical guide for African-Americans traveling during the ‘40s, ‘50s and early ‘60s. [music] It was created by a Harlem postal worker, Victor Green, and his colleagues, who gathered a listing of restaurants, bars, hotels and private homes that welcomed black travelers across the country. [music] In a time where Americans started hitting the road, African-Americans faced restrictions as they traveled. Although you could purchase a car, you couldn’t get gas, stay in hotels or eat in restaurants. Travel was difficult and dangerous. [music] Ben’s Chili Bowl, at 1213 U Street, Washington, D.C., was originally a silent movie theater called the Minnehaha. It was later featured in the “Green Book” as a pool hall. Since 1958, Ben’s Chili Bowl has continued the legacy of the “Green Book,” providing a refuge for the whole community. [music] I was born in Washington, D.C., in 1939 in a segregated hospital. I lived in a segregated neighborhood and I went to a segregated school. First, I didn’t realize any difference because all the people around me looked like me. And I was comfortable with that, until I realized that I was being discriminated against. [music] We couldn’t shop downtown at the major stores. You couldn’t try on clothes. You couldn’t try on hats. Because if you tried them on, they didn’t want you to get grease on the hats. You know, we oil our hair. And our makeup is dark, and so they didn’t want us to try on clothes because you might get makeup on the clothes. I remember being about 7, maybe 10 years old in Hecht’s department store when a little girl called me a nigger and spat on me. And I couldn’t retaliate. I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t do anything. I was so angry inside, but I couldn’t do anything about it because I knew that it would be blamed on me. [interposing voices] “The ‘Green Book’ was a guide for African-Americans to travel safely, to find shelter, food and gas in a time where these basic rights were not guaranteed.” [interposing voices] “Washington, D.C., had more listings in the ‘Green Book’ than any other city in this country. The 1213 U Street was listed in the ‘Green Book,’ and that’s why we’re sitting here in Ben’s Chili Bowl at 1213 U Street today. From the very day that we opened up to the current time, it’s still a safe haven for people.” [music] “And we invited the community in, and we started with the neighborhood young men that thought this was home for them. They always sat over there in that corner. There was always eight, six, eight, 10 of them every evening, from different walks of life in the community. When someone spilled something on the floor and the staff was busy, one of them took care of it — go in the back, get the mop. If we were running out of ice, they’d say, ‘Hey, Joe, go get some ice for me’ — kind of place. That was really the beginning of the building of the relationship with this community, these young guys that found this to be home. As soon as they started to broadcast professional basketball, they put the TV up for them to keep them here so they wouldn’t have to go see that game someplace else. We didn’t have TVs in Ben’s Chili Bowl, but that was for them. And that brought in that segment of our community. And then, of course, this being the strong close-knit community that it was, when you came here for a chili dog, you ran into a friend.” [music] Particularly in the early ‘50s, when we would leave Washington, D.C., on the train, we could sit anywhere on the train, until you got to the Virginia line. And when you get to the Virginia line, you had to go to the last train on the back. And I remember being so frustrated because we could not eat on the highway if the train stopped. We couldn’t eat. We couldn’t relieve ourselves on the train. You either had to hold it or relieve yourself sitting there, and then you’re wet. When the train stopped, you would get off the train and you would relieve yourself outside, almost like you would if you were a dog. [music] And that’s the way basically I thought that white people felt about me as a black African-American — or Negro woman, or nigger woman, or whatever — that they felt like I was not human, not a human being, that I was less than a human being. I see people treat their dogs better now. Right now, they treat the dogs better than they treated us as black Americans. [interposing voices] “Well, one of the things that I remember was traveling from southwest Georgia down to Mississippi. And this was right after Miss Hamer had been beaten. I mean, they dragged her off the bus and beat her and crippled her. And one of the things that I remembered on that bus, I felt two things. First, I had to sit in the front of the bus, just like you. But second, I also was, in my head, saying, what am I going to do if these people come on the bus and try to treat me like Miss Hamer? And one of the things I was very clear about is that I was not getting off the bus and going to any of these places to try to use the bathroom. I was not going to get off the bus to try to get anything to eat. I knew enough to pack a lunch before I got on that bus. Now, it was a 10-hour ride from Albany, Ga., down to Jackson, Miss. But, I mean, it was really tough trying to not only deal with the question of where you’re going to go to the bathroom, where you’re going to go eat, but whether if you exercised your right under the law, whether somebody was going to come up there and try to assault you. That was a reality that we wanted to change. I mean, I remember I was maybe 14 years old when I started seeing the challenge, the real challenge, in Montgomery with the bus boycott, with Rosa Parks. Just in terms of local transportation and interstate transportation, we had to face people telling us, you’re not good as we are. And now because of people who got on the bus and challenged the institutions that were developed, you can dream big. You can dream bigger than we could dream. It was important. I mean, the biggest thing that we were able to do — and Frank can tell you this — the biggest thing we were able to do is we were able to say, you cannot block our dreams. Now we couldn’t say what our dreams were, but we could say, you can’t block our dreams. You can’t tell us what we can’t do. We’re going to kick down all these barriers.” [music] “Those barriers could be life threatening. Every trip through America for a black person during those times was potentially fatal. It seemed like many people were out to hurt us, or even kill us, just because we were black.” [thud] [grunt] [thud] [thud] [thud] [siren blaring] “The assumption is, at some time it stopped. And that’s not the case. It never stopped.” [shouting] “That’s a continuous thing that hasn’t changed since the beginning of the relationship that exists here between blacks and whites in the United States. It’s like a river that keeps flowing, and we don’t really see all of it. But at the end of the day, it’s something that started back in slavery and continues today. Young black people don’t have the ‘Green Book’ in front of them, but they have it in their head. We are no longer looking at ‘No Negroes Allowed’ and stuff like that, but you’re looking at the same thing, which says, these are barriers here. And then people feel that if you cross these barriers, they have a right to kill you.” [shouting] [music] “Tamir was such a energetic kid. At 12 years old, he would actually get up in my arms, as big as he was, and let me hold him and kiss him and squeeze all on him.” [music] “So that day when you got the knock on the door, what happened?” “So, I was actually coming from the store and putting groceries up, and a knock came at the door. Two little boys told me that my son was shot by the police. And I was like in denial. I’m like, ‘No, you’re not talking about my kids. My kids is at the rec playing.’ And my oldest son was laying on the couch. He wasn’t feeling well. But he ran out right past me. I guess he heard it in the little boy’s voice. And he ran out before me, and I’m still trying to get my coat and my shoes on, talking about, ‘No, my kids is playing.’ And surely enough, as I walk across the street around a little track where I could see the kids, my son is laying on the ground with 10 police officers surrounding him. And my daughter is screaming in the back of the police car. And they have my other son surrounded, and they put him in the back of the police car. So it was terrible. That’s how that day turned out. The police asked me — well they didn’t ask me, they told me to calm down or they were going to put me in the back of the police car. Because I was trying to get to my son. They never let me get to him. They also let me ride in the front seat as a passenger.” “Of the police car.” “Of the ambulance.” “Of the ambulance.” “So I never even got a chance to get back close to my son, to hold his hand, to kiss him and let him know that it was going to be all right. I don’t know what they were doing.” “So he was in the back of the ambulance, and you were in the front.” “Yeah, I was in the front, like a passenger.” “What kind of service were they giving Tamir at the scene?” “I don’t know because they were surrounding him.” “They were surrounding him.” “I couldn’t really see.” “What were the officers doing? They were just standing there?” “Well they were just blocking me, not letting me go towards him, and telling me to calm down. And I’m telling them, you need to let my kids out the car. They’re minors and stuff like that. And like I told you, they gave me an ultimatum to stay at the scene of the crime with the other two children or to go with Tamir. I chose to go with Tamir, and I had to leave two children at the scene of a crime.” [music] “Everybody see what happened to my son. They didn’t even want to release that tape. My attorney had to threaten them to release the tape. And after that tape was released, it just went worldwide.” “What did you see on that tape? What was your reaction to it?” “My son was scared when they rolled up. He was scared. And he shrugged his shoulders, like this. They tried to say he was reaching for his waistband. He wasn’t reaching for nothing. When you roll up fast like that, you scared him.” “Absolutely.” “And that’s what I see.” “He was just stuck. He was just like — “ “Yeah. Like, what did I do?” “Right.” “Yeah. So, yeah, I will never get that vision out my head. That’s devastating. I play it over and over again. Also, with the picture of him laying on a gurney, and they would not allow me to touch him because they said he was evidence. So I didn’t even get a chance to touch him or none of that. No kiss goodbye. No nothing. No feeling him or nothing. So they said he was evidence, so I couldn’t touch him. And I don’t really know how that works.” “What ultimately happened to Tamir’s body?” “So — I had to get Tamir — well I didn’t have to, I choose to get him cremated. I don’t really think I told anyone that. But I don’t want to leave my son in Cleveland when I leave Ohio, so I will be taking him and my mother with me and have them in urns in my house.” “So to take him everywhere that you go, every stage of the rest of your life.” “Yeah, he has to go with me. Yeah. Because he just has to go. I wasn’t finished raising him, you know? I wasn’t finished nourishing him. And America robbed me. Yep, they robbed me.” “So when people talk about the American dream, what do you call it?” “A nightmare, especially if you’re black. Yeah.” [music] Traveling while black means to me that discrimination, segregation is still alive and well. And that even though I don’t have to have the “Green Book” to guide me to a black person’s house and I can stay in any hotel I want, but just think about the people who have been killed while traveling black. A young man, who was involved in the schools in the area where he lived, killed in front of his fiancée and their child, traveling while black. Traveling while black, I’m driving down the highway and the police decide to stop me. Even though I’m an elderly black woman, I could be killed just because I’m black and don’t give them the answer that they want. Traveling while black in America is still happening. And I am really frightened for black men traveling while black. I wonder, when does it end? [music]Before reading the article:
+With the Super Bowl approaching, it’s a good time to appreciate the athletic prowess of N.F.L. athletes.
+Watch the three videos of one-handed catches featured in the article.
+Which catch do you think was the best or most impressive, and why?
+Now, read the article, “Grab and Go: How Sticky Gloves Have Changed Football,” and answer the following questions:
+1. The article begins, “One of the most infamous dropped passes in football history clanged off Dallas Cowboys tight end Jackie Smith as he lay in the end zone during Super Bowl XIII.” Why did David Waldstein, the author, choose a play from 40 years ago to open the piece? Why does he suggest that Smith’s fortune might have been different if he were playing football today?
+2. Mr. Waldstein writes: “When a catch is made, the naked eye often sees only hands grabbing a ball. But what is happening on the palms of a receiver’s gloves is far more complex.” In your own words, explain the science involved when a player catches a ball while wearing silicone gloves.Like many stories of its kind — migrants fleeing unbearable lives — this one begins at sea, with 60 people jammed like livestock headed to market in a dinghy best suited for six.
+What makes the journey of these immigrants from the Middle East and Northern Africa different from others is not the dangers they braved before a Spanish rescue crew spotted them last summer in the Mediterranean. Every day, migrants risk everything when they set sail for Europe — drowning, starvation, suffocation and, if they reach land, rejection, detention, even enslavement by traffickers.
+What makes this story unique is its happy ending, almost as if in a fairy tale.In a typical morning class at American Ballet Theater, the brightly lit studio feels like a laboratory. If you’ve watched these dancers in performance, you might be surprised at how messy they can be when practicing, falling out of turns, missing the landing of jumps.
+On a Friday before “Nutcracker” season, the ballet master Vladilen Semenov remained relatively quiet, explaining a combination before stepping back to watch to the mixed class of men and women. But the dancers had their own agendas, testing their bodies in experiments of strength, flexibility and physics. A handful of the women, instead of going on point, stayed in slippers to try the men’s steps.
+Ballet is widely seen as putting women on a pedestal — male dancers literally lift them over their heads — reinforcing conventional ideas about masculinity and femininity. The pas de deux, or romantic male-female duet, is considered by many to be the art form’s linchpin, but it can seem sentimental, or worse, sexist. Can ballet reflect contemporary ideas about gender? This question is crucial in determining its future standing and reception, especially among audience members unfamiliar with its traditions.
+These stereotypes, though, are being challenged on a daily basis in company studios, as ballet dancers everywhere ask why their gender identity should determine the way they dance. Women can jump higher and complete more turns than ever before, skills traditionally associated with male dancers. For their part, men are training to incorporate the stretch and finesse that has long been standard for female dancers.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+T.S.A. in Slow Motion
+When Jimmy Fallon found out that a legal marijuana vendor is offering free medical cannabis to government workers during the shutdown, he imagined some unintended side effects for travelers.‘Chicken nuggets hatch from the eggs of eagles.’
+— From “Hinterlands,” a poem by Sy Hoahwah, as collected in “New Poets of Native Nations” (Graywolf Press, 2018, Page 153), edited by Heid E. Erdrich.
+Here is a whole sprawling history of the United States packed into one line of poetry, courtesy of the Yappithuka Comanche/Southern Arapaho writer Sy Hoahwah. Read it again. Think of recent news events. Read it again.
+The egg of a bald eagle is roughly the size of a human fist. Mothers usually lay one to three per year. Hatching a chick requires sitting, for many vigilant weeks, in a nest that can be as big as a refrigerator. This is followed by months of more-or-less constant feeding: strips of fish, possum bits, duck chunks. For eaglets, death is a coin flip. If they make it, they will sprout six-foot wingspans and take short test flights, swooping onto nearby branches before returning to the nest for more free food. In the first half of the 20th century, bald eagles were so abundant that officials offered bounties to kill them. By 1979, Americans had nearly annihilated our national bird in the lower 48 states.
+Coincidentally, in 1979, McDonald’s was also panicking about birds. Consumers had developed a hankering for chicken — a crisis, obviously, for a business that was built on the industrialized pulping of cows. So the company’s chairman put in a request to the lab. Was it possible to turn chickens — those skittish, bony, feathery, beaky creatures — into soft globs the size of your thumb? Of course it was. The result was the McNugget, a highly processed gumdrop of meat. It is the epitome of food divorced from its source. As Eric Schlosser puts it in “Fast Food Nation”: “The Chicken McNugget turned a bird that once had to be carved at a table into something that could easily be eaten behind the wheel of a car.”Exercise and eating have a fraught, unsettled relationship with each other. Workouts can blunt or boost appetites. People who start an exercise program often overeat and gain weight — and yet studies and lived experience demonstrate that regular exercise is needed to avoid regaining the weight lost during a successful diet. Intrigued by these contradictory outcomes, researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, along with colleagues from other institutions, ran an experiment on the melanocortin circuit, a brain network in the hypothalamus known to be involved in metabolism. The resulting study, published in December in Molecular Metabolism, suggests that intense exercise might change the workings of certain neurons in ways that could have beneficial effects on appetite and metabolism.
+The melanocortin circuit consists mainly of two types of neurons. The neuropeptide Y (NPY) cells relay signals encouraging the body to seek food, while the pro-opiomelanocortin (POMC) neurons countermand those orders, reducing interest in food. Animals, including humans, that lack healthy POMC neurons usually become morbidly obese. The researchers focused on what exercise would do to these cells in mice, whose melanocortin circuits resemble ours. Healthy adult male mice either ran on small treadmills or, in a control group, were placed on unmoving treadmills. The exercise routine consisted of 60 minutes of fast, intense running, broken into three 20-minute blocks. Afterward, the mice were free to eat or not, as they chose. The researchers then checked neuronal activity in some of their brains by microscopically probing individual cells in living tissue to measure their electrical and biochemical signals. The tests were repeated throughout the study, which ran for as many as 10 days for some mice.
+Exercise had a considerable impact on their melanocortin circuitry. The runners’ POMC neurons were much more active than those in the idle mice, even after a single workout, for up to 48 hours. And their NPY neurons were quieter, although their activity rebounded after about six hours. The mice also ate less after exercise than had been their habit before.
+These findings could help us understand “why many people report little interest in food in the hours after intense exercise,” says Kevin W. Williams, an assistant professor who specializes in hypothalamic research at UT Southwestern Medical Center and the study’s senior author. The data also suggest that continued training potentially remodels the neuronal circuitry in ways that endure, which might partly explain why exercise so often helps with long-term weight management.Q. I know that antibiotics don’t treat viruses, but at some point, isn’t it time to try one?
+A. With the caveat that medical expertise is required to differentiate bacterial illnesses from viral ones, many common infections have features that can help you decide when an antibiotic might be appropriate.
+In patients with bronchitis, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that an antibiotic could be needed in patients who have a heart rate greater than 100 beats per minute or a fever greater than 100.4 degrees, or who are breathing more rapidly than 24 times per minute.
+In patients with sinusitis, the American College of Physicians states that an antibiotic might be indicated when symptoms persist for more than 10 days; are severe; or are associated with three days of fever greater than 102.2 degrees, colored nasal discharge and facial pain. Antibiotics may also be needed in cases of “double sickening,” that is, worsening after several days of initial improvement.
+In patients with sore throat, the Infectious Diseases Society of America recommends that antibiotics be used only in patients who have a positive strep test. Symptoms that suggest a viral sore throat — and hence do not require an antibiotic — include cough, runny nose and hoarse voice.And after years of living a “secular” life, I realized that my notion of sin has evolved. As a girl, my focus was on gaining admittance to heaven. Now I believe that this life is the only life we’ll know; this planet, our only existence. I am no longer motivated by fear of an unproven hell, but by real-world concerns about injustice and inequality.
+Although I no longer have contact with my parents and live a very different life, we do have this in common. Just as my parents’ approach to imparting their values was shaped by an effort to avoid the sins they feared, I am raising my two daughters according to my moral code. To me, the greatest sin of all is failing to be an engaged citizen of the world, so the lessons are about being open to others rather than closed off.
+We started taking our kids to marches when the younger one, Davia, was an infant perched on our shoulders and 3-year-old Tessa danced between the lines of protesters as if it were a block party. We’ve marched for racial justice and for women’s rights. Our church is the street, our congregation our fellow crusaders. We teach our children to respect the earth by reducing, reusing and recycling.
+It’s sinking in. My daughters make me proud by taking their own actions to confront injustice where they see it — by insisting we keep a box of protein bars in the car to hand out to homeless people at stoplights, by participating in school walkouts against gun violence, by intervening when they see kids bullied on the playground, by always questioning the world around them.
+Their activism has even inspired others. In 2016, Tessa choreographed 20 grade-schoolers in a “Kids for Hillary” pantsuit flash mob in Berkeley which was featured by local media outlets as well as Fast Company and even Courrier Japon.
+As we stood in line a few weeks ago at the Dickens Fair, I realized that my kids already knew what sin was, without ever having been exposed to the onerous religious weight of the word. Despite being unchurched, they are empathetic, loving and kind. And even more: They are fearless.
+I gazed into Davia’s upturned face and felt a rush of love and happiness. I had raised her without sin. Here was a kid who’d recently joked that the Christmas standard “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” should be changed to “I’m Dreaming of a Diverse Christmas.”A variety of economic research has compared the results of generous family policies in other rich countries and the lack of such policies in the United States. Although the research doesn’t conclude what would work in the United States, it provides some clues.
+One study looked at the effect of paid leave on employment rates, women’s wages and health outcomes for babies. “The sweet spot was probably six to nine months,” said one of the authors, Christopher J. Ruhm, an economist at the University of Virginia. Longer leaves had a negative effect on women’s careers.
+In countries with very long leaves, Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn at Cornell found, women are more likely to work, but they are also more likely to be in dead-end jobs than women in the United States.
+“A possibility is it encourages employers to kind of mommy-track women, to put women into lower-level positions where it won’t be as difficult to the employer to accommodate a long time out,” Ms. Blau said.
+Claudia Olivetti at Boston College and Barbara Petrongolo at Queen Mary University of London found little evidence that extended leaves had a positive effect on women’s employment or earnings — but found that subsidized child care and preschool did. “You want to make it easier for mothers to work, and when you talk about paid leave in isolation, the issue is who is going to take care of the baby after, and how much does it cost?” Ms. Olivetti said.
+Research on paid leave in California has found that short leaves have a neutral or positive effect on employers, but the effect of long leaves on U.S. employers is unknown . The Gates Foundation serves as an American test case.
+A year was too long for several reasons, Mr. Rice said. It was hard for employees to hand off their work for a year. When they returned, the organization had usually changed to the point that re-entry was very time-consuming. And moving people around among the foundation’s 1,600 employees to cover for people on leave left gaps throughout the foundation.Have you ever been ghosted? Have you ever ghosted someone else?
+In “Why People Ghost — and How to Get Over It,” Adam Popescu writes about the phenomenon of ghosting and the psychology behind it:
+Something strange happened at the coffee shop the other day. The gentleman in line in front of me — mid-40s, suit, bad haircut — ordered a latte. “Whole milk,” he said before changing to half and half, then almond milk. “For here,” he mumbled, then shook his head. “No. To go.” I ordered an espresso. Our drinks arrived at the same time and I picked up mine, added sugar, sat, sipped. The latte remained at the counter, the barista calling his name over and over. But the man in the suit was gone. Why would someone order a drink and disappear? Ghosting — when someone cuts off all communication without explanation — extends to all things, it seems. Most of us think about it in the context of digital departure: a friend not responding to a text, or worse, a lover, but it happens across all social circumstances and it’s tied to the way we view the world. Asking for a beverage and then jetting may not seem equal to ditching an unwanted romance, but it’s really the same behavior. Uncomfortable? Just don’t respond. A ghost is a specter, something we think is there but really isn’t. We’ve all probably acted like this if we’re honest. We’ve all probably been ghosted, too, though sometimes we probably didn’t notice. These are supernatural times. Last week, my sister and I got in an argument and her boyfriend didn’t text me back — a micro-ghost move. “There are different levels of ghosting,” said Wendy Walsh, a psychology professor named one of Time’s 2017 people of the year for her whistle blowing that helped promote the #MeToo movement. My sister’s boyfriend is what Dr. Walsh calls lightweight ghosting. Midweight is when you’ve met a person a handful of times and you engage in deep avoidance, which hurts their feelings more. “Third wave is the heavyweight, when you’ve entered a sexual relationship and you leave, blindsiding the other.”
+The article explores ways to deal with ghosting:
+“It’s really important to remember if someone ghosts you that behavior says more about them than you,” Dr. Vilhauer said. “It’s about their discomfort. You have to keep trying.” One way to avoid this cycle is modifying how we reject people, suggests Dr. Freedman. Don’t apologize, she said, but be honest about boundaries, whether it’s going to a movie with someone or spending the rest of your life together. Just be real. “The good middle ground is explicitly rejecting someone and telling them ‘no,’ not ‘I’m sorry,’” she said. It may sound harsh, but it’s better than being left in limbo. That may be why so many daters don’t get the hint and keep texting. That ostracism leads to rage, frustration and further alienation. “If you’re apologizing, you’re enforcing a social norm and if you say ‘sorry,’ it’s very normal to say ‘that’s O.K., I forgive you,’” she said.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Have you ever been ghosted? If yes, tell us what happened. How did it make you feel? How did you handle the situation?
+— Have you ever ghosted someone else? Why do you think you chose this way to cut off contact with another person? Having read this article, do you think you would act differently if you were to able to do it over again?
+— What strategies did you learn from the article that you might use in possible ghosting situations in the future?
+— Is ghosting a big problem? How common is it with your friends and family? What does the phenomenon tell us about relationships and communication in 2019? Are people less able to handle discomfort and uncomfortable situations than in the past?While not the only bar in New York City that caters to the arts — KGB Bar still hosts regular readings and bars like the Arts and Crafts Beer Parlor in Greenwich Village organize art exhibits — it filled a unique niche.
+‘Just nothing too shiny’
+Steps away from an entrance to the High Line was the Half King. Inside was a dimly lit bar and a few wooden booths. About twice a month or more, since the bar opened, an invited author would set up shop toward the back of the bar’s spacious dining room. The doors would close, and for a couple of hours, the writer would discuss his or her most recent book with a moderator and a mixed crowd of fans, colleagues, and any unaware diners that may have found themselves present and yet to finish their meal. The event, which was held about 30 times this past year alone, became an integral part of the bar’s identity: The Half King Reading Series.
+“I introduced every reading by saying, ‘There’s 10,000 different things you could do in New York any single day, and we don’t take for granted that you’ve chosen to be with us,” said Glenn Raucher, who assumed the role of curating and moderating the series a year ago.
+“I wanted to make sure that the experience was organic, holistic and that everyone in the room got something from it,” said Mr. Raucher, who ordered a Widow Jane whiskey, neat, before moderating each reading. “And I sweated over time trying to make that happen. Even on the nights when we only had a few people, you could say the conversation only took on more importance.”
+In his early days of curating the series, Mr. Raucher remembered asking how much “carte blanche” he had in choosing the guests. “You have all the carte blanche you want,” Mr. Junger replied. “Just nothing too shiny.” The goal was, according to Mr. Raucher, to keep true to the ethos of the bar and present works that touched upon a wide-range of topics and issues, and more important, create a discussion that guests felt worthwhile being a part of.
+Since the launching of the Reading Series, speakers have ranged from authors like Bill McKibben, the acclaimed environmentalist, to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston, to the writer Vegas Tenold, who wrote the book “Everything You Love Will Burn,” about his time embedded in the American far right.We all want to get the most and pay the least when we’re booking flights, hotel rooms or rental cars, but when it comes to locking down the best rates, many factors are at play.
+With flights and hotels, it’s usually supply and demand. New flight routes also play a role in whether you can score a business-class upgrade affordably, or you’re stuck spending a ton on whatever is available in economy.
+The time of year and perceived trendiness of a destination can also impact the cost, said David Solomito, travel expert and vice president of marketing at travel booking site Kayak.
+When these variables intersect, it can create a perfect storm of savings. Thanks to intensive data analysis from travel booking platforms Kayak, Hopper and Hipmunk, travelers can try to pinpoint the best time to book a vacation in the coming year. Here are some trends to watch out for.This is not truly a saga of highway construction, as Rutkow spends little of his time on the front lines with the earthmovers. He is more interested in the difficult political road of Pan-Americanism, the romantic notion of hemispheric unity that lives on in the name of the defunct airline Pan Am; the fading country medallions on New York’s Sixth Avenue, which nobody ever calls “The Avenue of the Americas”; a little-visited marble building on the Mall in Washington, D.C.; a proto-United Nations body called the Organization of American States and the 19,000-mile highway that still bears the faint stamp of Simón Bolívar’s original vision of a common army and parliament for the New World.
+Image
+The story begins at sea with the nausea of Hinton Rowan Helper, the United States consul to Argentina, who endured a miserable voyage back to New York City in 1866 and wondered “why not by rail?” He devoted the next several years to promoting the then-fantastical concept of an overland rail link between the United States and Latin America. After initially floundering in Congress, the scheme became a choice morsel to be seized in the chaos capitalism typical of the early railroading era. Jay Gould, Collis P. Huntington and William Palmer all vied to be the first to lay tracks from the Rio Grande to Mexico City, an ambition that carried the endorsement in 1880 of the former president Ulysses S. Grant, who had fought in the Mexican-American War as a young officer and, as Rutkow puts it, “loved Mexico almost as much as he loved cigars, horses and whiskey.” The extensions of the Pan-American Railway into Central America became mainly a tool of the powerful mercantilist company United Fruit, known to its critics as El Pulpo, or “The Octopus.”
+By the 1920s, however, the automobile was king, and Washington had embraced the doctrines of the Good Roads movement that sought to bring all-weather macadam and concrete to every muddy corner of the country, and into Central America. Within a decade, Franklin Roosevelt would become one of Pan-Americanism’s greatest champions, and his posture toward the highway is a reminder of how freely ideas and cash flowed during the New Deal. Rutkow paints convincing portrayals of technocrat-heroes like Logan Page and Thomas MacDonald at the federal road office, who handled their jobs with efficiency and prudence even while commanding staggering amounts of money.
+At times, the book reads like an executive summary of the various conferences organized to promote the highway, while potentially colorful episodes are brushed over. Rutkow is a superb fact-hunter, having raided archives from San José, Costa Rica, to Laramie, Wyo., to find letters, minutes and articles that may not have seen daylight since the years they were written. Yet not every quotation about the highway feels necessary to the story, and there’s a paucity of description of the road itself or its surrounding landscape. And for such a well-researched book about a bicontinental project, there’s another strange omission. The route through South America receives precious little attention, with almost all the focus trained on United States policy toward road-building in Central America.
+Rutkow is a graceful writer with a penchant for well-placed classical allusions, yet he possesses a distracting literary tic: a heavy reliance on the adverb “finally,” which occasionally occurs twice on the same page. He uses it to describe such perfunctory matters as Mexico’s control of its own rail system, the opening of a tunnel under the Hudson River, the nationalizing of American railroads during World War I, a power transfer in Guatemala, the disbanding of a committee, a proposal for federal funding of canals, the appearance of a Treasury Department report, a vetoed bill in Congress, a call to form a lobbying organization, the emergence of rural free mail, the popularity of good roads, the use of science in road-building, a job offer and the desire among Latin Americans to buy cars. This conclusory word is a curious one when overused in connection with a project whose essence is incompletion.Mel Brooks said it best. “To me, tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” When you’re 12, though, the line between comedy and tragedy can thin to the point of translucence. Teetering on the cusp of adolescence, many kids feel that compared with the threat of embarrassment, walking into an open sewer is rather enticing. Yet the freshest fears yield the greatest comedic bounty. True schadenfreude is built on seeing your fellow humans fail with epic splendor. That’s where books come in. Rather than encourage average kids’ bloodthirsty instinct to cheer for the downfall of their friends and neighbors, let them delve into the fiascos of fictional characters. Three funny new novels do precisely that, appealing to kids’ inclination to laugh at others’ foibles and, maybe in the course of things, themselves.
+To the three friends in Caroline Cala’s BEST BABYSITTERS EVER (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 256 pp., $13.99; ages 9 to 12), there’s nothing funny about being broke and filled with an overwhelming desire to pull off the greatest mutual 13th-birthday party in history. When Malia Twiggs (named after a former first daughter and aware it “sounded kind of bootleg”) stumbles on an ancient, crumbling edition of “Kristy’s Great Idea,” the first of Ann M. Martin’s classic Baby-Sitters Club books, it’s not long before she’s roped her buddies Dot and Bree into updating the outdated concept. But how do you adapt a text from an era of corded phones and inexplicable loafer/vest combos to a world of babysitting apps, viral videos and parents wanting to pay via Venmo?
+Sure, the Baby-Sitters Club books have been successfully adapted into graphic novels that today’s kids gobble up, but given that “Best Babysitters Ever” plays off some serious ’80s nostalgia, a question lurks: Is the book bound to entice parents and librarians who harbor dear memories of cuddling up with their own super-special editions, more than it will speak to children? Happily, Cala manages to provide hilarity that both the intended audience and the snooping adults will appreciate on their own levels.
+From the start of this debut novel, Cala flexes her prodigious comedic muscles, managing to render the three friends both as sympathetic heroines and as the victims of lives more humorous than they would like. In the course of things adults are reduced to two-dimensional cutouts, particularly Dot’s mother, a hippie who acts like a walk-on from “I Love You Alice B. Toklas.” As the girls babysit more, things go worse and worse (aided in no small part by their utter lack of interest in wrangling children not much younger than themselves). By the time they score a massive family-reunion job, their careers end in a hilarious brouhaha involving glorious destruction and property damage. They may never get another babysitting gig, but you’re hooked on their story for life.When you arrive at the tiny glass-encapsulated Better Luck Tomorrow in Houston’s hip Heights neighborhood, you’re asked to join the bar’s “club,” which requires a signature before you’ve even looked at the menu. It’s the bar’s coy way of working around local restrictions that prohibit the sale of alcohol unless the establishment is a private club.
+But over the short time it has been open, you could say Better Luck Tomorrow has become one of the hottest clubs in Houston, winning accolades galore. Eater Houston ranked it the best bar in Houston when it opened in 2017, and Food & Wine magazine flagged it as one of the country’s top 10 restaurants of 2018.
+Awards for both restaurant and bar is the result of the mind-meld of the city’s two dining wunderkinds. Better Luck Tomorrow’s food menu is designed by Justin Yu, the James Beard award-winning chef known for his popular Houston restaurants Oxheart (closed in 2017) and Theodore Rex. The bar’s cocktail menu is the work of Bobby Heugel, the man who has virtually remade Houston’s drinking scene through innovative concoctions at his bars Anvil and The Pastry War. The two chose the name, the title of a film considered a prequel to the “Fast and Furious” franchise, because it seemed fitting for a bar. “Bars are generally happy places with a bit of melancholy,” Mr. Yu said.
+The bar is open nightly but does not take reservations. As a result, its small interior can get cramped quickly with millennials on dates or groups of foodies on the hunt, as it did on the rainy night I visited. With outdoor seating on either side of the bar, and in light of its popularity, the space is best calibrated for either sunny weekend brunch or boozy post-dinner drinks and nosh. The dress code is come as you are, or rather, come as you would like to be seen in a tight, flirty space.They come two by two, sometimes solo, or in fours, key card in hand, to the small room on the 10th floor of Hotel 3232. Some know what to expect, but others are in for a surprise.
+One couple came on their anniversary, a gift from husband to wife, and riding up in the elevator she wondered if he was taking her to a sex party. She was relieved to find that where the bed would normally be was a sushi bar — and behind it the exuberant, wisecracking chef David Bouhadana.
+Sushi by Bou Suite 1001 — Mr. Bouhadana’s latest project and part of his growing line of dining experiences — opened in December. It is a speakeasy like no other. New Yorkers love a hideaway or secret place and this one in NoMad has never quite been done before.
+Mr. Bouhadana, with the help of investors Michael Sinensky and Erika London, has partnered with the 32nd Street hotel to install a four-person sushi counter in one of its rooms. He is there every night, making his creations, from 5 p.m. to midnight, bouncing to disco music and encouraging diners to drink deeply from the Mr. Sake machine. Each 17-course meal lasts 60 minutes and costs $125 (not including sake), reasonably cheap by New York omakase standards.THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS
+My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers
+By Bridgett M. Davis
+“The World According to Fannie Davis” opens with an extraordinary story. The author, Bridgett M. Davis, recalls going to school in 1960s Detroit as a 6-year-old black girl. She brings her work to the front of the class for her teacher to inspect but the teacher, a white woman, has something else on her mind. “You sure do have a lot of shoes,” she says. She asks Davis what her parents do. Davis says her father “doesn’t work” and that she doesn’t know what her mother does. Her teacher then asks for an inventory of Davis’s shoes, and after the little girl stammers out a list she is told, “Ten pairs is an awful lot.” The next day, when Davis wears a pair she forgot to mention, the teacher snaps, “You didn’t mention you had white shoes.”
+What makes this incident extraordinary is what happens next, when Davis reports it to her mother, the Fannie Davis of the book’s title. Fannie takes her daughter to Saks Fifth Avenue and buys her yet another pair of shoes, yellow patent leather ones that she pays for with a $100 bill. Bridgett notices that the white clerk looks at Fannie the way her teacher had looked at her. Fannie, unfazed, tells her daughter, “You’re going to wear these to school tomorrow. And you better tell that damn teacher of yours that you actually have a dozen pairs of shoes.” The teacher “never says another word” to Bridgett.
+All of this is possible because Fannie is a numbers runner. “The fact that Mama gave us an unapologetically good life by taking others’ bets on three-digit numbers, collecting their money when they didn’t win, paying their hits when they did, and profiting from the difference, is the secret I’ve carried with me throughout my life,” Davis writes. “We lived well thanks to Mama and her numbers … My mother’s message to black and white folks alike was clear: It’s nobody’s business what I do for my children, nor how I manage to do it.” Fannie was able to buy the trappings of middle-class life while laying the foundation for generational wealth.“Kyrsten Sinema, you couldn’t tell the difference between her and Martha McSally on matters of the border,” he said. “She did not run as a Democrat, she ran as an independent or an Arizonan, and did not concede one bit of being tough on illegal immigration to Martha McSally.”
+Demographers have long predicted the growing share of Latinos in Texas and Arizona would turn those Republican-leaning states a shade of purple or blue. Democrats’ expectations of awakening “the sleeping giant” of Latino voters have been repeatedly thwarted.
+But 2018 may have moved them a step closer to the future. More than one in four Latino voters said they cast a ballot in a midterm election for the first time, versus 12 percent for whites, according to the Pew Research Center. In congressional races across the country, about 69 percent voted for the Democrat.
+“Immigration is the big deal breaker in not voting Republican,” said Joseph Garcia, director of the Latino Public Policy Center at Arizona State University.
+Because Latinos are much younger on average than whites, and many are just forming a partisan preference, Mr. Garcia predicted that Mr. Trump’s policies and language about immigrants would sour them on Republicans in federal elections for years to come.
+“It wasn’t just the wall, it was the rhetoric over three years demonizing Latinos in general,” he said. “That has a longer-lasting effect than just this administration.”
+“The die has been cast in that Arizona’s future is largely Latino,” he added, “and they’re all U.S. citizens because they were born here.” The median age of Latinos in Arizona is 26, and for non-Hispanic whites, 43.As improbable as some of the particulars might be, Gamble seduces with her rich, rollicking portrait of life in Jacksonian Ohio.
+THE PERILOUS ADVENTURES OF THE COWBOY KING
+By Jerome Charyn
+283 pp. Liveright. $26.95.
+Image
+Theodore Roosevelt’s acerbic daughter Alice suggested that her father wanted to be “the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding and the baby at every christening.” To this we must add the hero of every novel. Teddy’s cry of “Ya-ha-hawww!” punctuates the prose of “The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King,” exclamation being the default choice of voice for “Teedie,” who narrates his life from his childhood in Manhattan until his elevation to the presidency.
+As a writer/ventriloquist, Charyn has written works “by” Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickinson, productions in which the audience can occasionally see the performer’s mouth move. Teddy is a fraught choice for biographical treatment these days, a trustbusting conservationist who was also a big-game hunter with a dubious view of racial equality, appearing almost buffoonish behind his pince-nez and buck teeth. But Charyn’s empathic first-person strategy keeps the tone sprightly positive, undercutting the braggadocio with paradoxical self-deprecation. On the celebrated charge of the Rough Riders up San Juan Hill, for example, Teddy loses his eyeglasses and can’t seem to locate one of the many extra pairs that have been sewn into his uniform. He is rescued by an aide with yet another spare pair.
+Yet he is, undeniably, a marvel. As a little boy, he makes himself expert at imitating birdsong and keeps a seal skull and other artifacts in the malodorous “Teedie Roosevelt Museum of Natural History” in his bedroom. As an adult, he is “part cowpoke, part politician.” Perhaps most telling is his infatuation with a pet cougar named Josephine. “Ya-ha-hawww!”
+MAD BLOOD STIRRING
+By Simon Mayo
+386 pp. Pegasus. $25.95.
+Image
+The War of 1812, bookended by the American Revolution and the Civil War, usually disappears in their shadow, so it’s instructive as well as entertaining to find an ambitious novel set at the close of that conflict. A truce has been declared, yet American sailors find themselves still trapped in Dartmoor, a vicious den of a prison in Devonshire, England. Wicked cold grips the place in the winter of 1814, and a smallpox epidemic decimates the population. The plot of “Mad Blood Stirring” grows from a kernel of historical truth — Mayo provides a full bibliography, in case there’s any doubt — but his book dazzles not so much as fact than as fiction.In many cases, Mr. Malin added, clients might be coming to New York for the first time and might not have a social network. Then the real estate agent who is their first contact in the city could easily become more than the person who found them a place to hang their hat.
+“I like to say that being in the real estate business is like being in the hospitality business,” Mr. Malin continued. An agent might introduce a client to a neighborhood, suggest restaurants and become a resource, he said. The next step might involve inviting the client out to dinner as a gift after the deal has been completed, or inviting the client to a party the agent is having.
+“You’ve spent a lot of time together,” he said. “You’ve shared a lot of information. And all of a sudden you realize you have a lot of things in common, and one thing leads to another.”
+Sometimes, the thing it leads to is a breakup.
+It had been a late night for Joanna Mayfield Marks, an associate broker at Halstead Property. At 11 p.m. or so, she accepted her boyfriend’s marriage proposal. That’s why she was half an hour late for an appointment the next day to show several Manhattan apartments to an artist who was relocating from Buffalo.
+“I could tell pretty soon that he wasn’t going to want to rent from me, because he kept talking about wanting to live in Brooklyn, where all the artists lived,” said Ms. Marks, who is now 43. Despite the fact that the morning had been a bust, she was suddenly feeling butterflies (but she had just gotten engaged), and all because of this cute guy (did we mention that she had just gotten engaged?).
+Ms. Marks, the sort who reflexively puts it all out there, put it all out there within 20 minutes of meeting this new client, the artist.
+“I think I made a terrible mistake,” she announced to him. “I got engaged last night.” He listened without comment.I called the police and was connected to the dispatch office in the county where the avalanche had occurred. The dispatcher asked for my husband’s name. I told her. “Hold on a minute,” she said. She returned to the line. “Well, we don’t have his name right here,” she said. “I will have the coroner call you back one way or the other.” That should have been my clue. Either she didn’t want to tell me or she wasn’t authorized to deliver the news.
+The doorbell rang. I opened the door to the three sheriff’s deputies. I managed to speak first. “It was him, wasn’t it?” I said. My voice was barely a squeak. My tears started as they asked if they could come in. One of them was a chaplain, who sat on the couch and confirmed my fears. Much after that is a blur. Many other phone calls were made: to a friend who would come over so I wouldn’t be alone; to my parents, who would fly out the next day to be with me. The conversation with the deputies came around to informing Chris’s mother. She was in Kentucky. One of them called to Lexington. The police there were busy with New Year’s Eve festivities. The deputy called a fire chief, who said he didn’t feel comfortable with the task. It was left to me.
+It was approaching midnight where Chris’s mom lived. I wondered: Should I wait until morning? I dreaded causing her the pain I knew was to come. The wretched cry I had heard from my own mother minutes before would surely be multiplied a hundredfold. For a moment I thought that if I could wait until morning maybe I would think of the right words. There are many gaps in my memories of that night. One comment I do remember was this: “I’m a father,” one of the deputies said. “I would want to know now.” I made the call. I told her that, yes, his body had been recovered and passed on the coroner’s contact information. She responded with tears and devastation and shared in my disbelief of whether this moment was real.
+Chris’s urge to be in the mountains was related to his postwar adjustments, and it became central to his regeneration and health. But I didn’t blame the war for his death. His drive to pursue his passions outside of his first career gave me the resolve to do the same. Six months after he died, I left the Army, moved across the country and started medical school. Becoming a physician requires years of intensive practice and study, and in this early stage of my career, I know I should be more concerned with learning drug names or the proper quantity of fluid boluses. Yet it’s the act of communicating bad news to patients and their families that I often ponder. I came to medical school having served around violence and trauma, and having already received and given a death notification. I’ve learned that the worst moments in someone’s life can be a haze with few distinct memories. In these moments it matters less what you say than how you say it. People in pain remember compassion, like the compassion I received from the deputies who sat on the couch with me and didn’t leave until I was no longer alone.
+I am trying to apply this lesson as I follow Chris’s example, knowing that as an emergency-medicine physician, it’s inevitable that I will be informing families about a loved one’s death. I don’t view this as a dreaded duty. It is part of being human and connecting with others. I want to pass this knowledge on.Rainer Maria Rilke has a good line about fame being the sum of misunderstandings that gather around a name. This wave of books and reconsiderations feels so vital because it chases away so many misconceptions. Take Plath: In the popular imagination, she has long been the victim, the wronged wife, the suicide. But her newly published works, which include her massive collected letters, allow us to see her again, at full sail, her ruthlessness and hunger for experience. She has been unseated as a symbol or cause — and restored to us as a writer.
+As a critic, these revivals invariably spark much gratitude, some healthy anxiety (what geniuses am I overlooking?) and a few knotty questions.
+It’s tempting, and dangerous, to believe that the cream rises to the top — that great writing will eventually find readers. If anything, these rediscoveries argue the opposite point: Without champions and concerted support, even the most breathtakingly original writer will sail into oblivion, her legacy erased or distorted.
+It’s not enough to give thanks that these writers have been restored to us; we need to ask why they vanished in the first place.
+The work often contains clues, which is why I’m especially thankful that this era of rediscoveries includes so many journals and letters, from Berlin, Collins, Jackson, Susan Sontag and even Flannery O’Connor, in whose spellbinding “Prayer Journal” we see the 20-year-old writer trying to square her spiritual life with her artistic ambitions. We see their struggles and rivalries, the sexism and racism they face, the child care arrangements that fall through, the jobs that don’t pan out, the husband who goes missing, the alcoholism. But we see their triumphs, too.Questlove has described Madison McFerrin’s music as “soulappella.” DNA might be partially responsible. The singer is the daughter of Bobby McFerrin, the jazz vocalist, and the granddaughter of Robert McFerrin, Sr., the first black man to sing at the Metropolitan Opera. Ms. McFerrin, 27, a graduate of Berklee College of Music, is currently working on a non-a cappella record with her brother, musician/producer Taylor McFerrin. She is also finishing up a residency at C’Mon Everybody in Brooklyn; her final performance there will be Jan. 30. Ms. McFerrin lives in Bedford-Stuyvesant with her boyfriend and manager, Ned Levy. On Sundays, they try not to stray far from their kitchen.
+WRITE IT DOWN Usually Sundays are a late start. I don’t get up until 10:30 or 11, depending on how long I was out the night before. The first thing I do is write in my journal. Lots of times I’ll write about my dreams, or what I want to do that day, or how the day before went.For decades, it was a nagging mystery — how long does a day last on Saturn?
+Earth pirouettes around its axis once every 24 hours or so, while Jupiter spins comparatively briskly, once in roughly 9.8 Earth-hours. And then there is Venus, a perplexingly sluggish spinner that takes 243 Earth-days to complete a full rotation.
+With Saturn, it turns out the answer rippled in plain view, in the planet’s lustrous rings.
+After reading small, spiraling waves in those bands, sculpted by oscillations from Saturn’s gravity, scientists reported this month in the Astrophysical Journal that one Saturnian day is a mere 10 hours, 33 minutes and 38 seconds long, measured in Earth time.
+“The rings are not only beautiful, they’re very diagnostic of what’s going on inside the planet,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA’s Cassini mission, which studied Saturn for more than a decade.
+[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
+Saturn has been stubbornly secretive about its days. Its buttery c louds don’t bear helpful markings that scientists might use to track the planet’s rotation, and they can't easily use its nearly vertical magnetic axis — as they have for Jupiter's more off-kilter alignment — to gather clues about the planet's interior.1 of 7
+Many people have been told they are allergic to penicillin. But experts estimate that this percentage of people who say they are allergic to penicillin are not actually allergic:McDermott described Dunbar as “a blond, open-faced fellow who is very good-natured and shy around strangers. He ran in a women’s race last year wearing a T-shirt that read TOKEN. But there is a serious side to Dunbar, and he had seethed ever since his 1978 defeat. When people mime his hardened competitive spirit, they clench their fists and make chomping, biting gestures, evidently comparing him with an implacable snapping turtle.”
+The story was Ironman’s spark. “ABC’s Wide World of Sports” signed up for the third event, along with 108 competitors, in January 1980.
+By then, though, John and Judy Collins were gone to the mainland. They were relieved to know that the event, now in the hands of a couple who ran a couple of Nautilus fitness centers, would survive, at least for one more year.
+Dunbar is among those who still contend that it was not the Collinses’ race to give away — that it belonged to the collective group of original competitors, only one of whom was John Collins.
+“I have respect for John and his wife,” Dunbar said. “But it hits me here” — he tapped his chest — “as a fellow Navy man, that he didn’t consider the team.”
+A former Navy SEAL takes action
+Valerie Silk was 29 at the time. She was not an athlete and had no interest in endurance sports.
+“After the first event, I could see that it needed a race director, and it was something I wanted to try my hand at,” Silk, now 68, said in a recent interview from her home in St. Petersburg, Fla. “So I stepped away from the clubs, turned those over to my husband, and I took on the race. And he was happy for me to do it.”
+The couple divorced in 1981, but not before signing an article of incorporation with the state, creating a business called Hawaiian Triathlon Corporation.His use of vernacular is a barrier for many English speakers, but it is difficult to overstate the esteem he commands in Scotland and in the hearts of expatriates like this writer, who grew up in Burns’s home of Ayrshire.
+His verses gave dignity and voice to the disenfranchised, and he is beloved for his romanticism and sense of humor. Scots around the world celebrate his birth with “Burns suppers.”
+The most elaborate celebrations feature pipers marching in with a haggis (a traditional concoction of minced offal, oatmeal and spices) to a standing ovation, and a recitation by the host of Burns’s praise-filled “Address to a Haggis.”
+So tonight, whatever is on your plate, join me in a toast to one of Scotland’s best-loved sons.
+That’s it for this briefing. Have a good weekend. — Chris
+Thank you
+To Eleanor Stanford and James K. Williamson for their cultural and Smarter Living tips. Jeanie Kay, a designer on the briefings team, wrote today’s Back Story. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.
+P.S.
+• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Today’s episode is about the crisis in Venezuela.
+• Here’s today’s mini crossword puzzle, and a clue: Novelist Austen ( 4 letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
+• Last year, The Times published articles in 10 languages in addition to English: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian.After being handpicked to be his successor by Mr. Chávez, before his death in 2013, the left-leaning Mr. Maduro narrowly won a snap election. Two years later, the opposition won a so-called super majority in Congress. Instead of heeding the growing social discontent and working with the new National Assembly to pass corrective economic policies, Mr. Maduro moved to dissolve the legislative body, ultimately creating the Constituent National Assembly in 2017, a legislature packed with Maduro loyalists. As tensions intensified, both groups sought a negotiated transition. At every step, efforts to find a peaceful solution failed — from talks brokered by the Vatican in 2016 to meetings held in the Dominican Republic in late 2017 and early 2018.
+Venezuelans have been disillusioned and angry with the Maduro government for almost as long as he has been in power — and the situation has become desperate. Any support Mr. Maduro enjoyed is eroding as Venezuelans are increasingly unable to feed their families. Food and medicine shortages are widespread. Hundreds have died from malnutrition and illnesses that are easily curable with the appropriate treatment. Power outages last for days, water is scarce and the decaying infrastructure is reminiscent of a war zone.
+At a protest on Tuesday, people chanted anti-Maduro slogans and carried placards demanding change. But the most telling sign of the tragedy gripping the country was the hundreds of Venezuelan bolívares — the country’s currency — scattered on the pavement. Some people laughed at the sight, others trampled on them, but nobody bothered to pick them up. The International Monetary Fund estimates that hyperinflation will reach over 10 million percent this year.
+This painful reality affects all Venezuelans, but particularly the poor, Mr. Maduro’s traditional base of support. As a result, they have largely abandoned him or express that they want him out. Many have simply opted to leave the country. According to the United Nations, three million people have already left the country and five million more could leave this year.
+On Jan. 10, Mr. Maduro was sworn in to his second term in office. Throughout the ceremony he referred to himself as the constitutional president, but the elections he claims to have won in May were widely regarded as a sham, both domestically and abroad. The vote was overseen by an electoral body that is loyal to Mr. Maduro, and several key opposition leaders were excluded because they are imprisoned or were barred from running. He has progressively lost all legitimacy. This too is different from the past. Mr. Chávez was a lousy manager, but he had charisma and won elections more or less democratically.
+It is impossible to know how long Mr. Guaidó will stand as interim president, but even if the Maduro government manages to cling to power, it is hard to imagine Mr. Maduro will succeed in recovering the economy, legitimacy and, most critical to the Chavista revolution: popular support.
+Virginia Lopez-Glass has covered Venezuela and Latin America extensively for international media. She was senior correspondent for Al Jazeera English.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Nadal took 106 minutes, lightning fast for a match at that stage of a Grand Slam. Djokovic versus Pouille lasted only 83 minutes, with Djokovic riding his precision groundstrokes and feline quickness to the win.
+“A perfect match for me,” Djokovic described it. “From the first to the last point.”
+He looked calmly self-assured as he said this — nothing like the doubtful athlete who struggled through a nasty elbow injury and upset losses in Melbourne in 2017 and 2018, during the one confounding low period in his career. His performance on Friday had a transcendent quality, he said, and he called such a feeling “divine” and “in the zone, where everything flows so effortlessly and you are executing everything you are intending to execute.”
+He added that the semifinal was one of the best matches he had played on the sea blue center court at Rod Laver Arena.
+That’s saying a lot.
+He was speaking, after all, of the court on which he will soon be aiming for a record seventh Australian Open title; of the court on which he won the first of his 14 major titles, when he beat another French player, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, in 2008.
+It is also the court where he played one of the most stirring, and still the longest, Grand Slam finals in tennis history: the 5-hour-53-minute war of wills he won against Nadal in 2012, one of the greatest matches ever played, after which both players struggled to stay upright at the trophy ceremony.The colossal disarray over the British government’s plans to leave the European Union comes at an awkward moment for global financial markets.
+How can anyone in New York hope to make sense of the mess in London when the government in Washington is closed one day, set to re-open the next and in danger of shutting down again soon?
+Yet financial markets put a price on just about anything, and they don’t stop functioning when governments do. Even when a projected outcome is gruesome or improbable, some traders will try to make a wager on it. Bets on “Brexit” — Britain’s exit from the European Union — and the effects of the government shutdown in this country are well underway.
+Whether these bets are humane or prudent is another question. But the shifting odds on Brexit have moved stock, bond and foreign exchange markets, especially in the past two weeks, as the government of Prime Minister Theresa May has flirted with disaster.But good for you for speaking up. Americans are afraid of confrontation because of our extreme national affinity for independence and because of our propensity to shoot and/or stab people for almost any reason. “Are you trying to tell me what to do?” is our base response to anyone requesting that we obey the simplest social norms. Suggesting someone do something is a completely normal thing in many places in the world! But on Joe Biden’s beloved National Railroad Passenger Corporation, this weirdo you encountered is entitled to feel affronted.
+I don’t think any kind of nonviolent, non-naked, non-disgusting behavior is off-limits on trains, no matter how sucky that behavior is. “Making noise with their mouths” is a thing that humans do by vocalizing or by chewing up plants and animals with their teeth. It’s awful but here we are, trapped carting our brains around in these calcium and keratin sacks. I think you need better headphones. Come sit with me in the quiet car, where I type this column as gingerly as possible so as not to infuriate my fellow flesh monsters.
+Ride the Lightning
+I work in a school. Our tech support guy is awesome in every way: responsive, friendly, patient and highly competent. The only problem is that he douses himself with an obnoxious quantity of cologne. I don’t want him to feel embarrassed, but it might be in his best interest to know of his odorous offense. (Others in the building concur.) An anonymous letter might work, but just seems too cowardly. By nature of his job, he is never in one place or around the same people for long periods of time. Should I just continue to grin and bear it? He might be masking a natural odor that is even worse than the cologne.
+— N ew Haven
+First, this is not his fault, it’s the fault of the Axe Industrial Complex. But to your question: The general cowardly way this is dealt with is in a mass office email, tacked on to some housekeeping: “Oh and by the way, some of us are more sensitive than others to smells and the HVAC in here is not great, so please try to keep odors down.” The problem with that, I have found, is that everyone thinks you’re talking about someone else. “Glad you finally dealt with Joanna’s gross salads,” someone will thank you. “Good, maybe Dan will stop wearing those shoes that smell like burning road,” someone will confide. Your real target will elude you.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: A remarkable battle for power is playing out in Venezuela, with dueling claims to the presidency and talk of a coup. Nick Casey on the crisis in Caracas. It’s Friday, January 25.
+nicholas casey
+So on January 10 in Caracas, Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro put his hand on a book and swore himself in as president for another six-year term.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+Then two weeks later, in another part of Caracas on a sunny day, a little-known lawmaker named Juan Guaidó stood before a group of people and held a kind of citizens’ swearing-in ceremony, where he said he was the president of Venezuela.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+And he was prepared to lead the country himself.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+michael barbaro
+So two men are declaring themselves the president of Venezuela.
+nicholas casey
+One country, two presidents.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+michael barbaro
+And Nick, how is that possible? What has been going on in Venezuela that leads these two men, at the exact same time, to declare themselves the rightful leader of the country?
+nicholas casey
+Well, you have to turn the clock back to last year, just before the summer.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+archived recording
+Official campaigning for Venezuela’s presidential election has kicked off with huge rallies by the candidates.
+nicholas casey
+When Maduro was running for re-election. And remember, he’d been president of this country during this massive disaster in Venezuela. At the beginning of the summer, the currency was collapsing, people were losing even more of their savings than they ever had, hospitals were completely out of supplies. And they had been for years. I was there during that time. I got sick, I got dengue, and they weren’t able to do anything about it.
+michael barbaro
+Wow.
+nicholas casey
+This was the state of the country that has the world’s largest proven reserves of oil. It was at an all-time low. And Nicolás Maduro was asking them to give him another six years as the president.
+michael barbaro
+And that would seem quite counterintuitive. What was his standing at that moment? How many people blamed him for the situation?
+nicholas casey
+Everybody blamed him. You would go around in the neighborhoods in Caracas, and they would point at how skinny they were, and say this is the consequence of the Maduro diet.
+archived recording
+The Maduro diet, named after the current president, Nicolás Maduro.
+nicholas casey
+That’s what it’s called there when people have lost a bunch of weight.
+archived recording
+Over the past year, 74 percent of Venezuelans lost an average of 8.7 kilos in weight.
+nicholas casey
+He’s even laughed about that. He says he thinks it’s funny. This is a man who’s shown very little sympathy for this massive crisis that the country is going through, so you would think, under normal circumstances, that it would be impossible that this person would be re-elected by the country that had been so brought down during his first term as president.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+So then here comes the night of the election, and the results come in, and Maduro has won.
+archived recording
+Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, has been declared the winner of Sunday’s election.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+archived recording (interpreter)
+We won again. We were triumphant again. We’ve overcome all obstacles. We are the strength of history transformed into a popular victory — permanent popular victory.
+nicholas casey
+He’s going to be president for another six years, and to many Venezuelans, they found that terribly shocking.
+archived recording
+Today, the world have the eyes here in Venezuela. What Venezuelans have at stake today is their own survival as a democratic nation. Venezuela’s a dictatorship. The world can no longer turn a blind eye to that reality.
+nicholas casey
+The whole manner in which this election was conducted was under a big cloud, and immediately, you see countries outside of Venezuela condemning what had happened, saying that the election may have been rigged, that they’re not going to recognize Nicolás Maduro.
+archived recording
+Leaders are denouncing his win as a sham. Panama, Costa Rica, Chile and the U.S. Mission to the U.N. said they won’t recognize the results of the election. President Trump signing a new executive order this afternoon following the results of that controversial Venezuelan election. The executive order is designed to try and prevent the Venezuelan government from selling off its assets.
+nicholas casey
+And yet, if you’re in Venezuela, it looks like you’re going to have Maduro as your president for another six years.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+archived recording (interpreter)
+They said that you were obliged to vote. They said that people were coerced. It’s a lack of respect.
+nicholas casey
+So months passed. People are generally depressed about where things are going to go. And throughout this process, people are asking, “Well, wait a second. Where’s the opposition, here? Why are they not protesting? Why are they not trying to stand up to what’s going on or offer any alternative?
+archived recording
+He cracked down on dissenting voices. Prominent opposition leaders were arrested or put under house arrest.
+nicholas casey
+There was getting to be very little of the opposition left. The regime was going through and picking off — leader after leader off, and issuing orders of arrest for them, and they’d disappear. You’d find them in Colombia, you’d find them in Chile.
+archived recording
+Dragged from a car and briefly detained, this is believed to be the moment security agents in Venezuela arrested the country’s opposition leader, Juan Guaidó. The leader of the National Assembly —
+nicholas casey
+The opposition was getting thinner and thinner at this point, to the point that either you had an arrest warrant against you, or you thought there might be one soon. And you had just many, many people, both politicians and supporters of the opposition, leaving the country. Because after an election like that, kind of, what hope do you have to try to challenge this guy?
+michael barbaro
+Then what happened?
+nicholas casey
+Well, Maduro continued on, and he had his re-inauguration, which was January the 10th. I think he thought everything was going to go very smoothly. He had a big ceremony, many of the people in his government attended, and he said, “We’re starting another six-year term.” And it’s then the opposition starts to leap into action.
+archived recording
+Although parliament is now largely toothless, its leader, Juan Guaidó, has vowed to fight back.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+archived recording (interpreter)
+We reaffirm the illegitimacy of Nicolás Maduro. As a result —
+nicholas casey
+The opposition had a card up its sleeve, which was the Venezuelan Constitution. There are articles that they can use if a president has seized power illegally, and they say that this inauguration that he’s done for himself was a seizing of power, because he didn’t win that election back last year. In this case, this triggers a mechanism in Venezuela, whereby the legislature gets to take control of the country and decide who’s going to be running it, in which case, it gets to be the president of the National Assembly, who was Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old young lawmaker who no one had ever heard of — one of the last remaining men standing.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+He did something that no one in the opposition had been willing to do, which was to take Maduro on by saying that he was actually the president of Venezuela, which was an extremely audacious move.
+michael barbaro
+Right.
+nicholas casey
+It’s really hard to underestimate how much risk is involved in taking on Maduro this way.
+archived recording (juan guaidó)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+michael barbaro
+So beyond invoking obscure rules from the Constitution, what is Guaidó‘s plan for how to execute this and knock out Maduro?
+nicholas casey
+Well, I think you saw some of it the day that he inaugurated himself. And this was a really surprising day for everybody that was covering this, because he went out, he had this big ceremony, and just within minutes of him declaring himself the president of Venezuela, you had an announcement from the U.S. that they were going to recognize him.
+archived recording (vice president mike pence)
+Hola. I’m Mike Pence, the vice president of the United States. And on behalf of President Donald Trump and all the American people, let me express the unwavering support of the United States as you, the people of Venezuela, raise your voices in a call for freedom. Nicolás Maduro is a dictator with no legitimate claim to power. He’s never won the presidency in a free and fair election, and he’s maintained his grip of power by imprisoning anyone who dares to oppose him. The United States joined —
+nicholas casey
+And then you had an announcement from Canada that they were going to recognize them.
+archived recording
+So let me say on behalf of Canada that we recognize and express our full support for the interim presidency of Venezuela, assumed by the president of the National Assembly, Juan Guaidó.
+nicholas casey
+And then it just became sort of like dominoes. You had Costa Rica and Paraguay and Argentina.
+archived recording
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+Peru and Brazil.
+archived recording
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+Colombia.
+archived recording
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+All of these countries suddenly said, “Now we no longer recognize Maduro. It’s Guaidó who’s the president of Venezuela now.” So what you could see was there must have been another part of this plan, here, which wasn’t just to make this crazy statement that he was the president. But also, potentially, a back channel, in which they had a lot of other countries lined up to go along with this plan when he did it on Wednesday.
+michael barbaro
+I have to say that I’m struck that all these major democracies are backing Guaidó, who is not democratically elected as the leader of Venezuela. Why, exactly, are they doing that?
+nicholas casey
+Yeah, well, I’m surprised too, frankly, covering this. You know, he wasn’t elected, and people didn’t really know who he was. I think people are still trying to look under the hood of who this man is. So what does it show? It shows that the international community has gotten pretty desperate at this point in finding any alternative to Maduro, who’s become a dictator. So I think when the international countries — when Venezuela’s neighbors, when the U.S., finally saw that there was someone who was finally willing to take him on face-to-face, they seized the opportunity. And it’s a big gamble, because they’re gambling on someone that doesn’t really have a long track record, a long history, and Venezuela, frankly, is just beginning to know.
+michael barbaro
+So countries like the U.S. are not so much supporting Guaidó as they are supporting the removal and the substitution of Maduro.
+nicholas casey
+If Maduro is gone, someone’s got to be in charge. So if your goal is to get rid of Maduro, your goal also has to be to say who would be the president, then. And I think that’s largely the reason why Guaidó has so much backing right now, is because he’s not Maduro.
+archived recording (vice president mike pence)
+The United States joins with all freedom-loving nations in recognizing the National Assembly as the last vestige of democracy in your country, for it’s the only body elected by you, the people. As such, the United States supports the courageous decision by Juan Guaidó, the president of your National Assembly, to assert that body’s constitutional powers, declare Maduro a usurper and call for the establishment of a transitional government. On behalf of the American people, we say to all the good people of Venezuela, [SPEAKING SPANISH].. We are with you. We stand with you. And we will stay with you until democracy is restored, and you reclaim your birthright of libertad. [SPEAKING SPANISH]
+michael barbaro
+So how does Maduro respond to this big international outpouring of support for, basically, his ouster?
+nicholas casey
+Well, he threw a big tantrum on Wednesday.
+archived recording (nicolás maduro)
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+nicholas casey
+Starting with declaring that he was cutting diplomatic ties to the U.S., he ordered the personnel of the embassy out in 72 hours. This started kind of a fascinating chain of events, where the U.S. said it wasn’t going to leave, because it recognized Juan Guaidó as the president, and Guaidó came out with a statement saying, “Your embassy officials are welcome to stay. We’re the government, and we would love to have diplomatic relations with you continue just as they had before.”
+michael barbaro
+And how have the people of Venezuela responded to this intervention by countries like the U.S.?
+nicholas casey
+It’s been surprising to me. It was surprising to me starting maybe 18 months ago, when I talked to friends and colleagues who were back in Venezuela, and they would ask me what the U.S. was going to do about this. And my response would always be, “What do you mean what the U.S. is going to do about it? You don’t, certainly, want the U.S. to be involved in this, do you?”
+michael barbaro
+Why?
+nicholas casey
+The U.S. has got kind of a long history in Latin America that people don’t like. I mean, it was the U.S. that brought Pinochet into power. It was the U.S. that had the coup that got rid of Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala in the 1950s, who was a democratically elected leader. U.S.’ history of interventions has been very checkered, but it is a consequence of this strange situation that Maduro has put the country in, where an unpopular leader who’s presiding over a deep collapse in the country won’t go, won’t take the exit. The people have actually got to the position — and this isn’t everybody in Venezuela, but this is a lot of people in Venezuela, who are saying, “Why doesn’t the U.S. intervene and try to save us? And if it’s not the U.S., then why don’t our own military do this?” I think that’s what you actually hear much more on the streets of Venezuela, is, “How could the military stand by and let this man continue to run the country as he does?” And these two things, asking for intervention and asking for a military coup, are parts of the past that Latin America has been trying to bury for years. So to see them both be part of the landscape again in Venezuela I find to be a little bit terrifying, frankly. I met a woman who was protesting in a plaza last year, and she was telling me how much she wanted Donald Trump to intervene. And this shocked me. She told me that she’d be happy to see U.S. tanks circling around Caracas. And I told her, “Do you know what this means to have a U.S. invasion of your country?” And this girl was 19. I don’t think she really knew. But you are seeing people that are saying things that you would have thought were preposterous years ago, because they’ve suffered so many years under Maduro.
+michael barbaro
+Given the openness, because of the situation in Venezuela, to countries like the U.S. weighing in, does the support and the recognition of all these international powers give the opposition more power as they try to take over?
+nicholas casey
+Well, it does and it doesn’t. Symbolically, it’s great. They have all this support from outside of Venezuela. But what they need is support inside Venezuela. What they have now is all the recognition, but they don’t have any of the weapons. They don’t have control over the military, and ultimately, it’s the military that’s going to be the arbiter of power in Venezuela and really has been the one that’s been holding up Maduro. If anything’s going to change, they have to go from holding up Maduro to holding up Guaidó. Ultimately, the power in any constitutional democracy is kind of imaginary. It’s whether people are willing to respect the norms. And when they don’t, like what’s happened in Venezuela, and the Constitution has kind of melted away, it just comes down to the people that have got the weapons as the ones that can say who’s in charge. It’s the ones with the weapons that are saying Maduro is in charge, and if that changes, it’s probably going to be the same generals who are the ones that determine that he’s not.
+michael barbaro
+Does that start to look, Nick, like a military coup backed by the U.S. government?
+nicholas casey
+It does. Because you have the U.S. government supporting opposition parties that are supporting military intervention by their own military against the man who is running the government. Each of those links is there, and it would link the U.S. to what happens afterward. You just don’t know. When you ask the armed forces to get involved, it’s really up to them what happens next.
+michael barbaro
+So it could all go very badly. And then everybody who supported it would be implicated, including the U.S.
+nicholas casey
+Yeah, potentially.
+michael barbaro
+So what exactly is the military weighing right now, knowing that they hold all the power in this equation?
+nicholas casey
+So on one side, the military lives very well under Maduro. The top brass of the military live lavish lives. There’s lots of forms of revenue, they have lots of control over the economy. Many top officers are involved in the drug trade, smuggling. Even though there’s a big crisis in Venezuela, they’re not living it at the top. On the other end, they’re seeing that this institution, which had been beloved by Venezuelans, is getting increasingly tarnished for being on the side of Maduro. And they’re also seeing that so much of the world is now getting behind Guaidó, and wondering, probably, whether Maduro is going to be around forever, and what they’re going to do after Maduro is gone themselves. So this is kind of the dilemma that they’re facing. Whose side did they get on? Which side do they think is going to be right in history?
+michael barbaro
+And Nick, given how much time you have spent on the ground in Venezuela, I wonder if you have an instinct for which of these will weigh more on the military, and how it will go.
+nicholas caseyIn 1910, when Harry Payne Whitney bought his father’s mansion on Fifth Avenue, The Times reported, “No house in the country, perhaps, has been more sumptuously and artistically furnished.”
+Also: “The great bronze fire dogs in the dining room are the finest in America.”
+It cost “a trifle under $3,000,000,” fully furnished, “the largest private house sale in respect to price that has ever been recorded in the city.” (That would be about $80 million today.)
+In the modern era, the most expensive homes in the city were bought and sold at a scale that was, in a way, understandable. Prices ticked up by a million here, a couple million there.
+Then things started to accelerate. By 2006, a home on East 75th Street sold for $53 million.
+That record was shattered in 2012 when a penthouse on Central Park West was sold to a Russian oligarch for $88 million, soon to be topped by a $100 million sale.“Detainment” has won awards, including a special jury prize at Cannes, but it started to attract criticism in Britain after it was nominated for an Oscar. This month, Denise Fergus, James Bulger’s mother, called for the film to be pulled from the Oscars and complained that the family was not consulted about it.
+“It’s one thing making a film like this without contacting or getting permission from James family, but another to have a child re-enact the final hours of James’s life before he was brutally murdered and making myself and my family have to relive this all over again,” Fergus said in a statement posted on Twitter on Tuesday.
+Albert Kirby, the detective who led the investigation into the killing, told the BBC that the events shown in the film were accurate, but still called for its withdrawal from consideration. “It’s causing so much unnecessary upset,” he said.
+The 38-year-old Irish director Vincent Lambe said in a telephone interview that in 2012 he started researching the murder, which also dominated the news in Dublin during his childhood. “I wanted to try and understand what could have led two 10-year-old boys to have done this,” he said. There has never been a proper debate about why the killing happened, despite its prominence, he added.
+He considered contacting the families involved, he said, but decided it could harm the film. “We wanted to make a film that was factual and impartial,” he said. “I think if we did contact them there’d be pressure to tell it the way they wanted it to be told.”Good Friday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Shutdown, Day 35: A “ ‘let them eat cake’ kind of attitude”
+It went viral. Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, told Andrew on CNBC that he didn’t quite understand why unpaid workers, some of them now turning to Uber and Lyft for income after missing their second paycheck, were visiting food banks. They should just borrow some money, he said:
+There really is not a good excuse why there should be a liquidity crisis. Now, true, the people might have to pay a little bit of interest. But the idea that it’s paycheck or zero is not a really valid idea.
+The comments reflect a “ ‘let them eat cake’ kind of attitude,” said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has emerged as a powerful opponent to President Trump.
+Federal workers, many of them wary of taking on more debt, might also struggle to access credit. The credit union affiliated with Mr. Ross’s department advertises a shutdown loan with a rate higher than some other commercially available loans.
+As the shutdown drags on, lawmakers are scrambling to find a compromise after two proposals to reopen the government fell flat in the Republican-controlled Senate. Mr. Trump’s plan, which included funding for a border wall, garnered less support than the Democrats’ recommendation, which omitted the wall.
+The strain intensifies:
+• Low- and middle-income home buyers in rural areas are left in the lurch without an affordable mortgage option offered by the Agriculture Department.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: The special counsel’s indictment of Roger Stone contains details as over-the-top as Stone himself, including encouraging an associate to use a tactic straight from “The Godfather” films. But the indictment itself is quite serious in finally making a link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. It’s Monday, January 28. [POUNDING ON DOOR]
+archived recording
+F.B.I.! Open the door!
+archived recording (roger stone)
+Twenty-nine F.B.I. agents showed up at my home, pounded on the door. [POUNDING ON DOOR]
+archived recording
+F.B.I.!
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I opened the door to pointed automatic weapons. I was handcuffed. There were —
+archived recording
+We have some major breaking news in the Mueller investigation. Roger Stone — you see him right there — President Trump’s longtime political adviser, former campaign aide, has been arrested in Florida. Charged with seven federal felonies, obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements and one count of witness tampering.
+archived recording (sarah huckabee sanders)
+This has nothing to do with the president, has nothing to do with the White House, and beyond that, I’m not going to get into the back and forth.
+archived recording
+Have you spoken to the president?
+archived recording (roger stone)
+There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated.
+michael barbaro
+So, Mark Mazzetti, what do we need to know about who Roger Stone is?
+mark mazzetti
+Roger Stone is a legendary Republican operative who, from the earliest days of his career, has plied the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks in aid of political campaigns.
+archived recording
+Are you telling me that that was a lie? Roger Stone is a trickster. Roger Stone is a shady character, O.K.? I know Roger Stone, and you know, he worked for Nixon. He famously tattooed his hero on his back. And who among us can say that? The questionable consultant’s resume is filled with work for Republican stars — Nixon, Reagan, Bush senior.
+mark mazzetti
+He is someone who very proudly talks about how he tries to plant stories with the press, someone who tries to dig up any kind of personal dirt about a candidate in order to help the other side.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I’m certainly guilty of bluffing and posturing and punking the Democrats. Unless they pass some law against bull-bull-[BLEEP]-ing-ing and I missed it, I’m engaging in tradecraft. It’s politics. I’m sure it’s driving the Democrats crazy, but there’s nothing illegal about it.
+mark mazzetti
+So this is someone who — well, for many people who hate politics, they would hate someone like Roger Stone.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+The truth is, Jimmy Carter’s middle name was not Hussein. A very substantial number of people wonder, because of the policies of this administration, about whether the president is a Muslim. This is not going to hurt Trump, and it’s not going to hurt Carson.
+archived recording
+They may wonder, but should a presidential candidate like Trump be saying that, or at least condoning it with his silence?
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I don’t think he commented either way.
+mark mazzetti
+He goes on television in strange outfits, he gives interviews from his pool and clearly, in many cases, doesn’t take himself too seriously.
+michael barbaro
+So he’s kind of a sideshow.
+mark mazzetti
+Except he’s someone who Donald Trump has taken seriously for a long time.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+He’s a regular guy. You can talk to him like a regular person. There’s nothing formal or stilted about him, and he’s funny. He’s got a great self-deprecating wit. He’s just fun to be with.
+mark mazzetti
+He’s been this sort of informal adviser to Trump over decades, and someone who, long, long before anyone took seriously the idea of Donald Trump being the president of the United States, Roger Stone was pushing this idea.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+It was not until 1987, really, late ‘87, that I began thinking about him as a presidential candidate.
+mark mazzetti
+Although it has often been a contentious relationship.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+Yeah, I think we have a complicated relationship. But first of all, recognize, I’m a Trump loyalist. Even when he’s wrong, I’ll be there.
+mark mazzetti
+They’ve been at odds at times. He’s someone who didn’t last very long on the Trump campaign. He started out as an official campaign adviser, but was fired from the campaign pretty quickly.
+archived recording
+And more turmoil for Trump — a top longtime associate both from his business world and in the political realm, Roger Stone is out tonight. Dispute about whether he resigned or was fired. Trump’s campaign says Stone was fired because he was using the campaign to seek publicity for himself.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I have no interest in going back. Although I strongly support Trump, we have managerial differences. And meanwhile, I’m just making the very best case for him in public that I can, because I do think he has what it takes.
+michael barbaro
+And insofar as he was involved in the campaign, what exactly was his role as an informal adviser? What did that amount to?
+mark mazzetti
+He was the classic late-night phone call person to listen to what Trump was thinking. He was the confidant of then-candidate Trump, talking to him by phone, being a sort of back channel of advice outside official campaign communications. You didn’t always know that Roger Stone was there, because he did have this behind-the-scenes role. But it was pretty apparent to people close to Trump that Roger Stone had this outsized influence over Trump.
+archived recording
+It seems to me there’s more than meets the eye here with Roger Stone parting company from the Trump campaign, coming on my program and others and giving the big Trump pitch.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+You media types are so conspiratorial. [LAUGHTER]
+archived recording
+No, no, the Stone-Trump types I think are the conspiratorial.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I’m like —
+mark mazzetti
+So he was behind the scenes until he wasn’t. In August of 2016, a few months before the election, Roger Stone sent a very cryptic tweet about Podesta.
+archived recording
+Roger Stone tweeted that it would soon be, quote, “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
+mark mazzetti
+And he said it will soon be his time in the barrel. Now Podesta was John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton. And no one really knew what that meant until a few months later in October. A few weeks before the election, he sent out another tweet. I think it said, “On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”
+archived recording
+Roger Stone writes, “Thursday, October 6, Julian Assange will deliver a devastating expose on Hillary at a time of his choosing. I stand by my prediction. #HandcuffsForHillary.”
+mark mazzetti
+And then —
+archived recording
+We need to talk about these hacked emails.
+mark mazzetti
+The Podesta emails spill out a few days later.
+archived recording
+WikiLeaks released more than 2,000 emails. They claim they came from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other staffers. The leak revealed transcripts from some of Clinton’s paid Wall Street speeches. This is the first time that we’re actually getting a look at these Wall Street speeches. What you see is that her own words really hit on her own perceived weaknesses, particularly around relatability and trust. You see why she really wasn’t in a hurry to release these, as it really highlights a lot of concerns that voters have about her.
+mark mazzetti
+And so this is again Roger Stone creating this image that he had a direct channel to WikiLeaks and knew what the information was going to be before it became public.
+michael barbaro
+Right. And if I remember correctly, one of those WikiLeaks dumps of emails was right around the time of the “Access Hollywood” tape being published.
+archived recording (john podesta)
+October 7, the “Access Hollywood” tape comes out. One hour later, WikiLeaks starts dropping my emails into the public. One could say that those things might not have been a coincidence.
+michael barbaro
+Which was interesting timing.
+mark mazzetti
+Within hours. And of course, that’s very fortuitous timing if you’re candidate Trump. Very quickly, a lot of the media started focusing on the Podesta emails rather than this explosive story about the “Access Hollywood” tape.
+michael barbaro
+So at this point, justifiably, everyone is starting to wonder, does Roger Stone, this informal adviser to the president who is in touch with the campaign, does he have inside knowledge of what’s going on at WikiLeaks? Is he coordinating with this organization?
+mark mazzetti
+Yes, and remember, Roger Stone has built a career on creating an image that he does have great access.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation.
+mark mazzetti
+He does have insight that others don’t.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I think that Assange is going to be very influential in this election, because he’s going to be educating the American people about the Clintons.
+mark mazzetti
+Once the Russia investigation heats up, though, he has to reverse course.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I had no advance notice of the content source or the exact disclosure time of the WikiLeaks disclosures. Assange himself has said so. In fact, Assange has said in his own tweets and in interviews that Roger Stone never predicted anything that I hadn’t already said in public.
+mark mazzetti
+He has to paint himself as someone who didn’t have that knowledge, who didn’t have any insight, because that was something that could potentially put him in real legal jeopardy.
+michael barbaro
+So what do we learn from this indictment last week about what was really going on here?
+mark mazzetti
+So what we learned on Friday is that Roger Stone in fact did have insights into what WikiLeaks was doing. He made extensive efforts to find out what Julian Assange was planning. And we find out that he was directed by people inside the campaign to go find out what WikiLeaks was doing. So we really, for the first time, have a sense that there was a link between WikiLeaks’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton. And that link was Roger Stone. And something else that should not be lost in all this is that all of this was happening months after it was first revealed that the Russian government was behind this operation to hack the Democratic servers and put the information out for WikiLeaks.
+michael barbaro
+And that’s significant because it’s one thing to be coordinating with WikiLeaks when no one quite knows how it got those internal Clinton emails. It’s another to be coordinating with WikiLeaks once it’s understood that the emails it’s disseminating were stolen by Russia. It seems to elevate this above wanting negative information about your opponent out in the world.
+mark mazzetti
+That’s right. All of this was done while it was well known that the Russians were behind this operation.
+michael barbaro
+So do we know who on the campaign was talking to Roger Stone and encouraging him to keep communicating with WikiLeaks and find out when their leaks would occur?
+mark mazzetti
+That’s where it becomes really interesting. The Times reported a few months ago that Steve Bannon, who was the campaign chairman at the end, was in contact with Roger Stone about this. In early October, Stone writes Steve Bannon that WikiLeaks would release, quote, “a load every week going forward.” He separately writes to a supporter involved in the Trump campaign, quote, “spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.”
+michael barbaro
+Friend in London presumably meaning Julian Assange?
+mark mazzetti
+Right. But the Mueller indictment has a very tantalizing detail.
+michael barbaro
+What’s that?
+mark mazzetti
+The indictment said that a senior campaign official, quote, was directed by someone to contact Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases. There’s a very odd use of the passive voice that you would not expect in an indictment written by lawyers with Ivy League educations. The indictment does not say who it was that directed the senior campaign official. Of course, it’s led to speculation that that person could only be Donald Trump. We don’t know.
+michael barbaro
+Everything you’re describing here about Roger Stone’s communications with the campaign and Roger Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks — it sounds quite nefarious, but I wonder if it is illegal. Is his communication with WikiLeaks what Roger Stone was indicted for?
+mark mazzetti
+No. The charge is Stone lying to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks, trying to tamper with witness testimony and an overall charge of obstruction of justice. As for the witness tampering charge, that centers around Stone’s interactions with someone named Randy Credico, who is a longtime New York radio personality, on-again-off-again friend of Stone, and someone who did in fact seem to have direct connections to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And what the indictment details is that Roger Stone had several communications with Credico, trying to make sure that Credico told the same story to the House that Roger Stone had told, and even suggesting that he should pull a, quote, “Frank Pentangeli” before the committee.
+archived recording
+Did you serve on the capital regime, Peter Clemenza, under Vito Corleone, also known as “the godfather“?
+mark mazzetti
+And that is a reference to a character in “The Godfather 2” who is called before Congress to testify about the mob and all of a sudden gets amnesia.
+archived recording
+I ask you again, sir, here and now, under oath, were you at any time a member of a crime organization headed by Michael Corleone? I don’t know nothing about that! Oh. I was in the olive oil business with his father, but that was a long time ago. That’s all.
+michael barbaro
+And why isn’t Mueller going after Stone for anything other than the lying, for the actions he lied about?
+mark mazzetti
+It’s hard to make a conspiracy case. The fact is that the emails appear to have been stolen before Roger Stone knew about them, so he didn’t seem to have participated in the theft. And he seemed to maybe be trafficking in information that was becoming public or was about to be public. And this is what his defenders and the president’s defenders have pointed out, that these are all crimes that happened after the fact. He is not being charged with something that’s at the bottom of this whole thing — collusion, conspiracy, et cetera. And this is what, of course, President Trump has fallen back on for some time.
+archived recording
+This is why this thing is so weird, strange. The crime is conspiracy to hack. Collusion is not a crime. It doesn’t exist. Now, conspiracy to defraud the government — you’re right. Conspiracy to hack, that is the crime. We don’t know whether — Now, did Donald Trump engage in a conspiracy to hack with the Russians? They’ve been going at it — the counterintelligence investigation came to the conclusion — no evidence.
+michael barbaro
+Mark, it feels like time and time again, when it comes to the Mueller investigation, he and his prosecutors are charging people around the president with lying or tampering with a witness or doing something deceptive around their interactions with his own investigation, but not with actually colluding with Russia or coordinating with Russia or being involved in a conspiracy that involves Russia, which, of course, is what this investigation is really about. What do you make of that?
+mark mazzetti
+If you want to look at it as a best-case scenario for President Trump, it’s that there’s no original crime here. There’s no collusion, there’s no conspiracy. They’ve been charged because they were just lying to Congress.
+archived recording
+Today’s surprise guilty plea by Michael Cohen — Cohen said in federal court that he lied to Congress, he says, to support Mr. Trump’s timeline of a Moscow real estate deal.
+mark mazzetti
+Lying to the F.B.I. Withholding evidence.
+archived recording
+Tonight, former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos admitting he lied to the F.B.I. about his contacts with someone the F.B.I. suspected of being a Russian operative to cover for President Trump.
+mark mazzetti
+But the worst-case scenario is that they are lying to protect something big. They were so concerned about what’s at the bottom of this story that they had to lie to keep investigators from getting there. That’s been one of the enduring mysteries of this entire story. Was there a grand conspiracy, or does this all add up to small, individual acts, individual contacts with Russians, individual business deals gone bad that individual people were trying to lie to cover up their own role? The fact that we don’t know where Mueller is going and Mueller only reveals his strategy in individual indictments means that we’re still left with these kinds of questions.
+michael barbaro
+And in this latest indictment, we’ve learned that Roger Stone, who has not been taken very seriously all this time, now seems to represent something quite important in all of this.
+mark mazzetti
+Yes. In many ways, Roger Stone was this kind of cartoonish figure. If this were a whodunit, he’d be the obvious suspect that a reader would have long ago dismissed because he’s too obvious. And yet, here’s Roger Stone being charged with very serious crimes. And for the first time, we see Mueller show his hand that there really was this direct link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. But I think the bigger point is the question of how directly the Trump campaign officials were working with the original source of the information, and that is the Russian government. WikiLeaks was a pass-through here. The Russian government, Russian hackers gave it to WikiLeaks to distribute. The real question at the end of the day is not the communications necessarily with WikiLeaks, but whether there was foreknowledge about what Russia was doing and any direct communication with the Russians about their campaign to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s political future.
+michael barbaro
+Mark, thank you very much.
+mark mazzetti
+Thank you.
+michael barbaro
+We’ll be right back.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Thank you very much. My fellow Americans, I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government. [APPLAUSE]
+michael barbaro
+On Friday afternoon, just hours after the F.B.I. raid of Roger Stone’s home, President Trump walked into the Rose Garden of the White House and announced victoriously that he was temporarily ending the shutdown with no agreement from the Democrats to fund his border wall.
+archived recording (president trump)
+I want to thank all of the incredible federal workers and their amazing families —
+michael barbaro
+The announcement came a day after two bills to reopen the government — one sponsored by Republicans, the other by Democrats — failed to pass in the Senate, and as frustration over the shutdown began to boil over in highly public and disruptive ways.
+archived recording
+They’re both clowns. Both sides should sit down and make it happen, including our president, including Pelosi. It’s ridiculous. It’s not fair. It’s not T.S.A.‘s fault that they’re not getting paid and stuff. It’s the government’s fault. So the government should get it together.
+michael barbaro
+By Friday, so many air traffic controllers had called in sick that the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights across the Northeast. Hundreds of workers at the IRS refused to show up for work, and the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, had released a public message to his employees.
+archived recording (christopher wray)
+Hi, everyone. We’re now five weeks and two missed paychecks into this mess, and I wanted to touch base with all of you again. Making some people stay home when they don’t want to and making others show up without pay — it’s mind-boggling, it’s short-sighted and it’s unfair. It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time.
+michael barbaro
+Unity among congressional Republicans, which had held for a month, began to collapse, with Republican senators, including majority leader Mitch McConnell, telling Vice President Mike Pence that the president’s shutdown strategy was not working and needed to end immediately. In his speech, the president, who has made the $5.7 billion in funding for his wall a non-negotiable condition for ending the shutdown, and who repeatedly rejected Democratic proposals to reopen the government while negotiations continue, ultimately did just that, restoring government to normal function for the next three weeks and promising to quickly pay back federal workers who have missed paychecks since the shutdown began. But —
+archived recording (president trump)
+If we don’t get a fair deal from Congress, the government will either shut down on February 15 again, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.
+michael barbaro
+Democrats and Republicans will enter formal negotiations this week to see if they can find a compromise on border security funding and on what constitutes a wall, a definition that is evolving for the president himself.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea. We never did. We never proposed that. We never wanted that, because we have barriers at the border where natural structures are as good as anything that we can build. They’re already there. They’ve been there for millions of years.
+michael barbaroBeijing Youth Daily, a state-owned newspaper, reported that some residents said they saw explosives being thrown from the building, but a local official would not confirm those accounts.
+In one video posted to social media, more than 15 blasts can be heard, and at least one was proceeded by an object falling through the air. Some explosions produced loud booms, while others were more modest, like fireworks.
+In July, a man set off an explosion outside the United States Embassy in Beijing, badly injuring his hand. The police said he suffered from hallucinations and had been diagnosed with a paranoid personality disorder. A lighter, firecracker fragments and three unexploded firecrackers were found at the scene.Her inquiry does not amount to a formal, independent investigation of the kind the United Nations has ordered in the past, notably into the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan in 2007. But it is a first step that might lead to a some fuller United Nations examination of the case.
+It was not clear whether the announcement would satisfy Turkey, which has called on the United Nations to launch a full independent, international investigation in the Khashoggi case.
+Ms. Callamard’s investigation will begin with a trip next week to Turkey, aided by Helena Kennedy, a British lawyer, member of the House of Lords and former official at the University of Oxford; and Duarte Nuno Vieira, a leading expert in forensic medicine and professor of medicine at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
+American intelligence agencies have concluded that Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old crown prince and de facto ruler, personally ordered the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi, a Virginia resident who was killed and dismembered, and whose remains Turkish investigators have yet to find. After a briefing on the issue by the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Senate passed a resolution publicly holding the crown prince responsible.
+Saudi Arabia has said it is conducting its own investigation into the killing, and Saudi officials have said their initial inquiry has indicated that the leader of a team of agents on the ground in Istanbul — not the crown prince — decided to kill Mr. Khashoggi. The kingdom has said it has arrested 21 people in connection with the killing and this month it reportedly began prosecuting 11 of them. The kingdom has said it is seeking the death penalty for five of those defendants but has not named any of them.SYDNEY, Australia — At a dried-up waterhole in Australia’s far north, wild horses were found dead or dying. In cities in the southeast, power outages darkened traffic lights and shopping malls, and office workers and commuters were left exhausted and wilted.
+On the island of Tasmania, more than 50 wildfires were burning, and farmers were bracing for more. And in Elizabeth North, a town north of Adelaide, the Red Lion Hotel promised free beer if the temperature reached 45 degrees Celsius (113 Fahrenheit) — and then had to deliver.
+“I got three marriage proposals, the problem was all of them were dudes over 60 years old,” said Stephen Firth, the pub’s manager.
+Australia — again — is in the midst of one of its hottest summers on record. In the southeast, where most people live, aging coal-powered plants struggled to cope with demand on Friday, with more than 160,000 households temporarily losing power.The following report compiles all significant security incidents confirmed by New York Times reporters throughout Afghanistan from the past seven days. It is necessarily incomplete as many local officials refuse to confirm casualty information. The report includes government claims of insurgent casualty figures, but in most cases these cannot be independently verified by The Times. Similarly, the reports do not include Taliban claims for their attacks on the government unless they can be verified. Both sides routinely inflate casualty totals for their opponents.
+At least 90 pro-government forces and 21 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the past week. The casualties of pro-government forces increased this week, but the number of the Taliban attacks decreased. The bloodiest attack took place in Wardak Province, where a Taliban suicide attacker drove an armored Humvee packed with explosives to an Afghan intelligence agency’s base, killing 50 intelligence personnel and wounding dozens others. It is the first time in recent weeks that Taliban attacks across the country decreased dramatically, perhaps due to the cold weather and the first heavy snowfalls in many parts of the county. One American service member was killed in Oruzgan Province by enemy fire during a combat mission.
+[Read the Afghan War Casualty Report from previous weeks.]
+Contributors: Reporting was contributed by the following New York Times reporters: Rod Nordland and Fatima Faizi from Kabul; Najim Rahim from Mazar-e-Sharif; Taimoor Shah from Kandahar; Zabihullah Ghazi from Jalalabad and Farooq Jan Mangal from Khost.
+Jan. 23 Helmand Province: 16 civilians killed
+At least 16 civilians were killed during a joint military operation of Afghan and American forces in Sangin District. The house where the civilians lived was targeted, although it’s unclear if it was hit by an airstrike or a rocket.
+Jan. 22 Faryab province: one police officer killed
+The Taliban attacked security outposts in the center of Almar District, killing one police officer and wounding a pro-government militia member.CARACAS, Venezuela — Risking arrest, Venezuela’s opposition leader attended a rally on Friday in his first public appearance since he declared himself president, and told supporters to maintain pressure on the authorities “if they dare to kidnap me.”
+The rally in eastern Caracas, where at least 500 people converged in a square ringed by police officers, was peaceful and orderly, and there was no immediate indication that the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, would be taken into custody, as many had feared.
+At the same time, President Nicolás Maduro, who had been furiously describing his adversary as the lackey of an American-backed coup plot, appeared to take a more conciliatory approach, calling for dialogue.
+Alluding to reports of clandestine meetings that had taken place between opposition members and people in Mr. Maduro’s orbit, he even expressed a willingness to attend such meetings himself. “If I have to use a hood or go naked, however I have to go,” Mr. Maduro said at a news conference.LONDON — Over the last few years, as Britain has divided into warring tribes over its exit from the European Union, Queen Elizabeth II has retained a sphinxlike neutrality, imperturbably getting on with the business of conveying knighthoods and hosting garden parties.
+But this week even the queen was drawn into Britain’s constitutional turmoil, after a prominent lawmaker suggested she employ a royal prerogative that has not been used for centuries: the right to tactically adjourn, or “prorogue,” a rebellious Parliament.
+The 92-year-old queen then made a veiled reference to Brexit in a speech on Thursday, delivering a plea for “respecting different points of view” and “coming together to seek out the common ground.” In line with her constitutional obligation to remain neutral on political matters, she revealed nothing about her views on Prime Minister Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement or, say, the northern Irish backstop.
+[What is Brexit? A simple guide to why it matters and what happens next.]
+“As we look for new answers in the modern age, I for one prefer the tried and tested recipes, like speaking well of each other and respecting different points of view; coming together to seek out the common ground; and never losing sight of the bigger picture,” the queen said.Theater: The Return of Freestyle Love Supreme
+Jan. 30-March 3; freestylelovesupreme.com.
+One of the most fascinating things about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s fame is the way he uses the freedom and wealth that “Hamilton” gave him to boost people, projects and places dear to his heart.
+Examples from this month alone: “Hamilton” opening in a still-rebuilding Puerto Rico, Miranda back in the title role; the rescue of the Drama Book Shop, a threatened resource in Manhattan’s theater district bought by Miranda and friends; and the return, starting on Wednesday, Jan. 30, of the hip-hop improv group Freestyle Love Supreme.
+Miranda, a founder of the group, is a producer of the five-week engagement at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan. He’s also on the roster of occasional surprise guests, as are Christopher Jackson, the original George Washington in “Hamilton”; Daveed Diggs, who created that show’s sexy Lafayette; and James Monroe Iglehart (“Aladdin”), a current “Hamilton” star.“Hi. This is Bob Persichetti.” “This is Peter Ramsey.” “And this is Rodney Rothman, and we are the directors of “Spider-Man — Into the Spider-Verse.’” “Alright, so this is our obligatory spider biting kid scene, but this one’s special because we’ve got Miles. You know, his uncle Aaron brought him down to this place that he’s never been before, a place that has some history between Aaron and Miles” father Jefferson. And he’s looking to just blow off some pressure from school.” “Now, you on your own, Miles.” NARRATOR: “The sequence is fun. I mean, we really tried to stretch and use the textures of hip-hop, use the textures of graffiti, street art, even the cutting patterns that you’d see in, like, a music video. We’re doing an effect right here where his paint is splattering the camera in dots. We’re not just evoking kind of, like, “80s and “90s visual aesthetics. We’re also setting up this idea of Kirby dots. Jack Kirby is a comic book artist and is famous for these very abstract expressive dots. Those become important later in our movie, so we’re setting that up here also.” “A little help?” NARRATOR: “You can also see a lot of the use of different printing techniques that are transposed to cinematography techniques with our halftone dots, which are drawn from comics, the use of chromatic aberration you can see here, where the figures in the foreground are kind of blurred, and the colors and the edges drift over each other. That’s drawn from the imperfect comic book printing techniques that give the illusion of blur. In our movie, we don’t have any computer blur effects. It’s all drawn from graphic techniques to create the illusion of space and distance.” “Yeah. The story reason for doing that is we’re trying to say that Miles” universe is different than any other. So we’re trying to tweak the rules of cinema and lighting a little bit in very specific ways to make his world distinct.” “This was one of the early scenes that we did between Aaron and Miles, and it really became a touchstone for the style of animation we were doing as well. And then here, this is sort of the first introduction of really leaning into the 2D artwork and the comic book graphic with the spider bite. And then, of course, it’s just fun to have him be blase about the spider biting him. It’s a horrifying looking spider.” [laughter]According to the lawsuit, the allegations against Mr. Asher surfaced in April 2017, when Ms. Oliver received emails that were purportedly from a group of seven anonymous women who belonged to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The emails claimed that Mr. Asher had used the group’s conferences to prey on women sexually, then threatened them to intimidate them into silence, making them “feel unsafe to attend SCBWI events.”
+Mr. Asher has acknowledged having affairs with women he encountered at these conferences, but he maintains that they were consensual and that he never threatened any of the women or offered to help them professionally. In the complaint, Mr. Asher contends that “an individual upset over Plaintiff’s success” was behind the emails to Ms. Oliver, and that in June of 2017, one of the seven anonymous women contacted Ms. Oliver and told her that the allegations made in April were false. But according to the complaint, “no further investigation” was conducted.
+The lawsuit further states that Mr. Asher provided the organization with evidence that one of the authors of the emails had “sexually coerced him at a SCBWI Conference” and had been harassing him for more than a decade.
+Andrew Baum, a lawyer representing Ms. Oliver and the organization, said that Mr. Asher’s lawsuit “is entirely without merit” and “appears to be an attempt by Asher to repair his name and reputation after it became public that his private actions were inconsistent with his public persona of being an advocate and ally of women.” Mr. Baum noted that after the group received complaints about Mr. Asher’s behavior, Mr. Asher confirmed that he had sexual relationships with multiple members of the writers and illustrators group, and “agreed that he would no longer be on faculty at, present at, or attend, any future SCBWI events.”
+In February 2018, the allegations against Mr. Asher erupted into a public controversy, after an article on Medium about sexual harassment in the children’s book world set off a cascade of online accusations against prominent illustrators and authors, including Mr. Asher and the illustrator David Diaz.
+That month, Ms. Oliver said in a statement to The Associated Press that the organization had broken with both Mr. Asher and Mr. Diaz. “Claims against them were investigated and, as a result, they are no longer members and neither will be appearing at any SCBWI events in the future,” she said.“Hi. This is Bob Persichetti.” “This is Peter Ramsey.” “And this is Rodney Rothman, and we are the directors of “Spider-Man — Into the Spider-Verse.’” “Alright, so this is our obligatory spider biting kid scene, but this one’s special because we’ve got Miles. You know, his uncle Aaron brought him down to this place that he’s never been before, a place that has some history between Aaron and Miles” father Jefferson. And he’s looking to just blow off some pressure from school.” “Now, you on your own, Miles.” NARRATOR: “The sequence is fun. I mean, we really tried to stretch and use the textures of hip-hop, use the textures of graffiti, street art, even the cutting patterns that you’d see in, like, a music video. We’re doing an effect right here where his paint is splattering the camera in dots. We’re not just evoking kind of, like, “80s and “90s visual aesthetics. We’re also setting up this idea of Kirby dots. Jack Kirby is a comic book artist and is famous for these very abstract expressive dots. Those become important later in our movie, so we’re setting that up here also.” “A little help?” NARRATOR: “You can also see a lot of the use of different printing techniques that are transposed to cinematography techniques with our halftone dots, which are drawn from comics, the use of chromatic aberration you can see here, where the figures in the foreground are kind of blurred, and the colors and the edges drift over each other. That’s drawn from the imperfect comic book printing techniques that give the illusion of blur. In our movie, we don’t have any computer blur effects. It’s all drawn from graphic techniques to create the illusion of space and distance.” “Yeah. The story reason for doing that is we’re trying to say that Miles” universe is different than any other. So we’re trying to tweak the rules of cinema and lighting a little bit in very specific ways to make his world distinct.” “This was one of the early scenes that we did between Aaron and Miles, and it really became a touchstone for the style of animation we were doing as well. And then here, this is sort of the first introduction of really leaning into the 2D artwork and the comic book graphic with the spider bite. And then, of course, it’s just fun to have him be blase about the spider biting him. It’s a horrifying looking spider.” [laughter]ATHENS — Overcoming Russian meddling in the Balkans and intensive domestic opposition, Greek lawmakers on Friday cast a wrenching vote to set aside historical antagonisms and recognize the newly renamed nation of North Macedonia, in a rare victory for the European Union and NATO.
+The 153 to 146 vote by the Greek Parliament now essentially clears a path for Greece’s northern neighbor Macedonia, under its new name, to join NATO and potentially the European bloc, strengthening the West’s foothold in the Balkans over Moscow’s protests.
+Greece had fiercely objected to its neighbor’s use of the name Macedonia, arguing that it appropriated Greek history going back to Alexander the Great and implied territorial ambitions over the northern Greek territory of the same name.
+The issue has stirred months of mass demonstrations in Greece, and the decision to support the deal by Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who has sought to burnish his reputation as a statesman, may yet come back to haunt his government in elections this year. Polls show well over 50 percent of Greeks opposed to the new name, as well as the old one.My colleague Kate Conger and I reported Wednesday that lawmakers were asking Twitter for more information about the accounts. There is concern that the accounts that amplified the tweet were foreign (read: Russian) and looking to stir discord among Americans. Twitter said it was investigating. So far, it appears that at least the original poster, @2020fight, is American.
+The account was suspended by Twitter. But what, at least under Twitter rules, did it do wrong? Many people on Twitter use fake names; many more use fake photos. Neither practice is explicitly against Twitter’s rules, and in many ways the account used Twitter for exactly what the platform was designed to do — to make something go viral.
+There’s a question of whether that is good for any of us, or whether, as my colleague Farhad Manjoo succinctly put it in his column this past week, the answer is to “Never Tweet.”
+■ Twitter wasn’t the only company to have a bad week. French regulators announced that they had fined Google 50 million euros, or about $57 million, for not properly disclosing how it collected data about its users across its services. Adam Satariano wrote that it was the largest penalty of its kind levied by the European Union, which last year adopted a sweeping new data privacy law known as the General Data Protection Regulation.
+■ In Australia, a sweeping new law gives local law enforcement authorities the power to compel tech companies like Apple to create tools, known as back doors, that would circumvent the encryption they built into their products.
+My colleague Nellie Bowles reported that the law’s impact could be felt globally. If Apple were to build a back door for iPhones, law enforcement in other countries, including the United States, could ask to use the same tool.
+The debate about back doors to encryption has been raging for years. Tech companies argue that they encrypt devices to protect users. The police say they need access to devices, especially phones, to do their jobs.People in many countries often rely on only one or two text messaging services. In China, WeChat, which is made by Tencent, is popular, while WhatsApp is heavily used in South America. Americans are more divided in their use of such services, SMS text messages, Apple’s iMessage and various Google chat apps.
+For Facebook, the move also offers avenues for making money from Instagram and WhatsApp. WhatsApp currently generates little revenue; Instagram produces ad revenue but none from its messaging. Mr. Zuckerberg does not yet have specific plans for how to profit from integrating the services, said two of the people involved in the matter. A more engaged audience could result in new forms of advertising or other services for which Facebook could charge a fee, they said.
+One potential business opportunity involves Facebook Marketplace, a free Craigslist-like product where people can buy and sell goods. The service is popular in Southeast Asia and other markets outside the United States.
+When the apps are knitted together, Facebook Marketplace buyers and sellers in Southeast Asia will be able to communicate with one another using WhatsApp, which is popular in the region, rather than using Facebook Messenger or another, non-Facebook text message service. That could eventually yield new ad opportunities or profit-generating services, said one of the people.
+Some Facebook employees said they were confused about what made combining the messaging services so compelling to Mr. Zuckerberg. Some said it was jarring because of his past promises about independence. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, Mr. Koum talked publicly about user privacy, and said, “If partnering with Facebook meant that we had to change our values, we wouldn’t have done it.”
+Last month, during one of WhatsApp’s monthly meetings for staff members, it became clear that Mr. Zuckerberg’s mandate would be a priority in 2019, said a person who was there. One WhatsApp employee then conducted an analysis of how many potential new users in the United States the integration plan could bring to Facebook, said two people familiar with the study. The total was relatively meager, the analysis showed.
+To assuage concerns, Mr. Zuckerberg called a follow-up meeting with WhatsApp employees a few days later, three of the people said. On Dec. 7, employees gathered around microphones at the WhatsApp offices to ask him why he was so invested in merging the services. Some said his answers were vague and meandering. Several WhatsApp employees have left or plan to leave because of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans, the people said.Gang members would leave their guns at home and come play, Wood said. If anybody created trouble, they wouldn’t be allowed back. The hoop, Wood said, “saved my ass.”
+It was a much more serious brush with the wrong side of the law that led Wood to comedy. A student at Florida A&M University, he stole credit cards while working at the post office and used them to buy jeans. “There was no real agenda other than making money and looking fly,” Wood said, adding, “Most crime comes with little logic.”
+He was arrested in his junior year. Suspended from college and facing incarceration, “I spent every week on the Greyhound bus, riding around the South just doing stand-up to deal with the depression of knowing I had to go to prison,” Wood said.
+Except he didn’t end up behind bars.
+A judge took pity and sentenced him to probation. His probation officer encouraged him to keep doing comedy — so Wood fit in shows around classes. A few years after graduating in 2001, Wood sent him one of his comedy albums as a thank you. The officer returned it, saying he couldn’t accept gifts. It was the last time they communicated. But the officer’s influence inspired Wood to pitch Comedy Central on a pilot, now in development, about two probation officers in the South.
+“Getting arrested was the best thing that ever happened to me because it literally gave me the shock to the system,” Wood said.SAN FRANCISCO — Whether it is a video claiming the earth is flat or the moon landing was faked, conspiracy theories are not hard to find on Google’s YouTube. But in a significant policy change, YouTube said on Friday that it planned to stop recommending them.
+After years of criticism that YouTube leads viewers to videos that spread misinformation, the company said it was changing what videos it recommended to users. In a blog post, YouTube said it would no longer suggest videos with “borderline content” or those that “misinform users in a harmful way” even if the footage did not violate its community guidelines.
+YouTube said the number of videos affected by the policy change amounted to fewer than 1 percent of all videos on the platform. But given the billions of videos in YouTube’s library, it is still a large number.
+YouTube and other powerful technology platforms have faced rising criticism for failing to police the content that users post.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+First, Roger Stone — the longtime adviser to President Trump — was indicted this morning on seven counts, including witness tampering and obstruction. Legal analysts and journalists are still sorting through the charges. But as Quinta Jurecic of Lawfare notes, Stone appears to have been a conduit between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. If so, he may also have been at the center of the relationship between the campaign and Russia. Stay tuned.
+Let Them Eat Loans
+At this point, Wilbur Ross almost seems to be campaigning for the title of Worst Trump Cabinet member.
+Ross, the commerce secretary, made news yesterday by suggesting that federal workers working without pay don’t have it so bad: They should just take out a loan, he suggested, and all will be fine.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+There’s been so much California news this week — Kamala Harris, the L.A. teachers’ strike — that the Los Angeles Rams’ making the Super Bowl seems as if it slipped under the radar.
+Part of the reason may be that while the Rams do have a history in Los Angeles, the team’s presence is still new and novel to anyone college age or younger.
+“We are the shiny new toy, but we need to be the favorite toy,” Kevin Demoff, the Rams’ chief operating officer, told my colleague Ken Belson when the Rams returned to Los Angeles in 2016. “No matter how successful we are, there are going to be challenges.”
+They weren’t very good at first, but the Rams sure are successful now. So I asked Mr. Belson, our N.F.L. expert, to outline the challenges that remain.“I have to use this umbrella to protect myself from the torrent of illegal leaks.” Roger Stone. He’s a Republican political consultant and a self-described — “Agent provocateur.” He was an adviser to longtime friend Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. “Trying to stop Trump is like stepping in front of a hurtling freight train.” Now, Stone is back in the spotlight. He’s been charged as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization that released Clinton campaign emails stolen by the Russian government to help Trump win. In 2016, Stone said he had an in with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I actually have communicated with Assange.” “We have a mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman.” But now, he says it was all part of his political game. “I set a Google News alert for ‘Julian Assange.’ I read every interview he gave. And I used that information to posture and to bluff and to punk the Democrats.” Stone has built a reputation on winning at all costs, even if it means bending the truth. “I assumed he was lying. It’s something Roger does.” “Posture and bluff. That’s politics.” Stone started his career as a political operative at a young age. At 19, he was an entry-level trickster for Nixon’s re-election campaign. His name later came up in the Watergate investigation. “I paid $100 to Mr. Roger Stone on one occasion to leave a leaflet, I believe, at Senator McGovern’s headquarters.” Stone and Trump have been friends and associates since the 1980s, when Stone was working as a political consultant with Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who has since been convicted of financial fraud. Stone says he has been encouraging Donald Trump to run for president since 1988. “I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning.” “Between his outspokenness, his national name identification and his issue positions, he could be a formidable candidate.” “I guess we’re looking at it very seriously.” After he got into some trouble working for Bob Dole in 1996, he bounced back — but has largely worked outside of political campaigns. Stone has a unique personal brand: a mix of provocation, politics and fashion. He can often be found discussing some of his favorite topics: the Clintons, how L.B.J. was behind the assassination of J.F.K. and “fake news.” “Fake news.” Stone strongly denies any wrongdoing in 2016. “I haven’t done anything illegal. I’ve been targeted for one reason and one reason only: I am loyal to the president of the United States.” But emails and interviews suggest that he sold himself to the Trump campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks. He is also connected to a web of associates, some of whom have been interviewed as part of Mueller’s investigation. Stone has been charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering.Matt Apfel, the director of augmented reality and virtual reality content at Google, said there was a “sizable void when it came to arts and culture and V.R.,” so when Mr. Maler, who does consulting for Google, pitched the idea, Mr. Apfel and his team were intrigued.
+The possibilities of using “Hamlet 360” as an educational tool were also exciting, Mr. Maler said. One of his central goals for the project was to bring this Hamlet into classrooms and schools, where performances of Shakespeare are common, but professional-caliber productions are not.
+“Many young people’s first experience of Shakespeare is not all that great,” he said. “This is a way to put into the classroom an extraordinary experience of this play, and give teachers another tool to bring the material to life.”
+Although you watch it on a screen, “Hamlet 360” feels in many ways more like theater than cinema. The takes, for example, are extremely long — the “get thee to a nunnery” scene lasts nearly 10 minutes and is composed of only two shots. Matthew Niederhauser, a technical director and cinematographer on the project, said that quick takes can be hard to watch in V.R. because viewers have to reorient themselves every time the camera moves.
+To capture the action, a camera called the Yi Halo 360, lent by Google, was planted in one spot and the actors moved around it, aiming for the sweet spot of its focal depth, about three to eight feet away. The Halo is made up of 17 cameras, one pointed up and the rest fanned around in the shape of a wreath.Every decade or so, Hollywood produces a movie that is not only entertaining but also raises the question just what is entertainment.
+The 1934 musical “Stand Up and Cheer,” in which the president of the United States appoints a secretary of amusement to dispel the Depression, is an example of what could be called meta-entertainment. Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy” (1983) and Ben Stiller’s “Cable Guy” (1996), both self-reflexively predicated on characters who are mass-culture personified, are others. So is Michael Schultz’s 1976 “Car Wash.”
+A movie in which mass media, specifically radio, exerts a powerful influence on its characters’ lives, “Car Wash” is an energetic, vulgar, socially conscious farce — scored by the master of psychedelic soul Norman Whitfield and focusing on a single day at the Dee-Luxe Car Wash in downtown Los Angeles. It manages to have its cake and eat it too: The film is simultaneously downbeat and uplifting. The New York Times critic Vincent Canby called it “a terrifically shrewd piece of movie-making,” noting that “if ‘Car Wash’ makes no comment on our pop culture, it’s because it’s a piece of it.”
+Yet “Car Wash” does comment on itself: The contradictions between their labor and our leisure are manifest in the irresistible title song. Punctuated by the exhortation “work and work and work,” the song by the soul group Rose Royce explains that while the Dee-Luxe is “no place to be if you plan on being a star” (never mind that at least in the final credits just about everyone gets to be one), it’s “better than digging a ditch” (what isn’t?) and “the boss don’t mind if you act the fool” (of course not). Heard over the radio, the tune sets the Dee-Luxe employees bopping while they work in a speeded-up version of the Funky Robot dance. Has a $3-an-hour job ever been more fun?Smartphones played a key supporting role in James Graham’s “Privacy,” at the Public Theater, too, demonstrating — sometimes uncomfortably — how much could be gleaned about a randomly gathered group of theater fans by the devices they carried in their pockets.
+Digital wizardry in ‘The Tempest’
+Working with Intel and a motion-capture company founded by Andy Serkis (Gollum from “Lord of the Rings” trilogy), the Royal Shakespeare Company featured an unusually shape-shifting Ariel in its 2017 production of “The Tempest.”
+Mark Quartley, the actor playing Ariel, appeared both onstage and, at moments when his character referred to magic, as a digitally created avatar, filmed live and projected onto screens moving over fellow actors.
+More ‘Object’ lessons
+Sensorium, the company that oversaw the technical direction on “Hamlet 360,” also helped to develop “objects in mirror AR closer than they appear,” an extension of Geoff Sobelle’s acclaimed one-man show “The Object Lesson.”
+Presented at New York Theater Workshop and at the Tribeca Film Festival, the piece gave viewers the chance to wander through sections of Mr. Sobelle’s clutter-filled set and, using smartphone technology, watch and learn more about what was inside the many boxes and drawers — further fleshing out, visually and aurally, what Ben Brantley in The New York Times called the “connective poetry in the seeming randomness of what we hoard.”Jazz at Lincoln Center will program and produce the Saint Lucia Jazz Festival in May, the first time that this New York-based nonprofit organization has taken the creative reins at a festival abroad.
+The event’s official title will be the 2019 Saint Lucia Jazz Festival Produced in Collaboration with Jazz at Lincoln Center, and it will feature multiple performances from each of five artists in residence: the bassist Christian McBride, the vocalist Ledisi, the trumpeter Etienne Charles, the bassist Russell Hall and the saxophonist and clarinetist Patrick Bartley.
+[Read about the best jazz of 2018 here.]
+Other performers will include the United States-based vocalists Gregory Porter, Dianne Reeves, Catherine Russell and Somi, as well as a number of artists based in the Caribbean.
+The festival, now entering its 28th year, will run from May 5-12, and will take place at locations across the scenic island. The festival will also include educational events and performance opportunities for grade-school students at the Saint Lucia School of Music.“Could I get a program, please?”
+You can feel the bafflement percolating in the audience when ushers have nothing to give out before a performance in New York. We theatergoers have gotten used to the fact that some shows don’t want us getting our paws on a playbill until afterward — they don’t want us distracted, maybe, or a surprise spoiled — but the new twist is no program at all.
+At least not one we can hold in our hands.
+Often, they want us to go online to read a digital version — a money-saving move, surely, but one that shortchanges artists and audiences alike.
+That lovely Palestinian actor, Khalifa Natour, who starred in “Grey Rock” at La MaMa in early January? I’d have loved to glance down at a piece of paper that evening and find out that he’d been in the movie “The Band’s Visit,” which I adored. But that fact was in the program, and the program was online.
+I don’t mean to pick on La MaMa. Going digital has become such a trend Off and Off Off Broadway that I’m no longer surprised to be directed to a theater’s website if I want to know whose work I’m seeing. It’s not just a wrongheaded tack, though. It’s also counterintuitive, because it’s contrary to the spirit of live performance.Amy called me out of the blue one day and said, “You know, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve always been the oldest girl in the world.” And I’m like, “Is that a compliment?” Cut to the end of the story: We ended up developing a show for NBC called “Old Soul,” in which I played a character named Nadia, and Ellen Burstyn played [a character based on] Ruth, my real-life godmother who lives in Murray Hill and spends most of her time at the Borgata in Atlantic City and is a high-roller but almost exclusively on the slot machines. Chain-smoker, Carltons. So when that show did not get picked up, it was almost like a paid investigation of what would become “Russian Doll.”
+What’s it like handing off your ideas to an all-female writers’ room?
+In an amazing way, the first thing that goes out the window is the trope of a woman. Everybody is a vulnerable, complex person, but I don’t think that the ways in which we exhibit that are in any way how our stories have been told traditionally.
+How fun was it thinking up ways for Nadia to die?
+There’s probably a bit of a misconception around how key the deaths are. It was more an emotional story of bottoming out. There are metaphorical deaths big and small throughout the day: There are the bigger ones where you just feel like your whole world is collapsing, [because of] health or a relationship falling apart. Then there’s the smaller deaths of the text message that didn’t get responded to that you’re obsessing on, and it feels like you’re suddenly a hollow man inside.
+Let’s not forget those street-crossing hazards.
+I’m definitely a real criminal jaywalker. I’m happy for the environment that we have bicycles now in the city, but it’s unmanageable. You don’t know if they’re coming from this side or the other side. It’s way too zany. No longer is there this elegant kind of Richard Hell sort of Lou Reed lazy amble through the city as you cross the street, looking over your shoulder like a cool guy. They’ve killed that entire rhythm to Manhattan.
+I don’t want to spoil anything, but you’ve cast Chloë Sevigny in a very personal role.
+Chloë is my closest person in life, and there was really only one person that felt like it was safe to entrust that role to. Probably the most incredible moment for me was walking home with my little director’s binder in the East Village and watching the sun begin to rise. And I’m like, this is a very different kind of sunrise than what I’ve experienced historically at this hour. This was the good guy’s version of that, and it was deep stuff. Chloë and I had walked those streets so many times, and now it was this world that we had built. There was a lot of gratitude. I just couldn’t believe how things have turned out.
+In July, you told some crossword puzzle jokes for T Magazine. It seems you’re obsessed.
+I might like the crossword puzzle more than I care about cigarettes, which is insane. There have been relationships where I’ve broken up because I’m like, I need this to feel more like a crossword puzzle. At the time, I didn’t know that that’s what was missing — about the stimulus or lack thereof — but it’s a real sweet spot. Imagine if they ever really figure out virtual reality: It would feel similar in terms of why people would want to escape into a futuristic pod and just live in there because the world outside has become too toxic to inhabit. That was an early concept for “Russian Doll” that we abandoned because we realized we didn’t know how to make that show.The text message from his assistant coach Rex Kalamian popped up on Doc Rivers’s phone on an off night last week, but it contained no pressing strategic suggestions for the Los Angeles Clippers’ next game. No injury updates or juicy trade rumors, either.
+Kalamian simply felt an urgency to let Rivers know that it had happened again — another burst of the scoreboard overload that has dominated this 2018-19 N.B.A. season even more than the star-laden Golden State Warriors.
+A laughing Rivers recounted how Kalamian’s summary pointed out that nearly every winner that night (Jan. 14) scored 131 to 149 points. “It was like five teams up there,” Rivers said.
+In truth it was only four — Indiana (131), Atlanta (142), Golden State (142) and Philadelphia (149) — but Rivers’s point was made. A leaguewide push by teams to shoot more 3-pointers and take more shots earlier in the shot clock than ever before, combined with a freedom-of-movement crusade driven by the league office, has resulted in an offensive boom rendering scores in the 140s routine — with few signs of it abating.Dear Match Book,
+As St. Augustine said about time’s ineffability, we all know what music is until we are asked to explain it. Yet that challenge hasn’t stopped writers — musicologists, poets, novelists — from trying to articulate music’s place in the human experience. And while there are many good novels about pop and jazz, I am most interested in fiction that grapples with the complex power of classical music.
+Although there are many novels whose titles make reference to the genre, few actually address the nature of the musical experience. Many of the last century’s writers wrote beautifully about its ethereal and mysterious qualities: I’m thinking of the famous, though imaginary Vinteuil sonata in Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time,” and Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and “Doctor Faustus.” More recently, Richard Powers’s novels (“The Gold Bug Variations,” “The Time of Our Singing” and “Orfeo”) and “The Metropolis Case,” by Matthew Gallaway, have investigated the profoundness of music as both an art and a deeply personal experience. Could you suggest other titles that address classical music in a meaningful way?
+TIM McCRACKEN
+MILFORD, N.J.
+Dear Tim,
+The gloriously wide-ranging resource list of musical fiction that you’ve already compiled and included with your email stretches from 1941 (Virginia Woolf’s “Between the Acts”) to 2017 (the English translation of Mathias Énard’s “Compass”), and across genres, encompassing even science fiction (“The Memory of Whiteness,” by Kim Stanley Robinson) and mystery (“Charles Jessold, Considered as a Murderer,” by Wesley Stace). There’s even a diversity of musicians among your favorites: a soprano in Robertson Davies’s “A Mixture of Frailties”; a pianist in “Appassionata,” by Eva Hoffman; a composer in “Amsterdam,” by Ian McEwan. Allow me to add some additional tracks to your literary playlist.
+Echo Chambers
+“She hummed back the exact pitch of the buzzer (D-flat) and he let her in”: A quick tonal exchange between a violinist and a violist near the beginning of Aja Gabel’s bittersweet, romantic 2018 debut, “The Ensemble,” hints at the way music shapes the lives (and bodies) of members of a string quartet over the course of nearly two decades, and gives the narrative its harmony.There was something incredibly appealing about people who loved God so much that they believed it would solve every other problem in their lives, as these boys did. Soon enough, I found myself singing along to the catchy praise songs with my eyes closed and my hands in the air. If something promised to fix my self-hatred that easily, why not let it?
+The fact that I had a Jewish father was a problem. I don’t think anyone in the youth group knew this about me, unless they stopped to consider my last name, but I felt I wouldn’t fully fit in with them until I eschewed this part of myself. Until then, it was another aspect of myself to hate.
+Our youth group leader had a girlfriend who styled her hair in that choppy, angular cut popular in the early 2000s: one diagonal line from bang to tip, flat-ironed to death. She wore barbed-wire chokers and hot pink T-shirts with skulls on them.
+When we went on Christian camp overnights, she stayed with the girls, giving us talks from her top bunk about the sacredness of sex and the importance of maintaining our virginities for our future husbands. At that point in my life, sex was such a terrifying prospect that I was grateful to someone who told me not to do it.
+That winter, we drove around singing Christmas carols to anyone who would listen. I cared a lot about what our group leader’s girlfriend thought about me being genetically half-Jewish, because in the car, I asked her if she believed my Jewish grandfather, who had died when I was 6, was in hell.
+She thought about this for a moment. She couldn’t have been more than 20 years old.
+“You know,” she finally said. “I’d like to believe he had a moment, right before he died, when he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and personal savior,” she said. She patted me once on the knee for good measure.While the government is reopening for at least three weeks, it’s unclear whether all I.R.S. employees will return to work immediately, Mr. Reardon said on Friday evening. “The agency is hopeful of getting normal operations going on Monday,” he said, since tax filing season is officially starting. But workers, he said, were awaiting specific instructions from their supervisors. The union is urging the government to be flexible and pay workers as quickly as possible, he said, since many are facing financial hardship from missing two paychecks during the shutdown.
+As to the I.R.S. help line, taxpayers and tax preparers will probably have longer waiting times this year.
+“Even in a good season, there’s a backup,” said Edward Karl, vice president for taxation with the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.
+Despite the uncertain environment, Mr. Karl said, taxpayers who typically file early should do so, as soon as they have the necessary documents, like W-2 income statements.
+“The critical thing for taxpayers is to presume it’s business as usual,” he said.
+Meanwhile, the I.R.S. has announced a bit of relief for some taxpayers: If you underpaid your taxes in 2018, you’re less likely to pay a penalty this year. The agency said this month that because of tax changes passed by Congress in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, it would waive the penalty for many filers who underpaid.
+The change — just for the 2018 tax year — is aimed at helping taxpayers who were “unable to properly adjust” their withholding and estimated tax payments because of the “array of changes” under the tax law, and may have inadvertently underpaid, the I.R.S. said.
+The federal tax system is “pay as you go,” so taxes must be paid periodically, rather than all at once. Typically, taxpayers pay a penalty if their payments, from paycheck withholding or extra estimated tax payments, total less than 90 percent of the amount owed. (Other criteria also apply. For instance, if you underpaid but owe less than $1,000, you’re not subject to any penalty.) For 2018 returns, the I.R.S. said, the threshold will be lowered to 85 percent.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+At La Guardia Airport in New York on Friday, Divneet Wadhwa, 26, was stewing. Her flight to Toronto, where she was going for a wedding, had been delayed three times.
+“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,’’ Ms. Wadhwa said, adding that she had events later and that being stuck in New York would “really mess everything up.”
+She was just one of thousands of travelers across the Northeastern United States whose plans were upended Friday morning after a shortage of air traffic controllers triggered significant flight delays.
+A few hours later, President Trump announced a deal to temporarily reopen the government, easing the increasing strain on federal agencies, for a few weeks at least.“Each of you are glowing tonight, and the love of life that you are share with each other helps to light this world around us,” said the officiant, Rabbi Michele Ellise Lenke, under a white huppah in the temple room, which was a vision in crimson, from carpet to walls, with a Masonic Eastern Star hanging in the center. “Julien Baker may sing about turning the lights out,” the rabbi said, “but my wish for you is to keep shining bright.”
+In his vows, Mr. Ayers spoke of his respect for Ms. Grossan’s drive and ambition, and called her his motivation in life. “I’ve always been a happy person,” he said. “It’s become clear to me that you’ve always been a happy person. So it’s hard to believe that I would meet someone who has made me infinitely happier, but you’ve done that.”
+Ms. Grossan, who is taking her husband’s last name, praised his accomplishments and his “infectious warmth.” “Waiters, bartenders, shopkeepers and strangers we meet are immediately drawn to you,” she said. “It’s like the whole world is completely in love with you, but not as much as me. I vow to protect and cherish that feeling.”
+In toasts over dinner in the building’s Eastern Star Room, where guests drank sparkling Topo Chico water, natural libations from Silverlake’s Psychic Wines, and ate a Mediterranean buffet feast, Mr. Ayers was referred to by a co-worker, Gabe Spierer, as “the nicest guy in rock.”
+(“Not only rock, but one of the nicest guys in earth, wind and water,” Matt Berninger, the frontman for the rock band the National amended later in the evening).
+Mr. Ayers’s mother Louise Vesper, a former ballet dancer, recalled seeing the body language between the couple for the first time, and praised the fact that “in their busy lives, they still make time for their parents.” The party moved back across the hall to the Masonic Temple for dancing, and then onto an after party at Brass Monkey — for karaoke, of course.Good morning. Our Gabrielle Hamilton makes a powerful argument for cooking a pork shoulder on an outdoor grill this weekend, even if — and perhaps especially if — the glass is at zero and there’s snow underfoot.
+“Maybe I can persuade you to recall the miseries of grilling on oppressive thick August afternoons,” she wrote in her “Eat” column for The Times. “The sweat that trickles down the backs of your knees when you stand over that kettle of white hot coals. The way the humidity hangs so heavily that the smoke can’t plume or swirl away and instead attaches itself to you, stinging your eyes — and everyone else’s too. The scorching of your palms and knuckles when you baste the chicken even with the longest-handled brush you have.”
+And so: a pork shoulder rubbed with chile paste (above) cooked beneath the dome of a grill fueled by wood, in the still of the winter cold. It’s a Frost poem about barbecue, a thing to make alone, for others, simply because that is how it is done best. And wouldn’t that be great?
+I recommend accompaniments to GH’s food at my peril. Once I told her my idea for grinding up popcorn spiced with chile oil and using it to top something else — a piece of fried fish? She stared at me for a moment to see if I was joking, and then a few more after that in the way of discipline, which left me quiet for a day.How did you think about body language and staging as you were working to get your shots?
+I think a lot about photographing women: What are the ways that power is taken away from women in visual representations? How can I be mindful of these broader ideas and themes while still also speaking to the woman as an individual? Especially when you’re trying to convey power, and you’re photographing women of color, it’s hard to do it in a way that isn’t trope-y, that isn’t just power posing. A lot of times, women of color, especially black women, are photographed in a way that portrays them as angry.
+Also, a lot of these women are really used to having their portraits done — so [it’s about] getting them to not default into a political smile. I find that you have that same issue if you’re photographing teenage girls, where they know exactly their angles.
+Some might say that we’ve been oversaturated with coverage of these women. A worthy argument?
+The first woman wasn’t elected to Congress until 1917. The first black woman wasn’t elected to the House until 1968. The first woman of color wasn’t elected until 1964. The first black woman in the Senate wasn’t elected until 1992 — I was alive, and I’m not that old.
+Saying that we’ve covered all there is to cover about women and women politicians and women in power is just not true.“ The comeback starts now,” said Haley Joel Osment, as he leaned across the pool table and lined up his shot for a middle pocket. He missed. Wildly. “It’s a subtle comeback.”
+On a recent Monday, Mr. Osment was in New York to promote the new season of “Future Man,” a science fiction comedy on Hulu, and to audition for some new roles. He had met up with his college friend Nicole Pursell, an actress, at one of their undergrad haunts: Fat Cat, a scruffy, subterranean jazz bar and billiards hall in Greenwich Village that smells like spilled beer.
+Mr. Osment’s freshman year dorm at New York University was around the corner, and he used to come here weekly, playing pool if a table was open and Ping-Pong if it wasn’t. Shuffleboard, too. He liked to come really late at night. “You could see people sleeping against the walls,” he said nostalgically.
+Mr. Osment, 30, was a go-to child actor of the late 1990s and early ’00s, four-feet-plus of wounded innocence topped with meltwater blue eyes. See: M. Night Shyamalan’s “The Sixth Sense” and Steven Spielberg’s “A.I.”Slide 1 of 14,
+The Winter Show at the Park Avenue Armory held an opening-night benefit for the East Side House Settlement on Jan. 17. Attendees at the art, antiques and design fair included Amy Fine Collins.Once I fell in love with a lentil soup, and it was all I could think about when pulses came to mind. Lemony and tangy, it was the antidote to the bleakest winter days, and the color of sunshine (from red lentils) to match its bright disposition.
+Eventually, though, the obsession waned, and I remembered how deeply satisfying brown lentils could be. They can also be easier to find than red lentils.
+Earthy and hearty, brown lentils keep their shape when gently simmered, which makes for a richly textured soup. And when puréed, they turn soft, plush and wonderfully smooth.
+In this recipe, I’ve kept things minimal and straightforward. You’ll only need to chop one onion, sautéing it until well browned at the edges to maximize its sweetness. You’ll also have to grate (or press) some garlic, to be stirred in at the end for a pungent pop. But that’s it for the prep work.Nicola L, a French Pop artist who was best known for wry feminist sculpture of female and male forms that often function as furniture, died on Dec. 31 in Los Angeles. She is thought to have been in her mid-80s.
+Her death was announced this month by her sons, Christophe and David Lanzenberg. No cause was given. She had moved to Los Angeles 18 months ago to be near her family, having lived for many years in Manhattan, mostly at the Chelsea Hotel.
+Although well known in Europe in the 1960s and ’70s, Nicola L — she was born Nicola Leuthe — did not have her first institutional survey until 2017, when the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, Queens, mounted a show of about 50 of her works dating from 1968 to the present.
+That relative obscurity over the years could be attributed in part to her spreading herself thin as she moved frequently among different media, including performance, film and painting; and in part to her tendency to exhibit in the nearly mutually exclusive worlds of art and furniture design galleries.Bruce Eric Kaplan is a cartoonist and the author of the graphic memoir “I Was a Child.”
+Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast.There’s a story the writer Russell Baker, who died this week at 93, told about himself that reveals a lot about him. Back in 1961 — “in the time of Lyndon Johnson’s vice-presidential agony,” as Russ once put it in The New York Review of Books — he encountered the former Senate majority leader outside Mr. Johnson’s Capitol Hill office. Russ had covered Congress for several years and was well known on the Hill as a reporter for The Times. Johnson clapped his back, mauled his hand, massaged his ribs, “just as he’d always done in the glory days of old, all the time hailing me as though I were a long-lost friend” before inviting him in for an interview.
+The essence of what Johnson wanted to tell him was that he had come to love the Kennedys, which Russ knew to be claptrap, since the Kennedys, Johnson felt, had pretty much knifed him at the 1960 convention. Russ sensed a big scoop anyway. At some point during the monologue Johnson scrawled a few words on a scrap of paper and sent it out to his secretary. The note came back, Johnson looked at it, crumpled it up, tossed it in a wastebasket and resumed talking.
+Russ learned on his way out what was on the note. It said: “Who is this I am talking to?”
+“My vanity needed that blow,” Russ recalled in his book, “The Good Times.” “Like so many Washington newspaper people, I had begun to kid myself that these terribly important people talked so readily to me because of my charm. I needed to be reminded that they were not talking to me at all; they were talking to The New York Times.”
+If I have standing at all on the matter of Russ Baker, it is not that we overlapped at The Times for 35 years, in Washington and New York; it is that for over a decade, in the Johnson and Nixon years, he was my neighbor in Northwest Washington, his house across 39th Street a stone’s throw from mine. His mother-in-law, who lived with the Bakers, was our babysitter, and from time to time after returning her home, Russ and I would share a nightcap or two, after which I would retrace as best I could the path just taken with Mimi’s mother.Mr. Sánchez wants to give greater recognition to the victims of Franco, in accordance with a law of historical memory. That measure was approved in 2007, under a previous Socialist government, but was shelved and deprived of government funding under a conservative government led by Mariano Rajoy. One of the main goals of the 2007 law was to facilitate the opening of over 2,000 mass graves to identify the remains of those inside, most of whom died during the civil war.
+For now, Mr. Sánchez has made it a priority to remove Franco’s remains from the basilica of the Valley of the Fallen, which the general had built to honor those who “fell for God and Spain” in the civil war. But the plan has been stalled by a legal dispute with Franco’s relatives, who argue he can be reburied only in Madrid’s cathedral. Politicians are also feuding over what to do with Franco’s current burial site once his remains are moved.
+For Mr. Moreno, Franco not only needs to be physically removed from the Valley of the Fallen but also reinterpreted in Spanish history books, so as to get “the same treatment as Hitler and Mussolini, the other fascist war criminals.”NEW DELHI — Outside the white marble facade of the imposing Taj Mahal, tourists are facing a menace: gangs of hungry, rosy-bottomed monkeys. They bite. They scratch. Occasionally, they kill.
+Now, Indian security guards are cracking down, taking to the streets of Agra, India, where the monument is, to scare off the animals. Their weapon of choice?
+Slingshots.
+“Foreign tourists get very excited to see the monkeys,” said Dineshor Tongbram, the deputy commandant of a security force for the Taj Mahal. “They try to go closer to them and become victims.”
+The threat of an attack is real. Last May, two French tourists were reportedly confronted by a mob of monkeys and bitten. In November, a monkey snatched a local baby from his mother, bit him and then dumped him on a neighbor’s roof. The boy later died of his injuries.Frank Blaichman, who as a teenager during World War II fled into the forests of eastern Poland to avoid a roundup of fellow Jews by occupying Germans and soon became a leader of a band of partisans trying to disrupt the Nazis from inside the country, died on Dec. 27 at his home in Manhattan. He was 96.
+The Jewish Partisan Educational Foundation, which develops educational material about the Jewish partisans who fought back against the Nazis, recently announced his death.
+Mr. Blaichman, who settled in the United States after the war, was active in promoting the legacy of the partisans, hoping to counter the misperception that all Jews went passively to their fate and that none fought back against the Nazis. He told his story in a 2009 book, “Rather Die Fighting: A Memoir of World War II,” as well as in an oral history recorded for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and in several documentaries.
+He was among the organizers of an effort to create a memorial to Jewish partisans and soldiers. When that memorial was dedicated in Jerusalem in 1985, he was among the speakers.These days Gold is on better terms with her family. She received a Prozac prescription at the Meadows, but she said she had weaned herself off it. And she comes to the rink in any kind of weather wearing rimless orange sunglasses, which give her a brighter outlook.
+Gold gravitated back to skating because she sought the kind of structure that had grounded her during treatment. Last spring, she moved to the Philadelphia area for a fresh start with a new coach, Vincent Restencourt, who earned her trust by insisting that she gradually reverse her weight gain. He insists on dining with Gold at least once a week, and at their first meal together he coaxed her into eating at least half a hamburger, emphasizing that she should not starve herself back into shape.
+Since June, Gold has lost more than 30 pounds, the result of a healthier combination of foods, she said, not any fad diet.
+She gives skating lessons to young children and adults, trains alongside teenagers and wonders what they must be thinking.
+“When I was their age,” Gold said, “I never had a semiretired, mentally ill Olympian come to my rink.”
+The comeback feels a lot like starting from scratch. The first time Gold executed a clean triple Lutz, she felt an immense sense of accomplishment. “You forget how magical those moments are,” she said.
+Whenever Gold returns to competition, she will have a new long program, the one she planned to unveil in Detroit. It is set to Sara Bareilles’s “She Used to Be Mine,” a song that she found in her mother’s playlist.“DAU,” the sprawling interactive art project by the filmmaker Ilya Khrzhanovsky, was supposed to have its big moment this week, opening in Paris after a trail of delays and cancellations stretching from Ukraine to Berlin.
+Instead, hours before the doors were set to open on Thursday, the Paris premiere was postponed, too. Ticket holders were told only that the Paris Police had not given their approval. A spokesman for the project eventually said it would open at 9 p.m. Friday.
+Originally intended as a biopic of the theoretical physicist Lev Landau, “DAU” has ballooned into an immersive experience that includes improvising actors and live musical performances as well as 13 feature-length films. Shooting took place in Ukraine between 2009 and 2011, in a fully functioning theoretical physics institute where participants were expected to stay in character 24 hours a day.
+The project arrived in Paris after plans for a premiere in Berlin last year were scuttled by city administrators. The official reason was incorrectly filed paperwork, but the rejected proposal had included a concrete wall that would be built around the interactive spectacle — and torn down on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall — and caused an outcry in the city. Many critics accused the organizers of normalizing the horrors of totalitarianism.In a city where Mr. Kelly has become part of the cultural fabric, the suggestion was explosive. Public sentiment has been tilting against Mr. Kelly since the documentary, but support for him is still easy to find in Chicago.
+After the documentary aired, Mr. Kelly celebrated his birthday at a Southside nightclub, singing powerfully as adoring fans cheered him on.
+Anaya Frazier, a 17-year-old junior at Gwendolyn Brooks Preparatory Academy in Chicago, said two boys recently blasted R. Kelly songs in the cafeteria. When she asked a security guard to get them to turn it off, she said the guard told her to “get over it,” and that the music was not hurting her.
+“A lot of young folks in Chicago, they talk about the R. Kelly situation as if it’s a joke,” said Anaya, who takes part in A Long Walk Home, a nonprofit that uses the arts to empower young girls.
+Two decades ago, Anaya’s mother, Tiahanna Robinson, went to Kenwood Academy, the same high school that Mr. Kelly had attended. Ms. Robinson said she remembered Mr. Kelly, who had long since left the school, as one of many men who used to hang around the campus and spend time with female students.
+“I knew it was wrong,” said Ms. Robinson, 37. “But at the same time, it was normal almost because that’s what was going on in the area.”
+Ms. Robinson said she was no longer a fan of R. Kelly, but her boyfriend still plays his music, arguing that you can love the art and not the artist.KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Local Afghan officials are blaming the American military for two airstrikes that killed 29 people this week, most of them women and children, in heavy fighting in southern Helmand Province, even as American diplomats negotiated possible peace terms with the Taliban.
+The reaction followed a familiar pattern in the long history of disputed airstrikes in Afghanistan, with the American military denying that the second airstrike even occurred, while confirming that the first was under investigation. The United Nations called the civilian casualty reports “credible.”
+In Doha, Qatar, where the American peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad was in the fifth day of peace negotiations on Friday, Taliban negotiators accused the American military of stepping up airstrikes to pressure them to make a deal.
+“Killing innocent people, with their women and children, is a great concern to us,” said a senior member of the Taliban reached by telephone in Pakistan. “We raised the issue with Khalilzad.”Altered States
+To the Editor:
+I am sure that Michael Pollan’s eloquent essay “Smoking the Toad: How Do You Put a Drug Trip Into Words?” (Dec. 30) will contribute, if only indirectly, to the present re-emergence of legal research into the healing possibilities of psychedelic substances. I was a doctoral student at Harvard when the young Prof. Timothy Leary was engaged in his highly promising research with psychedelics. I knew Leary well and we stayed in touch for years, but I became increasingly disappointed and then angry as he escalated his work into a pseudo-religion (the “League of Spiritual Discovery”), with himself as the white-robed high priest. After that, and for many other reasons, psychedelic research was viewed with suspicion and eventually outlawed. But now the door has been opened a bit.
+My own pivotal experience with psychedelics took place when some Huichole Indians invited me and a couple of other outsiders to join them in the Mexican desert for a few days during their annual “hunt for the little deer,” the name they give to the peyote plant, which they use in their rituals. Fascinated, I quickly accepted. The Huichole welcomed us and taught us how to dig out the “little deer” without cutting its root. Then they asked us to gather around our own campfire while they sat around theirs, about a hundred yards away.
+That night, as we quietly, even reverently, ingested pieces of the little deer, I began to see why “psychedelic” (mind-expanding) and not some negative term is the proper word for peyote and related substances. During that memorable night I did not hallucinate. Instead, I saw all the ordinary things around me — our canvas tent, the crackling fire, the cactus plants, the sand dunes, the people in our group and the stars — with both a vivid and a comforting clarity. When the sun eventually rose, I knew why the ancestors of these Huichole saw it as the beginning of a new world.
+Thanks to Pollan and many others, we may now be on the threshold of a period in which ancient spiritual practices and modern medical research can combine to bring clarity and healing to many troubled souls.To succeed with this approach, a useful first step is to remove from your smartphone any apps that make money from your attention. This includes social media, addictive games and newsfeeds that clutter your screen with “breaking” notifications. Unless you’re a cable news producer, you don’t need minute-by-minute updates on world events, and your friendships are likely to survive even if you have to wait until you’re sitting at your home computer to log on to Facebook or Instagram. In addition, by eliminating your ability to publish carefully curated images to social media directly from your phone, you can simply be present in a nice moment, free from the obsessive urge to document it.
+Turning our attention to professional activities, if your work doesn’t absolutely demand that you be accessible by email when away from your desk, delete the Gmail app or disconnect the built-in email client from your office servers. It’s occasionally convenient to check in when out and about, but this occasional convenience almost always comes at the cost of developing a compulsive urge to monitor your messages constantly. If you’re not sure whether your work requires phone-based email, don’t ask; just delete the apps and wait to see whether it causes a problem — many people unintentionally exaggerate their need to constantly be available.
+Once you’ve stripped away the digital chatter clamoring for your attention, your smartphone will return to something closer to the role originally conceived by Mr. Jobs. It will become a well-designed object that comes out occasionally throughout your day to support — not subvert — your efforts to live well: It helps you find that perfect song to listen to while walking across town on a sunny fall afternoon; it loads up directions to the restaurant where you’re meeting a good friend; with just a few swipes, it allows you to place a call to your mom — and then it can go back into your pocket, or your bag, or the hall table by your front door, while you move on with the business of living your real-world life.
+Early in his 2007 keynote, Mr. Jobs said, “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” What he didn’t add, however, was the follow-up promise that “tomorrow, we’re going to reinvent your life.” The iPhone is a fantastic phone, but it was never meant to be the foundation for a new form of existence in which the digital increasingly encroaches on the analog. If you return this innovation to its original limited role, you’ll get more out of both your phone and your life.
+Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown and the author of the forthcoming book “Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. BodyI.C.R.C. is one of the few organizations that offer Afghans cost-free and sustainable medical treatment for amputations and other injuries. It has been working in the country for 30 years and has provided more than 109,000 prosthetics to Afghans since the orthopedic program started. Many of the people who seek assistance were injured by roadside bombs, airstrikes or undetonated bomblets leftover from American cluster munitions dropped after the initial U.S.-backed invasion in 2001. In 2017, a third of the clinic’s patients were children, who are often taken on field trips to learn how to recognize and avoid stray ordnance. In a recent profile written by Mujib Mashal for The Times, Alberto Cairo, the head of I.C.R.C.’s physical rehabilitation program, described how these injuries are about more than physical loss. “When you lose a leg, you don’t just lose a leg — you lose a piece of heart, you lose a piece of mind, you lose a piece of self-confidence.”
+[Get a weekly roundup of Times coverage of war delivered to your inbox. Sign up here.]
+Despite the grim reality that McDonnell’s photos depict, they also demonstrate the resourcefulness of a people who once relied on clothing, scrap metal and tape to build and maintain their own artificial appendages. It’s this intimate sense of survival that makes McDonnell’s photos stand out and that reminds us of a past era of a war that has yet to end.
+Lauren Katzenberg is the editor of At War.
+TIMES EVENT: Civilian Casualties of the War on Terror
+Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019 | New York City
+A rare convergence of experts on the human costs of war will discuss the often-ignored outgrowth of the global war on terror: two decades of civilian casualties. Times journalist and Marine Corps infantry veteran C. J. Chivers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his 2016 story about an Afghan war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, will moderate the discussion. The panelists are Alissa J. Rubin, the Times Paris bureau chief who won a Pulitzer Prize for foreign reporting on Afghanistan in 2015; Azmat Khan, an investigative reporter and New York Times Magazine contributor, who uncovered civilian casualties among nearly 150 airstrike sites across northern Iraq; and writer Brian Castner, a veteran of the Iraq war and weapons expert for Amnesty International’s crisis team, who also investigates war crimes and human rights violations.
+Get tickets here.
+The Latest Stories From At WarThe title of Ivan Ayr’s debut feature is a bit misleading: “Soni” is only partly about the titular cop (Geetika Vidya Ohlyan); her immediate superior in the Delhi police department, Kalpana (Saloni Batra), plays an equal role in this quiet character study. Despite their difference in rank, the two women forge a reserved friendship after Soni blows a fuse during an undercover operation — verbally harassed while biking at night, she gives the offender a piece of her mind, and her fists.
+While the film is set among cops, it does not involve any crime solving.
+Relying almost exclusively on single-take scenes and eschewing music, Ayr details the obstacles in Soni and Kalpana’s way with low-key, quasi-documentary detachment. At its best, that pace creates a trance-like feel, but a few scenes extend their welcome and become plodding.Listen to an Outtake From ‘The Freshman, Part 1: Rashida Tlaib’ Jan. 25, 2019
+For an episode of “The Daily,” we visited Representative Rashida Tlaib at her home in Detroit — and some of you thought that the congresswoman’s two sons, Adam and Yousif, stole the show. There were many more adorable moments with them than we could fit into the episode. Here’s one, courtesy of audio producer Andy Mills: “During the car ride to drop the boys off at school, Yousif told us about ‘The Hello Song,’ which his class sings every morning to start off the day. It was Yousif’s turn that morning to sing it in front of the whole class, and he’d been practicing. We didn’t have tickets to the show, but he gave us a sneak preview in the car. Listen here.”We caught up with Mr. Kobach this week by telephone. His remarks were condensed and edited for clarity.
+Q. I understand that you’re on the board of an organization that’s promoting a private wall. Can you tell me what the goal is?
+A. The goal is to facilitate construction of a border wall on private land with private funds along the southern border in conjunction with federal government efforts to construct the wall.
+Have you done any work to see how much that’s going to cost?
+We believe we can build the wall, or build sections of the wall, for well under half the price that the federal government is projecting and perhaps as low as a quarter of the price. Quite often the federal government purchases things at prices higher than individuals in the private marketplace.
+Do you have a location in mind right now? Do you have landowners who will donate land for this?
+We have landowners who are inviting us already. We’ll be hopefully breaking ground within weeks, but I don’t want to give the names yet. We haven’t selected where we’re going to start. It doesn’t require the donation of a large amount of land. The landowner retains the land. It’s not like we build the wall and take possession of the land.
+Do you think there’s a groundswell of support for this?
+I do think there’s a groundswell of support. It’s an objective that people conceive of very easily. It’s not rocket science. It’s not super high technology to construct border barriers.
+Democrats have proposed other kinds of mechanisms for securing the border — technology, drones, radar.ROME — While working on “Otello” and “Falstaff,” his final two operas, the composer Giuseppe Verdi tucked dozens of pages of musical drafts and sketches into folders, scribbling on their covers: “Burn these papers.”
+Fortunately, his heirs never carried out those orders. But for years, scholars have complained that for all the access they had to them, those pages might as well have been lost. Locked in a trunk kept at the composer’s home in Sant’Agata, in northern Italy, only select specialists were allowed to peruse them, mostly at the discretion of Verdi’s heirs.
+Academics grumbled that requests to study the papers went unanswered. “It was intolerable that scholars couldn’t easily get their hands on the material,” said Sandro Cappelletto, the editor of Studi Verdiani, the journal of the National Institute of Verdi Studies. “We had access to Rossini’s papers, Bellini’s papers. Why should 5,000 of Verdi’s papers remain unread?”
+For Verdi aficionados, the trunk — made in Chicago by Marshall Field & Company at the end of the 19th century — became a sort of Holy Grail. Rumors about its contents have been the stuff of legend.Hi, and welcome to Five Weeknight Dishes, recipes for busy people who still want something good to eat. So Melissa Clark, one of our weeknight-cooking queens, has a new recipe in her column this week for lentil soup. And look, it sounds great. Her recipes are great! But I didn’t want to let this moment pass without paying tribute to an old friend: Melissa’s red lentil soup, which deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award for its tireless work converting people into lentil-soup lovers. I made it over the weekend and was reminded of how wonderful it is, especially if you let it sit in the fridge for a day.
+More on this below. And, as always, send me your feedback, ideas and kitchen dilemmas at dearemily@nytimes.com.
+[Sign up here to receive the Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter in your inbox every Friday.]
+Here are five recipes for the week:The saxophonist, flutist and bass clarinetist Eric Dolphy led just five studio sessions in his brief lifetime, yet he’s seen as one of jazz history’s great possibility-expanders — an improviser who squirreled away his masterful abilities under layers of evocative idiosyncrasy, packing his notes with more breath than they could fit, letting them bloom and quiver well beyond their natural pitch. Dolphy’s second-to-last recording session took place in New York in July 1963, with a midsize band, across two days, less than a year before his death at 36. It resulted in a pair of well-reputed albums, “Conversations” and “Iron Man,” but many assumed the complete session recordings were lost. The flutist James Newton — who had held onto a trove of tapes and papers that Dolphy left behind — recently turned them over to Resonance Records, which released 18 of the finest tracks from those 1963 dates on “Musical Prophet: The Expanded 1963 New York Studio Sessions.” Half were previously unissued, including this alternate take of “Jitterbug Waltz,” a Fats Waller classic with a frisky, twirling melody that’s oddly befitting of Dolphy. And mark the trumpeter: It’s the future jazz eminence Woody Shaw, age 18, sounding phenomenal in one of his first professional recording dates. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
+Wayne Shorter, ‘Prometheus Unbound’New this week:
+JONI By Norman Seeff. (Insight Editions, $75.) On the occasion of the folk goddess Joni Mitchell’s 75th birthday, this collection highlights the best of her long collaboration with Seeff, a rock ’n’ roll photographer who has an enormous portfolio of famous stars. Gloomily puffing on a cigarette or in full smile, Joni is captured in her many moods. KEHINDE WILEY Essays by Simon Kelly and Hannah Klenn. (Roberts Projects, $40.) Wiley, now famous for his official portrait of Barack Obama, has a solo exhibition at the Saint Louis Art Museum melding artworks from the museum’s collection with paintings of local residents from North St. Louis and Ferguson — all featured in this catalog. JAPANESE PRINTS By Louis van Tilborgh. (Thames & Hudson, $45.) In 1888, in a letter to his brother, Vincent van Gogh wrote, “All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art.” This collection of the Japanese prints that van Gogh owned and displayed during his lifetime offers the clearest picture of how influential this art was to his own creations. EDGE OF ORDER By Daniel Libeskind, designed by Rodgrigo Corral, written by Tim McKeough. (Clarkson Potter, $80.) Libeskind is renowned for his architectural works, including the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the plan for the World Trade Center. This retrospective provides a panorama of his works as well as insight into his creative process. GOOD TROUBLE By Christopher Noxon. (Abrams, $19.99.) Noxon explores the history of the civil rights movement in this illustrated guide to its iconic moments and most important figures, from Rosa Parks to Bayard Rustin.
+& Noteworthy
+In which we ask colleagues at The Times what they’re reading now.
+“In listless moments, I play Khalid’s song ‘Hopeless’ on repeat and turn to narratives about other people feeling trapped and miserable in daily routines. But dwelling in that state of mind, even by proxy, can soon feel self-indulgent and self-absorbed, and art in that register can end up feeling more like a hefty weight than a release. In THE PERFECT NANNY, Leila Slimani captures the experience of tedium without sounding at all tedious. Every sentence propels the plot forward. ‘Louise has moments of euphoria,’ she writes. ‘She has the vague, fleeting sense of a life that will grow bigger, of wider open spaces, a purer love, voracious appetites.’ Slimani writes movingly about desire, but she is also unsparing with the entitlement, arrogance and dark impulses of her characters: ‘Children don’t care about the contours of our world. They can guess at its harshness, its darkness, but they don’t want to know anything more.’ She absolves no one. I think the novel’s British title, ‘Lullaby,’ closer to the French original, is more apt because this book is a dazzling nightmare you don’t want to leave. I gasped at its final chapters, putting it down to breathe. Then I turned back to the start and immediately began rereading.”
+— Tiffany May, reporter, Hong Kong bureauMELBOURNE, Australia — There’s no rewinding the results in sports, as New Orleans fans still fuming about last week’s N.F.C. Championship game can attest. But sometimes, as Sam Stosur proved Friday at the Australian Open, it is possible to get it right the second time.
+In 2006, Stosur, a Queenslander playing in the women’s doubles final in her home Grand Slam, lost her service while attempting to close out the match in the second set. Stosur and her doubles partner, Lisa Raymond, squandered two championship points on their way to a three-set defeat to the Chinese team of Yan Zi and Zheng Jie.
+Thirteen years later, Stosur was back in the women’s doubles final, this time alongside China’s Zhang Shuai. They were playing the defending champions, Timea Babos and Kristina Mladenovic, and again Stosur was serving in the second set to close out the match.
+Stosur earned a championship point, which she squandered with a double fault. But the past doesn’t have to be prologue. On the next point, Stosur produced an overhead winner to end a 25-shot rally. Then she watched the 13th shot of the next point sail long, near her feet, to seal her 6-3, 6-4 victory with Zhang at Rod Laver Arena.TYSONS, Va. — Under scrutiny for his embrace of centrist politics at a time when an insurgent Democratic wing is demanding more leftist policies, Michael R. Bloomberg, actively weighing a presidential run in 2020, on Friday rejected the idea that he could not represent a broad coalition in the party.
+“I don’t think we have to choose between bold ideas and pragmatic leadership,” he said after emphasizing the importance of working across the aisle.
+Mr. Bloomberg, a billionaire media executive and former Republican mayor of New York, has said he would run as a Democrat if he pursues the White House in 2020. But in the face of concerns that he is too far to the right on a number of issues, including big business and stop-and-frisk policing tactics, he has shown few signs of seeking to assuage those critics.
+In a keynote speech at a sold-out breakfast hosted by the Democratic Business Council of Northern Virginia, Mr. Bloomberg underscored the importance of working with Republicans and seemed to brush off attacks that his brand of politics would be unable to unite the party. He also delivered a sharp attack on President Trump as a failed businessman.THE RECOVERING: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, by Leslie Jamison. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $18.99.) Jamison, adding to a large group of addiction memoirs, maps her own recovery while considering the relationship between creativity and substance abuse. The emotional firepower of the book comes in its second half, after she has embraced sobriety; our critic, Dwight Garner, called this section “close to magnificent, and genuinely moving.”
+LOVE AND RUIN, by Paula McLain. (Ballantine, $17.) McLain’s latest novel, about the marriage between the journalist Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, takes up the question that vexed (and probably doomed) their relationship: Why must a woman choose between her career and what her husband wants her to be? McLain drew on primary sources to develop her fiery protagonist.
+A WORLD WITHOUT ‘WHOM’: The Essential Guide to Language in the BuzzFeed Age, by Emmy J. Favilla. (Bloomsbury, $18.) The BuzzFeed copy chief discusses her plan to codify language in a digital era, balancing a need for logic with flexibility to account for how people actually talk. Along with a look at the rules she devised, the book offers a guide to the quandaries we face as the way we communicate online reshapes language itself.
+MADNESS IS BETTER THAN DEFEAT, by Ned Beauman. (Vintage, $17.) Emboldened by “fungal clairvoyance” after inhaling mold in an old temple, a C.I.A. agent tells the story of a fateful meeting in the Honduran jungle in 1938. The novel’s twists and turns touch on everything from colonialism to conspiracy theories. Our reviewer, Helene Stapinski, called the story “a kitchen-sink sendup of spy novels, 1930s Hollywood and screwball newspaper comedies, with a pinch of Pynchon thrown in for fun.”Last week, high-profile spots for the latest “Ghostbusters,” Spider-Man” and “John Wick” movies were released. This week, it’s Matthew McConaughey’s bare bum, an Idris Elba movie without Idris Elba, and a Nancy Drew whodunit. The trailer gods work in mysterious ways.
+‘The Beach Bum’ (March 29)
+The red-band trailer for the writer-director Harmony Korine’s follow-up to his 2013 cult favorite “Spring Breakers” makes it look like a spiritual sequel. This time, McConaughey partakes in the sex- and drug-fueled exploits as Moondog, a hedonistic novelist trying to go straight. The starry cast also includes Snoop Dogg, Isla Fisher, Zac Efron, Jimmy Buffett and Martin Lawrence, but they all get upstaged by McConaughey in a thong. Guess you can take the man out of “Magic Mike” …
+‘Yardie’ (March 15)WASHINGTON — President Trump agreed on Friday to reopen the federal government for three weeks while negotiations continued over how to secure the nation’s southwestern border, backing down after a monthlong standoff failed to force Democrats to give him billions of dollars for his long-promised wall.
+The president’s concession paved the way for the House and the Senate to both pass a stopgap spending bill by voice vote. Mr. Trump signed it on Friday night, restoring normal operations at a series of federal agencies until Feb. 15 and opening the way to paying the 800,000 federal workers who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay for 35 days.
+The plan includes none of the money for the wall that Mr. Trump had demanded and was essentially the same approach that he rejected at the end of December and that Democrats have advocated since, meaning he won nothing concrete during the impasse.
+Mr. Trump presented the agreement with congressional leaders as a victory anyway, and indicated in a speech in the Rose Garden that his cease-fire may only be temporary: If Republicans and Democrats cannot reach agreement on wall money by the February deadline, he said that he was ready to renew the confrontation or declare a national emergency to bypass Congress altogether.Many in the caravan said they decided to migrate after a decision by the Mexican government to drastically speed up the process for securing a yearlong humanitarian visa that allows migrants to legally travel and work in Mexico.
+“The humanitarian visa that they’re giving now is the reason we are here,” said Carlos del Valle, a Guatemalan teacher who was standing in line with his family this week to apply for the visa on the bridge connecting Guatemala with Mexico.
+“Later, if possible, we can get to the United States,” he said.
+Under the streamlined process, which began last week, the government is seeking to issue the humanitarian visa in an average of five days rather than a month. Migration officials said the policy would be permanent.
+The initiative, officials say, is part of the president’s strategy to make Mexico’s immigration policy more humane, after years of stepped-up deportations under pressure from the United States. But it could also draw even more migrants to trek north to the border with the United States, inflaming tensions with a Trump administration determined to build a border wall and lower immigration numbers.[Crowd: Lock him up! Lock him up! Lock him up!]
+This morning at the crack of dawn, 29 F.B.I. agents arrived at my home with 17 vehicles with their lights flashing, when they could simply have contacted my attorneys and I would have been more than willing to surrender voluntarily.
+They terrorized my wife, my dogs. I was taken to the F.B.I. facility, although I must say the F.B.I. agents were extraordinarily courteous. I will plead not guilty to these charges. I will defeat them in court. I believe this is a politically motivated investigation.
+I am troubled by the political motivations of the prosecutors, and as I have said previously, there is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated.
+REPORTER: [Inaudible] you in any way cooperate with the special counsel’s office?
+MR. STONE: Since I was not contacted prior to the charges today, my lawyers have not talked to the special prosecutors. I don’t want to address that question, but I have made it clear I will not testify against the president. Because I would have to bear false witness against him.
+[Crowd shouting]
+REPORTER: But will you work with the prosecutors?
+MR. STONE: I will be appearing for an arraignment in D.C. next week, and I’ll address those questions at that time.
+REPORTER: Roger, the president said that you had done [inaudible]. What do you think he meant by that?
+MR. STONE: Well, I intend to tell the truth. I have told the truth throughout this entire proceeding, and I will prove that in a court of law.There are 43 muscles in the human face and you can count most of them during “Skin,” a sometimes absorbing and sometimes irritating evening of cast-created vignettes, performed by the wildly expressive members of Broken Box Mime Theater at A.R.T./ New York Theaters. A company dedicated to giving a new wordless spin on an old wordless form, Broken Box skips walking against the wind and trapped in a box in favor of pop culture capers and #MeToo inspired riffs.
+In the first vignette, “Boys Syde,” five guys become members of a boy band, who perform a wordless dance routine and then burst into solos: break dancing, tap dancing, hula hooping. Joél Pérez (“Fun Home”) begins a striptease and then continues it, miming splitting his skull and clambering out of his skin, which he then tosses to the crowd.
+So no, this isn’t the suspenders-and-beret style of mime, though the performers do all wear the characteristic oval of white makeup, with blacked brows, blacked lips and each eye quartered by three black lines. The mask gives the actors a kind of uniformity and anonymity though one of the stated goals of “Skin,” which the artistic director Becky Baumwoll discusses in a brief program note, is “decentralizing white normative discourse.”
+That’s worth high-fiving, but these mimes already have their hands full telling stories without benefit of words, costumes, sound effects or props. (A few large blocks are a slight cheat.) The simpler, goofier sections are a treat, like “Lake,” a quick and fully clothed ode to skinny dipping or “16th Annual Brooklyn Beard Awards,” which is weird and hirsute fun.McALLEN, Tex. — President Trump traveled to the Rio Grande Valley earlier this month and made his case for building a wall on the Southern border — needed, he said, to keep America safe from a variety of dangers that are continuing to make their way across the frontier from Mexico.
+To help make his point, the evidence was laid out on tables: a big bag of cash, bundles of drugs, high-powered firearms, all confiscated by law enforcement agents working the borderlands in South Texas.
+“This is just all recent. This is all very recent,” Mr. Trump said, pointing to the illicit exhibit in front of him. Mr. Trump was not shy about his disgust for the illegal goods: “It looks pretty brutal. This is not a manufactured deal, as you say. This is the real stuff.”
+But the display at the president’s Jan. 10 round table, it turns out, had little to do with what happens along unfortified reaches of the border. An examination of the seized items suggests that a border wall would not have stopped most of the items from entering the United States, or, in the case of several weapons displayed in front of the president, from leaving the United States for Mexico.LONDON — The Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei was dealt another blow on Friday when one of the world’s largest wireless carriers suspended its purchases from the company in Europe over security concerns about its ties to the Chinese government.
+Vodafone Group, which is based in London, said it would temporarily stop buying Huawei equipment for core parts of its next-generation wireless networks, known as 5G. Nick Read, Vodafone’s chief executive officer, said the pause was necessary while European governments considered whether to ban the use of Huawei equipment.
+Mr. Read said Vodafone’s decision reflected political factors rather than any newly discovered security vulnerabilities. Huawei has been dogged by a campaign led by United States officials, who have argued that Beijing could use the company’s gear for spying.
+“The noise level is at an unhealthy level across Europe,” Mr. Read said during a conference call with reporters.The organization has managed to address three persistent challenges that philanthropists at all levels face. How can private money meaningfully influence a societal problem? How can successes be replicated? And how do you get other philanthropists to support what was essentially your idea?
+Mr. Campbell said he wanted to give a sense of stability to children who may not have it at home. His organization hires a mentor, or friend, to work with just eight children, who are selected in kindergarten and are expected to remain with the program until they finish high school. The cost per child each year works out to about $10,000.
+The friends are paid a wage equivalent to or slightly higher than teachers’ salaries in the first years of their careers. And they spend four hours every week with each of their eight students — two hours in the classroom and two helping them in a variety of activities, such as doing homework and going to museums and sporting events they couldn’t afford.
+From the start, Friends of Children logged data for all of these activities to get a sense of what was working and what wasn’t. It found that the intensive interaction helped build trust, increased the children’s positive social behavior and was more likely to keep the children out of trouble.
+In many cases, the children’s relationship with their parent or caregiver improved. A recent study by researchers at the University of Washington and Washington State University found that the paid mentor approach provided children and their caregivers with a “consistency and continuity” that was critical to the program’s success.“P Is for Pterodactyl” — the children’s picture book by Raj Haldar and Chris Carpenter that bills itself as “the worst alphabet book ever” — is an A-to-Z primer featuring words that start with silent letters: C is for Czar, K is for Knight, T is for Tsunami and so on. As The Times’s review said, “You can curse the English language for its insane spelling rules (or lack thereof), or you can delight in it, as this raucous trip through the odd corners of our alphabet does.”
+Haldar, also known as the rapper Lushlife, told The Guardian that he and Carpenter got the idea for the book after watching a friend’s child play with alphabet flashcards. “Q was for quinoa,” he recalled. “We were laughing about how it phonetically sounds weird — plus, I didn’t have quinoa until I was, like, 25. We were joking about that and started talking about how it would be even sillier if an entire alphabet hinged on silent letters.”
+Last Nov. 6, a week before “P Is for Pterodactyl” came out, the kids’-book website Imagination Soup raved about it on Facebook, writing that it was “perfect for logophiles (someone who loves words)!” The post went viral and drew over 4,000 commenters, many of them word nerds who shared jokes about puns, silent letters and homophones: “Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl using the bathroom? Because the P is silent!” The story blew up Reddit, too, and “P Is for Pterodactyl” sold out of its 10,800-copy first printing the day it was published.
+Not quite three months later, the book is in its seventh week on the children’s picture book best-seller list with 210,000 copies in print. “I have never seen anything like this before,” says Kelly Barrales-Saylor, the editorial director of children’s nonfiction at Sourcebooks Kids who remembers “giggling at my desk the entire time I was reading the proposal.” She thinks one of the reasons “P Is for Pterodactyl” has done so well is that it appeals to both adults and children. “Kids think it’s hysterical because they’ve been taught all the rules of spelling and phonics and now here are all these ridiculous words that break the rules they just learned,” she says. “And adults think it’s hilarious because we know how ridiculous all those rules are in the first place.”The Fyre Festival, which imploded publicly and spectacularly in April 2017, was meant to be the ne plus ultra of music festivals — an opportunity for moderate-level influencers to get up close and personal with peak-level influencers, and the beginning of a boondoggle empire for the entrepreneur Billy McFarland.
+Its collapse was witnessed in real time on social media, providing a source of seemingly endless schadenfreude. But there was more to the story.
+This month, competing documentaries about the fiasco were released within a few days of each other: “Fyre,” on Netflix, and “Fyre Fraud,” on Hulu. They take differing approaches. “Fyre” is a relentless and still somewhat glossy play-by-play of the festival’s planning, or lack thereof. “Fyre Fraud” hopes to answer larger questions about the generation that made Fyre seem like a great, and viable, idea in the first place.
+Discussing the films — and the victims, villains and scammers they capture — on this week’s Popcast are:There are stretches in which the music of “Fire in my mouth” assumes its place in the multimedia whole a little too well. I liked it most when Ms. Wolfe went for something musically visceral or extreme, as in the climactic episode of “Protest.” The women’s choir sings relentless phrases espousing the determination of these immigrants to “talk like,” “look like” and “sing like” Americans.
+Then the girls’ choir, entering the hall from the aisles, sang a stark passage from a speech by Clara Lemlich, an activist leading a strike. Here, the choral refrains and orchestra layers built into piercing harmonies, like clusters out of Ives or Varèse, yet driven by Ms. Wolfe’s Minimalism-influenced rhythms.
+In one of the most gripping moments, the choristers raised actual scissors (specially chosen by Ms. Wolfe) above their heads in an eerie gesture that also added metallic slicing sounds to the musical textures. During the harrowing climax of “Fire” the music turned raw, brassy and blazing, with fractured rhythms, choral plaints that border on screeching, and chanted repetitions: “Burn like, burn like, burn.”Saving enough money for a down payment is one of the biggest barriers to homeownership, particularly in expensive cities like New York.
+We want to hear from those who have recently purchased a home or are planning to purchase one this year — especially those who did not receive help from relatives. How did you do it? How did you manage to save such a large amount of money?
+Tell us below.To the Editor:
+Re “The Day the Music Died,” by Margaret Renkl (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, Jan. 21):
+While it’s true that the death of one neighborhood bar in a growing city isn’t a tragedy, when it comes on the heels of 43 other music-related businesses demolished over the last five years, the public should be concerned. Especially considering that during that same time, only one threatened historic building — RCA Studio A — was saved.
+As Ms. Renkl eloquently describes, Nashville is in danger of destroying its own history. Instead of providing exemptions to Music Row’s zoning — which ultimately encourages demolitions of small-scale, music-related buildings — the city should adopt incentives to support the music industry on Music Row. Although large companies are routinely awarded incentives to locate or operate in Nashville, no such benefits exist for small music businesses.
+Creating these incentives, including a state tax credit for historic rehabilitation, would help save the past and future of Music Row. Otherwise, no number of mournful laments by the many talented troubadours in Music City will make up for the permanent loss of the city’s cultural heritage.
+David J. Brown
+Washington
+The writer is executive vice president and chief preservation officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.To the Editor:
+Re “How About Free College for a Cut of Your Income?,” by Andrew Ross Sorkin (DealBook column, Jan. 8):
+It’s disappointing, if perhaps not surprising, that “income share agreements” are gaining support on Wall Street. As the economist Milton Friedman said more than 60 years ago, paying for college as a percentage of students’ future income is the equivalent of “partial slavery.”
+These agreements hide the real price of education to everyone but the lender and his algorithms. To consumers, the program design creates an impression that college is free and that a future job is assured, when neither is the case.
+Even the most legitimate schools have an incentive to find students who don’t realize their earnings potential and take maximum advantage of them.
+Investors also face serious risks. Lenders who start these programs greatly underestimate the administrative difficulties of determining incomes and collecting on debts, problems that have beset even the federal income-based repayment program.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Less than four months ago, the staid Metropolitan Republican Club in Manhattan became an unlikely battleground between anti-fascism activists and a far-right group known as the Proud Boys.
+After the Proud Boys’ founder, Gavin McInnes, spoke at the club, vandalism and violence ensued, as people associated with the group squared off with protesters on the streets of the Upper East Side.
+Now the brawl has moved inside the century-old club. The fight mirrors broader tensions within the Republican Party around the country, pitting far-right conservatives energized by President Trump against a Republican establishment that was once a bastion of New York moderates like John V. Lindsay and Nelson A. Rockefeller.
+The election for club president will be held Wednesday, and one of the two candidates, Ian Walsh Reilly, has won support from another right-wing provocateur, Milo Yiannopoulos, who posted a New Year’s Eve appeal on Facebook, urging his followers to join the club and vote for Mr. Reilly.WASHINGTON — In Friday’s indictment of Roger J. Stone Jr., a longtime informal adviser to President Trump, the special counsel for the first time revealed evidence of efforts by senior Trump campaign officials to learn how emails and other information that had been hacked by Russia and given to WikiLeaks could damage Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The evidence appeared to contradict Mr. Stone’s assertions that he was acting on his own in his attempts to communicate with WikiLeaks. Senior campaign officials asked Mr. Stone to look into WikiLeaks’ plans, and he kept the campaign abreast of what he found out, the indictment said.
+The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, disclosed new details about his investigation into Russia’s 2016 election interference and possible ties to the Trump campaign:
+The campaign sought to learn how WikiLeaks’ releases might damage Mrs. Clinton
+The public has long known that Mr. Stone and his associates had tried to connect with WikiLeaks in the summer of 2016 as Mr. Trump clinched the Republican nomination. Senior campaign officials dispatched Mr. Stone on that mission, the indictment revealed.
+In June or July 2016, Mr. Stone told senior campaign aides that he knew that WikiLeaks had documents “whose release would be damaging to the Clinton campaign,” the indictment said. After WikiLeaks released emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee on July 22, 2016, “a senior Trump campaign official was directed to contact Stone about any additional releases” and other information that WikiLeaks had that could hurt Mr. Trump’s opponent in the race, Mrs. Clinton.
+The Trump campaign officials were interested in learning about the stolen emails and other documents, despite the fact, as the indictment noted, that the Democratic National Committee had publicly blamed the Russian government more than a month earlier for hacking its computers.To the Editor:
+Re “F.B.I. Arrests Roger Stone, Adviser to Trump, in Mueller Case” (nytimes.com, Jan. 25):
+Whether President Trump himself engaged in criminal behavior or not, his choices for campaign, cabinet and White House staff are indisputable evidence of his horrible judgment.
+They include more than two dozen people indicted, convicted, fired by Mr. Trump or who resigned. If his judgment in staff hiring is so awful, what trust can we have in his judgment making decisions running the country and handling foreign policy?
+Charles Merrill
+New YorkBRUSSELS — The year 2019 is a crucial one for democracy in Europe, with 14 elections, probably the most important of which will be in late May for the European Parliament.
+With turnout traditionally low in those elections, there is anxiety that the passionate anti-Europeans will vote while many others will stay home, helping the far right and the so-called populist parties, which are nearly universally nationalist.
+So a form of fighting back has begun, led, in a very European way, by some of its most prominent writers and intellectuals.
+Thirty of them signed a pro-European manifesto, published on Friday in Libération, the French daily, that warns that “Europe is in peril” from “the populist forces washing over the continent.”The judge pointed out to Mr. Weinstein his lawyers would face an ethical problem if the actress were called to testify against him.
+Mr. Weinstein, 66, faces five charges in Manhattan, including rape and two counts of predatory sexual assault, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. The charges are related to one woman who accused Mr. Weinstein of raping her in a Midtown hotel and another who said he performed oral sex on her against her will in his apartment.
+He has denied the allegations and has said the relationships were consensual.
+Ms. McGowan has been a vocal critic of the movie producer and was one of the first women to come forward and accuse him of sexual misconduct. She said Mr. Weinstein assaulted her during a film festival in Utah in 1997, but charges were never filed. It is possible she could be called to testify about her experience to establish a pattern of behavior.
+Ms. McGowan has criticized the lawyers for taking the Hollywood producer’s case, calling it an “egregious conflict of interest.”
+Mr. Baez and Mr. Sullivan represented Ms. McGowan in November 2017 when she faced drug possession charges in Virginia. She had accused Mr. Weinstein of having a hand in her arrest, saying, without evidence, that he had the drugs planted in her wallet.The icy rock that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year’s Day is coming into focus.
+On Thursday, the mission team released the sharpest picture of the 21-mile-long body known officially as 2014 MU69 and nicknamed Ultima Thule. Consisting of two roundish lobes that are fused together, it is believed to be an almost pristine leftover from the earliest days of the solar system, more than 4.5 billion years ago.
+[Sign up to get reminders for space and astronomy events on your calendar.]
+The spacecraft took the picture when it was 4,200 miles from Ultima Thule, just seven minutes before its closest approach. From this angle, the shadows are more apparent, revealing a deep depression on the smaller lobe. This could be a crater, a pit that collapsed or an area that was blown out when gases escaped from the interior long ago.
+Scientists also can better resolve light and dark patterns on the surface, including a particularly bright collar where the two lobes connect.Feet
+If someone has his feet turned toward you while you’re talking, that means he’s engaged in the conversation. If his feet are turned away, he’s probably not interested. Feet going opposite directions? You’re talking to a contortionist. To make him comfortable, try to match his footwork while maintaining eye contact.
+Head
+Sometimes a person will tilt her head to show empathy. The gesture says, “I care about you enough to show part of my neck, arguably the most vulnerable body part save for arm flab or the back of the knee.” As a sign of submission, sometimes a person will lower her head. Occasionally, she will swirl her head 360 degrees as a sign of demonic possession or because she’s a cartoon and wants to be, like, “What you just said was bonkers, my dude!”
+Hands
+Open hands with palms up are often a sign of offering, especially when paired with presenting an idea. Open hands with palms down are a sign of confidence or a display of authority. Open hands with palms that quickly switch between up and down are a sign that a jazz number is about to begin.
+Fingers
+If eyes are the windows to the soul, fingers are the eyes of the hands. Picking at one’s fingers indicates insecurity. Twiddling one’s thumbs indicates boredom. One or both thumbs up indicates approval. One or both thumbs down indicates you’re not making it to the next round of this talent competition. A pinky up indicates fanciness. A thumb and pinky up on the same hand indicates chillness. I don’t know what a thumb and pinky up on the different hands indicates, but I’d like to find out. An index finger pinched with thumb means someone smokes. A middle and ring finger pinched with the thumbs means a deer with big ears. Crossed fingers means he’s lying. Interlaced fingers either mean contentment or he’s about to do the “Here’s the church, here’s the steeple” thing.Or maybe not so much. In the years since, the Mets have won just one more World Series, in 1986 over Boston. It was another miraculous victory for the Mets, after they were down to their final out, trailing by two runs with the bases empty in Game 6.
+The two championships featured an only-in-baseball kind of symmetry — the pitcher on the mound at the end of the 1969 World Series, Jerry Koosman, was eventually traded for Jesse Orosco, who closed out the 1986 title. And the manager of the 1986 Mets, Davey Johnson, made the last out for the Orioles in ’69 — a fly ball to Jones in left field.
+Had Johnson’s ball cleared the fence, the Orioles would have tied Game 5 — just as the Mets’ Mike Piazza would have tied Game 5 against the Yankees in 2000 if his long fly drive to center had gone out. But both balls produced just a fleeting glimmer of hope; like Bernie Williams in 2000, Jones had it all the way.
+“Davey Johnson said it’s the hardest ball he’s ever hit, and he didn’t know why it stayed in the ballpark, but when the ball went up, I knew it was an out,” Jones said. “That’s my claim to fame, the last out and the kneeling, praying, ‘Come on down, baby, come on down.’ People associate me with that, so everywhere I go, that’s what they do, get in position to catch the ball and get on one knee.”
+Jones had never done that before, he said, but then again, he had never caught a ball that meant so much. He gave it to Koosman later, in the clubhouse celebration. Nobody besides Ed Kranepool cared much about memorabilia back then, Jones said.
+Kranepool will be there with Jones, Shamsky, Ron Swoboda and Buddy Harrelson on Saturday. Kranepool, 74, is seeking a kidney donor. Harrelson, also 74, is fighting Alzheimer’s disease. Tom Seaver, the ace of the team and the greatest player in franchise history, has a vineyard in Calistoga, Calif., but has struggled for years with Lyme disease.Mr. Syeed is a filmmaker.
+Jan. 25, 2019
+Here’s what I knew about my grandfathers: They were both pirs, spiritual guides of Sufi orders in Kashmir. Also: Both had long white beards, wore turbans and rode horses. So, as a nerdy Muslim kid growing up in Indiana, I imagined my grandfathers were like characters from Narnia or Middle-earth, Shariah-compliant wizards who dispensed wisdom and miracles.
+I badgered my parents, aunts and uncles for stories to shore up this supernatural status. They tossed me some scraps. How Dadajan cured a follower’s cancer. How Abajan exorcised a jinn from his possessed wife. How Abajan, on his deathbed, saw the Prophet Muhammad appear at his side.
+My elders were hesitant to share much. My grandfathers themselves hadn’t broadcast these stories. And my parents’ generation grew skeptical of the family traditions. They came of age at a time of seemingly unfettered progress in Kashmir: They replaced their cooking fires with gas stoves, piled up advanced degrees, landed cushy public service jobs. My parents, aunts and uncles came to see pirs as backward, or un-Islamic, or charlatans eager to make a quick buck off exorcisms and amulets.
+And yet, pirs persist. Curious what life might be like if my parents had carried on the tradition, I wanted to make a film about faith healers today in Kashmir.NASA’s Opportunity rover began its 15th year on Mars this week, although the intrepid robotic explorer may already be dead.
+“I haven’t given up yet,” said Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator for the mission. But he added, “This could be the end. Under the assumption that this is the end, it feels good. I mean that.”
+The rover — which outlasted all expectations since its landing on Mars in 2004 and helped find convincing geological signs that water once flowed there — fell silent last June when it was enveloped by a global Martian dust storm. In darkness, the solar panels could not generate enough power to keep Opportunity awake.
+To be taken out by one of the most ferocious storms on Mars in decades: “That’s an honorable death,” Dr. Squyres said.Thursday would have been the 100th birthday of the composer, pianist and conductor Leon Kirchner, who died at 90 in 2009. One of the most comprehensive musicians of his day, he was a valued teacher during a long career at Harvard. As a composer, Mr. Kirchner demonstrated that one could write works of rigorous complexity employing modernist techniques but in an instinctive, richly expressive, viscerally dramatic way.
+Though steeped in the dodecaphonic music of his beloved teacher Schoenberg, Kirchner never used the 12-tone system strictly. Just hints of the aesthetic run through this mysterious slow movement from Kirchner’s Second String Quartet (1958), beautifully performed here by the Orion Quartet. Bartok and Stravinsky where also major influences, as the punchy opening movement of Kirchner’s First Piano Concerto (1953) make clear in this 1956 performance featuring the composer at the piano, with Mitropoulos conducting the New York Philharmonic.
+Some musical highlights of my years living in Boston were the concerts Mr. Kirchner conducted with the Harvard Chamber Orchestra. He was not the tidiest technician. But he led scores by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and contemporary giants like a fellow composer who completely understood how the piece at hand worked. ANTHONY TOMMASINI
+Any ensemble making its American debut is likely to feel some jitters, especially when the program includes a masterpiece as dense and thorny as Beethoven’s Op. 130. But on Sunday, members of the Maxwell String Quartet had an additional reason for feeling a little, well, vulnerable.The publisher Spiegel & Grau, a Penguin Random House imprint known for its best-selling and groundbreaking nonfiction, has been shut down as part of a continuing effort to streamline Penguin Random House’s sprawling operation following the merger between Penguin and Random House in 2013.
+On Friday, the company announced that the imprint will be shuttered and that its founders, Cindy Spiegel and Julie Grau, will leave. The news came as a shock to some at the company and in the publishing world, as the imprint had just completed one of its most successful years. In 2018, it published multiple New York Times best sellers and other high-profile titles, including a book about the Beastie Boys by the band members Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, and one about pressing societal concerns by the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Harari.
+The imprint, which was started at Doubleday in 2007 and moved to Random House in 2008, has over the years amassed a stable of prominent authors and award-winning books.
+Spiegel & Grau published “Between the World and Me,” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, a best seller that won a 2015 National Book Award and helped drive conversation about police violence and systemic racism. They also published best sellers like Bryan Stevenson’s “Just Mercy,” the memoir “Born a Crime,” by the “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah, Jay-Z’s “DECODED,” Piper Kerman’s prison memoir “Orange Is the New Black” and books by popular self-help authors like Suze Orman and Brené Brown.SÃO PAULO, Brazil — A mining dam burst in southeastern Brazil on Friday, killing at least seven people, flooding nearby homes, submerging cars and buses under a river of sludge and leaving 200 people missing, according to the rescue workers searching for them.
+The accident, in the town of Brumadinho, comes just three years after a dam burst in Mariana, 75 miles away, killing 19 people and causing one of the worst environmental disasters in Brazil’s history.
+The Brumadinho dam ruptured in the early afternoon on Friday, spilling murky water filled with mining waste into an administrative area where employees were working and a neighborhood where they lived. The dam is owned by the iron ore mining giant Vale S.A., which also was a joint owner of the dam that burst in Mariana.
+The press office for the Civil Defense service said search and rescue efforts had been suspended after nightfall, but confirmed that seven people were killed and 17 people were injured and rescued. There were more than 50 firefighters on location with six helicopters and the search for approximately 200 would continue on Saturday.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When a New York City public housing employee overhauled her kitchen with stolen equipment, she even took the cabinets — but didn’t stop there.
+She stole the kitchen sink, too.
+This is according to charges filed in Queens Criminal Court, which say that Eva Torres, who worked for the New York City Housing Authority, stole eight kitchen cabinets, a white refrigerator and a sink from a public housing complex in East Harlem.
+The property taken from the housing authority, also known as Nycha, was worth over a thousand dollars, officials said.
+“This Nycha supervisor misused her position to give her personal kitchen a makeover, realizing the renovation with stolen equipment and an appliance from Nycha and denying residents what was rightfully theirs, according to the charges,” the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation, Margaret Garnett, said in a statement.On Feb. 24, the next edition of the Learning special report will be published with a theme of “resilience.”
+The editors would like to hear from teachers: Do you consciously teach resilience, or related topics like “grit” or “growth mind-set”?
+Please take the short survey below and feel free to share it with other educators.Directing us to move with stealth into a lot overgrown with poison oak vines and blackberry brambles, she pointed to a ring of eucalyptus trees. The morning had begun cold but the temperature had inched past 54 degrees, when monarchs begin to emerge from their slumber. The brown and green branches of one tree were stirring, as if a slight breeze was ruffling the dun-colored leaves. But then a distinctive orange color revealed itself. Butterflies peeled off from the branches, each one opening like a warm kiss before fluttering into the air.
+Increasingly, people without formal backgrounds in science are collaborating with scientists to collect data on a scale that scientists alone would be unable to compile. The work of these people in recording the exact time, place and conditions of their butterfly observations is vital to monitoring the health of monarch populations. Tracking these butterflies is one of the longest-standing examples of this kind of teamwork.
+Over the period of a year, monarchs produce four to five generations. The last and longest-lasting of them is born between August and October. Unlike their predecessors, which live as butterflies for a mere two to four weeks, these monarchs survive for six to eight months. After staying put over the winter in Mexico or California, they disperse in March or April, spreading far and wide in search of milkweed upon which to lay their eggs, which will morph into caterpillars that become the next generation of butterflies. The final generation in this yearlong cycle will return to the same California coast as their ancestors did. How these butterflies find their place of origin remains a mystery.
+Last year’s count in Bolinas had been very low; still, the trees had been festooned with scores of butterfly clumps, in which hundreds of monarchs hung together for warmth and protection. This time, there was just one clump. Later we would learn that the total count of this site in Bolinas, which the previous year tallied 12,360 butterflies, plummeted this winter to just 1,256 monarchs. “This animal story that has been going on for centuries and perhaps thousands of years is disappearing and may be gone” soon, Ms. Monroe told us, her eyes tearing.
+The total number of West Coast monarchs was estimated at approximately 4.5 million in the 1980s. In the latest count , that number fell to 28,429, dipping below the number scientists estimate is needed to keep the population going. This drastic decline indicates the migration is collapsing. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service is expected to announce in June whether its scientists think the monarch qualifies for protection under the Endangered Species Act.A civil rights group in Birmingham, Ala., said on Friday that it had reinstated Angela Davis, the activist and scholar, as the recipient of its annual human rights award, reversing a controversial decision to revoke the honor weeks ago.
+The group, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, first announced last fall that Professor Davis would receive the award, but its board walked the decision back on Jan. 4 amid criticism over her support for a boycott of Israel. That move prompted a backlash, with many describing it as an insult.
+In a since-deleted statement, the group had said that Professor Davis, who retired from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2008, “does not meet all of the criteria on which the award is based.” But, on Friday, Andrea L. Taylor, the institute’s president and chief executive, reaffirmed Professor Davis’s qualifications.
+“Dr. Angela Davis, a daughter of Birmingham, is highly regarded throughout the world as a human-rights activist,” she said in the statement, noting Professor Davis’s activism around feminism and mass incarceration. “Her credentials in championing human rights are noteworthy.”To the Editor:
+Re “The Insulin Wars,” by Danielle Ofr i (Sunday Review, Jan. 20):
+My 3-year-old son received a diagnosis of Type 1 diabetes 37 years ago. Doctors, nurses and friends reminded me to be patient, as a cure was surely coming. I hung onto that hope for a while, but later that seemed like a pipe dream. Dr. Ofri’s article reminds me why that cure may never come.
+Diabetes is but one of many chronic illnesses. The discovery of insulin continues to be a godsend. Profiting from the suffering of others is not.
+As a society, we would all benefit from legislation that prohibits the manipulation of medications that financially benefit the manufacturer without regard for the patient. My son said that he has kept track of his expenses for his diabetes over the last 15 years and that the amount is staggering even with insurance.
+Along with Dr. Ofri, I, too, am at a loss as to how to proceed. Where do I direct my anger and disappointment? Perhaps this is a first step, and I will continue to take more steps to see if I can make a difference. If not me, who?The Perfect Fisherman’s Coat
+“A sketch of one of our coats almost looks like a children’s drawing,” says Camille Serra, the French designer at the helm of the new outerwear brand Kassl Editions. “It’s just very simple, graphic lines,” she adds. Launched last June in Amsterdam, the company has one clear mission: to reinterpret the classic fisherman’s coat with every collection. Founded by a team of fashion industry veterans — Ilse Cornelissens and Tim Van Geloven, founders of the concept store Graanmarkt 13 in Antwerp, Belgium, Bart Ramakers and Charlotte Schreuder of Parrot, an Amsterdam-based fashion agency, and Christian Salez, the former C.E.O. of Delvaux — Kassl prides itself on its minimalist approach.
+All Kassl coats have the same basic silhouette, inspired by a vintage fisherman’s coat. New editions are released a couple times a year in different colors and fabrics, sourced from Italy and Japan. The first edition offered a short A-line button-up mackintosh, which came in a buttery cream and a lacquered olive cotton, while for spring the brand proposes an oversize, elongated trench coat in powder pink and white. “The fashion system is crazy to keep up with,” says Cornelissens. “A sustainable way of changing the flow would be to make sure pieces come in at the right time, so they don’t end up in midseason sales.”
+The brand takes its name from Kassel, the city in central Germany where the line’s coats are made by a family-run factory that also manufactures outerwear for the German fire brigade. Minimally embellished and made from technical materials including oilcloth and rubber, the coats are built to last: velcro-fastening cuffs and sealed seams keep out wind and rain, while buttons are affixed with a metal ring to stop them from ever falling off. “Brands are offering too many stories today,” says Serra, who still wears her dad’s cashmere coat that predates the 1970s. “But you can play many different games with fabrics to bring diversity in a very simple idea. Focusing on just one thing is more radical.” kassleditions.com — GRACE COOKThe building that houses the Newseum — the financially troubled monument to journalism in Washington — is being sold to Johns Hopkins University for $372.5 million by the Freedom Forum, the foundation that created the museum.
+The institution will remain open through 2019 and museum executives will spend that time trying to find a new space for its contents.
+“This was a difficult decision, but it was the responsible one,” Jan Neuharth, the chairwoman and chief executive of the Freedom Forum, said in a statement released Friday. “We remain committed to continuing our programs — in a financially sustainable way — to champion the five freedoms of the First Amendment and to increase public awareness about the importance of a free and fair press. With today’s announcement, we can begin to explore all options to find a new home in the Washington, D.C., area.”
+For Johns Hopkins, the purchase will allow the university to expand and consolidate its presence in the nation’s capital.Movements like #OscarsSoWhite and #MeToo have challenged Hollywood to do a better job of representing women and people of color in films.
+Depending on how you judge diversity, this year’s Academy Awards nominees could be considered progress. Half of the nominees for best picture feature black or Latino leads, but in the acting categories, only 4 out of 20 nominees are persons of color.
+The two films with the largest number of total nominations are stories about and starring women, though in the highly prized directing category, women are nonexistent.“I have to use this umbrella to protect myself from the torrent of illegal leaks.” Roger Stone. He’s a Republican political consultant and a self-described — “Agent provocateur.” He was an adviser to longtime friend Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. “Trying to stop Trump is like stepping in front of a hurtling freight train.” Now, Stone is back in the spotlight. He’s been charged as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization that released Clinton campaign emails stolen by the Russian government to help Trump win. In 2016, Stone said he had an in with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I actually have communicated with Assange.” “We have a mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman.” But now, he says it was all part of his political game. “I set a Google News alert for ‘Julian Assange.’ I read every interview he gave. And I used that information to posture and to bluff and to punk the Democrats.” Stone has built a reputation on winning at all costs, even if it means bending the truth. “I assumed he was lying. It’s something Roger does.” “Posture and bluff. That’s politics.” Stone started his career as a political operative at a young age. At 19, he was an entry-level trickster for Nixon’s re-election campaign. His name later came up in the Watergate investigation. “I paid $100 to Mr. Roger Stone on one occasion to leave a leaflet, I believe, at Senator McGovern’s headquarters.” Stone and Trump have been friends and associates since the 1980s, when Stone was working as a political consultant with Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who has since been convicted of financial fraud. Stone says he has been encouraging Donald Trump to run for president since 1988. “I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning.” “Between his outspokenness, his national name identification and his issue positions, he could be a formidable candidate.” “I guess we’re looking at it very seriously.” After he got into some trouble working for Bob Dole in 1996, he bounced back — but has largely worked outside of political campaigns. Stone has a unique personal brand: a mix of provocation, politics and fashion. He can often be found discussing some of his favorite topics: the Clintons, how L.B.J. was behind the assassination of J.F.K. and “fake news.” “Fake news.” Stone strongly denies any wrongdoing in 2016. “I haven’t done anything illegal. I’ve been targeted for one reason and one reason only: I am loyal to the president of the United States.” But emails and interviews suggest that he sold himself to the Trump campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks. He is also connected to a web of associates, some of whom have been interviewed as part of Mueller’s investigation. Stone has been charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering.To the Editor:
+Re “After a Crash, Prince Philip, 97, Ignites a Debate About Older Drivers” (news article, Jan. 19):
+The solution lies in the self-driving car, already being tested on roads. Prince Philip’s accident would not have happened had he been using a self-driving car.
+The elderly — I am one — do not want to drive; we just want to get from point A to point B.
+Steven Freedman
+Rockville, Md.
+The writer, a mechanical engineer, is a former assistant professor at M.I.T.To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Agrees to Reopen Government for 3 Weeks in Surprise Retreat From Wall” (nytimes.com, Jan. 25):
+This whole thing could have and should have been resolved six weeks ago, with no shutdown. People have suffered horribly and the nation was put at risk. This is shameful.
+Maybe Congress can now pass a law forbidding shutdowns to be used as extortion.
+Christine McMorrow
+Waltham, Mass.
+To the Editor:
+Members of President Trump’s most vocal base, those who supported him in great part because of his promise to build a wall on the southern border, must be seething after he seemingly agreed to Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s demand that the government be reopened before any discussions of increased border security.
+That a well-seasoned female soldier of the Democratic establishment caused Mr. Trump to cave is just delicious.KABUL, Afghanistan — As the United States has shifted from trying to defeat the Taliban militarily to seeking a negotiated end to the long Afghan war, American diplomats and Afghan officials alike have grappled with a basic question: Just who speaks on behalf of the Taliban, and with how much authority?
+That question seemed to be answered on Thursday when the Taliban announced that one of their founding leaders, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, would serve as the new chief negotiator in high-level talks that have reached a critical stage. The appointment brought much-needed clarity and indicated that the Taliban are taking negotiations seriously, according to Western diplomats and Afghan officials.
+Mullah Baradar is known as a longtime, powerful lieutenant to the Taliban’s founding supreme leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar. The following that Mullah Baradar commands among the Taliban’s rank and file could help make a deal negotiated by him more acceptable, officials said.
+Word that a noted Taliban leader would be helping lead the talks was a sign that after an estimated eight years of sporadic negotiations, this round could actually show results. With a war now lasting more than 17 years — America’s longest — the major stakeholders have signaled they are ready for a compromise. The Taliban want the American military to pull out, and the United States is looking for security assurances.Florence Knoll Bassett, a pioneering designer and entrepreneur who created the modern look and feel of America’s postwar corporate office with sleek furniture, artistic textiles and an uncluttered, free-flowing workplace environment, died on Friday in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 101.
+Her death was announced by David E. Bright, a spokesman for Knoll Inc., the company she and her husband Hans Knoll ran for many years.
+To connoisseurs of Modernism, the mid-20th-century designs of Florence Knoll, as she was known, were — and still are — the essence of the genre’s clean, functional forms. Transcending design fads, they are still influential, still contemporary, still common in offices, homes and public spaces, still found in dealers’ showrooms and represented in museum collections.
+Ms. Knoll learned her art at the side of Modernist masters. She was a protégé of the German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Eliel Saarinen, the Finnish architect and teacher and the father of the architect Eero Saarinen. And she worked with the renowned Bauhaus architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Throughout her career, influenced by the German Bauhaus school of design, she promoted the Modernist merger of architecture, art and utility in her furnishings and interiors, especially — although not exclusively — for offices.In particular, BuzzFeed has deep ties to Group Nine Media, the digital media company behind Thrillist, Seeker, The Dodo and NowThis. Its chief executive, Benjamin Lerer, has long been friends with Mr. Peretti, and his father, the venture capitalist Kenneth Lerer, is the chairman of BuzzFeed. (The younger Mr. Lerer has stressed that any business deal between the two would not include his father, to avoid conflicts of interest.)
+On Thursday, BuzzFeed News employees in New York were told to be in the office on East 18th Street no later than 10 a.m. the next day. Some reporters not in New York learned their fates over the phone. Many of those who were dismissed announced their departures on social media.
+“I’ve been on vacation for two weeks, and received the news over the phone an hr ago while I stood on a street in Delhi,” Talal Ansari, a reporter, wrote on Twitter. “Now, I write this as I wait to go through airport security. Being laid off from 8k mi away doesn’t make this any easier.”
+Marisa Carroll, the deputy national editor, who edited a notable series of articles on accusations of sexual misconduct against the R&B artist R. Kelly, was also laid off. So were John Stanton, who led the Washington bureau for many years before moving to New Orleans to be a national reporter; Cates Holderness, who ignited an internet phenomenon in 2015 with a post that triggered a debate about whether a dress was blue and black or gold and white; and Tyler Kingkade, a national reporter who covered sexual assault and Title IX issues.
+“It’s a rough business,” Mr. Kingkade wrote on Twitter.
+Some employees took advantage of an internal Slack messaging channel called AJA, for “Ask Jonah Anything,” to make their displeasure known. In messages reviewed by The Times, one staff member asked if employees could bring dogs to work on Monday, to alleviate stress. After Mr. Peretti chimed in, saying it was a “good idea,” another staff member wrote, “Dogs won’t save us from this hell.”
+The international bureaus will also be affected by the cutback. The Spain office has been shut down. Last week, Janine Gibson, a longtime editor at The Guardian who was the editor in chief of BuzzFeed UK, left the publication.
+In the days leading up to the layoffs, BuzzFeed News came under scrutiny after publishing an article reporting that President Trump had instructed his former lawyer Michael D. Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress. In a rare public statement, the special counsel’s office denied the report. Mr. Smith has said he stands by the article.After reading a New York Times article about the families’ gun dilemma that was published earlier this month, the California businessman decided to write a check to the families for $62,500. He contacted a reporter at The Times so that he could get in touch with the lawyer for the special administrator of the estate.
+“It was tugging at my heart strings and it seemed like a horrific situation for the families to deal with this choice,” he said in an interview. “I wanted to alleviate some of the pain or at least not allow it to get worse.”
+The executive said that he wants the donation to be anonymous because the focus should be on the families.
+“No credit in the face of pain,” he said. “This was about heartbreak and wanting to help.”
+He said he made the donation conditional on the destruction of the firearms — which range from pistols to high-powered long arms — to ensure they do not end up back in circulation.
+“I think the families would feel better if the weapons are gone,” he said.
+Alice Denton, the lawyer for the special administrator of the estate, said the F.B.I., which is in possession of the firearms, had given a verbal commitment that it would destroy the weapons if it received a court order to do so. She said that she would seek such an order next month from the Las Vegas judge overseeing the estate case. In the meantime, no action to destroy the guns would be taken.You may not have appreciated it at the time — golden eras have a habit of coming and going like that — but a five-year stretch that started in 2013 was a pretty great time to buy a washing machine.
+Inflation for home laundry equipment, as measured by the Labor Department, fell steadily during that time, which meant you could buy the same washer your neighbor bought last year for less money. Or you could buy a better one at the same price. Great news for your clothes, though maybe bad news for your friendship, if your neighbor was the covetous type.
+That stretch of laundry deflation ended last year, shortly after President Trump imposed tariffs, starting at 20 percent, on imported washers. The move was a response to a complaint filed by Whirlpool, a Michigan-based manufacturer.
+The company has long dominated the washing machine business — many Americans have had Whirlpools in their laundry rooms for decades — but has recently faced stiffer competition from foreign manufacturers. Whirlpool claimed that foreign competitors like LG and Samsung were flooding the appliance market with washing machines from South Korea and Mexico at prices so low that they were hurting American makers.WASHINGTON — American taxpayers could face the most chaotic filing season in decades as the Internal Revenue Service digs out from a backlog of millions of documents and unanswered calls that accumulated during the longest federal government shutdown in history.
+I.R.S. officials briefed congressional staff members on Friday and painted a grim picture of the agency’s operational capacity just days before the start of tax filing season, which begins on Monday. Despite a deal to end the shutdown on Friday, the funding freeze paralyzed large swaths of the agency during the crucial weeks that its staff prepares for its busiest time of year.
+The Trump administration ordered 46,000 I.R.S. employees back to work, without pay, earlier this month. That included 26,000 employees who were recalled to ensure that tax refunds continued to be paid and to answer calls.
+But only 12,300 of those 26,000 employees showed up, according to congressional aides briefed by the I.R.S. As a result of their absence, five million written correspondences to the I.R.S. have gone unanswered and only 18 percent of calls to the agency’s Automated Collection System reached a representative. Hold times exceeded an hour, according to a document circulated to House staff members on Friday.DAVOS, Switzerland — They’ll never admit it in public, but many of your bosses want machines to replace you as soon as possible.
+I know this because, for the past week, I’ve been mingling with corporate executives at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. And I’ve noticed that their answers to questions about automation depend very much on who is listening.
+In public, many executives wring their hands over the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers. They take part in panel discussions about building “human-centered A.I.” for the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” — Davos-speak for the corporate adoption of machine learning and other advanced technology — and talk about the need to provide a safety net for people who lose their jobs as a result of automation.
+But in private settings, including meetings with the leaders of the many consulting and technology firms whose pop-up storefronts line the Davos Promenade, these executives tell a different story: They are racing to automate their own work forces to stay ahead of the competition, with little regard for the impact on workers.PARK CITY, Utah — Amid breathless reports of protests, disruptions and personal threats, news outlets swarmed to the Sundance Film Festival premiere of “Leaving Neverland,” a new documentary mini-series detailing accusations of sexual abuse against the pop star Michael Jackson. But the protesters outside the Egyptian Theater found themselves vastly outnumbered by reporters, photographers and camera crews, as teams from Variety, “Extra,” and, yes, The Times waited patiently for their turns to interview the poster-carrying Michael Jackson defenders. All two of them.
+Brenda Jenkyns and Catherine Van Tighem said they drove 13 hours from Alberta, Canada, to protest the debut of the docu-series, which HBO will broadcast this spring. Though three more protesters showed up after the screening, the two friends said they felt compelled to speak out. “I’ve never actually heard of Sundance before that,” Jenkyns said. “I just know about Michael Jackson, and we also know about the two people who are featured in this film. So we knew that it would be not true, basically.”
+Van Tighem added that the film was “not a voice for victims,” saying, “There’s another side to the story. The information is there for people, if they want to take the time to look at it.” She carried a cardboard poster featuring a photo of Jackson, as well as copies of a pamphlet titled “Protect Michael,” with a storybook-style illustration of the pop singer leading a group of children through a garden of flowers.
+“Leaving Neverland,” directed by Dan Reed, paints quite a different picture of Jackson’s interactions with young people. In two parts running nearly four hours, it details the singer’s history with Wade Robson and James Safechuck, who both spent time with Jackson in the late 1980s, at the height of his post-“Thriller” fame.Ms. Best, 32, who has published at the investigative site MuckRock and elsewhere, noted that the Distributed Denial of Secrets site already hosts thousands of leaked documents from dozens of countries, the largest number from the United States.
+The new site operates roughly on the model pioneered by WikiLeaks — inviting hackers and whistle-blowers to send confidential documents for posting. But Ms. Best has been quite critical of that site and its founder, Julian Assange, who played a central role in distributing the Democrats’ emails that Russians hacked in 2016. Distributed Denial of Secrets has posted a large archive of internal documents from WikiLeaks itself.
+“Personally, I am disappointed by what I see as dishonest and egotistic behavior from Julian Assange and WikiLeaks,” Ms. Best said. But she added that she had made the Russian document collection available to WikiLeaks ahead of its public release on Friday, and had posted material favorable to Mr. Assange leaked from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has lived for more than six years to avoid arrest.
+Russian and Eastern European hackers have for many years been among the world’s most active, many operating, initially, from a criminal underground in search of profit. But over the last decade, Russian intelligence agencies have become adept at using cyberintrusions to pilfer documents abroad as part of intelligence gathering and to leak for political purposes.
+While the 2016 American election attack, carried out by Russian military intelligence hackers from the agency known as the G.R.U., has gotten the most attention, similar hack-and-leak operations have been carried out on a daily or weekly basis for years in Eastern Europe. Ukrainian hackers have worked aggressively to expose Russian covert activities in Crimea and the regions of eastern Ukraine controlled by separatist rebels.
+Business tycoons have used hackers to go after rivals. Activists have sought to expose wrongdoing by the police and security agencies. The resulting archives of emails and inside documents have been posted all over the web, and the new collection seeks to gather it all in one place.
+Ms. Best said Distributed Denial of Secrets is operated by fewer than 20 people who live in multiple countries, most preferring to remain anonymous. She said the Russian project began last year when she connected with a journalist looking for a collection of emails hacked by Shaltai Boltai, the Russian group whose name means Humpty Dumpty.Subscribe: iTunes | Google Play Music | How to Listen
+When the memoirist Dani Shapiro got her genealogy results from Ancestry.com, she saw the name of someone who was apparently a first cousin but a complete stranger to her. That was surprising enough, but hardly preparation for all that followed. “I still could not imagine that I was going to find out what I would eventually find out,” she says. “I spent 54 years believing that I absolutely understood my own identity.”
+This week on the podcast, Shapiro talks about her new best-selling memoir, “Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love.”
+Image
+David Treuer also joins us this week, to discuss his new book, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America From 1890 to the Present.” Treuer (Ojibwe) wants to counter the familiar narratives of invisibility surrounding America’s indigenous peoples. “We occupy a central place in the stories America tells about itself, and yet we are, because of numbers and geography, almost invisible in the daily lives of most Americans,” Treuer says. “So there’s a huge disconnect.”It’s 7 p.m., and dinner is on the table: a large, one-dish centerpiece for everyone to dig into. We call it a “one-pot wonder” for a good reason, and that is its incredible ability to connect ingredients and humans alike. Centuries of cooking in underground pits or stone-built hearths have shaped our instincts to both get together and throw it all together.
+My experience writing recipes definitely confirms this: One-p an dishes are by far the most popular. The sense of contentment people experience when they gather around one is akin to the comfort they get when they taste it. Ingredients that have been left to sit alongside one another for a long while simply lose some of their sharp edges in the process for the sake of a greater good, in much the same way as individuals morph into a family.
+There is something else at play here, I suspect, something much more prosaic: cleaning up . Modern-day cooking and feeding are wedged in between a whole host of other activities that make up our busy schedules. Skipping a couple of extra saucepans and serving straight from the pot is attractive proposition for those strapped for time.This is Nicolás Maduro, president of Venezuela. And this is Juan Guaidó, self-declared president of Venezuela. Two leaders, both trying to control the country and the narrative. Here is how they’re doing it. Venezuela’s state television is controlled by Maduro’s government. So the opposition has been relying on social media to get its message out. On January 23rd, the opposition called for a large anti-Maduro protest, and shared the images of flooded streets and squares online as proof of its popular backing. But state TV aired images of pro-Maduro crowds and speeches from his supporters. Guaidó is advocating for a peaceful and democratic overhaul of the system. During the protests, he tweeted this video of a previous speech he gave in front of the National Assembly. While Maduro is leaning on the establishment, with state TV broadcasting general after general voicing their support for him. And airing the approval of the country’s highest court. The list of countries recognizing Guaidó as the new president of Venezuela has expanded. “It is clear that Nicolás Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela. So the United Kingdom believes that Juan Guaidó is the right person to take Venezuela forward.” Guaidó retweeted world leaders, including those from the U.S., the European Council and Argentina, and thanked them for their endorsements. On pro-Maduro state TV, the support for Guaidó was denounced as interventionism. And the super power behind it? And some countries seemed to agree. Russia, China and Turkey, among others, have vowed to stand by Maduro. The fight over who will run Venezuela continues with both leaders trying to control the message.The top-ranked man in able-bodied tennis, Novak Djokovic, has tried his skills in a wheelchair across the net from Alcott, which he said made him appreciate the challenge and the craft of the discipline.
+“Dylan deserves the popularity,” Djokovic said. “He’s a very great guy, very charismatic. I’ve said it before, these guys are heroes to me, they really are. They make the game of tennis more beautiful and more unique because of what they do and how they do it .”
+After winning Paralympic gold medals in singles and doubles in 2016, Alcott was presented Tennis Australia’s Newcombe Medal, which goes annually to the country’s top player. Alcott said winning an award in a general category rather than one designated for disabled athletes “felt like breaking through.”
+Alcott was born with lipomeningocele, which caused a large tumor against his spinal cord. He underwent his first of many surgeries at five weeks old. Health struggles continued throughout his childhood, with his ability to use his extremities worsening at times, both gradually and suddenly.
+In 2012, an inebriated acquaintance tried to pick up his chair and dumped him onto the floor, which was covered in broken glass; Alcott severed an artery in his hand in the fall, damaging his ability to use his right hand fully, which is one of the reasons he competes in the quad division. That spelled the end of his wheelchair basketball career and led him to focus on tennis, which he had started playing around age 9 or 10.1. President Trump agreed to reopen the federal government for three weeks while negotiations continued over border security, backing down after a monthlong standoff with Democrats over funding for his border wall.
+The decision paved the way for Congress to pass spending bills as soon as Friday. The stopgap measure will restore normal operations at a series of federal agencies until Feb. 15 and begin paying the 800,000 federal workers who have been furloughed or forced to work for free for 35 days.
+The plan includes no money for the wall and was essentially the same approach Mr. Trump rejected at the end of December. But he cautioned that the cease-fire might be only temporary.MELBOURNE, Australia — After bowing out of the Australian Open this week, Jack Sock and his childhood friend and doubles partner, Jackson Withrow, ended up on opposite sides of a great divide.
+Withrow’s childhood dream was to play professional tennis; doubles proved to be his only portal.
+Sock, the world’s second-ranked doubles player, has an Olympic gold medal from 2016 that he won in the mixed event, which led to his being honored at a University of Nebraska football game and throwing a ceremonial first pitch at a Kansas City Royals baseball game.
+In addition, he shares four Grand Slam titles, three in doubles and the other in mixed.
+Sock, 26, has also climbed as high as No. 8 in singles, which is where he stood last year at this time. His ranking since has tumbled to 105, but singles remains No. 1 in his heart.
+“I can personally say if I’m not relevant in the singles world and my only choice is to play doubles, I’d probably stop playing tennis,” Sock said.[Kara Swisher answered your questions about her column on Twitter.]
+O.K., so instead of just criticizing, I thought I would help him with his piece, given I do this for a living and he does not, by rewriting his work. Here goes:
+MARK WROTE: “Facebook turns 15 next month. When I started Facebook, I wasn’t trying to build a global company. I realized you could find almost anything on the internet — music, books, information — except the thing that matters most: people. So I built a service people could use to connect and learn about each other. Over the years, billions have found this useful, and we’ve built more services that people around the world love and use every day. Recently I’ve heard many questions about our business model, so I want to explain the principles of how we operate.”
+KARA TRANSLATES: We old now. We big now. It came from my one really good idea: AOL sucked and I could do better and I did. Now the noise has reached me up on Billionaire Mountain, so I am going to have to pretend that I care.
+MARK: “I believe everyone should have a voice and be able to connect. If we’re committed to serving everyone, then we need a service that is affordable to everyone. The best way to do that is to offer services for free, which ads enable us to do.”
+KARA: No rich person is going to pay too much for this muffler, um, social media service, and poor people aren’t going to pay us at all because they apparently don’t have money. So everyone will have to endure the ads that we shovel out and stop griping, because free ain’t free, people.
+MARK: “People consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant. That means we need to understand their interests. So based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category. Although advertising to specific groups existed well before the internet, online advertising allows much more precise targeting and therefore more - relevant ads.”Get the DealBook newsletter to make sense of major business and policy headlines — and the power-brokers who shape them.
+__________
+The indictment unsealed this month charging Natalia V. Veselnitskaya, the Russian lawyer who met with Trump campaign officials in June 2016, with obstruction of justice in another case raises an interesting question: Why would the Justice Department pursue a case in which there is little likelihood of ever getting the defendant to the United States?
+The charges stem from a civil asset forfeiture case filed two years ago. Ms. Veselnitskaya is accused of making false statements in that case to thwart a money laundering investigation involving her clients, Prevezon Holdings and its owner, Denis P. Katsyv, an influential Russian businessman. According to the Justice Department, the defendants financed real estate purchases in New York to hide funds as part of a tax evasion scheme.
+In an interview with Yahoo News, Ms. Veselnitskaya said that she would not return to the United States but planned to use “all methods” to defend herself.The claim that a wall would lead to a huge decrease in crime is not supported by statistics. Construction of a wall would not suddenly remove millions of undocumented immigrants already in the United States, and there is no evidence of a causal link between immigration and crime. As for drugs, 90 percent of heroin coming into the United States enters through the southern border. But it is mostly smuggled through legal ports of entry and not wall-less areas. Most Fentanyl arrives in the United States from China through the mail.
+He exaggerated the numbers of border crossers and cited unverified tales of human trafficking.
+Though border crossings have been declining for nearly two decades, Mr. Trump continued to stress the need for a border wall with exaggerated data and overstated claims.
+“Last month was the third straight month in a row with 60,000 apprehensions on our southern border,” he said. “Think of that. We apprehended 60,000 people.”
+That monthly figure for October and November — data for December was not yet publicly posted — includes the 51,000 people caught illegally crossing the border, as well as the 9,000 to 10,000 people who attempted to enter through legal ports of entry but were deemed “inadmissible” each month. In the 2018 fiscal year, apprehensions at the border averaged 33,000 per month.
+And he recounted with graphic detail what happens to victims of smugglers: “Women are tied up. They’re bound. Duct tape put around their faces, around their mouths. In many cases, they can’t even breathe. They’re put in the backs of cars or vans or trucks. They don’t go through your port of entry. They make a right turn going very quickly.”
+It is possible that Mr. Trump learned of a duct-taping case from law enforcement officers, but more than a dozen experts in human trafficking told The Washington Post and The Toronto Star that they had not witnessed or heard of such an episode.
+For emphasis, he added, “It’s at the worst level — human trafficking — in the history of the world.” Millions of Africans were forcibly enslaved and trafficked during the 15th and 18th centuries.Then there was a third group: those who are staunchly committed to the wall and argued that Mr. Trump’s move on Friday was actually strategic.
+“I am more proud of President Trump today than I have ever been,” wrote Bill Mitchell, an outspoken Trump supporter, arguing that the president had essentially guaranteed victory by vowing to declare a national emergency if Democrats do not fund the wall within three weeks.Some cried with relief. Their 35-day nightmare of missing bill payments, working without paychecks, asking strangers for money and visiting food pantries was finally ending.
+But many of the federal workers who have been furloughed or working for free since December were leery of the three-week deal reached on Friday to reopen the government. New worries gnawed: How long before they got paid? Would federal contractors see even a dime of back pay?
+And most of all, after the longest shutdown in American history, would they and 800,000 other federal workers be back in the same mess in three weeks if President Trump and Democrats do not reach an accord on whether to fund his proposed border wall?
+“This was all for nothing, basically,” said Angela Kelley, 51, a furloughed worker for the Bureau of Land Management in Milwaukee who picked up shifts as an Uber driver to earn money to buy gas and groceries as the shutdown dragged on.Thousands of artifacts were eventually recovered, and the museum reopened in 2015.
+Lamia Al-Gailani was born on March 8, 1938, in Baghdad, where she grew up with four siblings. Her father, Ahmad Jamal al-Din Al-Gailanilani, was a landowner, and her mother, Madiha Asif Mahmud Arif-Agha, was a homemaker.
+Iraqi history ran deep in her family. Her father descended from Abdul-Qadir al-Gailani, a 12th-century Muslim theologian and mystic, and her lineage included the first prime minister of modern Iraq.
+“Nobody in her family before her was in archaeology, but because her family is one of the oldest in Iraq, her sense of history was very keen,” Zainab Bahrani, a friend and professor of ancient Near Eastern and archaeology at Columbia University, said in a telephone interview.
+Her archaeological education began with one year at Baghdad University before she moved to England, where she graduated from the University of Cambridge with a bachelor’s degree in archaeology and architecture. She earned a master’s at the University of Edinburgh and her Ph.D at University College London, where the subject of her thesis was cylinder seals.
+Dr. Gailani joined the National Museum of Iraq in 1961 as a curator. One of her first tasks was to make clay impressions of the cylinder seals. But her ambition to join an archaeological dig in Iraq — fertile territory for excavations — was circumscribed by conservative Iraqi attitudes toward women. Still, she convinced the museum authorities that she was capable of the work, although in agreeing to take her on they limited her to excavating in the Baghdad area.
+At Tell al-Dhibai, on the outskirts of the city, Dr. Gailani was part of a group that discovered a Babylonian town, complete with houses, a temple and an administrative building.Mr. Trump and his associates might have thought that Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, was just being a mischievous scamp, not passing along communications stolen by Russian intelligence, most of which came from the hacker Guccifer 2.0, an online persona created by Russian military intelligence officers. Mr. Stone said in 2017 that he had carried out “completely innocuous” private Twitter exchanges with Guccifer 2.0 during the presidential campaign.
+But then why did Mr. Trump say, five days after the first WikiLeaks release, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
+And might not the Trump circle have suspected that WikiLeaks was working with Russia after Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and the campaign chairman Paul Manafort met at Trump Tower on June 9, 2016, with Russians who were peddling dirt on Mrs. Clinton?
+And if Mr. Trump’s first F.B.I. intelligence briefing on Aug. 17, 2016, included a warning about Russian espionage, as NBC News reported in 2017, why didn’t Mr. Trump or anyone else in the campaign tell the agents about the meeting or the suspicious release of emails?
+After the first WikiLeaks release, the indictment says, “a senior Trump Campaign official was directed” — presumably by someone even more senior — to contact Mr. Stone about what dirt the group had on the Clinton campaign. If the Trump campaign had not known that it was getting dirt from Russia, why did George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser whom Mr. Trump called “an excellent guy,” plead guilty to lying about his contact with a professor who said he had dirt from Russia on Mrs. Clinton? (Mr. Papadopoulos’s lawyer said his client had taken his cues from Mr. Trump, and that “the president of the United States hindered this investigation more than George Papadopoulos ever could.”)When Venezuelans took to the streets this week to demand a return to democracy, they chose a date with deep historic significance: Jan. 23, the day a dictatorship collapsed in the face of surging protests more than 60 years ago.
+But demonstrations alone didn’t bring down Venezuela’s strongman back then. Only when the military stepped in, with tanks alongside protesters, did the dictatorship fall.
+It’s a playbook that Juan Guaidó, the 35-year-old opposition leader who declared himself Venezuela’s rightful president to cheering crowds on Wednesday, hoped would be just as relevant today as it was in 1958.
+While Mr. Guaidó earned the official recognition of the United States and more than 20 other countries, he remains a leader without a state. Venezuela’s military brass publicly swore allegiance to the nation’s president, Nicolás Maduro, frustrating the opposition’s plan to entice the armed forces into breaking ranks and turning the tide in the country’s long slide into authoritarianism.I am a European patriot because I have lived in Germany and seen how the idea of Europe provided salvation to postwar Germans; because I have lived in Italy and seen how the European Union anchored the country in the West when the communist temptation was strong; because I have lived in Belgium and seen what painstaking steps NATO and the European Union took to forge a Europe that is whole and free; because I have lived in France and seen how Europe gave the French a new avenue for expressing their universal message of human dignity; because I have lived in Britain and seen how Europe broadened the post-imperial British psyche and, more recently, to what impasse little-England insularity leads; because I have lived in the Balkans and chronicled a European war that took 100,000 lives; because “plain-routine, rut-living Bertie Cohen of Johannesburg,” as he put it, came to Europe to save the continent along with the young Americans whose graves I have gazed at in Normandy. Not least, I am a European patriot because I am a Jew.
+I am a European patriot and an American patriot. I am not from one place but several. The bond that binds the West is freedom — the cry of revolutions on both sides of the Atlantic. There is no contradiction in my patriotisms. Patriotism is to nationalism as dignity is to barbarism. As nationalism equals war, so contempt for the law brings savagery.
+Will anyone remember Europa? As the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote of the aftermath of war: “Those who knew/ what was going on here/ must make way for/ those who know little./ And less than little./ And finally as little as nothing.”
+European patriots do remember. They are multiplying in the face of danger. Writers including Milan Kundera, Elfriede Jelinek, Ian McEwan, Anne Applebaum, Salman Rushdie, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Herta Müller, Adam Michnik and Orhan Pamuk have just published an important European manifesto, drafted by Lévy.
+Europe, it declares, “has been abandoned by the two great allies who in the previous century twice saved it from suicide; one across the Channel and the other across the Atlantic. The continent is vulnerable to the increasingly brazen meddling of the occupant of the Kremlin. Europe as an idea is falling apart before our eyes. … We must now fight for the idea of Europe or see it perish beneath the waves of populism.”
+We must. European unity is a peace magnet. I am a European patriot for my children and grandchildren. It is they who will pay the price if the most beautiful postwar political idea dies.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.“For far too long, our immigration system has been exploited by smugglers, traffickers and those with no legal right to be in the United States,” said Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of homeland security, on Thursday.
+The Department of Homeland Security said that the claims for those returned would be adjudicated within a year, with an initial hearing held within 45 days. But immigration courts are already clogged with 800,0000 pending cases, raising questions about whether this timetable can be achieved, experts said.
+The policy would apply both to some asylum seekers who try to enter the United States at border crossings and to those apprehended by the authorities after illegally touching United States soil.
+Historically, undocumented single men have represented the bulk of those arrested and subsequently removed from the county. But since 2013, unaccompanied children and families have arrived in ever-larger numbers.
+That influx of people was cited by a Department of Homeland Security fact sheet as justification for the policy. Children cannot be detained for more than 72 hours in border holding facilities, prompting the authorities to release their adult parents with them, and the fact sheet referred to a shift in the profile of immigrants reaching the border, “from a demographic who could be quickly removed when they had no legal right to stay to one that cannot be detained and timely removed.”
+Analysts and lawyers raised other questions about the program.
+Human rights groups questioned the ethics of sending people fleeing in search of safety back into Mexico, which itself is experiencing horrific violence. Politically, some have asked why Mexico’s new president would essentially agree to turn his country into a waiting room for American asylum seekers.
+The Mexican government has cautioned that the details of who would be returned and when were still unclear. But in its statement, the government said that it would not accept unaccompanied children or people suffering from health problems. Mexico has yet to agree to accept families, but opened the door for future discussions.SAN DIEGO — When Tiger Woods saw the position of his ball in a bunker near the 18th green on Friday, he frowned, and then slapped the butt end of his iron on the fringe several times.
+“Had an 8-iron in from the middle of the fairway, and I plugged it under the lip,” Woods said in disgust.
+His horrible lie off a pulled approach shot stood to damage his second round in the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines and imperil his chances of making the cut.
+With an awkward, bent-kneed stance outside the bunker, he slashed at the ball below his feet but could move it only a few yards, onto the fringe. From there, Woods chipped past the hole, then lipped out a 6-foot putt and finished with a double-bogey 6.Even by the Mounties’ tight-lipped standards, remarkably few facts were released on Friday about the plot and the people the police said had originated it.
+At a news conference, an official of the Mounties, Chief Superintendent Michael LeSage, said that the national police force had received a tip from the F.B.I. in late December that a terror plot was underway in Kingston. About 300 people and a special, low-flying surveillance airplane — which provoked curiosity and irritation among many people in the city — were brought in to aid in the investigation.
+Superintendent Peter Lambertucci of the Mounties, who heads one of its counterterrorism units in Ottawa, said that while Mr. Alzahabi and his friend had developed an “attack plan,” they had no target or date. And while the police seized materials that could be components for a bomb, they said the two had not built one. The police would not answer questions about a possible motive or ideology fueling the plot.
+Canada’s welcoming attitude toward refugees from Syria’s civil war, which is approaching its eighth year, became a powerful symbol of its openness as a country.
+In 2017, Mr. Trudeau famously wrote a tweet saying that Canada was ready to welcome “those fleeing persecution, terror & war.” It came after President Trump moved to ban travelers from several Muslim-majority countries and seemed calculated to present liberal Canada’s embrace of refugees as a counterpoint to the attitude of the Trump administration.
+A group of four churches in Kingston sponsored Mr. Alzahabi’s family, said Alex Pierson, the executive director of the Anglican Diocese of Ontario. Citing privacy reasons, he declined to say when the family arrived, other than that it was more than a year ago.
+An annual report for one of the churches indicates that Mr. Alzahabi arrived from Kuwait with his father, Amin Alzahabi, his mother and three siblings after their home in Damascus, Syria, was destroyed. Amin Alzahabi, the report said, had been jailed for political reasons and “would be vulnerable to arrest and ‘extreme measures’ should he and the family return home.”What a debacle President Trump’s shutdown proved to be — what a toddler’s pageant of foot-stomping and incompetence, of vainglory and self-defeat. Mr. Trump tormented public servants and citizens and wounded the country, and, in conceding on Friday after holding the government hostage for 35 days, could claim to have achieved nothing.
+He succeeded only in exposing the emptiness of his bully’s bravado, of his “I alone can fix it” posturing. Once upon a time, Mr. Trump promised that Mexico would pay for a wall. He instead made all Americans pay for a partisan fantasy.
+Maybe you want a wall. Can you possibly argue that Mr. Trump’s shutdown strategy advanced your cause? He made the right decision on Friday — to sign a bill reopening the government through Feb. 15, giving lawmakers time to reach a permanent deal. But he could have had this same outcome without a shutdown. He ultimately agreed to the sort of bill that Democrats have been pitching for weeks — one that contains not one dollar in wall funding.
+In his announcement, the president struggled to obscure his failure with yet another rambling infomercial about the glory of walls. “No matter where you go, they work,” he said (raising the question of how you can get there if, in fact, there’s a wall in your way). He had nothing of substance to offer beyond the usual specious claims that only his wall can end the border flood of drugs, crime and migrant women who have been duct-taped and stuffed into vans by human traffickers . To repeat: Fewer border-crossing apprehensions were made in 2017 than at any time since 1971 ; drugs are overwhelmingly smuggled through established points of entry; and the only crisis at the border is a humanitarian one, of people fleeing violence and seeking asylum — again, mostly at established points of entry — under international law.How about lawyer Michael Cohen, now sentenced to three years in prison for lying to Congress? If Trump and the gang were a Sopranos remake, Cohen would be “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, who turned on Tony after being busted himself.
+Really, there’s so much talent there, it could have been anybody.
+Stone and Trump go way back. They were introduced about 40 years ago by their good mutual friend Roy Cohn, the guy who gave us the McCarthy witch hunts. Trump still burbles about how great Cohn was. And he enthused to a documentary interviewer that Stone is “a quality guy” who “always wanted me to run for president.”
+Can’t get a better recommendation than that. Stone has a talent for identifying presidential talent — he’s got a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back. He was partners with Paul Manafort in a Washington lobbying firm that specialized in representing the most terrible dictators on the planet. If you had a million dollars, a need for support from the United States government and a small problem with torture, rape and terrorism, these were the guys to see.
+(A third partner, Charlie Black, said that when reporters called him to ask if Stone was the connection between the Trump campaign and Russia, he replied, “With all due respect, Roger couldn’t find Russia on a map.” As always, when we’re considering possible crimes committed during the 2016 campaign, the best defense of Trump and his associates is that they were too dumb to be capable of plotting.)
+“I’m proud of the job I did at Black Manafort and Stone because I made a lot of money,” Stone told those documentarians, getting right to the point.
+Stone’s political career almost came to a crashing end in 1996 when he ran into a scandal that forced him to resign from the Bob Dole campaign. (The candidate was touchy about headlines like “Top Dole Aide Caught in Group Sex Ring.”) Stone blamed the story on a lying, disgruntled former employee. Later, he admitted that it was true, and explained that he needed to deny it because “my grandparents were still alive.”
+But no matter, he would go on triumphantly to organize a wild protest that stopped the recount of votes after the Gore-Bush election in Florida. Or maybe not. Stone bragged that he was the guy who staged one of the most spectacular assaults on the democratic process in recent history, but there was competition for the title.The president scheduled an announcement, and the scene in the Rose Garden was surreal. Cabinet officers and White House aides lined up and applauded when the president emerged from the Oval Office as if he were declaring victory in his confrontation with Democrats in Congress. And the president sounded as if he was doing just that, opening his remarks by saying that he was “very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown.”
+Only there was no deal, just a retreat. The president who said he would never reopen the government unless he secured money for his border wall agreed to reopen the government without money for his border wall.
+Supporters of a wall were hardly fooled, excoriating Mr. Trump for giving in. “Good news for George Herbert Walker Bush: As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as President of the United States,” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator who prodded Mr. Trump to take a firmer stand in December, wrote on Twitter.
+Breitbart News, the conservative news site once run by Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former senior adviser, made clear the disappointment among Mr. Trump’s base with its banner headline: “Government Open ... And Border. No Wall.” So did The Daily Caller, another leading voice on the right: “TRUMP CAVES.” And The Washington Examiner agreed: “Trump blinks.”
+Democrats were not exactly gracious in victory, barely containing their delight. “Hopefully, it means a lesson has been learned: Shutting down government over a policy difference is self-defeating,” tut-tutted Mr. Schumer. “It accomplishes nothing but pain and suffering for the country and the American people.”
+By late in the day, a defensive Mr. Trump was insisting it was not a defeat. “I wish people would read or listen to my words on the Border Wall,” he tweeted. “This was in no way a concession. It was taking care of millions of people who were getting badly hurt by the Shutdown with the understanding that in 21 days, if no deal is done, it’s off to the races!”
+Until now, of course, he had expressed little if any concern for those hurt by the shutdown, insisting instead that many of the 800,000 who went without pay for five weeks were on his side and wanted him to stand strong. Whether this episode prompts Mr. Trump to change his approach to governing, it has altered the politics of shutdowns leaving federal workers caught in the middle.The mystery over the incarceration of a Navy veteran in Iran last July deepened on Friday, when an Iranian prosecutor said that the case had been based on an “individual plaintiff” and that the prisoner might face security-related charges.
+The veteran, Michael R. White of Imperial Beach, Calif., is the first American to be imprisoned in Iran since the Trump administration took office two years ago.
+His arrest raised the number of American prisoners in Iran to at least four, and has added an irritant to the already poor relations between the countries.
+The prosecutor, Gholamali Sadeqi, in the northeast Iranian city of Mashhad, was quoted in a brief report by Iran’s Mehr news agency as saying “there is an individual plaintiff in the case,” but he did not provide details.“He don’t be in that neighborhood.”
+When one court reporter in Philadelphia transcribed that phrase, it turned into this: “We going to be in this neighborhood.” In other words, the opposite of what the phrase actually meant — that someone is not usually in a neighborhood.
+That was just one transcription error captured in a soon-to-be published study that found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors in transcribing sentences that were spoken in a dialect that linguists term African-American English.
+Researchers played audio recordings of a series of sentences spoken in African-American English and asked 27 stenographers who work in courthouses in Philadelphia to transcribe them. On average, the reporters made errors in two out of every five sentences, according to the study.
+The findings could have far-reaching consequences, as errors or misinterpretations in courtroom transcripts can influence the official court record in ways that are harmful to defendants, researchers and lawyers said.Conspicuous by its absence in much of the mainstream news coverage of Venezuela’s political crisis is the word “socialism.” Yes, every sensible observer agrees that Latin America’s once-richest country, sitting atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves, is an economic basket case, a humanitarian disaster, and a dictatorship whose demise cannot come soon enough.
+But … socialist? Perish the thought.
+Or so goes a line of argument that insists socialism’s good name shouldn’t be tarred by the results of experience. On Venezuela, what you’re likelier to read is that the crisis is the product of corruption, cronyism, populism, authoritarianism, resource-dependency, U.S. sanctions and trickery, even the residues of capitalism itself. Just don’t mention the S-word because, you know, it’s working really well in Denmark.
+Curiously, that’s not how the Venezuelan regime’s admirers used to speak of “21st century socialism,” as it was dubbed by Hugo Chávez. The late Venezuelan president, said Britain’s Jeremy Corbyn, “showed us there is a different and a better way of doing things. It’s called socialism, it’s called social justice, and it’s something that Venezuela has made a big step toward.” Noam Chomsky was similarly enthusiastic when he praised Chávez in 2009. “What’s so exciting about at last visiting Venezuela,” the linguist said, is that “I can see how a better world is being created and can speak to the person who’s inspired it.”Everything at His Fingertips
+When it is Zanardi’s turn to drive, he uses his own steering wheel, modified so that everything he needs is within reach. There is almost no point in the race when either of his hands is free enough to focus on only one operation.
+FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW FRONT VIEW Traction control Engine mapping Radio Wipers Drinking FRONT VIEW Traction control Radio Engine mapping Wipers Drinking FRONT VIEW Traction control Engine mapping Radio Wipers Drinking FRONT VIEW Dash High beams Parking brake Cancels dash warnings Pit speed limiter Full course yellow FRONT VIEW Dash High beams Parking brake Cancels dash warnings Pit speed limiter Full course yellow FRONT VIEW Dash High beams Parking brake Cancels dash warnings Pit speed limiter Full course yellow FRONT VIEW BACK VIEW BACK VIEW BACK VIEW Throttle ring Paddle shifters Steering wheel release BACK VIEW Throttle ring Paddle shifters Steering wheel release BACK VIEW Throttle ring Paddle shifters Steering wheel release BACK VIEW
+Nearly everything seen on the front of the steering wheel would be standard for Zanardi and his able-bodied teammates. The exception is the hornlike extension on the left side. During extreme left-hand turns, Zanardi rotates the steering wheel as much as 180 degrees. The extension allows him to shift his hand to use the throttle. Standard functions on the steering wheel allow the driver to communicate with his pit crew (RAD), and fine-tune the traction control (TC) and engine mapping (MAP) settings that affect the drivability of the car. The driver scrolls through the numerous diagnostic screens using the dash knob and cancels warnings with the O.K. button. The back of the wheel contains the bulk of the modifications specific to Zanardi.
+Pulling or pushing on paddle shifters located on the right side allows him to change gears. Normally the upshift paddle would be on the left and the downshift on the right.
+Listen to Zanardi describe how he drives with this modified steering wheel.
+Braking and Downshifting
+Instead of using a pedal, a brake lever is mounted beside him. He pushes it forward to apply the brake. There is also a trigger on the lever that he uses to downshift while braking.
+Downshift trigger BRAKE LEVER Parking brake Parking brake ratchet Master cylinders Downshift trigger BRAKE LEVER Parking brake Parking brake ratchet Master cylinders Downshift trigger BRAKE LEVER Parking brake Parking brake ratchet Master cylinders
+Changing Drivers
+The pit stop exchange between Zanardi and his teammates, John Edwards, Jesse Krohn and Chaz Mostert, has been choreographed down to the last detail for safety and to save valuable time. “It is a dance in which the important thing is getting all the steps in exactly the right order and in the limited time that you have available,” Zanardi explained. “So we can’t give away a single second.” The team completes the exchange in less than 20 seconds, faster than the time it takes to refuel.
+Zanardi shares insight into his team’s driver exchange.
+It’s Race Time
+Driving the car requires Zanardi to coordinate complex movements while dedicating different hand muscles to particular operations. As Zanardi explained it, “There are times I’m approaching turns with my right hand on the brake lever, I’m downshifting with my fingers, I’m controlling the throttle with my left hand and steering into the corner with only one hand on the wheel.”FRONT PAGE
+An article on Friday about the most expensive residential sale in United States history described incorrectly the gift Kenneth Griffin gave to Harvard. Mr. Griffin’s $150 million gift to Harvard University in 2014 was, at the time, the largest gift in the school’s history; the university has since received larger donations.
+BUSINESS
+Because of an editing error, an article about layoffs at BuzzFeed and other media companies misstated Gannett’s reason for reducing the size of its work force. It is to shore up its shrinking profits, not to attract a buyer.
+MAGAZINE
+An article this weekend about Mitch McConnell misstated the number of American troops in Afghanistan and the number of troops that President Trump said he would withdraw from the country. Seven thousand of 14,000 American troops in Afghanistan were going to be pulled out. It is not the case that only 7,000 troops were still deployed to Afghanistan.
+OBITUARIES
+An obituary on Thursday about Mary Boyd Higgins, the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s trustee, using information from a family member, misstated the year she moved to Lexington, Ky., where she died. It was 2018, not 2001.MADRID — The Spanish authorities said early Saturday that they had found the body of a 2-year-old boy who fell into a well nearly two weeks ago, bringing to a tragic end a search operation that had gripped the nation.
+The toddler, Julen Roselló, was said to have slipped into an abandoned, narrow borehole on Jan. 13, while his parents were preparing lunch in the countryside near the southern port city of Málaga.
+His fall set off a rescue mission that was covered around the clock by Spanish news outlets. As the operation encountered engineering and geological obstacles, it grew to include about 300 people, including Spanish mining specialists and a Swedish company that provided the technology to help save 33 Chilean miners in 2010.
+Officials had tried various routes to the toddler, whose body was trapped behind hardened soil and rock that blocked rescue workers and equipment. A government official, Alfonso Rodríguez Gómez de Celis, said that Julen’s body was found at 1:25 a.m. Saturday. A group of miners used a series of controlled explosions to help them excavate the last few meters of earth separating them from the child.“None of us are willing to go through this again.”
+SENATOR LISA MURKOWSKI of Alaska, one of a half-dozen Republicans who voted for a Democratic measure to reopen the government, on the possibility of a new shutdown in mid-February.The Texas secretary of state’s office on Friday called into question the citizenship status of 95,000 registered voters who were found to have identified themselves at some point to a state law enforcement agency as noncitizen, legal residents of the United States.
+The office of David Whitley, the secretary of state, said its findings were a result of an 11-month investigation with the Texas Department of Public Safety that also found that about 58,000 people on the list had voted since 1996. The results of the investigation were referred on Friday to Attorney General Ken Paxton, who said he planned to open a potentially sprawling investigation.
+The two announcements seemed certain to reignite partisan debates over the frequency and impact of voter fraud, which Republicans have claimed is rampant in America. Democrats scoff at that notion, and a voter fraud commission started by (and later angrily disbanded by) President Trump found no evidence of widespread electoral fraud.
+“Every single instance of illegal voting threatens democracy in our state and deprives individual Texans of their voice,” Mr. Paxton, a firebrand conservative who has prosecuted isolated cases of illegal voting with gusto, said in a statement. “Nothing is more vital to preserving our Constitution than the integrity of our voting process, and my office will do everything within its abilities to solidify trust in every election in the state of Texas.”14D: I know enough about romance languages in general to “get” this entry, PRIMUS, but it still instantly reminded me of this really weird band whose fans somehow constantly enter my life. For that reason, probably, I thought of BAND NAME right away at 31D.
+22D: Is this what we’d call double meta? I thought “Workers making preparations to retire?” was such a clever hint for “pitchers,” who make their bacon from retiring batters, in baseball. I was wrong; the real answer plays on the same word with an even better pun — a PIT CREW earns its collective keep by retiring racecars, i.e., changing tires out for fresher tires (in less than 12 seconds).
+40D: I really adored this entry, which was utterly mystifying for a good long moment before the “aha” happened. My paltry mixology knowledge didn’t include “sidecar” at all, except as a possible other meaning to “chaser.” (A little drink next to your main drink? Made sense to me.) To be honest, I think my mixology knowledge begins and ends with the 1988 Tom Cruise movie “Cocktail,” which is why ALABAMA SLAMMER gave me no trouble at all.
+I solved BAR TAB on the crosses, but figured I’d find out more about this “sidecar” and apparently the name does refer to an actual motorcycle sidecar in the drink’s origin story (which of course is contested). The drink actually sounds pretty nice, a combination of cognac, cointreau and lemon, served in a sugared “coupe,” or stemmed glass with a rounded bowl.
+Constructor Notes
+When my last puzzle was published, I went onto the comments section of the Wordplay blog as I’m sure many new constructors do. I was pleasantly surprised at the positive responses from people — despite a few minor nitpicks, most people loved it! However, there was one woman who really seemed to hate my puzzle with a fiery passion. She insulted me directly, saying she had been doing the NYT puzzle for 60 or so years, and was disgusted by what it had turned out to be. She slammed my use of “you know it or you don’t” clues, implying I wasn’t “man” enough to include clues based solely on wordplay alone. My response to her is, I’m sorry my puzzle made you feel that way. I genuinely am. Despite all that, I’m still proud of it. I believe that The New York Times Crossword exists as a reflection of the English language — of how people speak in this day and age. I’m sorry if you wish there were more “scholarly” clues and words, with only dictionary definitions, but people in real life use slang, and they talk about movies, and they use brand names. The crossword is a reflection of the world as it is. And it’s always used clues that you either know or you don’t! I don’t know the names of obscure Czech composers or minor characters from “Leave It to Beaver.” But I’m happy to find things I don’t know, and learn them! So you don’t have to do my puzzle today, because yes, there’s another video game reference in it. There are plenty of old puzzle compilation books from decades past that are still good. But if you’re willing to give this puzzle a try, maybe you’ll learn something about the things in my world! I am very proud of today’s puzzle. It’s seemingly become a good-luck charm of mine to put a video game clue in my puzzles (like the classic 32-Across — how can you not say it in his voice?). I’m also proud of the pun clues sprinkled throughout, and the inclusion of what I think is the funniest food (31-Across. I don’t know why). Basically, I made the grid, and the first thing my program suggested was that center circle in its entirety. I was astounded at how easy it was, and I just went from there.
+Need a ride to the finish?
+Subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.
+Trying to get back to the puzzle page? Right here.
+What did you think?Some of them were obvious, like Quebec City or Vancouver. While I’m not listing those here, they are, of course, terrific vacation spots. Below is our first Eight Places to Go in Canada in 2019 list. The suggestions have been edited for space:
+• I am a Canadian and attended McGill University in Montreal. Its outdoors club led cross-country ski trips every winter, including one I took to Parc National du Bic in March 2015. Six hours’ drive east of Montreal on the south shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, it covers wide-ranging terrain including bays, beaches, forests, fields and dramatic cliffs. We arrived at the tail end of ski season, during breakup on the river. — Alice Norris, Santa Fe, New Mexico
+• If you come to Canada and don’t visit Gros Morne National Park in Newfoundland, then you haven’t really visited Canada. It is not overrun by manufactured tourist experiences and, on top of that, it is a Unesco World Heritage site. — Jerry Belben, Halifax, Nova ScotiaThe comedian Amanda Seales dissects sexuality and race in a new special on HBO. And Willie Nelson takes the stage on “Austin City Limits.”
+What’s on TV
+AMANDA SEALES: I BE KNOWIN’ (2019) 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO Go or HBO Now. In her first hourlong stand-up special, the comedian Amanda Seales (“Insecure,” “black-ish”) breaks down why catcalling is the opposite of complimenting and explains what differentiates a “Hannah” (a person who happens to be white) from a “Becky” (a white person). Seales hosts a weekly podcast called “Small Doses” and is touring with “Smart Funny & Black,” a game show she created that tests contestants’ knowledge of black culture and history.This past week, as the world was made aware, the Chicago hedge fund manager Ken Griffin bought the most expensive home ever sold in the United States, a $238 million, 24,000-sqare-foot penthouse on Central Park South. What do you do with 24,000 square feet? You could hoard, presumably, and never require the advice of Marie Kondo, because who would ever notice that you hold on to all your old adapters and Ping-Pong balls? Each one of them could have its own guest wing.
+The current taste for huge residential real estate and the fortunes that underwrite it have brought obvious comparisons to the Gilded Age for some time now. You can find some contemporary version of early 20th-century Newport, R.I., in many places. Under construction for 15 years, a house modeled after Versailles in Windermere, Fla., for instance, will be the largest in the country when it is finished, with 11 kitchens, five swimming pools and a 30-car garage.
+It is easy to imagine that outsize American wealth always sought to express itself in immense square footage, but there was a protracted period in which aesthetics took a different course. In the years following World War II and for much of the mid-20th century, the consumption habits of the rich were guided by more modest ambitions. This happened to be a time when top marginal tax rates were high, at various points much higher than what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and many on the left are proposing now. Between 1945 and 1980, those rates never fell below 70 percent and for many years they exceeded 80 percent.
+As it happens, you can see the cultural transition from opulence to discretion unfold in the history of a single Fifth Avenue apartment: the 54-room penthouse triplex built for the cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in 1925 (when, for what it’s worth, the top marginal tax rate was 25 percent). Post — who was already building the 126-room Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach — sold the mansion she had been living in to make room for the apartment building that would take its place, but she saw no point in sacrificing any of the luxuries and the accommodations to which she had been accustomed. The apartment still holds the record for one of the biggest ever built in New York.From the shutdown’s end to Roger Stone’s indictment, it’s been a busy week in American politics. Here are some of the biggest stories you might have missed (and some links if you’d like to read further).
+___________________
+The shutdown is over, for now.
+President Trump agreed Friday to reopen the federal government for three weeks while talks on securing the border proceed, backing down after failing to force Democrats to fund his long-promised wall.
+The announcement came after federal workers missed their second consecutive paycheck and flight delays rippled across the Northeast because of a shortage of air traffic controllers.
+Over the next three weeks, a House-Senate conference committee representing both parties will try to reach a consensus on a border security plan. Mr. Trump indicated that if lawmakers cannot strike a deal by Feb. 15, he is prepared to close the government again.When a father-and-son hunting pair from Alaska poached a black bear mother and her two newborn cubs in their den last year, they initially seemed to get away with it.
+There was little chance for witnesses on a remote island off Alaska’s southern coast. The hunters traveled there by boat, strapping on backcountry skis to reach the bear den. But a motion-activated camera, being used for wildlife research, captured the hunters’ actions on the island, the authorities said.
+This week, after pleading guilty to various poaching charges, the father, Andrew Renner, a 41-year-old from Wasilla, Alaska, was sentenced to three months in jail and barred from hunting for a decade, said Aaron Peterson, the state’s assistant attorney general, who prosecuted the case. His son Owen Renner, 18, received a 30-day suspended sentence and was required to perform community service.
+Based on state law, killing a mother bear or bear cubs is a crime. But Mr. Peterson said that defendants in poaching cases rarely get jail time. That’s because hunters often argue that they poached an animal by mistake and typically have no criminal record, he said.NEW DELHI — The man’s last footsteps, cast in concrete, lead out from an all-white mansion to the spot where he took his final breath.
+On a mild winter day, Mohandas K. Gandhi walked slowly across a stately lawn in New Delhi, India’s capital, leaning on the shoulders of two young women, when an assassin greeted him, touched his feet and then shot the frail 78-year-old three times in the chest.
+The grounds where Gandhi crumpled to the ground, and the elegant mansion where he spent his final days, have been turned into a memorial to his life, and violent death. To enter, there is no security check or ticket booth. You walk in off the street, unfettered and free, just the way Gandhi would have probably liked it.
+The memorial, the Gandhi Smriti, is perhaps the best place in India to contemplate the legacy of one of history’s momentous figures.SEATTLE — Leslie Christian recently added unusual language to her living will: After death, she hoped her remains would be reduced to soil and spread around to help out some flowers, or a tree. In essence, compost.
+“It seems really gentle,” said Ms. Christian, 71, a financial adviser. “Comforting and natural.”
+A bill before the Washington State Legislature would make this state the first in the nation — and probably the world, legal experts said — to explicitly allow human remains to be disposed of and reduced to soil through composting, or what the bill calls recomposition.
+The prospect has drawn no public opponents in the state capital as yet, but it is a concept that sometimes raises eyebrows. Funeral directors say a common reaction to the idea, which has been explored and tested in recent scientific studies, is to cringe.
+“There’s almost a revulsion at times, when you talk about human composting,” said Brian Flowers, the managing funeral director at Moles Farewell Tributes, a company north of Seattle that supports the bill.He insisted that “the real acting award I should get is for what I’ve done in comedy for 40 years.” While I sat with him I remembered looking around at the audience in Vegas a week earlier. One fan was cackling with joy , and another had a look of horror and confusion on her face that screamed: “What exactly am I witnessing here?” I felt like both of them at once.
+This weekend, Mr. Clay may take home an award as part of the “Star Is Born” ensemble at the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Though he’s bringing the comedian Eleanor Kerrigan, a close friend, as his date, he’s hoping to meet a woman that night, as he did at the movie’s premiere, because he just doesn’t want to do the dating app thing that his sons have tried talking him into.
+Of course, when he took the woman from the premiere out to Craig’s, a restaurant in West Hollywood, things ended awkwardly. “For two and a half hours I’m telling this girl I’m very regular and very grounded,” he said. “And when we leave, it’s bulb mania. The paparazzi was all over me. ‘Dice! Dice!’”
+He ended up taking her to the Comedy Store that night so she could watch him do an impromptu set, as he sometimes does on Monday nights, because “I need to know if a girl can accept what I do.”
+The only woman who couldn’t, he said, was his first wife. (He’s got a story about being served with those divorce papers while he was at an outdoor cafe with Mickey Rourke, if you’ve got the time.)
+Whether or not he scores at the awards, Mr. Clay may come home, smoke a joint with Max and Dillon , and watch something on Netflix, which he signed up for a few months ago. The night before I visited, he and the boys were up until 5 a.m. watching Adam Sandler in “50 First Dates.”Inside the Big Mystery Box
+While most of us experience Amazon’s surveillance with a mixture of annoyance and bemusement — you are never allowed to forget what items you’ve looked at on Amazon, at least not until you buy them — Vine reviewers have learned to exploit it. “You can try to signal to it,” K.T. said. “I searched for drones, hoping they would show up in my targeting.” (No luck yet.) Sometimes Vine’s behaviors give the impression of something far less intelligent: Some Viners described getting clothing in more-or-less “random” sizes.
+In 2017, Amazon removed the Vine discussion forums from its site; Amazon didn’t share its reasons with Vine reviewers. (Logged-in reviewers still see a link to the forums on their profiles, but it leads nowhere.) To the extent there is a coherent Vine community still, it is spread across multiple private groups on Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon, and smaller communities further afield, on Reddit and Craigslist. They are throwbacks to the old Vine, and the old web: There are groups and splinter groups, cross-forum enemies, reputations and rivalries.
+Mostly, though, the forums serve the same needs that the old official forum did. They’re a place where people who are part of this odd program that they’re not supposed to talk about can figure out what’s going on in a system that changes constantly without notice, in the shadow of the company that is both an intense part of their lives and outwardly indifferent to their existence.
+In a Craigslist forum, for example, users spent recent weeks commiserating about their suddenly shrinking review queues. (They were restored shortly after, but posters weren’t happy with how: “Mine has been restocked as well, but with things I don’t need,“ said one. “That’s it — junk.” Another user warned others off a particular brand of chocolates he’d gotten for his wife: “They weren’t even edible and had a strange odor.” They discussed a recent investigation by the website The Verge into Amazon’s treatment of sellers (“great reading and it confirms everything we already know!”). They attempted to troubleshoot minor issues (Amazon’s brand Solimo, which makes a variety of household goods, seems to break the Vine interface for some reason) and major issues (a “technical error” reported last year, which exposed some Amazon users’ data, including email addresses, has created a huge problem for affected Vine reviewers: a flood of emails from overseas sellers attempting to bribe them for reviews and, in some cases, threatening to falsely tell Amazon that they’re doing it anyway). The forum has a resident tax expert.
+They talk about the weather, on planets Earth and Amazon. Reviewers are sometimes removed from the program without notice, or are reinstated. Sometimes they’re told they broke rules they didn’t believe they’d broken; other times, forum users are left to assume they’ve been culled by some sort of automated system designed to root out fraud, only to be brought back days later, after appeal.
+They’re also friends. K.T. described the old Vine forums as cliquish, and then, in their final days, gripped, like so many communities online, by politics. “They were all liberal, and a few of us weren’t, so they made an assumption that I support Trump,” she said, and that was that. She helps moderate one of the Goodreads forums now. It’s calmer. “‘What’s your life like?’ ‘What do you do?’ Then general happy stuff,” she said. “There’s a photo gallery thread for a member who is a great photographer.”But today, as tech culture infiltrates every corner of the business world, its hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force. One obvious difference, of course, is that those Stakhanovite posters had an anticapitalist bent, criticizing the fat cats profiting from free enterprise. Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.
+Perhaps we’ve all gotten a little hungry for meaning. Participation in organized religion is falling, especially among American millennials. In San Francisco, where I live, I’ve noticed that the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.
+Aidan Harper, who created a European workweek-shrinkage campaign called 4 Day Week, argues that this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,” he told me.
+It’s cultist, Mr. Harper added, to convince workers to buy into their own exploitation with a change-the-world message. “It’s creating the idea that Elon Musk is your high priest,” he said. “You’re going into your church every day and worshiping at the altar of work.”
+For congregants of the Cathedral of Perpetual Hustle, spending time on anything that’s nonwork related has become a reason to feel guilty. Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.
+Mr. Crawford changed his lifestyle after he realized it made him miserable. Now, as an entrepreneur-in-residence at 500 Start-ups, an investment firm, he tells fellow founders to seek out nonwork-related activities like reading fiction, watching movies or playing games. Somehow this comes off as radical advice. “It’s oddly eye-opening to them because they didn’t realize they saw themselves as a resource to be expended,” Mr. Crawford said.
+It’s easy to become addicted to the pace and stress of work in 2019. Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email.Jennifer Glover was assaulted by her fellow guards at a nuclear site in Nevada, she said. And instead of responding to her complaints, the government contractor she worked for eventually fired her. The accusations underscored an entrenched culture of discrimination and retaliation that guards said flourished under two contractors at a highly classified Energy Department site in Nevada. PoliticsMELBOURNE, Australia — In a riveting Australian Open women’s final on Saturday, Petra Kvitova tried unsuccessfully to shake Naomi Osaka. Kvitova earned five break points in the first set, which she could not convert, and saved three championship points in the second, which she ultimately was unable to capitalize on.
+Osaka refused to fade away. Later, as the Rod Laver Arena crowd celebrated Osaka’s 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-4 victory, Kvitova looked around to congratulate her opponent — and couldn’t find her anywhere.
+“Well done, Naomi,” Kvitova said, craning her neck to look behind her. “Where are you?”
+Every little thing Osaka does on the court inexorably draws the eye to her, but take the racket out of her hand and she visibly shrinks from the spotlight. Born in Japan and raised in the United States by a Japanese mother and a Haitian father, she was asked in an interview on Australian television if she was ready to become the face of the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
+“Yikes,” she said, wincing. “Hopefully for their sake they don’t do that.”
+How can they not?
+Osaka came into this tournament last year ranked No. 72. When the new world rankings come out on Monday, Osaka, 21, the reigning United States Open champion, will become the first singles player, male or female, from Japan to reach No. 1. The retired Chinese star Li Na might as well have been passing a torch when she presented Osaka with the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup in the on-court trophy presentation.Michel Legrand, the invariably romantic pianist, arranger and composer of hundreds of film scores and songs that have became pop hits and love anthems, died on Saturday. He was 86.
+His death was confirmed on the artist’s official Facebook page by his management team.
+Over a career of more than 60 years, Mr. Legrand collaborated onstage, onscreen and in the studio with dozens of celebrated musicians of his era, from Miles Davis to Perry Como, Stéphane Grappelli to Liza Minnelli.
+A three-time Academy Award winner and five-time Grammy winner — he was nominated for a total of 13 Oscars and 17 Grammys — Mr. Legrand made the love song his métier. Among his better-known compositions are “The Windmills of Your Mind” from “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), which won the Oscar for best song; “The Summer Knows,” the theme from “Summer of ’42” (1971) (Mr. Legrand won an Oscar for the movie’s score); and the Oscar-nominated “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” from the film “The Happy Ending” (1969). All three were written with the lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman.Make Sure You Aren’t Hurt
+You may laugh, but I get a lot of emails and tweets from people who are struggling to run because of some stabbing pain, and want me to tell them what to do so running can be enjoyable again (go to a doctor GO TO A DOCTOR the answer is always go to a doctor). We’re used to this sport being mildly uncomfortable. If pain is stopping you from getting out the door, it’s the pain that’s the problem, not the running you’re not doing.
+Make Sure It’s a Running Issue
+Because life can be a drag. Family stress, work stress, too much travel, not enough sleep — all of these things can suck the luster out of your running. After I bonked on a long run a few weeks ago, I did this kind of self-check. It didn’t seem to be any of those. But I realized that even though my weekly mileage had increased, I hadn’t increased how much I was eating. (For more on the relationship between exercise and metabolism, here’s a report from Gretchen Reynolds on new research and my guide, How to Feed a Runner.)
+Do Something Different
+If you run the same route over and over again, run a different route — or run that route in the opposite direction. Run in the morning? Try running at night (properly lit up, please). I give props to anyone able to run on a treadmill for more than 20 minutes because treadmills make me want to drill holes into my eyeballs. If you’re bored there, hit buttons: Increase the incline, or add in a few doses of running at higher speeds. Or watch something different. When I ran on a treadmill more often, I’d often park myself in front of whatever TV was showing the Phillies game, or “The Price is Right,” depending on what time of day I was there. It helped.
+Run Errands
+Having a destination in mind makes it not just about a run, but checking something off your to-do list. I’ve run to my P.O. box, dropped off/picked up books at a Little Free Library, left something for my mom on her porch. I even once picked up a piece of jewelry I’d had engraved. I think the woman in the full fur coat was surprised to see me in my running clothes next to her at the jewelry counter, but I got my miles in that day.
+Run With Friends
+My friend Hollie Sick, who runs the site FueledbyLOLZ, said she had also been feeling unmotivated, so we decided to run together once a week. Even though she’s much (much) faster than me in races, our easy training pace is about the same. We talk about just about everything, and before we know it, our hour run is done. I even introduced her to the joy of running to a Little Free Library. Running with someone else can take your mind off a task that, right now for both of us, seems pretty blah. If you don’t have a running friend who has your pace and schedule, check out your local running store to see if they have a group run. I usually join group runs when I travel to a place I don’t know well. I did this at RunnersWorld Tulsa on a night when their group run was also a scavenger hunt. I had a blast and got a memorable tour of a great city.He is the son of Suzanne D. Sugar of Chappaqua, N.Y., and the late Bert Sugar. The groom’s father was a boxing aficionado, a sports journalist, historian and author.
+The groom’s first marriage ended in divorce.
+Ms. Grossman and Mr. Sugar met in May 2011 on an airplane that was about to leave New York for Florida. When Ms. Grossman, who is 5 feet 3 inches, arrived at her designated seat, she realized it was located between two tall men who were already seated, one of whom was Mr. Sugar, who is 6 feet 3 inches.
+“How lucky are you that a 5-foot-3-inch woman is sitting next to you instead of another tall guy,” Ms. Grossman playfully said to Mr. Sugar, who was on his way to a digital media convention in Fort Myers, Fla.
+Mr. Sugar looked up from the newspaper he was reading, laughed and said he thought to himself, “Huh, she’s pretty cute.”
+Moments later, Ms. Grossman floored Mr. Sugar by asking him, “Who won that fight last night?” She was referring to a light-heavyweight championship bout between Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins, who, at 46, was attempting to become the oldest world champion in history.Q: When my husband and I bought our West Village townhouse 32 years ago, we inherited a rent-stabilized tenant in one of the apartments. She paid rent on time until a few years ago when her son, who’s been living with her for 10 years, assumed control of her finances. Now the rent consistently arrives after the 15th of the month. The tenant is in her late 80s, but owns several homes and travels frequently. September’s rent, for example, arrived on the 29th, with a note saying, “We didn’t have the money for September’s rent because we were vacationing in Europe for the past two and a half months.” Can we charge late fees?
+A: You can charge a late fee if the original lease contains language providing for one. So check the lease. But you can only collect the fee if the tenant agrees to pay it, and if she doesn’t you would have to take her to housing court. Few judges would be pleased to see a landlord suing a woman in her late 80s for paying her rent a few weeks late.
+“Most tenants will not willfully agree to pay a late fee, and the court will not order it without a trial,” said Bradley S. Silverbush, a lawyer who represents landlords with the Manhattan law firm Rosenberg & Estis. “So, does anyone want to go through all of that time and expense just to recover late fees? Probably not.”President Trump’s defeat in his border-wall standoff with Congress has clouded his already perilous path to a second term in 2020, undercutting Mr. Trump’s cherished image as a forceful leader and deft negotiator, and emboldening alike his Democratic challengers and Republican dissenters who hope to block his re-election.
+The longest government shutdown in history inflicted severe political damage on the president, dragging down his poll numbers even among Republicans and stirring concern among party leaders about his ability to navigate the next two years of divided government. Mr. Trump, close associates acknowledge, appears without a plan for mounting a strong campaign in 2020, or for persuading the majority of Americans who view him negatively to give him another chance.
+Compounding the harm to Mr. Trump on Friday was the indictment of Roger Stone, his political adviser for several decades, on charges of lying to investigators and obstructing the inquiry by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The indictment was taken by some Republicans as the surest sign yet that Mr. Mueller’s investigation is likely to grow more painful to Mr. Trump and his associates before it wraps up.
+Mr. Trump still commands the loyalty of a passionate electoral base that has rallied to him in trying moments, and advisers believe he will have room to right himself while Democratic presidential candidates are mired in a long nomination fight. Yet they are also growing anxious that he could face a draining primary of his own next year.Make cauliflower, cashew, pea and coconut curry (above); Melissa Clark’s pearl couscous with creamy feta and chickpeas; or any of the recipes in the collection below.CHICAGO — On Day 1 of what would become the longest government shutdown in the country’s history, Mary Kelly had a typically American view of the situation: She was optimistic. As an employee of the Internal Revenue Service, she had been through shutdowns before. This one would not last long, she figured.
+On Day 24, weeks into her mandatory furlough, she applied for unemployment benefits.
+Ten days after that, she left her home in the Chicago suburbs, rode a train downtown and joined demonstrators on a windswept Federal Plaza, her cheeks mottled pink from the cold.
+“I was never scared during shutdowns in the past,” Ms. Kelly, a union officer, said during the protest on Thursday, wearing woolen gloves and clutching a sign. “But now who knows what’s going to happen?”
+And then on Day 35, with no resolution seemingly in sight, she had her answer in news leaked from Washington: The shutdown was finally coming to an end.KARACHI, Pakistan — For three generations, Muhammad Rizwan’s family saw their tiny market stall as their second home, the sons growing up there helping with the stock while their fathers dealt with customers.
+Mr. Rizwan, 35, started selling shoes and clothing there as a teenager and had hoped to pass the business down to his son. Today it is a pile of rubble, the result of a government bulldozing operation that began around Karachi’s famous Empress Market and now stretches across the city.
+“My grandfather was the first to work in this market — he sold rope back then — and now it seems like I’ll be the last,” Mr. Rizwan said.
+The unofficial tent stalls that had long surrounded Empress Market are among the many sites targeted by the Karachi government’s “anti-encroachment” campaign against commerce that spills into the city’s streets and parks. Hawkers and informal structures have become an entrenched part of life in Karachi in the decades since it transformed from a quaint port village into one of the biggest cities in the world, with a population of at least 15 million.“It is one of these moments where after many years of us trying to get something passed that ends the shutdown, I think there is support coalescing around a legislative response,” Mr. Portman said.
+Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat whose state is home to tens of thousands of federal employees and contractors, introduced his own proposal, partly with the idea of shaming his colleagues and the Trump administration into avoiding such confrontations.
+Searching for a bill title that would deliver the message, he and his staff came up with Stop Shutdowns Transferring Unnecessary Pain and Inflicting Damage in the Coming Years, otherwise known as the Stop Stupidity Act. In the event of funding showdowns, his approach would be to maintain spending for all but the legislative branch and the White House.
+“More than a little bit of common sense tells me that we wouldn’t be here 35 days into this shutdown if all our staffs were experiencing the same kind of shortfall and economic distress that 800,000 of our fellow federal workers experienced,” he said on the Senate floor.
+Mr. Warner acknowledged that his title was somewhat tongue in cheek and that he would be receptive to making changes in the interest of enacting a law that would prevent recurrences of the last weeks.
+“The final language in any deal that comes out three weeks from now should put strong provisions and strong penalties in place to prevent this tactic from being used by either party or any White House or Congress in the future,” he said, a view shared by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa.And Democrats have moved closer to Mr. Trump’s $5.7 billion price tag. Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the No. 3 House Democrat, told reporters this past week that lawmakers in his party were prepared to spend that much on a border security package that would include what he called a “smart wall,” featuring drones, sensors and more Border Patrol agents.
+“This has become a shutdown over semantics,” said Steve Israel, a Democratic former congressman from New York, who ran the party’s campaign committee. “This has become Donald Trump’s shutdown over the definition of a wall, and Democrats have succeeded at redefining border security from bricks and mortar to investments in modern technology.”
+But the path ahead remains complicated. Mr. Trump is desperate to fulfill his 2016 campaign pledge for a “big, beautiful wall” along the southern border — a huge sticking point for Democrats, who see the president in a weakened position now that he has caved to their core demand of reopening the government first and negotiating border security later.
+Progressives especially are feeling emboldened and do not like the idea that Mr. Trump is once again tying the debate over border security to a threat to shut down the government.
+“I think it’s offensive, even to some of the centrists and moderates, that he links his program on immigration with the functioning of government,” said Representative Ro Khanna of California, a leader of the House Progressive Caucus. “The vast majority, not just the progressives, will say not a dime goes for the border wall. And that’s especially true because we just won this fight.”
+Even so, Mr. Trump may have already put forth the broad outlines of a deal, with his proposal to pair money for a barrier with protections for some undocumented immigrants. The Senate rejected that plan this past week. Still, if the protections were expansive enough, and included a path to citizenship for the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers, some centrist Democrats might be persuaded to sign on.I’ve written about how multiple visits to the West Bank have really shaken the default liberal Zionism I was brought up with. More recently, as Israel has become increasingly illiberal and has acted to foreclose the possibility of a two-state solution, I’ve become more sympathetic to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It’s not that I’m totally sold on it — I understand the awful historical echoes of singling the Jewish state out for economic punishment, and I hate the way it’s used to shun Israeli writers and academics in international forums. But I feel like I can no longer dismiss B.D.S. or its adherents outright, for reasons I recently wrote about in my column.
+I also recently read Alex Berenson’s book about marijuana, “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness and Violence,” and interviewed him for our podcast. He didn’t convince me that marijuana should be illegal, but he did persuade me that the drug has more ill effects than the pot lobby would like us to believe.
+Michelle, could a third national party ever take hold in the U.S.A.? — Barry G. Larocque in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
+I’m generally skeptical of third parties for reasons I recently discussed on “The Argument.” As long as we have a winner-take-all system, third parties are destined to play a spoiler role, helping the party that is furthest from them ideologically. The history of the last few decades, I think, shows that working within the parties is far more effective than trying to start a new one. Consider how much more the Democratic Socialists of America have accomplished, in terms of building real political power, than the Green Party has. I’m all for electoral reforms, like the ranked-choice voting system in Maine, that would make third parties more viable and practical. But absent those reforms, I think we’re stuck with a two-party system.
+That said, those two parties don’t have to be the ones we have currently. It would certainly be fantastic if a rational, decent conservative party emerged to replace the G.O.P.!
+What did you learn from your least favorite teacher? — Nancy Barlow
+I love this question! When I went to graduate school for journalism at U.C. Berkeley, I was assigned to an introductory class with a notorious hard-ass who ran his seminar like a boot camp. He made us show up at an ungodly hour of the morning, professionally dressed, having read the entire New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle. (He’d give us quizzes that included questions about the sports and style sections, so you had to read everything.) Sometimes he would make us file two articles a day, six days a week. He’d assign us to spend the night in an emergency room and come back with a story, or send us out to cover something he’d heard on the police scanner. If I remember correctly, he had us cover a BDSM fetish ball, which he probably couldn’t have gotten away with today. If you missed a class, you lost a letter grade. If you were late, you lost half of one. If you hadn’t placed a story in a legitimate outlet by the end of the semester, you couldn’t get higher than a C. Sometimes he would say to us something like, “Death is better than failure because at least you don’t have to look at yourself in the mirror.”
+It was a brutal experience, and at the time, I hated him. But I learned more in that class than I did in any other that I’ve ever taken. I was only 20 when I started grad school — I’d gone to college early — and had very little real-world experience, and that class forced me to quickly get over whatever hesitation I had about hitting up sources for quotes or pitching editors. Many years later I taught journalism students and found myself wishing someone had put them through at least a light version of that initiation.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.For many, Friday’s arrest of Roger Stone, the veteran political trickster and longtime adviser to Donald Trump, was a sign that the special counsel investigation into Russian electoral interference is entering its final phase. Yet there were also several indications that the probe may not be as near its conclusion as many observers assume — and that the true target of Friday’s F.B.I. actions was not Mr. Stone himself, but his electronic devices.
+Mr. Stone’s early-morning arrest at his Florida home unsurprisingly dominated coverage, but reports also noted that federal agents were “seen carting hard drives and other evidence from Mr. Stone’s apartment in Harlem, and his recording studio in South Florida was also raided.” The F.B.I., in other words, was executing search warrants, not just arrest warrants. Even the timing and manner of Mr. Stone’s arrest — at the absolute earliest moment allowed under federal rules of criminal procedure without persuading a judge to authorize an exceptional nighttime raid — suggests a concern with preventing destruction of evidence: Otherwise it would make little sense to send a dozen agents to arrest a man in his 60s before sunrise.
+The indictment itself — which charges Mr. Stone with witness tampering, obstruction of justice and false statements to Congress — takes little imagination to translate into a search warrant application, and also hints at what Robert Mueller might be looking for. In describing the lies it alleges Mr. Stone told a House committee, the document places great emphasis on Mr. Stone’s denial that he had any written communications with two associates — associates with whom he had, in fact, regularly exchanged emails and text messages. That’s precisely the sort of behavior one might focus on in seeking to convince a recalcitrant judge that an investigative target could not be trusted to turn over documents in response to a subpoena, requiring the more intrusive step of seizing Mr. Stone’s devices directly.
+Of course, as the indictment also makes clear, the special counsel has already managed to get its hands on plenty of Mr. Stone’s communications by other means — but one seeming exception jumps out. In a text exchange between Mr. Stone and a “supporter involved with the Trump Campaign,” Mr. Mueller pointedly quotes Mr. Stone’s request to “talk on a secure line — got WhatsApp?” There the direct quotes abruptly end, and the indictment instead paraphrases what Mr. Stone “subsequently told the supporter.” Though it’s not directly relevant to his alleged false statements, the special counsel is taking pains to establish that Mr. Stone made a habit of moving sensitive conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like WhatsApp — meaning that, unlike ordinary emails, the messages could not be obtained directly from the service provider.WASHINGTON — When a pharmaceutical company sold its patent rights for a blockbuster drug to an Indian tribe 16 months ago, stymied competitors and consumer groups condemned the move as a flagrant abuse of the patent system.
+This month, the company, Allergan, doubled down, asking the Supreme Court to rule that the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe can use its sovereign immunity to fend off challenges by makers of low-cost generic copies of the best-selling prescription eyedrops, Restasis.
+Congress is gearing up for what promises to be a yearlong investigation of drug prices, with House and Senate committees planning to hold hearings on Tuesday. The deal between Allergan and the Saint Regis Mohawks promises to be front and center when lawmakers in both parties examine the use of patents to delay competition and keep prices high.
+Restasis, a treatment of chronic dry eye disease, had sales of nearly $1.5 billion in 2017 — Allergan’s best seller after Botox.“The language that I speak has got a poor status or standing in Ontario. Not only the language, it’s also the culture,” said Ms. Truax, 64. “Because of that, here are many small daily battles to be won if I want to live en français.”
+Many of those battles in Ontario have been around education. Ms. Truax is from the first generation of francophone Ontarians who were able to attend all of high school in French. The now-abandoned plan to build a French-language university in Toronto, which was created by the previous Liberal government, was widely seen as the final step in a campaign dating back to 1890.
+The province currently has three bilingual universities, including Laurentian, although exactly what that means varies both by field of study and campus.
+Marie-Pierre Héroux, a third-year Canadian history major at Laurentian, who is from a French-speaking farm town east of Ottawa, attends all of her classes in French, something that is impossible for students in sciences. But English dominates life at her residence and around campus.
+After Mr. Ford announced the cuts, Ms. Héroux said she was in tears.
+“I’m in history, right, so I learned about all the battles that had been fought,” she said. “I never thought I was going to live one like that in my life.”
+Ms. Héroux advertises her passion as she walks around campus. A piece of green felt and a piece of white felt, the colors of Franco Ontario, are pinned to the front of her jacket.BERLIN — Germany will spend tens of billions of dollars to end its use of coal power within two decades, if a plan agreed to early Saturday by representatives of the power industry, environmental movement, miners and local interest groups becomes official policy.
+The deal, hammered out after more than 20 hours of intense, often fractious negotiating among a 28-member commission appointed last year by Chancellor Angela Merkel, would be one of the most significant energy transformations a nation has yet attempted in the face of climate change.
+Thirty countries have already set out proposals to cut their carbon emissions by eliminating coal, the dirtiest and cheapest fossil fuel, including Britain, Canada and Sweden. But none of those plans are of the scale laid out in Germany, an industrial giant that currently relies on coal for almost a third of its energy needs.
+The commission’s plan now requires approval from the leaders of four states affected and the federal government.BRUMADINHO, Brazil — One woman searching for her husband collapsed on the floor. Another clutched a photo of her missing daughter and a third shouted at volunteers: “To you, he is just someone you can substitute. But he is my husband, the father of my daughter!”
+Scenes of desperation played out at a local school on Saturday in the Brazilian town of Brumadinho where hundreds of people waited as rescue workers dug through mud and sludge searching for survivors a day after a mining dam collapse in southeastern Brazil left at least 34 dead and almost 300 missing.
+More than 24 hours after one of the deadliest mining accidents in Brazil’s history, official information was scarce. The Civil Defense office said 199 people had been rescued by emergency workers, but only 23 of their names were tacked on the walls of the makeshift crisis center.
+“I’m anxious, despaired, because there is no news,” said Lucilene Ferreira, 37, who was looking for her husband Emerson José. “Sometimes, I think everything will be all right. And sometimes, I think the worst.”SUNDAY VARIETY COLUMN — I had never solved a puzzle of this particular variety before and assumed it was a new invention, but it looks to be a triumphant return, under new management, after a long absence (there are two earlier versions from 2010 and 2009, by Eric Berlin, in the archives).
+It’s a clever ruse — Jim Horne likened the solving strategy to “crosswords on quicksand,” which implies uncertainty and probable doom. I did find it challenging to get started, but aside from a few really tough nuts (which did cause a sinking feeling) I was able to keep my wits about me and gradually crawl to completion.
+At first, I focused on just finding entries that I was dead certain fit their allotted boxes — names like VERDI, ALLAN and IMAN, for example. I took a chance on STREAMED and LLAMAS, but felt quite stymied at that point, having run out of obvious good guesses that fit, and uncertain where to start with all the entries that were just too long.
+Then I realized that entries that began or ended on a “wall” of the puzzle could be safely written in; if you knew that 1D was HAITI, that H had to be in the corner (crossing HERB), and the final “I” had to dangle below, in the first square of the fifth row across. As soon as I entered that, I was able to put in PELOSI, which led to LESSORS, which helped with TRACTS. This was very much a one-step-at-a-time puzzle for me.But at a minimum, that would require evidence that the Trump campaign knew that WikiLeaks was trying to damage Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, agreed with that objective and engaged in overt acts to further the scheme.
+“Two or more people have to agree to do something that the law forbids, and at least one of them has to take a step to further the conspiracy — an overt act,” said Chuck Rosenberg, a former United States attorney and senior F.B.I. official.
+What might constitute an “overt act”? If Trump campaign officials coordinated with Julian Assange, the organization’s founder, on the timing and content of the document releases in an effort to maximize the damage to the Clinton campaign, that might qualify. But Mr. Mueller has offered no evidence of that.
+Will charges come later?
+Maybe. Mr. Rosenberg cautioned against viewing Mr. Stone’s indictment as the final word on whether the Trump campaign did or did not conspire with WikiLeaks. “I wouldn’t take from the fact that they didn’t charge it that they can’t charge it or that they won’t charge it,” he said.
+The special counsel has mounted two criminal cases claiming illegal schemes to tilt the election results, both against Russians. Legal experts cited those cases as possible templates for what a conspiracy case involving the Trump campaign might look like, assuming the evidence existed to bring one.
+Thirteen Russians and three Russian companies were accused of conspiring to defraud the United States by illegally influencing the presidential election. That indictment said the Russians mounted an illicit social media campaign aimed at sowing political discord, undercutting Mrs. Clinton and promoting Mr. Trump. Their activities were illegal because foreigners cannot spend money to influence American elections or engage in political activity in the United States without registering with the Justice Department.
+In the other case, Mr. Mueller charged 12 Russian military officers with hacking into Democratic computers and releasing tens of thousands of stolen documents, using WikiLeaks and other means. That case alleged a conspiracy to commit computer crimes.MEXICO CITY — When the opposition leader Juan Guaidó was briefly detained by Venezuelan intelligence agents last week, some saw the hand of another government at work.
+“This agency is controlled & directed by experienced oppressors sent by #Cuba & these kinds of tactics are textbook methods used by the Cuban regime,” Senator Marco Rubio of Florida said on Twitter.
+Cuba seems to loom over the political crisis roiling Venezuela as President Nicolás Maduro faces a robust challenge from Mr. Guiadó, who declared himself interim leader this past week.
+Cuba is a longtime ally of Venezuela and its biggest supporter in the region. The government of President Miguel Díaz-Canel has offered Mr. Maduro its “unwavering solidarity” and called Venezuela’s political turmoil “the attempt to impose a coup d’état, a puppet government at the service of the United States.”Barbara DeBolt Roy and Robert Ford Greene were married Jan. 25 at the Naples Sailing and Yacht Club in Naples, Fla. Mary Elizabeth Beadle, a friend of the couple who was ordained by the New Seminary Church, officiated.
+Ms. Roy, 85, is retired as the founder and president of a chain of children’s care centers throughout the Greater Tri-Cities region of Michigan, known as Kinder Kare, and not affiliated with the national chain KinderKare Learning Centers. Her business was based in Saginaw, Mich. She is also the former president of the Naples chapter of the Circumnavigators Club. She graduated from Michigan State University.
+She is the daughter of the late Maxine A. DeBolt and the late Orville L. DeBolt, who lived in Battle Creek, Mich. The bride’s father retired as the treasurer of the Kellogg Foundation in Battle Creek.
+Dr. Greene, 87, is a retired professional tennis player who competed at Wimbledon, the United States Open, the Italian Open and the French Open before going on to coach professionals, college athletes and amateurs for the next 25 years. He became one of eight elected members of the N.C.A.A. Tennis Committee that governed intercollegiate tennis, and served as athletic director at both the City College of New York and C.W. Post, as well as the tennis director at the New York Athletic Club, and at the Riverdale Tennis Club in the Bronx, which he owned.BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government and its Russian backers have suggested that the recent takeover of the last rebel stronghold in Syria by an Al Qaeda-linked group could threaten a cease-fire that has been in place for several months.
+Nearly a million of the more than three million civilians in Idlib Province have already fled their homes elsewhere in Syria, often more than once. Many landed there after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government seized control of other opposition areas in recent years, busing rebels and civilians who refused to live under his rule to Idlib.
+The shattering of the cease-fire in Idlib, in northwest Syria, would put the population in the path of yet another military onslaught and propel a wave of refugees into Turkey, which lies to the north.
+Many analysts have regarded Mr. Assad’s assault on Idlib, backed by Russian air power, as a matter of when, not if. Mr. Assad is determined to retake control of all of Syria, grinding out victory after nearly eight years of civil war; Moscow is concerned about foreign fighters from its neighbors in Central Asia taking root in Idlib.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+A little more than a year ago, Noel Millea, the deputy editor of the New York Times Real Estate section, asked if I could recommend a journalist to take over a column called “What You Get.” The assignment was to write every week about three houses on the market that were roughly the same price, but located in different parts of the United States.
+Like many New Yorkers, I was already spending a lot of time online looking at real estate for free. I usually did this at night when I couldn’t sleep and the idea of uprooting my family and moving to, say, Abiquiu, N.M. — where we could buy a house with 50 acres of vineyards for the price of a two-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan — didn’t seem preposterous.
+So I did a Dick Cheney and recommended myself.
+Now every week, in broad daylight, I think up a number from $250,000 to $3 million and investigate what it would buy in San Diego or Philadelphia or maybe Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Using websites like Zillow, I pick three homes that are in good condition and nicely furnished and photographed. If a house has been staged with clichés like horse-head portraits or caged hanging light fixtures, I pass it by. I am also averse to obviously faked photos, with fires pasted into fireplaces and lawns the color of Sprite bottles.To the Editor:
+Re “May the Best Woman Win,” by Michelle Goldberg (column, Jan. 22):
+After the total disaster of Trumpism, America needs and deserves the empathy, compassion and fair-mindedness that only a woman can bring to the Oval Office. While I would vote for a ham sandwich over Donald Trump, 2020 and beyond will be the era of powerful women with governing experience and the patience and understanding it takes to lead the nation.
+Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and most likely Amy Klobuchar are all capable candidates, and I expect there will be other women who will enter the fray.
+We are a long way off until the 2020 election, but I applaud the women who have thrown their hats into the ring now, as Americans need to get to know and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses and help choose the woman with the best chance of taking back the White House. The midterms in 2018 showed that women are on the move in American politics, and there is little doubt in my mind that the best woman will be our 46th president.
+Henry A. Lowenstein
+New York
+To the Editor:
+While I wholeheartedly agree with Michelle Goldberg’s argument that it would be nothing short of poetic justice for President Trump to lose re-election in 2020 to a female Democrat, I worry that she is too optimistic about a female Democrat’s chances in a general election, even if she can get through the competitive Democratic primary.Tiley said that there were “strict protocols about what could be shown, but that players were not all explicitly warned about the cameras or told to sign waivers agreeing to be shown at any time. The high-definition cameras are in areas otherwise off-limits to the public and, this year for the first time, to accredited news media.
+“The cameras are round and black and hang down from the ceiling,” Tiley said. “They are very easy to see, and we have had dozens and dozens of players and coaches playing up to them.”
+There are areas the cameras do not show, including the players’ restaurant and gym.
+“They’re not in the locker room, not that I know of,” Maria Sharapova said, smiling. “Safe there.”
+But many players and coaches did not realize the scope of the surveillance. Serena Williams, who starred in her own HBO reality show, “Being Serena,” and even gave birth on camera, said she initially did not notice how many cameras were tracking her at the tournament until she heard other players talking about them and began to look around.
+“Then I was, like, ‘Oh, there is a camera there; oh, there is one there,’ ” Williams said. “They are everywhere, which I actually didn’t realize. Good to know.”
+Naomi Osaka also underestimated the number of cameras watching her, thinking there was only one. “I guess I will be very conscious,” she said.A St. Louis police officer has been charged with involuntary manslaughter after the authorities said he fatally shot another officer during a game of Russian roulette.
+The officer, Nathaniel R. Hendren, was charged on Friday in the death of Katlyn Alix, another officer with the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.
+Officer Hendren had been on duty when he met Officer Alix, who was off duty, at his home on Thursday and the two began playing with guns, according to a statement of probable cause.
+Officer Hendren produced a revolver, emptied the cylinder and put one round back in, the statement said. He then spun the cylinder, pointed it away and pulled the trigger. The gun did not fire, the authorities said.Russell Baker, a longtime New York Times columnist, died last week at 93. Mr. Baker’s observations on politics and cheeky insights on the everyday — which he shared in his “Observer” column for more than 35 years — were variously described as “wry and exquisitely observational,” “sardonic and idealistic at the same time” and having “a deep appreciation for the absurdity of living.” Mostly, though, he understood a viral quip well before he would have suffered the indignity of watching his words trend on Twitter.
+“The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.”
+— “Growing Up” (1982)
+“I think — this has been a long time ago, remember, but I think we expected school only to process those kids — that is, swell them a bit in size and add social poise without really changing them from kids, the point of our lives, into something alarming, as school did. They were fated to become people, alas, and they did it without our even noticing for the longest while.”
+— “No kidding” (1973)In the meeting, Ms. Hair described herself as a strong Trump supporter, according to those familiar with the events. Ms. Hair did not respond to an email seeking comment.
+A central focus for Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas was administration appointments that they wanted made and that they accused the president’s aides of blocking. People familiar with the situation indicated that the people Ms. Hair and Ms. Thomas wanted hired were rejected for a range of reasons, and in at least one case someone was offered a job and declined it because the position was not considered senior enough. Another complaint was that Ms. Thomas had not actually shared the full list of people to be hired, said those familiar with the meeting.
+Others attending included Frank Gaffney, the founder of the Center for Security Policy who has advocated curtailing immigration and has repeatedly denounced Muslims, and Rosemary Jenks, who works for the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, according to the people familiar with the events.
+Ms. Thomas — whose group, Groundswell, was formed in 2013 to strategize against Democrats and the political left and meets weekly — joined others in prayer at the start of the meeting. Some members of the group prayed at different moments as the meeting continued. At one point, Mr. Trump pulled in his daughter Ivanka, a West Wing adviser, saying she would be beloved if she were serving a liberal president, instead of getting negative news coverage.
+One attendee criticized Republican congressional leaders, saying they should be “tarred and feathered,” a person briefed on the meeting said. Mr. Trump defended the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, saying that they had held strong for nearly five weeks of a shutdown, and that it was not clear what else the attendees thought they could be doing.
+Ms. Thomas, who was said to have opened the meeting by informing the assembled White House staff members that she feared being open because she did not trust the people there, has long been more conservative than her husband, and has often provoked controversy.
+In 2011 she formed a government affairs firm called Liberty Consulting, which drew criticism for boasting on its website that Ms. Thomas would use her “experience and connections” to help clients.WASHINGTON — Roger Stone has always lived in a dog-eat-dog world.
+So it was apt that he was charged with skulduggery in part for threatening to kidnap a therapy dog, a fluffy, sweet-faced Coton de Tuléar, belonging to Randy Credico, a New York radio host.
+Robert Mueller believes that Credico, a pal of Julian Assange, served as an intermediary with WikiLeaks for Stone. Mueller’s indictment charges that Stone called Credico “a rat” and “a stoolie” because he believed that the radio host was not going to back up what the special counsel says is Stone’s false story about contacts with WikiLeaks, which disseminated Russia’s hacked emails from the D.N.C. and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman.
+Stone emailed Credico that he would “take that dog away from you,” the indictment says, later adding: “I am so ready. Let’s get it on. Prepare to die (expletive).”
+As the owner of two Yorkies, Stone clearly knows how scary it is when a beloved dog is in harm’s way. When he emerged from court on Friday, he immediately complained that F.B.I. agents had “terrorized” his dogs when they came to arrest him at dawn at his home in Fort Lauderdale.Into this toxic storm came Ellie.
+Ellie — no last name given — appeared at first to be a previously undiscovered, highly ranked female player who’d seemingly come out of nowhere to dominate the Overwatch leader boards. As such, she was a tempting recruit for the Contenders team Second Wind, which, according to a statement released this month, had found itself “desperately” in need of a new player to fill a hole in its roster.
+Ellie, however, proved reticent to reveal anything about her identity other than her online alias . Some fans argued that she did so with good reason: The e-sports world has an ugly history of haranguing female players to the breaking point. In 2015, for instance, Hyerim Lee, a professional competitor known as MagicAmy in another popular game, Hearthstone, was accused by a fellow player of being nothing more than a pretty face and a front for an anonymous man or team of players. These accusations led to an investigation; Ms. Lee was vindicated and her employer, the team Tempo Storm, offered to “support MagicAmy in an attempt to clear her name.” However, in the wake of the negative attention, Ms. Lee opted to retire from professional play instead.
+In 2016, another professional player — this time an Overwatch specialist — named Kim Se-yeon and known as Geguri, also faced charges of cheating from her male competitors, though in her case she was accused of simply hacking the game itself, not of having a man play for her. At least two players were so confident that she must have been pulling the wool over the community’s eyes that they staked their careers on it, promising not only to apologize but also to retire from the league if they were proved wrong. To their credit, they did so following a live-streamed event where she demonstrated her preternatural mouse skills for all to see.
+So there was reason enough for Ellie to want to keep her identity a secret, and Second Wind indicated it would respect Ellie’s desire for privacy. Others, however, remained suspicious and soon enough the cycle of harassment, abuse, threats and calls for doxxing began. (Doxxing is the online practice of publishing people’s personal, private information without their consent.) Not long after, Ellie announced that she would not be playing for Second Wind after all. It seemed as though yet another female e-sports athlete had been driven away from the scene.
+But this time, the story had a twist. Soon after her early retirement was announced, another highly accomplished but as yet undrafted Overwatch player calling himself Punisher confessed to a fellow player that he was, in fact, the man behind the Ellie persona and that the entire fiasco was intended to function as a kind of “social experiment.” In other words, it turned out that Ellie really had been lying about her identity all along.[Listen to “The Argument” podcast every Thursday morning, with Ross Douthat, Michelle Goldberg and David Leonhardt.]
+I’m open to these arguments; indeed, I have to be, since I’m on the record urging this president’s removal from office using the unusual remedy of the 25th Amendment. But there are several difficulties with the current briefs for impeachment, which suffice for now to keep a Pence presidency out of reach.
+The first is the gulf between the democracy-subverting powers that the briefs ascribe to Trump and the actual extent of his influence. In Appelbaum’s essay, the president is charged with nothing less than having “trampled” on “the liberties guaranteed by the Constitution.” But many of his examples feature Trump failing to actually trample anything. He “did his best” to enact a Muslim travel ban (the actual ban was limited and upheld by the Supreme Court), he has “called for” the firing of political enemies (with little discernible result), he has made “efforts” to impede the Mueller investigation (which continues apace), and so on down the list of outrages that exist primarily on his Twitter feed.
+Much of the case for “trampling,” then, is a case against Trump’s rhetoric. And one can acknowledge that rhetoric’s evils while doubting that the ranting of a president so hemmed in, unpopular and weak is meaningfully threatening the Constitution.
+Especially because of the second problem with the case for impeachment, which might be summed up in a line from a poem that Trump often quoted in 2016: You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in. Meaning, in this case, that little about his rhetorical excess, his penchant for lies and insults or the seaminess of his courtiers was hidden from voters on the campaign trail in 2016, in an election that by the Constitution’s standards Trump legitimately won.This is what is happening on that front already:
+A 2017 executive order barred people from seven countries, including five with Muslim majorities, from entering the country. An older rule put in place during the Obama administration compelled anyone who’d even just visited seven blacklisted nations to obtain additional clearance before traveling to the United States. Even as the Trump administration’s policy has met with legal challenges, it means that the barrier to entering the United States, for many, begins with their data and passport stamps, and is thousands of miles away from this country.
+The Trump administration would also like to make it harder for immigrants who’ve received public assistance to obtain citizenship or permanent residence by redefining what it means to be a “public charge.” If the administration succeeds, it will have moved the border into immigrants’ living rooms, schools and hospital beds.
+The walls of the future go beyond one administration’s policies, though. They are growing up all around us, being built by global technology companies that allow for constant surveillance, data harvesting and the alarming collection of biometric information. In 2017, the United States announced it would be storing the social media profiles of immigrants in their permanent file, ostensibly to prevent Twitter-happy terrorists from slipping in. For years, Customs and Border Protection agents have asked travelers about their social media, too.
+The Electronic Frontier Foundation has said these practices can “chill and deter the free speech and association of immigrants to the United States, as well as the U.S. persons who communicate with them.” In other words, it’s no longer enough to have been born in the right place, at the right time, to the right parents. The trail of bread crumbs you leave could limit your movements.
+It’s possible to get a glimpse of where a digital border might lead from China. Look at its continuing experiment with social-credit scoring, where a slip of the tongue or an unpaid debt c ould one day jeopardize someone’s ability to board a train or apply for a job. When your keystrokes and text messages become embedded in your legal identity, you create a wall around yourself without meaning to.
+The Berkeley political theorist Wendy Brown diagnoses the tendency to throw up walls as a classic symptom of a nation-state’s looming impotence in the face of globalization — the flashy sports car of what she calls a “waning sovereignty.” In a recent interview for The Nation, Professor Brown told me that walls fulfill a desire for greater sovereign control in times when the concept of “bounded territory itself is in crisis.” They are signifiers of a “loss of a national ‘we’ and national control — all the things we’ve seen erupt in a huge way.”
+Walls are a response to deep existential anxiety, and even if the walls come down, or fail to be built in brick and stone, the world will guarantee us little in the way of freedom, fairness or equality. It makes more sense to think of modern borders as overlapping and concentric circles that change size, shape and texture depending on who — or what — is trying to pass through.During a fraternity party at a West Coast college in 2016, a drunk boy and an equally drunk girl went into a bedroom. Two freshmen noticed them go upstairs. They rounded up several other students and found the couple. One student, flanked by the rest as backup, said to the boy: “Hey, dude? You can’t do this.” Another student offered to walk the girl home.
+The students who thwarted a potential crisis were neither women nor members of a sexual assault awareness group; they were freshman members of the fraternity that hosted the party. They had been counseled by their chapter president, who told me this story, that it was their mission to prevent sexual assaults and to treat women right.
+Americans demonize fraternities as bastions of toxic masculinity where young men go to indulge their worst impulses. Universities have cracked down: Since November 2017 , more than a dozen have suspended all fraternity events . But I spent more than two years interviewing fraternity members nationwide for a book about what college students think it means to “be a man,” and what I learned was often heartening. Contrary to negative headlines and popular opinion, many fraternities are encouraging brothers to defy stereotypical hypermasculine standards and to simply be good people.
+Consider some recent examples: In 2017, brothers in Beta Theta Pi at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln invited officers from several sorority houses to a dinner where they talked about the experiences of being a woman on campus and the ways men could help to prevent sexual assault. Last October, Alpha Tau Omegas at the University of Maryland assembled 400 sexual-assault aftercare kits that included handwritten notes of support. When Ball State University fraternity houses hung banners supporting consent awareness for Homecoming last year, Sigma Phi Epsilon declared it would continue to display its “‘No’ does not mean ‘Convince Me’” banner as long as sexual assault remained a campus problem. Last July, Christian Kahf, a former Georgia Tech student, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for rape; the case against him began when his fraternity brothers called the police in 2017 to say he had confessed to them.“So many Democrats just assume we’re going to win,” she said. “They underestimate how hard it’s going to be.” And it might be a serious tactical mistake, she added, to nominate any candidate who seems to be at war with capitalism itself or entertains the idea of a guaranteed minimum income.
+“We have become the party that is anti-business,” she told me. “We need to be the party of work.”
+She acknowledged that “the system we have today is totally broken.” She cited grotesque income inequality. She noted that too many Americans have no economic security and no prospects for achieving it.
+“But I fall in the camp of: Let’s fix it,” she said. “Let’s embrace business to come to the table. Someone needs to make the case that it’s in the best interest of businesses and wealthy people to be better corporate citizens. Pay for health care. Help people get their college degree. Pay for job training.”
+Along those lines, she recently proposed that companies doing business in Rhode Island be taxed up to $1,500 annually for every employee who is enrolled in Medicaid because he or she can’t get health insurance through a company-sponsored plan. “I hope that they’re embarrassed,” she said.
+But, she added, “Where I think we are at risk is if all we do is beat up and crap on businesses.”
+That’s an exaggeration of where the party is, but I take her point. And I’m fascinated by her unflashy example and the questions it raises about how we currently accord importance to politicians and how much that really relates to their impact.
+Journalists obsess over the most camera-ready emissaries and provocative assertions, and we often outsource our judgment to social media. To go viral is to be relevant. “In the future,” the Politico media columnist Jack Shafer wrote a few days ago, “your news source of choice will contain only stories about Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” Shafer forgot Beto O’Rourke, which is funny, because he once wrote an excellent broadside about how political reporters can’t forget him.
+When I checked social media during Raimondo’s re-election campaign, I mostly saw people bashing her, and she wasn’t bothering to engage with that hate. I assumed she was in trouble.That first travel ban, and each subsequent one, made my stomach lurch, as I imagined not being allowed back into the place I belong. And since that chaotic weekend two years ago, I have wondered what life has been like for immigration lawyers — people whose livelihoods depend on getting others through a door that was only ever ajar and is now in danger of slamming shut.
+As the administration hacks away at immigrants’ rights and rains down policy changes, immigration requests that would usually have been approved are denied, many lawyers told me. They are receiving requests for further evidence that are baffling, with precedents continuously blurring. “Any way the government can have a moment of ‘gotcha’ they do and they will,” Ms. Gupta said. “If they can get you out of the country, they will.”
+John Khosravi, an immigration lawyer in Los Angeles, agrees. “These past two years it’s like someone is running around sticking their finger in people’s eyes and I’m an eye doctor,” he said. “Sure, business is good, but those aren’t the injuries I want to treat.”
+On his podcast “The Immigration Lawyers Podcast,” he urges his colleagues to have a Plan B and to save their money for a rainy day. Mr. Khosravi is Iranian-American, and when he started practicing nearly a decade ago, all of his clients were Iranian. Since then, he has diversified and now has clients from around the world. “Had I just been starting out when the ban came down, that would have been lights out, just no way,” he said.
+For Lauren Blodgett, a staff lawyer at Safe Passage Project, the past two years have seen her definition of success change. She has represented children seeking asylum who were separated from a parent at the border, per the policy put in place by this administration last year. She said that even if her clients are denied a chance to stay in the United States, it’s crucial to her to help them feel heard and even loved throughout the process.One evening in 2014 , a police officer in Kolwezi, a dusty mining city of a half-million people in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo, decided that his family needed a new latrine. He picked up a shovel and started digging a pit in his yard and soon stood transfixed at the shimmering black dirt he’d unearthed: Before him was a pile of cobalt, one of the world’s most important minerals.
+Cobalt is an essential component of rechargeable batteries in cars and mobile phones, and Congo is by far the world’s largest producer, with about half of all known reserves. In Kolwezi, the cobalt is often found with vast deposits of copper: After a rainstorm, some of the ground in the city turns as green as the Statue of Liberty. With the electronics boom worldwide, demand for both minerals has exploded.
+In the days that followed the policeman’s discovery, he began digging up his living room, his bathroom, his bedroom, his kitchen. Within weeks, his neighbors followed suit. By mid-2015, when I started visiting that area of Kolwezi, known as Kasulo, the place looked as if it had been bombed.
+Kasulo was once a quiet hillside neighborhood, home to the families of the cooks and cleaners, mechanics and drivers who worked for the mining industry. Now its small brick and concrete houses were crumbling and the streets were pockmarked with cavernous holes.Remember this name: Loujain (pronounced Loo-JAYNE) al-Hathloul. She is 29 years old and a courageous advocate for gender equality — so she is in a Saudi Arabian prison, and reportedly our Saudi allies have tortured her, even waterboarded her.
+There has properly been global outrage at Saudi Arabia’s murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post and resident of Virginia. Jamal was a friend of mine, and I find it infuriating that President Trump and other officials won’t hold Saudi Arabia accountable for killing and dismembering him.
+Still, we can’t bring him back. So let’s direct equal attention to those still alive — like Hathloul, along with nine other women’s rights activists who are also in custody, including some who say they have endured torture.
+Trump, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Jared Kushner bet big on the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, but they were bamboozled. M.B.S. isn’t a great reformer, and he isn’t coming clean about Khashoggi’s murder.WASHINGTON — His hand chopping in the air, his voice stern and stalwart, he declared that it was time for the regional despot to go and warned of the consequences if he did not. With a commander in chief’s resolve, he vowed that the United States would do whatever it took to protect its own diplomats on the ground.
+It was not the commander in chief but Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who nearly three years after losing his own bid for the presidency has become a lead policy architect and de facto spokesman in a daring and risky campaign involving the United States in the unrest that is now gripping Venezuela.
+Through sheer force of will and a concerted effort to engage and educate President Trump, Mr. Rubio has made himself, in effect, a virtual secretary of state for Latin America, driving administration strategy and articulating it to the region from the Senate floor, as he did the other day, and every television camera he can find. Perhaps no other individual outside Venezuela has been more critical in challenging President Nicolás Maduro.
+“He’s picked a battle he can’t win,” Mr. Rubio, 47, said of Mr. Maduro in an interview on Friday. “It’s just a matter of time. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take — and whether it will be peaceful or bloody.”But Mr. Mujahid said progress was made on a withdrawal, and he emphasized that the insurgents still wanted to negotiate.
+“Since these issues are critical and need comprehensive discussion, it was decided that talks about unsolved matters will resume in similar future meetings,” he added.
+The basic outlines of the emerging deal have leaked out through Taliban sources. American officials have been tight-lipped by comparison, though Western diplomats tacitly confirmed those outlines.
+The Americans would promise to withdraw their 14,000 troops, and the Taliban would agree to never again allow their territory to be used by extremists like Al Qaeda, the terrorist network that staged the 2001 attacks on the United States from Afghanistan and set off the start of the war.
+That much seemed in agreement. But as always, the devil is in the details. How long would the cease-fire be, and would it start before, after or even during the American withdrawal? How long a time frame would the withdrawal cover?
+All of these questions are potential deal-breakers.
+Taliban sources remained optimistic, even as Western diplomats expressed concern that there would not be a deal from this round of Doha talks. On Saturday afternoon, Sayed Akbar Agha, a former Taliban official who now lives in Kabul but keeps close contacts with insurgent leaders, said he had just spoken to them.
+“I have been told that talks are going ahead very well and we are close to an agreement,” he said. Whatever the result this time, Mr. Agha said, “Afghanistan was never so close to peace in these past years. What is happening now has never happened before.”To the Editor:
+Has President Trump ever heard of the Berlin Wall? It is hard to think so from his explanation of his decision to stop the government shutdown to give congressional leaders a chance to provide funding for a wall between the United States and Mexico (“Shutdown Ends With No Funding for Wall,” front page, Jan. 26).
+Part of his speech was a paean to walls:
+“They do work. No matter where you go, they work. Israel built a wall, 99.9 percent successful. Won’t be any different for us. They keep criminals out. They save good people from attempting a very dangerous journey from other countries, thousands of miles, because they think they have a glimmer of hope of coming through. With a wall, they don’t have that hope.”
+No, and people living in East Germany didn’t have that hope for almost three decades after the Berlin Wall went up in 1961. Every American president from John F. Kennedy to George H.W. Bush denounced the cruelty of that wall. Its demise in 1989 led to the reunification of Germany, a great victory for democracy and a fatal defeat for the Communist dictatorships in East Berlin and Moscow that had erected it.
+Now, Vladimir Putin has second thoughts about all that; has Donald Trump ever had a first thought about the Berlin Wall?In that context, Racing stands out as a bastion of innovation. It is not just the homemade Footbonaut. It is the support available to the 55 boys who live at the club’s academy, far in advance of what most of their peers in Argentina would be offered, ranging from social workers and psychologists to academic tutors. It is the approach to player development, centering less on results and more on individual progress. Most of all, it is the work done in a small, subterranean office in the parking lot of the club’s stadium.
+Here, Javier Weiner’s team of four scouts, including Huerta, sits at a bank of four desks, each one dominated by an iMac. The scouts scour games from Argentina’s lower leagues and a handful of South American countries on Wyscout, a content platform that streams action from across the world.
+Each scout has an area to cover: Weiner takes Argentina and Colombia; Huerta monitors youth soccer and Venezuela.
+Using the analytics service InStat, they compile dossiers on potential acquisitions, drawing together not just raw performance data but also players’ psychological, emotional and medical backgrounds. They track information from journalists on social media.
+Most clubs of this scale in Europe, North America and Asia would see this work as standard now; in Argentina, it is all but revolutionary. “Most of the time, it is the head coach who recruits players, or the president, with the help of a few agents,” Huerta said. “There is no process: Everything changes constantly. And there are times when crucial decisions are made by someone who does not know anything about football.”
+Racing, however, is determined to be “another type of club,” Weiner said. “We have to be creative,” he said. “We have to have a network that means we can get players before bigger clubs because financially we cannot compete with River Plate and Boca Juniors.”The idea that the United States could withdraw from NATO is surreal.
+The alliance, now numbering 29 countries, has been the foundation of trans-Atlantic stability and prosperity for seven decades. It continues to keep a predatory Russia at bay and diminish the danger that American soldiers might once again have to fight on European soil.
+Yet in Donald Trump’s go-it-alone presidency, the possibility of America’s withdrawal has become such a concern that Congress is taking steps to prevent it.
+The Democratic-led House on Jan. 22 voted 357-22 for a bipartisan bill that would tie Mr. Trump’s hands by refusing him any federal money to pay the costs of leaving the alliance.
+The Republican-led Senate should quickly follow, either approving the House measure or a separate bill proposed by a bipartisan group of senators that requires Mr. Trump to obtain approval from two-thirds of the Senate to “suspend, terminate or withdraw U.S. membership in NATO.” If the president refused to abide by a Senate vote preserving NATO membership, the bill would then prohibit the use of federal funds for withdrawal.The foundation of tennis success in Nava’s family can be traced to an undersized court in a small town in Mexico. His grandfather Ernesto Escobedo Sr. fell in love with the sport when he watched a Davis Cup tie in Los Angeles. After moving his large family to Jerez, Mexico, he built a tennis court, or as much of one as he could fit, in the family’s backyard.
+Xóchitl Nava, Emilio’s mother, said the little court her father built had its limitations, but also offered boundless opportunities.
+“On one side of the court, we didn’t have room to hit a backhand or forehand,” she said in a telephone interview. “So it was a tennis court, but more of a playground where we could hit balls and have fun.”
+Their father’s passion for tennis rubbed off on many of his 10 children.
+“When we started getting older, everybody went their own ways,” Xóchitl Nava said. “But we were always playing tennis.”MONTREAL — Canada’s ambassador to China has resigned following a series of diplomatic missteps that further complicated already strained relations between the two countries.
+The resignation came days after the ambassador, John McCallum, stunned seasoned diplomatic observers by saying that Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of the Chinese telecom firm Huawei who was arrested in December by Canadian authorities in Vancouver at the United States request, stood a good chance of avoiding extradition to the United States.
+His public assessment of the sensitive and high profile case came under sharp criticism, including from the leader of the opposition conservative party Andrew Scheer, who said Mr. McCallum’s comments threatened to politicize the case and called for him to be fired.
+“Last night, I asked for and accepted John McCallum’s resignation as Canada’s ambassador to China,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday.SUNDAY PUZZLE — They say that comedy is just tragedy plus time (who they are can be pretty much up to you, since the Venn diagram of humorists and people credited with that expression is about a perfect circle). The timing of this puzzle, vis-à-vis the government shutdown, is an unfortunate coincidence; our lineup is scheduled and set so far in advance that this kind of juxtaposition can happen, and I hope that nobody is dismayed.
+Today’s puzzle is Randolph Ross’s 49th Sunday contribution (he’s made 110 puzzles, according to xwordinfo.com, in total). That’s one shy of his Sunday golden jubilee, and it puts him in fine company. I remember a few, including a great nautical puzzle, and I think of Mr. Ross as a very elegant and intricate constructor — today’s grid has two theme spans and a lot of very bright fill that made it a fun solve.
+Tricky Clues
+Today was a day when my mental repository of names came up short, so I struggled with BEAMON, CULP, THIEU and a couple of others; I did appreciate solving BABE and then getting THE BAMBINO, and I’ll take any reference to LASSIE that I can get, the cleverer the better. Once we reached into the 70s and 80s with BEEPERS, entertaining UTAHANS and MCDLTS, I was on a bit firmer ground.
+Some very brief entries were gotchas, like EPA (I thought Carter set up this agency) and BAA, of all things, simply because I’d only thought of cotes as housing doves.MAGAZINE
+An article this weekend about Mitch McConnell misstated the number of American troops in Afghanistan and the number of troops that President Trump said he would withdraw from the country. Seven thousand of 14,000 American troops in Afghanistan were going to be pulled out. It is not the case that only 7,000 troops were still deployed to Afghanistan.
+BOOK REVIEW
+A biographical note on Jan. 13 with a review of Mesha Maren’s “Sugar Run” misstated the title of the most recent novel by the reviewer, Charles Frazier. It is “Varina,” not “Vienna.”
+TRAVEL
+The Places to Go in 2019 special Travel section on Jan. 13 had several errors.
+The article on Los Angeles misstated when the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures is scheduled to open in that city. The museum will open in late 2019, not summer 2019. The article on Danang, Vietnam, misstated the location of the Cau Ron Dragon Bridge. It is in Danang, not in the hills above the city. The article about Dakar, Senegal, misspelled the surname of a Senegalese pop singer. He is Youssou N’Dour, not N’Dor. And the article on New York City misstated the number of steps in the structure known as New York’s Staircase. It is 2,500, not 2,000.
+REAL ESTATE
+An International Real Estate column last Sunday, about a property in Bogotá, Colombia, misstated Santiago Rico Calderón’s job title. He is the managing director of Engel & Völkers Bogotá, not the sales director.Q. We once had to have an elderly cat euthanized because of painful arthritis. The vet said there were no good long-term analgesics for cats. Why?
+A. The treatment of pain in cats is more problematic than it is in people, or even in dogs, in part because it has been hard to develop pain-scoring systems for cats.
+Long-term use of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, or NSAIDs, can cause serious side effects, as in humans, including liver, kidney and intestinal problems. Acetaminophen in particular is toxic to cats and can be fatal.
+Long-term corticosteroids also can lead to damage, including an increased susceptibility to infections, muscle weakness and Cushing’s disease. Opioids aren’t a good alternative, as they tend to produce mania in cats.
+Some metabolic pathways that metabolize analgesic drugs in other animals are lacking in cats, which can lead to toxicity or lack of effect.“He’s picked a battle he can’t win. It’s just a matter of time. The only thing we don’t know is how long it will take — and whether it will be peaceful or bloody.”
+SENATOR MARCO RUBIO of Florida, on President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.Germany, France, Spain and Britain were also among the nations calling on Mr. Maduro to commit to a new vote. Mr. Maduro’s re-election last year was marred by reports of widespread coercion and fraud.
+Mr. Arreaza, the foreign minister, scoffed at the ultimatum.
+“Europe is giving us eight days? What gives you the right?” Mr. Arreaza demanded during a session of the United Nations Security Council.
+Mr. Maduro continued to strike a defiant tone on Saturday, writing on Twitter that his government “would not rest until we defeat the attempted coup” orchestrated by people who want to establish a “puppet government of the United States empire.”
+But his government appears to have decided for the time being not to detain Mr. Guaidó or disrupt his political rallies as support for the 35-year-old opposition leader has grown at home and abroad. Mr. Guaidó proclaimed himself the legitimate head of the executive branch on Wednesday as his supporters took to the streets in droves.
+He argued that the presidency became technically vacant on Jan. 10, when Mr. Maduro was sworn in for a new term after an election widely seen as rigged. The country’s Constitution says that the president of the National Assembly, Mr. Guaidó in this case, becomes interim leader if the presidency is vacated.
+Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry and the State Department did not respond to a request for information about the status of Venezuelan diplomats. It was unclear how many have pledged allegiance to Mr. Guaidó and whether they would remain accredited as diplomats in the United States.
+At least one official, the country’s military attaché in Washington, Col. José Luis Silva, said in an interview with The Nuevo Herald that he no longer recognized Mr. Maduro as president.It was a stunning setback for the president and for Mr. Kushner, who had told colleagues that public opinion would move to their side and that Speaker Nancy Pelosi would emerge as the one who looked unreasonable and intransigent.
+Mr. Kushner had advised the president against declaring a national emergency, which would enable him to get funding for his wall without approval from Congress. Instead, he ultimately pushed Mr. Trump toward the announcement he made on Friday, supporting it as a way to buy more time to reach a deal.
+Mr. Trump, White House aides said, has been frustrated at everyone around him for not delivering a deal he can accept. And he has become wary of his son-in-law’s advice on this issue, the aides said.
+This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen congressional officials, White House aides and people involved in the immigration debate.
+On Capitol Hill, aides said, Mr. Kushner had positioned himself as the person who could sell the president on a compromise, casting himself as a facilitator who did not lobby for details of any proposal but simply wanted to find a solution that both sides could claim as a victory.
+Mr. Kushner has told Mr. Trump that he should spend the next three weeks trying to achieve a broader immigration package. That challenge has eluded both parties for years, but Mr. Kushner has suggested to colleagues that it is worth trying for, according to West Wing aides.Here are the paths that the members of the House of Representatives took to Congress. Each line represents a Democratic or Republican representative, and circles are the major educational, career and political milestones on their path to the House. Items are not exhaustive nor in chronological order.
+The United States does not grant titles of nobility. There are no lords, barons or dukes here. At least, not officially.
+Unofficially, however, Congress is made up of people who have credentials and experiences vastly different from those of most citizens. Unofficially, considering education, career, family background and personal wealth, it seems that America has a ruling class — or at least a limited number of ways to enter the halls of power.
+Here, we’ve traced the pre-congressional career of every House member in the 116th Congress, showing the narrow but well-trodden paths through prestigious schools, lucrative jobs and local political offices that led the latest crop of legislators to Capitol Hill.
+The new House has a notable number of political novices, and more women and people of color than any Congress in history. But a majority of members, even the new ones, still made it to Washington by way of institutions and professions that are out of reach for most Americans.
+More than 70 percent of House members were lawyers in private practice, businesspeople (including employees in insurance, banking, finance and real estate) or medical professionals. That work can inform the types of bills they introduce, according to research by Katie Francis, a faculty member at Western Governors University. Doctors sponsor more health care legislation, for example.
+In part because Congress is filled with successful white-collar professionals, the House is much, much richer than the people it represents, and affluent politicians support legislation that benefits their own class at the expense of others. Wealthier legislators are, for instance, more likely to vote to repeal the estate tax.
+“The rosy notion that lawmakers from business and professional backgrounds want what is best for everyone is seriously out of line with the realities of legislative decision-making in the United States,” wrote Nicholas Carnes, a Duke professor of public policy, in his book “White-Collar Government.”
+About 5 percent of representatives don’t have a bachelor’s degree, compared with about two-thirds of Americans 25 and older. Hover to see members with no bachelor’s degree
+The path to the House starts with higher education. About half of members graduated from public universities, often in their home states, but more than 10 percent of representatives have bachelor’s degrees from elite, private colleges.
+It makes sense to elect educated leaders, and voters seem to think a college education is a necessary qualification for office. But the link between having a degree and being a more effective politician is tenuous. Research on legislators in the United States and in Brazil shows that lawmakers with more formal education are not more productive, more popular or less likely to be corrupt.
+The gap between legislators and their constituents is stark in graduate education, too. Almost 70 percent of representatives attended graduate school, but only around 10 percent of Americans 25 and older can say the same.
+More than one in three members have law degrees, compared with around 13 percent in the United Kingdom's Parliament. Law school
+Among both Democrats and Republicans, lawyers are staggeringly overrepresented: They constitute less than 1 percent of the voting-age population but more than one-third of the House. Perhaps it is natural for the people writing laws to study them first. But the United States is an exception internationally. Research by Adam Bonica of Stanford and Maya Sen of Harvard found that in Sweden, France and Denmark, lawyers make up less than 10 percent of the legislature.
+Not only are lawyers more likely to run for office, they are also more likely to win. This success is largely because of the advantage they have in early fund-raising, drawing from professional networks of other lawyers and affluent professionals.
+Once in office, lawyers tend to vote in a way that benefits their profession. They are less likely to support laws that would cap awards for damages or regulate legal fees, according to Mr. Bonica and Ms. Sen’s research.
+Almost 40 percent of House members, more than half Republicans, cite business experience. Business owners, executives or professionals
+In addition to small business owners and corporate executives, the House is filled with people who worked in finance, insurance and banking.
+Members with business backgrounds sometimes argue that their “outside the Beltway” experience will enable them to run government more like a business — to reduce grift and waste and to pass laws more efficiently. Indeed, a majority of Americans think the country would be better governed with more people from business and management, according to a 2014 Gallup poll.
+House members with business backgrounds get more contributions from corporations and vote for pro-business legislation more often. Other research has shown that states with more legislators who worked in the insurance industry are likely to pass bills more favorable to it.
+Fewer than 5 percent of representatives cite blue-collar or service jobs in their biographies. Blue-collar or service job
+They include Tom Marino, Republican of Pennsylvania, who worked in factories before law school and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, who often refers to her working-class experience as a bartender when explaining her left-leaning economic policy positions.
+Mr. Carnes notes that there is no dearth of politically ambitious, qualified working-class candidates. And when working-class candidates run, they do just as well as candidates from other backgrounds. But blue-collar workers are less able to shoulder the practical burdens associated with running a campaign — like taking time off from paid employment — and less likely to be asked to run by local party leaders and officials.
+To get people with a more diverse set of experiences into Congress, he argues, we need to focus on recruiting working-class candidates at the local level — often years before a potential congressional run.
+Nearly one in five members served or currently serve in the armed forces, including the National Guard. Military experience
+This is a substantial decline from the early 1970s, when more than 70 percent of Congress had military experience.
+Seventy percent of veterans in the House are Republicans — but several Democratic women elected in 2018 made their military experience a focus of their campaigns, including Chrissy Houlahan, Democrat of Pennsylvania, who served in the Air Force.
+Common fields for Republicans include medicine, real estate and farming. For Democrats, they include teaching, nonprofits and unions. Experience in one of the above fields
+There are rarer occupations, too. Colin Allred, Democrat of Texas, played for the Tennessee Titans in the N.F.L. before becoming a lawyer. Jody B. Hice, Republican of Georgia, served as a pastor before stepping down to run for office. He also started a conservative talk radio show.
+Other professions are underrepresented, with material consequences for lawmaking. Only about 15 United States representatives are scientists or engineers, which could partly explain lackluster action on climate change and ineffectual regulation of technology companies.
+Women tend to have followed more varied paths to Capitol Hill: A smaller proportion are lawyers and businesspeople. Female representatives
+While men might run for office because of a “longstanding desire to be an elected official,” women are more likely to run because “they encounter something in their engagement with the political system that angers them enough or frustrates them enough,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political scientist at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics.
+When they run, men and women have roughly the same chance of winning. But research by Sarah A. Fulton, a political scientist at Texas A&M University, shows that female candidates tend to be more qualified.
+Many female representatives campaigned on their experience in business and the working world. Some, like Ann Wagner, Republican of Missouri, also highlighted more traditional domestic roles. Her website says her “most important jobs,” despite her previous role as ambassador to Luxembourg, “have always been as a wife, mother and now grandmother.”
+Only 20 percent of House members did not hold previous political office before entering Congress. No previous political office
+Historically, it is somewhat rare for representatives to reach the House without holding previous political office. Nearly 200 representatives have experience in a state legislature; others were mayors, local district attorneys or state agency heads. These experiences aren’t just symbolic. New legislators with political experience introduce and pass more bills, according to Ms. Francis’ research.
+But drawing politicians from local governments and state legislatures also gives an edge to people who can afford to take those jobs. In some states, those positions don’t pay enough to live on. New Hampshire’s legislature, for example, pays just $200 per two-year term. As a result, state politicians are often “local economic elites and corporate titans,” said Jake Grumbach, a researcher at Princeton.
+The new representatives in the 116th Congress, however, do represent a significant break from the past. More than 40 percent of those elected in November are political novices who have never worked in government. Many were inspired to run in order to stand up to President Trump’s agenda — two-thirds of new members are Democrats — but they may also have been emboldened by Mr. Trump’s lack of political experience.
+“That hasn’t translated into lots of working-class candidates in this cycle,” Mr. Carnes said, but “the larger narrative I see on both sides is, ‘You don’t have to be an establishment type to be a good politician.’”Nervousness about Chinese technology has long existed in the United States, fueled by the fear that the Chinese could insert a “back door” into telecom and computing networks that would allow Chinese security services to intercept military, government and corporate communications. And Chinese cyberintrusions of American companies and government entities have occurred repeatedly, including by hackers suspected of working on behalf of China’s Ministry of State Security.
+But the concern has taken on more urgency as countries around the world begin deciding which equipment providers will build their 5G networks.
+American officials say the old process of looking for “back doors” in equipment and software made by Chinese companies is the wrong approach, as is searching for ties between specific executives and the Chinese government. The bigger issue, they argue, is the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Chinese government, the fading line between independent business and the state and new laws that will give Beijing the power to look into, or maybe even take over, networks that companies like Huawei have helped build and maintain.
+“It’s important to remember that Chinese company relationships with the Chinese government aren’t like private sector company relationships with governments in the West,” said William R. Evanina, the director of America’s National Counterintelligence and Security Center. “China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law requires Chinese companies to support, provide assistance and cooperate in China’s national intelligence work, wherever they operate.”
+The White House’s focus on Huawei coincides with the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on China, which has involved sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods, investment restrictions and the indictments of several Chinese nationals accused of hacking and cyberespionage. President Trump has accused China of “ripping off our country” and plotting to grow stronger at America’s expense.
+Mr. Trump’s views, combined with a lack of hard evidence implicating Huawei in any espionage, have prompted some countries to question whether America’s campaign is really about national security or if it is aimed at preventing China from gaining a competitive edge.
+Administration officials see little distinction in those goals.
+“President Trump has identified overcoming this economic problem as critical, not simply to right the balance economically, to make China play by the rules everybody else plays by, but to prevent an imbalance in political/military power in the future as well,” John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser, told The Washington Times on Friday. “The two aspects are very closely tied together in his mind.”SAN DIEGO — Though Tiger Woods grabbed most of the headlines at the Tour Championship in September, with a victory that ended his five-year drought, it was Justin Rose who left the event — the finale of the FedEx Cup playoffs — with a $10 million bonus for winning the season-long points race.
+Rose also moved to No. 1 in the world that weekend in Atlanta, passing Dustin Johnson.
+Over the past few days at the Farmers Insurance Open, his second PGA Tour event in 2019, Rose has demonstrated why, after trading the top ranking several times with Johnson and Brooks Koepka, he came into this tournament at No. 1.
+Despite two double bogeys and a closing bogey during Saturday’s third round, Rose shot a three-under-par 69 on the South Course at Torrey Pines to maintain a three-shot lead heading into Sunday’s final round. His 54-hole total of 18-under 198 tied a tournament record, as had his 36-hole total of 15 under.Fatima Ali, who was voted by fans of the television show “Top Chef” as their favorite contestant of Season 15, died on Friday at her family’s home in San Marino, Calif. She was 29.
+A brother, Mohammad Ali, said the cause was cancer.
+While her season of the reality culinary competition show was airing, Ms. Ali announced in 2017 that she had Ewing’s sarcoma, which affects bone and soft tissue.
+Ms. Ali chronicled her fight against the rare form of cancer on social media. Interspersed with pictures of food on her Instagram page were photos of her in the hospital, her head bald from chemotherapy treatments in some and dyed platinum blond in others.
+“I know it’s been ages since I posted and most may have figured out why,” Ms. Ali wrote on Instagram on Jan. 10. “I’m sick and unfortunately I’m getting sicker. Right now all I need are prayers; prayers that are simple.”Three men who were convicted of plotting to blow up a Kansas apartment complex where Somali refugees lived have each been sentenced to at least 25 years in prison, the Justice Department said on Friday.
+“The defendants in this case acted with clear premeditation in an attempt to kill innocent people on the basis of their religion and national origin,” Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting United States attorney general, said in a statement. “That’s not just illegal — it’s morally repugnant.”
+During the trial last year in Wichita, Kan., prosecutors portrayed the men as aspiring domestic terrorists who were preparing to bomb the apartment complex in Garden City, Kan., which is home to a makeshift mosque and a community of Somali immigrants. The men, who called themselves “the Crusaders,” were arrested about four weeks before Nov. 9, 2016, the date they had picked for the bombing.
+Prosecutors said the men had also considered attacks on other targets, including elected officials and churches that helped refugees. In secretly recorded conversations, the men could be heard making demeaning comments about Muslims; one called them “cockroaches.”For eight years, it seemed to Margarita Cruz that the management at the Trump Organization’s golf club in Westchester County, N.Y., did not notice — or did not care — that the green card and Social Security card she had used to get hired were fake, purchased in Queens for about $120.
+Ms. Cruz, a housekeeper, said she cleaned guest rooms, offices and shops at the club. She laundered sheets and pool towels. But that all ended this month, she said.
+Ms. Cruz and about a dozen other employees — housekeepers, landscapers and a head chef — at the club, Trump National Golf Club, were fired Jan. 18 because they were in the country illegally, according to interviews with Ms. Cruz and the former workers’ lawyer.
+The firings were first reported on Saturday by The Washington Post.
+The New York Times reported in December that undocumented immigrants had been employed at another club owned by the Trump Organization, the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., and that they were kept on the payroll for years even though management there had some knowledge of their fraudulent papers.Jennifer Morrison and Stuart Douglas Andrew Grant were married Jan. 26 at the Fermenting Cellar, an events space, in Toronto. David G. Stinson, a judge of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice and an uncle of the bride, officiated.
+Ms. Morrison, 42, is an executive producer of etalk, a daily celebrity entertainment show based in Toronto. She graduated from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and received a postgraduate degree in journalism from Centennial College in Toronto.
+She is the daughter of Katherine A. Morrison and John H. Morrison of Toronto. Her father retired as an appointed tribunal member of the Veterans Review and Appeal Board of Canada. He conducted hearings of decisions made on disability claims of members and former members of the Canadian Armed Forces and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
+The groom, also 42, is the chief of the compliance office at HGC Investment Management, a hedge fund based in Toronto, and is pursuing a master’s degree in finance through Boston University. He graduated with a diploma in sports administration from Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario, and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Belmont University in Nashville.Halley Marisa Goodman and Benjamin Zadek Mandel were married Jan. 26 at Cipriani 42nd Street in Manhattan. Rabbi Joshua M. Davidson officiated.
+Mrs. Mandel, 30, is a research analyst at Baron Capital, an asset management firm in Manhattan. She graduated magna cum laude with a dual degree — a bachelor of science in economics and a bachelor of arts in economic history — from the University of Pennsylvania, from which she also received an M.B.A.
+She is a daughter of Dr. Candyce Silver and Dr. David P. Goodman of Muttontown, N.Y. The bride’s parents are psychiatrists in private practice, based in Bayside, Queens.
+Mr. Mandel, 32, is an investment analyst at Discovery Capital Management, a hedge fund in South Norwalk, Conn. He graduated from Dartmouth, and received an M.B.A. from Harvard. He is the treasurer on the board of CitySquash, a nonprofit after-school enrichment program for children in the Bronx and Brooklyn.Dr. Alexandra Marie Ristow and Colin Patrick McDonell were married Jan. 26 at the Kualoa Ranch, a private nature reserve and cattle ranch in Kaneohe, Hawaii. Judge Richard Clifton of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with chambers in Honolulu, officiated.
+The couple met at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif., from which both graduated, summa cum laude.
+The bride, 32, is a primary care physician and the medical director of the Lakeland, Fla., market of ChenMed, which provides health care for low- to moderate-income older people. She received a medical degree from Yale and completed an internal medicine residency at the University of California, San Francisco.
+She is a daughter of Therese A. Ristow and Gary J. Ristow of Lenexa, Kan. The bride’s father is the parks and recreation director for the City of Lenexa. Her mother, who is retired, was a paraeducator for special-needs students.Sarah Gornstein Gelles and Jonathan Todd Thrope were married Jan. 26 at the Fairmount Park Horticulture Center in Philadelphia. Rabbi Yael Levy officiated.
+The couple met at Amherst College, from which they graduated, the bride summa cum laude and the groom cum laude.
+Ms. Gelles, 30, is program manager in research and development for the Houston Astros.
+She is a daughter of Sharon Gornstein and Jeff Gelles of Philadelphia. The bride’s father retired as a business columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Her mother is a partner in Leventhal Sutton & Gornstein, a law firm in Bucks County, Pa.
+Mr. Thrope, 31, is a trial lawyer in the civil division of the Department of Justice in Washington. He received a law degree from Harvard.Meredith Suzanne Scott and Elliott Samuel Hyman were married Jan. 26 at the Hilton Cincinnati Netherland Plaza. Rabbi Michael Danziger officiated.
+The bride, 33, is a development associate at the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. She graduated from Trinity University in San Antonio and received a law degree from Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Ind.
+She is a daughter of Deborah E. Scott and George A. Scott of Cincinnati. The bride’s father is the president of Green Light Projects, a special projects consulting firm based in Cincinnati. He also serves on the board of Warren Wilson College board of trustees in Asheville, N.C. Her mother is the director of the Taft Museum of Art and is on the board of the Art Academy, both in Cincinnati.
+The groom, 29, is the director of business development at Wolf Consulting, an information technology consulting firm based in Pittsburgh. He is also a member of the chief executive training program at Alpine Investors, a San Francisco-based firm. He graduated from Vanderbilt and received an M.B.A. from Northwestern.Sarah Rose Riedl and Brandon Christopher Clark were married Jan. 26 at the Mid-America Club in Chicago. Heather E. Moran, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for the occasion, officiated.
+The bride and groom are each changing their middle name to Riedl.
+Mrs. Clark, 30, is a lawyer in the Chicago office of the San Francisco law firm Gordon & Rees. She graduated from the University of Illinois and received a law degree from Wake Forest University School of Law.
+She is a daughter of Lisa A. Riedl and Warren L. Riedl of Elgin, Ill. The bride’s father is a mold maker of plastic closures at the Armin Tool and Manufacturing Company in Elgin. Her mother, a court reporter, is the owner of Janson Reporting Services in Elgin.
+Mr. Clark, 36, also a lawyer, works at the Chicago office of the New York law firm Proskauer Rose. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and received a law degree cum laude from DePaul University.Jennifer Turnbull Carl and Samuel Scappaticci Brickfield were married Jan. 26 at the Metropolitan Club in Washington. Inosi Nyatta, a cousin of the bride, received permission from the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to officiate.
+The couple, who are both 29 and associates at law firms in New York, met at the University of Virginia, from which each received a law degree.
+Mrs. Brickfield works in the investment management group at Schulte Roth & Zabel. She graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania.
+She is a daughter of Joan T. Carl and Bernard J. Carl of Palm Beach, Fla. The bride’s father, a former law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, is a retired lawyer and private equity executive who held several presidential appointments in the housing and banking sectors. Her mother is the owner of the Paris-based company D. Porthault, a maker of bedsheets, towels and other linens.MANILA — Two bombs exploded at a cathedral in the southern Philippines on Sunday, killing 20 people and wounding scores of others, officials said.
+The attack on the island of Jolo came less than a week after voters rejected its inclusion in a Muslim autonomous area; the referendum was overwhelmingly approved in other parts of the Mindanao island group, which includes Jolo. The government of the mainly Catholic country has for decades been fighting Islamist separatist groups like Abu Sayyaf and the Islamic State.
+The blasts occurred in the morning as people were gathered for Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Jolo, the capital of Sulu Province, said Col. Gerry Besana, a spokesman for the military. The bombs were believed to be homemade.
+He said one of the bombs exploded inside the church, while the other exploded in a nearby parking lot as congregants panicked and rushed outside.Scientists have long known what causes sickle-cell disease and its devastating effects: a single mutation in one errant gene. But for decades, there has been only modest progress against an inherited condition that mainly afflicts people of African descent.
+With advances in gene therapy, that is quickly changing — so much so that scientists have begun to talk of a cure.
+In a half-dozen clinical trials planned or underway, researchers are testing strategies for correcting the problem at the genetic level. Already a handful of the enrolled patients, who have endured an illness that causes excruciating bouts of pain, strokes and early death, no longer show signs of the disease.
+Among them is Brandon Williams, 21, who lives with his mother in Chicago. Because of his sickle-cell disease, he had suffered four strokes by age 18. The damage makes it hard for him to speak. His older sister died of the disease.Suzanne Lynn Grossman and JB Sugar met in May 2011 on an airplane that was about to leave New York for Florida. When Ms. Grossman, who is 5 feet 3 inches, arrived at her designated seat, she realized it was located between two tall men who were already seated, one of whom was Mr. Sugar, who is 6 feet 3 inches.
+“How lucky are you that a 5-foot-3-inch woman is sitting next to you instead of another tall guy,” Ms. Grossman playfully said to Mr. Sugar, who was on his way to a digital media convention in Fort Myers, Fla.
+Mr. Sugar looked up from the newspaper he was reading, laughed and said he thought to himself, “Huh, she’s pretty cute.”
+Moments later, Ms. Grossman floored Mr. Sugar by asking him, “Who won that fight last night?” She was referring to a light-heavyweight championship bout between Jean Pascal and Bernard Hopkins, who, at 46, was attempting to become the oldest world champion in history.A live production of “Rent” airs on Fox. And awards season blazes on, at the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
+What’s on TV
+RENT 8 p.m. on Fox. Fans who have only seen high school productions (or middle school, or elementary school, or all three) of Jonathan Larson’s 1996 musical riff on “La Bohème” have at least one major reason be excited about this live television adaptation: Michael Greif, who directed the original production at the New York Theater Workshop and a more recent Off Broadway production, is working with Alex Rudzinski (who in recent years directed “Grease: Live!” and John Legend as Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar” live in concert) to bring the musical to TV. That’s about the most qualified team one could hope for, and the cast is delightfully varied: Vanessa Hudgens (of “High School Musical” and “Grease: Live!”), the pop singer Tinashe, Brandon Victor Dixon (Leslie Odom Jr.’s replacement as Aaron Burr in “Hamilton”) and Valentina (“RuPaul’s Drag Race”) are all featured. The story concerns a group of New York artists living in the shadow of the AIDS epidemic — though it’s not all gloomy. “Puccini’s ravishingly melancholy work seemed, like many operas of its time, to romance death,” Ben Brantley wrote in his 1996 review for The New York Times. “Mr. Larson’s spirited score and lyrics defy it.”
+25TH ANNUAL SCREEN ACTORS GUILD AWARDS 8 p.m. on TBS and TNT. With awards season in full swing, the SAG awards arrive Sunday night to add fuel to an already roaring conversation about who stood out onscreen in 2018. Anyone who watched the Golden Globes a few weeks ago or read the list of Oscar nominees released this week will find much that’s familiar. (Lady Gaga? Glenn Close? Rami Malek? Richard E. Grant? Olivia Colman? They’re all here.) But with the SAG ceremony, those performances are more or less isolated from the movies they came from; more even than usual, the actors themselves get center stage. This year, the ceremony will be hosted by Megan Mullally.“Saturday Night Live” once again dipped into its deep reserve of celebrity guest stars to portray the various members and associates of President Trump’s administration, this time turning to Steve Martin, who played Roger J. Stone Jr., the longtime Trump adviser who was arrested on Friday after having been indicted by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III.
+The opening sketch of this week’s episode, hosted by James McAvoy and featuring the musical guest Meek Mill, was a parody of the Fox News program “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Carlson was played by the “S.N.L.” cast member Alex Moffat, who explained, “I’m like if those shorts with the little whales on them came to life.”
+Moffat introduced his top story: “President Trump’s heroic end to the shutdown,” he said. “It did take him 35 days, but he was finally able to get no wall.” Interviewing another Fox News personality, Jeanine Pirro (Cecily Strong), Moffat said, “I’m going to smugly ask a question that I already know the answer to, and a warning to our viewers, my voice will get very high.”Animals can pick up salmonella from contaminated food, or the bacteria can live naturally in their intestines. Some can even pick up the bacteria from their mothers before they are born, according to the C.D.C.’s website.
+Although pet hedgehogs may not show signs of sickness, they can carry the bacteria and spread it through their droppings. Once the hedgehog passes the germs to their surroundings — like their toys and beddings — humans are vulnerable to infection when they handle those objects.
+This is not the first time pet hedgehogs have been linked to a salmonella outbreak. From December 2011 to April 2013, 26 people were infected with the same bacterial strain, Salmonella typhimurium; a majority of them reported contact with hedgehogs. One person died and eight people were hospitalized in that outbreak, the C.D.C. reported.
+“The fact that hedgehogs are a risk is not new,” said Jane Sykes, a professor of small animal internal medicine at the University of California, Davis. “But we don’t know how common the shedding of salmonella is among hedgehogs specifically.”
+Scientists also are not sure exactly why hedgehogs seem to be more prone to transmitting salmonella than other animals are, Dr. Sykes said. For people with compromised immune systems, she recommends choosing a pet that poses a lower risk, like a dog.Each week, our survey of recent residential sales in New York City and the surrounding region focuses on homes that sold around a certain price point, allowing you to compare single-family homes, condos and co-ops in different locales.
+The “list price” is the asking price when the property came on the market with the most recent broker. The time on the market is measured from the most recent listing to the closing date of the sale.
+Connecticut | 4 bedrooms, 2½ baths
+$455,000There were 60,000 Jews living in Krakow before the war, a quarter of the population; today, there are about 200. The Jewish district now feels at once like a tribute to and a caricature of what it used to be: Outside the Old Synagogue (Poland’s oldest), bright green trolleys advertising tours of Schindler’s factory bounce along the cobblestone. Near Remuh Synagogue and the Old Cemetery are kitschy, Jewish-looking restaurants with Hebrew signs and waiters offering picture menus to passers-by.
+Whatever the sentiment, seeing “Heil Hitler” signs in the neighborhood was jarring. But the legality of it, I soon learned, is an ongoing debate.
+Article 256 of the Polish criminal code states:
+“Whoever publicly promotes a fascist or other totalitarian system of state or incites hatred based on national, ethnic, race or religious differences or for reason of lack of any religious denomination shall be subject to a fine, the penalty of restriction of liberty or the penalty of deprivation of liberty for up to two years.”
+It continues:
+“Whoever, in order to distribute, produces, records or brings, buys, stores, possesses, presents, transports or sends” the aforementioned items, or those with “fascist, communist or other totalitarian symbolism,” can be subject to that punishment.
+But there’s a caveat: Violators are exempt “if the act was committed as part of artistic, educational, collecting or scientific activity.” Sales of antiques or collectibles with some historic, academic or artistic value are permitted; sales of recent reproductions are not.
+It’s one of many ambiguities that makes the provision ineffective, according to Katarzyna du Vall, a lawyer in Krakow. “You don’t know who is an artist, educator, collector or researcher,” she said.
+Another is the vocabulary. “The biggest problem from a legal perspective is what, exactly, ‘totalitarian state’ means,” Ms. du Vall said, explaining how contemporary scholars — political scientists, sociologists, lawyers and other experts — cannot agree on one binding definition.
+“We talk about Article 256 a lot in Poland, and people don’t understand why those proceedings end up with nothing,” she said. “It’s really hard to enforce a law that is not clear for anybody — for judges, for those who punish, for those who commit those crimes.”
+Rober Opas, a deputy chief of police in Warsaw, acknowledged the law and said violators would be punished. But “from our point of view,” he said in an email, “the problem is sporadic, and we do not receive many reports of this kind.” He also noted that it is the Polish court that determines the punishment for each perpetrator.Given the scintillating way both had performed throughout the tournament, with Nadal winning every set he played in his first six matches and with Djokovic winning all but two, it seemed certain that they would duel once again deep into the Melbourne night.
+It was a match that was expected to dust off hallowed memories of what might have been their greatest combined moment of glory. In 2012, the two played one of the most epic finals in Grand Slam history, right on Laver’s sea-blue center court: a 5-hour-53-minute marathon won by Djokovic, the longest major final ever.
+But a reprise was not to be. What unfolded was not even a reasonable facsimile.
+Still, the night had its own way of being unforgettable. The final failed to offer drama, but it did present beauty — that of a top-flight athlete, among tennis’s greatest champions, operating at the very peak of his powers.
+“Things started so quick,” Nadal said, snapping his fingers twice to emphasize the point. “He was pushing me to every ball. He played so well. He hit so long. His return was fantastic. He was super quick.”
+Nadal, 32, did not appear particularly downcast after the match. Instead, it seemed as if he had simply resigned himself to the result. He noted that he had been injured and had not been able to prepare for the tournament as he had wished. Indeed, after pulling out of his semifinal match at the United States Open last September and then having ankle surgery, he had not played a match on tour until this tournament began.
+But he also allowed that there had been nothing he could really do on Sunday against Djokovic, saying it “was unbelievable, the way that he played, no doubt about that.”1. The partial government shutdown is over — for now.
+President Trump signed a bill on Friday reopening the federal government for three weeks, but he said he was ready to renew the confrontation or to bypass Congress altogether if Republicans and Democrats didn’t agree on funds for a wall at the southern border by Feb. 15.
+The bill opened the way to paying the 800,000 federal workers who had been furloughed or had been working without pay. We talked with more than a dozen federal workers and contractors about how they survived the 35-day shutdown, and of the uncertainty they now face.
+According to Standard & Poor’s, the U.S. economy lost at least $6 billion during the shutdown — more than the $5.7 billion Mr. Trump was holding out for.Want this column in your inbox? Sign up here.
+Hi there. Did you see the lunar eclipse last week? I didn’t, either. (I thought about it, and then fell asleep.) Of course, of all the eclipses to miss, this one was eventful: A mysterious flash of light appeared on the side of the moon right around midnight. Astronomers believe that it was a meteoroid that crashed and burned, but we may never know.
+Scientists also reported last week that a planet the size of Mars collided with Earth about 4.4 billion years ago, scattering a shower of rocks that coalesced into the moon. These celestial events put this dark, endless-seeming January into perspective, don’t they? Or they’re just one more reminder that NASA has been mostly closed for weeks, another casualty of the government shutdown. You can catch up on the latest shutdown (and reopening) news below, plus the biggest stories in business and tech, in much less time than 4.4 billion years (more like four minutes). Then, get back to enjoying this particular rotation of the Earth.
+JAN. 20- 2 6
+What’s Up?
+And Just Like That
+President Trump made a surprise announcement on Friday that he had agreed to reopen the federal government for three weeks. During that time, Congress can pass spending bills to temporarily restore normal operations at a number of federal agencies and resume paying the 800,000 workers who have been furloughed or forced to work for free for 35 days. (They’ll also receive back wages.) Mr. Trump will continue to negotiate for more funding to secure the nation’s southwestern border, although he appears to be retreating from his previous demands for a $5 billion wall. The cease-fire came after a backlash against Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross’s suggestion that furloughed workers take out personal loans to cover their bills. There were also widespread flight delays on Friday because of a shortage of air traffic controllers, who called in sick after more than a month of working without pay.
+Dispatch From Davos
+You know who doesn’t have paycheck woes? The business tycoons who took a record number of private jets (about 1,500 in total) to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week. On the ground, the hot topic was tech. Several world leaders called for international regulations in the technology sector, particularly over the collection and use of our personal data. But could that really happen? A recent report showed that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google and Microsoft spent a combined $64 million in 2018 to lobby for measures that would keep regulators at bay. And they aren’t the only ones working behind the scenes. Many business elites claimed to be worried about how artificial intelligence and automation could replace people’s jobs, but privately they’re investing in it.____________________________
+The U.S. versus China: It’s not a trade war, it’s a tech war
+The soap opera of tariff negotiations has riveted economists and executives: Will Beijing keep its promises? Will Washington cooperate?
+But the real drama is not about trade, but about technology, many in Davos have said. The brewing conflict could affect generations and disrupt the world order, according to Fred Kempe, the chief executive of the think tank Atlantic Council. He wrote:
+The growing danger is that the tech race could become the primary battleground in a struggle between democracy and autocracy — and between China and the U.S. The dangers of a technological Cold War, a zero-sum contest for global dominance that ultimately separates Chinese and U.S. tech sectors from each other and divides up the world, are increasing.
+What’s the worry? The billionaire George Soros said that artificial intelligence, when in the hands of authoritarian regimes, was a “mortal threat” to the world. He cited China, which is developing a social credit system that would use personal data to judge an individual’s trustworthiness, as an example. President Xi Jinping could eventually have “total control over the people,” making him “the most dangerous opponent of open societies,” Mr. Soros said.
+What do the Chinese think? The technology industry relies heavily on global interactions and is “probably suffering the most right now,” said Ken Hu, the deputy chairman of Huawei. The Chinese telecommunications company has been accused by multiple nations, including the U.S., of violating trade rules. Other players, such as the Chinese state-owned oil and gas company Sinopec, say they expect Chinese companies to scale back foreign investment — steps already taken by Alibaba and by GAC Motor. Last year, nearly 60 percent of Chinese C.E.O.s considered the U.S. to be the most important foreign market; this year, only 17 percent feel the same, according to one survey published this past week.
+Hope for resolution? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said via video link that Washington was willing to play nice with Beijing if China pledged to protect intellectual property. At a dinner in Davos, a top Chinese regulator heard complaints from international business leaders about the ownership structure of state-owned enterprises and about the Made in China 2025 effort, which aims to take the lead in industries such as artificial intelligence and robotics.
+But China wants its space. Vice President Wang Qishan said in a speech that “it is imperative to respect national sovereignty and refrain from seeking technological hegemony.” He added:
+We need to respect the independent choices of model of technology management and of public policies made by countries, and their right to participating in the global technological governance system as equals.
+More forecasts for a global economic slowdown
+A recession may not be coming this year, but neither is a boom, Greg Ip of the WSJ writes.
+The International Monetary Fund downgraded its 2019 forecast for global growth to 3.5 percent. That’s a respectable number, he writes, but the world is struggling to sustain even that muted pace.
+The reason: The world cannot tolerate interest rates as high as it once did. The “neutral” interest rate — one that is high enough to contain inflation, yet low enough to avoid recession — is much lower than before.
+The underlying cause: As aging workers retire and birthrates drop, the labor force has grown more slowly. Productivity has also eked out smaller gains than in the past.LONDON — Prince Philip, the 97-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Britain, has apologized to a woman who was injured in a car crash he was involved in this month, British news outlets reported on Sunday.
+The Duke of Edinburgh sent an apology letter to Emma Fairweather, who sustained a broken wrist when his Land Rover hit the Kia minivan in which she was traveling near the royal estate of Sandringham on Jan. 17.
+In the note, written on Sandringham stationery and dated Jan. 21, the duke said he was “deeply sorry” and wished Ms. Fairweather a “speedy recovery.” He also acknowledged that the accident had left him “somewhat shaken,” a rare admission from a member of the royal family.
+“I would like you to know how very sorry I am for my part in the accident at the Babingley crossroads,” Prince Philip said in the letter, acknowledging his share of responsibility. The note was first published online by The Sunday Mirror.Good morning. It’s an off week for the N.F.L. in advance of next weekend’s Super Bowl in Atlanta, with the Lunar New Year to follow the game by two days. You could plan for both today, lining up recipes for the wings and heroes and dips and nachos you might make for the matchup between the Patriots and the Rams, and stocking your pantry for the dumplings and noodles and fish you could cook to celebrate the Year of the Pig.
+Cook today even if you’re not planning to grill wings next weekend, preferring the company of books and Mozart to metaphorical war between New England and Southern California on a field in the capital of Georgia. Try this slow-cooker chili (above), for instance, or a Dutch oven full of galbijjim, or a Filipino oxtail stew. Make some green ravioli. Bake a coconut layer cake.
+On Monday, try out the chef Michael Solomonov’s recipe for hummus, from his restaurant Zahav in Philadelphia. It’s outstanding plain with pita, but I love it topped, Jerusalem-style, with sautéed ground beef flavored with the spice blend known as baharat — or, failing that, with paprika, cumin and cinnamon.
+I like the idea of pasta alla vodka for dinner on Tuesday night, particularly if you can make extra vodka sauce. (Which is amazing on pan pizza, above a heavy run of low-moisture mozzarella and, crazily, a healthy shake of grated Cheddar, with pepperoni and pickled jalapeños.)Reading Andrew S. Curran’s “Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely” will, among other things, make you feel very lazy. On a typical day, Curran points out, Diderot might “write on ancient Chinese and Greek music first thing in the morning, study the mechanics of a cotton mill until noon, help purchase some paintings for Catherine the Great in the afternoon, and then return home and compose a play and a 20-page letter to his mistress in the evening.” The 18th-century French philosopher (he was called “le philosophe” by his contemporaries; “the philosopher,” not “a philosopher”) was the most famous atheist of his generation. He edited the “Encyclopédie,” for which he wrote 7,000 articles. He was also an art critic, a novelist, a political writer and a satirist, though much of this was known only long after his death. He wrote dozens of manuscripts that he meant to be discovered after he was gone, hoping and trusting that future generations would better sympathize with his more radical thoughts. Below, Curran talks about grave robbers, Diderot’s political prescience, how he was like Benjamin Franklin and more.
+When did you first get the idea to write this book?
+It starts in 2013, with The New York Times, when I wrote an op-ed about Diderot’s 300th birthday. Right after that happened, Other Press contacted me and said, “Do you want to write a biography?” I jumped at the chance. I had had it in the back of my mind that it would be great to do something different than what was out there. All the biographies had been 700 pages, 800 pages, and very useful and scholarly for people who study Diderot. But I thought that for somebody who was so interested in posterity, it was important to work for him and help him out with that posterity, to make him more accessible.
+He’s so interesting and human. He’s vulnerable, open, complicated and very fun to read about. He’s like Montaigne or Benjamin Franklin, too, in that he can become your friend — a lifelong companion. My thesis adviser at N.Y.U., who died last year, once told me the only man she has loved, other than her husband, is Diderot.
+What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it?
+I always knew he was a complete workhorse, just an intellectual beast. But I really didn’t grasp how important he was as a political thinker until I worked on him. He went to Russia to speak with Catherine the Great, who was his benefactor, and tried to democratize the Russian empire. He didn’t get too far.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+This time around, Edward Conlon’s day job is putting words on a computer screen, not putting handcuffs on bad actors.
+So, no pseudonyms and no articles in The New Yorker. No police uniform, either. But he has a title that fits him and only him: director of executive communications in the office of the New York City police commissioner, James P. O’Neill.
+Here he is in a suit, the same person who once said that he had joined the Police Department “precisely to avoid work that entailed a suit, a commute and a cubicle.” He was assigned to a cubicle when he rejoined the department last year, but now has a small office. “They reshuffled things,” he said, perhaps a bit sheepishly.
+Bookworms with memories will remember Mr. Conlon, now 54, as the cop who wrote an acclaimed best-seller. In a 16-year career that ended when he retired in 2011, he was an officer in the Housing Bureau, and a detective in the 44th Precinct in the Bronx and in the Police Department’s intelligence-gathering liaison bureau in Jordan.“I have to use this umbrella to protect myself from the torrent of illegal leaks.” Roger Stone. He’s a Republican political consultant and a self-described — “Agent provocateur.” He was an adviser to longtime friend Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. “Trying to stop Trump is like stepping in front of a hurtling freight train.” Now, Stone is back in the spotlight. He’s been charged as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization that released Clinton campaign emails stolen by the Russian government to help Trump win. In 2016, Stone said he had an in with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I actually have communicated with Assange.” “We have a mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman.” But now, he says it was all part of his political game. “I set a Google News alert for ‘Julian Assange.’ I read every interview he gave. And I used that information to posture and to bluff and to punk the Democrats.” Stone has built a reputation on winning at all costs, even if it means bending the truth. “I assumed he was lying. It’s something Roger does.” “Posture and bluff. That’s politics.” Stone started his career as a political operative at a young age. At 19, he was an entry-level trickster for Nixon’s re-election campaign. His name later came up in the Watergate investigation. “I paid $100 to Mr. Roger Stone on one occasion to leave a leaflet, I believe, at Senator McGovern’s headquarters.” Stone and Trump have been friends and associates since the 1980s, when Stone was working as a political consultant with Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who has since been convicted of financial fraud. Stone says he has been encouraging Donald Trump to run for president since 1988. “I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning.” “Between his outspokenness, his national name identification and his issue positions, he could be a formidable candidate.” “I guess we’re looking at it very seriously.” After he got into some trouble working for Bob Dole in 1996, he bounced back — but has largely worked outside of political campaigns. Stone has a unique personal brand: a mix of provocation, politics and fashion. He can often be found discussing some of his favorite topics: the Clintons, how L.B.J. was behind the assassination of J.F.K. and “fake news.” “Fake news.” Stone strongly denies any wrongdoing in 2016. “I haven’t done anything illegal. I’ve been targeted for one reason and one reason only: I am loyal to the president of the United States.” But emails and interviews suggest that he sold himself to the Trump campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks. He is also connected to a web of associates, some of whom have been interviewed as part of Mueller’s investigation. Stone has been charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering.The filmmakers provided the materials to The New York Times, and offered a reporting collaboration. The Times investigated the claims but did not enter into such a partnership. When asked about the discrepancies in Mr. Jones’s story, the filmmakers acknowledged that they could not corroborate the account and that the plan Mr. Jones had described might not have been medically possible. They encouraged journalists to investigate further.
+“Journalists reporting on it should take care to contextualize the allegations,” said one of the filmmakers, the Danish producer Peter Engel, “and to remind readers that, even if proven true, there is no reason to turn away from modern medical clinics, which are regulated in ways which did not exist in the 1980s at the end of the apartheid era.”
+Such a cautionary note was not included in the version of the film seen by The Times.
+The documentary adds new details and raises fresh questions about the death of Mr. Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat whose plane crash has never been fully explained. A United Nations panel concluded that there was “persuasive evidence that the aircraft was subjected to some form of attack or threat.”
+But the AIDS accusations are likely to generate the most attention. And though Mr. Jones’s account cannot be corroborated, there is support for the notion that the militia was at least interested in AIDS research. One young woman, Dagmar Feil, was killed in front of her home in 1990. Her mother told the South African authorities that she had been conducting AIDS research for the militia at the time, according to contemporaneous documents.
+Much is unknown about the militia, and it is difficult to sort fact from fiction. Its leader, Keith Maxwell, had claimed that it was rooted in British admiralty traditions and traced its lineage to the early 1800s. When the Hammarskjold documents surfaced in the late 1990s, government officials and experts puzzled over what to make of them. Many dismissed them as forgeries or the product of a Soviet disinformation campaign.
+Whatever the group was in that era, by the 1980s and early 1990s it appeared to be a mercenary organization. Paramilitary groups and private military organizations were common during the apartheid era, and the group known as Saimar (pronounced “Sy-marr”) advertised for military-trained men to serve in unspecified foreign operations.
+Mr. Maxwell, who reportedly died in 2006, also ran medical clinics of some kind in South Africa, though he was not a doctor. And he claimed publicly that AIDS would ultimately be good for humanity and would decimate the black population in South Africa.His devotion to Ms. Zadora included inviting Golden Globe Awards voters to private screenings of “Butterfly” (1982), a film he produced for her, and promoted her candidacy in a media campaign — all for someone considered a lightweight competing with the likes of Kathleen Turner, Howard E. Rollins Jr. and Elizabeth McGovern for best new star of the year in a motion picture.
+When Ms. Zadora won the award — a shock in Hollywood and beyond — it was assumed that Mr. Riklis had somehow engineered her victory, although he and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which runs the Golden Globes, denied the accusation.
+In 1990 Mr. Riklis and Ms. Zadora tore down Pickfair, the Beverly Hills estate once owned by the film stars Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, to build another mansion. Two years later they were ordered by a Manhattan judge to pay $751,000 in back rent for their apartment at Trump Tower to Donald J. Trump.
+They divorced the next year.
+“Pia didn’t hurt his reputation as a businessman,” Marcia Riklis said in a telephone interview. “It was quite the opposite. He created her celebrity and enjoyed it. And he enjoyed being known as Mr. Zadora while he was still working on his business deals.”
+Mr. Riklis was born on Dec. 2, 1923, in Istanbul, while his parents, Pinhas and Batya, were on their way from Odessa, Russia, to Palestine, which at the time was under the British Mandate. As a child, he excelled in math and Bible studies; while in high school he was in charge of the physical fitness program of the youth battalion of Haganah, the main Jewish military organization of Palestine before Israeli independence.
+After serving with the British Army in Europe during World War II, he returned to Israel, where he married Ms. Stern, his high school sweetheart. The couple and their daughter, Simona, immigrated to the United States and settled in New Mexico, where he briefly attended college before moving to Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio State University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics.
+The family then moved again, to Minneapolis, where he taught in a Hebrew school. But he wanted to earn more money than he did as a teacher — and wanting to work in finance, he found a job as a junior securities analyst at the investment firm Piper Jaffray & Hopwood and continued to teach for a while.Fears of an imminent recession, which caused major turbulence in financial markets at the end of 2018 and beginning of 2019, have eased a bit.
+That’s the good news. The bad news is what that episode exposed.
+For much of 2018 , it appeared that the world economy was finally getting out of the rut it had been stuck in for the decade since the global financial crisis. But it now looks as if the era of persistently low growth, low inflation and low interest rates isn’t over after all.
+In the past week alone, the European Central Bank said that economic risks had “moved to the downside,” and the Bank of Japan cut its projections for inflation.
+The Federal Reserve will hold a policy meeting Tuesday and Wednesday, and is likely to leave its interest rate target unchanged. Its leaders could also discuss their broader strategy for making monetary policy, which may include keeping more of their giant portfolio of bonds — accumulated during its years of stimulus efforts — than analysts had once expected.A written work is a new life created by the author as progenitor. To ban childbirth in morally offensive couples would certainly raise eyebrows, if not overturn governments. How can we accept the moral equivalent in the world of publishers and writers? Is it because the bottom line has become more valuable than literature itself?
+Robert S. April
+New York
+To the Editor:
+My reaction to Judith Shulevitz’s article was to find my own contracts with American and Spanish publishers to see if I could find a morality clause. Aside from a vague commitment to my Spanish publisher, in the six contracts we have signed, to avoid offending someone on purpose, I am glad to report that I can write what I want, and my publisher will publish it, as long as she likes it, and will not be penalized for behaving in ways society deems inappropriate.
+My two contracts with City Light Books in San Francisco did not ask me to be “moral.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published “Howl,” by Allen Ginsberg , and went to trial to defend his right to publish “obscene” poetry, would not include a morality clause in any of his contracts. Would Ferlinghetti , like many of us, consider a morality clause immoral?
+Perhaps the poorly called “morality clause” is a sign of these times in which we are in need of protecting ourselves from the risks of what written and visual language bring about: thought and self-inquiry, not just lawsuits.
+Juvenal Acosta
+Oakland, Calif.
+The writer is a novelist.To the Editor:
+Re “Cuomo Scoffs at Plan to Lift Subway Fares” (front page, Jan. 23):
+The political gridlock over New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority — whether to raise fares, and the L train tunnel repairs — pales in comparison to the bigger question of the subway’s longer-term defense against climate change.
+In a better world all sides would work to re-elevate tracks and trains above future mega-floods and surges. After all, the Brooklyn Bridge originally carried trains, and early designs for the George Washington Bridge were all about trains and tracks.
+New buildings are putting emergency generators up top instead of below ground. And, of course, Lower Manhattan used to be served by elevated lines that, when removed, were never replaced as promised by new subways.
+Why do str aphangers have to tolerate stalemate and dysfunction while drivers pay no congestion fees? Liberate the subway riders from flood-prone tunnels!To the Editor:
+“Life After a Heart Attack at Age 38,” by Trymaine Lee (Sunday Review, Jan. 20), is a powerful testament to living as a black person in the United States. All things being equal, black Americans often carry undue — and in this case, unexpected — health burdens because of sustained racial stressors.
+Many will benefit from Mr. Lee’s powerful testimony to the emotions surrounding his heart attack and his recovery. Thankfully, he is able to share his story and bring greater awareness of medical vigilance and personal resilience.
+I, for one, will share this essay with students in my global health class this semester.
+Donna A. Patterson
+Dover, Del.
+The writer is an associate professor and chairwoman of the department of history, political science and philosophy at Delaware State University. She teaches classes on global health, African studies and African-American history.
+To the Editor:
+I’m glad that Trymaine Lee survived his heart attack, but having gone through the same experience at the same age, I would point out two big mistakes he made that could have cost him his life .In the gray depths of a New York winter, it was an aptly gray couple of days at the Metropolitan Opera.
+First, on Thursday, the opening of a revival of the company’s bleak, brooding double bill of Tchaikovsky’s “Iolanta” and Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle,” inspired by black and white film. Then, on Friday, Debussy’s “Pelléas et Mélisande,” which, in Jonathan Miller’s staging, runs the visual gamut from slate to putty. Drab weather, outside and in.
+But the sense of grayishness in the “Iolanta”/“Bluebeard” pairing — and in “Pelléas,” for that matter, almost at the end of its run this season — extended past the designs. Both operas were populated with intelligently, earnestly emoting singers whose voices were often unable to put across a strong sense of character or drama.Gandhi: Around the world, the man who led India into independence is still revered as a peaceful revolutionary. But his halo has dimmed for the Hindu right and lower castes.
+Germany: A panel drawn from the power industry, environmental movement, miners and local interest groups laid out a plan to end the country’s use of coal power within two decades, the most significant national attempt yet to reduce carbon emissions.
+The Holocaust: On her way to visit Auschwitz, our reporter found “Heil Hitler” signs and other Nazi swag at a flea market in Poland, where laws regulating such sales are little enforced.
+Australian Open: In a stunning career revival, Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal for his 15th Grand Slam title. And Naomi Osaka became the first Asian player to clinch a No. 1 ranking globally after defeating Petra Kvitova for her second Grand Slam title.
+Amazon: “Vine Voices” — trusted product reviewers the company has designated since 2007 — have become a powerful yet secretive force on the e-commerce platform.
+Taj Mahal: In an effort to stop mischievous monkeys from attacking tourists near the famous landmark, Indian security guards are turning to an unusual weapon of choice — slingshots.
+#ThankGodIt’sMonday? A new workplace culture has emerged in recent years that glorifies the hustle and encourages employees to put in long hours. Our technology reporter considers whether that’s sustainable.It is not for lack of trying.
+Since the new year, Mr. de Blasio has aimed announcements on health care for undocumented New Yorkers and a new plan for paid vacation at television and news media audiences far beyond the five boroughs. His proposals are a model, he said in television interviews on “The View” and on MSNBC. He promised a series of trips around the country to “preach the gospel” of liberal governance on everything from education to police reform.
+The efforts follow a fund-raising push by Mr. de Blasio last year via a national political action committee, Fairness PAC, that raised $469,000 since he started it in July. He doled out modest sums through the committee for candidates in contested races for governor and Congress, and $25,000 each to the state Democratic parties in Iowa and South Carolina — key presidential primary states.
+“He spent some Q.T. there,” said Mr. Benjamin, referring to the quality time Mr. de Blasio spent in South Carolina in September. Mr. de Blasio dined with the chairman of the state Democratic Party, Trav Robertson, during the visit. He later contributed money to the party, as have other potential candidates, including Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Garcetti.
+Mr. de Blasio continued his push on Thursday, energetically bounding onto the stage at the mayors’ conference for his first address outside New York since his pledge to spread the good word.
+But as a player in the 2020 conversation, Mr. de Blasio does not yet register even among his fellow mayors, where he holds clout as the leader of the nation’s largest city, nor among many strategists.There’s no mystery surrounding how “I Am the Night,” TNT’s new truthy-crime mini-series, came to be. The director Patty Jenkins met and befriended Fauna Hodel, author of a memoir, “One Day She’ll Darken,” about her difficult youth. Not quite a decade later Jenkins made “Wonder Woman,” which made more than $821 million. Et voilà: “I Am the Night,” a long-gestating project “inspired by the life of Fauna Hodel” with Jenkins as a director and executive producer.
+It’s less clear how the six-episode mini-series (beginning Monday), which was created and written by Jenkins’s husband, Sam Sheridan, and stars her “Wonder Woman” collaborator Chris Pine, turned out to be such a lackluster and derivative affair. But we can speculate.
+Hodel’s book was primarily the story of her childhood and teenage years, when she grew up with African-American adoptive parents and thought she was mixed-race, although she was white. It had a sensational kicker: When she learned the truth about her biological parents, she also learned that one of her grandfathers was George Hodel, a prime suspect in the infamously gruesome and unsolved Black Dahlia killing in 1947.
+So the story had two currently hot hooks: struggles with race and identity, on one hand, and a lurid real-life murder mystery, on the other. It was out of balance — George Hodel and the Black Dahlia case were a minor, if highly promotable, part of the book — but screenwriting could fix that.The nature of the elusive graffiti artist’s public works, which often comment on issues like greed, pollution or immigration, leave them prone to theft and vandalism. According to Le Monde, one of his murals in Paris was cut completely from a wall just days after it appeared on it. And in 2013, a work entitled “Slave Labour” vanished from the wall of a London discount store and wound up on auction in Miami, before it was withdrawn and returned to Britain.
+His works have also become more lucrative on the auction circuit over the years. In October, a spray painted work on canvas called “Girl With Balloon” was sold for $1.4 million before it self-destructed thanks to a secret shredder the artist built into its frame.
+In the past, Banksy has encouraged buyers to avoid purchasing public works. “For the sake of keeping all street art where it belongs,” he wrote in a 2008 statement, “I’d encourage people not to buy anything by anybody unless it was created for sale in the first place.”
+In its post on Saturday, the Bataclan reiterated this idea, writing that the work stolen from its door “only has meaning in this place.”
+“It’s the reason that we wish to leave it free, in the street,” it added, “accessible to all.”Anyone who has seen “Casablanca” knows the connection between Portugal and World War II refugees. But few know the story of the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes , who in 1940 saved tens of thousands of lives only to be punished for this heroism by his own government. As we mark Holocaust Remembrance Day on Sunday, we should honor this man who engaged in what one historian called “perhaps the largest rescue action by a single individual during the Holocaust.”
+An aristocratic scion, Mr. Sousa Mendes entered the foreign service after law school and spent years on a whirlwind diplomatic tour taking him from Zanzibar to San Francisco before arriving in the south of France in 1938. Mr. Sousa Mendes was a bon vivant and excelled as a diplomatic host, entertaining luminaries famous across the world like Albert Einstein and King Alfonso XIII of Spain. But with his posting as consul-general in Bordeaux, things took a more serious turn.
+As the winds of war swept across Europe, Portugal’s autocratic prime minister, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, was determined to maintain a strict neutrality. So in late 1939, a couple of months after the German invasion of Poland, the Portuguese Foreign Ministry issued its infamous Circular 14 to all embassies and consulates, announcing new regulations concerning categories of people who would not be issued visas without direct approval from the Foreign Ministry. Those “of undetermined, contested or disputed nationality” were excluded, as were those unlikely to be able to freely return to their home country or support themselves . One category was stark: “Jews expelled from the countries of their nationality.” Circular 14 covered the very refugees for whom passage was a matter of life and death.
+Mr. Sousa Mendes resisted this order from the start. Then in May 1940, the Nazi blitzkrieg swept into France. Tens of thousands of people descended on Bordeaux by train, car, bicycle and even foot. Crowds formed at the Portuguese consulate. Mr. Sousa Mendes cabled Lisbon for instructions. The response: enforce Circular 14.Others see them as important markers of national identity because they were designed by a generation of up-and-coming local architects just after the city-state’s founding in 1965, when the area’s growth was fueled by large-scale urban renewal projects.
+But a few prominent Brutalist landmarks are on the verge of being sold to private developers, which has prompted a last-ditch scramble by enthusiasts to have the buildings protected by conservation laws. It has also set off a thorny debate about what type of architecture is worth saving in the first place.
+Brutalist buildings represent Singapore’s early “hopes and aspirations,” said Darren Soh, an architectural photographer. He said destroying them would add to a sense among many residents of this former British colony that buildings of all kinds are being demolished and replaced too quickly.
+“At some point in time, all this glitz is going to become old,” Mr. Soh said at Golden Mile Tower, referring to the glass towers of the nearby financial district. “What are we going to do then?”In a depressing news cycle, the cover of In Touch Weekly’s Jan. 21 issue was a beautiful sight.
+It was a blast from a less complicated past, with its vintage photograph of a beaming Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt staring out at readers from above the bold headline: “We’re Having a Girl!”
+For some who saw it in the racks, me included, the cover of this supermarket tabloid provided a double dose of joy. Not only was the It Couple of the late 1990s and early aughts back together — they were about to be parents.
+But wait a minute.
+The story rang a bell, and when I looked into it, I found that In Touch had devoted its cover to a similar piece of news back in October, with a story headlined “Brad & Jen Baby Announcement! ‘Our Dream Finally Came True!’” That one included the persuasive-seeming detail that the father-to-be was “designing the nursery in their new home.”
+And what about that other time Ms. Aniston was pregnant? In July, the In Touch cover promised, “Bombshell Pregnancy News!” — and that was just the icing atop the wedding cake of the headline “Brad & Jen: Just Married! Inside the Backyard Ceremony.”While most of Hollywood was busy talking about last week’s Oscar nominations, viewers stepping up to buy tickets said one title more than any others: “Glass.”
+Universal’s M. Night Shyamalan-directed superhero movie earned about $19 million during its second weekend in theaters, comfortably topping the North American box office against two relatively weak newcomers and a slew of holdovers.
+In fact, none of the top three films shifted at all.
+STX’s “The Upside,” starring Kevin Hart and Bryan Cranston, maintained its second-place position with $12.2 million in domestic sales this weekend, its third in theaters.
+[See the complete list of Oscar nominees.]
+And a trident-wielding Jason Momoa defended his territory, with “Aquaman” again landing in third place with about $7.4 million in domestic ticket sales. Overseas, the film made around $7.8 million, bringing its global tally to $1.09 billion, according to Warner Bros. The movie has been in theaters for six weeks.Think of the great patrons of music, and some resonant names come to mind: Nikolaus, Prince Esterhazy, for instance, who for three decades employed Joseph Haydn; or Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, who funded Italian baroque luminaries.
+But cast around for their successors — the most important commissioners of living composers — and you encounter a string of initials: BBC, WDR, SWR.
+The fertile generosity of these public broadcasters (the latter two are Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Südwestrundfunk, regional radio entities with headquarters in Cologne and Stuttgart) is the subject of this year’s Focus Festival at the Juilliard School. It opened on Friday with a stimulating concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble in the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in Manhattan.
+Under the banner “On the Air! A Salute to 75 Years of International Radio Commissioning,” the festival presents five more programs, through Feb. 1, that reveal how much of a lifeline noncommercial radio has become to composers since the end of World War II.“I’m launching an exploratory committee for president.” Senator Elizabeth Warren could be fighting President Trump for the keys to the White House in 2020. But the two already have a long history of trading barbs. “She is a ‘goofus.’” “Wannabe tyrant.” Here’s how Elizabeth Warren has faced off against Donald Trump. In the 2016 election, Warren gleefully played the role of attack dog for the Democrats, taunting Trump on Twitter and in speeches. “A small, insecure money-grubber who doesn’t care who gets hurt, so long as he makes a profit off it. Donald Trump is worried about helping poor little Wall Street. Let me find the world’s smallest violin to play a sad, sad song.” After Trump went after a federal judge because of his Hispanic heritage — “He’s a Mexican. We’re building a wall between here and Mexico —” it was Warren who went on the attack. “Trump is picking on someone who is ethically bound not to defend himself. Exactly what you would expect from a thin-skinned racist bully.” And at the Democratic National Convention, Warren told liberals that Trump had ripped off ordinary Americans. “But he filed business bankruptcy six times, always to protect his own money, and stick the investors and contractors with the bill. And for one low, low price, he’ll even throw in a goofy hat.” But it was her fight with Trump over her claim of Native American heritage that got the most attention. “And Massachusetts is represented by Pocahontas, right? Pocahontas. They call her ‘Pocahontas.’ I’ve got more Indian blood in me than Pocahontas, and I have none. I mean — sadly, I have none. But I have more than she does.” “Hi. This is Elizabeth Warren.” Trump’s unrelenting mockery prompted Warren to release the results of a DNA test that she says is proof of her ancestry. The announcement largely backfired. She apologized to the Cherokee Nation for taking the DNA test. “My mother was born in eastern Oklahoma.” But the feud between Warren and Trump continues. “President Trump’s actions and instincts align with those of authoritarian regimes around the globe. He embraces dictators of all stripes. He cozies up to white nationalists. He undermines the free press and incites violence against journalists.” As the 2020 presidential race heats up, one thing is clear — the skirmishes could get nastier.Still, Paul, Weiss is no exception to the broader pattern across big law: the share of partners who are women and people of color is much smaller than the number reflected in the ranks of associates, or those starting law school, not to mention the general population.
+“I fear that African-American partners in big law are becoming an endangered species,” said Theodore V. Wells Jr., a black partner at Paul, Weiss and one of the country’s most prominent litigators.
+The LinkedIn image was a stark illustration of what can happen when promotion decisions are relationship-driven and concentrated in the hands of white-male rainmakers, even in workplaces with a commitment to diversity.
+“If you’re arguing that you’re better than most firms, it’s not a good argument,” said Tsedale Melaku, a sociologist at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York who studies law firms. “Because most firms have a very difficult time actually bringing real diversity and inclusion into those spaces.”
+Diversity remains an unfulfilled promised in a variety of elite industries, including tech and finance as well as at big media companies like The New York Times.
+More than 20 women and people of color interviewed for this article described obstacles to achieving diversity at Paul, Weiss. Many said that opportunities to be groomed for partner are harder to come by for women and minorities. Even as their work shined, some said, they failed to break into the good graces and social circles of the firm’s top lawyers, who must champion those hoping to earn a lucrative spot as a partner.
+“There are white males at the firm that are visibly being given more time in business development opportunities and client contact,” said a female minority lawyer at Paul, Weiss who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. “They’re clearly being cultivated.”The rate of scoring on power plays in the N.H.L. has risen steadily for the past five seasons. One of the main reasons for this is an increasingly popular offensive formation that gives scorers many more options — and goaltenders many more headaches.Winnipeg Jets right wing Patrik Laine honed his powerful right-handed shot as a youngster in his backyard in Tampere, Finland, where he would fire pucks at soda cans after watching YouTube clips of his childhood idol, the Washington Capitals’ Alex Ovechkin.
+And like Ovechkin, Laine has found offensive potency on the power play. Since the start of last season, Laine, 20, leads the N.H.L. in man-advantage goals — even if his powerful shot has become detrimental to special-teams practice in morning skates.
+“It’s why we rarely work on our power play in practice, because we have three guys run away from the net, and rightfully so,” Jets Coach Paul Maurice said. “The goalie sometimes, too.”
+Aggregate power-play success rates in the N.H.L. have been on the rise over the last five seasons, peaking at 20.2 percent a year ago. That number and this season’s 20 percent mark so far are the highest since the 1989-90 season. With more than half of this season completed, four teams are on pace to rank among the top 50 single-season power-play rates in league history: the Tampa Bay Lightning (29.5 percent, sixth), the Boston Bruins (27.2 percent, tied for 25th), the Florida Panthers (26.8 percent, 34th) and the Jets (26.0 percent, 46th).MELBOURNE, Australia — The first tennis player to capture Novak Djokovic’s imagination was a big-serving American with a beautiful one-handed backhand. A grade-school-aged Djokovic, living in the Serbian mountain resort town of Kopaonik, watched on television as Pete Sampras won one of his seven Wimbledon titles, and he fell madly in love with tennis.
+“I did not have a tennis tradition in my family,” Djokovic said, adding, “To me it was definitely a sign of destiny to start playing tennis, to aspire to be as good as Pete.”
+Djokovic tried to emulate Sampras’s game, right down to the one-handed backhand, before his first coach, Jelena Gencic, encouraged him to switch to both hands because that was his natural stroke. But on other things, Djokovic refused to budge.
+Most significantly, Djokovic never abandoned the belief that he would grow up to be the best men’s player in the world, like Sampras, who held the year-end No. 1 ranking for a men’s record six years beginning in 1993, when a 6-year-old Djokovic began playing tennis in earnest.After school and on weekends, he knocked on hundreds of doors in an attempt to reach every registered Republican in his district, which covers one full county and parts of three others. He won his party’s primary by 45 percentage points in May.
+“In the beginning, I knew the odds were against him,” said Andrew Gilson, who taught Mr. Hanna in Advanced Placement government class. Mr. Gilson assumed that his student was running mainly to gain experience for later in his career.
+But Mr. Gilson’s opinion changed after Mr. Hanna’s landslide victory in the primary. “Well, maybe he’s got a shot here,” he recalled thinking. “Things were so fickle and fluid at the moment in politics, and even nationally.”
+Mr. Hanna then toppled Mr. Lynch in the general election in November, winning by 25 percentage points. “It was kind of a surprise,” Mr. Gilson said, pointing out that the rural district is predominantly older, white and conservative. Voters are mostly focused on the economy, he said, while age and race are marginal issues.DAVOS, Switzerland — Men attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, this year were worried about a lot of things. A global economic slowdown. Threats to cybersecurity. Populism. War.
+And, several acknowledged at the meeting this past week, mentoring women in the #MeToo era.
+“I now think twice about spending one-on-one time with a young female colleague,” said one American finance executive, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the issue is “just too sensitive.”
+“Me, too,” said another man in the conversation.
+The #MeToo movement, which burst into the spotlight in the fall of 2017, bringing down powerful figures in Hollywood, the media, politics, sports and more, continues to reverberate 15 months later. It has empowered women to speak up about harassment in the workplace and forced companies to take the issue more seriously. More than 200 prominent men have lost their jobs, and nearly half of them were succeeded by women.
+But in one unintended consequence, executives and analysts say, companies seeking to minimize the risk of sexual harassment or misconduct appear to be simply minimizing contact between female employees and senior male executives, effectively depriving the women of valuable mentorship and exposure.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A man and woman walked out of a subway car at the 51st Street station in Manhattan and darted into the next one on the same train. A plainclothes police officer noticed.
+It was rush hour on a Tuesday evening in September on the busy No. 6 line. The officer watched as the woman dipped her hand into a commuter’s purse while her partner stood in front of her, shielding her from view, according to the officer’s affidavit. The woman lifted out a wallet, and the officer and his partners closed in.
+She threw the wallet to the ground, and the commuter quickly identified it as hers. The woman, Jenny Gomez Velandia, 27, and her accomplice, John Diaz-Albarracin, 31, were arrested, according to a criminal complaint. What seemed like a routine pickpocketing had been thwarted.
+But the suspects were not routine. Unlike most pickpockets, they had no criminal history in New York City. They were not locals. They were from Colombia and had come to New York for the purpose of stealing wallets on subways, one of several international pickpocket rings to descend on the transit system in 2018, the police said.After a 4-12 season, the Jets were expected to overhaul their staff. But few expected the team to land perhaps the most controversial figure in the N.F.L. coaching ranks.
+Enter Gregg Williams, the Jets’ new defensive coordinator, whose credentials include a Super Bowl ring with the New Orleans Saints in 2009; a surprisingly positive run as the interim coach of the Cleveland Browns this season; and, not to be forgotten, a role as the face of one of the ugliest scandals to tarnish the image of the N.F.L. in the last decade.
+For the Jets, mired in one of their trademark periods of borderline irrelevance, he has been brought in to reform an undisciplined defense and counterbalance Adam Gase, the newly hired coach, who at 40 is one of the league’s youngest, most innovative offensive minds.
+Williams’s reputation as a firebrand, however, carries significant risks for a franchise frequently plagued by off-field distraction.Millions of Americans have come to count on tax refunds to fuel their spending in the waning days of winter. But as income tax filing season opens on Monday, a sweeping tax code overhaul and the lingering effects of a government shutdown could squeeze taxpayers’ refund checks and delay them, too.
+The monthlong government shutdown coincided with one of the Internal Revenue Service’s busiest times, and while 46,000 employees were called back to work without pay, many did not show up. Many taxpayers calling with questions faced delays of over an hour. While furloughed federal workers will return to their jobs on Monday, it will take time to get parts of the I.R.S. running smoothly again. And the workers’ time on the job could be brief, with a temporary measure funding the government expiring in three weeks.
+Even before the shutdown, big questions loomed about this year’s tax season. The $1.5 trillion tax overhaul that took effect at the beginning of 2018 lowered individual income tax rates, doubled the standard deduction and eliminated or capped many personal exemptions and tax breaks, such as the state and local tax deduction. All told, the overhaul threw a cloud of confusion over the correct amount to withhold in advance from workers’ paychecks.
+The Treasury Department was given discretion to set new withholding levels, which I.R.S. officials finished early last year to help taxpayers ensure they would not have too much — or too little — held back from their paychecks.Updated: Jan. 31, 2019
+Students
+1. After looking closely at the image above, think about these three questions:
+• What is going on in this picture?
+• What do you see that makes you say that?
+• What more can you find?
+2. Next, join the conversation by clicking on the comment button and posting in the box that opens on the right. (Students 13 and older are invited to comment, although teachers of younger students are welcome to post what their students have to say.)
+3. After you have posted, try reading back to see what others have said, then respond to someone else by posting another comment. Use the “Reply” button or the @ symbol to address that student directly.
+Each Monday, our collaborator, Visual Thinking Strategies, will facilitate a discussion from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eastern time by paraphrasing comments and linking to responses to help students’ understanding go deeper. You might use their responses as models for your own.Maj. Charles S. Kettles, an Army helicopter commander in the Vietnam War, led an extraordinary rescue operation that saved the lives of dozens of airborne troops who had been ambushed by North Vietnamese soldiers in May 1967. President Barack Obama would later describe the incident as “like a bad Rambo movie.”
+Major Kettles was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s highest citation for valor after the Medal of Honor, in 1968.
+But the story of his heroism and those of his fellow helicopter crewmen remained largely unknown beyond military circles for nearly half a century.
+That changed on July 18, 2016, when President Obama presented Mr. Kettles, a retired lieutenant colonel, with the Medal of Honor at the White House.Mr. Green and Mr. Zimmer, who remained in New York, embarked on what Mr. Zimmer called a “long-distance relationship,” working together over Skype. In 2008, they moved to a two-bedroom apartment in Palo Alto, Calif. Neither drew a salary in the first three years of building Zimride, and each contract they sold to a college was celebrated with a trip to Ikea for Swedish meatballs, Mr. Zimmer said.
+In 2011, Zimride raised $6 million. But as a web service, it was caught flat-footed by the rise of smartphones and mobile apps. In 2012, Mr. Green decided to spin out of Zimride a mobile, peer-to-peer ride-hailing service, calling it Lyft.
+Instead of just pairing students for long-distance rides, Lyft would put drivers together with riders on public streets, in real time. Mr. Zimmer came up with the idea to emblazon the cars with pink mustaches; Mr. Green encouraged passengers to greet their drivers with a fist bump, to keep the community feeling of Zimride.
+At the time, ride-hailing wasn’t legal, and only licensed drivers could pick up passengers on public streets. Ann Miura-Ko, a partner at the venture capital firm Floodgate, who had invested in Zimride and sits on Lyft’s board, recalled that some board members had been doubtful about the change — but that Mr. Green had been confident.
+“Someone asked, ‘Will this really work?’ And he wasn’t just sure, he was positive,” she said.
+But Mr. Green didn’t reckon with one issue: Uber. At the time, Uber, run by Travis Kalanick, had positioned itself as a luxury service for the wealthy that used only licensed drivers, unlike Lyft’s lower-cost service. In 2013, Uber published a white paper outlining the risks of peer-to-peer ride-hailing, a way to elbow Lyft out of the market.
+“They were trying to get the whole category shut down behind the scenes,” Mr. Green said. “They didn’t want competition.”
+Uber officials met with California regulators about the matter. As for Mr. Green, several current and former regulators and lawmakers who oversee ride-sharing in California said they had never worked with him, because Mr. Zimmer was often the one who communicated with officials.“Border security and immigration issues are important, and we should deal with them, but we can deal with several important issues at the same time,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. “We can’t put the rest of the business of government on hold while these issues, important though they are, are resolved.”
+For House Democrats, the return to normal governance provides a window to reclaim some of the attention the shutdown drained from the initial rollout of their legislative agenda. House Democratic leaders had insisted when they took control early this month that the shutdown would not affect their carefully choreographed agenda rollout. But it did.
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and her allies plan to hold a ceremony on Wednesday to formally reintroduce the Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure intended to equalize pay between men and women that Democrats have tried to enact for 20 years. Like other bills under consideration in the House, it is unlikely to be taken up by the Republican-controlled Senate, but it is a key piece of Democrats’ messaging to voters ahead of the 2020 elections.
+Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Trump also are likely to renew discussion in the coming days about a date to reschedule the president’s State of the Union address, which was previously scheduled for Tuesday and became a casualty of the shutdown. Last week, Ms. Pelosi rescinded her invitation for the president to address Congress while the government was still shuttered, and has said subsequently that the two sides will work to find an agreeable date in the future to allow time to prepare.
+On the House floor, Democrats will bring up a vote on legislation that would give nonmilitary federal workers a pay raise in line with the pay increase members of the military have received. The legislation, if it became law, would override an executive order issued by Mr. Trump a week into the shutdown that froze civilian federal pay.
+The House Armed Services Committee will hold a hearing on Tuesday about the cost and rationale behind the deployment by Mr. Trump of thousands of active duty troops to the southern border. Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the committee’s chairman, said in a statement that “there has not been adequate justification for the use of our military personnel in this way.”4:31
+After the Storm, a Fight for Survival in Mozambique
+0:57
+Madrid Struggles With Heaviest Snowfall in 50 Years
+1:41
+Ugandan Police Harass Opposition Candidate
+0:50
+E.U. Secures 300 Million Additional Doses of Pfizer-BioNTech Vaccine
+0:42
+‘Angry and Sad,’ Merkel Says of Capitol Mob Attack
+0:51
+‘We Believe in the Strength of American Democracy,’ Macron Says
+0:43
+Britain Scrambles to Battle the Virus
+0:46
+Merkel Extends Coronavirus Lockdown in Germany
+1:35
+It’s Back to Lockdown for Britain as Cases Soar
+1:20
+Scotland Will Go Into Lockdown After Coronavirus Variant Spread
+1:31
+The World Says Goodbye to 2020
+1:27I met Mekas in the late 1980s after I started writing for The Voice about avant-garde cinema. He recognized that my last name is Lithuanian, which obviously amused him. He was a vibrant, persistent presence whether in the audience at a screening or at Anthology Film Archives, the cinematheque he co-founded. Over the years, I wrote about his work and in 2005 interviewed him just before he left for the Venice Biennale, where he represented Lithuania. He was 82, filled with plans and, he animatedly confided, in love. Later, I sent him a newspaper article about the ship, the General Howze, that brought him to the United States.
+He was 26 when he and Adolfas landed in New York in 1949 along with 1,352 other displaced persons. The brothers moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Jonas worked in manufacturing in Long Island City. He visited museums, got fired, struggled, watched “The Blood of a Poet,” bought a Bolex 16-millimeter camera. “In Hollywood, it’s much simpler: it’s done with money,” he wrote in 1950. “But we are trying to do it with our own last miserable pennies.” People said that the cinema made him mad. “But today, if you don’t want to sell yourself for money and work work work,” he wrote, and if you dreamed of being an artist, you had to become mad.
+Image Mekas’s memoir, which drew criticism that he distorted his history under the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. Credit... Spector Books
+He wrote about his early days in his hauntingly elegiac memoir “I Had Nowhere to Go,” a collection of diary entries that cover 1944 to 1955 and that he began while in a Nazi labor camp. Published in 1991, the memoir opens with some background about his early life in Lithuania, the Nazi occupation, and the brothers’ departure and detention. Mekas wrote that before he was interned, he had engaged in “various anti-German activities.” He also wrote that he didn’t know anymore “is this truth or fiction,” a thread that Michael Casper amplified in a 2018 article in The New York Review of Books that accused Mekas of distorting his history.
+The grim charges are that Mekas supported the Nazi occupation and worked for Nazi publications, although Casper writes that none of Mekas’s writing was anti-Semitic. Mekas and his circle saw the Germans as liberating them from the Soviets; and he characterized the newspapers as provincial, not Nazi. Casper wrote that “Mekas’s life during the war years was more complicated than he makes it out to be.” In a response, the art critic Barry Schwabsky lamented that Mekas had written for these papers and noted his memory lapses, but also wrote that “Mekas’s own explanation for his inaccuracies — the trauma of living amidst so many murders, and the need to respond to them as a poet if at all — seems worthy of more respect.”
+This seems right and fair, and I don’t believe the revelations lessen Mekas’s work. Casper agrees. “As for Mekas’s films,” he wrote, “the truth of his life does not diminish the beauty of his work; it complicates and even enhances it.” I wonder what Mekas would make of that enhancing comment. It is painful to think that the last year of his life was clouded by this. It is also hard not to wish that he had made other choices when he was young and joined the partisans in the woods. But he didn’t. “If you want to criticize me for my lack of ‘patriotism’ or ‘courage,’” he wrote in his memoir, “you can go to hell!” Instead, he was in a Nazi labor camp and he survived.
+In time, he found his way to New York, the home where he made films and history. This brings me back to Mekas’s line about making films to live, which he delivers in “Walden” over images of a wedding, an event that can seem less interesting to him than the laughing, smoking and chatting people around the couple. The darkly colored sequence is jagged-looking and often out of focus, and the quick cutting and rapid, agitated camera movements at times turn it into an impressionistic blur. Mekas utters his film-live comment, pauses and then repeats it with a crucial difference. “I make home movies, therefore I live,” Mekas says, “I live, therefore I make home movies.” Only recently, while rewatching “Walden,” did I finally grasp the full implications of his use of “home movies,” and how for him these two words had become inseparable.MONDAY PUZZLE — Alert the media! The crossword puzzle constructor Thomas van Geel makes his New York Times Crossword debut today, but that’s not even the best part. The best part is that he lives in Natick, Mass. I don’t remember the last time I was this excited about a debut for entirely geographic reasons. This is too good to be true.
+As some of you know, a Natick in puzzle solving is when two obscure proper nouns cross each other with little hope of the solver getting either one. It was coined by Rex Parker, and is based on the Massachusetts town.
+Anyway, we begin our solving week with a theme that may present a challenge for beginners on a Monday, but there have been enough themes like this early in the week for it to be something you’ve run into at least once. The upside of this is that early-week solvers get more of an “Aha!” moment.
+So we’re already off to a good start. Which, as always, is a hint but not a spoiler.
+Tricky Clues
+Easy, easy, easy. You’ve got this. Just a couple of things:
+30A: “Extra job in the gig economy,” like driving for Uber or Lyft, is familiarly known as a SIDE HUSTLE, which makes its New York Times Crossword debut today. Great, crunchy phrase.Three main themes emerge in the book in relation to Mr. Trump.
+Mr. Trump is less of a cartoon figure than he is in most accounts contained in new books about the White House. But Mr. Christie describes him as averse to interpersonal conflict with people he likes, needlessly nasty to some subordinates and prone to trusting people he should not.
+Mr. Kushner, whose power has grown recently, appears as a shadow campaign manager and chief of staff in the White House, often giving his father-in-law questionable and problematic advice, according to the book, on topics including Mr. Flynn; how Democrats would perceive the firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director; his initial support for the campaign chairman, Paul Manafort; and how West Wing and key cabinet jobs were filled.
+And a number of unqualified figures attached themselves to Mr. Trump and pandered to Mr. Kushner, Mr. Christie said, particularly after he was dismissed from the transition team. One was Mr. Manafort, who bluntly told Mr. Christie in the spring of 2016 that he was succeeding over a rival campaign aide “because I’m smart enough to agree with Jared, and he is not.”
+On Feb. 14, 2017, Mr. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, had lunch scheduled with the president. It happened to be the day after Mr. Flynn — whom Mr. Christie did not back for the national security adviser role — was dismissed for lying to the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Mr. Kushner decided to attend.
+As Mr. Kushner tucked into his “typical salad,” Mr. Christie wrote, the president said to him, “This Russia thing is all over now, because I fired Flynn.” Mr. Christie said that he started laughing, and the president asked why.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A New York City police union has been criticized for comparing a professional football player to an animal after the authorities said he punched a sergeant and refused to pay his cab fare in Queens.
+The union, the Sergeants’ Benevolent Association, on Saturday said on Twitter that Trevor Bates, a linebacker for the Detroit Lions, acted “beyond that of a wild animal.” The tweet drew outcry from people who believed the language used in the statement was inappropriate.
+Joo-Hyun Kang, the director of Communities United for Police Reform, a coalition of grass-root and civil liberties groups, called the union’s characterization of Mr. Bates “racist” and said it fit a pattern of union officials using racist language to target black people. She pointed out that just last week, the head of the city’s rank-and-file officers’ union referred to a 16-year-old sentenced for dragging a police officer outside a car, leaving him with critical injuries, as a “mutt.”
+“If the allegations against Bates, including not paying his cab fare are true, he should be held accountable. But the constant use by N.Y.P.D. unions of racist dog whistles to dehumanize and criminalize black communities must be condemned, and end,” she said.KABUL, Afghanistan — When Rahima Jami heard that the Americans and the Taliban were close to a peace deal, she thought about her feet.
+Ms. Jami is now a lawmaker in the Afghan Parliament, but back in 1996, when Taliban insurgents took power, she was a headmistress — until she was forced out of her job and told she could leave her home only in an ankle-length burqa.
+One hot day at the market, her feet were showing, so the religious police beat them with a horse whip until she could barely stand.
+Horror stories at the hands of enforcers from the Taliban’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice are a staple for any educated Afghan woman over age 25 or so. Now those women have a new horror story: the possibility that American troops will leave Afghanistan as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.“They were disappointed that these students were not taking the opportunity to improve their English and were being so impolite as to have a conversation that not everyone on the floor could understand,” Professor Neely wrote in the email. “To international students, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE keep these unintended consequences in mind when you choose to speak Chinese in the building.”
+She added that she had the utmost respect for international students. “That being said,” she wrote, “I encourage you to commit to using English 100% of the time” in a professional setting.
+The university confirmed the authenticity of the email, which was widely shared on social media.
+In February 2018, Professor Neely sent a similar email, which a university spokesman also verified. In that email, she acknowledged that living and studying in a foreign country was a “tremendous undertaking,” but relayed that faculty members were concerned about students speaking foreign languages in the department’s break rooms.
+“Speaking in your native language in the department may give faculty the impression that you are not trying to improve your English skills and that you are not taking this opportunity seriously,” she wrote. “As a result, they may be more hesitant to hire or work with international students because communication is such an important part of what we do.”
+In her letter, Dr. Klotman, the dean, apologized to students and said she had asked the university’s Office for Institutional Equity to conduct a “thorough review.”The Trump administration on Sunday lifted sanctions against the business empire of Oleg V. Deripaska, one of Russia’s most influential oligarchs.
+Congressional Democrats had tried to block the move this month, assailing it as a capitulation to the Kremlin and a key ally of President Vladimir V. Putin. But they failed to win enough Republican support to enforce the sanctions.
+The Treasury Department had announced the sanctions against Mr. Deripaska, six other oligarchs and their companies in April as retaliation for Russia’s “malign activity” around the world.
+Most of the sanctions went into effect, including against Mr. Deripaska personally. But their implementation was repeatedly delayed against Mr. Deripaska’s giant aluminum company, Rusal, as well as two linked firms, including EN+, the holding company that owned much of Rusal. The companies financed a sophisticated legal and lobbying campaign arguing that the sanctions would disrupt the aluminum market and damage companies in the United States and allied countries.“Black Panther” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” were the big winners Sunday night at a SAG Awards ceremony that spread the bounty among several films and television shows.
+[READ: See the 2020 SAG Award nominations.]
+Chadwick Boseman, speaking for the “Black Panther” cast, which took the SAG equivalent of best picture, said that he was often asked if he expected the Marvel superhero film to be such a blockbuster. (It has earned $1.3 billion globally.) He said the Nina Simone song “To be Young, Gifted and Black” came to mind as he thought about the lack of diversity in most Hollywood films. “We know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on,” he continued. But “Black Panther,” he said, meant that “we could be full human beings in the roles that we were playing, that we could create a world that could exemplify a world we wanted to see.”
+“Mrs. Maisel” swept the comedy honors, including outstanding comedy series ensemble, and best comedy actress and actor for Rachel Brosnahan, who plays the title character, and Tony Shalhoub, who plays her father. “This Is Us,” the NBC melodrama, took best drama series ensemble.
+There were few overtly political moments Sunday evening, which more often focused on guild issues. Patricia Arquette, named best actress in a mini-series for “Escape at Dannemora,” thanked Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Russia’s 2016 election interference, as she left the stage. But she drew much more applause from fellow union members when she called out production companies that didn’t pay performers overtime.HOUSTON, British Columbia — Amid vast forests of spruce, pine and poplar trees, deep in the interior of British Columbia, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived at a small bridge this month to clear a group of First Nations people who had set up a blockade across a narrow, gravel logging road.
+Dozens of officers, some equipped in military-style tactical uniforms and carrying semiautomatic rifles, stared across a plywood and barbed wire roadblock as the Wet’suwet’en people and their supporters gathered behind it. A helicopter circled overhead, and police boats were deployed on the pristine Morice River running nearby the protest site.
+“You’re trespassing on Wet’suwet’en land,” Molly Wickham yelled at the police. She is the spokeswoman for the Gitdumden checkpoint, as the blockade and surrounding encampment is known, after one of the clans of the Wet’suwet’en people who claim this part of the province.
+But the officers ignored her and started to systemically dismantle the blockade, cutting the wire and pushing against the wooden structure, testing for weak spots. Three protesters had locked their arms to it, and the pressure hurt, causing them to cry out.A barrier-breaking prosecutor with a love for grilling — “Question, I will repeat” — roasting and music. “One nation under a groove, getting down —” California Senator Kamala Harris has joined the race for the White House. “I’m running for president of the United States. And I’m very excited about it. I’m very excited about it.” So who is she? Harris has a history of being the first. “You may be the first to do many things, but make sure you’re not the last.” In 2010, she was the first woman and person of African and South Asian descent to become California’s attorney general. “I decided to become a prosecutor because I believed that there were vulnerable and voiceless people who deserved to have a voice in that system.” And in 2016 she became the first black senator from California. “So my question to you —” Harris serves on four Senate committees, and is perhaps best known for her tough questions. “It makes me nervous.” “Is that a no?” “Is that a yes?” “Can I get to respond please, ma’am?” “No, sir.” “No, no.” She’s moved to the left in recent years. But her political message remains broad, stressing unity and togetherness. “We are all in this together.” She has defended immigrants’ rights, as well as public schools and Medicare for All. But her signature issue is criminal justice reform. “Crime is not a monolith. We cannot have a one-size-fits-all approach to criminal justice policy.” Critics on her left have called her record into question, arguing that she failed to embrace progressive reforms during her tenure as district attorney and California’s attorney general. So, what’s her dynamic with President Trump? Harris has voted against more Trump administration nominees than most of her peers. She has called Trump’s border wall: “his vanity project.” And the government shutdown: “a crisis of leadership.” For now, Trump has said little about her. So, what are her chances? Political strategists believe Harris may be better positioned to build coalitions than some of her party rivals. “This is our house.” But despite strong initial fund-raising numbers and a liberal donor network in her home state, she’s stagnated in the polls. As a relative newcomer to national politics, many voters may be waiting to hear more from Harris before making up their minds. “I voted.”Young Americans favor aggressive action, now, to slow climate change. But the Republican Party — which wins elections with strong support from older voters — has vetoed any such action. As a result, greenhouse gases keep spewing into the atmosphere, and the climate crisis is likely to be far worse than it needs to be. Today’s young Americans will be left to suffer the consequences and bear the costs.
+Last week, one of those young Americans — somebody who qualifies as an older millennial — announced that he was running for president: the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., Pete Buttigieg. A Navy veteran and Rhodes scholar who’s been praised by Barack Obama, Buttigieg (“BOOT-edge-edge”) is a rising star in Democratic politics. But of course he is a long shot to win the nomination. He is the mayor of a moderate-size city, after all.
+And yet I think his candidacy is important, because it has the potential to influence the entire campaign. Buttigieg kicked off his run by talking about “intergenerational justice” and made clear that he would focus sharply on the future. After we spoke on Friday, I looked at my notes and discovered he hadn’t said “Trump” once.
+During our conversation, I asked him how he hoped to win over older Americans — who, to their credit, vote at much higher rates than the young — and he told me an intriguing story. When he first ran for mayor of South Bend in 2011, he had the money to conduct only one poll. In it, his team asked voters how they would feel about having such a young mayor. The group most likely to see it as an advantage were the oldest voters.NASHVILLE — The scruffy little dog of indeterminate origin — she’s either a beagle mix or a terrier mix, depending on which veterinarian is guessing — reaches the end of the driveway and sits down. A gentle tug on the leash merely inspires the dog to lower herself completely, her face on her front paws. A treat offered in exchange for progress on this “walk” yields no better results. In the dead heat of August, she flops onto her side, extending all four legs and dropping her head to the blistering asphalt. Her point is clear. This is rescue-dog semaphore for “I would strongly prefer not to leave this yard, thank you very much.”
+I can hardly blame her — she’s new to this house, and she may never have had a house before. Who would willingly abandon her own home, even briefly, if such a boon is new? If such a gift, as far as she knows, is only temporary? She came to the rescue organization as a stray, so no one knows where she’s been or what she’s been through, but she is clearly traumatized.
+Her fear is ubiquitous. She’s afraid of other dogs, of course, and strangers, but also doorways, shoe-clad feet, her own food bowl. Every unfamiliar noise causes her to stiffen, on high alert, and every noise is unfamiliar. She doesn’t bark; she has never barked even once, but she yelps at the slightest unexpected touch. It’s more than a yelp, really. Something between a howl and a piercing scream. Soon I am feeling traumatized myself. My dog screams, and my heart starts to pound: What on earth did I do this time?
+Despite her manifold fears, this damaged little dog is preternaturally gentle — “grandmotherly,” according to her page on the rescue organization’s website. She tries to understand what we want from her, and she noses our hands, apologetic, when she can’t understand. We named her Millie, for our late neighbor who lived a life of quiet kindness.This type of phishing is precisely the kind of threat that two-factor authentication is supposed to protect you against. Unlike so-called dictionary attacks — in which hackers try to guess your password by running through a dictionary of possible choices — forcing people to develop more complicated or longer passwords (a minimum of eight characters with uppercase and lowercase letters, and at least one symbol and one number) does not help at all when someone steals your password via phishing. So the password-complexity requirements that have reigned as a common (and irritating) best practice in every workplace for years are increasingly supplemented by two-factor authentication, to protect you against both dictionary attacks and phishing attacks.
+But it turns out that the one-time codes generated by people’s smartphones or sent via text message and email can also be phished. If you’re the hacker, all it takes is adding a component to your fake Bank of America website so that after you prompt someone for his password, you try to log in to his real Bank of America account using the password he has just provided, triggering a second-factor alert that doesn’t alarm him because he thinks he’s signing into Bank of America too. Then, on your fake phishing site, you prompt him to enter his second-factor code and use it to complete the login.
+The activity in Amnesty International’s report is not even the first time that two-factor authentication has been compromised in that manner. In 2014, an F.B.I. special agent, Elliott Peterson, described how malware distributed by the botnet GameOver Zeus could compromise two-factor authentication protecting bank accounts in the same way.
+The fact that two-factor authentication can be compromised through fairly straightforward, widely used tactics is no reason to stop using it. After all, no security tool is perfect. As long as it significantly decreases the likelihood of account compromises, two-factor authentication is still worth using. But we don’t know a lot about how much two-factor authentication actually helps protect your accounts.
+Google has offered its optional two-step verification system to Gmail users since 2011 but has never released any data about its effectiveness at driving down account compromises. In fact, last year Google switched all of its employees from using the Google Authenticator app for two-factor authentication to physical security-key devices that need to be inserted into a computer port to complete a login. Since making that switch, Google announced last July, none of its employee accounts have been compromised. The announcement seems to imply that the security provided through the app was not regarded as sufficient by the company for its internal accounts, even though it is what many Google users rely on. Should we all be using physical security keys? How much less effective is the Google Authenticator app? We still don’t know (though presumably, Google does).Two years ago this week , President Trump signed an executive order banning travelers from a number of Muslim-majority countries from entering the United States. The fallout has been dire.
+A teenage Syrian girl who survived a bombing and is in urgent need of reconstructive surgery was barred from traveling from Germany to the United States to seek medical treatment. A 7-year-old Somali boy, whose father died, was prevented from reuniting with his mother in the United States. One American citizen was forced to move to Syria in order to live with her husband, who was barred from coming to the United States. In fact, hundreds of people from Yemen alone who had already undergone vetting and received visa approval notices from the State Department have since had those approvals rescinded or been barred from traveling to the United States.
+Our organization, the International Refugee Assistance Project, was among the groups that filed the first challenge to the executive order, and we won a series of injunctions temporarily blocking the ban from being enforced. But in June the Supreme Court upheld a modified version of the ban in a 5-to-4 decision. The majority sided with the Department of Justice, which had claimed that a “robust” waiver process would allow citizens from the blacklisted countries to enter the United States if they met certain reasonable criteria. The Trump administration had cited this as evidence that the travel ban was rooted in national security concerns and not in the discriminatory intent to ban people on the basis of their religion.
+This assurance was a key rationale for the court’s decision. Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion argued that a waiver process would provide humanitarian exceptions to the ban and thus supported “the government’s claim of a legitimate national security interest.” However, in their separate dissents, Justice Stephen Breyer raised serious concerns about the waiver process, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that it was a “sham.”The possibility of Mr. Schultz’s candidacy as an independent has drawn condemnation from Democrats, who said that an independent run would split the vote on Election Day 2020 and hand Mr. Trump a second term.
+“I have two words for Howard Schultz on a potential run for president as an independent: Just don’t,” Tina Podlodowski, chairwoman of the state Democratic Party of Washington, said last week as speculation mounted about Mr. Schultz’s plans. Ms. Podlodowski also appeared on CNN Monday to reiterate her concerns.
+Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress and a former adviser to Hillary Clinton, said on Twitter, “If he enters the race, I will start a Starbucks boycott because I’m not giving a penny that will end up in the election coffers of a guy who will help Trump win.”
+Mr. Schultz said he was well aware of the criticism, but said it was misplaced.
+“I am certainly prepared for the cynics and the naysayers to come out and say this cannot be done,” he said. “I don’t agree with them. I think it’s un-American to say it can’t be done. I’m not doing this to be a spoiler.”
+Asked if he would consider changing his mind and run as a Democrat, he said, “I feel if I ran as a Democrat I would have to be disingenuous and say things that I don’t believe because the party has shifted so far to the left.”
+“When I hear people espousing free government-paid college, free government-paid health care and a free government job for everyone — on top of a $21 trillion debt — the question is, how are we paying for all this and not bankrupting the country?” Mr. Schultz said.BRUMADINHO, Brazil — Two days after a torrent of mud pouring from a ruptured mining dam left at least 58 dead and 305 missing in the Brazilian town of Brumadinho, residents had to evacuate Sunday as a second dam threatened to collapse, spurring panic and outrage at what residents called a lack of accountability for Brazil’s powerful mining industry.
+Sirens sounded before dawn, set off by heavy rains and dangerously high water levels at a dam at an iron ore complex owned by the Brazilian mining giant Vale S.A. Rescue workers looking for survivors from Friday’s disaster turned instead to evacuating residents to higher ground.
+By the end of the day, residents were allowed to return to their homes. But for many Brazilians, this latest warning was further evidence that the system regulating the mining industry is broken, risking people’s lives and endangering the environment.
+Still, few expect the rules to tighten under Brazil’s new president, Jair Bolsonaro, who promised during his campaign to restrict fines and ease regulations on mining and other industries that exploit natural resources.As President Trump presses on with the trade war, observers say he hasn’t wrapped his head around China. The miscalculation is expected to have costs.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.SAN DIEGO — To be the best, you have to beat the best. That’s what Justin Rose did over the past four days to win the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines, protecting his status as the world’s top-ranked golfer.
+After a shaky start Sunday that included three bogeys over his first five holes, Rose recovered to shoot a three-under-par 69 and beat his close friend Adam Scott by two shots. Rose conquered a field that featured 12 of the top 20 players in the world rankings to record his 10th PGA Tour victory, passing Nick Faldo for the most tour wins by a player from England in the modern era.
+Rose, 38, finished with a 72-hole total of 21-under 267, a tournament record since the South Course was redesigned in 2003 and one shot off the overall record of 22 under shared by Tiger Woods (1999) and George Burns (1987). Scott birdied the final four holes to close out a 68 and finish at 19 under. Hideki Matsuyama (67) and Talor Gooch (68) tied for fourth at 16 under.
+The scores were unusually low because recent rain had softened the greens, and there was very little wind coming off the Pacific Ocean.Season 4, Episode 13: ‘Man of Worth’
+“Must you fight the same fight again? Do you not recall how it ends?”
+In the season premiere of the Frasers’ American adventure, “Outlander” prompted big questions: Why bring Claire and Jamie to this place, at this moment in history? To what purpose did they cross the ocean into the tumult of colonial America?
+The season has struggled to answer. For one thing, it spent more narrative energy on bringing familiar faces back into the Frasers’ circle than on giving those characters much to do. Some of those reunions were satisfying, as when Brianna joined her family through the stones. Some were convenient, as when Lord John moved in next door. And then there was Bonnet, whose ability to appear in every aspect of the Fraser story strained credulity.
+All this busy work pushed some characters into the background. Take Ian — particularly noticeable this episode after he agreed to stay with the Mohawk in exchange for Roger. The show made time for a heart-wrenching goodbye, and the actors John Bell and Sam Heughan did a great job. But that moment brought into relief how scattered this season has been. And Claire’s darting in for a last-second goodbye reminded us that she was practically demoted to a supporting act for large stretches of this season.
+That is even more unfortunate considering that when Claire was at the fore, it was usually during strained, and often failed, attempts to engage race issues. Slavery didn’t stop anyone from accepting hospitality at River Run — even Brianna. Jamie honored the Cherokee’s fight against land grabs, only to claim ten thousand acres. When the Cherokee were upset by that, Jamie won them over with a classic white-savior move.The show is lighter as a result, which is not to say it’s less compelling. Ms. Benanti’s scenes with Harry Hadden-Paton, remaining from the original cast as Higgins, are very finely observed, filled with the kind of new detail an extended run encourages.
+That’s even more evident with the other principal holdover, Allan Corduner, as Higgins’s pal Pickering. Together the two men have developed a delightful meta-narrative from glances and gestures that connect the dots of an underwritten relationship.
+[What’s new onstage and off: Sign up for our Theater Update newsletter]
+If the newcomers, other than Eliza, do not have as much opportunity to deliver distinctively original impressions, they make pointed adjustments along the margins. Mr. Burstein, following Norbert Leo Butz as the dustman with the soul of a philosopher, drives home the character’s rhetorical intelligence; I heard, perhaps for the first time, the speech rhythms (“I put it to you, and I leave it to you”) that so impress Higgins.
+And as Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Mr. White brings a full-throated tenor (his “On the Street Where You Live” is terrific) that complements a giddy, almost unbridled enthusiasm. This makes for less of a comment on effete society, as Jordan Donica’s hilariously twitty take on the character suggested, than a satire on the deracination of love.
+But it is the recasting of the smallest principal role that makes the most touching difference, and like everything connected to Ms. Harris’s stage presence, her success as Mrs. Higgins cannot be pinned down. Of course, one is so delighted to see her, at 91, some 67 years after her Broadway debut, carrying on with such aplomb. But it’s more than that. Ms. Harris has found a way into a role that has resisted most previous exploration, and then carried it off with exquisite taste. With little fuss and fewer words, she sketches a woman whose independence and complacency help explain her son’s more toxic versions of each.
+When Higgins, distraught over Eliza’s departure, cries, “What am I to do?” she answers sweetly but without undue sympathy, “Do without, I suppose.” She’s not about to waste her time trying to change someone who does not want to be changed.
+Wanted and unwanted change are exactly what “My Fair Lady,” like “Pygmalion” before it, is about. I mean change in individuals, of course, but also, as this blooming revival and its success make clear, in society. As such, its portrait of bullies and resistance may never wear thin. At least not this year.Try out your new colored pencils on The Swear Word Coloring Book (be warned: there are swear words) to add a little attitude to an otherwise humdrum day.
+Smart speakers
+Impromptu dance parties are a great way to shake up the energy. Instead of digging around your personal collection for something everyone in your household would want to bop to, instruct the digital assistant on your smart speaker to stream your favorite artist’s station or a curated playlist. If you’re a Marie Kondo-type, the speaker can play podcast episodes as you declutter the house, room by room.
+If you’re new to smart speakers and are wondering which is right for you, read Wirecutter’s breakdown here to see if a Google Home or Amazon Echo device is a better fit.
+Baking
+Yes, the holidays have passed, but there’s never a bad time to make holiday cookies!
+Baking is a perfect cabin-fever-busting activity: It’ll keep you just busy enough so you feel occupied and productive, and when you’re done you have delicious treats.
+Wirecutter pulled together everything you need to own — and know — to bake cookies in this comprehensive guide. Pick up the items you’ll need so you’re ready to go next time you’re snowed in.
+Electric kettle
+I used to own a traditional stovetop kettle, but I disliked how intrusive the screeching whistle was. I’d drop whatever I was doing and run to the stove anytime the water boiled. I’ve since switched to an electric kettle and now making warm drinks is a thousand times more chill.
+Wirecutter recommends the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp Cordless Electric Kettle because it is fast, accurate and easy to use (and its 1.7 liter capacity makes preparing drinks for a crowd a breeze). Banish the blahs with a round of hot chocolates, hot toddies or a spontaneous tea party.Season 3, Episode 4: ‘The Hour and the Day’
+“True Detective” has fallen off the wagon.
+For the first two episodes of Season 3, the show had been taking a conservative, back-to-basics approach to the procedural that seemed like a correction to the indulgences of the previous season, which got lost in the tangled psychology of four lead characters who were the same brand of “edgy.”
+Those two episodes, directed by the genre wizard Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room,” “Blue Ruin”), evoked the poverty and fear of its small-town Arkansas backdrop, but they also did the unglamorous work of moving the story forward. Two kids were abducted. One is dead. The other is still missing. The urgency of that situation should be the engine that moves “True Detective” forward, even in the two later timelines, when the cold case has once more become hot.
+But now it has run completely aground. Developments in the case are so slow-moving and diffuse that it’s hard to keep track of them, and most of them are probably red herrings anyway. Dead ends are to be expected in the middle of an eight-hour whodunit, but that doesn’t absolve the series’s creator, Nic Pizzolatto, from the responsibility to keep plugging away. It’s not just the detectives in “The Hour and the Day” who are losing their sense of direction — it’s as if the show itself had unscrewed the cap on a bottle of Jack Daniels and gone for a swim. Maybe it will wake from its stupor and start working the case again, but for now it’s passed out on the couch. And it’s dreaming about the Viet Cong.
+This week’s episode was Pizzolatto’s inauspicious debut as director, though the problems here are mostly with the script, which is credited to him and David Milch, the trailblazing showrunner of “Deadwood” and “NYPD Blue.” It’s impossible to say how much influence Milch wielded, but many of Pizzolatto’s weaknesses are on display here: grossly overwritten dialogue, a leaden understanding of domestic relationships and a tendency to brood alongside his characters.A highly publicized television production of the musical “Rent,” which was supposed to be performed live on Sunday, was forced to broadcast material shot the night before, the actors said in a prerecorded video during the three-hour event.
+The announcement forced the cast to embrace one of the central mantras of a beloved musical about struggling East Village artists living in the shadow of AIDS: “No day but today.”
+In a brief prerecorded video before a commercial break, a cast member confirmed that one of its lead actors, Brennin Hunt, had broken his foot and would not perform. Earlier Sunday, a spokesman for Fox said that Mr. Hunt, who plays Roger — one of the show’s central characters — had been injured while performing on Saturday.
+“Most of what you’ll see tonight will come from last night’s performance,” Jordan Fisher, who plays Mark, said during the prerecorded video. Mr. Fisher added that the cast members had “rallied together to rework the final act” so they could perform it live with Mr. Hunt as well as with the original Broadway cast from the 1996 show.“People already think we are bad girls for dancing. What will happen to us if the Taliban become part of the government?”
+QADRIA AZARNOOSH, a Hazara dancer whose art has been suppressed by cultural conservatives, on the possibility that American troops will leave Afghanistan as part of a peace deal with the Taliban.No corrections appeared in print on Monday, January 28, 2019.
+Errors are corrected during the press run whenever possible, so some errors noted here may not have appeared in all editions.
+To contact the newsroom regarding correction requests, complaints or other comments about our coverage, please email nytnews@nytimes.com or call 1-844-NYT-NEWS (1-844-698-6397).
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+For newspaper delivery questions: 1-800-NYTIMES (1-800-698-4637) or email customercare@nytimes.com.Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg plans to merge the social media platform’s messaging services — WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger — at a time when the company has been scarred by scandal. The services will continue to operate as stand-alone apps but will allow users to communicate across the platforms.
+The Holocaust: On her way to visit Auschwitz, our reporter found “Heil Hitler” signs and other Nazi swag at a flea market in Poland, where regulations on such sales are rarely enforced.
+Spain: The authorities said they had found the body of a 2-year-old boy who fell into a well nearly two weeks ago.
+Gandhi: Around the world, the man who led India into independence is still revered as a peaceful revolutionary. But his halo has dimmed for the Hindu right and lower castes.
+Australian Open: Novak Djokovic beat Rafael Nadal for his 15th Grand Slam title, and Naomi Osaka became the first singles player from Japan to clinch a No. 1 ranking globally after defeating Petra Kvitova for her second Grand Slam title.
+In memoriam: Michel Legrand, the French pianist, arranger and composer of hundreds of film scores and songs, among them “The Windmills of Your Mind,” died at 86.President Trump came away empty-handed for now after the longest federal government shutdown in American history failed to pressure Congress into funding his long-promised border wall, purportedly to stop an inflow of drugs and crime from Mexico.
+But he is not done making his case on immigration.
+On Sunday he rattled off several figures on Twitter about how many undocumented immigrants there are in the United States, how much they cost the country financially and how many had illegally voted in Texas.
+There were already many problems with Mr. Trump’s assertion that undocumented immigrants disproportionately bring with them more drugs and crime. And several experts said they had concerns with the figures he disseminated on Sunday.
+The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
+Noncitizens casting votes in Texas
+In one tweet on Sunday, Mr. Trump said that “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote.” He was citing an investigation that Texas officials had publicized days earlier but that Democrats in the state immediately questioned.“In the Balkans the transition is over,” Remzi Lani, an Albanian political analyst, told me some time ago. But unlike in many post-Communist countries, Mr. Lani didn’t mean a transformation from dictatorship to democracy. “We transitioned from repressive to depressive regimes.” He is right. The old Communists and radical ethnic nationalists are largely gone; in their places is stagnation — economic, social and political.
+The question now is how these depressive regimes fit into a growing geopolitical rivalry.
+A day before his recent visit to Belgrade, Serbia, President Vladimir Putin of Russia expressed his great displeasure with Macedonia’s name change and accused “the United States and certain Western countries” of “destabilizing” the region; the Russian foreign minister, meanwhile, denounced “the willingness of the United States to lead all Balkan states into NATO as soon as possible and to remove any Russian influence in this region.” Russia wants to make clear that this is not what the people in the region want.
+Watching Mr. Putin’s visit to Belgrade and listening to his rhetoric, one couldn’t help but conclude that the confrontation in the Balkans between the West and Russia is changing both in nature and intensity. In the last decade, Russia was actively defending its economic and cultural presence in the region, but it never openly challenged NATO or European Union hegemony. Not anymore.
+At first glance, Russia’s ambitions seem unrealistic. The Balkans remain firmly entrenched in the West: Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Albania and Montenegro are all NATO members and Macedonia is on its way. Every country in the region is either a member of the European Union or aspires to join it. The European Union is far and away the region’s top trading partner, its biggest investor and the preferred destination for emigration. The conventional wisdom is that Russia might be a troublemaker but could hardly be more.A search for family ties takes a dark turn in “I Am the Night” on TNT, and a London publicist finds the humor in detective work in “Agatha Raisin” on Acorn TV.
+What’s on TV
+I AM THE NIGHT 9 p.m. on TNT. Chris Pine and the director Patty Jenkins, who worked together on the megahit “Wonder Woman,” partner again for a limited series inspired by true events. The show, set in 1965, follows Fauna Hodel (India Eisley) as she begins to trace her family origins with the help of the tormented journalist Jay Singletary, played by Pine. They soon discover that her past may be tied to the infamous gynecologist George Hodel (Jefferson Mays), a chief suspect in the gruesome Black Dahlia murder. Dr. Hodel remains an ominous figure whose powerful connections and desire to keep secrets buried may put Fauna and Jay in serious danger as they edge closer to the truth.
+BRESLIN AND HAMILL: DEADLINE ARTISTS (2018) 8 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO Go or HBO Now. In timing that can only be called bittersweet, this documentary highlighting two of New York’s most prolific journalists comes to HBO just a few days after the death of their counterpart Russell Baker. Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill receive a thorough examination of their lives and careers, and how the intersection of the two created stories that resonated with the masses and helped define one of the greatest periods of journalism.The filtered import of foreign imams may look like a good practical solution; in fact, it’s an ideological trap. These imams, even if acting in good faith, can only reinforce communalism in France and work against integration, because they are not French. In the name of laïcité, France is dangerously delegating its Islam to other states.
+Those states benefit. For the Algerian government, the export of imams seems to confirm the country’s return to stability. Saudi Arabia sees proselytizing as a form of soft power. So does Turkey, which appears invested in maintaining a religious lobby abroad.
+The stakes are high, apparently. When last year the Austrian government expelled about 60 Turkish preachers to counter, it said, the creation of “parallel societies” and “political Islam,” Turkey called the move “racist” and “Islamophobic.” When the French government said it wanted to create a distinct “Islam of France,” Algeria — speaking indirectly, via an expert’s op-ed in state media — accused it of “arrogance tinted with ignorance.”
+The import of imams, the foreign financing of mosques — these delegations of power by the French authorities are a dead end: They won’t do enough to stem radicalism in France, and they will do even less to nurture the emergence of, precisely, an Islam of France.
+The president’s office seems to want to overcome all this. But some of the participants in that first meeting convened by Mr. Macron at the beginning of the year reacted with calculated anger before accepting the invitation. Members of the French Council of the Muslim Faith decried the “ colonial administration of Islam. ” It’s a clever conflation: By invoking colonialism, they can leverage guilt as a bargaining chip while maintaining Islam’s communal valence. Why do that? For fear of losing power if France develops a sui generis form of Islam. Harping on Muslims’ status as a once-colonized group is a way of highlighting their ties to their countries of origin, over those to their host country.
+Past attempts to create Muslim councils — the Great Mosque of Paris, the Federation of French Muslims, the Union of Islamic Organizations in France (also known as Muslims of France) — that could effectively represent France’s various Muslim communities have failed. One reason is the rivalry among the groups’ leaders, different confessional strands and foreign governments with ties to immigrant communities. Algeria competes with Morocco, and both of them compete with Turkey and Saudi Arabia: As the journalist Henri Tincq has pointed out on Slate.fr, the Paris Mosque is “loyal to Algeria,” the Federation of French Muslims has “ties to the Muslim World League and Morocco” and the Union of Islamic Organizations in France is “close to the Muslim Brotherhood.”
+It’s difficult to separate Islam from its community and the community from its country of origin without being accused of interference. Whenever the French government tries to manage Islam in France, Algeria says it’s meddling, when in saying so, it is Algeria that is meddling in France’s affairs.L’immigration filtrée d’imams étrangers semble être une bonne solution d’un point de vue technique ; en fait, c’est un piège idéologique. Même s’ils sont de bonne foi, ces imams ne peuvent qu’accentuer le communautarisme en France, et travailler à contresens de l’intégration, car la plupart ne sont pas français. Au nom de la laïcité, la France est en train de déléguer dangereusement son islam à d’autres pays.
+Eux y trouvent leur compte. Pour le gouvernement algérien, cette exportation est l’affirmation de sa stabilité retrouvée. L’Arabie saoudite considère le prosélytisme comme une forme de soft power. La Turquie aussi, pour qui il s’agirait de maintenir un lobby à l’étranger.
+Les enjeux sont importants, apparemment. Lorsque le gouvernement autrichien expulsa une soixantaine d’imams turcs l’année dernière pour, disait-il, contrer les « sociétés parallèles » et « l’islam politique », la Turquie a décrié le « racisme » et « l’islamophobie » du geste. Lorsque le gouvernement français parle d’un « islam de France » distinct, l’Algérie — s’exprimant indirectement en relatant un propos d’expert via son agence de presse officielle — l’accuse « d’une arrogance teintée d’une ignorance ».
+L’importation d’imams, le financement étranger des mosquées — cette espèce de procuration faite par les autorités françaises — est une impasse : elle ne suffira pas à lutter contre le radicalisme en France, et encore moins à faire émerger, justement, un islam de France.
+L’Elysée semble vouloir surmonter tout ceci. Mais certains de ceux qui ont été convoqués à une première réunion avec M. Macron en début d’année ont réagi avec une colère calculée. Avant d’accepter l’invitation, des membres du Conseil français du culte musulman ont dénoncé une « gestion coloniale de l’islam ». L’amalgame est malin : évoquer la colonisation permet de négocier en jouant sur la culpabilisation tout en gardant à l’islam un statut communautaire. Pourquoi ? On redoute de perdre du pouvoir si l’islam devient vraiment français. On veille à garder le statut d’ex-colonisés pour rappeler le lien des musulmans avec leur pays d’origine plutôt qu’avec leur pays d’accueil.
+La création de divers conseils musulmans dans le passé — la Mosquée de Paris, la Fédération des musulmans de France, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France — pour tenter de structurer une représentation efficace a été un échec. Celui-ci s’explique notamment par la lutte de leaderships et de courants d’orthodoxies, et par la concurrence entre les pays d’origine des communautés musulmanes. L’Algérie est en compétition avec le Maroc et les deux sont en rivalité avec la Turquie et l’Arabie Saoudite : « la Mosquée de Paris fidèle à l’Algérie, la Fédération des musulmans de France liée à la Ligue islamique et au Maroc, l’Union des organisations islamiques de France, proche des Frères musulmans, » comme l’indique Henri Tincq dans Slate.fr.
+Difficile de détacher l’islam de la communauté, et la communauté de son pays d’origine, sans être accusé d’ingérence à chaque tentative. Quand la France tenter de gérer l’islam de France, en Algérie on parle d’ingérence, alors qu’il s’agit d’ingérence de l’Algérie dans les affaires de la France.Good Monday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• The longest government shutdown in history inflicted severe political damage on President Trump, dragging down his poll numbers and stirring concern about his ability to navigate a divided government. He now appears without a plan for mounting a strong campaign in 2020.
+• With the shutdown over for now, Congress will hit reset this week, showcasing a Democratic agenda in the House that was overshadowed by the struggle to reopen the government. In both chambers, lawmakers have teed up a high-impact lineup of hearings.
+• As income tax filing season opens, a sweeping tax code overhaul and the lingering effects of the shutdown could squeeze taxpayers’ refund checks — and delay them, too.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.
+_________
+The word eviscerate has appeared in 89 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Oct. 11 in the book review “Waging War From the Oval Office” by Jay Winik:
+How presidents deal with war is the subject of the historian Michael Beschloss’s latest work, a sweeping overview of presidents leading the United States through almost two centuries of conflict. “Presidents of War” is a marvelous narrative that opens with James Madison, the father of the Constitution and a reluctant warrior during the War of 1812, desperately fleeing for his life, his table still set for dinner, while British troops torched Washington. From there, Beschloss takes us through the Mexican War, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II and Korea. He ends with America’s humiliating loss in Vietnam.
+.... One of the book’s more intriguing contributions is in noting that the founders could not have envisioned war in the nuclear age, when the president would have the ability to eviscerate hundreds of millions in less than an hour — all resting on “the whim” of a single person. However, beyond pointing this out, Beschloss says little more. The issue cries out for a treatment of its own.ST. PAUL — Days after nearly dying during cancer treatments, Hunter Cantrell, a 23-year-old university student, made what seemed a quixotic decision: He would run for the Minnesota House of Representatives to plead for affordable health care for all.
+To the shock of nearly everyone, Mr. Cantrell flipped a Republican-held seat in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, and this month, he became one of nearly 1,700 candidates who took the seat of an incumbent in state legislatures across the nation.
+The vast majority of the newcomers are Democrats, and as legislatures started new sessions this month, they were already shifting the debate in a number of states to liberal pledges made during their campaigns, including lowering health care costs, promoting gun control, and expanding access to college.
+Republicans continue to hold majorities in most of the nation’s state capitals, as they have in recent years, but Democrats now control six new legislative chambers, including the Minnesota House of Representatives. Along the way, though, Minnesota — where Republicans hold a narrow majority in the Senate — became the only remaining state in the nation where control of a legislature is divided.After It’s Over
+Dear Diary:
+When Sam and I broke up, I decided to sell everything. New York makes it easy.
+The woman who bought our kitchen table was from Williamsburg. She appeared to be around my age, late 20s, but I could be wrong. She left in an Uber after I detached the legs for her.
+A friend bought a pair of printed fabric chairs for $80. She also took some shelves and a plant. Sam never watered the plants anyway. One time I joked that all of our plants had an absent father. It’s the kind of joke that makes me sad now.
+The blue couch went to two girls from Crown Heights. They were younger than me, but not by much. I told them it was comfortable enough to sleep on if you removed the back cushions. Sam’s dad slept on it when he visited from California.
+The bookshelf went to a former co-worker who lives in Manhattan. I kept the books.
+I sold the night stands to Julia, a hometown friend, someone I knew could handle color. They were bright yellow.As Americans brace for the next presidential campaign — already underway and showing on a screen near you — press pundits are worried about the news media’s readiness for the challenge ahead.
+Will reporters follow the same assumptions that made the outcome in 2016 such a shock? Can pollsters reassure a public that has soured on the power of political forecasting?
+To answer those questions, I turned to a cohort accustomed to diagnosing human foibles: scholars who have expertise in psychology. After all, journalists are basically a bunch of neurotics. And with the 2020 race looming, maybe we could all use some time on the couch.
+“All of us who thought it was inevitable that Trump would lose ignored warning signs that we were wrong,” said Susan Fiske, a professor of social psychology at Princeton.The speculation about terrorism has inspired more than protests. In 2017, a Tennessee man, Robert Doggart, was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison over a plot to recruit a militia and storm the enclave. In a phone call recorded as part of a federal wiretap, Mr. Doggart said, “I don’t want to have to kill children, but there’s always collateral damage.”
+The most recent threat of violence came last week after investigators in Greece, outside Rochester, thwarted an apparent plan concocted by a group who, officials said, had stockpiled 23 firearms and three homemade bombs.
+Three men — Vincent Vetromile, 19, Brian Colaneri, 20, and Andrew Crysel, 18 — were arrested and charged with criminal possession of a weapon and conspiracy, and a fourth person, whose identity was not released because he or she is a minor, was charged as an adolescent with the same offenses.
+It is unclear how the individuals were connected, but three of them had been Boy Scouts. In the days before the plot was uncovered, at least one of them, Mr. Vetromile, shared far-right memes and conspiracy theories about border security and a government scheme to seize weapons. The authorities also said that the defendants had corresponded using Discord, a group chat app created for video gamers that became popular with far-right activists.
+Mr. Vetromile and Mr. Colaneri remain in custody, according to jail records.
+“Just imagine having to wake up and tell your children of such a plot, tell your children that their life was in danger,” said Rashid Clark, Islamberg’s mayor.
+Much of the scrutiny directed at Islamberg centers on the community’s ties to Mr. Gilani, an elusive figure who became more widely known after the 2002 murder of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan. Mr. Pearl, who was reporting on a story about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard C. Reid, was seeking an interview with the sheikh when he was abducted. (The sheikh is not believed to have been involved in the plot, counterterrorism analysts said.)In 2006, a restaurateur in a suburb of Mumbai, India, named a cafe “Hitler’s Cross” and put a swastika in its logo. In 2014, a controversy erupted over a Nazi-themed cafe in Indonesia, as well as an Italian restaurant in Taiwan that had named a pasta dish with German sausage “Long Live the Nazis.”
+Also that year, the South Korean pop band Pritz danced in outfits that resembled Nazi uniforms.
+And in 2016, a high school parade in Taiwan featured students dressed as Nazi soldiers. That echoed an earlier Nazi-themed school parade in Thailand, and foreshadowed a controversy in Taiwan last year over a swastika that hung outside a hair salon.
+Typically, such controversies over Nazi or Hitlerian iconography in Asia are followed by humble apologies, but also a recognition that local awareness of Nazis and the Holocaust is inadequate.
+After the Nazi-themed school parade in Taiwan, for example, a local Jewish center expressed regret about the use of Nazi imagery and logos. But the center’s chairman also said the act was “not meant to be an act of anti-Semitism” and that Holocaust education in Taiwan was “extremely limited.”
+Mr. Li, a historian who specializes in Holocaust pedagogy, said that some school curriculums across Asia touched on 20th century atrocities, including the Japanese Army’s notorious 1937 massacre in the Chinese city of Nanking (now known as Nanjing) and the treatment of the tens of thousands of “comfort women” who were detained and raped by Japanese soldiers before and during World War II.
+But there is little education in the region about genocides generally and the Holocaust in particular, Mr. Li added, partly because many teachers are unsure how to tell students about the scale of the horrors.Before reading the article:
+Watch the above video, “Trump Announces Deal to End Shutdown.” What does President Trump say is the “fair deal” he is looking for from Congress? What does he say he will do if this deal is not reached? When does he say he will take this action?
+Now, read the article, “Trump Signs Bill Reopening Government for 3 Weeks in Surprise Retreat From Wall,” and answer the following questions:
+1. What has happened as a result of the announcement that the federal government shutdown has ended?
+2. The article characterizes the announcement as a “surprise” and a “remarkable surrender” on the part of Mr. Trump. What details support these ideas?
+3. On Friday, before the announcement that the shutdown had ended, what three events occurred that suggested that the shutdown had “fallout far beyond paychecks”?
+4. What have Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer said they would be willing to support in terms of border security? What do they say they will not support?Before you are born, and until you die, life is more or less a series of contingencies .
+That missed light signal may have kept you from being run over by a truck, while that crinkled lotto ticket in the laundry, had you looked, could’ve been your path to absurd riches. And then there’s your parents, who in any infinite number of selfish, altruistic and unforeseen ways, could have set you out on a different path altogether.
+Lawrence Sumulong, a Filipino-American photographer, went down this theoretical rabbit hole in “Dead to Rights,” his long-term project documenting his parents’ hometown, Manila. And, in an alternate reality, it’s his home, too.
+“My life was determined, essentially, by my parents, in that it could have gone the other way, and that I could have been born in the Philippines,” Mr. Sumulong said. “And so throughout the entire story, I’m trying to see what came about while I was away.”Here at The Learning Network, when we ask students about life as a student, we often hear about the fatigue and stress caused by school. Students tell us about the pressure they feel to perform academically while keeping up with extracurricular activities, volunteer commitments and other obligations while also cultivating meaningful experiences, fostering friendships and managing to get enough sleep in the process.
+Does any of that resonate with you? Do you think the need to “hustle harder” is real, or is it being perpetuated by those who see hard work as a lifestyle choice?
+In “Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work?” Erin Griffith investigates hustle culture in the workplace, particularly among young people. She writes:
+Never once at the start of my workweek — not in my morning coffee shop line; not in my crowded subway commute; not as I begin my bottomless inbox slog — have I paused, looked to the heavens and whispered: #ThankGodIt’sMonday. Apparently, that makes me a traitor to my generation. I learned this during a series of recent visits to WeWork locations in New York, where the throw pillows implore busy tenants to “Do what you love.” Neon signs demand they “Hustle harder,” and murals spread the gospel of T.G.I.M. Even the cucumbers in WeWork’s water coolers have an agenda. “Don’t stop when you’re tired,” someone recently carved into the floating vegetables’ flesh. “Stop when you are done.” Kool-Aid drinking metaphors are rarely this literal. Welcome to hustle culture. It is obsessed with striving, relentlessly positive, devoid of humor, and — once you notice it — impossible to escape. “Rise and Grind” is both the theme of a Nike ad campaign and the title of a book by a “Shark Tank” shark. New media upstarts like the Hustle, which produces a popular business newsletter and conference series, and One37pm, a content company created by the patron saint of hustling, Gary Vaynerchuk, glorify ambition not as a means to an end, but as a lifestyle.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— What, if anything, do you find appealing about “hustle culture,” as described in the article? Does anything surprise you? If so, what?
+— Can you draw any parallels between your experiences in school and the workplaces you read about in the article?
+— What do you think about messages like “do what you love” and “don’t stop when you are tired; stop when you are done”? What are some possible advantages and disadvantages to taking such messages to heart?
+— The article posits some theories about why “performative workaholism” became a “lifestyle.” Do you think any of them are valid? Explain.
+— Do you think that when you start your career, you’ll be enthusiastic about working long hours? Why or why not?
+— Do you find the article to be critical of people who believe “the work itself is all”? What, if anything, is inherently wrong with finding a high degree of meaning in one’s job?
+— What advice do you have for people in workplaces where there are disparate views on what constitutes “hard work?”But back to portions. If you’re serious about losing or maintaining weight, you’d be wise to learn the size of a healthful portion of various categories of foods and treat what is typically served in restaurants to individual diners as servings for two or more. My “lean and mean” son and daughter-in-law in Los Angeles routinely order one entree for two people, and often have leftovers to take home for lunch the next day. In fact, my daughter-in-law usually requests a to-go container when the meal is ordered and packs up the excess food even before they dig in.
+Still, Dr. Young insists — and I agree — that it’s far more helpful to prepare and eat most of your meals at home. You’ll know what’s in them (was that grilled fish you ordered prepared with a tablespoon of butter?) and how much lands on your plate. In fact, start by downsizing your dinner dishes to salad-plate size, and you can save nearly 600 calories a meal. Use measuring cups to dole out reasonable portions until you are able to eyeball them accurately. You might also invest in a kitchen scale to help you keep meat, poultry and fish servings to three or four ounces.
+I know you’ve heard this before, but it bears repeating: Fill half or more of your plate with low-carbohydrate vegetables, like broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, green beans, carrots and brussels sprouts, and have a side salad with a dribble of dressing. Limit starchy vegetables like white and sweet potatoes (baked, not fried) and grains (whole, not refined) to a half-cup serving, one-cup max.
+Dr. Young urges people to “get over their fear of carbs — if you’re eating the right kinds of grains in the right amounts, they don’t make you fat. They make you full — and provide you with a battalion of disease-fighting nutrients,” she wrote. But watch out for those oversized New York bagels, whole grain or otherwise, that are the caloric equivalent of six slices of bread.
+Many people are unaware of how much, or how often, they eat. Keeping a food diary, recording everything you consume and where for a week or so, can help you recognize sources of mindless or excess consumption and their relationship to your feelings and circumstances.
+Be wary of “nutrition halos” — foods deemed healthful but loaded with calories, albeit from healthy fats. A friend who moved to California gained 25 pounds in a year eating avocados from the tree in her yard. A serving of avocado is ¼ cup. Same for nuts, which, along with air-popped corn, are my favorite snacks.
+At the same time, Dr. Young and I recognize the dangers inherent in feeling deprived of cherished, not-so-good-for you foods. When I was shedding those 40 pounds, I included one small treat a day — a few tablespoons of ice cream, a small cookie, a slice of quick bread, or sliver of cake or pie — lest after weeks of no treats I break down and devour half a cake or quart of ice cream at one sitting.We know many people end up with a risky pileup of prescribed medications. Many efforts have been made, with varied success, to correct this problem. Yet we’ve usually focused on physician behavior, when there’s another powerful lever: pharmacists.
+About 30 percent of older adults in the United States and Canada filled a prescription in the last few years for one of many medications that the American Geriatrics Society recommends they avoid. Such drugs can lead to more harm — like cognitive impairment or falls — than good, and often safer options are available.
+“Older adults are taking an awful lot of pills these days — 66 percent take five drugs or more per day, and 27 percent take 10 or more per day — so if some of those pills are no longer necessary and may even be causing harm, why not ask if it is time to deprescribe?” said Dr. Cara Tannenbaum, a professor of medicine and pharmacy at the University of Montreal, and director of the Canadian Deprescribing Network.
+It’s not easy to get patients off such drugs, though. Physicians often don’t have enough information about what patients are taking, or may lack the time to talk to patients about these medications. They fear that stopping the drugs might cause harm or make patients upset.There is definitely a new onus on doctors to make sure that the prescribing is rational and appropriate, especially around some of the most common situations in which opioids are prescribed, including dental procedures, orthopedic procedures and emergency room visits.
+Of course, the prescribing doctor should know if a patient may be especially vulnerable to addiction, whether because of warning signs in the family history, psychiatric disease or adolescent experimenting.
+“Traditionally, oral surgeons tended to be among the highest prescribers of opioids to adolescents,” said Dr. Charles Berde, the founder of the division of pain medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital. With the proactive use of acetaminophen and ibuprofen around the clock, he said, most adolescents who had their wisdom teeth extracted did not need any oxycodone at all. And for those who do, he said, “four pills is enough to cover the great majority of kids.”
+In the past, Dr. Mason said, children were often prescribed too many pills, which can contribute to the risk of using the medication longer than strictly necessary, and to leftover doses remaining in the medicine cabinet.
+“You should not keep them for use for a future time,” Dr. Mason said. “These are for a specific surgery,” and any that remain should be disposed of, not left around to be perhaps used by another family member, or found by an exploring toddler — or visiting adolescent. She recommended taking them to a local pharmacy or health center, or to a police station, or else mixing them with dirt or kitty litter before throwing them away.
+A study published in December in JAMA Pediatrics found a threefold increase in the mortality rate among children and adolescents from opioid poisoning, both by prescription drugs and by illicit drugs, over the past two decades. In addition to deaths among adolescents, the rate increased markedly among children under 4, underscoring the need to store these drugs safely and dispose of any leftover doses.
+Pediatric orthopedists are looking at whether children need any opioids at all in certain situations, said Dr. Joshua M. Abzug, the director of pediatric orthopedics and deputy surgeon in chief at the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital, who was the co-author of a 2018 review article on managing pediatric orthopedic pain in the setting of the opioid epidemic. And when they do need them, he said, doctors should limit the prescriptions to only the few pills that the child is likely to need.Cumulative monthly precipitation, in inches, compared with normal. Precipitation totals are rainfall plus the liquid equivalent of any frozen precipitation.Something funny happens about halfway through “Watching You.” Already an engaging thriller, it becomes a moving one as well when its focus shifts to two teenagers living on Joey’s street, Jenna and Freddie. Jenna lives alone with that paranoid mom, and despite being pretty and sociable, feels, too often, “a terrible hollowness open up inside her, a sense that she was all alone, that she had in fact always been all alone, that the corners of her life were folding in and folding in, and that there was nothing she could do about it.” Then there’s Freddie, friendless and odd, watching Jenna from his window, who might say something similar if he could articulate it.
+Adolescence and the novel have always been well-suited partners, sharing an air of growth, of privacy. As Jenna and Freddie turn detective, “Watching You” reaches both a tricky, clever, unexpected ending, and lands a final turn on a surprisingly affecting and sensitive revelation of autism. In her 18th book, Jewell does little spectacularly but everything well — a pro’s pro. It seems there’s at least one good plotter out there.
+If “Watching You” has a precise identity, THE CURRENT (Algonquin, $27.95), by the best-selling literary suspense novelist Tim Johnston, is tougher to assess. The tale of parallel drownings in a frozen Minnesota river 10 years apart, it has the atmosphere of an A.A. meeting: rueful, solemn, suffused with shy and tender hopes. There’s a burdensome, long-winded seriousness to it, but Johnston writes in gracefully exact language with genuine heart. A reader who either dismisses or exalts this book too quickly is making a mistake.
+“The Current” begins with two college students driving north. Audrey Sutter’s father is dying of cancer, and her friend Caroline offers to take her home. After being assaulted by two young men at a gas station, Audrey and Caroline speed away, breathlessly grateful, until they get stuck on a bridge. A car comes along the highway — the men’s? — and tips them into the rapids. It’s a situation unhappily analogous to the death of a girl named Holly Burke, and her father, Gordon, is one of the central characters of “The Current.” The other is Sheriff Sutter, Audrey’s dying father, who handled the Burke case.
+Johnston is excellent at the mechanics of a thriller, but hides his adroitness between long stretches of rumination. (Glance at a page of “The Current” and there’s a decent chance you won’t see any dialogue.) Of its dual main characters, one, Sutter, is beautifully wrought; the other, Gordon, too often overwrought. The book’s women are, like those orbiting the politicians who gravely remind us that they’re fathers and husbands and sons, mainly supernumeraries of the male struggle. Wait, capitalize that: the Male Struggle. “If you’re gonna slug me, go ahead and slug me,” a suspect in Holly’s death tells Gordon. “What makes you think I’m gonna slug you?” he replies. “Those two fists at the end of your arms.”
+Exchanges like this could nearly turn you against “The Current.” But its feelingness, its deliberative dexterity of plotting, its insights into grief and loss, are at their best reminiscent of writers like Annie Proulx and Richard Bausch. In a more compact, narrative-driven novel, Johnston might be a writer to create a work of art.SAN FRANCISCO — Despite a trade war between the United States and China and past admonishments from President Trump “to start building their damn computers and things in this country,” Apple is unlikely to bring its manufacturing closer to home.
+A tiny screw illustrates why.
+In 2012, Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, went on prime-time television to announce that Apple would make a Mac computer in the United States. It would be the first Apple product in years to be manufactured by American workers, and the top-of-the-line Mac Pro would come with an unusual inscription: “Assembled in USA.”
+But when Apple began making the $3,000 computer in Austin, Tex., it struggled to find enough screws, according to three people who worked on the project and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements.
+In China, Apple relied on factories that can produce vast quantities of custom screws on short notice. In Texas, where they say everything is bigger, it turned out the screw suppliers were not.She’s only just arrived, but Annie Murphy is about to g et kicked out of the Plaza Hotel.
+The situation would be a fitting one for the character she plays on “Schitt’s Creek”: Alexis Rose, a fallen socialite whose family loses everything in a Bernie Madoff-esque Ponzi scheme. For Alexis, being ushered out of a New York City landmark would be yet another entry in a long line of humiliating losses, including getting dumped by her Greek shipping magnate boyfriend, saying goodbye to her wild life on the international party scene and moving from an affluent neighborhood in an unspecified city to the small town of Schitt’s Creek .
+And, O.K., the cause for the hotel banishing Ms. Murphy — a rogue photo shoot staged in the lobby — is admittedly very Alexis too. It probably doesn’t help that, out of character, Ms. Murphy could still pass for a rich hellion of Instagram, with her waterfall of caramel colored hair and precision-winged eyeliner. One of the Plaza’s chief occupations these days is likely trying prevent glossy-maned women just like her from creating influencer content inside its storied walls.
+“It would be hilarious if we got kicked out,” Ms. Murphy remarked. She remained un-Alexis-ly pleasant and patient through the negotiations with management until they were finally assuaged. (The Plaza eventually consented to a photo shoot as long as it was limited to one dead-end hallway and there was no flash photography. Otherwise, she was welcome to use the exterior of the building, where any old pleb with a selfie stick can pose.)
+Then it was on to the Champagne Bar, which is less intimidating and exclusive than it sounds, but just as expensive. Ms. Murphy’s eyes widened as she read the menu, which includes a champagne and caviar special that costs $895. She instead settled on a glass of more reasonable rosé.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Two leading candidates in the 2021 race for mayor of New York City are already beginning their ground game.
+Corey Johnson, the speaker of the New York City Council, and Scott M. Stringer, the city’s comptroller, will soon begin hosting fund-raising house parties, seeking to plant a stake in what is certain to be a prolonged race for City Hall.
+Neither Mr. Johnson nor Mr. Stringer has formally declared his candidacy, but the small, intimate gatherings were designed with the city’s new campaign finance rules — which increase the power of small donations — in mind.
+Mr. Johnson said that a year ago he had no plans to undertake an underdog run for mayor in 2021.
+“I love this city. I love New York,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview with The New York Times.DUBLIN — The abortion clinic’s website pops up at the top of a Google search for “free ultrasound,” its content and color scheme mimicking the government’s new support service for unplanned pregnancy.
+“Looking for abortion advice?” “How far along am I?” The bright orange speech bubbles attached to stock images of smiling medical experts purport to inform women about abortion options that became legally available in Ireland on Jan. 1.
+The brick-and-mortar version of the Dublin clinic, however, is less inviting. Its true purpose is to obstruct abortions: Hanging out front, like a graphic warning on a cigarette pack, is a giant poster of a 15-year-old girl who died after receiving an abortion in London. Inside sits an ultrasound machine in a small, narrow room that has the air of a back alley medical facility.
+In May, Ireland voted decisively to cast aside one of the world’s most restrictive abortion bans, approving a new law that guarantees unrestricted abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy, and longer in situations in which there is a serious risk to the life or health of a woman, or in which there are fatal fetal abnormalities.A good throw is as comforting as it is beautiful, providing a little extra warmth whenever you need it and making a room feel more welcoming and relaxed.
+“It’s a homey thing,” said Ameé Allsop, a designer in East Hampton, N.Y., who often creates minimalist spaces warmed up by textured linen and other textiles.
+And throws aren’t just for winter, said Ms. Allsop, who recommended having one slung over the sofa all year long, but changing the materials with the seasons. “In winter, I look for textured wool, mohair or cashmere,” she said. “But in summer, having a linen or cotton throw is nice.”
+Whenever possible, you should see a throw in person — and touch it — before buying it, to make sure it feels as good as it looks. A wool throw that appears thick online could turn out to be disappointingly thin, and one that looks soft could be scratchy.Ms. Rousseu often was in the back of the pack, riding solo, as she prefers. She has done cycling tours on her own or with TDA since 1980, but has been ill in recent years, she said. “I’m not supposed to be here,” she told me. “I prayed a lot to return to my health to be able to suffer again on my bicycle.”
+She said this would likely be her final TDA ride. Some of the cyclists were too competitive, and, she said, it seemed to her that as soon as she pulled up to a Coke stop or lunch, “they jump on their bikes and go, go, go, ” because they didn’t want to arrive at the next stop after her.
+A couple of days later, on our rest day in Nouakchott, I told her that I had been talking with some of the younger riders — in this case a group of men in their 40s and 50s — who singled her out as an inspiration: “Ordinary people doing extraordinary things every day,” as one of them put it.
+She looked at me for a moment and her eyes welled up. She touched my arm and walked away.Puebla is considered by many to be the gastronomic capital of Mexico. And its most famous culinary creation is — that complex brown chili sauce, traditionally served over poultry, that involves dozens of ingredients and carries hints of its unsweetened chocolate.BEIJING — An outspoken Chinese human rights lawyer was sentenced to four and a half years in prison on Monday, the last to be prosecuted among hundreds of legal activists who had been rounded up in a crackdown in 2015.
+The lawyer, Wang Quanzhang, was found guilty of “subversion of state power,” the No. 2 Intermediate People’s Court of Tianjin said on its website. That charge is usually applied to critics of the ruling Communist Party who are accused of organizing political challenges.
+Other lawyers and activists who had been picked up in an expansive campaign by the government that began in the summer of 2015 were either released or put on trial and sentenced. But Mr. Wang, 42, had been held for nearly three and a half years before he faced charges in a closed trial in Tianjin on Dec. 26 that even his wife was barred from attending.
+The crackdown, which included televised show trials in which lawyers confessed to plotting to overthrow the government and working on behalf of foreign forces, is a part of President Xi Jinping’s efforts to obliterate threats to the party’s control.Roger Stone, the Trump adviser and self-proclaimed dirty trickster arrested on Friday at his home in Florida, is the latest figure indicted in the Mueller probe investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
+But long before his present appearance on the national stage, Mr. Stone perfected his bare-knuckled brand of political warfare in New York.
+Back in high school in Westchester County in the late 60s, Mr. Stone said he orchestrated the ousting of the student president and elevated himself.
+“I built alliances and put all my serious challengers on my ticket,” Mr. Stone told The Times in 1999. “Then I recruited the most unpopular guy in the school to run against me. You think that’s mean? No, it’s smart.”
+Other highlights from Mr. Stone’s activities in New York:
+1980: He helped run Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign in New York and Connecticut. The Times called him “equally adept at cajoling or threatening.”“Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.” That was the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “We need the freedom to operate on the ground and in the air.” It’s now America’s longest war. About 18 years. Yet few battles or notable events from Afghanistan have taken root in America’s collective memory. And that means fewer signposts to mark the long passage of time. But if we look at how long it took to reach seminal moments in other wars, it might bring America’s 17-year presence in Afghanistan into clear view. We’ll start with the Battle of Gettysburg. This bar represents the number of days the U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan. The fighting at Gettysburg began 811 days into the Civil War. Many consider this the most important battle of the conflict. And it took place after half the war was fought. Now apply it to Afghanistan time. It would bring us to just Dec. 27, 2003. There were about 13,000 American troops in Afghanistan back then. That number would eventually peak at 100,000. “In England, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his deputy commanders chart the liberation of a lost continent.” Then there’s the Allied D-Day invasion at Normandy. One of the most iconic moments of World War II. The culmination of extensive planning in years of fighting in Northern Africa, Italy and elsewhere. That invasion began 913 days after America entered the war. In Afghanistan time, that brings us to just April 4, 2004. Hamid Karzai hadn’t even been elected as president of Afghanistan yet. And when World War II neared its end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, that came after 1,339 days of battle. In Afghanistan time, that would reach to June 2005. Not even a quarter of the way through. Vietnam was America’s second-longest war. And the final pivotal moment was the fall of Saigon in April 1975. That occurred 3,706 days after U.S. Marines landed in Da Nang in 1965. And in a final comparison to Afghanistan time, that would bring us to Nov. 30, 2011. Osama bin Laden was killed about six months earlier. And President Obama had already announced plans to completely withdraw U.S. troops. He would later reverse that decision. The Obama and Trump administrations would unveil new strategies – continuing the fight, which goes on to this day.The details: The plan centers on a phased withdrawal of American troops in exchange for a Taliban cease-fire. The insurgent group would also pledge not to allow international terrorist groups to use Afghanistan as a hub.
+What’s next: The Taliban are debating the requirement that the group enter talks with the Afghan government and agree to a lasting cease-fire, two points they have long resisted.
+Another angle: The idea of a U.S. troop withdrawal worries Afghan women, who fear that their rights will be taken away.
+Shutdown is over, but the clock is ticking
+Negotiators from the House and Senate have less than three weeks to hash out a plan to secure the southwestern border, after President Trump signed a stopgap funding bill last week to end the partial government shutdown. Mr. Trump said he would shut down the government again or invoke emergency powers to build a wall if Congress doesn’t offer a solution he likes by Feb. 15.The family approached border officers to assert their right to ask for asylum; they were also seeking help for a son who no longer had medicine for his chronic heart condition. In response, a border officer noted that he was not a doctor, physically pushed the family back across the international line into Mexico, and told them to return to Piedras Negras and the local migrant shelter there.
+In the shelter, the family put their names on an informal waiting list for their chance to seek asylum again. However, their smugglers learned they had not yet entered the United States and began demanding more money, promising to infiltrate the shelter and kill the family if they did not send additional payments. Several days later, while the family walked to a convenience store, a white van screeched to a halt and armed men forced the family into the vehicle.
+The family was taken to a house and spent two days in captivity, until Mexican state police arrived. However, these officers had not come to save the family but rather to sit down at the table for a leisurely breakfast and to accept money from the kidnappers. When the police did pay attention to the family, it was to call Mexican immigration agents to deport them. These agents proposed a deal, to release the family for $1,000. But with no more money, the family was transported to a Mexican migration detention center. After languishing for two months, the parents and children were released into Mexico City, where the threats continued both from their former kidnappers and Barrio 18 gang members searching for the family.
+This family’s harrowing story is far from an isolated case. In February 2017, a Honduran woman and her three children were kidnapped in the border city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas — the migrant kidnapping capital of Mexico — after trying to seek asylum with border officers on three occasions. And in November 2018, a transgender Mexican asylum seeker was robbed and assaulted in Tijuana. The next month, a Cameroonian asylum seeker was stabbed and two Honduran asylum-seeking teenagers were murdered.
+Routine turnbacks and the expansion of “metering” systems at ports of entry began in 2016. Yet last summer, border officers doubled down on the practice, stationing its agents mid-bridge from El Paso to Brownsville and at border gates from New Mexico to San Diego with instructions to reject people seeking asylum. Today, these turnbacks are occurring daily at major ports of entry along the southwest border.There is so much oversaturation with coverage. I feel like, as a movie critic, I like to be able to see things before everyone else has seen them. I feel like I’m allowed to have a discovery. That is really important. When I write about them, I’m reporting back, not just to the readers but to the film section and alerting them as to what we need to look for in the coming year as things slowly are released into theaters.
+What is your Sundance routine? You said it involves the health food store?
+Usually it is very boring. The life of a film critic at a festival is not at all glamorous. And my routine really is, basically, you dump your luggage; you run and grab your pass; do a little bit of quick food shopping because it is very difficult, at least during the first week, to eat out. Restaurants are booked. But also if you’re seeing four to five movies, there is just not a lot of time. The theaters are scattered across town. So you’re either walking long distances or taking buses to go from one theater to the next. It really becomes the survival of the savviest — sneaking food into your bag, and pockets, and everything. My friend Kenneth Turan, a film critic for The Los Angeles Times, is always eating nuts and berries out of his pockets.
+What do you have in your pockets?
+I’m a vegetarian, but there is a really fabulous health food store there. They have sandwiches, and so I usually have a sandwich and a couple of little cookies that tide me over.
+How do you decide which movies you’ll see?
+It is a certain amount of investigation. First you start by just reading what is there. You’re checking to see: Is there a familiar name? Who are those names? There is a certain amount of buzz. But buzz is manufactured. Movies are being talked up by the people who are handling them. Virtually every movie has a publicist, or a team — my inbox is flooded with public relations notices for the movies. I have friends who are festival programmers. They will alert me. Sometimes you’re just stumbling into things, and that can be really exciting.
+What do you hope readers take away from the film coverage out of Sundance?
+I hope that they’re inspired. I always see things every single year that I find inspiring and exciting. That really kind of affirms that I’m right to love movies and there is a reason to love movies. Right now, there is a lot of talk about Netflix and streaming, but the theatrical experience is really important. When I’m going to Sundance, I’m sitting in a movie theater with a lot of people watching a movie and having a real theatrical experience. There is something really special about that and I really try to convey that. Movies are still something to get excited about.
+Which parties will you go to?
+The one party I do try to go to is Cinetic Media. They are a big player in the independent film world. It is always overcrowded, and it is always too noisy, which I always complain about. It is one of those parties where you have to basically yell at the person who is five inches from your head. But if you haven’t seen someone all week, because you can be on a completely different schedule than other people, you might see them at the Cinetic party. But mainly I’m just watching movies.
+Are there any other things you do to prepare for the week?
+I try to walk as much as possible. I have really good snow boots — they’re ugly as sin — and I just walk everywhere. I’m sitting for so many hours a day, sometimes 10 hours a day. If I have enough time, I try to walk. It clears my head and gets me ready for the next movie. And the health food store.The share of the world’s population in extreme poverty — subsisting on less than $1.90 a day , adjusted for inflation and cost of living across countries — has plummeted from 42 percent in 1981 to 10 percent in 2015. Poverty fell not only proportionally but in absolute terms as well: The number of people in extreme poverty fell by 1.17 billion between 1981 and 2015, even as the global population grew by almost three billion. The reduction was driven in large part by the fast-growing economies of Asia, in particular, China and India.
+But decline of poverty in those countries has fed an erroneous belief in the West that economies rising into middle-income status are on track to end extreme poverty and no longer need assistance — and that major donors need to focus on the fragile and conflict-ridden countries left behind.
+This redirection of global aid risks neglecting the hundreds of millions who may never escape poverty despite living in countries that are becoming relatively rich.
+Bill and Melinda Gates, whose yearly contributions to international development exceed the aid budgets of countries like Canada and Norway, have argued that “as extreme poverty disappears from many places, including China and India and, increasingly, many countries in Africa, it gets more and more concentrated in the most challenging places in the world” — mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today: The special counsel’s indictment of Roger Stone contains details as over-the-top as Stone himself, including encouraging an associate to use a tactic straight from “The Godfather” films. But the indictment itself is quite serious in finally making a link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. It’s Monday, January 28. [POUNDING ON DOOR]
+archived recording
+F.B.I.! Open the door!
+archived recording (roger stone)
+Twenty-nine F.B.I. agents showed up at my home, pounded on the door. [POUNDING ON DOOR]
+archived recording
+F.B.I.!
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I opened the door to pointed automatic weapons. I was handcuffed. There were —
+archived recording
+We have some major breaking news in the Mueller investigation. Roger Stone — you see him right there — President Trump’s longtime political adviser, former campaign aide, has been arrested in Florida. Charged with seven federal felonies, obstruction of an official proceeding, five counts of making false statements and one count of witness tampering.
+archived recording (sarah huckabee sanders)
+This has nothing to do with the president, has nothing to do with the White House, and beyond that, I’m not going to get into the back and forth.
+archived recording
+Have you spoken to the president?
+archived recording (roger stone)
+There is no circumstance whatsoever under which I will bear false witness against the president, nor will I make up lies to ease the pressure on myself. I look forward to being fully and completely vindicated.
+michael barbaro
+So, Mark Mazzetti, what do we need to know about who Roger Stone is?
+mark mazzetti
+Roger Stone is a legendary Republican operative who, from the earliest days of his career, has plied the dark arts of scandal-mongering and dirty tricks in aid of political campaigns.
+archived recording
+Are you telling me that that was a lie? Roger Stone is a trickster. Roger Stone is a shady character, O.K.? I know Roger Stone, and you know, he worked for Nixon. He famously tattooed his hero on his back. And who among us can say that? The questionable consultant’s resume is filled with work for Republican stars — Nixon, Reagan, Bush senior.
+mark mazzetti
+He is someone who very proudly talks about how he tries to plant stories with the press, someone who tries to dig up any kind of personal dirt about a candidate in order to help the other side.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I’m certainly guilty of bluffing and posturing and punking the Democrats. Unless they pass some law against bull-bull-[BLEEP]-ing-ing and I missed it, I’m engaging in tradecraft. It’s politics. I’m sure it’s driving the Democrats crazy, but there’s nothing illegal about it.
+mark mazzetti
+So this is someone who — well, for many people who hate politics, they would hate someone like Roger Stone.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+The truth is, Jimmy Carter’s middle name was not Hussein. A very substantial number of people wonder, because of the policies of this administration, about whether the president is a Muslim. This is not going to hurt Trump, and it’s not going to hurt Carson.
+archived recording
+They may wonder, but should a presidential candidate like Trump be saying that, or at least condoning it with his silence?
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I don’t think he commented either way.
+mark mazzetti
+He goes on television in strange outfits, he gives interviews from his pool and clearly, in many cases, doesn’t take himself too seriously.
+michael barbaro
+So he’s kind of a sideshow.
+mark mazzetti
+Except he’s someone who Donald Trump has taken seriously for a long time.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+He’s a regular guy. You can talk to him like a regular person. There’s nothing formal or stilted about him, and he’s funny. He’s got a great self-deprecating wit. He’s just fun to be with.
+mark mazzetti
+He’s been this sort of informal adviser to Trump over decades, and someone who, long, long before anyone took seriously the idea of Donald Trump being the president of the United States, Roger Stone was pushing this idea.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+It was not until 1987, really, late ‘87, that I began thinking about him as a presidential candidate.
+mark mazzetti
+Although it has often been a contentious relationship.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+Yeah, I think we have a complicated relationship. But first of all, recognize, I’m a Trump loyalist. Even when he’s wrong, I’ll be there.
+mark mazzetti
+They’ve been at odds at times. He’s someone who didn’t last very long on the Trump campaign. He started out as an official campaign adviser, but was fired from the campaign pretty quickly.
+archived recording
+And more turmoil for Trump — a top longtime associate both from his business world and in the political realm, Roger Stone is out tonight. Dispute about whether he resigned or was fired. Trump’s campaign says Stone was fired because he was using the campaign to seek publicity for himself.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I have no interest in going back. Although I strongly support Trump, we have managerial differences. And meanwhile, I’m just making the very best case for him in public that I can, because I do think he has what it takes.
+michael barbaro
+And insofar as he was involved in the campaign, what exactly was his role as an informal adviser? What did that amount to?
+mark mazzetti
+He was the classic late-night phone call person to listen to what Trump was thinking. He was the confidant of then-candidate Trump, talking to him by phone, being a sort of back channel of advice outside official campaign communications. You didn’t always know that Roger Stone was there, because he did have this behind-the-scenes role. But it was pretty apparent to people close to Trump that Roger Stone had this outsized influence over Trump.
+archived recording
+It seems to me there’s more than meets the eye here with Roger Stone parting company from the Trump campaign, coming on my program and others and giving the big Trump pitch.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+You media types are so conspiratorial. [LAUGHTER]
+archived recording
+No, no, the Stone-Trump types I think are the conspiratorial.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I’m like —
+mark mazzetti
+So he was behind the scenes until he wasn’t. In August of 2016, a few months before the election, Roger Stone sent a very cryptic tweet about Podesta.
+archived recording
+Roger Stone tweeted that it would soon be, quote, “Podesta’s time in the barrel.”
+mark mazzetti
+And he said it will soon be his time in the barrel. Now Podesta was John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Hillary Clinton. And no one really knew what that meant until a few months later in October. A few weeks before the election, he sent out another tweet. I think it said, “On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton is done. #WikiLeaks.”
+archived recording
+Roger Stone writes, “Thursday, October 6, Julian Assange will deliver a devastating expose on Hillary at a time of his choosing. I stand by my prediction. #HandcuffsForHillary.”
+mark mazzetti
+And then —
+archived recording
+We need to talk about these hacked emails.
+mark mazzetti
+The Podesta emails spill out a few days later.
+archived recording
+WikiLeaks released more than 2,000 emails. They claim they came from her campaign chairman, John Podesta, and other staffers. The leak revealed transcripts from some of Clinton’s paid Wall Street speeches. This is the first time that we’re actually getting a look at these Wall Street speeches. What you see is that her own words really hit on her own perceived weaknesses, particularly around relatability and trust. You see why she really wasn’t in a hurry to release these, as it really highlights a lot of concerns that voters have about her.
+mark mazzetti
+And so this is again Roger Stone creating this image that he had a direct channel to WikiLeaks and knew what the information was going to be before it became public.
+michael barbaro
+Right. And if I remember correctly, one of those WikiLeaks dumps of emails was right around the time of the “Access Hollywood” tape being published.
+archived recording (john podesta)
+October 7, the “Access Hollywood” tape comes out. One hour later, WikiLeaks starts dropping my emails into the public. One could say that those things might not have been a coincidence.
+michael barbaro
+Which was interesting timing.
+mark mazzetti
+Within hours. And of course, that’s very fortuitous timing if you’re candidate Trump. Very quickly, a lot of the media started focusing on the Podesta emails rather than this explosive story about the “Access Hollywood” tape.
+michael barbaro
+So at this point, justifiably, everyone is starting to wonder, does Roger Stone, this informal adviser to the president who is in touch with the campaign, does he have inside knowledge of what’s going on at WikiLeaks? Is he coordinating with this organization?
+mark mazzetti
+Yes, and remember, Roger Stone has built a career on creating an image that he does have great access.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation.
+mark mazzetti
+He does have insight that others don’t.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I think that Assange is going to be very influential in this election, because he’s going to be educating the American people about the Clintons.
+mark mazzetti
+Once the Russia investigation heats up, though, he has to reverse course.
+archived recording (roger stone)
+I had no advance notice of the content source or the exact disclosure time of the WikiLeaks disclosures. Assange himself has said so. In fact, Assange has said in his own tweets and in interviews that Roger Stone never predicted anything that I hadn’t already said in public.
+mark mazzetti
+He has to paint himself as someone who didn’t have that knowledge, who didn’t have any insight, because that was something that could potentially put him in real legal jeopardy.
+michael barbaro
+So what do we learn from this indictment last week about what was really going on here?
+mark mazzetti
+So what we learned on Friday is that Roger Stone in fact did have insights into what WikiLeaks was doing. He made extensive efforts to find out what Julian Assange was planning. And we find out that he was directed by people inside the campaign to go find out what WikiLeaks was doing. So we really, for the first time, have a sense that there was a link between WikiLeaks’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton and the Trump campaign’s efforts to damage Hillary Clinton. And that link was Roger Stone. And something else that should not be lost in all this is that all of this was happening months after it was first revealed that the Russian government was behind this operation to hack the Democratic servers and put the information out for WikiLeaks.
+michael barbaro
+And that’s significant because it’s one thing to be coordinating with WikiLeaks when no one quite knows how it got those internal Clinton emails. It’s another to be coordinating with WikiLeaks once it’s understood that the emails it’s disseminating were stolen by Russia. It seems to elevate this above wanting negative information about your opponent out in the world.
+mark mazzetti
+That’s right. All of this was done while it was well known that the Russians were behind this operation.
+michael barbaro
+So do we know who on the campaign was talking to Roger Stone and encouraging him to keep communicating with WikiLeaks and find out when their leaks would occur?
+mark mazzetti
+That’s where it becomes really interesting. The Times reported a few months ago that Steve Bannon, who was the campaign chairman at the end, was in contact with Roger Stone about this. In early October, Stone writes Steve Bannon that WikiLeaks would release, quote, “a load every week going forward.” He separately writes to a supporter involved in the Trump campaign, quote, “spoke to my friend in London last night. The payload is still coming.”
+michael barbaro
+Friend in London presumably meaning Julian Assange?
+mark mazzetti
+Right. But the Mueller indictment has a very tantalizing detail.
+michael barbaro
+What’s that?
+mark mazzetti
+The indictment said that a senior campaign official, quote, was directed by someone to contact Stone about additional WikiLeaks releases. There’s a very odd use of the passive voice that you would not expect in an indictment written by lawyers with Ivy League educations. The indictment does not say who it was that directed the senior campaign official. Of course, it’s led to speculation that that person could only be Donald Trump. We don’t know.
+michael barbaro
+Everything you’re describing here about Roger Stone’s communications with the campaign and Roger Stone’s communications with WikiLeaks — it sounds quite nefarious, but I wonder if it is illegal. Is his communication with WikiLeaks what Roger Stone was indicted for?
+mark mazzetti
+No. The charge is Stone lying to Congress about his interactions with WikiLeaks, trying to tamper with witness testimony and an overall charge of obstruction of justice. As for the witness tampering charge, that centers around Stone’s interactions with someone named Randy Credico, who is a longtime New York radio personality, on-again-off-again friend of Stone, and someone who did in fact seem to have direct connections to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. And what the indictment details is that Roger Stone had several communications with Credico, trying to make sure that Credico told the same story to the House that Roger Stone had told, and even suggesting that he should pull a, quote, “Frank Pentangeli” before the committee.
+archived recording
+Did you serve on the capital regime, Peter Clemenza, under Vito Corleone, also known as “the godfather“?
+mark mazzetti
+And that is a reference to a character in “The Godfather 2” who is called before Congress to testify about the mob and all of a sudden gets amnesia.
+archived recording
+I ask you again, sir, here and now, under oath, were you at any time a member of a crime organization headed by Michael Corleone? I don’t know nothing about that! Oh. I was in the olive oil business with his father, but that was a long time ago. That’s all.
+michael barbaro
+And why isn’t Mueller going after Stone for anything other than the lying, for the actions he lied about?
+mark mazzetti
+It’s hard to make a conspiracy case. The fact is that the emails appear to have been stolen before Roger Stone knew about them, so he didn’t seem to have participated in the theft. And he seemed to maybe be trafficking in information that was becoming public or was about to be public. And this is what his defenders and the president’s defenders have pointed out, that these are all crimes that happened after the fact. He is not being charged with something that’s at the bottom of this whole thing — collusion, conspiracy, et cetera. And this is what, of course, President Trump has fallen back on for some time.
+archived recording
+This is why this thing is so weird, strange. The crime is conspiracy to hack. Collusion is not a crime. It doesn’t exist. Now, conspiracy to defraud the government — you’re right. Conspiracy to hack, that is the crime. We don’t know whether — Now, did Donald Trump engage in a conspiracy to hack with the Russians? They’ve been going at it — the counterintelligence investigation came to the conclusion — no evidence.
+michael barbaro
+Mark, it feels like time and time again, when it comes to the Mueller investigation, he and his prosecutors are charging people around the president with lying or tampering with a witness or doing something deceptive around their interactions with his own investigation, but not with actually colluding with Russia or coordinating with Russia or being involved in a conspiracy that involves Russia, which, of course, is what this investigation is really about. What do you make of that?
+mark mazzetti
+If you want to look at it as a best-case scenario for President Trump, it’s that there’s no original crime here. There’s no collusion, there’s no conspiracy. They’ve been charged because they were just lying to Congress.
+archived recording
+Today’s surprise guilty plea by Michael Cohen — Cohen said in federal court that he lied to Congress, he says, to support Mr. Trump’s timeline of a Moscow real estate deal.
+mark mazzetti
+Lying to the F.B.I. Withholding evidence.
+archived recording
+Tonight, former Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos admitting he lied to the F.B.I. about his contacts with someone the F.B.I. suspected of being a Russian operative to cover for President Trump.
+mark mazzetti
+But the worst-case scenario is that they are lying to protect something big. They were so concerned about what’s at the bottom of this story that they had to lie to keep investigators from getting there. That’s been one of the enduring mysteries of this entire story. Was there a grand conspiracy, or does this all add up to small, individual acts, individual contacts with Russians, individual business deals gone bad that individual people were trying to lie to cover up their own role? The fact that we don’t know where Mueller is going and Mueller only reveals his strategy in individual indictments means that we’re still left with these kinds of questions.
+michael barbaro
+And in this latest indictment, we’ve learned that Roger Stone, who has not been taken very seriously all this time, now seems to represent something quite important in all of this.
+mark mazzetti
+Yes. In many ways, Roger Stone was this kind of cartoonish figure. If this were a whodunit, he’d be the obvious suspect that a reader would have long ago dismissed because he’s too obvious. And yet, here’s Roger Stone being charged with very serious crimes. And for the first time, we see Mueller show his hand that there really was this direct link between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks. But I think the bigger point is the question of how directly the Trump campaign officials were working with the original source of the information, and that is the Russian government. WikiLeaks was a pass-through here. The Russian government, Russian hackers gave it to WikiLeaks to distribute. The real question at the end of the day is not the communications necessarily with WikiLeaks, but whether there was foreknowledge about what Russia was doing and any direct communication with the Russians about their campaign to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s political future.
+michael barbaro
+Mark, thank you very much.
+mark mazzetti
+Thank you.
+michael barbaro
+We’ll be right back.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Thank you very much. My fellow Americans, I am very proud to announce today that we have reached a deal to end the shutdown and reopen the federal government. [APPLAUSE]
+michael barbaro
+On Friday afternoon, just hours after the F.B.I. raid of Roger Stone’s home, President Trump walked into the Rose Garden of the White House and announced victoriously that he was temporarily ending the shutdown with no agreement from the Democrats to fund his border wall.
+archived recording (president trump)
+I want to thank all of the incredible federal workers and their amazing families —
+michael barbaro
+The announcement came a day after two bills to reopen the government — one sponsored by Republicans, the other by Democrats — failed to pass in the Senate, and as frustration over the shutdown began to boil over in highly public and disruptive ways.
+archived recording
+They’re both clowns. Both sides should sit down and make it happen, including our president, including Pelosi. It’s ridiculous. It’s not fair. It’s not T.S.A.‘s fault that they’re not getting paid and stuff. It’s the government’s fault. So the government should get it together.
+michael barbaro
+By Friday, so many air traffic controllers had called in sick that the Federal Aviation Administration grounded flights across the Northeast. Hundreds of workers at the IRS refused to show up for work, and the director of the F.B.I., Christopher Wray, had released a public message to his employees.
+archived recording (christopher wray)
+Hi, everyone. We’re now five weeks and two missed paychecks into this mess, and I wanted to touch base with all of you again. Making some people stay home when they don’t want to and making others show up without pay — it’s mind-boggling, it’s short-sighted and it’s unfair. It takes a lot to get me angry, but I’m about as angry as I’ve been in a long, long time.
+michael barbaro
+Unity among congressional Republicans, which had held for a month, began to collapse, with Republican senators, including majority leader Mitch McConnell, telling Vice President Mike Pence that the president’s shutdown strategy was not working and needed to end immediately. In his speech, the president, who has made the $5.7 billion in funding for his wall a non-negotiable condition for ending the shutdown, and who repeatedly rejected Democratic proposals to reopen the government while negotiations continue, ultimately did just that, restoring government to normal function for the next three weeks and promising to quickly pay back federal workers who have missed paychecks since the shutdown began. But —
+archived recording (president trump)
+If we don’t get a fair deal from Congress, the government will either shut down on February 15 again, or I will use the powers afforded to me under the laws and the Constitution of the United States to address this emergency.
+michael barbaro
+Democrats and Republicans will enter formal negotiations this week to see if they can find a compromise on border security funding and on what constitutes a wall, a definition that is evolving for the president himself.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We do not need 2,000 miles of concrete wall from sea to shining sea. We never did. We never proposed that. We never wanted that, because we have barriers at the border where natural structures are as good as anything that we can build. They’re already there. They’ve been there for millions of years.
+michael barbaroNissan’s response sent its shares tumbling sharply. They recovered before closing down 0.8 percent.
+Mr. Ghosn, 64, has been accused by the Japanese authorities of underreporting his compensation to the tune of $80 million while chairman and improperly shifting personal losses onto Nissan’s books in 2008. He denies all the charges and has been in a Tokyo jail since his initial arrest in November.
+The confirmation of an inquiry by United States regulators is yet another blow to Mr. Ghosn, who became one of the auto industry’s most celebrated executives starting in the 1990s as he turned around the French carmaker Renault, led its purchase of a large stake in Nissan and then broadened the alliance to include Mitsubishi Motors, turning it into the world’s largest carmaker. Since his arrest, he has been removed as chairman of all three companies.
+While Nissan is listed in Japan, investors in the United States can buy its shares indirectly. The company has also raised money from American and European investors through the bond markets. An investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission could result in a fine, putting a dent in Nissan’s financial resources at a difficult time.
+Any action by the commission could also prompt other regulators to take a closer look at Nissan as well as at Renault and Mitsubishi, its partners in a global alliance that Mr. Ghosn ran.
+Representatives of Renault and Mitsubishi did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the commission also did not respond.Good Monday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+Huawei and China’s role in 5G
+The next generation of computer and phone networks, known as 5G, is expected to connect cities around the world and fuel a future run on robots, autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and other technologies.
+But it may also rely on an infrastructure vulnerable to hackers and spies, one that the U.S. wants to stop China from building.
+The Trump administration has conducted a campaign to pressure allies such as Britain, Poland and Germany to banish Chinese companies, especially the telecommunications giant Huawei, from participating in the 5G buildup, according to the NYT:
+The administration contends that the world is engaged in a new arms race — one that involves technology, rather than conventional weaponry, but poses just as much danger to America’s national security. In an age when the most powerful weapons, short of nuclear arms, are cyber-controlled, whichever country dominates 5G will gain an economic, intelligence and military edge for much of this century.
+What’s next? President Trump is expected to issue an executive order prohibiting American companies from incorporating equipment originating from China in critical telecommunications networks, extending current rules that apply only to government entities. His administration, which has also waged a trade war with China, says that it is motivated by concern for national security, not just by competitive defensiveness. China’s economic czar, Liu He, will meet with the American trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, in Washington on Wednesday for two days of trade talks, which is likely to cover issues of cyberprotection and the proliferation of state-owned companies.
+What do officials think? Beijing’s ambassador to the E.U. threatened “serious consequences” if Huawei and other Chinese companies were excluded from 5G projects. In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fired the country’s ambassador to China after he said that a senior Huawei executive had “strong arguments” to fight extradition to the U.S.What Do They Say?
+The most hyped amendment, offered by Yvette Cooper of the Labour Party and the Conservative Nick Boles, is designed to make it more difficult for Britain to leave the bloc without a deal. If Parliament has not agreed to a deal by the end of February, the amendment says, Parliament should get a chance to vote on delaying Brexit, possibly for a few months or even until the end of the year.
+That would cheer a broad coalition of lawmakers who are aghast at the likely economic fallout of a no-deal exit, along with those who want to buy time for a second public vote on whether Brexit should happen at all.
+An amendment offered by a Conservative lawmaker, Graham Brady, would give Parliament’s backing to a harder-line Brexit. It is designed to force Mrs. May to scrap the “backstop” plan that at least temporarily binds Britain and, to a greater extent, Northern Ireland to European trading rules. (That plan is meant to avoid customs checks on the historically contentious border between Ireland, a member state of the European Union, and Northern Ireland, which is part of the United Kingdom.)
+What those warring amendments have in common is that they give clear signals about what Parliament does not want — a no-deal exit, in one case, or temporary ties to the European Union, in the other — without charting a course for what Mrs. May should negotiate instead.
+And there are many more. An amendment offered by a Conservative lawmaker, Dominic Grieve, would set aside six days before March 29, the Brexit deadline, for Parliament to debate a wide array of Brexit plans. Labour’s official amendment would let Parliament weigh in on the party’s preferred Brexit deal, which includes stronger and more lasting ties to the European Union’s single market, and says lawmakers should get to vote on whether to hold a second public vote on Brexit.MADRID — The Prado was not designed to be one of the world’s great art galleries. But as it celebrates its 200th anniversary this year, Spain’s national museum can boast of welcoming almost three million visitors a year to what has become one of Europe’s finest painting collections.
+When King Charles III of Spain commissioned the building in the 1780s, he wanted a museum of natural science to celebrate the spirit of the Enlightenment. But when his ultraconservative grandson, Ferdinand VII, came to the throne three decades later, he put a stop to that. “He wanted to showcase the wealth of his collection rather than make any kind of contribution to scientific progress,” said Javier Portús, the curator of an exhibition that celebrates the Prado’s bicentenary.
+“The irony is that the Prado opened in a period of clearly regressive thinking in Spain,” he added.
+The exhibition, called “A Place of Memory” and running through March 10, shows how, right from the beginning, the Prado navigated the often choppy waters of Spanish politics, as the country went from being an imperial power to a nation divided by civil war, and then through dictatorship to the democracy it is today.The report said Captain Sultan had slept little the night before the flight and had been unaware of new rules in Bangladesh that required international flights to have air clearance before departing from Dhaka, leading to confusion when he prepared for takeoff.
+He was also considering whether to resign from US-Bangla Airlines over comments from a colleague who had questioned his competency. In the air, Captain Sultan seemed “very insecure,” the report said. He acted aggressively with other crew members, smoked in the cockpit and complained repeatedly about the colleague’s criticism. (She was not on board.)
+Once in Nepalese airspace, Captain Sultan failed to follow standard procedures at a critical stage of the landing phase at Tribhuvan International Airport, the report said. This led to the loss of “situational awareness” that had prevented him from properly judging the angle of approach to the runway.
+The report also blamed air traffic controllers in Nepal for a “lack of assertiveness” in safely guiding the plane, a twin-engine turboprop that can carry up to 78 passengers, to the ground.
+“Landing was completed in a sheer desperation after sighting the runway, at very close proximity and very low altitude,” the report said.
+Captain Sultan, his co-pilot and the two other crew members on board were among those who died in the crash. The report was compiled using cockpit voice recordings, closed-circuit television footage, a flight data recorder and interviews with air traffic controllers and Nepali and Bangladeshi officials.
+Though an experienced pilot, Captain Sultan had struggled in the past. In 1993, he was let go from the Bangladesh Air Force in connection with his depression, the report said. He was later cleared to work again and flew planes for several airlines before joining US-Bangla Airlines in 2015, the year after it began operations.The last sentence could be interpreted as a reference to Paul’s longtime relationship with his star client — LeBron James of the Los Angeles Lakers — since the Lakers have been considered the league’s most ardent suitor for Davis for months.
+Davis also faces possible league discipline because the N.B.A. typically fines players when they, or their representatives, publicly request a trade.
+“We commenced an investigation this morning upon reading the reports regarding Anthony Davis,” the N.B.A. spokesman Mike Bass said Monday. “That process is ongoing.”
+Teams such as the Knicks and Davis’s hometown Chicago Bulls are among the many clubs expected to join the Lakers in pursuing a trade for Davis over the days leading to the 3 p.m. trade deadline on Feb. 7. Yet it might behoove New Orleans to wait until closer to the draft to get serious about dealing its franchise player.
+That is because the Boston Celtics, regarded for some time as the Lakers’ foremost challenger in the long-anticipated trade sweepstakes for Davis, are ineligible to acquire Davis via trade while the All-Star guard Kyrie Irving is on Boston’s roster. League rules preclude one team from having two players on the designated rookie scale contract extensions possessed by both Davis and Irving.
+With a record of 22-28 in a season marred by numerous injuries, New Orleans had slipped to 13th in the Western Conference entering Monday’s play and looked increasingly unlikely to make a playoff run. The Pelicans, though, are under no obligation to trade Davis and could decide to wait until after the season, when the Celtics would be able to join the bidding. Irving has the ability to become a free agent on July 1 by declining the $21.3 million player option he holds for next season.
+Knicks Coach David Fizdale tried to downplay his team’s interest in Davis on Monday. But the Knicks — who were already planning to make a free-agent run in July at the likes of Kevin Durant and Irving — could emerge as a team to watch for Davis if they show a willingness to make trade assets such as the star forward Kristaps Porzingis, their prized rookie Kevin Knox and this June’s likely top-five draft pick part of any discussions.
+Although Davis has missed the Pelicans’ last four games with a finger injury, Coach Alvin Gentry told reporters Monday that he expects Davis back in the lineup soon. Davis, according to Gentry, plans to play out the season even if New Orleans elects to keep him past next week’s trade deadline.A longstanding superstition holds that saying the title of William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” while inside a theater — unless you are rehearsing or performing the play itself — will bring about a terrible curse.
+The notion is based on an unfounded legend, but it makes you wonder what people were saying in the studio where “Rent: Live” was rehearsing the past few weeks. On Sunday, not long before the 8 p.m. curtain for the musical’s live broadcast on Fox, the network announced that Brennin Hunt, the actor playing Roger, seriously injured his foot while performing during the previous day’s dress rehearsal. Unlike on Broadway (and in most professional theater productions), the show did not have understudies for its leads.
+The solution? Much of what viewers would see would be Saturday’s recorded performance, the cast noted in a statement during an early commercial break. The final 15 minutes or so were live; Hunt was at a table, his foot in a cast and propped on a chair. (Hashtags like #RentNotLive and #RentKindaLive trended during the broadcast.)Astead: South Carolina, which votes fourth in the Democratic primary and is particularly important because of its high percentage of black voters, has played host to several likely presidential hopefuls in recent days, including Ms. Harris’s Senate colleagues Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
+The difference for Ms. Harris? She has been able to lean on her enormous network as a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority Inc., the country’s oldest black sorority. On Friday, she was the noted guest at the group’s annual Pink Ice Gala, which afforded her an audience of thousands of black South Carolinians at the ticketed event.
+“I’m so honored to celebrate with my sorors,” she said. “We stand on the shoulders of women who were leaders, who 111 years ago said to us that we must honor sisterhood and service.”
+The room was a preview of the electorate that could help slingshot her to victory. Older black residents, all dressed in black tie for the event, rushed the stage to get a photo with the presidential candidate, or to stream her speech on their social media channels. Ms. Harris did not mention her presidential candidacy in the short remarks, but the crowd knew this was the beginning of a long-term courtship.
+In a short gathering with reporters after, Ms. Harris said it was important to her to attend the event, to highlight the importance of black voters — and particularly black female voters — but also to share how much the sorority means to her.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+Pete Buttigieg’s notion of “intergenerational justice” — the subject of one of my newsletters last week — sent me on a data hunt. I dug into the numbers on income, wealth and other issues to see how millennials, baby boomers, my own Generation X and others are faring.
+The results tell a clear story, and it’s the story I tell in my column today: The fleecing of millennials. If you don’t have time to read the full column right now, check out the first two charts.
+Is Nancy Pelosi tired of winning yet?
+President Trump’s disconnection from reality is sometimes a big political advantage for him. Without any apparent interest in the facts, he is often able to persuade his supporters to believe whatever story is most favorable to himself. Other times, however, this disconnection from reality ends up hurting Trump.Museums have incrementally hired more people of color in recent years, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has concluded in a second iteration of a comprehensive survey, conducted last year.
+The survey, carried out with the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museums and Ithaka S+R, a research group, collected data on more than 30,000 museum employees from 332 museums, most of which are members of the directors’ association. It found that in 2018, the share of people of color hired at the institutions it surveyed was 35 percent, up from 26 percent in 2015.
+The Mellon Foundation had released the findings of its first nationwide survey that tracked the ethnic, racial and gender makeup of art museums’ staff members across the country in 2015. The study was carried out in response to speculation that the museum sector has a problem of underrepresentation, particularly within leadership roles.
+The 2015 results confirmed that assumption. “It clearly was a wake-up call for the field,” Mariët Westermann, the executive vice president of the foundation, said.Slide 1 of 10,
+The designer F. Taylor Colantonio’s small loft in Rome is decorated with theatrical arrangements of flea market finds and his own handcrafted touches. He found the ceramic tiger at Rome’s Porta Portese market and brought it by tram to his home, where it now sits in front of a large picture window.He was really bright and got into medical school, but he didn’t like working with patients — perhaps because of his parents’ situation. In the end, he decided to go into public health and not be a clinician. That kind of shift c an work for some.
+Similarly, I had a young woman come to me. She was training to become an oncologist and she had crashed her car twice. What was going on? When we talked, it turned out that her father had died of cancer when she was 7.
+Her unresolved grief was coming to the fore in the clinic. She decided that being around cancer was like reopening an old wound. Eventually, she moved over to family medicine.
+You write about counseling physicians who are disabled or ill. What are their special issues?
+Well, doctors are not supposed to get sick. When it happens, healthy colleagues will sometimes try to push them out, because they don’t want to be reminded of their own vulnerabilities.
+I had a client with a physical disability, and he was very good at his job. But a couple of his colleagues bullied him and made his work life intolerable. For him, the solution was to find another hospital to practice in.
+I had another client, an obstetrician, who wanted children and was infertile. When fertility treatments failed, her colleagues minimized her distress and acted like she should “get over it,” an attitude they wouldn’t have with their patients. For a time, she considered leaving obstetrics.
+As we talked, she realized that she liked the drama of childbirth and wanted to continue in her specialty. I encouraged her to speak to her colleagues. Together we developed a backup strategy: she could move over to emergency medicine. Just knowing that there was a Plan B made it possible to stay.The furniture and object designer F. Taylor Colantonio, dressed in a red-trimmed poet’s blouse, gives a gentle shove to a fluted Doric column in his small, theatrically furnished loft in the Campo de’ Fiori neighborhood of Rome. The column wobbles loose from the wall, revealing itself suddenly to be light as Styrofoam, phony as a stage set. “Everything in my house is fake,” says Colantonio. “I’m a punk collector. It’s all fake.”
+In addition to working on interior design projects for private clients, Colantonio, 30, creates surrealist objects, which range from coiled-rope vases to snakelike rebar candlesticks to transparent rugs. Championed by Alex Eagle, the owner of the Store, and the design dealer Jermaine Gallacher (who both sell his work in their London boutiques), his pieces are often offbeat interpretations of chintzy suburban décor and imitations of antiquity.
+At his apartment’s towering picture window, a ceramic tiger — a flea market find as big as a real cub — stands guard, across from a daybed upholstered with hand-painted violet-striped linen. Colantonio composed an intricate savanna mural for the wall above — tropical creatures amid palms and yellow roses — rendered in the chalky children’s tempera paints he prefers. In the dining alcove, in front of a collection of modern ceramic vases inspired by ancient urns, is a black-and-cream vase of his own creation. It occupies a 19th-century walnut table and recalls a Greek kylix, but it flops, uncannily, to one side, its body made not of rigid and impermeable pottery, but of softly coiled machine-braided rope. “The wonkiness gives it personality and gesture,” Colantonio explains, lifting it by its squishy lollipop-like handles. The vase is a vase in idea only. A fake.Good morning. Serendipity arrived in our language on this day in 1754, a coinage of Horace Walpole in a letter to Horace Mann. The word apparently emerged from the title of a Persian fairy tale called “The Three Princes of Serendip.” This group of young fellows, Walpole wrote Mann, “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.” These discoveries, he explained, “I call Serendipity.”
+Serendipity is a rare pleasure. It is also a hallmark of the search bar on NYT Cooking. I typed “goat” there today, looking for the excellent recipe for curried goat that Priya Krishna scored for us last year in an article about Jamaican holiday cooking. The search led to some reading, some surfing, a lot of clicking and, suddenly, this lovely 2009 essay from Henry Alford, “How I Learned to Love Goat Meat.” Read that, why don’t you?
+But don’t just look to the past. New recipes abound across our landscape today like — hey now! — goats in a Chagall painting. Melissa Clark has a fantastic one for the easiest lentil soup, with garnishes galore.
+For his own part, Yotam Ottolenghi weighed in with a new recipe for Bolognese casserole with harissa, which I’d like to see called Ottolenghi hotdish, moving forward. We’ll get him to Minnesota yet.Ms. Tregulova said that while some Western museums had added armed guards to exhibitions, Russia still tended to depend on grandmotherly types to keep an eye on visitors. The museum will add motion detectors and might consider inspecting departing visitors, she said.
+The episode is the latest in a string of bold art thefts across Europe. Last weekend, thieves stole a door from the Bataclan concert hall in Paris that featured a mural attributed to the British street artist Banksy and thought to be a tribute to the victims of the 2015 terrorist attack at the venue.
+In November, three men walked into the Dorotheum auction house in Vienna, cut a landscape painting by Renoir from its frame, and walked out. A 59-year-old Ukrainian man with a history of art theft was arrested in December over the crime, but the artwork has yet to be recovered, according to Harald Sörös, a spokesman for the Vienna police.
+“It’s relatively rare to see someone go into a pretty significant gallery and just lift a painting off the wall,” James Ratcliffe, director of recoveries and general counsel at The Art Loss Register, which tracks and tries to solve art crime, said in a telephone interview of the Tretyakov theft. “There’s no doubt that security there is at a pretty low level to be able to do this without setting off an alarm, without any gallery staff stopping you, and to get out of the building too.”
+With his closely cropped haircut and black clothes, the thief appeared to many visitors to be a hip young member of the museum staff, Russian news reports said, although one visitor eventually raised the alarm. .
+“It’s amazing what you can achieve by acting confidently,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.CHICAGO — Two of the most dreaded words in a Midwestern weather forecast — “polar vortex” — returned this week, promising life-threatening low temperatures that could shatter records and plunge much of the region into its deepest freeze in decades.
+Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin declared an emergency and told the National Guard to be ready to help. The University of Notre Dame announced it was closing its northern Indiana campus from Tuesday evening until Thursday afternoon. And in Chicago, city leaders deployed buses as mobile warming centers and offered tips on how to thaw frozen pipes (hair dryers work well, they said, but don’t use an open flame).
+“This is right up there with the best of the cold waves, and we’ve had some doozies over the years,” said Tom Skilling, the chief meteorologist at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he has worked for 40 years. Mr. Skilling predicted 72 hours of subzero wind chills and 48 hours of subzero temperatures so low that “we’re going to hear buildings and outdoor objects creaking.”
+[Read some cold hard facts about the polar vortex: You could get frostbite in five minutes, and Des Moines will be colder than parts of Antarctica.]WASHINGTON — The five-week federal government shutdown took a significant economic toll, costing the United States economy $11 billion, with nearly a quarter of that total permanently lost, the Congressional Budget Office said on Monday.
+The figures are the first official projection of the economic effects of the longest federal shutdown in history, and they show that its cost was nearly double the $5.7 billion request by President Trump for a border wall that fueled the impasse. That is enough to reduce first-quarter growth by about 0.4 percentage points.
+Much of that spending was simply delayed, and will flow back into the economy as workers get back pay. But the report makes clear that not all the economic damage will be undone and that the effects of the shutdown will linger. With the federal government funded for just three weeks and Mr. Trump threatening to shutter the government again if his demands for a wall are not met, many workers say they are planning to spend less of their income and increase rainy-day savings.
+Kelly Spencer, a federal contractor at the Justice Department, was planning to buy her first home this spring, but as she returned to work on Monday, she said she was shelving those plans.Did you apply for undergraduate admission this year and write an application essay about money, work, social class or other related topics? If so, we’d like to see it.
+Since 2013, we have collected hundreds of essays like this each year and published some of ones we love each May. You can read the five we selected last year here.
+Nearly anything goes: Tales of family fortunes gained or squandered, musings on the state of socioeconomic diversity in your community, summer jobs, start-ups, struggle and triumph. Last year, one high school senior wrote about her experiences preparing other people’s tax returns. In 2014, a teenage McDonald’s employee wrote about his work.In dementia research, so many paths have led nowhere that any glimmer of optimism is noteworthy.
+So some experts are heralding the results of a large new study, which found that people with hypertension who received intensive treatment to lower their blood pressure were less likely than those receiving standard blood pressure treatment to develop minor memory and thinking problems that often progress to dementia.
+The study, published Monday in JAMA, is the first large, randomized clinical trial to find something that can help many older people reduce their risk of mild cognitive impairment — an early stage of faltering function and memory that is a frequent precursor to Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.
+The results apply only to those age 50 or older who have elevated blood pressure and who do not have diabetes or a history of stroke. But that’s a condition affecting a lot of people — more than 75 percent of people over 65 have hypertension, the study said. So millions might eventually benefit by reducing not only their risk of heart problems but of cognitive decline, too.
+“It’s kind of remarkable that they found something,” said Dr. Kristine Yaffe, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the research. “I think it actually is very exciting because it tells us that by improving vascular health in a comprehensive way, we could actually have an effect on brain health.”Mr. Baradar was a moderate on social issues and argued for maintaining relationships with the West and Afghanistan’s neighbors. The hard-liners among the Taliban under the influence of Osama bin Laden had forced Western aid agencies to leave Afghanistan, and the country faced a severe famine and economic crisis. Mr. Baradar argued against isolating Afghanistan and cutting off all aid. He was aware of his country’s dependence on financial aid from the West.
+Although he had opposed the presence of bin Laden in Afghanistan after Mullah Omar gave him sanctuary in 1996, Mr. Baradar stayed close to Mullah Omar in Kandahar after their regime fell.
+Owing to his impeccable record of service to the Taliban cause, no other Taliban leader will be able to contradict Mr. Baradar if and when he takes steps toward peace. He is also the most likely figure to sell peace to the more militant Taliban commanders, who are inclined to continue fighting and want to claim total victory and impose a Shariah system on the country as they did in the 1990s.
+The United States will benefit from his presence in the Qatar talks, as Mr. Khalilzad and his colleagues will be speaking to a prominent and decisive Taliban leader who can make decisions.
+Mr. Khalilzad’s team has made significant headway, and American and Taliban officials have “agreed in principle to the framework” of a peace deal in which the Taliban promise not to host terrorist groups in the future and to help the United States rid Afghanistan of the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The deal could lead to a full pullout of American troops in return for a cease-fire and Taliban talks with the Afghan government.
+Major questions remain to be resolved. The Taliban want an American troop withdrawal announced and their prisoners freed from Afghan jails as an immediate first step. The Americans have won a pledge from the Taliban that Afghan soil will never be used again by terrorist groups. The United States is also insisting on a Taliban cease-fire with both American and Afghan forces and an agreement to start talks on the future political setup with President Ashraf Ghani and the Kabul government.The four film actors who won top honors from the Screen Actors Guild last year all went on to win the Oscar.
+So did the four who won the year before that.
+[READ: See the 2020 SAG Award nominations.]
+With this in mind, and the knowledge that actors make up the biggest voting branch in the academy, at least some of the winners at Sunday night’s SAG Awards should feel confident about repeating their victories at the Oscars next month.
+Take Glenn Close in “The Wife” and Rami Malek in “Bohemian Rhapsody”: After both added SAG trophies to Golden Globes they already picked up, they should be considered leading contenders for best actress and best actor.
+[Fill out your Oscar ballot here.]
+Ditto Mahershala Ali, who won the SAG Award for best supporting actor for “Green Book” on Sunday and, after winning the same award two years ago for “Moonlight,” joins Daniel Day-Lewis as one of only two men to win more than one SAG Award for film acting. Ali is now almost certain to take the Oscar in that category.Medical records for 14,200 H.I.V.-positive people in Singapore were obtained by an American and illegally disclosed online, officials said Monday, in the second major data breach of the country’s public health system in less than a year.
+“We are sorry for the anxiety and distress caused by this incident,” the Health Ministry said in a statement, adding that it had started to contact affected people on Saturday. “Our priority is the well-being of the affected individuals.”
+The Singaporean police notified the Health Ministry on Jan. 22 that confidential information from its H.I.V. Registry “may have been disclosed by an unauthorized person,” the statement said. The ministry said it had filed a police report the next day and spent another two days working “with the relevant parties to disable access to the information.”
+Though access was successfully disabled, the information “is still in the possession of the unauthorized person, and could still be publicly disclosed in the future,” the statement said. It named that person as Mikhy K. Farrera Brochez, an American citizen who it said had lived in Singapore on an employment pass from January 2008 to June 2016, when he was jailed. Mr. Brochez could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday.PARIS — As he joined a “Yellow Vest” protest in Bordeaux, in southwestern France, Jean-Marc Michaud felt elated. His wife worked nearby and they had not seen each other in a month, so the march was a perfect opportunity to reunite.
+Instead, his life took a serious turn for the worse at the protest in early December, when a rubber projectile fired by the police destroyed his right eye. Mr. Michaud, 41, who lives on France’s western coast, now joins demonstrations to protest both economic distress and police violence.
+“The government claims that we are looters and violent protesters, but so many of us are just peaceful civilians,” said Mr. Michaud, a horticulturist who now wears an eye patch and says his arms were raised when he was shot. “The government isn’t listening to us, and now they are trying to silence us with repression in the streets.”
+Anger at officers’ use of force has helped fuel the nationwide Yellow Vest movement that began as protests against a fuel tax increase and that has grown into a broader revolt against President Emmanuel Macron’s government.BOSTON — At 5 on a windy winter morning, in a cold, harshly lit warehouse in Boston’s seaport district, Baracat Paiva stared down at the 200-pound bigeye tuna before him and reached for his knives.
+Mr. Paiva, as tall and imposing as the dead fish before him, dipped his cloth-gloved hand in warm water, to keep his fingers from numbing. He deftly sharpened an eight-inch knife against a water stone before plunging it into the silver-scaled fish and sawing off the collar, using another, bigger knife to lop off the bone. A few bits of tuna sprayed off his knife and stuck to his hooded sweatshirt and flat-brimmed baseball cap, but he didn’t seem to notice.
+Then, in a single motion, he slid the knife down the length of the fish on one side, then made another slice on the other. After a few more strokes, he carefully peeled away the rib cage and splayed open the fish, which split into four neat sections. He picked up one of the fillets, brimming with burgundy-hued flesh, and bounced it around in his arms like a baby.
+“Beautiful,” he said.
+Mr. Paiva, the highest-volume fish cutter at the popular Boston wholesaler Wulf’s Fish, has become something of a celebrity at a job that normally doesn’t attract much attention.WASHINGTON — Hundreds of thousands of federal employees returned to work on Monday with a presidential promise of a paycheck “very quickly” but no guarantee that they will be working in three weeks, when a temporary stopgap of funding expires.
+President Trump and congressional Democrats arrived at a short-term agreement late on Friday, reopening the government after 35 days and the longest government shutdown in history. Lawmakers have until Feb. 15 to reach a compromise on the Republican request for billions of dollars to be allocated for a border wall — a wall Democrats have refused to fund.
+Referring to the odds that a deal could be struck over that time, Mr. Trump told The Wall Street Journal on Sunday, “I personally think it’s less than 50-50.” Mr. Trump said he would use emergency powers to fund the wall if an agreement could not be reached.
+In a stark reminder that federal employees were returning to work with the knowledge that they might be forced to go without a paycheck once again next month, one federal agency, the Department of Agriculture, updated its employee information website and said, “We will also leave some of the shutdown-related material up for a period time, should you need to refer back to it.”The rapper Future scored his sixth No. 1 album in less than four years, matching Elton John’s early 1970s chart run and bringing an apparent end to the music industry’s post-holidays sales doldrums.
+Future’s new album, “The Wizrd” (Freebandz/Epic) — its full title is “Future Hndrxx Presents: The Wizrd” — opened with the equivalent of 126,000 sales in the United States, which includes 144 million streams and 15,000 copies sold as a full album, according to Nielsen.
+Since Future’s album “DS2” in July 2015, all six albums he has released — including “Evol,” “Future,” “Hndrxx” and “What a Time to Be Alive,” with Drake — have gone to No. 1. According to Billboard, that matches a feat last seen on the chart with John’s six albums from “Honky Château” in spring 1972 through “Rock of the Westies” in fall 1975.
+Also this week, Maggie Rogers, the former New York University student whose work went viral while still in the classroom, opened at No. 2 with her major-label debut, “Heard It in a Past Life” (Capitol). Although the album’s streaming numbers were modest, at 14 million, a ticket bundle deal helped her move 37,000 copies of the full album.Christine Goerke, the soprano singing Brünnhilde in the Metropolitan Opera’s “Ring” cycle this spring, will give New Yorkers a taste of her Isolde next season when she sings the second act of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in November opposite the tenor Stephen Gould, with Gianandrea Noseda conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington.
+A week later, a John Adams piano concerto called “Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?” will be given its New York premiere by the pianist Yuja Wang, with Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
+The performances are among the highlights of next season’s Great Performers series at turbulence-prone Lincoln Center, which was announced on Monday.
+The series will also feature the conductor Ivan Fischer leading the Budapest Festival Orchestra in Dvorak and Mahler programs; Simon Rattle conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in a concert version of Bartok’s “Bluebeard’s Castle”; and the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of its new chief conductor, Lahav Shani, for a Brahms program.For a play devoted to the ever-elusive mysteries of human existence, Stephen Belber’s “Joan” is remarkably transparent. The title character of this tedious grade-school-to-grave drama, a photographer portrayed by Johanna Day, is said to take pictures that “hide as much as they reveal” about her personality.
+That, in any case, is the opinion of a smitten but baffled lover, who goes on to observe of Joan’s photographs, “It’s like they give us a true part of you, but only a part.” From the perspective of the audience at Here, where “Joan” opened on Sunday night in a Colt Coeur production, the view is considerably more comprehensive, though seldom very illuminating.
+That ultimate, bald openness is true to form for Mr. Belber. As evidenced in earlier teasing, enigma-centered works that include “Match” (seen in a 2004 Broadway production starring Frank Langella) and “Tape” (which became a 2001 Richard Linklater movie starring Ethan Hawke), his riddles usually aren’t very hard to decipher.
+With his latest offering, the riddle is life itself — and particularly, life for someone finding her way through the contradictory directives for being a woman in the 20th and 21st centuries. Directed with admirable clarity by Adrienne Campbell-Holt, “Joan” leapfrogs through time to connect the dots that define its restless, ever-questing protagonist. She is also exceptionally articulate, if seriously verbose, and banters her way through a series of relationships with family members, friends, lovers and strangers (all portrayed by a nimble Adam Harrington and Marjan Neshat).Most Americans tend not to think of these egalitarian (even anti-capitalist) sentiments as part of the nation’s intellectual heritage. But Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and similarly situated politicians like Bernie Sanders are drawing on influential currents in American political history.
+Some of those stretch back to the founding era. Despite his own status as a wealthy slaveholder, Thomas Jefferson was wary of extreme disparities of wealth and thought it was incompatible with republican political ideals. Commenting on “the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind” in Europe, he described his position in a famous letter to James Madison in 1785. “Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labor and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.” He concluded with a statement of belief: “The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.”
+More than a century later, labor and agrarian radicals would make a version of this observation vis a vis the unjust and unfair arrangements that trapped farmers and industrial workers. For them, the extreme inequality and labor exploitation of the era was simply incompatible with meaningful democratic citizenship, as it left both hopelessly dependent on the owners of capital, corroding American democracy’s basis in the ideal of equal relations between citizens. “Suddenly, without warning, the shop closes down” or the worker “is discharged and his wage, small at best, is cut off. He has to live, the rent must be paid, the wife and children must have clothing and food, fuel must be provided, and yet he has no job, no wages, and no prospect for getting any,” wrote the socialist leader Eugene Debs in a fiery 1904 pamphlet, “Unionism and Socialism,” which painted a dire picture of capitalist dependency.
+He continued: “Is a worker in that position free? Is he a citizen? A man? No! He is simply a wage slave, a jobholder, while it lasts, here today and gone tomorrow.” Channeling the founders, Debs held independent material security as a precondition for individual liberty. “No man is free in any just sense who has to rely upon the arbitrary will of another for the opportunity to work,” he had written in 1900. As Debs saw it, if we are deprived as workers, then we cannot truly act as citizens.One of the facts of crossword-solving life is that if a clue and entry are not something that happened in your formative years, and therefore might not be in your wheelhouse, people will complain about it.
+Some younger solvers are miffed that they have to know older pop culture, and some older solvers scoff at the idea that they should have to know the names of current hip-hop artists. The truth is, anything is fair game in crosswords and love.
+This week, it is our younger solvers’ turn to learn something new. The answer to the clue, “‘Brigadoon’ co-star Charisse,” is CYD, the actress who was lauded for her glamorous looks and technically flawless dancing in 1950s movies.
+Image The actress Cyd Charisse was considered to be one of Hollywood’s greatest dancers. Credit... Flickr.com/Twm1340
+Ms. Charisse (1922-1980) made two films with the actor and dancer Fred Astaire, but her breakout role was in the movie “Singin’ in the Rain,” with the actor and dancer Gene Kelly. She later partnered with Mr. Kelly again in the 1954 film “Brigadoon.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+A woman was trapped for three days in the elevator of a Manhattan townhouse, where she worked, while the house’s owners spent a weekend away, officials said.
+The woman, Marites Fortaliza, 53, of Queens, was rescued Monday morning only after a person attempting to deliver something to the building contacted the home’s owners. The owners sent a family member, who saw that Ms. Fortaliza was trapped inside the broken lift and called 911, police and fire department officials said.
+After she was rescued Monday, Ms. Fortaliza appeared to be in good condition but was taken to a hospital for treatment, James Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said. She had been alone in the elevator since Friday evening, he added.
+Firefighters reported to the home at 48 East 65th Street, a five-story building on the Upper East Side, just after 10 a.m. Monday, Mr. Long said. The firefighters forced open the doors of the elevator, which was stuck between the house’s second and third floors.In creating their egg salad sandwich, the chefs Nick Montgomery, left, and Akira Akuto were inspired by Tokyo's convenience stores.
+Credit... Lisa Corson for The New York Times“Mary Poppins Returns,” which picked up four Oscar nominations last week, is an enjoyably derivative film that seeks to inspire our nostalgia for the innocent fantasies of childhood, as well as the jolly holidays that the first “Mary Poppins” film conjured for many adult viewers.
+Part of the new film’s nostalgia, however, is bound up in a blackface performance tradition that persists throughout the Mary Poppins canon, from P. L. Travers’s books to Disney’s 1964 adaptation, with disturbing echoes in the studio’s newest take on the material, “Mary Poppins Returns.”
+One of the more indelible images from the 1964 film is of Mary Poppins blacking up. When the magical nanny (played by Julie Andrews) accompanies her young charges, Michael and Jane Banks, up their chimney, her face gets covered in soot, but instead of wiping it off, she gamely powders her nose and cheeks even blacker. Then she leads the children on a dancing exploration of London rooftops with Dick Van Dyke’s sooty chimney sweep, Bert.
+This might seem like an innocuous comic scene if Travers’s novels didn’t associate chimney sweeps’ blackened faces with racial caricature. “Don’t touch me, you black heathen,” a housemaid screams in “Mary Poppins Opens the Door” (1943), as a sweep reaches out his darkened hand. When he tries to approach the cook, she threatens to quit: “If that Hottentot goes into the chimney, I shall go out the door,” she says, using an archaic slur for black South Africans that recurs on page and screen.ISTANBUL — A United Nations investigation team arrived in Turkey on Monday to start an inquiry into the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi three months ago inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
+Agnès Callamard, the United Nations special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary killings, met with the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, in Ankara at the beginning of the planned weeklong visit. The minister posted a photograph of the meeting on Twitter.
+Ms. Callamard said the inquiry was her own initiative, independent of the United Nations or any government. Turkey, however, had repeatedly said that it was considering requesting a United Nations investigation into the killing, because of frustration at Saudi Arabia’s failure to cooperate on a joint inquiry.
+The Saudi government has placed 11 officials linked to the killing on trial in the capital, Riyadh, but has refused to extradite to Turkey any of those suspected of being involved.Yamiche Alcindor, the White House correspondent for “PBS NewsHour” and a former New York Times reporter, was also on the panel and responded to Mr. Brokaw’s comments.
+“You’re talking about assimilation. I grew up in Miami, where people speak Spanish, but their kids speak English. And the idea that we think Americans can only speak English, as if Spanish and other languages wasn’t always part of America, is, in some ways, troubling,” Ms. Alcindor said.
+Among those who criticized Mr. Brokaw was Representative Joaquin Castro, Democrat of Texas. He explained in a Twitter thread that even though there are generations of Hispanics in the United States, they are, in his opinion, never truly considered American.
+“For a celebrated journalist who spent years chronicling American society you seem stunningly ignorant of the Hispanic community in this country,” Mr. Castro tweeted. “Unfortunate to see xenophobia pass for elevated political commentary.”The 250-year-old retirement digs of an 18th-century Chinese emperor are getting a face-lift.
+The World Monuments Fund announced Monday that the New York-based architect Annabelle Selldorf and her firm, Selldorf Architects, will design an interpretation center at the Qianlong Garden in the Forbidden City in Beijing. The center will be built as part of an ongoing conservation effort by the World Monuments Fund and the Palace Museum to restore the site, which has four courtyards and was constructed in the late 18th century as a retirement retreat for the Qianlong Emperor. The garden has not previously been accessible to the public.
+“It was understood that it would always be very limited access, just because of the sizes of the space and the fragility of the buildings and their contents,” Lisa Ackerman, the interim chief executive officer of the World Monuments Fund, said in a phone interview. “The idea of the visitor center was to find a way to give a lot of information to people who might only get to be in that first courtyard.”
+The plan they’ve ended up with, Ms. Ackerman said, is “specifically designed to be low-tech.” She said that the interpretation center is meant to evoke the tranquillity of the gardens themselves, adding, “There aren’t going to be flat-panel screens.”
+The center will be built in an existing, restored structure in the garden. There are plans for an exhibition space with information on the garden’s origins, an area showcasing the restoration process and an open space with views of the rockeries in one of the garden’s courtyards.The government is back. Government data, however, will have to wait awhile.
+The partial government shutdown left forecasters, investors and policymakers without much of the data they rely on — just as concerns were mounting that the United States’ decade-long economic expansion could be nearing its end.
+Now that the monthlong shutdown is over, it will take government statisticians time to collect and analyze delayed figures for retail sales, manufacturing, housing and other parts of the economy. On Monday, the Commerce Department said it would not be able to release an estimate of gross domestic product for the fourth quarter that had been scheduled for Wednesday.
+That means that when officials gather Tuesday and Wednesday for a meeting of the Federal Reserve’s policymaking group, the Federal Open Market Committee, they will do so without access to much of the information they usually have. The timing is awkward: Fed officials have emphasized in recent months that with the economy’s direction uncertain, they will be paying particularly close attention to the latest data when making decisions on interest rates and related matters.
+“The F.O.M.C. have told us that policy has become increasingly data dependent, but what data?” said Joel Prakken, chief United States economist for Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm.TOKYO — After Bernard L. Madoff, arguably the most notorious financial criminal of all time, was arrested for defrauding investors in a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, he was released on $10 million in bail the same day. Until his trial months later, he lived and slept in his Manhattan penthouse.
+Carlos Ghosn, the global auto chieftain indicted on charges of financial wrongdoing in Japan, can only imagine such freedom. Last week, a Tokyo court denied his lawyers’ bail request for the second time in a single week. He remains consigned to a small cell inside the hulking gray jail where he has been since his arrest in November.
+Mr. Ghosn, 64, who until recently helmed a global car-making empire that united Nissan and Mitsubishi of Japan and Renault of France, has been indicted on charges that he underreported his income by more than $80 million for years and temporarily transferred personal investment losses to Nissan while he was chairman and chief executive.
+His lawyers have said Mr. Ghosn, who denies all allegations, could remain in custody for months. In the most recent court decision, he was denied bail even after he promised to surrender his passports, rent an apartment in Tokyo and pay personally for an ankle bracelet and private security guards.Veteran insomniacs know in their bones what science has to say about sleep deprivation and pain: that the two travel together, one fueling the other.
+For instance, people who develop chronic pain often lose the ability to sleep well, and quickly point to a bad back, sciatica or arthritis as the reason. The loss of sleep, in turn, can make a bad back feel worse, and the next night’s slumber even more difficult.
+Why sleep deprivation amplifies pain is not fully worked out, but it has to do with how the body responds to an injury such as a cut or turned ankle. First, it hurts, as nerves send a blast up the spinal cord and into the brain. There, a network of neural regions flares in reaction to the injury and works to manage, or blunt, the sensation.
+Think of the experience as a kind of physiological dialogue between the ground unit that took the hit and the command-control center trying to contain the damage. In a new study, a team of neuroscientists has clarified the nature of the top-down portion of that exchange, and how it is affected by sleep.Dr. Mazmanian and other researchers now must manage a tricky balancing act. On one hand, their experiments have proven remarkably encouraging; on the other, scientists don’t want to encourage the notion that microbiome-based cures for diseases like Parkinson’s are around the corner.
+That’s not easy when people can buy probiotics without a prescription, and when some companies are willing to use preliminary research to peddle microbes to treat conditions like depression.
+“The science can get mixed up with what the pseudoscientists are doing,” said Dr. Hsiao.
+Dr. Costa-Mattioli hopes that L. reuteri some day will help some people with autism, but he warns parents against treating their children with store-bought probiotics. Some strains of L. reuteri alter the behavior of mice, he’s found, and others don’t.
+Dr. Costa-Mattioli and his colleagues are still searching for the most effective strain and figuring out the right dose to try on people. “You want to go into a clinical trial with the best weapon, and I’m not sure we have it,” he said.
+Katarzyna B. Hooks, a computational biologist at the University of Bordeaux in France, warned that studies like Dr. Costa-Mattioli’s are still unusual. Most of these findings come from research with fecal transplants or germ-free mice — experiments in which it’s especially hard to pinpoint the causes of changes in behavior.
+“We have the edges of the puzzle, and we’re now trying to figure out what’s in the picture itself,” she said.“I will not be shamed,” Mr. Crews said in his video. “I did nothing wrong.”
+It has been over a year since “Me Too” became a viral hashtag and a force that knocked men who were accused of abuse from positions of power. But the original Me Too movement was started more than 10 years ago by Tarana Burke, and it was her group made that the videos.
+“These powerful shorts place the focus back where it belongs: the dignity, humanity and healing of all survivors,” Ms. Burke said. “These courageous individuals are not alone and we hope that people around the world see their journeys reflected in the words of these brave individuals.”One morning this past October, Ms. Whitney ate a protein bar before a statistics exam. She checked the label, which noted “natural flavors” on the list of ingredients — but not sesame.
+When Ms. Whitney sat down to take the exam, she started experiencing signs of an anaphylactic reaction. She readied her EpiPen.
+“All of the sudden my tongue is just totally swollen and my throat is closing,” said Ms. Whitney. The reaction was so severe that she had to be injected with two doses of epinephrine before recovering at the university’s health clinic.
+Stories like Ms. Whitney’s are driving a push by advocacy groups to mandate sesame labeling. The Food and Drug Administration is considering whether to add sesame to the list of major allergens.
+“Sesame should be included as one of the top allergens that needs to be disclosed on labels,” said Lisa G. Gable, chief executive of Food Allergy Research & Education, a nonprofit organization based in McLean, Va.
+Sesame labeling is already mandated in Canada, the European Union and Australia.
+Traces amounts are difficult to track
+Here’s where it gets even more complicated. Even if my box of cookies doesn’t include one of the mandated warning labels, the cookies may still contain an allergen.
+Let’s say, back at the manufacturer , my cookies were put on the same conveyor belt used for almond cookies. Small bits of almond might have made it into my seemingly almond-free cookies.Eager to promote itself as making strides on women’s rights, the United Arab Emirates on Sunday announced the winners of its Gender Balance Index awards, with the ruler of Dubai posing for pictures with the government officials collecting the accolades.
+They were all men.
+The irony wasn’t lost on social media users, who accused the Emiratis of tone deafness.
+“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you forgot to invite women,” Rianne Meijer, a Dutch journalist, wrote on Twitter.WASHINGTON — President Trump this week will turn his attention from a fight with congressional Democrats to an even more formidable negotiating challenge, one with potentially higher stakes: China.
+Trade talks with Beijing begin on Wednesday in Washington, kicking off a monthlong sprint of negotiations between the two nations that could prove more difficult than Mr. Trump’s unsuccessful attempt to secure money from Congress for a border wall.
+The negotiations come at a critical moment for Mr. Trump’s economic agenda and the global economy, which is beginning to slow in part because of the president’s trade policies.
+This week, a Chinese delegation led by Liu He, the vice premier, will meet with an American delegation led by Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. A White House official said on Monday that Mr. Liu will meet personally with Mr. Trump on Thursday.Angélica and Lola Torrente prefigure Angélica and María Font, José Arco anticipates Ulises Lima and a toothless Tiresian poetess named Estrellita gives a foretaste of Tinajero; but these characters, archetypes for Bolaño, are integrated here into a narrower time frame. At the Torrentes’ house, Remo falls in love with a girl named Laura, and a chapter about their visits to Mexico City’s bathhouses, which appeared out of context in Bolaño’s posthumous poetry collection, “The Unknown University,” forms a natural coda here. It can be reckless to draw connections between an author’s life and his work, but this book invites such comparisons. Late in the novel, when Jan writes a letter to another sci-fi hero, he signs it with the pseudonym “Roberto Bolaño.” The reader thrills at this revelation, one of many “coded messages” in this playfully difficult, gem-choked puzzle of a book, and the most nakedly exposed. “The Spirit of Science Fiction” serves as a key to Bolaño’s later work, unlocking clues to his abiding obsessions.
+Image
+From 1968, when he was 15, to 1977, when he moved to Europe, Bolaño lived mostly in Mexico City, where he read incessantly, caroused, fell in love, wrote poetry and scathing reviews, lurked in cafes, and founded a vigorous yet vague literary movement called “infrarrealismo.” The “infrarealists,” young rebel poets, artists and writers like himself, liked to stage provocations — for instance, disrupting a reading by the Mexican giant of letters Octavio Paz by shouting “Paz is an idiot!” In Mexico City in the ’70s, Bolaño’s Sancho Panza — the model for José Arco and Ulises Lima — was the poet provocateur Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. Decades later, this fraternity re-emerged in “The Savage Detectives” as “visceral realists.” But they got their first outing, without a name, in “The Spirit of Science Fiction.” The mayhem and energy of their embrace of the poetic life — intellectual (and hormonal) passion wedded to judgmental idealism, clinched by a sense of the absurd — vibrates on the page.
+[ Read an excerpt from Bolaño’s last interview. ]
+By now, Bolaño’s international reputation is secure, but he only started publishing novels in the 1990s, late in his short life. He came to the attention of most English readers in 2003, the year he died of liver failure in Barcelona, when his exquisite allegorical fiction “By Night in Chile” was translated into English by Chris Andrews. By the time that book appeared in English, the “myth” of Bolaño, as Vargas Llosa calls it (appreciatively, not derisively), had already spread throughout the Spanish-reading world; now it crossed over. “By Night in Chile” is narrated by a Jesuit priest, critic and failed poet named Father Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, who gutlessly lends his learning to the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. A dissolute literato named Farewell justifies Urrutia’s sellout by telling him the tale of an Austro-Hungarian shoemaker who wasted his life attempting to erect a mountaintop monument to every single hero of the past, present and future. It’s a metaphor for literature, one that Farewell rejects. “What’s the use,” he asks Urrutia. “What use are books, they’re shadows, nothing but shadows.” But to Bolaño, a shadow was never nothing. His books are peopled with shadows that have as much, or more, vitality as living beings.
+The posthumous release of “The Spirit of Science Fiction” in Spain, 13 years after Bolaño’s death, provoked controversy among the author’s loyalists, but there is no disloyalty in bringing this work to light. It is not unripe juvenilia; it is a hardy forerunner that stands on its own. In it, Bolaño enfolds the adventures of Jan, Remo and José Arco — along with Jan’s sci-fi letters and digressions — into a rich and wry second narrative, packed with enigmatic, funny allusion. This interleaved narrative takes the form of an interview between a young, cynical literary prizewinner and a wide-eyed female journalist, who plays Remo to the writer’s Jan, allowing him to unspool the Borgesian plot of his book — which concerns the caretaker of a Potato Academy in southern Chile who makes endless didactic radio broadcasts on potato cultivation, not knowing if anyone hears them. It is a gesture as futile, and as glorious in its futility, as building a monument to all the world’s heroes in Mitteleuropa, or printing magazines no one will read.
+As the journalist clamors for information, the author is distracted by the rowdy literati around them. “Who would’ve thought renowned intellectuals … could make such a racket?” he asks her; and later, “Do you really think this is normal?”WASHINGTON — The fate of President Trump’s $5.7 billion demand for a border wall is now in the hands of a 17-member bipartisan panel that includes some of the most senior members of Congress and, perhaps more tellingly, lacks the most vocal immigration hard-liners on Capitol Hill.
+Under the agreement Mr. Trump reached last week with congressional Democrats, a committee of Republican and Democratic lawmakers from both chambers — known as a conference committee — has until Feb. 15 to come up with a border security package.
+During the 35-day shutdown, many Americans accused Mr. Trump and Congress of acting like toddlers, with Mr. Trump insisting that he had to have the wall, and Democratic leaders insisting that they would not give him a penny for it.
+Now, a group less dominated by ideology will be in charge.
+One conference committee member, Senator Jon Tester, Democrat of Montana, departed from Democratic orthodoxy on Monday when he told reporters that he would be in favor of including some money for a wall in the border security package. Late last year, Mr. Tester and other Democrats on the Appropriations Committee voted for a spending bill that included $1.6 billion for 65 miles of fencing along the border.What’s at stake? If the two sides cannot reach a trade agreement by March 2, the United States plans to escalate the trade war with tariffs on an additional $200 billion of Chinese imports. China has indicated it will similarly retaliate.
+Analysis: Trump administration officials claim they have the upper hand as China’s economy begins to buckle under U.S. tariffs. But Mr. Trump may have lost some of that leverage. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the five-week partial government shutdown cost the economy $11 billion, nearly a quarter of which is permanently lost.
+Go deeper: Apple, like many other companies that rely heavily on China to assemble its products, would face significant financial pressure if the trade war escalated and would find it increasingly difficult to move its manufacturing elsewhere. A tiny screw demonstrates why.
+Singapore reports vast breach of H.I.V. patients’ data
+The medical records and personal information for 14,200 H.I.V.-positive people were stolen by an American and illegally disclosed online, officials said, in the second major data breach of the country’s public health system in two years.
+Details: The American, Mikhy Farrera Brochez, lived on an employment pass in Singapore from January 2008 to June 2016, when he was jailed. In 2017, he was convicted of “numerous fraud and drug-related offenses” — including lying to labor officials about his H.I.V. status, providing false information to the police and using forged degree certificates in job applications. He has been deported and his whereabouts was not disclosed.
+Why it matters: Half of H.I.V. cases reported in Singapore every year are transmitted through same-sex intercourse, which is illegal there, so the breach is especially sensitive. The country also doesn’t grant employment passes to H.I.V.-positive foreigners.Thomas L. Phillips, who transformed Raytheon from mainly a weapons company into a diversified manufacturer of aircraft, industrial equipment and appliances as its longtime chief executive, died on Jan. 9 at his home in Weston, Mass.
+Mr. Phillips had said he was 94, though family members said they could not be sure about his precise date of birth. His death was confirmed by his daughter Debbie Phillips.
+Mr. Phillips often spoke of his midcareer embrace of evangelical Christianity as a pivotal moment in both his personal and his business life, leading him to make corporate decisions based in part on his faith. Charles W. Colson, a lawyer and political saboteur for President Richard M. Nixon, credited Mr. Phillips as having inspired him in his own born-again experience in the 1970s while serving a prison term stemming from the Watergate scandal.
+Mr. Phillips, an engineer by training, joined Raytheon in 1948, when the company, now headquartered in Waltham, Mass., was known as a manufacturer of vacuum tubes and microwave tubes for radar equipment.I still hear Michel Legrand’s voice in my head: “Melissa! Hurry! Come!”
+It was morning at the Music Box Theater, an early rehearsal during the first previews of his 2002 Broadway musical “Amour.” It was 10:01 a.m., and we were all moving slowly, nursing coffee cups in the palms of our hands. We had performed the show the night before and were still easing into the day.
+Michel, the three-time Oscar-winning film composer who died on Saturday at 86, didn’t want to waste a minute. He pulled on my arm, speaking fast in heavily accented English, insisting that we must find a piano. As we scurried to the theater’s downstairs lobby, he told me he had written a new song for my character, Isabelle, and it would go into the show that evening. We flew down the gilded stairs, and I sat at his side at the piano.
+What I remember most was the change in Michel’s body language as he shared his new music. Once at the piano, he slowed down and became absorbed. He would rush you as if to an American ice cream parlor on a crowded summer afternoon — and then offer you a slowly simmered French meal. I sat as he played, and marveled quietly when his hands turned the melody unexpectedly, a new minor key, a delicious twist that only he could have invented.
+Of course the song, “Other People’s Stories,” with lyrics by Jeremy Sams, was beautiful, perhaps the best remembered in the show. And it was in “Amour” by 7 p.m. that night, typed hurriedly by a stage manager and taped into a magazine prop so I could literally read it as I sang in front of a thousand people.I went to the Théâtre de la Ville twice on Saturday. Much of my visit was spent waiting in line: for security, screenings and virtually everything else. It took nearly an hour to get a “visa,” which everyone is required to purchase. (They give access ranging from six hours to anytime throughout the run of “DAU,” which ends Feb. 17.) Mine hadn’t been printed yet, and I had to navigate a crowd of people trying to get new ones after the cancellations on Thursday and earlier Friday.
+My problem wasn’t unique: “Why are so many visas missing?” I overheard one employee ask, to no one in particular.
+After finagling one, I made my way inside the theater, where you are meant to hand over your smartphone in exchange for a “DAU”-issued device programmed to guide you through the visit — uniquely tailored to each person based on answers to an elaborate and emotionally invasive questionnaire. I took the test, but never received a device, and was left to explore on my own.
+It was late afternoon, yet “DAU” didn’t seem to have woken up yet, despite being a 24-hour operation. At first, none of the films were being screened. However, the cafe and gift shop appeared to be up and running with no problems.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+ALBANY — For more than a decade, victims of childhood sexual abuse in New York have asked lawmakers here for the chance to seek justice — only to be blocked by powerful interests including insurance companies, private schools and leaders from the Roman Catholic Church and Orthodox Jewish communities.
+As activists and Democratic officials pushed to strengthen protections for child abuse victims, those opposing interests — wealthy and closely tied to members of the then Republican-controlled State Senate — warned that permitting victims to revive decades-old claims could lead churches, schools and community organizations into bankruptcy. For 13 years, the so-called Child Victims Act foundered.
+But in November, Democrats won control of the Senate. And on Monday, both the Senate and Assembly overwhelmingly approved the Child Victims Act, ending a bitter, protracted battle with some of the most powerful groups in the state. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has promised to sign the bill into law.
+Every senator, Republican and Democrat, voted for the bill — even though it never even came to the Senate floor for a vote under the Republican majority. The bill passed the Assembly 130-3.A frigid morning in Chicago. Jose M. Osorio/Chicago Tribune, via Associated Press
+As climate change heats up the planet, winters are warming faster than summers. But during periods of extremely cold weather, many people wonder, “If the Earth is getting warmer, how can winter still be so cold?”
+President Trump raises this question frequently, most recently on Jan. 28:
+In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019
+So, how can the temperature still tumble so low? The answer lies the difference between local weather and climate.
+Climate refers to how the atmosphere acts over a long period of time, while weather describes what’s happening on a much shorter time scale. The climate can be thought of, in a way, as the sum of long periods of weather.
+Or, to use an analogy Mr. Trump might appreciate, weather is how much money you have in your pocket today, whereas climate is your net worth. A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, anymore than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.
+Even on a day when it is colder than average where you live, the world as a whole is frequently warmer than average, which you can see for yourself on these daily maps from the University of Maine.
+Here is an example from a period of unusually frigid weather in December 2017, when parts of the United States were 15 to 30 degrees Fahrenheit colder than average, but the world as a whole was about 0.9 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 1979-2000 average:
+The coldest weather (relative to average) will be positioned right over North America through at least the next 7-days...
+[Maps: https://t.co/3ktgI4H39L] pic.twitter.com/Fsua7Lc9xW — Zack Labe (@ZLabe) December 27, 2017
+While climate scientists expect that the world could warm, on average, roughly two to seven degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century — depending on how quickly greenhouse-gas emissions rise — they don’t expect that to mean the end of winter altogether. Record low temperatures will still occur; they’ll just become rarer over time.
+One 2009 study found that the United States saw roughly as many record highs as record lows in the 1950s, but by the 2000s there were twice as many record highs as record lows. Severe cold snaps were still happening, but they were becoming less common.
+Some recent cold spells have been caused by a dreaded weather system called the polar vortex. There’s growing evidence to suggest that the polar vortex is appearing outside the Arctic more frequently, because of changes in the jet stream that are attributed to the warming atmosphere. These changes help frigid air escape from the Arctic and swoop southward.
+Politicians have tried to use cold snaps to prove a point before. Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, brought a snowball to the Senate floor in February 2015 as evidence that the Earth was not warming.
+Mr. Trump, who has repeatedly denied the science of climate change, has recognized the threats where some of his properties are involved. His golf resort in Ireland intends to build two sea walls and cited the risks of global warming in one of its applications for the construction.
+Mr. Trump has made a habit of airing his climate skepticism on Twitter, posting comments on “climate change” or “global warming” more than 100 times since 2011. Before his presidency, he called climate change a hoax and claimed the idea was perpetuated by the Chinese.
+In 2018, he backed off that claim, saying: “I don’t think there’s a hoax. I do think there’s probably a difference. But I don’t know that it’s man-made.”BANGKOK — A deadly bombing of a cathedral in the Philippines has brought fresh attention to the Islamic State’s ability to metastasize across the world, even as the militant group has been reduced to a sliver of turf in Syria.
+The attack, consisting of two detonations, struck the Cathedral of Our Lady of Mount Carmel on the island of Jolo at the southern end of the Philippines, a region where Muslim insurgents have for decades battled the Catholic-majority state. At least 20 people were confirmed dead in the assault, which took place just as worshipers gathered for Mass on Sunday.
+Through various online bulletins, the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, claimed responsibility.
+The violence showcased the ability of the Islamic State to graft onto faraway militant movements and fan the flames of local conflicts by striking a high-profile target like a cathedral, the premier church in a Catholic diocese. Fighters from Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia flocked to Iraq and Syria in recent years, and returnees from the Islamic State’s battles have strengthened the reach and tactical power of extremist groups back in Southeast Asia.
+The bombings in the Philippines occurred just after a Muslim-majority part of the island group of Mindanao, which includes Jolo, held a referendum on a delicate peace process. On Monday, the Philippine national security adviser, Hermogenes Esperon, implied that the bombings on Sunday were most likely the work of rebels affiliated with Abu Sayyaf, a separatist militia with a stronghold in Jolo that is excluded from the current peace process.To the Editor:
+Re “A Lack of Respect for the Working Class,” by Daniel Wasik (letter, Jan. 21):
+John Gardner, the secretary of health, education and welfare from 19 65 to 1968 ), commented on the consequences of the lack of respect shown to the working class.
+“The socie ty which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”
+Stephen Krashen
+Los Angeles
+The writer is professor emeritus of education at the University of Southern California.Kudos to our latest political supernova, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for helpfully bringing taxes back into focus, with her call for a new top tax rate of 70 percent on incomes above $10 million a year.
+That seemingly simple concept makes for a great headline, but it’s not great tax policy. While I’m all for raising taxes on the wealthy (in large part because we need to deal with our growing deficit), there are more sensible ways to do it.
+For starters, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez seems to be ignoring the burden of state and local taxes, particularly for residents of places like her hometown. For us New Yorkers, the top rate for those levies is 12.7 percent. And thanks to the 2017 Republican tax cut, it is no longer deductible, bringing her proposed top rate to 82.7 percent.
+There are other, better ways to raise revenue — in particular, by increasing the tax rate on capital gains and dividends and closing loopholes.The Big Ears Festival is turning 10 years old in March — but it’s using the opportunity to celebrate a more senior institution.
+The annual experimental-music festival announced on Monday that it will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the trailblazing label ECM Records with 20 separate performances across its four days.
+This is set to be the largest single convocation of ECM-related artists in the United States. Like the rest of Big Ears, these shows will take place March 21-24 at a variety of venues throughout downtown Knoxville, Tenn.
+Since 1969, ECM has been devoted to publishing music at the crossroads of contemporary Western classical, jazz and experimental music. This puts it roughly in line with the programmatic mission of Big Ears. ECM’s founder and director, Manfred Eicher, will be on hand at the festival, although he has not yet announced plans to participate in any official events.To the Editor:
+Re “Ex-Starbucks Chief Preparing for ’20 Run” (news article, Jan. 28):
+By now Howard Schultz should have learned that third-party or independent candidates can only be spoilers, not presidents. If this self-proclaimed lifelong Democrat really wants to bring his own ideological vision to the White House, he should run as a Democrat.
+Donald Trump became president by conquering the Republican Party. If Mr. Schultz is serious, he should follow suit by trying to win his party’s nomination through the Democratic primaries. If he doesn’t like what his party stands for, he should fight to change it, not abandon it.
+Steven W. Sinding
+Bondville, Vt.
+To the Editor:
+Regarding Howard Schultz’s possible independent run for president, I have two thoughts: Ralph Nader and Jill Stein. Imagine, in 2000, if we’d elected a president who believed in forceful action against climate change and didn’t believe in weapons of mass destruction? Imagine, in 2016, well ... enough said.
+I once heard the great historian David McCullough say, “Learning history is an antidote to the hubris of the present.” Mr . Schultz, for the good of the planet, get over yourself.LONDON — Tesco supermarket, the largest grocer in Britain by market share, said it was planning to cut thousands of employees, an attempt to fend off challenges from discount retailers and a possible Brexit downturn.
+The chain, which employs more than 440,000 people globally, said that it expected 9,000 jobs in Britain to be affected, but that half of the workers could be moved to other positions. The decision comes more than four years after Tesco started a price-cuts campaign and revamped stores to win back customers.
+Tesco shares closed down 1.73 percent on Monday.
+Retailers in Britain have been under pressure for months. Consumer spending on food rose slightly over Christmas, but retail sales over all were flat. It was the worst December in 10 years for retailers and a sign of a tough year ahead given uncertainty over Brexit, according to the British Retail Consortium.
+Tesco still accounts for the largest share of sales at supermarkets, but it is facing increasing competition from discount stores like Aldi and Lidl and online shopping.Mr. Pham, who writes a Vietnamese food blog with Kim Pham, his wife, brought a big batch of pickled vegetables. He encouraged everyone to take some home, and stepped in to help late arrivals with the process.
+Many attendees had roots in Vietnam, others in Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and China. Few had experience making banh chung. They chatted as they wrapped alongside their children, sisters and mothers, introducing one another and sharing their stories.
+Ta-Cuc Nguyen came to the United States as a refugee in the 1970s. She remembered making banh chung in preparation for Tet in Lancaster, Pa., where it was impossible to find the leaves of an arrowroot plant used as a wrapper, or even banana leaves, a common substitute. Ms. Nguyen made do with plastic wrap brushed with a little green food coloring.
+After the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in the United States, fleeing persecution. Although government programs placed new arrivals throughout the country in small groups, to encourage assimilation, Vietnamese families moved to be near one another and built strongly rooted communities, particularly in California.
+Ms. Tran came to the United States in 1978, as a child, and settled in Los Angeles. Her family owns the restaurant Pho 79, in Garden Grove, which was at one point a chain with locations in Los Angeles County and Orange County. She is known for her own restaurant, Good Girl Dinette in Highland Park, which closed in October.Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization at the University of Toronto, has published hard-hitting research on powerful targets in recent years: Chinese government censorship, Silicon Valley’s invasion of customers’ privacy, despotic regimes’ electronic surveillance of dissidents. It’s the kind of work that can make enemies.
+So when John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, got an odd request for a meeting last week from someone describing himself as a wealthy investor from Paris, he suspected a ruse and decided to set a trap.
+Over lunch at New York’s five-star Peninsula Hotel, the white-bearded visitor, who said his name was Michel Lambert, praised Mr. Scott-Railton’s work and pried for details about Citizen Lab. Then — “as I was finishing my crème brûlée,” Mr. Scott-Railton said — a reporter and photographer from The Associated Press, alerted by Mr. Scott-Railton and lurking nearby, confronted the visitor, who bumped into chairs and circled the room while trying to flee.
+At least two other men nearby appeared to be operatives — one who stood at the door, another who seemed to be filming from a table, said Mr. Scott-Railton, who himself filmed his lunch companion.Here’s some news you oughta know: “Jagged Little Pill” is coming to Broadway.
+Producers said on Monday that the musical, which uses the song catalog of Alanis Morissette to confront such contemporary issues as rape culture and addiction, will open next fall. They did not specify a theater or a date.
+“Jagged Little Pill” has had one previous production, a sold-out 10-week run last year at the nonprofit American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
+Reviewing the show for The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green said it “takes on the good work we are always asking new musicals to do: the work of singing about real things,” but added, “if only it didn’t sing about all of them all at once.” In the Boston Globe, Christopher Muther expressed similar misgivings about the catalog of social issues crammed into the plot, but called it “wildly entertaining” and “wickedly funny in just the right places.”
+The musical features songs written by Ms. Morissette and Glen Ballard, many of them from the 1995 album that gives the show its title, and a book by Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning screenwriter for “Juno.” Diane Paulus, who is the artistic director of the A.R.T. and a Tony winner for “Pippin,” is the director.This sounds like some document. In addition to a list of vetted candidates for each cabinet post and numerous other leadership roles, Christie writes, “We had a day-one plan and a 100-day plan once the administration started. We had a 200-day plan after that.”
+Trump didn’t want to talk about the transition. Bad karma, he thought. “C’mon, Chris, just close it down,” Trump told him. “Chris, you and I are so smart, and we’ve known each other for so long, we could do the whole transition together if we just leave the victory party two hours early!”
+Expecting Trump’s other senior advisers to read 30 volumes, especially from Christie, was like waiting for monkeys to begin typing Shakespeare. In Christie’s view, trashing the transition plan was the original sin of the Trump administration.
+The president didn’t get the right people. Instead he got “the revolving door of deeply flawed individuals — amateurs, grifters, weaklings, convicted and unconvicted felons — who were hustled into jobs they were never suited for, sometimes seemingly without so much as a background check via Google or Wikipedia.”
+If Trump had only listened to him, Christie writes, he would have fired James B. Comey, then director of the F.B.I., at the start of his administration. His later firing would become, according to Bannon, the worst mistake in modern political history.
+If you skim through “Let Me Finish,” riffling the book like a deck of cards, nearly all you will see is Christie saying, in so many words, I told you so.
+He told Trump that retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn was trouble. He told Trump to stop picking on Khizr Khan, the Gold Star father. He was the only one who could tell Trump when he’d done poorly in a debate. “He needed someone from the world of politics he could talk to,” Christie writes. “Being his peer was a key part of the role that I played.”To the Editor:
+Re “Mr. Trump’s Shutdown Was a Cruel Joke” (editorial, Jan. 26):
+While this editorial makes good points about the cruelty and folly of the shutdown, the negative tone misses an opportunity. President Trump made a courageous and mature decision Friday to reopen the government. In the best interest of the whole country, he dared the predictable avalanche of “caving” and “incompetence” insults from both the right and the left.
+So let’s give him the praise and appreciation he deserves. If even his “enemies” like us are fair to him now, in his next tight spot he may be encouraged to decide as wisely again.
+Betsy Duren
+Tucson
+To the Editor:
+As a Democrat I’d like to let President Trump know that I hope his failure to bully Speaker Nancy Pelosi into paying for the wall is the beginning of the end of the bombast and incompetence he has shown in his first two years in office. While it is still too early to know if he has learned anything from this experience, it should not be lost on him that we now have a Congress capable of standing up to him and doing what is necessary to make sure he is held accountable for his actions.
+Michael Scott
+San Francisco
+To the Editor:
+Let ’s be honest. The wall debate has nothing to do with the actual merits or costs of constructing a wall. For Republicans, it’s a symbol of getting tough on illegal immigration. For Democrats, it’s a means of thwarting President Trump and gaining popularity among liberal and Latino voters. For the nation, it’s a symptom of politics trumping good government.May I say there are few combinations better than fish and potatoes? I don’t think anyone could argue convincingly to the contrary.
+Fish and chips are an obvious example of how good a pairing it is, and New England fish chowder would be decidedly one-dimensional without the world’s best-loved tuber in the picture.
+This week I’m offering an easy, flavorful method for roasting any type of firm-fleshed fish fillet, in this case halibut, to served with roasted potatoes.Corporate warnings about China’s sluggish economy hit stocks on Monday as the battle between the world’s largest economies over trade and technology continued to weigh on the outlook for growth and profits.
+The warnings, which came from the chipmaker Nvidia and the bulldozer builder Caterpillar, concerned very different sectors of China’s economy. But the message was nearly the same, as was the sharp tumble in shares, which made them the two worst performing stocks in the S&P 500. The broad index dropped almost 0.8 percent on Monday.
+Nvidia, which makes technology that allows computers to quickly render graphics for games, cut its expectations for revenue in the fourth quarter by roughly half a billion dollars, to $2.2 billion, sending its shares down nearly 14 percent. The Santa Clara, Calif., company cited “deteriorating macroeconomic conditions, particularly in China,” for hampering demand for such graphics-processing chips.WASHINGTON — The Trump administration imposed sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil company on Monday, seeking to cripple the government of embattled President Nicolás Maduro by cutting off its main source of cash.
+The move marked the first punitive step by the United States to force Mr. Maduro to give up power since the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, declared himself interim president last week after years of accusations of corruption in Venezuela at the expense of its people.
+The sanctions prohibit most American businesses from engaging in transactions with the oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or Pdvsa. Administration officials said the financial penalties are expected to block $7 billion in assets and result in $11 billion in export losses over the next year for Venezuela’s government, starving it from its most important source of revenue and foreign currency.
+Last week, the Trump administration recognized Mr. Guaidó, the 35-year-old leader of the National Assembly, as his supporters took to the streets to demand new elections. Mr. Maduro has cut ties to the United States and has demanded that all American diplomats leave the country.As if you need another step to add to your beauty regimen.
+So, rather than offer fussy tips that will require more time in the morning, the Paris hairstylist David Mallett, who tends to the coifs of Charlotte Gainsbourg, Clémence Poésy and Léa Seydoux, suggests rethinking the way you approach hair care in the first place.
+“Frenchwomen wash their hair less, and they have more of a strategy when it comes to hair care,” said Mr. Mallett, who recently opened a salon in SoHo. “It’s less about blow-dry bars, which are very aggressive and hard on hair, and more about an organic approach.”
+That includes D.I.Y. tips to refresh hairstyles until the next shampoo, as well as ways to maintain volume and texture throughout the week. Below you’ll find three of Mr. Mallett’s favorite tricks.Meg Medina won this year’s John Newbery Medal for the most outstanding contribution to children’s literature for her novel “Merci Suarez Changes Gears,” the story of an 11-year-old girl who navigates her home life with a Cuban-American extended family and her experiences as a scholarship student at a private school. Medina is the second Latinx writer to win the award — Matt de la Pena won in 2016 for the picture book “Last Stop on Market Street,” illustrated by Christian Robinson — and the first to win for a novel.
+Sophie Blackall won the Randolph Caldecott Medal, which is awarded to an illustrator for the year’s most distinguished American picture book, for “Hello, Lighthouse,” a chronicle of working and living in a remote lighthouse that pays tribute to the difficult job lighthouse keepers performed for centuries. Blackall, who also won the award in 2016 for “Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World’s Most Famous Bear,” becomes the ninth illustrator to win the award multiple times since it was first given in 1938.
+The Newbery and the Caldecott awards are the most anticipated of the annual prizes given out by the American Library Association for young adult and children’s literature. They were announced Monday at the association’s midwinter conference in Seattle. Considered among the most prestigious prizes given for children’s literature, the awards are known to drive sales and spur librarian and teacher recommendations.On Friday, the government will release its monthly hiring and unemployment figures for January. Because furloughed government employees will receive back pay, the shutdown is unlikely to affect payrolls but could push the unemployment rate higher.
+There’s another important figure from the report to watch: wage growth. The average hourly earnings for workers had grown slowly during the recovery from the financial crisis, but has ticked up in recent months.
+That comes with its own complications. Historically when wage growth is strong, inflation picks up. The Fed chairman, Jerome H. Powell, and his two immediate predecessors raised questions about the connection this month, but a big jump in wage growth this year could make investors nervous that it will lead to inflation or push the Fed to raise interest rates.
+Investors will keep an eye on two other labor market releases: the monthly Jolts (Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey) report and the weekly initial jobless claims. The two reports offer indications of job vacancies and layoffs.
+Inflation could eat into profits
+Data releases: Personal consumption expenditures, Consumer Price Index
+There are two main measures of inflation: the Consumer Price Index and the personal consumption expenditures, or P.C.E., price index, which the Fed has indicated is its preferred measure of inflation. After rising above the Fed’s target of 2 percent earlier last year, both have pulled back in recent months.
+In December, the Consumer Price Index rose 1.9 percent annually because of lower oil prices. Excluding the volatile food and energy prices, the index climbed 2.2 percent.“I as a junior in college found myself lying in bed in a hotel looking out at the red stars on the top of the Kremlin towers, saying to myself, ‘How the hell did I get here?’ ” he recalled in a 2017 talk at the National Museum of American History in Washington. “But I took a lot of pictures — 200 pictures.”
+Image Mr. Olsen in Moscow in 1954. He was one of two American students chosen to go to the Soviet Union as part of a Soviet-American exchange. Credit... via Olsen Family
+It was a time, during the Cold War, when few Americans had seen the Soviet Union, and he used those photographs to start a sideline giving show-and-tell lectures. (The C.I.A., his daughter said, was also interested in the pictures.) On a return visit in 1959, he became enchanted with the elevator operator at his Moscow hotel, Ludmilla Stefutkina.
+After he returned a year later and married her, his efforts to bring her to the United States — which eventually succeeded — made news across the country, partly because the Soviets had just shot down an American spy plane and captured its pilot, Francis Gary Powers.
+After graduating from Harvard Divinity School in 1959 and ministering for a time in Westboro, Mass., Mr. Olsen took a ministerial post in Berkeley, Calif., in 1962. After Bloody Sunday — when the future United States representative John Lewis was among those beaten — Dr. King urged religious leaders to come to Selma for a subsequent march.
+“I heard that on the radio and my first thought was, ‘I’d like to go,’ ” Mr. Olsen said. But, besides having a packed schedule, he couldn’t afford the long trip. Then a couple in the Berkeley congregation offered to pay his way.
+“I suddenly had to rethink all those excuses,” he said.
+His plane was delayed, so he missed the march Dr. King led that Tuesday afternoon. But he reached Selma later in the day and ran into Mr. Reeb and Mr. Miller, whom he knew. They went to dinner, and they were attacked after they left the restaurant.LONDON — Patricia McBride Lousada, who was a founding member of New York City Ballet and interpreter of some of George Balanchine’s seminal early works and who later became a noted cookbook author, died on Jan. 8 in London. She was 89.
+The cause was a heart attack she had while riding her bicycle, her daughter Carla Capalbo said.
+Ms. Lousada danced under the name Pat McBride with Ballet Society, which was founded in 1946 by Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein, and with the company after it was renamed New York City Ballet in 1948. She performed in works by Balanchine, Frederick Ashton, Merce Cunningham, Lew Christiansen and Jerome Robbins. (She is not to be confused with the principal dancer Patricia McBride, who joined City Ballet in 1959.)
+Ms. Lousada was a cast member of many central works created by Balanchine, including “The Four Temperaments,” which had its premiere on Ballet Society’s opening night, Nov. 20, 1946, at the Central High School of Needle Trades.
+Along with dancing in the corps de ballet of Balanchine’s “L’Enfant et les sortilèges” (1946), “Symphony in C” (1947) and “Symphonie Concertante” (1947), she performed the solo role of the Young Girl in “The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne” (1947), to a commissioned score by Vittorio Rieti, and the role of Eurydice in “Orpheus” (1948).Also along for the Russia trip were Joseph R. Gregory, co-chairman of the N.R.A.’s Golden Ring of Freedom, a group for donors of $1 million or more; and Pete Brownell, then the organization’s first vice president, who would later become president.
+Congressional scrutiny of the N.R.A. has intensified since Ms. Butina pleaded guilty last month to conspiring to act as a foreign agent, in a deal with the United States attorney’s office in Washington. She admitted to being part of a Russian-backed effort to use the N.R.A. to influence American politics. Two Senate committees are also investigating the N.R.A.’s ties to Russia, as is the House Intelligence Committee, and the Federal Election Commission initiated a preliminary inquiry last year. Three past N.R.A. presidents — Mr. Keene, Mr. Cors and Mr. Brownell — have been asked for interviews in the inquiries.
+A critical question for investigators is the extent of the N.R.A.’s financial ties to Russia. While the N.R.A. has turned over thousands of pages of records in the Senate inquiries, those documents do not include the organization’s closely held donor records; it is possible, however, that federal investigators have obtained the organization’s tax records from the Internal Revenue Service.
+Responding to questions from the Senate Finance Committee, the N.R.A. said last year that since 2015 it had brought in roughly $2,500 “from people associated with Russian addresses” or Russian nationals living in the United States. But that left open the question of money that may have come from shell companies or other less overt sources.
+“The N.R.A. should provide the financial documents and other records necessary to explain the scope of their activities,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon and the committee’s ranking member, said in a statement. “The prospect of N.R.A. or N.R.A. officials abusing nonprofit status to work with a hostile regime and undermine our democracy is central to my investigation.”
+The N.R.A.’s outside counsel, Mr. Brewer, said that after an internal review, the group “believes that no foreign money made its way into the organization for use in the 2016 presidential election.” Any suggestion that the group took in Russian money, he said, “fails to appreciate the steps the N.R.A. takes to guard against such an unwanted event.”
+With Democrats now controlling the House, an inquiry led by the House Intelligence Committee has new life.WASHINGTON — The Justice Department unveiled sweeping charges on Monday against the Chinese telecom firm Huawei and its chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, outlining a decade-long attempt by the company to steal trade secrets, obstruct a criminal investigation and evade economic sanctions on Iran.
+The pair of indictments, which were partly unsealed on Monday, come amid a broad and aggressive campaign by the United States to try to thwart China’s biggest telecom equipment maker. Officials have long suspected Huawei of working to advance Beijing’s global ambitions and undermine America’s interests and have begun taking steps to curb its international presence.
+The charges underscore Washington’s determination to prove that Huawei poses a national security threat and to convince other nations that it cannot be trusted to build their next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The indictments, based in part on the company’s internal emails, describe a plot to steal testing equipment from T-Mobile laboratories in Bellevue, Wash. They also cite internal memos, obtained from Ms. Meng, that prosecutors said link her to an elaborate bank fraud that helped Huawei profit by evading Iran sanctions.
+The acting attorney general, Matthew G. Whitaker, flanked by the heads of several other cabinet agencies, said the United States would seek to have Ms. Meng extradited from Canada, where she was detained last year at the request of the United States.WASHINGTON — President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address to Congress on Feb. 5, 10 days before the deadline for lawmakers in the House and the Senate to reach an agreement on a border security package to avert another government shutdown.
+Speaker Nancy Pelosi sent an invitation to the president on Monday afternoon, after the two spoke for about 12 minutes by telephone in a conversation that she initiated, an aide said. Mr. Trump later replied, agreeing to the date.
+“We have a great story to tell and yet, great goals to achieve!” he wrote.
+The invitation capped weeks of back-and-forth between the speaker and the president over when, and whether, he could deliver the speech in the House chamber.
+On Jan. 23, in the middle of the 35-day government shutdown, Ms. Pelosi told the president she wanted to postpone the address, initially scheduled for Tuesday, until after the government reopened, and even went as far as to suggest that he deliver the speech in writing.As Nets guard Joe Harris walks the cobblestone streets outside the team’s practice facility in Sunset Park, no one seems to notice.
+“Most of the time, I blend in,” he said. “I kind of look like I work in a Brooklyn coffee shop.”
+Harris’s journey from unemployed castoff to indispensable starter mirrors the rise of the Nets, a team reconstructed through savvy draft picks and second-chance signings. Without a marquee star, the Nets have won 19 of their last 25 games, and they are on a six-game winning streak against opponents in the stronger Western Conference.
+The Nets had 28 victories last season; now, despite a loss in Boston on Monday, they have the sixth-best record in the Eastern Conference (27-24), and playoff talk is brewing. The injury-riddled team has weathered the loss of Caris LeVert, out with a foot injury since November, and now is without Spencer Dinwiddie, a strong candidate for the Sixth Man of the Year Award, who may be out until mid-March with a thumb injury. In Dinwiddie’s absence, the next-man-up Nets will look to G League call-ups and increased scoring from everyone.“It will be very difficult” for Neymar to return in time to face Manchester United, P.S.G.’s German coach, Thomas Tuchel, said after a 4-1 Ligue 1 win over Stade Rennais on Sunday. “It is too early to talk about a possible return date.”
+Neymar, a 26-year-old forward, was acquired from Barcelona last season for $262 million, making him the most expensive player in soccer history. The goal was to finally push P.S.G. over the hump to Champions League glory after years of dominating the French league but coming up short in Europe.
+With Neymar, P.S.G. won the French league by 13 points last season, and it leads this year by 13 again. But despite the presence of Neymar, P.S.G.’s Champions League run ended last year as it so often has, in the round of 16, with a 5-2 aggregate loss to the eventual champion, Real Madrid. Neymar’s five goals in the competition this season ranks him tied for third behind Robert Lewandowski of Bayern Munich and Lionel Messi of Barcelona.
+P.S.G. is already missing the playmaking midfielder Marco Verratti; he has a sprained ankle.
+“I truly believe that we can handle the situation without Marco and Neymar,” Tuchel told reporters.LONDON — Under normal circumstances, the British lawmakers Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper would hardly be called rebels.
+Mr. Boles, an Oxford-educated Tory, comes from a long line of colonial officers and Conservative Party stalwarts. Ms. Cooper, an Oxford-educated Labour lawmaker, became a government minister at the age of 30, and was the first woman to serve as chief secretary to the Treasury.
+But on Tuesday, these two moderate, establishment lawmakers, both representing districts that strongly backed Britain’s exit from the European Union, hope to present the British government with a historic challenge.
+They plan to propose an amendment in Parliament that could delay Britain’s departure from the bloc for a few months or even until the end of the year rather than leave without a deal.WASHINGTON — Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting attorney general, announced on Monday that the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, is wrapping up his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign and whether the Trump campaign cooperated with Moscow’s operation.
+“The investigation is, I think, close to being completed, and I hope that we can get the report from Director Mueller as soon as possible,” Mr. Whitaker said.
+His impromptu remark, at the end of a news conference about an unrelated case, was a highly unusual confirmation of the state of the special counsel’s investigation. Justice Department policy ordinarily prohibits public comment on open criminal inquiries, and Mr. Mueller has refused to publicly discuss the investigation since he was appointed in May 2017 to oversee it.
+Mr. Whitaker, who is considered intensely loyal to President Trump, said that he had been “fully briefed on the investigation” and that he looked forward to Mr. Mueller delivering a report.1. $11 billion.
+That’s how much the five-week government shutdown cost the U.S. economy, with nearly a quarter of that total permanently lost, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
+The number was released as hundreds of thousands of federal employees returned to work. After returning to work, subway traffic picked up in Washington, above. Now, a 17-member bipartisan panel has less than three weeks to come up with an agreement on border security.
+In the meantime, investors and economic policymakers, including the Federal Reserve, are operating without government analyses of retail sales, manufacturing, housing and other parts of the economy.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.ROME — Pope Francis sought to downplay what he called “inflated expectations” for a global church summit on child sexual abuse next month, casting it as an educational workshop for bishops more than a definitive policymaking meeting.
+“We have to deflate expectations,” the pope told reporters on the papal plane returning to Rome from an international event for Roman Catholic youth in Panama. “Because the problem of abuse will continue, it is a human problem.”
+The summit is shaping up to be a pivotal moment in Francis’ nearly six-year papacy. As abuse scandals have spread beyond the United States and Europe to Latin America and Asia, the pope has faced pressure to prove that the church is capable of removing abusive priests and disciplining negligent bishops.
+The pope said that the meeting, to be held at the Vatican on Feb. 21 through Feb. 24, was intended to help bishops and the heads of religious orders better understand the procedures to follow when faced with allegations of abuse, and to impress on them the terrible suffering of victims.America invented progressive taxation. And there was a time when leading American politicians were proud to proclaim their willingness to tax the wealthy, not just to raise revenue, but to limit excessive concentration of economic power.
+“It is important,” said Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, “to grapple with the problems connected with the amassing of enormous fortunes” — some of them, he declared, “swollen beyond all healthy limits.”
+Today we are once again living in an era of extraordinary wealth concentrated in the hands of a few people, with the net worth of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of Americans almost equal to that of the bottom 90 percent combined. And this concentration of wealth is growing; as Thomas Piketty famously argued in his book “Capital in the 21st Century,” we seem to be heading toward a society dominated by vast, often inherited fortunes.
+So can today’s politicians rise to the challenge? Well, Elizabeth Warren has released an impressive proposal for taxing extreme wealth. And whether or not she herself becomes the Democratic nominee for president, it says good things about her party that something this smart and daring is even part of the discussion.Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
+[Get On Politics delivered to your inbox.]
+Hold on to your triple-venti soy no-foam latte. Howard Schultz is running for president. Probably.
+The former Starbucks chief told The New York Times on Sunday that he was preparing a 2020 bid as an independent. He’ll spend the next three months traveling the country, while simultaneously promoting his memoir.
+Now, could this all be a ploy to sell books? Of course. But when a guy who can self-fund his candidacy announces that he’s considering running, it’s probably worth paying some attention.
+And a lot of people did. Mr. Schultz’s announcement immediately made him the Twitter villain du jour, with Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor (a Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-independent-turned-Democrat), jumping over each other to explain why his bid is likely doomed — and bad for anyone who wants to defeat President Trump next year.KABUL, Afghanistan — A giant H has been painted on the broad boulevard in front of the American Embassy in Kabul, creating a new helipad that recently, embassy officials say, has been used only by Zalmay Khalilzad, the special United States diplomat who has been talking with the Taliban.
+President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan usually uses the roads, moving in armored convoys that snarl traffic in the gridlock-weary capital.
+The pecking order is clear. As American policy in Afghanistan seems bent more than ever on making a deal with Taliban insurgents to withdraw American troops from the country after nearly two decades of war, Mr. Khalilzad’s diplomacy is taking priority.
+The talks between Mr. Khalilzad and the Taliban, while full of caveats, have raised some parallels to Henry A. Kissinger’s talks with North Vietnamese leaders, which presaged the American pullout from South Vietnam in 1973 and the collapse of South Vietnam two years later.Fortunately, there are several ways to broaden the conversation.
+Diversify the deciders. Science is a noble endeavor, but it is not entirely pure. Patents and profits and the race against competitors influence individual researchers as well as entire scientific programs. ( The Crispr patent, which is currently the subject of a fierce legal battle, is expected to be worth $1 billion at least.) Those influences are not necessarily corrupting, but money and ego have a way of skewing priorities. Dr. He, for example, is said to have gone rogue partly out of a desire to be the first to create “Crispr babies.”
+As gene-editing technology advances toward the clinic, scientists will need to do more than listen to the concerns of bioethicists, legal scholars and social scientists. They will have to let these other voices help set priorities — decide what questions and issues need to be resolved — before theory becomes practice. That may mean allowing questions over societal risks and benefits to trump ones about scientific feasibility.
+As several scholars have suggested, a “global observatory” — an international consortium of experts from many different fields in many different countries — would go a long way toward making this shift.
+Engage the public. Obvious though this may sound, it’s not a given. “There’s a lot of skepticism about the value of public involvement in science and technology decisions,” says Simon Burall, a senior associate with Involve , a British nonprofit dedicated to increasing public engagement in science. That’s too bad. There’s plenty of evidence that having citizens weigh in on proposed policies makes them better and more sustainable. There are also far too many examples of the converse: Leaving the public out of the conversation invites suspicion and mistrust that can be difficult to overcome. It’s easy to dismiss concerns over new technology as the product of ignorance. It’s also a mistake.
+Surveys show that most people already support genome editing, as long as it’s directed at intractable diseases and not at the creation of genetically enhanced “designer babies.” Scientists and policymakers stand a better chance of preserving that good will, especially in the face of the He baby scandal, if they give the concerns that do arise a fair hearing. Social media offers an unprecedented platform for doing just that. Crispr’s proponents should start by using that platform to clarify the following:
+Scientists are nowhere near being able to make “designer babies.” They have barely figured out the genetic determinants of height; there’s no telling how long it will take them to understand more complex traits, like intelligence, beauty and athleticism. What they are close to doing is using tools like Crispr to repair faulty genes that cause serious diseases. Clinical trials are already underway for hemophilia and sickle cell disease. And these trials involve editing DNA in adult study participants, not in sperm, eggs or embryos; so the results, good or bad, can’t be passed on to offspring.Stanley Hill, a pioneering black labor leader who headed New York City’s largest public employee union for more than a decade, until he was forced to step down amid revelations of overspending and mismanagement, died on Friday in Queens. He was 82.
+His death, at a hospital, was confirmed by his son Brett, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia.
+A former welfare caseworker, Mr. Hill rose to become a major player in the intertwined worlds of local union and party politics.
+He was the first black executive director of District Council 37 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest public employee union in New York City. He served from 1987, when he emerged as Victor Gotbaum’s handpicked successor, until 1999, when he retired under pressure.I went into journalism to cover politics, but now I find myself in national marriage therapy. Covering American life is like covering one of those traumatizing Eugene O’Neill plays about a family where everyone screams at each other all night and then when dawn breaks you get to leave the theater.
+But don’t despair, I’m here to help. I’ve been searching for practical tips on how we can be less beastly to one another, especially when we’re negotiating disagreements. I’ve found some excellent guides — like “Negotiating the Nonnegotiable” by Daniel Shapiro, “The Rough Patch” by Daphne de Marneffe and “The Art of Gathering” by Priya Parker — and I’ve compiled some, I hope, not entirely useless tips.
+The rule of how many. When hosting a meeting, invite six people to your gathering if you want intimate conversation. Invite 12 if you want diversity of viewpoints. Invite 120 if you want to create a larger organism that can move as one.
+Scramble the chairs. If you invite disagreeable people over for a conversation, clear the meeting room, except jumble the chairs in a big pile in the middle. This will force everybody to do a cooperative physical activity, untangling the chairs, before anything else. Plus, you’ll scramble the power dynamics depending on where people choose to place their chairs.The reason the four are so far-flung — as least from a New York City perspective — is rooted in the 2013 law that authorized the expansion of casinos in New York, part of a plan pushed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo as a way to enliven long-sluggish upstate communities and their economies. That has not happened, as all four have struggled to meet their promises of tax revenue and in some cases, their debt payments.
+The governor’s embrace of sports betting is an acknowledgment of how it could help draw people to those casinos, as well as an acknowledgment of the competition from other states (see New Jersey).
+What about all those commercials I see for online betting?
+Those ads, for companies like FanDuel and DraftKings, are aimed for New Jersey residents and sports gamblers visiting the state.
+It is not at all clear if New York will authorize online betting, which is a potentially much bigger moneymaker than the so-called brick-and-mortar operations the Gaming Commission gave its initial approval to on Monday.
+The Cuomo administration has expressed the opinion that authorizing online bets would require changing the State Constitution. That is a time-consuming process; any such change would require passage by two separate legislatures and approval via a voter referendum. That means 2021, at the very earliest. Needless to say, casinos are not pleased by this interpretation or this timetable.
+New York sports bettors do have one option that their New Jersey brethren do not: tribal casinos.
+Betting will likely be available at Turning Stone, the hugely successful operation outside Syracuse, which is owned by the Oneida Indian Nation. Earlier this month, the Oneidas announced a partnership with Caesar’s Entertainment to open betting lounges at Turning Stone and two other smaller casinos nearby in 2019.
+What will I eventually be able to bet on?
+Pretty much any professional or major collegiate sporting event. Betting on politics and other cultural events — the winner of “The Voice,” for example, or the coming Democratic presidential primary cage-match — will not be allowed.The witnesses also accused the crime lord of paying off almost every level of the Mexican police, military and political establishment, including an alleged $100 million bribe to one of the country’s former presidents, Enrique Peña Nieto. Mr. Guzmán was said to have ordered the deaths of dozens of his rivals, enemies and informants, and to have armed himself with a gold-plated AK-47, a camouflage patterned M-16 and at least three diamond-encrusted pistols, one with his initials on the handle. Witnesses said he personally killed at least three people, ordering his men to bury one of them alive and to dispose of the other two bodies in a bonfire.
+Beyond helping prosecutors substantiate the 11 counts in Mr. Guzmán’s indictment, witnesses painted a complicated portrait of the man himself. They told jurors how he rose from being a poor campesino in the village of La Tuna in the Sierra Madre mountains to become a billionaire narco lord with a $10 million beach house, a fleet of private jets, a yacht he named for himself and a personal zoo. By the end of the government’s case, jurors had heard stories about Mr. Guzmán’s temper, grace under pressure, bottomless libido, workaholic nature, love of the limelight and obsession with spying on everyone around him. They learned about his failed vanity movie project and even got to see a video of his underwear drawer.
+Prosecutors were able to assemble all of this because many have been working on the Guzmán case for a decade or more. Well before the kingpin was extradited from Mexico two years ago to stand trial in New York, he was already facing six separate indictments filed in six separate federal judicial districts.
+As one of the world’s biggest drug traffickers, Mr. Guzmán presented a unique target. And, with some notable exceptions, building one of the world’s biggest drug trafficking cases against him required a unique level of collaboration. The charges brought against the crime lord drew upon the work of the F.B.I., the D.E.A., Homeland Security, the Narcotics and Dangerous Drug Section of the Justice Department, and United States attorney’s offices in Chicago, Miami, San Diego, El Paso and New York.
+When Adam Fels, a prosecutor from Miami, gave the government’s opening statement on Nov. 13, he made it sound as if a single, seamless case had been brought against Mr. Guzmán. But once the government rested, it was clear that there was never only one case against the kingpin, but rather there were several sewn together in a kind of patchwork quilt.
+This collage of a case was ultimately tried in Brooklyn on the orders of Loretta Lynch, the former United States attorney general who had previously served as Brooklyn’s top federal prosecutor. It was so extensive that testimony from any one individual witness might have been enough to convict Mr. Guzmán. The amount of testimony was so excessive that Judge Cogan cautioned prosecutors more than once from engaging in overkill.HOUSTON — Four undercover narcotics officers in Houston were shot Monday evening and another police officer was also injured during a gun battle that broke out when they tried to serve a search warrant, the Houston Police Department said. Two suspects were killed.
+The police officers were part of a team that was trying to search a home in a working-class, mostly Hispanic neighborhood about seven miles southeast of downtown Houston. The police believed drugs, including black tar heroin, were being dealt out of the home.
+At about 5 p.m. Central time, the police knocked down the door and were met with gunfire by an unknown number of people.
+Police officers returned fire, and during the exchange, two suspects were killed.
+Two officers were shot in the neck and were in critical but stable condition Monday night, Chief Art Acevedo of the Houston police said at a news conference. Two other officers who were shot were being observed at a hospital, but were expected to make a full recovery.WASHINGTON — The Senate voted Monday to advance legislation affirming the right of local and state governments to break ties with companies that boycott or divest from Israel, as Republicans try to drive a wedge between the Democratic Party and its traditional allies in the American Jewish community.
+The bipartisan legislation reauthorizes assistance to Israel and Jordan and imposes additional sanctions on individuals providing support for the Syrian government. But Republican leaders added a provision by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, that aims to curtail support for the boycott, divest and sanctions — or B.D.S. — movement, which seeks to pressure Israel into ending the occupation of the West Bank.
+The late inclusion was an opportunity for Republicans to draw out the new generation of insurgent liberal representatives who have been critical of Israel. Republicans are trying to paint them as extremist, and even anti-Semitic, as they try to push moderate voters away from a Democratic Party moving left. The Senate voted 74 to 19 on Monday to cut off debate on the measure, with final passage expected on Wednesday.
+Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali refugee; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the first Palestinian-American woman to serve in the House; and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York have emerged as the most vocal supporters of Palestinian rights, and as high-profile targets of Republicans. The three represent heavily Democratic districts, with supportive constituents, but Republicans hope to tar the whole party with their views.Charter schools, which are generally not unionized, were not officially on the bargaining table in the protracted negotiations between the union and the district. It is the state, not the school district, that crafts the laws governing charter schools and their growth. But it was always a central message of the union during the strike: Charter schools, they argued, were taking students and money away from traditional public schools.
+Still, charter schools have proven popular among many parents in Los Angeles. Some schools have long waiting lists and the district already has more students enrolled in charters than any other public school system in the country.
+It is still unclear how much practical impact the deal will have on charters. Charter school supporters are lobbying the school board, which has steadfastly supported charters for more than a decade, to vote down the resolution for a charter school cap this week. Even if it passes, advocates are certain to take the fight to Sacramento, where a bill calling for a moratorium seems likely. They will argue that charters have given poor students and students of color essential options for better schools.
+But the defeat in the court of public opinion is clear: After years of support from powerful local and national allies — including many Democrats — charter schools are now facing a backlash and severe skepticism.
+Over the past two years, charter school supporters were dealt painful political defeats in California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and other states.
+As the push for alternatives to traditional public schools has come to be more associated with President Trump and his secretary of education, Betsy DeVos, the shift in Democratic Party politics has been especially pronounced. President Barack Obama supported expanding high-quality charter schools, and pushed teachers’ unions to let go of some of their traditional seniority protections and put more emphasis on raising student achievement.It almost doesn’t matter. What does is that many Zimbabweans — and potential international investors — concluded that things had not changed with the exit of Mr. Mugabe. The ZANU-PF political machine that the old dictator ran since independence in 1980 was still in command and up to its old ways.
+There was a moment of hope when Mr. Mnangagwa, backed by the military, ousted Mr. Mugabe. People danced in the streets — anything was better than the enfeebled nonagenarian autocrat who had all but destroyed the economy of a country rich in resources and human potential. The new president donned a bright scarf in the colors of the Zimbabwe flag (which he has worn ever since) and promptly lifted much of the petty oppression and harassment that had been the norm. A few weeks later he was in Davos, spreading the word that Zimbabwe was “open for business.” At home, he declared that “the people’s voice is the voice of God,” and he promised free elections.
+Image Emmerson Mnangagwa continues to wear a scarf in the colors of the Zimbabwe flag. Credit... Jekesai Njikizana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
+The doubts set in with those elections, held last July 30. Mr. Mnangagwa was elected to a full term, and international observers declared the vote a marked improvement over elections under Mr. Mugabe, which, granted, is not saying much. But the 40-year-old challenger, Nelson Chamisa, claimed fraud , and when his supporters gathered in protests, government forces crushed them mercilessly.
+The economic challenges before Zimbabwe are enormous: vast debts, a battered infrastructure, hyperinflation, soaring unemployment. Confronting them will require foreign aid and investment, lifting the international sanctions imposed during Mr. Mugabe’s rule and restoring a glimmer of optimism for the future in a population that will be asked to make more sacrifices, like the fuel price increase, before things can get better. Under American law, removing sanctions requires a nonpartisan army and respect for the rights and freedoms of all people.“It was a melting pot for poets and artists and musicians and photographers,” he said, “people who were what she always called freethinkers.”
+Ms. Grill became a photographer’s agent thanks to a chance meeting and her own audacity. On an especially stormy night in 1962, while standing under an awning to shelter herself from the rain, she began chatting with a man, Alberto Rizzo, who was also waiting out the storm. He told her that he was a fashion photographer. She quickly volunteered that — what a coincidence! — she was a photographers’ agent, although she had never done that type of work before. He became her first client.
+Her roster grew to include leading photographers, among them Frank Horvat, Oliviero Toscani and Steven Meisel.
+Ms. Grill’s move into managing models was also spontaneous. A couple of decades after she had begun representing photographers, one of her clients, Fabrizio Ferri, came to her office accompanied by Ms. Rossellini, his girlfriend at the time. She hadn’t posed for any professional photographers other than Mr. Ferri.
+“She looked at her, and put her finger to her mouth, like she did when she was thinking,” Mr. Ferri said of Ms. Grill in a phone interview. “She started looking Isabella up and down, and then she said, ‘Hmm, I think I’m going to open a model agency.’ ”
+Ms. Grill immediately got to work on behalf of Ms. Rossellini, who joined the nascent agency soon afterward.
+“She took Isabella straight to Avedon, and the next day Richard Avedon shot Isabella for the cover of American Vogue,” Mr. Ferri said. “That’s how Frances was — she was pure instinct.”Peter Magowan, who in 1992 — decades after he had watched the New York Giants play at the Polo Grounds as a boy — led a group that bought the team to keep it from relocating to Florida from San Francisco, died on Sunday at his home in San Francisco. He was 76.
+His wife, Deborah, confirmed his death. Mr. Magowan had liver and prostate cancer and had had a liver transplant.
+Mr. Magowan had been the chief executive of Safeway Stores, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, when Bob Lurie, the Giants’ owner, made a deal with investors in the St. Petersburg-Tampa area in August 1992 to move the team there. Very quickly, a group of local investors, led by Mr. Magowan, assembled a $100 million bid to keep the team in San Francisco, where the Giants had moved from New York 35 years earlier.
+To Mr. Magowan, the possibility of the team fleeing his adopted hometown was as unfathomable as the departure of the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who moved to Los Angeles, had been.[Read more on Joe Biden selecting Antony Blinken as Secretary of State.]
+Senator John McCain liked to remind us that it is always darkest before it goes completely black. That may prove an apt metaphor for President Trump’s foreign policy. The past two years have been plenty dark, with a long list of self-inflicted wounds: tearing up the Iran nuclear deal, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, walking away from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, separating children from their parents at the border, insulting allies while embracing autocrats.
+But the administration has not faced an actual national security crisis that tests it and us in a profound way. There is no shortage of possible candidates — a major terrorist attack; a debilitating cyberattack; an infectious disease outbreak; an incident with North Korea, Iran, China or Russia that escalates into a broader conflict. Yet no administration in modern memory has been less prepared to deal with a true crisis than this one.
+I spent nearly 25 years in government, and almost as much time studying it. When it comes to the effective stewardship of our nation’s security — especially during crises — the most successful administrations had three things in common: people, process and policy.
+People with the experience, temperament and intellectual honesty to give a president good ideas and to dissuade him from pursuing bad ones. An effective process that brings key stakeholders together to question one another’s assumptions, stress test options and consider second-order effects. And all of this in the service of developing clear policies that provide marching orders to everyone in an administration, while putting allies at ease and adversaries on notice about our intentions.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Michael Stewart, known as “Mikey,” spent the twilight hours of Dec. 20 celebrating the holidays at an Irish pub on Staten Island. After leaving, he spotted an old friend from high school, Angelo Nesimi, in a nearby barbershop, and walked inside.
+In security camera footage from that evening, Mr. Stewart appeared raucously happy — maybe thrilled about seeing his old friend, maybe just a touch tipsy from his previous stop, maybe both. He slapped Mr. Nesimi’s hand and pulled him into a bear hug.
+It looked like a normal reunion between two old friends, except for one significant twist: The next day, prosecutors say, Mr. Stewart was dead and Mr. Nesimi was furiously trying to clean up the crime scene.
+Prosecutors in Staten Island on Monday afternoon charged Mr. Nesimi, 33, with the murder of Mr. Stewart and the subsequent attempts to hide his killing, including dumping the body and gutting his own apartment to get rid of evidence.But this frustrated executive’s politics aren’t widely shared by people who haven’t been to Davos. In a 2017 study, the political scientist Lee Drutman plotted the 2016 electorate along two axes, one dealing with social issues and identity, the other with economics and trade. Only 3.8 percent of voters fell into the socially liberal/economically conservative quadrant.
+Indeed, Trump’s campaign demonstrated that the truly underserved market in American politics was voters who are socially conservative but economically liberal — the photonegative of what Schultz is offering. Such voters — the type who might resent both immigrants and Wall Street — make up 28.9 percent of the electorate, according to Drutman’s study.
+Schultz makes much of the fact that around 40 percent of Americans identify as “independent.” But as anyone who has spent 15 minutes googling should know, independent is not the same thing as centrist. Most independents lean toward one party, and as the Pew Research Center has demonstrated, in the past two decades independents have grown more ideologically polarized, not more moderate. America has two independent senators. One of them is Bernie Sanders.
+Even if there were a latent constituency of modern Rockefeller Republicans longing for the leadership of an enlightened plutocrat, third-party presidential campaigns are terrible vehicles for building political power. America’s two-party system, unfortunate as it is, is an inevitable result of the winner-take-all nature of our elections. It cannot simply be wished away.
+There are policies that could potentially break the two-party stranglehold on our politics. Ranked-choice voting, which Maine used for the 2018 congressional elections, lets voters select candidates in order of preference. One by one, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated. Their supporters’ votes are apportioned to those voters’ next-highest choice, until someone emerges with a majority. If Schultz were serious about challenging party monopolies he might invest some of his fortune in efforts to pass similar reforms elsewhere.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When Mayor Bill de Blasio acknowledged this month that his administration had kept secret that a former chief of staff was forced to resign after two women accused him of sexual harassment, the mayor said he was shocked and sickened by the aide’s conduct.
+But it turns out that barely a month before he was hired by the de Blasio administration, the aide, Kevin O’Brien, had been fired from his previous job as a senior adviser at the Democratic Governors Association in Washington for similar reasons, the association confirmed on Monday.
+Mr. O’Brien had been a senior staff member for Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, a centrist Democrat who has been mentioned as a possible 2020 presidential candidate. Mr. Bullock served a one-year term as chairman of the governors association in 2015 and he sent Mr. O’Brien to Washington to be his representative at the organization.
+When Mr. O’Brien left the governors association in December 2015, Mr. Bullock was among those who knew the reason: A woman employed at the association had accused Mr. O’Brien of sexually harassing her, and an investigation had backed her up.El Museo del Barrio announced on Monday that it was canceling a survey of the work of the Chilean-born artist and director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who was quoted as saying he had raped an actress while filming a scene in a movie.
+In a written statement Monday the museum said that the decision to cancel the exhibition was made after an assessment of Mr. Jodorowsky’s remarks “regarding an act of sexual violence he perpetrated” during the making of his 1970 film “El Topo.”
+“While the issues raised by Jodorowsky’s practice should be examined, we have come to the conclusion that an exhibition is not the right platform for doing so at this time,” El Museo’s director, Patrick Charpenel, said in a statement.
+The museum’s decision was first reported on Monday by Art News. Coming less than three weeks after the museum reversed a decision to honor a socialite from Germany who has ties to archconservative opponents of Pope Francis, the cancellation raises questions about the vetting process that El Museo employs while arranging programming and events.WASHINGTON — President Trump’s headway in Afghan peace negotiations with the Taliban raises the same question that has bedeviled other presidents who extracted American troops from foreign wars: Will the departing Americans end up handing over the country to the same ruthless militants that the United States went to war to dislodge?
+A hasty American withdrawal, experts said, would erode the authority and legitimacy of the Afghan government, raising the risk that the Taliban could recapture control of the country. Short of that, it could consign Afghanistan to a protracted, bloody civil war, with Taliban fighters besieging the capital, Kabul, as they did in the 1990s.
+These scenarios now seem possible because of the progress in direct talks between the United States and the Taliban. The chief American negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad, said Monday that American and Taliban officials had agreed in principle to the outlines of a deal in which the insurgents would guarantee that Afghan territory is never used by terrorists, setting the stage for a total pullout of American troops.
+[Afghans fear that the country’s interests have been sidelined in U.S. talks with the Taliban.]
+While current and former American diplomats and military officials voiced cautious optimism about the negotiations, they questioned whether the Taliban and the administration in Kabul would ever agree to a power-sharing arrangement, given that the Taliban still refuse even to speak to the government of President Ashraf Ghani. Some fear that the Taliban will seek to overthrow the government once the Americans are gone.Lawyers for the family of Stephon Clark, the unarmed black man who was fatally shot last March by Sacramento police officers, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit on Monday alleging that the officers who fired had racially profiled the 22-year-old and used excessive force.
+The complaint, filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California, names the two officers — Terrence Mercadal and Jared Robinet — as well as the City of Sacramento as defendants. It seeks at least $20 million in damages and was filed on behalf of Mr. Clark’s two sons, his parents and his grandparents.
+According to the 31-page lawsuit, the officers failed to identify themselves as police or issue verbal warnings about their intent to use deadly force before firing 20 times at Mr. Clark, who was killed in his grandmother’s backyard and was later found to have been holding a cellphone, but no gun. It also faults the officers for having deprived Mr. Clark of lifesaving medical care.
+During the encounter, Mr. Clark’s civil rights were violated in several ways, his family’s lawyers argued. “There were other reasonable options available other than shooting and killing” Mr. Clark, the complaint said.WASHINGTON — Several prominent veteran Democrats, alarmed by the party’s drift from its longstanding alignment with Israel, are starting a new political group that will try to counter the rising skepticism on the left toward the Jewish state by supporting lawmakers and candidates in 2020 who stand unwaveringly with the country.
+With polls showing that liberals and younger voters are increasingly less sympathetic to Israel, and a handful of vocal supporters of Palestinian rights arriving in Congress, the new group — the Democratic Majority for Israel — is planning to wage a campaign to remind elected officials about what they call the party’s shared values and interests with one of America’s strongest allies.
+“Most Democrats are strongly pro-Israel and we want to keep it that way,” said Mark Mellman, the group’s president and a longtime Democratic pollster. “There are a few discordant voices, but we want to make sure that what’s a very small problem doesn’t metastasize into a bigger problem.”
+The group, whose board includes former Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm and a former Clinton administration housing secretary, Henry Cisneros, will create a political action committee later this year and may engage in Democratic primaries, Mr. Mellman said. They also are planning an “early states project” with the goal of organizing pro-Israel Democrats in the first nominating states to lobby the party’s presidential hopefuls.This past season was the first in which there were more strikeouts than hits. It’s an issue with the commissioner’s office; they’d like to see more hits and more action. Do you see it as a problem?
+I don’t know how you solve it, but you’ve definitely seen an increase in velocity year by year. There’s been an emphasis on the whole launch angle thing and pitchers combating that with throwing fastballs up in the zone. There’s been a greater push on analytics and teams to look into it and how to get guys out. Hitters have that as well, but hitting has always been hard. Hitting a baseball is still incredibly hard. It’s just one of those things where hitters have to make an adjustment and we have to find a way. Since I’ve been in the league for parts of six years, you can tell already the difference as far as just the amount of power arms you face on a nightly and daily basis.
+Given the oversaturation of statistics and measurements in baseball, what do you look at to evaluate your own performance?
+I feel like probably the biggest one is O.P.S. It’s the biggest stat that people take value from in the game, from the people who evaluate it and the people who play it. Just because it’s slugging and on base — two of the things that make up a productive baseball player. We’ve gotten away from batting average a little bit. I still think batting average is important; other people will tell you it’s not anymore in the game, but you don’t want to make outs, basically. You still have to get on base and be productive. Somehow getting on base and getting a hit are really not that big of a deal. It’s still really hard to get a hit in the big leagues, whether it’s a single or homer. There’s still something that can be said for that. You’ve seen that, where the game has gotten away from it, where it’s become acceptable to hit .220 or .230 and hit 30 homers.
+Every hit almost feels like a miracle because pitchers are throwing so hard. Do you ever sit back and think, This is a really freakish skill I have?
+Sometimes it feels a lot harder than other times. There’s times when you’re in the on-deck circle or on the bench and you’re like: ‘I have no shot. I don’t know how I’m going to do this but I’ve got to figure it out.’ And other times you’re more locked in and it doesn’t feel as hard. It’s the same feeling every spring training when the pitchers are throwing their bullpen or live batting practices and you’re like” ‘Oh man, this might be the year I go 0 for 500. I don’t know how I’m going to do this.’ And then you get back to the process. I feel like, from the side or in the dugout, this guy is throwing is so hard. And then when you get in there, it’s not really what you think it is because you’re so used to it. It just slows down every day when you’re in there.
+In the second half last year, did the ball look like a beach ball to you?
+There are times even during that second half where there were week stretches where it kind of leaves you and doesn’t feel right. But it comes back quicker. When you go on stretches like that, there’s still times where it doesn’t feel great but it still comes back to you quicker. Some years, you’re constantly searching for “it” — and “it” is different for everybody.FRONT PAGE
+Because of an editing error, an article on Saturday about Roger Stone’s career misidentified the organization that disputed characterizations of Mr. Stone as a Nixon campaign aide or adviser. It was the Nixon Foundation, not the Nixon Library.
+INTERNATIONAL
+The Canada Dispatch on Monday about a pipeline project in British Columbia misspelled the given name of a spokeswoman for Coastal GasLink. She is Jacquelynn Benson, not Jaqueline.
+BUSINESS
+An article on Saturday about layoffs at BuzzFeed misspelled the surname of the national editor of BuzzFeed News. She is Tina Susman, not Sussman.
+ARTS
+An article on Monday about the Juilliard School’s Focus Festival misidentified the public radio broadcaster for which Harry Vogt runs the new music program. It is the WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk), not the NDR (Norddeutscher Rundfunk).TUESDAY PUZZLE — When we last saw Benjamin Kramer, he was charming us with compliments, but today he’s up to something different.
+Are you set to solve? That’s a hint but not a spoiler.
+Tricky Clues
+1A: It took me a surprisingly long time to realize this, but the entry DQ’ED has nothing to do with Dairy Queen. If you’ve been “Barred from competition, briefly,” you have been disqualified, or DQ’ED for short.
+9D: No, I didn’t know “Molybdenite, for molybdenum” either. But the crossings were fairly gentle, and they enabled me to get the answer ORE.
+36D: If I had to make a Venn diagram of crossword puzzle solvers and “Star Wars” fans, I would bet that the results would be almost a perfect circle. So tell me, constructors, how is the planet TATOOINE just making its New York Times Crossword debut today?As a content-obsessed millennial, I have made podcasts part of my daily routine for years. I listen while commuting, cooking, running errands, putting away laundry, washing dishes or during any relatively mindless activity that can be done while wearing wireless headphones.
+My bond with podcasts is so cemented that it comes as a shock when someone I meet at a party — or someone in my family, or a friend I thought I knew — tells me that they, in the year 2019, do not listen to podcasts. And never have. And don’t really get what it’s all about. And, worse, don’t quite know how to start.
+Their reasons range from “I don’t have time” to “It’s passed me by” to “What should I even listen to?” Luckily, those concerns are easily answered and dispatched. For anyone who wants to become a full-fledged podcast listener, here’s what you need to know to get into it, from experts who know best.
+Find the right app
+To keep and organize your podcasts, you’ll need a podcast app that allows you to subscribe to new shows and listen. If you’re brand-new to podcasts, the stock podcast app already installed on your smartphone is the easiest point of entry; for iPhone, you have the Apple Podcasts app, and for Android users, the easiest option is to play podcasts through the Play Music app.“I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but you forgot to invite women.”
+RIANNE MEIJER, a Dutch journalist, writing on Twitter about the government officials who were photographed collecting awards given by the United Arab Emirates for efforts to promote gender equality. They were all men.SAN JOSE, Calif. — It may be lonely at the top, but that phrase seldom applies to the N.H.L. All-Star Game.
+Among the four coaches — whose teams were in first place at the cutoff point this month — Paul Maurice had two of his Jets in tow, Jon Cooper guided three players from his Lightning and Todd Reirden had three of his Capitals named to the team, though Alex Ovechkin opted not to participate.
+The remaining coach, Calgary’s Bill Peters, was accompanied by only left wing Johnny Gaudreau. Each team is required to be represented in the game, meaning the Pacific Division-leading Flames had as many All-Stars as each of the four last-place teams.
+Yet Calgary features four of the top 15 scorers in the N.H.L. among their forwards, as well as the front-runner for the Norris Trophy in defenseman Mark Giordano, among other key contributors.SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone as an eavesdropping device? Watch out. It can happen.
+On Monday, Twitter and other social networking sites lit up with anxious Apple users after the news site 9to5Mac reported on a strange glitch in the company’s iPhones. The issue: It turns out that an iPhone user can call another iPhone user and listen in on that person’s conversations through the device’s microphone — even if the recipient does not answer the call.
+The problem was the result of a bug and involves Apple’s FaceTime app for placing video and audio calls over an internet connection. The bug could also give a caller access to a live feed of the recipient’s camera.
+On Monday night, Apple said it had disabled Group FaceTime, the feature that was causing the glitch.
+The glitch is embarrassing for Apple, which is set to report disappointing financial earnings on Tuesday. The Silicon Valley company has long positioned itself as a protector of user privacy offering more secure devices than its rivals.Britain prepares for more crucial Brexit votes
+The British Parliament is expected to vote today on a number of amendments to Prime Minister Theresa May’s plan that could end up shaping how the country departs from the E.U.
+How it works: Various lawmakers, including those in opposition parties, have proposed more than a dozen changes to the wording of Mrs. May’s exit plan. Only the speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, can decide which will be voted on. The voting is for the most part not binding, but Mrs. May will be under political pressure to adopt popular measures.
+What are the amendments? There is a broad range. The most hyped could delay Britain’s departure from the bloc for a few months or even until the end of the year if there is no deal. That would blunt Mrs. May’s best cudgel: the clock.Stream Gabriel Iglesias’s new Netflix special. Or gear up for the Super Bowl with a countdown of memorable ads.
+What’s Streaming
+GABRIEL ‘FLUFFY’ IGLESIAS: ONE SHOW FITS ALL (2019) stream on Netflix. In this follow-up to his 2016 stand-up special, “I’m Sorry for What I Said When I Was Hungry,” Gabriel Iglesias remembers a hazy interview with Snoop Dogg and props up his teenage son as an eligible bachelor. This is set to be a busy year for this actor and comic, who is better known as Fluffy. Iglesias also has a role in the animated movie “UglyDolls,” opening this spring; he will star in his own scripted comedy series on Netflix this year; and he plans to tape another performance for the platform in the near future.
+SILENT WITNESS on Britbox. This gory procedural, created by a former detective, is the longest-running British crime drama on television. Season 22 lays out five two-part stories and begins with the case of a murdered transgender man and a seemingly related kidnapping that puts the pathologists at the Lyell Center in a tough position. Andrew Knott, Heather Peace and Johann Myers guest star.MILAN — Politics is a show, and every country has its favorite. The United States is bringing on yet another Hollywood classic (the aging action hero, the desert, the border, the money). France is offering its periodic re-enactment of its Revolution, with gilets jaunes replacing sans-culottes. Germany’s national orchestra is saying goodbye to an exhausted chancellor/conductor. Britain is deep into a Shakespearean tragedy of its own creation: to leave or not to leave Europe…?
+And what about Italy? It’s a music festival, of course.
+The Italian Song Festival (Festival della Canzone Italiana) is held annually in Sanremo, a quaint seaside resort near the French border, and is by far the most popular television event of the year. This year it will be broadcast live between Feb. 5 and Feb. 9. Held since 1951, it is used for picking the Italian entry to the Eurovision Song Contest and today it attracts more than 12 million viewers — more than half of the country’s TV audience. It combines a song contest with some comedy and a few handsomely paid international guests. Advertisers scramble to squeeze their products into five days of prime-time broadcasts.
+But Sanremo, as it is known, is far more than a song contest. It’s a national gathering, like the Academy Awards in the United States. It’s a truce in quarrelsome times. It’s predictable and reassuring. The young like to trash it live on social media, but they too watch it, and talk about little else for days. That is why I’ve accepted an invitation to join the festival’s giuria degli esperti (experts jury), which includes writers, actors and film directors (Sanremo’s organizers didn’t know I was planning to write about them, of course). But watching the Barnum from the inside? How could I say no? It’ll be a master’s degree in political science, anthropology and social studies — all in a few days.
+Sanremo’s presenter — and artistic director — changes regularly. Last year and again this year both roles have fallen to a soft-spoken pop singer in his 60s, Claudio Baglioni. His 1972 song “Questo Piccolo Grande Amore” (“This Little Great Love”), lamenting a young man’s obsession about his unattainable beloved in her ultrathin T-shirt, is still an unofficial national anthem; every Italian can sing along with it. On Jan. 9, during the preview news conference, Mr. Baglioni answered a question about immigration. It’s a sensitive topic; the populist government is openly fighting it. He complained that the public mood has turned “nasty.” He said that this government, just like the previous ones, is mismanaging immigration, this time allowing a”a farce” by leaving 50 asylum-seekers at sea for 19 days. (They were finally brought to shore the same day by the Maltese Coast Guard and will be distributed across nine European Union nations).Note for Teachers: Join our Feb. 6 free webinar on teaching with New York Times-inspired writing prompts. Sign up here.
+_________
+A polar vortex has seized the Midwest, bringing snowstorms and the coldest weather in a generation. Are you or people you know affected by the snow and frigid temperatures?
+Do you enjoy winter weather? What do you like about the season? What do you dislike about it? How do you like to spend cold or snowy days?
+If you don’t get cold weather where you live, are you happy about that or not? Why?
+Tell us in the comments, then read the related article to learn more about the polar vortex.LOS ANGELES — Pacific Gas and Electric’s bankruptcy filing on Tuesday, to deal with billions of dollars in wildfire liability, set off a scramble by the company, investors and elected leaders in California to protect themselves and influence what happens next.
+The corporate reorganization is shaping up to be one of the most complicated and difficult in recent years. In addition to traditional legal tussles between the company and its creditors and suppliers, the bankruptcy court will contend with demands by California officials and victims to force PG&E to pay damage claims estimated at tens of billions of dollars for wildfires started by its equipment. State leaders and residents are also likely to seek to thwart any effort by the utility to raise electricity rates.
+Coming up with a bankruptcy plan for PG&E, which is California’s largest utility and serves 16 million people, will amount to solving an intricate puzzle. Proposals to raise rates to pay creditors will inflame residents and lawmakers. And seeking to reduce what the utility pays for solar power could hurt renewable-energy companies and jeopardize California’s climate-change goals.
+“This is a real mess,” said Dan Reicher, an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration. “It comes down to lots of needs: Take care of the fire victims, keep the lights on, ensure progress on climate change and protect ratepayers. That’s at least a partial list.”Before reading the article:
+What do you know about whales?
+Have you ever seen or heard one?
+Watch and listen to this video of a humpback whale.
+What do you notice about the sounds? What surprises you about them?
+Now, read the article “These Whales Are Serenaders of the Seas. It’s Quite a Racket.” and answer the following questions:
+1. According to Michael Noad, an associate professor in the Cetacean Ecology and Acoustics Laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia, humpback whales sing complex songs. What qualities in the sounds lead them to be considered “songs”?
+2. What is the leading hypothesis for why only male humpback whales sing? What evidence does the article provide for that theory?
+3. What evolutionary advantage is gained by singing complex songs? How has this led to large and often very noisy animals in the ocean?The past informs the present in the work of Sheila Pree Bright, who has been photographing the Black Lives Matter movement since 2014. As an artist who draws connections between today’s young activists and their civil rights forebears, she seemed a natural choice to be among 11 socially conscious artists selected to create murals highlighting Atlanta’s past, present and future in time for the Super Bowl, when the city will be in the spotlight.
+She knew she wanted to produce a photo-mural recalling the activism of the 1960s. She began her research and was captivated by a 1963 Richard Avedon photo of Julian Bond, co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “He was holding his young daughter Phyllis in his arms, while young people from S.N.C.C. stood behind him,” Ms. Bright recalled. “I immediately thought of the mothers who lost their children to police brutality and other acts of racial violence, and I decided to center their story and photograph them.”
+Her realization that a single event can resonate in unexpected ways led her to seek out mothers whose children have died at the hands of the police. She sought out Felicia Thomas, a mother from Atlanta whose 23-year-old son, Nicholas Thomas, was killed when police officers from Smyrna, Ga., and Cobb County tried serving an arrest warrant at the auto shop where he worked. News accounts said Nicholas tried fleeing in a customer’s car and was killed when the police said he drove at them. No charges were filed against the officer who shot him.
+Ms. Bright and Ms. Thomas recognized something more than a photo shoot was needed. The two women had a shared vision to bring together a group of mothers who didn’t have a chance to tell their stories. They organized a three-day retreat, inviting about a dozen mothers from Atlanta and three other cities, including Samaria Rice, the mother of 12-year-old Tamir Rice from Cleveland; Oscar Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson; and Eric Garner’s mother, Gwen Carr. Ms. Thomas called her friends and invited a chef to prepare meals. The women were treated to massages and given plaques to acknowledge their activism. It became a bonding experience.He was internationally crowned the “world’s loneliest duck,” but that clearly wasn’t true. There haven’t been many ducks as loved as Trevor.
+The tiny Pacific island nation of Niue, about 1,500 miles northeast of New Zealand, mourned this week after Trevor — its beloved, and only, duck — was killed by a stray dog near the roadside puddle that had been his home since January 2018. Niue’s 1,600 residents had grown quite fond of their mysterious visitor, working every day to keep him alive by feeding him or refilling his rapidly evaporating puddle.
+No one knew how he’d ended up there, but they were very glad he did.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+‘His Heels Are Completely Dug In’
+President Trump agreed to open the government for three weeks amid continuing border-wall negotiations, but he insisted that he hadn’t backed down from any of his demands. Stephen Colbert said on Monday that the president’s approach seemed less like a strategy and more like recalcitrance. Or worse.Note for Teachers: Join our Feb. 6 free webinar on teaching with New York Times-inspired writing prompts. Sign up here.
+_________
+Are you a football fan? Will you be watching the Super Bowl this Sunday?
+If you are a fan, who do you think will win? Why?
+If you’re not, is there anything you enjoy about Super Bowl Sunday, whether it’s the Puppy Bowl, the halftime show, the advertisements or even just the snacks?
+In “Super Bowl LIII Will Have a Young Coach, an Old Coach and a Lot of Things in Between,” Victor Mather writes about the story lines for Sunday’s game. Here are some of them:
+Not every Super Bowl is super, and we’ll find out if this year’s edition fits the tag on Feb. 3. But we do know some of what is in store. One of those things is (no surprise) the New England Patriots, who will be appearing in their third consecutive Super Bowl and fourth in five years. The Rams will be the first team to represent Los Angeles in the game since 1984. Those are not the only records and oddities about Super Bowl LIII. Game of Ages Sean McVay, who took over the Rams last season after a meteoric rise as an N.F.L. assistant, turns 33 this week, which will make him the youngest head coach in Super Bowl history. He breaks the record held by Mike Tomlin, who was 36 when his Pittsburgh Steelers won the big game in 2009. At 66, Bill Belichick will not be the oldest Super Bowl coach, as Marv Levy went to the game with the Bills at age 67 and 68. But Belichick could become the oldest winner, breaking the record held by Tom Coughlin, who was 65 when the Giants beat the Patriots in 2012. Game of Ages II Tom Brady is 41 and will become the oldest Super Bowl starting quarterback. He breaks the record set by, well, Tom Brady last year. At 24, Jared Goff is not the youngest Super Bowl starter, but he’s not far off. Dan Marino was the youngest, at 23 years 127 days, and Ben Roethlisberger was just behind him at 23 years 340 days.
+By the Number The Roman numerals have reached LIII, or 53. You could also call it Super Bowl 110101 if you prefer binary numbers or Super Bowl 35 if hexadecimal is more your thing. It’s the first prime-number Super Bowl since XLVII (Ravens over 49ers, 34-31.) Among the athletes who have worn No. 53: Don Drysdale, Harry Carson, Artis Gilmore and Darryl Dawkins. Diversion Pop band Maroon 5 and rappers Big Boi and Travis Scott will perform the halftime show. Up with People, which headlined the show four times, is still awaiting its first appearance since 1986. Gladys Knight will sing the national anthem, a year after Pink did the honors. Knight will join an odd mix of stars to carry out the duties, a list that includes Lady Gaga (2016), Billy Joel (1989 and 2007), Cher (1999), Kathie Lee Gifford (1995) and Al Hirt (1970). Gamblers are saying the anthem performance will last 1 minute 50 seconds. You can bet on it. Or on whether a player will kneel (5-1 against). Or if a fan runs on the field (15-1). Or the color of Adam Levine of Maroon 5’s shirt (Black is the favorite) or whether a Coke or Pepsi commercial will appear first, or — well, you get the idea.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Are you planning to watch Super Bowl LIII? If so, what are you most looking forward to — the game, the commercials, the parties or the halftime show? If not, why not?
+— If you’re a football fan, what do you think of the matchup of the Los Angeles Rams and the New England Patriots? Who are you rooting for? Who do you think will win? What do you think will be the final score? Which players do you think will stand out and why?
+— Of the narratives outlined in the article, which story line is most compelling to you and why?
+— What do you think about the choice for this season’s Super Bowl halftime performers? If you could see anyone perform at the Super Bowl, whom would you want to see, and why?When Ronald Braunstein conducts an orchestra, there’s no sign of his bipolar disorder. He’s confident and happy.
+Music isn’t his only medicine, but its healing power is potent. Scientific research has shown that music helps fight depression, lower blood pressure and reduce pain.
+The National Institutes of Health has a partnership with the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts called Sound Health: Music and the Mind, to expand on the links between music and mental health. It explores how listening to, performing or creating music involves brain circuitry that can be harnessed to improve health and well-being.
+Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, said: “We’re bringing neuroscientists together with musicians to speak each other’s language. Mental health conditions are among those areas we’d like to see studied.”It isn’t obvious how this principle should be applied to a game like football. Some think that new high-tech helmets will help; others argue that no helmets at all would be safer, because (as in rugby) it might discourage head collisions. Players spend much more time in practice than in actual games, and some think that practice needs to be reformed to avoid the subconcussive impacts that have been linked to C.T.E. There’s more research to be done, more rethinking of the rules of the game. Players who lower their heads and initiate helmet contact can now be penalized, and maybe there’s a way to expand that penalty category. The existing penalties can certainly be increased and made more of a deterrent. Shortening the preseason could help, too. But if you really care about the welfare of football players, you should want not just to turn your back on bad practices but also to advocate for better ones.
+A utilitarian, who assesses actions by their effects, would point out that nothing you’re proposing to do contributes to that effort. You can avoid newspaper coverage or screens in sports bars, but given your refusal to urge anyone else to refrain from attending or watching games, that gesture will be undetectable to the football authorities, not to mention sports journalists, and puts no pressure on them. (At least in picking the Jets to follow you’ve made it easier to skip every Super Bowl, from which fate seems to have decided they would be excluded for the past half-century.)
+But again, that’s not the end of the discussion. Might there be a reason to shun a harmful activity even if doing so won’t have beneficial effects? There are two lines of argument to consider here: one associated with Immanuel Kant and the other with Aristotle. A Kantian test for assessing an action is to consider whether it flows from a principle that you’d have reason to want everyone to follow. Let’s suppose everyone’s boycotting football would lead to swift changes to make the game much safer or even bring the sport to an end. (Here, the utilitarian would note that the end of football might lead to worse lives for those who now play the game at all levels and to the loss not just of a lot of pleasure among fans but also of jobs for commentators, stadium staff, officials and the like.) You can still wonder whether that Kantian strategy of the universalized maxim matters if, in the real world, none of your sports-fan friends are going to follow your lead.
+One reason to refrain from fandom is simply that you may not want to be the sort of person who takes pleasure in a game that is causing serious and unnecessary harm to its players. An approach to ethics that focuses on what kind of person you are — so-called virtue ethics — is often associated with Aristotle. It tends to judge action in terms of character, rather than the other way around, and you hear its echoes in a familiar formula of reproval: “What kind of person would ... ?”
+Let me offer a final consideration: In following the game, in joining the culture that sustains football, in its current form, as an American institution, you are not causing harm directly — but you are, in a sense, participating in causing harm. You’ve been enlisted in a collective action that you view with disapproval. In this regard, you can be part of the problem, even if the problem would persist if you weren’t.Building a border wall. It’s the holy grail of President Trump’s immigration policy. “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be.” But at the border, there’s a kind of chaos unfolding that a wall might not fix. The Trump administration’s hard-line stance on keeping migrants out is pushing asylum seekers to take remote and dangerous routes into the United States. Here’s how this is playing out. The border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, and these are the official ports of entry. More than 650 miles already have barriers installed. Fences, barbed wire or vehicle barricades. Over the years, that’s pushed people to try riskier routes to get across. And since 2014, more families have been arriving. And many of them are seeking asylum, a human right protected by both U.S. and international law. The Trump administration’s hard-hitting crackdown includes a tactic called “metering.” “Documents ready.” Entering through an official border crossing is one way to request asylum. But that’s become more difficult under Trump. The practice of metering allows border agents to limit the number of asylum seekers that are processed each day by delaying them from setting foot into the U.S. We can see it in action here, at the Paso del Norte crossing in El Paso, Texas. Officers are standing right at the border, trying to intercept people before they get to the border station. This tactic is deliberate. Once people reach U.S. soil, they have the right to claim asylum. But if they never cross the border, they have to come back another day. Metering is not new. But the Trump administration has taken it to a new level. “We’re metering, which means that if we don’t have the resources to let them in on a particular day, they’re going to come back. So they’re going to wait their turn.” But as the government is limiting asylum seekers, they’re still funneling people to these same ports of entry to seek asylum. “Instead migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry.” This is creating bottlenecks. Here, in Tijuana, is a vivid example of how metering plays out. Thousands of migrants are stuck. Human rights observers say that some are camping in squalid and dangerous conditions. The situation is leading migrants to try riskier routes through desolate terrain, where they’re at greater risk of dehydration and other illnesses. They’re showing up in places like Antelope Wells, N.M. It’s extremely remote and mountainous. Antelope Wells is part of the El Paso border area, which has seen a dramatic increase in the number of families crossing far away from official border stations. As you can see here, this increase happened right when the practice of metering expanded. And many are crossing in groups of 100 or more, like this one that arrived in January. But these remote outposts lack facilities, especially to deal with children. 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin and her father crossed here on Dec. 6, where they encountered Border Patrol. They were brought to a nearby outpost, where Jakelin got sick. It took an overnight journey with multiple stops, including a 94-mile bus ride and an air ambulance evacuation to get her to the children’s hospital in El Paso. Her condition worsened, and she later died. 12 days later, another father crossed the border in the El Paso area with his 8-year-old child. Felipe Gomez Alonzo was in custody for six days. He died from the flu on Christmas Eve. Border Patrol officials say that they’re not equipped to deal with all of this. “Our infrastructure is incompatible with this reality. Our Border Patrol stations and ports of entry were built to handle mostly male, single adults in custody, not families or children.” But the practice of metering is forcing people through more remote routes, in turn overtaxing these far-flung outposts and putting a strain on officers. It’s also leading to ever-more-dangerous consequences for migrants.Compared with us tourists, the bona fide beach naturists were easy to spot. Older, whiter and fairly mixed in gender, they showed an affinity for equipment-dependent recreation — their games of horseshoes seemed like catastrophes waiting to happen — and barbecues. They appeared invigorated by the plain fact of one another’s naked company, an excitement they expressed with a flurry of wholesome activity. The rest of us tended toward a more slothful nakedness; we swam, we sunned, we had picnics of cheese and wine. We did what we would normally do at any beach, albeit while avoiding eye contact with one another’s areolas.
+My friends and I hardly followed the naturists’ chaste, no-judge code to the letter, but the more we visited, the closer we approached a sense of ease. The discipline of public nakedness rewarded our efforts in proportion to our degree of exertion, the euphoria of being in the moment a direct byproduct of battling the innate and unignorable weirdness of our collective situation. Off the beach, I was a distracted, ruminating mess; my therapist, annoyed by my self-conscious inability to “body scan” during guided mindfulness exercises, swiftly fired me as her patient. But on the beach, consumed with the task of pretending this was normal, I was able to attain what I assume is something like Zen. Naturism required so much effort that, somehow, it worked.
+Maybe naturists truly believe it’s possible for a body to just be a body — that by imposing a neutral state of mammalian coexistence, people can fake social equilibrium, if only for an afternoon. I can see how, for some, there is power in the notion that your body is enough. For my friends and me, over those summers, naturism came to be something we tried on; less a worldview than a means of believing, momentarily, in the escapability of bodily burden. Such utopian nudeness takes discipline and rules, both of which naturism handily provides. And I suspect, for many, a result of this laborious reorientation might resemble “being present.”
+Nakedness doesn’t democratize social experience, as the naturists seem to suggest. Instead, it offers something better: a shared preoccupation. It’s so awkward to act blasé about being naked around other people — people who are also, themselves, naked — that there’s nothing left to do but submit en masse to the social and afferent novelty. Take in the warmth of the sun on your bare butt, skinny-dip unaccompanied by a sneaky sense of thrill, try not to stare at anyone’s penile jewelry. It’s easier said than done.For decades, sports gambling tended to be a static experience. You bet on a team and handed money to somebody, and maybe got a slip of paper in return. Then you waited to find out if you were right. That changed when three American options traders moved to Antigua in the mid-1990s to create an online gambling business they named World Sports Exchange. Instead of offering point spreads, World Sports Exchange operated like a commodities market. Before tipoff, options on the favored Lakers, for example, might cost $60 each. Options on the Knicks, the underdogs, might sell for $40. At the end of the game, the options on the losing team would become worthless, while the options on the winning team would each pay out $100.
+But here was the novelty: You didn’t have to wait until the game was over to cash in. If the Lakers scored the first eight points, the value of that $60 option might grow to, say, $72. You could sell it and pocket your $12 gain. You might then invest in the Knicks at a discount. Or you might wait for the price to fall and buy another option on the Lakers. You could buy and sell options, on either team or both, throughout the game. Once you’d started, it was hard to stop until the game ended. It was exhausting. It was also great fun. And even more than the other bookmakers operating beyond U.S. borders, which were handling traditional bets, it seemed to threaten the monopoly on sports gambling that Nevada’s casinos had long enjoyed.
+I met one of those traders, Haden Ware, under a thatched roof in the Caribbean in early 2000. He was drinking beer and eating lobster salad. Steve Schillinger, a partner at World Sports Exchange, later confided to me that he and Ware were each making more than $1 million a year. Yet they were miserable. The Interstate Wire Act of 1961 had outlawed taking bets over telephone lines. In that era of dial-up internet access, that’s exactly what World Sports Exchange was doing. Online gambling was “especially pernicious,” in the words of Jon Kyl, the U.S. senator from Arizona. “You get up in the morning and log on to your computer and start to gamble. It plays to the addictive nature of many people, especially kids.” Quoting an unnamed Harvard professor, Kyl called it “the crack cocaine of gambling.” A conservative Republican, Kyl introduced specific legislation against internet gambling and vowed to indict expats taking bets online. In 1998, 21 U.S. citizens were charged with Wire Act violations. Among them were Ware, Schillinger and Jay Cohen, another partner. Weary of living in exile, Cohen flew home. He was convicted and served 18 months in prison. Janet Reno, the U.S. Attorney General, backed Kyl’s efforts. So did casinos, sports leagues and gambling interest groups — just about everyone, in fact, except some Indian tribes. Even the lobbyist being paid by World Sports Exchange acknowledged that the opponents of digital gambling had a point. “The casinos worked a long time to establish legitimacy,” he told me.
+Eventually, World Sports Exchange was overtaken by better-funded rivals. It ceased operations in 2013. That same day, Schillinger committed suicide. After serving his sentence, Cohen disappeared to Europe. By then, though, their insight that betting doesn’t have to stop when play begins had revolutionized the industry; what DraftKings and its competitors are currently doing in New Jersey, and what companies like Betfair and Bet365 do in England, could not exist without it.
+Since the demise of World Sports Exchange, sports betting on various hand-held devices has proliferated. And because smartphones and tablets routinely capture the details of each transaction, proponents argue that games are actually better protected against manipulation when digital betting is legal. “If there was a huge bet placed against a team two hours before an announcement that its star player wouldn’t be participating, that is something that should cause us to investigate,” Silver says. “And it’s something that historically we wouldn’t have known.”
+For many N.B.A. owners — and some in other leagues as well — the conversion began in 2014 with Silver’s Op-Ed and his argument that legalization actually offered more protection, not less, from the unsavory characters who might try to influence players. Europe was proving to be a test case, and its teams were thriving. Now Leonsis has come along, telling owners that their franchises would gain in value because gambling, like fantasy leagues, gives fans another reason to be engrossed in a sport.
+“Ted was able to articulate the value proposition of not just the betting, but the deepening of the engagement,” Guber says. Rather than customers, Leonsis thinks of fans as an audience. “He understood that audiences want experiences,” Guber says. “This gives them a chance to walk away telling their own story — ‘I saw this opportunity, I recognized what this player would be able to accomplish.’ When you have a tool that makes an audience more of a participant than a passenger, it’s a very vital and vibrant element.”“I definitely think innovation in how we build has a significant role to getting to affordability,” said Carol Galante, the faculty director of the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. “I can see it coming. I see it happening.”
+It now costs as much as $500,000 per unit to build low-income housing in the most expensive markets. Savings in the cost of construction could help developers of such housing stretch subsidies further. Cheaper construction could also change the math in markets where developers say it’s also not profitable to build middle-class housing.
+But Mr. Hoffman is skeptical that construction tech can fundamentally change affordability; market-rate developers have no incentive to pass those savings on to renters or home buyers, he said. And he shrugs at 3D-printed houses. “Where am I going to put those houses?” he said, nodding to the policy problems. “How long is it going to take me to find the land, get through the local zoning, the neighborhood planning process?”
+Enterprise is looking instead for companies that could affect how we consume, finance and regulate housing. Perhaps they could enable models between renting and ownership, or squeeze new supply out of the housing that already exists. This month, Enterprise teamed up with a New York-based venture capital firm, MetaProp, to pick and co-invest in companies (MetaProp’s tagline: Location. Location. Innovation.).
+Together they’re looking not for feel-good stories, but for viable businesses that could grow at Silicon Valley speed. Those companies may not even have creating affordability as their goal. But if that winds up being a result, Enterprise will be content.
+“We believe that for-profit, fast-growing businesses — and we could be wrong about this — are going to have the biggest impact on this huge problem the fastest,” said Leila Collins, a senior associate at MetaProp. “I don’t have a lot of faith that there will be some huge policy change in the next three years that will make housing affordable in cities.”
+Point Digital Finance, one company Enterprise has already invested in, helps homeowners tap the equity in their homes in exchange for a share of the property’s future appreciation. That service could help homeowners pay for constructing an accessory dwelling unit, like a backyard in-law cottage. Housing experts say such small-scale units could add to the lower-cost rental stock, but traditional lenders often won’t finance them.The partial government shutdown ended last week after 35 days, but conservationists have warned that its impact may be felt for hundreds of years in at least one part of the country: Joshua Tree National Park.
+The Southern California park, which is larger than Rhode Island and famed for its dramatic rock formations and the spiky-leafed Joshua trees from which it takes it name, had only a skeleton crew of workers during the shutdown.
+With most of its park rangers furloughed, vandals and inconsiderate guests ran amok. Gates and posts were toppled, new roads carved through the desert by unauthorized off-road drivers, and a small number of the park’s thousands of Joshua trees were outright destroyed, conservationists said.
+Pictures posted to social media showed trees that were chopped down or that appeared to have been driven over by cars. The sensitive ecosystem of desert and craggy rock formations that surrounds them was littered with garbage and other telltale signs of illegal camping.Cyberconflict right now, at this very moment, is like this airplane. It was the first military airplane that was ever built — back in 1909. But in just a few decades, planes would be capable of destroying entire cities. Right, so when we talk about cyberweapons, we’re still basically in 1909. “That’s why you have to have some humility about what’s going to happen in the world of cyberconflict.” David, here, is a national security correspondent for The Times, and he’s written a book about cyberconflict. It seems like we’re hearing more and more — “One of the worst cyberattacks ever.” — about state-sponsored cyberattacks. “Occasionally, there are going to be breaches like this.” “And this weapon will not be put back into the box.” “We have more to lose than any other nation on earth.” So, we really wanted to find out just how bad things are. And how bad they could get. Should we be afraid? “Yes, you should be afraid, but not for the reason you think — not because somebody is going to come in and turn off all the power between Boston and Washington. You should be worried about the far more subtle uses of cyber.” For example, not an overt attack on U.S. troops, but instead, maybe hacking into military health records and switching around people’s blood types. It still causes havoc. “Think terrorism —” “About a third of the building has been blown away.” “— instead of full-scale war.” “Why do you call it the perfect weapon?” “Because it’s deniable. If you can’t figure out right away where the attack’s coming from, you can’t really retaliate.” Plus, you can fine-tune the strength of cyberattacks. You can make them just strong enough to do real damage, but not so strong that they trigger a military response. “It’s cheap compared to, say, nuclear weapons. You just need some twenty-somethings who are good at programming, a little bit of stolen code and maybe some Red Bull just to keep them awake during the night.” That’s why cyberweapons have only just begun to spread. “And cyber is the perfect weapon for a country that’s broke.” “And we can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” Take that time North Korea hacked into Sony — “Because of a satirical movie starring Seth Rogen and James Flacco.” What if they didn’t have cyberweapons? “Maybe they would have landed some commandos at Long Beach, called an Uber, stuck some dynamite underneath the Sony computer center and run like hell.” So really, North Korea’s only option was to use cyberweapons. But it wouldn’t be so easy for the U.S. to hit North Korea’s cybernetworks. “They have fewer IP addresses — Internet Protocol addresses — in North Korea, than you have on any given block of New York City.” Still, we wanted to know who’s the best at cyberconflict. “Russia, China, Iran, they use it regularly to advance their political agendas. The Russians to disrupt, the Chinese frequently to steal information, the Iranians to show that they can reach the United States.” “How good or bad is the U.S. at this stuff?” “Among the very best at cyberoffense. The problem is that while we’re good at offense, we’re the most vulnerable in the defensive world because we’ve got so many networks that form such a big target. The United States has 6,200 cybersoldiers.” “Are these people sitting in military fatigues behind a computer?” “They are sitting in military fatigues behind a computer. But the Russian hackers, or the Chinese hackers, may not be in uniform. They may be in blue jeans. They are probably sitting at the beach somewhere — someplace that’s got a really good internet connection.” All this cyberconflict really kicked off in 2008. Right, that’s when the U.S. and Israel attacked Iranian nuclear facilities. “It was the most sophisticated use of cyber by one state against another, and it opened up the Pandora’s box.” And remember — it’s still only the beginning. “We haven’t seen a full-blown war, and we don’t know what one looks like.” “What’s the most challenging part about covering this beat?” “The hardest part about covering the state use of cyber, is the enormous secrecy that the U.S. government wraps around it. But we’ve hit the point where the secrecy has actually begun to impede our ability to deter attacks. Because others don’t understand what we can do to them, and what we’re willing to do to them. In other words, we’re not setting any red lines out there.”COLUMBIA, S.C. — As Senator Kamala Harris attempts her own version of former President Barack Obama’s historic rise from first-term senator to the White House, one of her political tests will be trying to secure the overwhelming support from black voters that buoyed Mr. Obama in 2008. Ms. Harris wants that support, but it does not come automatically.
+In many ways, she is well positioned: Ms. Harris is the most high-profile and politically connected black woman ever to run for president, and she can also draw on her powerful alumni networks from Howard University, one of the most prominent historically black colleges, and Alpha Kappa Alpha, the oldest black sorority.
+Yet interviews with more than 30 black voters and political leaders in early primary states like South Carolina and her home state, California, show that Ms. Harris faces challenges. She will have to persuade black activists skeptical of her record as a prosecutor; overcome sexism and a bias on the part of some voters that a female candidate cannot beat President Trump; and work to gain broader support from black men, who generally expressed more wariness about Ms. Harris in interviews than black women.
+She would also need to win over left-leaning young black voters, some of whom were ultimately disenchanted by Mr. Obama’s presidency and may value political ideology more than racial solidarity.The axolotl, sometimes called the Mexican walking fish, is a cheerful tube sock with four legs, a crown of feathery gills and a long, tapered tail fin. It can be pale pink, golden, gray or black, speckled or not, with a countenance resembling the “slightly smiling face” emoji. Unusual among amphibians for not undergoing metamorphosis, it reaches sexual maturity and spends its life as a giant tadpole baby.
+According to Aztec legend, the first of these smiling salamanders was a god who transformed himself to avoid sacrifice. Today, wild axolotls face an uncertain future. Threatened by habitat degradation and imported fish, they can only be found in the canals of Lake Xochimilco, in the far south of Mexico City.
+Captive axolotls, however, are thriving in labs around the world. In a paper published Thursday in Genome Research, a team of researchers has reported the most complete assembly of DNA yet for the striking amphibians. Their work paves the way for advances in human regenerative medicine.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+Many animals can perform some degree of regeneration, but axolotls seem almost limitless in their capabilities. As long as you don’t cut off their heads, they can “grow back a nearly perfect replica” of just about any body part, including up to half of their brain, said Jeramiah Smith, an associate professor of biology at the University of Kentucky and an author of the paper. To understand how they evolved these healing superpowers, Dr. Smith and his colleagues looked to the axolotl’s DNA.Building a border wall. It’s the holy grail of President Trump’s immigration policy. “The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility. It won’t be.” But at the border, there’s a kind of chaos unfolding that a wall might not fix. The Trump administration’s hard-line stance on keeping migrants out is pushing asylum seekers to take remote and dangerous routes into the United States. Here’s how this is playing out. The border stretches nearly 2,000 miles, and these are the official ports of entry. More than 650 miles already have barriers installed. Fences, barbed wire or vehicle barricades. Over the years, that’s pushed people to try riskier routes to get across. And since 2014, more families have been arriving. And many of them are seeking asylum, a human right protected by both U.S. and international law. The Trump administration’s hard-hitting crackdown includes a tactic called “metering.” “Documents ready.” Entering through an official border crossing is one way to request asylum. But that’s become more difficult under Trump. The practice of metering allows border agents to limit the number of asylum seekers that are processed each day by delaying them from setting foot into the U.S. We can see it in action here, at the Paso del Norte crossing in El Paso, Texas. Officers are standing right at the border, trying to intercept people before they get to the border station. This tactic is deliberate. Once people reach U.S. soil, they have the right to claim asylum. But if they never cross the border, they have to come back another day. Metering is not new. But the Trump administration has taken it to a new level. “We’re metering, which means that if we don’t have the resources to let them in on a particular day, they’re going to come back. So they’re going to wait their turn.” But as the government is limiting asylum seekers, they’re still funneling people to these same ports of entry to seek asylum. “Instead migrants seeking asylum will have to present themselves lawfully at a port of entry.” This is creating bottlenecks. Here, in Tijuana, is a vivid example of how metering plays out. Thousands of migrants are stuck. Human rights observers say that some are camping in squalid and dangerous conditions. The situation is leading migrants to try riskier routes through desolate terrain, where they’re at greater risk of dehydration and other illnesses. They’re showing up in places like Antelope Wells, N.M. It’s extremely remote and mountainous. Antelope Wells is part of the El Paso border area, which has seen a dramatic increase in the number of families crossing far away from official border stations. As you can see here, this increase happened right when the practice of metering expanded. And many are crossing in groups of 100 or more, like this one that arrived in January. But these remote outposts lack facilities, especially to deal with children. 7-year-old Jakelin Caal Maquin and her father crossed here on Dec. 6, where they encountered Border Patrol. They were brought to a nearby outpost, where Jakelin got sick. It took an overnight journey with multiple stops, including a 94-mile bus ride and an air ambulance evacuation to get her to the children’s hospital in El Paso. Her condition worsened, and she later died. 12 days later, another father crossed the border in the El Paso area with his 8-year-old child. Felipe Gomez Alonzo was in custody for six days. He died from the flu on Christmas Eve. Border Patrol officials say that they’re not equipped to deal with all of this. “Our infrastructure is incompatible with this reality. Our Border Patrol stations and ports of entry were built to handle mostly male, single adults in custody, not families or children.” But the practice of metering is forcing people through more remote routes, in turn overtaxing these far-flung outposts and putting a strain on officers. It’s also leading to ever-more-dangerous consequences for migrants.Is there a dream role you’d like to conjure into this world? I would like to do a fantasy movie and put on some heavy prosthetics and some fairy wings. I would also love to play a villain.
+How do you decide what roles to take? If the role does not scare me, I won’t take it, because it’s not going to change me. I won’t be transformed, therefore the audience won’t benefit from the transformation. There’s nothing for me to do.
+Have you said no to roles for that reason? I said no to Cookie at first. I thought she was horrible. But as an actor, you can’t judge. Your job is to empathize with that character and to tell that character’s truth. Once I started really looking at her as a mother, that changed. When I lived in the ’hood, I understood that jobs went away, and drugs were dropped off, and that a 9-to-5 job and minimum wage is not going to take care of your family. I’m not condoning selling drugs in any way: I think it’s the worst thing you can do to your people. But it’s survival. And if you want to save your kids from a life of drugs and jail and becoming statistics, then you do what you got to do. And that’s what she did.
+Does it feel inspiring to see actors in their 40s and 50s — especially other African-American women like Regina King and Viola Davis — getting these really rich roles? This change is a culmination of all of our efforts and hard work, but also because people in Hollywood are going to notice anything that makes money. So as long as these projects keep making money, Hollywood’s going to keep greenlighting these films. But I never saw myself being done at the age of 40. Liam Neeson is still out here kicking butt, and so is Denzel Washington, and so is Tom Cruise. Why can’t the ladies have a go at it?ZUCKED
+Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe
+By Roger McNamee
+The dystopia George Orwell conjured up in “1984” wasn’t a prediction. It was, instead, a reflection. Newspeak, the Ministry of Truth, the Inner Party, the Outer Party — that novel sampled and remixed a reality that Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism had already made apparent. Scary stuff, certainly, but maybe the more frightening dystopia is the one no one warned you about, the one you wake up one morning to realize you’re living inside.
+Roger McNamee, an esteemed venture capitalist, would appear to agree. “A dystopian technology future overran our lives before we were ready,” he writes in “Zucked.” Think that sounds like overstatement? Let’s examine the evidence. At its peak the planet’s fourth most valuable company, and arguably its most influential, is controlled almost entirely by a young man with the charisma of a geometry T.A. The totality of this man’s professional life has been running this company, which calls itself “a platform.” Company, platform — whatever it is, it provides a curious service wherein billions of people fill it with content: baby photos, birthday wishes, concert promotions, psychotic premonitions of Jewish lizard-men. No one is paid by the company for this labor; on the contrary, users are rewarded by being tracked across the web, even when logged out, and consequently strip-mined by a complicated artificial intelligence trained to sort surveilled information into approximately 29,000 predictive data points, which are then made available to advertisers and other third parties, who now know everything that can be known about a person without trepanning her skull. Amazingly, none of this is secret, despite the company’s best efforts to keep it so. Somehow, people still use and love this platform.
+Hostile foreign intelligence services also love this platform, if only because its users have proved shockingly vulnerable to social manipulation — a dark art the company itself has admitted to dabbling in. In 2014, the company set out to learn whether it could make its users sad and angry on purpose. It learned it could. When this astonishing breach of user trust became public, the company claimed it wasn’t a big deal, that many companies did similar things. It was, and they don’t.
+A tech company founded on creating human connection is now ripping American society apart and compromising our civic foundation, though not because it has overtly wicked intent. As McNamee elucidates, our “democracy has been undermined because of design choices.” Choices including the platform’s pleasurable, frictionless interface, which encourages users to stay and return. It’s no stretch to posit that because human neurotransmitters respond to the platform’s iconic use of a certain shade of blue, and spark with dopamine upon receiving a “like” or “tag” notification, desperate children are now living in cages and a raving madman occupies the Oval Office. Not even Orwell, after a feast of psilocybin, could have predicted this dystopia. This one’s all ours.A compact, collapsible shovel with a metal edge can cut through ice, dig tracks for tires and clear out a potential parking spot.
+Wirecutter is a New York Times company that reviews and recommends products. More at Wirecutter.com.
+Follow NY Times Travel on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Get weekly updates from our Travel Dispatch newsletter, with tips on traveling smarter, destination coverage and photos from all over the world.“I have to use this umbrella to protect myself from the torrent of illegal leaks.” Roger Stone. He’s a Republican political consultant and a self-described — “Agent provocateur.” He was an adviser to longtime friend Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential campaign. “Trying to stop Trump is like stepping in front of a hurtling freight train.” Now, Stone is back in the spotlight. He’s been charged as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation over his communications with WikiLeaks, the organization that released Clinton campaign emails stolen by the Russian government to help Trump win. In 2016, Stone said he had an in with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. “I actually have communicated with Assange.” “We have a mutual acquaintance who is a fine gentleman.” But now, he says it was all part of his political game. “I set a Google News alert for ‘Julian Assange.’ I read every interview he gave. And I used that information to posture and to bluff and to punk the Democrats.” Stone has built a reputation on winning at all costs, even if it means bending the truth. “I assumed he was lying. It’s something Roger does.” “Posture and bluff. That’s politics.” Stone started his career as a political operative at a young age. At 19, he was an entry-level trickster for Nixon’s re-election campaign. His name later came up in the Watergate investigation. “I paid $100 to Mr. Roger Stone on one occasion to leave a leaflet, I believe, at Senator McGovern’s headquarters.” Stone and Trump have been friends and associates since the 1980s, when Stone was working as a political consultant with Paul Manafort. Yes, that Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, who has since been convicted of financial fraud. Stone says he has been encouraging Donald Trump to run for president since 1988. “I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of winning.” “Between his outspokenness, his national name identification and his issue positions, he could be a formidable candidate.” “I guess we’re looking at it very seriously.” After he got into some trouble working for Bob Dole in 1996, he bounced back — but has largely worked outside of political campaigns. Stone has a unique personal brand: a mix of provocation, politics and fashion. He can often be found discussing some of his favorite topics: the Clintons, how L.B.J. was behind the assassination of J.F.K. and “fake news.” “Fake news.” Stone strongly denies any wrongdoing in 2016. “I haven’t done anything illegal. I’ve been targeted for one reason and one reason only: I am loyal to the president of the United States.” But emails and interviews suggest that he sold himself to the Trump campaign as a conduit to WikiLeaks. He is also connected to a web of associates, some of whom have been interviewed as part of Mueller’s investigation. Stone has been charged with seven counts, including obstruction of an official proceeding, making false statements, and witness tampering.Inside one of Surf Simply resort’s three gleaming new glass-walled video-coaching suites, I’m staring at a giant screen freeze-frame of myself taking off into an overhead wave. It is a glorious shot, hair flying, stance low, a white-water trail streaming behind me to the lip of the wave.
+“So what do we see here, Bonnie?” asks Jessie Carnes, one of the resort’s four owners and my coach for the week. What the screen doesn’t yet show, but what she and I both know: It’s the moment right before I biff the wave and fly face-first into the Pacific.
+What’s different from every other time I biff it face-first, though, is that this time I can see that both of my hands are coming too far forward into the turn, pitching my upper body toward the water. I say so, and Ms. Carnes rewards me with a radiant grin.Bauhaus Revisited, in Highland Park
+The 1962 home was miraculously intact, but it needed some updating. Two decades later, it’s nearly done.She was especially excited to see that the original structure hadn’t been damaged by any ham-handed renovations.
+“The house was like it had been put under a bell jar. It was in pristine historic condition,” said Ms. Summers, who was impressed with the way Mr. Perry had designed the house around a series of courtyards that provided nearly every room with light and views. “It has a very Bauhaus, thin-roof profile, but it’s done in a beautiful adobe brick, which has more regional character.”
+With three grown children who had recently moved out, the couple, now in their early 70s, saw the single-story house as an appealing way to downsize — never mind that it would mean moving out of a house they had built for themselves from the ground up.
+Image Ms. Summers and her husband, Steve Summers, reduced the number of bedrooms from four to two, converting one into a home office and another into an exercise room. Credit... Allison V. Smith for The New York Times
+Of course, a house that has never been updated often needs a little help. “It included all of the funky things you might not necessarily want” in the 21st century, Ms. Summers noted, like acoustic panels covering the wood ceiling in the living room, woodwork sealer that had turned a greenish hue and a tiny pass-through window with shutters between the kitchen and family room.Good Tuesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• The Senate voted to advance legislation affirming the right of local and state governments to break ties with companies that boycott or divest from Israel. The measure to combat the so-called B.D.S. movement is as much about highlighting Democratic divisions on Israel as it is about defending the Jewish state.
+• American and Taliban officials have agreed in principle to the outlines of a deal for the removal of troops from Afghanistan. The goal: to avoid handing over the country to the same militants that the United States went to war to dislodge.
+• The Justice Department unveiled sweeping charges against the Chinese telecom firm Huawei and its chief financial officer, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets, obstructing justice and helping banks evade sanctions on Iran.So we checked around, first on Facebook, where all of our friends are — in wartime, Facebook is even more important for staying in touch, because it’s safer than meeting in public places.
+Fahim’s friend Nasim Pakhtoon, 35, who runs a government television channel, had posted that when peace came he was going to open a restaurant in remote Nuristan Province, a place tucked into the mountains and so hard to reach that it was long described as the fabled Shangri-La.
+Fatima’s friend Tahera Rezaee, 28, a documentary photographer, had it all planned, too.
+“I’ll grab my bag, a few dresses and my camera,” she said. “I’ll take public transport, not a private car. I will hike in Panjshir, listen to music in Helmand, go to Kandahar to visit the Aino Mena new city — I heard it is like Dubai. I will photograph girls in Badakhshan and dance with Sikhs in Nangarhar.”
+Many of our friends had simple dreams.
+Rafiullah Stanikzai, 30, who works at the United States Institute of Peace, said he would get into a car and drive across the country in winter, stopping along the way where there is deep snow. “I’ll light a fire and sit around it with my friends during the night,” he said. “I could never do that now.”
+Laila Noorani, 23, who works as a radio producer, just wants to go jogging — something she has only ever seen women do in movies.
+Throughout the peace talks in Qatar, there was much more laughter in our newsroom than usual. Reports suggested more and more that a peace deal could actually happen, and it put us all in a heady mood.An intelligence assessment from 2017 said a complete withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan would lead to an attack on the U.S. within two years. Aides have used the report to try to convince President Trump that a residual American force must remain in the country.
+Another angle: Afghan officials are worried the U.S. could try to reach a separate deal with the Taliban if that would allow American troops to leave.
+Voices: They were children when the war started. Now, two Times reporters from Afghanistan reflect on the possibility of peace.
+U.S. accuses Chinese tech giant of theft
+The Justice Department unveiled charges against the telecommunications firm Huawei and its chief financial officer on Monday, outlining a decade-long attempt to steal trade secrets, obstruct a criminal investigation and evade sanctions on Iran.This reasoning was abandoned by post-Cold War presidents, and especially by George W. Bush, in the heady days when it appeared that America could project power as easily in Kabul as in the Caribbean. And despite the Iraq disaster most of Bush’s would-be Republican heirs — John McCain and Mitt Romney as well as Rubio and Jeb! — maintained a similarly maximalist posture, in which every theater was supposedly a vital one, every tyrant a potential enemy, and we should be prepared to fight in Afghanistan and Syria and Libya and eastern Ukraine as readily as we would fight for a NATO ally.
+Compared with that vision, the Trump doctrine aims for a more limited and sustainable view of American commitments. Along with jihadism it seeks to confront and contain two major state-based enemies, China and Iran, and it takes a harsh line toward their potential allies and clients in the Americas. But it has no nation-building ambitions in the Muslim world, no dreams of pushing NATO into the Caucasus, and in East Asia it’s trying to woo the Kim regime into some kind of bizarre friendship instead of acting like Pyongyang is just as great a long-term danger as its patron in Beijing.
+The administration’s official European goals (if not Trump’s behind-the-scenes anti-NATO grumbling) also fit plausibly into its larger framework: Building up a stronger military presence on NATO’s Russia-facing flank while getting other countries to bear more of the military burden is the most plausible way to preserve the Western alliance’s basic purposes while the United States refocuses on China. And in the long run, Trump’s dream (whatever its motivations) of a better working relationship with Russia also fits with a retrench-and-refocus framework — with the major caveat that Putin seems too interested in disruption to make a genuine and cooperative détente imaginable for now.
+Let me stress that I don’t think that Trump’s grand strategy is springing fully formed from the president’s own mind (he isn’t scribbling notes about the Monroe Doctrine, I assume), or for that matter anyone else’s; instead it’s emerging organically as a synthesis of his own blustering, quasi-isolationist impulses and the more hawkish and internationalist and status-quo-oriented views of the people working for him. That makes it interesting for future international-relations scholars to study — but also vulnerable to sudden changes of personnel or presidential mood. (If we unleash a ground war in Venezuela tomorrow in a fit of Trumpian pique, you can disregard this column’s analysis.)
+And of course it has other vulnerabilities as well. Events often destroy even well-thought-through grand strategies, and every foreign-policy maneuver carries risks. The hawks who fear that jihadism will surge if we pull back from Afghanistan and Syria could be vindicated. So could the institutionalists who fear that Trump’s bluster is damaging our standing and disillusioning our friends, and the human rights activists who regard this administration’s cynicism as a carte blanche for thugs and dictators, and the simple Trump-fearers (like myself) who worry that he could make a truly catastrophic blunder should, say, the North Korea negotiations blow up or a real crisis with Russia or China comes along.
+But those of us who fear Trump also need to be honest when he exceeds our expectations. Before his election, I wanted a Republican foreign policy that was less hubristic and more calculating than what most leading G.O.P. politicians were offering, that showed a willingness to limit foreign interventions and conduct diplomatic experiments while also trying to maintain United States primacy in a more multipolar, Chinese-influenced world.
+Within certain limits, and with a lot of stumbling and bluster, that’s roughly what Trump has delivered. And however his foreign policy looks by November 2020, I suspect that future administrations of both parties will often find themselves imitating the strategy of his first two years.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram, join the Facebook political discussion group, Voting While Female.Some religious leaders and institutions, who share Mr. Bashir’s religious and political worldview, deployed their particular interpretation of Islamic law to argue that the ruler of the state should only be advised in private and that people are not allowed to demonstrate against the state.
+While these religious leaders tried to use religion to garner support for Mr. Bashir during their Friday sermons, the attendees at the mosques — tired of the dire conditions in Sudan — responded with unprecedented protests inside the mosques.
+On Dec. 21, an imam at the Al Yaqeen Mosque in the Bahri area of north Khartoum argued that the prices were rising because of people’s moral turpitude. Before completing his argument, the people gathered for prayers at the mosque objected and insisted that the imam should get off the pulpit. They forced him to leave the mosque. A week later, Mr. Bashir was attending Friday prayers at a mosque in Khartoum and worshipers chanted slogans asking him to step down. Mr. Bashir left the mosque.
+The protests inside the mosques have sent a strong message to Sudan’s religious leaders and institutions that the people will no longer tolerate outdated religious positions and views that help dictators and authoritarian regimes stay in power. And several Sudanese religious leaders have spoken out against the violent repression of protests.
+The protests have also created a tenuous unity in the ethnically and regionally divided Sudanese society. Major General Salah Abdallah , the director of the notorious Sudan Intelligence and Security Service, tried to use a divisive strategy to break the momentum of the protests. Mr. Abdallah blamed the Sudan Liberation Movement, a non-Arab rebel group from Darfur, which has been fighting against Mr. Bashir’s government, for burning the offices of the ruling National Congress Party.
+But the protesters in Khartoum responded by chanting, “The entire country is Darfur.” The divisive gambit failed because the protests are about desperate economic conditions and authoritarian rule across the country, not unresolved political problems in Darfur.
+And despite historical ethnic and regional divisions in Sudan, the drivers and the leaders of the protests are millennials, who seem to have decided to rise above the regional and ethnic dichotomies of their society. More than 60 percent of Sudan’s population is under 25 and around 20 percent is between 15 and 24 years old.That said, Trump’s hopes of being re-elected depend on his appeal to his base, and his base support is eroding. A poll from earlier this month has him down a net of 10 points with Republicans, down 13 with white evangelicals and down 18 with suburban men. If I were looking at those numbers as the head of the Republican National Committee, I’d be thinking that Trump would be wise to declare that he won’t run for re-election. Whether he would do that is, of course, another question entirely.
+Gail: Well, you’re presuming he has a life outside of this.
+Bret: Depends on his legal jeopardy, I guess.
+Gail: If the jeopardy level is high enough, he’d need to run again just because you can’t indict a sitting president. I for one do not want to imagine a 2020 campaign in which the base believes he’s a martyr who has to be saved from imprisonment.
+Bret: Maybe Bob Mueller can offer him immunity if he promises not to run. O.K., now I’m dreaming.
+Gail: We’re both trapped in an anti-Trumpian vortex where we agree about so much, but I know that deep down you’re a serious conservative, particularly on economic issues. So I want to ask about … oh God, Davos.
+Bret: God is of no use in Davos, Gail. Go on.
+Gail: Davos, as you may have heard, is an annual gathering in Switzerland where the economic and political elite come to have dinners and chat and pontificate. This year there were two things that interested me. One was that Anthony Scaramucci was there. This is the guy who lasted 11 days as White House communications director, appeared as a contestant on “Celebrity Big Brother” and then vanished from the series to reappear at Davos.
+I truly believe that reality TV is a thermometer of our cultural mind-set. Maybe the Mooch connection is proof that Davos is indeed a magnet for the best and the brightest.
+Bret: My long-held view of Davos is that nothing good that happens there is real, and nothing real that happens there is good. The Mooch’s presence this year proves both those points. Go on.Projekt Spiecie is limited to intellectual, relatively courteous magazines based in Poland’s major cities, Warsaw and Krakow. It has not changed the broader political discourse in Poland and, given its short reach, it’s unlikely to. But it is proof that there are ways to breach the walls of the filter bubble. It demonstrates that peaceful disagreement is still possible, and it has shown that this is something many readers on all sides want.
+Mr. Malko, 29, is not an influential journalist — he doesn’t consider himself a journalist at all. He’s an economist, author of the book “Economics and its Discontents,” who teaches in a high school. He used to write a weekly column for Krytyka Polityczna, a small, left-wing online magazine with views similar to The Nation in the United States.
+His column recommended articles in the Polish or foreign press. “I looked for interesting articles outside my bubble and comfort zone,” he said. For example, when the government first tried to purge the Supreme Court, he devoted his entire column to right-wing perspectives on the crisis.
+Readers liked his column. But Mr. Malko was dissatisfied. “I looked for diverse views, but they were still my choices,” he said. He decided to quit writing his own column and organize something bigger. He called the leaders of Krytyka and five other magazines and asked each for a meeting.
+One editor declined to join the project; the magazine was overstretched. Krytyka and four other magazines joined: Mr. Piekutowski’s rightist Nowa Konfederacja; Klub Jagiellonski, a conservative Catholic publication; Kontakt, a magazine of the Catholic liberation theology left; and Kultura Liberalna, which espouses free-market views (“liberal” means something different in Europe than in America).
+Mr. Malko had no money to offer, and he was talking to magazines that were largely broke. Kontakt, for example, has only one paid employee.
+Even without money, it didn’t take much convincing. “We were waiting for something like this,” said Mr. Piekutowski, whose magazine runs not only conservative content, but also occasional interviews with, or articles by, left-wing activists and opinion leaders. “We were fed up with the language of Polish politics: ‘You are a traitor and should go to jail,’” he said.[Read our new story about how Mr. O’Brien was fired from the earlier job.]
+By January 2016, Mr. O’Brien had begun working as Mr. de Blasio’s deputy chief of staff, having received the job based on the recommendation of a top political strategist.
+By February 2018, two women working for the city had accused Mr. O’Brien of harassment, and an investigation was conducted, and Mr. O’Brien left.
+In April 2018, he was hired by the same political strategist who had recommended him to the mayor two years before.
+This month, Mr. O’Brien was fired from his latest job after The Times reported the reason for his departure from City Hall. The firm that had hired Mr. O’Brien said it “had no idea” about the series of allegations against him.
+A spokesman for Mr. de Blasio said the Department of Investigation, as part of a standard background check, contacted the governors association and “received confirmation of title and work dates and no adverse information” about Mr. O’Brien’s employment.
+A look ahead: The scandal raises questions about the thoroughness of the city’s vetting procedures and how Mr. de Blasio handled the aftermath of the harassment case.
+The mayor has tried to project himself as a progressive, transparent leader and feminist champion, but that image may be tarnished after he allowed Mr. O’Brien to go on to his next job without scrutiny.ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A Christian woman who has been in hiding since Pakistan’s Supreme Court overturned her blasphemy conviction last year, leading to violent protests and death threats, is apparently free to leave the country, after the court on Tuesday dismissed a challenge to its earlier ruling.
+The woman, Asia Bibi, a farmworker with five children, spent eight years on death row after being convicted in 2010 of blaspheming Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. She denied the accusations, which she said were made after she had an argument with Muslim co-workers.
+Ms. Bibi was released from prison after the Supreme Court acquitted her in October. But hard-line Islamists, who led large protests in the days after her acquittal, called for her execution, and she has remained in hiding. She has sought asylum overseas, but the government said she could not leave Pakistan until the high court had heard a petition calling for a review of her acquittal.
+On Tuesday, a three-member Supreme Court panel led by Chief Justice Asif Saeed Khosa dismissed that petition. During the proceedings, Justice Khosa observed that the petitioner had failed to present any violation of the law in the acquittal verdict.Good Tuesday morning. Want this by email? Sign up here.
+U.S. charges Huawei with theft and sanctions evasion
+The Justice Department partly unsealed a pair of indictments yesterday that accuse the Chinese telecommunications firm of trying to steal trade secrets, evade economic sanctions on Iran and obstruct a criminal investigation into its behavior.
+The context: The charges come as officials from Beijing and Washington prepare to continue trade negotiations and as the Trump administration tries to shoulder Huawei out of international efforts to build the next generation of wireless networks, known as 5G. The company has denied the claims; a spokesman for China’s industry and information technology ministry called them “unfair and immoral.”
+The allegations: The U.S. says that Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and the daughter of its founder, Ren Zhengfei, participated in a plot to defraud four large banks into clearing millions of dollars in transactions with Iran in violation of international sanctions. American officials say that Huawei tried to impede their investigation by destroying evidence and by moving employees out of the U.S. to prevent them from being called as witnesses. The company, prosecutors say, also stole information about a phone-testing robot called Tappy from T-Mobile facilities in Washington state and encouraged employees to steal other confidential information from competitors.
+What now: Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general, said that the U.S. government wants to have Ms. Meng extradited from Canada, where she was detained last year at Washington’s request and where officials are now on tricky political turf trying to balance American and Chinese interests. The tussle has the industry on edge; an internal assessment from Deutsche Telekom concluded that the 5G rollout in Europe would be delayed by at least two years and cost billions of euros if governments banned Huawei, whose technology underpins much of the current network infrastructure.annie brown
+Good morning.
+meridith kohut
+Good morning.
+azam ahmed
+Good morning.
+meridith kohut
+How’d you sleep?
+annie brown
+I slept pretty bad —
+michael barbaro
+After a 35-day government shutdown over a proposed wall on the southern border, Democrats and Republicans in Congress are now negotiating over what border security actually means.
+annie brown
+Is there a wall over here?
+azam ahmed
+I don’t know.
+michael barbaro
+So we check back in with “The Daily”‘s Annie Brown.
+azam ahmed
+Oh, look, it just sort of stops and turns into a chain-link fence.
+michael barbaro
+Who’s been driving the length of the U.S.-Mexico border with reporter Azam Ahmed.
+speaker
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+michael barbaro
+Their last dispatch focused on migrants on the Mexican side who are deciding whether to cross the border illegally.
+speaker
+My wife, my two daughters and [INAUDIBLE].
+michael barbaro
+Today, what happens once they cross?
+speaker
+Irrespective of what the government — whatever it is, we know we’re going to cross. We know we’re going to cross.
+michael barbaro
+It’s Tuesday, January 29.
+azam ahmed
+A few days into our road trip along the border, we found ourselves not on the border at all, but 80 miles north.
+annie brown
+O.K. Driving to Brooks County.
+azam ahmed
+In a place in Texas called Brooks County, one of the deadliest counties in the country for migrants.
+annie brown
+What is today?
+azam ahmed
+Because after making the dangerous trek to the border and then making it across successfully, it’s not over. The next thing they face is the inhospitable landscape. The nature here is crazy. It’s just kind of this scrubland, untamed — it’s pretty remarkable. What they’re up against now is not only being caught by border Patrol, but getting lost in the brush, getting dehydrated, dying of exposure. Hello.
+eddie canales
+Are you here?
+azam ahmed
+Yep. We’re here. We just pulled up in front of the court house. So we went up to go meet a guy named Eddie Canales. Ah. O.K. I see you. O.K. I’ll just park right where you are. He’s basically dedicated the last few years since 2013 helping to try and keep migrants from dying, essentially. And we’re basically going to follow him around for the day.
+eddie canales
+Hey.
+azam ahmed
+How are you doing?
+eddie canales
+Hey! You’ve got more than one photographer.
+azam ahmed
+She is — a radio show I told you about. Eddie works out of a small brick building across the street from the courthouse in Brooks County.
+eddie canales
+You know, I was born in Corpus, grew up on the border.
+azam ahmed
+He’s 71. His great grandparents came over from Mexico, and he grew up along the border.
+eddie canales
+I consider myself a fronterizo.
+annie brown
+What does that mean?
+eddie canales
+Border guy? [LAUGHS] Border rat?
+azam ahmed
+For decades, he was a union guy organizing immigrants working as cleaners, builders and janitors. He retired a few years ago, but then the death count in Brooks County spiked.
+eddie canales
+From 2004 to the present there’s probably 750 or so just in Brooks County alone.
+azam ahmed
+In the last 15 years, the remains of 700 migrants have been found just in Brooks County alone. And oftentimes they’re bleached bones with an empty jug of water beside them. It’s a sort of grim still life of someone’s final moments.
+eddie canales
+Came out here, you know, we’ve got to save lives, we’ve got to figure this out, we’ve got to do rescues and stuff. You know, you’re desperate to try to do something.
+azam ahmed
+And Eddie decided he was coming out of retirement to find a way to keep so many migrants from dying.
+eddie canales
+This is the — welcome to the South Texas Human Rights Center.
+azam ahmed
+Love it.
+annie brown
+Thank you.
+eddie canales
+Yeah, we’re —
+azam ahmed
+So as part of his work, Eddie sets up water stations at strategic locations throughout Brooks County.
+eddie canales
+Go out with — some of the citizens are going to go out with us for the water station, water drops. Those are all water station.
+azam ahmed
+He’s got a map of Brooks County with these little push pins all over it. These are where you dropped water off for migrants crossing through.
+eddie canales
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+azam ahmed
+[SPEAKING SPANISH] All right. All right. We’ll squeeze in. So we went out with him —
+annie brown
+I’m going to squeeze in with you all back here.
+speaker
+O.K. Perfect.
+azam ahmed
+On one of his tours, which is essentially checking and replenishing water supplies.
+eddie canales
+O.K. Watch where you step. O.K., please? When you open up the water station —
+azam ahmed
+We hop in Eddie’s truck with a couple of volunteers. The bed is filled with hundreds of gallons of water.
+eddie canales
+Look out for wasps and spiders and stuff. O.K. Be cognizant of that.
+azam ahmed
+And we take off for the different access roads that line the ranchland in Brooks County.
+annie brown
+How often do you go out and replenish these?
+eddie canales
+In the summer every week, and every two weeks in the winter.
+azam ahmed
+And surrounding you realize just how desolate it is, because you drive for miles and miles and miles, and there’s nothing. There’s these roads, but there’s no structures, there’s no stores. There’s just sandy plains, scrub brush and — I mean, even the plants don’t look really alive. Why do you figure so many migrants wind up dying here in Brooks County? It’s not on the border. What is it about the county?
+eddie canales
+Well, there’s a checkpoint, right? So the checkpoint being so far —
+azam ahmed
+There’s one main road that runs through Brooks County. And there’s a Border Patrol checkpoint on it, which means you can’t really transit via car if you’re a migrant, because you’re going to get stopped and your car is going to be reviewed, which forces people out into the scrubland and into this inhospitable climate where they have to walk, essentially, around that checkpoint and presumably get picked up on the other side.
+eddie canales
+And it’s by design, right? That they’re going to force them into the brush. They’re going to force them to walk.
+azam ahmed
+It’s part of this idea of deterrence.
+eddie canales
+That’s the way that they have it set up.
+azam ahmed
+I think people think it started with Trump, but this is a Clinton-era initiative. If we make it harder on people, if we push them into more desperate conditions, it might dissuade them from coming.
+eddie canales
+Because you’re actually forcing people into the more remote, very harsh areas, very isolated areas.
+azam ahmed
+The one thing we’ve learned is that doesn’t actually work. It’s not working today with making it harder to cross legally to ask for asylum. People just cross illegally. In the same way, making them take this treacherous journey through Brooks County, the number of people who have died over the last 15 years, it hasn’t stopped them. It hasn’t stopped people from dying. It hasn’t stopped them from taking that track.
+eddie canales
+I mean, there’s so much death. [SPEAKING SPANISH] I mean, we’ll show you — see how that fence is down? Yeah. They’re jumping that. They’re stepping —
+azam ahmed
+So basically we pulled off to the side of one of these roads, and everybody jumps out.
+eddie canales
+It’s difficult to find shade out here. Look at how bad that is.
+azam ahmed
+It’s incredibly dry and brittle plant life.
+eddie canales
+Now, everything’s got thorns. Everything’s got thorns.
+azam ahmed
+It’ll tear your clothes, it’ll rip your skin. There’s no shade overhead. There’s a few trees, there’s live oaks, but they’re sparse. For the most part, it’s just exposed.
+eddie canales
+We have a barrel, a 55-gallon barrel. Blue for water. It’s symbolic. And inside the barrel we have 6 gallons, 7 gallons of water. O.K. We need two.
+azam ahmed
+He pops the lid of this blue bin open.
+eddie canales
+O.K. They just took enough water that they needed.
+azam ahmed
+To check on the water supply.
+eddie canales
+So let’s put the one in there. And that’s one [INAUDIBLE].
+azam ahmed
+There’s a flag planted beside it.
+eddie canales
+The most expensive part is really the flag. It’s very — it’s important.
+azam ahmed
+It’s a tall metal pole, and essentially there’s just a white cloth at the end of it, but it’s just a signal to migrants if they’re crossing through this area that there’s something here, there’s water here.
+annie brown
+Have you come across any migrants while you’re doing the work?
+eddie canales
+Yes. In one of the ranches. I remember going in there to check the water and there were two guys that were in the corner there. So I went around and I asked them if they needed water, food — we gave them everything we had, because they had been walking around the ranch for three days. Three days they had been in the ranch and didn’t — [SPEAKING SPANISH] — you know, going around and around. And I said, “Look,” I said, “You go over there, right there, the high wire, you get that high wire, you jump that fence, and you head north and you just stay on the perimeter, you’ll be fine.”
+annie brown
+And Eddie, what number is this? Station number?
+eddie canales
+Put Singer Ranch —
+azam ahmed
+In general, people try to stay off the road. Instead, they trek through these ranches, which can be hundreds of acres, with no landmarks or mountains to orient them. They sometimes wander in circles for days. So when you talk to the ranchers, what do most of them say to you when you say, “Look, will you allow me to put water on your property? Will you allow me to at least do that?”
+eddie canales
+My approach to them is a humanitarian approach. I’m not going to try to talk politics to them. And I introduce myself. “I’m the guy that’s putting out water stations out there. We’re trying to save lives.” I’m going to say, “Do you have traffic in your ranch?”
+azam ahmed
+Eddie uses the term “traffic,” but he means people, migrants crossing their land.
+eddie canales
+I say, “If you have traffic, could a water station help you? It affects the county, the cost of the county and the community in terms of having this image of the valley of death.”
+azam ahmed
+He’s convinced a few ranchers here and there to let him put water stations on their land, since most of the migrants don’t pass along the main roads, where he’s able to put his stations. But it’s not as good as he’d like. He’s not able to access a lot of the private land. The guys who tell you no, though, why? What do they say?
+eddie canales
+Oh, some people say, “Nah, I don’t need one of them stopping in my ranch.” That type of attitude. “No, no, no. I don’t want them trespassing or anything like that,” you know. It’s difficult to — how many’s in there? Four. O.K. We need two. O.K.
+azam ahmed
+We spent four hours filling up water stations with Eddie.
+annie brown
+Next station?
+eddie canales
+You got the stickers? Let’s do stickers on all of them, O.K.? We’ve been at it for a while. We’ve got over 160 stations.
+speaker
+Another station.
+eddie canales
+Put Singer Ranch, SR, number one.
+azam ahmed
+Just driving one after the next after the next.
+speaker
+Next stop.
+eddie canales
+One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The others are good. They look good so far.
+speaker
+Five good?
+eddie canales
+Yeah. I think we’re done. Yeah. This is the end of the road here. We can’t go no further.
+azam ahmed
+A lot of it was along the main roads because Eddie can’t get access to some of the ranches where migrants are more likely to stop. And I couldn’t help but notice that most of these were still full. The water hadn’t been drunk. And it made me wonder what happened to all the people that Eddie couldn’t reach.
+annie brown
+And describe where we’re going.
+eddie canales
+We’re going to the Sacred Heart Burial Park, where the cemetery is owned by the county.
+azam ahmed
+So in Brooks County, there’s a cemetery called Sacred Heart.
+eddie canales
+Yeah. You’ll see how they’re trenching based on — let me park where I’m out of the way here.
+azam ahmed
+For the past few years, Eddie’s been working with a team of scientists there, basically to search the cemetery for anonymous migrant graves.
+eddie canales
+I’ll just give her a rundown. 2013 was the first exhumation. 2014, the second one.
+azam ahmed
+Because what had been happening here over the years is that people in the county, when they’d find bodies, migrants on their property, their remains were brought here and buried wherever there was space.
+eddie canales
+[INAUDIBLE] in here?
+azam ahmed
+The county cemetery looks almost like any other county cemetery you’d come to. Grassy, a few big trees, quite full, fake flowers banked against headstones. But after we parked, we began to walk in and see these long trenches being dug. And there’s these small — almost encampments of people digging.
+eddie canales
+As of yesterday — [SPEAKING SPANISH] So there’s now 17. You can see.
+azam ahmed
+Wow. [SPEAKING SPANISH] And just as we arrived, they’d found something. [SPANISH SPEECH]
+eddie canales
+Oh my God.
+azam ahmed
+It’s a black plastic trash bag that’s been worn thin, and inside are just bones stacked on top of one another.
+speaker
+That’s what — that’s all that’s exposed.
+eddie canales
+[SPEAKING SPANISH] Because the essence is disintegrated. So carefully —
+azam ahmed
+It was obvious, from the condition, that this person had died long before they were buried.
+eddie canales
+And this is Dr. Kate Spradley.
+kate spradley
+Hi.
+annie brown
+Hi. Annie.
+kate spradley
+Annie, nice to meet you.
+eddie canales
+You can ask her any questions.
+kate spradley
+I’ll answer them, too.
+azam ahmed
+Eddie introduced us to the anthropologist leading the dig, Dr. Kate Spradley.
+kate spradley
+The Texas Criminal Code of Procedure and the Texas Health and Safety Code mandate that —
+azam ahmed
+So in Texas, there are now laws that require DNA samples to be taken from every body found, but for years —
+kate spradley
+In Brooks County, that wasn’t happening.
+azam ahmed
+That wasn’t happening.
+kate spradley
+And there were so many people dying here. In this particular county in 2012, you had 130 deaths. And that’s just too much for this county to handle.
+azam ahmed
+This county, overwhelmed with the number of people, was finding wherever they could in this cemetery to bury these individuals.
+kate spradley
+They buried them anywhere they could find.
+azam ahmed
+Without a map, without taking DNA samples, without gravestones.
+kate spradley
+It’s body bags, and it’s just digging shallow holes and throwing people in.
+azam ahmed
+Literally anonymously.
+kate spradley
+But in 2013, things changed, and the South Texas Human Rights Center helped the county get the money they needed to send remains to a medical examiner. So what we’re dealing with is people who died before 2013 that are buried in this cemetery.
+azam ahmed
+So at baseline, they’re exhuming these bodies to take DNA samples so that they can then compare those to databases of families who have missing loved ones. Essentially, she is trying to reclaim people from anonymity.
+kate spradley
+We’ve found 16 so far.
+azam ahmed
+So this is the potential 16th?
+kate spradley
+This is not the 16th. The 16th, do you see the white in the corner over here? Above that scale —
+azam ahmed
+Oh, yes.
+kate spradley
+There’s a little white coming through. That looks like it’s going to be another bag. Yes. A bag of remains.
+azam ahmed
+Since they started, they’ve found more than 150 bodies in the cemetery. And with them they often find the things they carried.
+kate spradley
+They’re carrying a toothbrush and toothpaste. This is something — you know, you and I are not carrying that right now. That’s something that — somebody is traveling. People carry just different things. There’s been stuffed animals, baseball cards, a luchador mask. It’s really interesting because you can see, also, through looking at the personal effects, how some people prepared for this trip. One person had photocopied money and put the photocopied money in his pockets. And then he sewed in a little pocket inside the pants with his real money. So just by looking at this and documenting it, you can tell how they prepared for this.
+azam ahmed
+Many of the families that have missing loved ones have placed their DNA in a database. And essentially, using that database, they compare it with the samples that come in from the bodies they exhume. And they occasionally match.
+kate spradley
+And we’ve identified 30 people so far.
+azam ahmed
+That’s incredible. I mean, I work and live in Mexico, it’s just, like, a — it’s just a dark hole. Nobody ever finds out where their loved ones —
+annie brown
+And give me context for that. What does it mean that they’ve matched 30 in this case?
+azam ahmed
+I mean, it means that there’s 30 families who have closure. There’s 30 families who know what happened.
+kate spradley
+We identified two individuals. Their families were in Houston, so they came to visit their remains in our lab before they were sent back to their country of origin. And you really got to see how this information impacted them. It let them just, I think, finally breathe for a moment. They’ve been on pins and needles. They didn’t know what happened. They asked questions like, well, how long were they out there? We called this person. We called this person. We called this agency. Is there anything more we could have done? And we said, no. You did everything that you could. Then they actually viewed the remains. They held the remains, and they wrote letters and put them in the box to go back with them for burial. It’s very nice to see that side of it and to see the impact and the meaning that it carries.
+azam ahmed
+The effort has largely been a success in Brooks County, but there are still hundreds, if not thousands, of people whose bodies are never found. And if they’re never found, they’re never identified.
+kate spradley
+Will we ever find the rest? That’s what I really start thinking. Will we ever be able to clear this cemetery? Will we ever find all of the individuals? How many people will we leave behind? And how many families will never know what happened to their loved one?
+eddie canales
+For every recovered body, there’s one other body that’s still out there.
+kate spradley
+Or more.
+eddie canales
+Or more.
+kate spradley
+They’re all accidental discoveries. Nobody’s out looking for them. So it’s just a ranch hand or somebody — a property owner is doing something, and they happened upon a body and find them. If you could go out and do systematic searches, I think you would find a lot more.
+eddie canales
+We’re just scratching the surface. You know, all this debate and everything about a wall and all the government shutdown and everything, people are still dying. Everybody says the system is broken, immigration system is broken, right? And you have a deterrence policy. So as long as you have migrant deaths, is that O.K. for the system? No. It’s not O.K. Not one life should be a consequence of a system that is broken.
+azam ahmed
+We’ve driven 80 miles away from the border that day. And I don’t think I realized until later that that was still the border. Even though geographically, it was not technically on the border, the same sort of realities applied.
+annie brown
+Thank you. Thank you so much.
+kate spradley
+Bye. You’re welcome. Nice to meet you.
+azam ahmed
+When you’re in Brooks County with Eddie, it’s hard to imagine why someone would want to stand in this guy’s way. I mean, he’s just trying to save lives. But there are moments when we’re with him, it becomes clear that not everybody does want him to succeed.
+eddie canales
+Right there at Mil Ojos, three of the bottles have been slashed.
+azam ahmed
+While we were on the water run with him, there was one water station where all of the jugs had been punctured, and the water had been allowed to seep out.
+eddie canales
+It was clear, I mean, you could tell where somebody took a —
+azam ahmed
+And he said, on really bad days, sometimes the entire water station can disappear, just thrown on the back of someone’s truck and taken. At one of the water stations we went to check on — So one of these flagpoles that are used to designate where the water stations are has been bent completely down to the ground.
+eddie canales
+I don’t know if maybe the wind in itself — it can get pretty windy out here.
+azam ahmed
+At first Eddie suggested it might have been the wind, but I think that was wishful thinking.
+annie brown
+So it’s like, either the elements or a person knocked this thing down.
+azam ahmed
+I’d be surprised if the wind bent it down all that way.
+eddie canales
+Yeah. No.
+azam ahmed
+It was sort of laying flush with the ground.
+eddie canales
+Somebody could have just came in here and bent it down completely. Or somebody got mad and decided to bend it down.
+azam ahmed
+And people are like that? People not like what you do sometimes?
+eddie canales
+Yeah. Yeah. There are some people that are like that.
+azam ahmed
+And so he spent several minutes using his body weight to try and lift the pole back up and bend it back into shape, but ultimately he couldn’t. It was too badly bent.
+eddie canales
+But I’ll refurbish the flagpole.
+azam ahmed
+And so it sort of sat there, eventually when we left, half in the air, kind of bobbing. You guys — we can give you guys a ride to where you’re going. We have some extra seats. So Eddie took some of the volunteers home. And then —
+eddie canales
+Come back and maybe do a dinner or something.
+azam ahmed
+Came back and asked us if we wanted to go to dinner. So we followed him to his Thursday night dinner spot, a restaurant called Jaliscos right on the highway into town.
+eddie canales
+[SPEAKING SPANISH]
+azam ahmed
+It’s like a Tex-Mex standard restaurant. A few families here and there. SPEAKER You can sing any song you want. But they were setting up for karaoke night.
+eddie canales
+Any song you want!
+azam ahmed
+By the bar, we see a guy with a white handlebar mustache, cowboy hat, cowboy boots, queuing up for karaoke. The D.J. walks over, hands him the mic, and he starts singing a George Strait song.
+phillip gómez
+(SINGING)
+azam ahmed
+Behind his head, the TV is playing, and it’s showing the highlight reels of President Trump’s speech that day about the border wall. But nobody, I mean, nobody was even looking at it. Everybody was just focused on him and this song.
+phillip gómez
+(SINGING) Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
+azam ahmed
+And the mic just starts getting passed around.
+speaker
+(SINGING)
+azam ahmed
+And the song choice was kind of an interesting border mix of, like, Mexican songs and Texas country songs.
+speaker
+(SINGING) [SINGING IN SPANISH]
+azam ahmed
+And it goes like — it was actually a really fun vibe, everybody just totally being themselves. So about an hour in, I walked over to the guy with the handlebar mustache and invited him to sit down with us. Trying to understand the border a little bit. I spent the whole day with Eddie and sort of had been seeing the county through his eyes, and I wanted to know what other people thought. His name was Phillip Gómez and he was the grandson of Mexican migrants. Phillip actually supported the wall.
+phillip gómez
+I don’t care who’s president whatsoever. Everybody’s making a big deal about Trump, but he’s right.
+azam ahmed
+He said he didn’t care who was president, but that President Trump was right.
+phillip gómez
+Why do people have walls in their backyard?
+azam ahmed
+He said, “Why do people have walls in their backyard? Because they don’t want people in there. There’s no difference. Explain the difference to me.” So Eddie starts eavesdropping on Phillip and I having this conversation, so he kind of interjects. Starts by asking Phillip, “You’re in favor of the wall?” And Phillip says yeah, and Eddie starts to tell him, “I was born here. I’m from here. My family is Mexican. I see it as a symbol of racism.” And it was interesting, there’s these two guys, both Mexican-Americans, both speaking in Spanglish, both in their late 60s early 70s having this conversation from absolutely opposite sides of the divide, at least until —
+speaker
+Phil, I think you’re next.
+azam ahmed
+It’s time for the next song.
+speaker
+Phil, you’re next.
+azam ahmed
+And someone comes over, hands Phillip the mic, and we convince him to sing from our table.
+phillip gómez
+(SINGING)
+azam ahmed
+And he launches into his next song.
+phillip gómez
+(SINGING)
+azam ahmed
+Eddie sat back, took a sip of his beer and smiled. And then, like everybody else, he started humming along.
+phillip gómez
+(SINGING) [APPLAUSE] Thank you.
+michael barbaroOpening on the 71st anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the conspiracy thriller “The Gandhi Murder” begins with a claim to be “based on verified facts.” Given the overall shoddiness of the production, including distractingly inapt casting and matte work that makes a Ganges River scene look fake, those facts are probably worth reverifying.
+Directed by Karim Traidia and Pankaj Sehgal, the movie unfolds during the weeks leading up to Gandhi’s death, mingling fictional and real-life figures. It posits that authorities knew in advance that the murder would happen and could have stopped it but didn’t, believing that making Gandhi a martyr would bring unity to feuding Hindus and Muslims in the wake of India’s independence.
+It pins the skulduggery on a fictional intelligence officer, Sunil Raina (Stephen Lang), who carries out his plan with the helpful and conflicted inaction of a policeman, Jimmy (Luke Pasqualino). Raina explains his theory of how Lincoln’s death brought the United States together after the Civil War.Also in the indictment is a reference to a file found on an electronic device that Ms. Meng was carrying when she arrived at Kennedy International Airport in New York in 2014. Officials detained her for a couple of hours when she arrived, according to a person with knowledge of the events. During that time, they briefly confiscated her electronic devices, said the person, who asked for anonymity because the events had not been made public.
+The file she was carrying, which the indictment said might have been deleted before being discovered, contained “suggested talking points” about Huawei’s relationship with Skycom, the company that prosecutors accuse Huawei of using as an unofficial subsidiary to obtain American-sourced goods, technology and services for its Iranian business.
+The indictment also said Skycom employed at least one United States citizen in Iran, a violation of American law. And it said that after Huawei found out that the United States was pursuing a criminal investigation in 2017, the company destroyed evidence and tried to move unspecified witnesses who knew about its Iranian business to China, beyond the reach of the American government.
+The other indictment, which concerns the theft of trade secrets from the American wireless provider T-Mobile, refers to internal emails describing a plot to steal testing equipment from T-Mobile’s lab in Bellevue, Wash.
+Huawei has contended that its employees were acting on their own to learn more about a robot that T-Mobile used to test smartphones, nicknamed Tappy because it could rapidly tap a phone screen. But the indictment cites multiple emails exchanged between Huawei engineers urging those with access to Tappy to take increasingly precise measurements.
+Image Ren Zhengfei, the founder and chief executive of Huawei, is Ms. Meng’s father. Credit... Vincent Yu/Associated Press
+Eventually, the indictment says, a Huawei engineer sneaked into the Tappy laboratory with the help of other Huawei employees who had access. He was caught and thrown out but returned, the indictment said.ATLANTA — At N.F.L. media nights, the biggest stars speak at podiums, and this year was no different. When the Los Angeles Rams took the floor, quarterback Jared Goff, running back Todd Gurley II and Coach Sean McVay drew big crowds.
+But cornerback Nickell Robey-Coleman drew equally large crowds. A week ago, Robey-Coleman was just a former undrafted free agent finishing his sixth season. Now, he needed media minders to keep reporters from digging too deeply into a play that may have altered the Super Bowl.
+That came in the N.F.C. Championship Game in New Orleans, where he drilled Saints wide receiver Tommylee Lewis before he could get in position to catch a pass from Drew Brees.
+No flag was thrown for pass interference or helmet-to-helmet contact. The Saints went on to kick a field goal, but left enough time on the clock for the Rams to tie the game and send it into overtime, when they eventually won, 26-23.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+When Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo abruptly called off the L train shutdown, he upended years of careful planning to ensure that 275,000 displaced riders were not left stranded in an L-pocalypse.
+Now, even as officials forge ahead with a widely debated alternate plan, many transit advocates are calling for those contingency measures — more bus and ferry service, new bike lanes, traffic restrictions — to be put in place even with no shutdown. The planned changes, they say, are still needed in a growing city facing critical transportation challenges from congestion to a broken subway system.
+Why turn back, they say, when so much of the groundwork is done. Bike routes have been expanded. Bus lanes have been painted, and the skeletons of bus fare machines have been installed on sidewalks. New bus and ferry services have been announced.
+“What we have in front of us is a city that has to expand our transportation system,” said Ydanis Rodriguez, the chairman of the City Council’s transportation committee. “We have an opportunity to become the most pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly city in the whole nation.”Above is an image related to one of the news stories we followed this past week. Do you know what it shows? At the bottom of this quiz, you’ll find the answer.
+Have you been paying attention to the news recently? See how many of these 10 questions you can get right.True, many high-income voters are socially liberal and economically conservative. They aren’t particularly religious and generally agree with the Democratic Party on social issues, like abortion, affirmative action and immigration. On economic issues, though, these affluent voters lean to the center if not the right. They don’t like talk of 70 percent marginal tax rates, and they favor cuts to Medicare and Social Security (which they describe as “entitlement reform”).
+Many commentators share these views, and they commit a classic version of the pundit fallacy: They confuse their own beliefs with the country’s. They fool themselves into thinking that “socially liberal and economically conservative” is a good campaign strategy. This is precisely the theory that seems to motivate Howard Schultz, the former Starbucks C.E.O. now planning an independent run for president.
+In reality, the American public is closer to being “socially conservative and economically liberal” than the reverse.
+On the socially conservative part: More than half of Americans say they pray daily. About 53 percent say abortion should be legal either “only in a few circumstances” or never. Almost 70 percent say illegal immigration is a “very big” or “moderately big” problem. On some of these subjects, the answers can depend on the precise phrasing of poll questions. But you have to twist the data pretty hard to create a portrait of a secular, liberal majority on most social issues.
+Economic policy is very different. Large majorities of Americans oppose cuts to Medicare and Social Security and favor expanded Medicaid. They favor higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. They favor a higher minimum wage and more aggressive government action to create jobs. No wonder: Incomes for most Americans have been growing painfully slowly for most of the past four decades.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.
+: a circular domed dwelling that is portable and self-supporting; originally used by nomadic Mongol and Turkic people of Central Asia but now used as inexpensive alternative or temporary housing
+_________
+The word yurt has appeared in 19 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Feb. 2 in “A Room (or a Ryokan, Yurt or R.V.) With a View” by Stephanie Rosenbloom:
+Airbnb’s booking data for the beginning of this year suggests that more travelers are interested in spending their vacations in what the short-term rental site calls “nontraditional” spaces, particularly those that allow travelers to be or feel closer to nature. Bookings for nature lodges and ryokans (traditional Japanese inns) have skyrocketed since last year. Reservations for yurts and recreational vehicles (R.V.s) have also spiked.
+These are hardly new or nontraditional forms of shelter. The ryokan is centuries old. Yurts have been used by nomads for decades. Yet it seems interest in such lodgings has prompted more places to not only offer them, but reimagine them, too. The latest iterations have modern comforts and deluxe trappings even as they aim to retain some of the minimalism and spirit of their predecessors.$109.45/SQ. FT.
+$162,000 approximate annual rent
+48 West Eighth Street (between Macdougal Street and Avenue of the Americas)
+Manhattan
+Frevo, a new French restaurant, has taken a lease for 10 years and five months in this five-story Greenwich Village walk-up. Its chef, Franco Sampogna, who was born in Brazil and moved to France as a teenager, was the chef at Jema, owned by the shopping guru Joy Mangano in Huntington, N.Y. Bernardo Silvao is to be the manager of the restaurant, which is to open this spring. The 850-square-foot ground-floor space, with a usable 630-square-foot lower level, will also feature a gallery displaying works by Toma-L, a contemporary French painter. Il Bambino, an Italian restaurant, was the previous tenant.
+Tenant: Frevo
+Landlord: Return to Home
+Brokers: Elba Diaz and William Abramson, Buchbinder & Warren Realty GroupLONDON — Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain survived a critical vote in Parliament on Tuesday that could have delayed Brexit, undermined her strategy for leaving the European Union and undercut the country’s constitutional protocol.
+Mrs. May’s latest political escape came when lawmakers narrowly failed to approve an amendment giving Parliament the power to instruct her to seek a delay to avoid a disorderly, and possibly chaotic, exit that Britain faces on March 29 if there is no agreement.
+However, she later lost a vote on a nonbinding amendment that said Britain should not leave the bloc without a deal, a sign of potential troubles ahead.I grew up in San Diego with immigrant parents, before the food blogs, before this kind of celebrity chef culture we know now. It was not about Alice Waters for me, it was about the community and the world she had created.
+I didn’t get to know her until about 2010, 2011. I started working with Michael Pollan. He’s really close with her.
+Has she given you any advice about being a known food personality?
+I was telling her how I was coming here, and how I was feeling kind of ill from all the eating I’ve had to do, and I said, “Oh my god, I don’t understand how you do this,” and she’s like, “You always have to bring your own food. You just have to figure out where the vegetables are.”
+Where did you grow up?
+University City. I went to La Jolla High School. My parents came from Iran in the 1970s.
+I’m curious about how growing up in California informed your worldview and your work now.
+That was all I knew. I really love the beach. The beach has always been a constant in my life. And you asked about how being a Californian has influenced me: Above any other way of identifying, like above race or religion or anything — or nationality — I identify as a Californian. This way that I’ve gotten to spend so much of my life outside, in different landscapes, has absolutely affected me. Agriculture has affected me. The way there are so many different kinds of people from all over the world — I’m so, so grateful for that. I remember being sick of the fact that it was always sunny in San Diego. My dad said to me: “What’s wrong with you? Everyone in the whole rest of the world aspires to live in California.”
+I don’t know — I mean, I love Mexican food so much. I could probably go on for a long time about the differences between Northern California and Southern California Mexican food.Mecanoo brought a theater consultant on board to make sure sufficient thought was given to both form and function. The acoustics of the concert hall, Taiwan’s first with 360-degree seating, make performances in the large space feel deceptively intimate. For instance, the recital hall’s asymmetric design facilitates viewing of the pianist’s hands.
+“The design principle that Francine brought to Weiwuying was to get people close to the arts, and close to each other,” said Chien Wen-pin, the arts center’s executive and artistic director, a position he took after serving as director of Deutsche Oper am Rhein in Düsseldorf for 22 years. A native of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital in the north, he was persuaded to return to Taiwan in 2013 by the island’s culture minister, Lung Ying-tai.
+Mr. Chien praised the versatility of the stages and performance spaces in the arts center’s four halls, which he said he hoped would enable performers to re-envision their art.
+“We want artists to come and feel and create for themselves,” he said. “We want to push artists to create new work.”
+The arts center at Weiwuying appears to be off to a strong start: It had 800,000 visitors in its first nine weeks after opening, and larger performances have drawn audience members from Taiwan’s northern cities as well as farther afield, including Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore.
+It also seems to be well received by those who do not take particular interest in the arts. Chen Hsiao-li, a Kaohsiung resident who runs a small shop selling betel nuts and cold drinks near Weiwuying, said she thought the arts center would help revitalize the neighborhood.
+“I’m not really the theatergoing type, but my daughter is, so it’s nice that she has somewhere she can go for that,” Ms. Chen said. “For the rest of us, I think it will bring more people into Kaohsiung and bring more business to this part of the city.”HONG KONG — Singapore takes pride in being a technology hub where municipal decisions are driven by cutting-edge data science.
+“Data is the new currency, and with open data, the possibilities are endless!” the government says on its “smart nation” portal.
+But that image has been dented by two embarrassing data breaches.
+Last year, a cyberattack on Singapore’s public health system compromised data from 1.5 million people. And on Monday, the Health Ministry said that medical records for 14,200 H.I.V.-positive people in the city-state had been obtained by an American whose Singaporean partner worked at the ministry. The ministry said it learned on Jan. 22 that the records had been illegally disclosed online.
+Experts say the breaches highlight the potential pitfalls for Singapore and other countries that are pushing to make vast troves of data more accessible and centralized. Do the public benefits justify the inherent risks to privacy? And can anyone prevent senior officials from misusing information they have at their fingertips?“She was the kind of kid that when you made her smile,” he said, “it felt like a real win.”
+After graduating in 2015, her mother said, Ms. Goodson had big dreams. She worked for about a year at a day care center in Stamford, and loved it. But she had also talked about becoming a security guard or a flight attendant.
+Ms. Goodson’s daughter was the light of her life, her cousin, Ronshuana Anthony, said.
+“Malaysia just gave so much of her self,” Ms. Anthony said, adding, “She’d give her last breath to her if she could.”
+When emergency responders arrived at the subway station on Monday night, Ms. Goodson was unconscious and unresponsive, police said.
+She was taken to the Mount Sinai West hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
+Ms. Goodson’s daughter was found conscious and treated at the scene. She was reunited with her father and grandmother in the city and was doing well, Tamika Goodson said.
+It was not clear whether Ms. Goodson suffered a medical condition or if she was killed from the impact of the fall. The city’s medical examiner will determine her cause of death, officials said.
+Shams Tarek, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the subway, called the death “a heartbreaking tragedy” and said the agency would work with the police to investigate.
+While officials are continuing to probe the circumstances around Ms. Goodson’s fall, her death has shined a light on the lack of elevator service and accessibility issues that have long plagued the city’s subway system.SEOUL, South Korea — Kim Bok-dong, a former sex slave for the Japanese military during World War II whose tireless campaigning helped bring international attention to the suffering that thousands of women like her endured, died on Monday in Seoul. She was 92.
+Ms. Kim had cancer. Yoon Mi-hyang, president of the Korean Council for Justice and Remembrance, an advocacy group for the South Korean women who were forced to work in Japanese brothels, announced her death, at Severance Hospital, on Tuesday.
+Since the early 1990s, Ms. Kim had been a prominent representative of the former sex slaves, who were known euphemistically as comfort women. She was one of the first to break decades of silence and talk about what had been done to her, and she traveled around the world to testify about it, including at the United Nations.
+To her last days, she demanded reparations from Japan. When reporters visited her in the hospital, she accused Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government of refusing to atone properly. Historians say as many as 200,000 girls, from Korea and other Asian countries, were forced or lured into sexual slavery during the war.Diana Athill spent most of her life as an editor, working with titans of literary history. They were mostly male — most anointed titans are — and the challenge of this job was immense enough to warrant a thick memoir, “Stet: An Editor’s Life.” Remarkably, Athill didn’t use the pages to complain, an instinct that would have been easy to understand, but instead to sing the praises of the written word and the people who make it their mission to tell stories. What she less overtly advertised, though, was her fiercely independent life. Athill died last week at the age of 101, and her words, at several critical points in this reader’s life, provided a lifeline. Perhaps her greatest legacy was her refusal to cede to societal expectations as she carved out a persistently unusual world for herself in which the demands of femininity — marriage and children, specifically — were rethought and redefined.
+I was introduced to Athill through her memoir “Somewhere Towards the End.” Published when she was 91, it was a meditation on the mixed bag that is aging. While Athill was quick to point out the injustices of growing older, chief among them giving up sex (Athill loved sex in her very British way, decreeing that every woman should have a few good love affairs), her tone was almost defiantly peppy — never saccharine, but refusing to give in to the weighty fear with which we tend to face the great unknown. I had my first existential crisis (that’s putting it generously) at age 13, and sat with the pain for years afterward. My primary literary bedfellows in the ensuing years were death obsessives like Philip Roth and Robert Lowell, or poets who were far too successful in its pursuit (Sylvia Plath, who was less enthusiastic about her life in the London literary scene than Athill, her counterpart who was born more than a decade before her and survived her by more than 50 years). I figured if I couldn’t solve the mystery around mortality then I could at least wallow with some of the greats. I was on year 15 of this strategy when I found myself in possession of Athill’s slim book in consideration of the topic. The simplicity of her prose belies a complexity of thought that would have been necessary to edit V. S. Naipaul (or survive a dinner with Jean Rhys); though Athill may not have been afraid of death, she didn’t think it was simple, either. She just didn’t dwell on its complexities. I swallowed her words like barbiturates and they killed the fear. “I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader’s conscious response to a text,” Athill writes, “whatever is needy in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.” Guilty as charged.
+In the same book Athill reflects on how her relationship to sex had “gone through several stages and had not always been a happy one, but that had always seemed central to my existence.” Sex, she explains, “obliterates the individuality of young women more often than it does that of young men, because so much more of a woman than a man is used by sex.” And her individuality appears to be the quality Athill valued most as she made decisions that were unorthodox, and geared to maximize joy and minimize obligation. She wasn’t the workaholic we expect passionately single women to be (in the movies, it seems everyone who’s unmarried by choice wears a blazer and wields a Blackberry), proclaiming in “Stet,” “I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work; that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.”
+But here she must have been underplaying her ambition, so spectacular was the second act that followed (achieved at fourth-act age). Athill was under no illusion that she would be celebrated for her work as an editor: “We must always remember that we are only midwives — if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.” And so she did, writing novels, essays and nonfiction with the kind of 9-to-5 work ethic she’d once shown in the office of the publisher André Deutsch. She quickly found her subject: romance in its many forms. In “Stet,” it was a romance with words. In “Yesterday Morning,” with memories of childhood. In “After a Funeral,” it was a love lost to depression, her partner ending his life violently in Athill’s home, an act she treated with her signature lack of fanfare. She used “A Florence Diary” to describe every inch of the Italian city as happily as a tween with a thesaurus. She made peace with love’s dark demise in “Instead of a Letter,” in which she admits frankly that an early broken engagement has left her with a fear of lasting intimacy. She had love affair after love affair, including a brief but soul-expanding dalliance with the Black Panther Hakim Jamal (a man who’d also had a high-profile relationship with the actress Jean Seberg before the murder of his next girlfriend by his fellow Panthers, and who later was murdered himself). Athill lived with the Jamaican playwright Barry Reckord for nearly 40 years, though she was his lover for fewer than 10.BRUSSELS — Serge Schoffel placed a red sticker on the label for a 19th-century Dan Mano mask from Liberia. “This is my best sale,” he said.
+Mr. Schoffel, a dealer based in Brussels, who has been trading in tribal art for 11 years, had just completed negotiations over a cellphone with a French collector during the Friday preview of the Brafa art fair. “We’ve been talking to him for some time, but this is the first piece he’s bought,” Mr. Schoffel said, adding that the wooden mask was priced between 20,000 and 30,000 euros, or about $23,000 to $34,000.
+It was one of countless sales of artworks from sub-Saharan Africa that have been conducted in Europe since the colonial era. Belgium and France, two of the largest former colonial powers in Africa, have traditionally been the main trading hubs.
+But specialists in this long-established business have become alarmed by a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France and published in November. Written by two academics, Bénédicte Savoy of France and Felwine Sarr of Senegal, the report recommends that French museums permanently return artworks that were removed from Africa without consent if their countries of origin ask for them back.The end of a TV show can mean a lot of things for an actor: the end of getting your hair done for free, the end of eating hot snacks for free, the end of free time spent napping in your trailer. But it also means something more poignant: the end of your character’s journey. (At least until the show’s reboot.) While television characters are immortal in a way — living on even after the show is done — when the story reaches its conclusion, so, too, does the time an actor has spent getting to know the characters in that world. When I learned that the fourth season of “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” would be its last, I felt sad to have to say goodbye to Kimmy. While rumors of a possible movie help to cushion the blow, still, the series itself is over.
+I have been a cast member of two television shows that have ended. (I swear it’s just a coincidence that when I’m on a show, it ends.) The first one, “The Office,” wrapped up way back in 2013, when you didn’t order your deodorant online. I cried every single day for the final month of filming. I would drive home on the 101 in my Ford Fusion, blasting “Ada” by the National and “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. As the tears streamed down my face, I would wave away concerned motorists giving me the universal “Are you O.K.?” gesture (yes, that’s right, I’m confident that’s what the gesture meant).
+What was happening to me? I hadn’t even been on the show since its start; I entered at the end of the fifth season. Jobs end, people move on. Why, then, did I feel as though I were leaving home for the first time? And why did I ever think that a Ford Fusion was the car for me? It’s way too wide!BRUMADINHO, Brazil — The Brazilian police on Tuesday arrested five people, including three employees of the giant mining company Vale, as part of an investigation into a dam rupture that left at least 84 dead and 276 missing.
+The dam, filled with mining waste and sludge, burst on Friday afternoon, sending a tidal wave of mud crashing down on homes in the town of Brumadinho in southeastern Brazil. The torrent also struck Vale administrative buildings, including the company cafeteria.
+The other two people arrested were engineers working for the Brazilian subsidiary of the German industrial testing company TÜV Süd, which conducted two inspections of the Brumadinho dam last year, the most recent in September, according to both Vale and TÜV Süd. The subsidiary carried out an inspection of the dam’s safety in September, it said, though it refused to comment further, citing the continuing investigation.Though Venezuelan generals appear to be backing Mr. Maduro, a handful of Venezuelan diplomats and officials posted to missions in the United States have said they are abandoning the Maduro government to support Mr. Guaidó. On Monday, Scarlett Salazar, a veteran diplomat based in Miami, where there is a large anti-Maduro Venezuelan population, announced she was siding with Mr. Guaidó.
+Most Latin American countries have recognized Mr. Guaidó and demanded that Mr. Maduro acquiesce to the call for new elections. Several European nations also joined the call for elections after Mr. Pompeo held a meeting with representatives of the United Nations Security Council in New York on Saturday.
+The campaign by the Trump administration has gotten a high level of bipartisan support among lawmakers in Washington, though some Democratic legislators have expressed concern about how hard-line policies might affect ordinary Venezuelans, who are already suffering from years of economic collapse. Others have asked whether the administration has a coherent strategy if Mr. Maduro clings to power.
+On Monday, the United States put into effect what is essentially an embargo on oil from the main Venezuelan state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or Pdvsa. The sanctions would prevent most American companies from doing business with Pdvsa. Any money going to Pdvsa — including from its United States subsidiary, Citgo — would be put into accounts that could be used by what the Trump administration deems to be the legitimate Venezuelan government. For now, that is Mr. Guaidó and the National Assembly, where the 35-year-old political activist and industrial engineer serves as leader.
+The oil sanctions amount to the first punitive action taken by the United States against Mr. Maduro since the power struggle in Caracas erupted last week, and it is intended to starve the government of Mr. Maduro of cash and foreign currency. Oil production in Venezuela has already plummeted because of mismanagement and poor policies, and the country’s economy is in shambles. Extraction at oil fields still takes place, though, and until now the country exported much of its crude oil to the United States to be refined and then sold.There are more than 48,000 people being held in immigrant detention in more than 200 facilities in the United States. More than two-thirds of them, according to the National Immigrant Justice Center, are confined by private companies, working on contracts with the federal government . Those numbers have ballooned in the last two years under the Trump administration, drawing new attention to the terrible conditions detainees are living in.
+One feature of privately run centers — the Voluntary Work Program — is the subject of six separate lawsuits, which say that privately run immigrant detention centers are coercing detainees into working for a dollar a day and punishing those who don’t. The lawsuits demand, among other things, that the practice stop and that detained workers be paid minimum wage .
+Congress should not wait for these lawsuits to be decided. Democrats have won the House, so even if they can’t stop the president’s anti-immigrant push, they can push to raise the obsolete and exploitative $1-a-day wage. And, just as they have rejected Mr. Trump’s request for $5.7 billion for the border wall, they should reject the request for $2.8 billion to expand detentions to 52,000 beds.
+Prison labor is nearly as old as the American prison system itself, and it is protected by the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery and indentured servitude except as punishment for a crime. This exception means that prisons can require their prisoners to work, even without compensation.WASHINGTON — One day in October 1979, an American diplomat named Archer K. Blood arrived at Afghanistan’s government headquarters, summoned by the new president, whose ousted predecessor had just been smothered to death with a pillow.
+While the Kabul government was a client of the Soviet Union, the new president, Hafizullah Amin, had something else in mind. “I think he wants an improvement in U.S.-Afghan relations,” Mr. Blood wrote in a cable back to Washington. It was possible, he added, that Mr. Amin wanted “a long-range hedge against over-dependence on the Soviet Union.”
+Mr. Blood’s newly published cable sheds light on what really drove the Soviet Union to invade Afghanistan only two months after his meeting with Mr. Amin. Spoiler alert: It was not because of terrorism, as claimed this month by President Trump, who said the Soviets were right to invade. Among the real motivations, the cable and other documents suggest, was a fear that Afghanistan might switch loyalties to the West.
+“This was a key moment that raised the Soviet sense of threat,” said Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, a research organization at George Washington University that recently obtained the cable through the Freedom of Information Act and posted it online on Tuesday. “It’s a fascinating case study of the necessity in all of these international affairs of putting yourself in the other guy’s place — what does it look like over there?”OTTAWA — A Toronto landscaper pleaded guilty to eight murders on Tuesday in a case that traumatized the gay community in Canada’s largest city.
+The landscaper, Bruce McArthur, 67, was arrested a year ago and initially charged with killing six men, dismembering them and hiding the pieces in planters on the property of a client who allowed him to store tools there.
+Additional remains were later uncovered in a ravine behind the house where he had transformed planters into graves.
+A limited amount of new information about the killings was presented in court on Tuesday. Michael Cantlon, a prosecutor, said Mr. McArthur planned all of the murders, held some of his victims captive and killed others while also sexually assaulting them.“The Wild Pear Tree,” Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s latest film, shares its title with a manuscript written by its protagonist, a restless young man named Sinan. The book is a collection of short pieces, quasi- or semi-fictional but based in reality, touching on aspects of life in the part of western Turkey where Sinan (Aydin Dogu Demirkol) and his family live. Pitching the manuscript to a local government official he thinks might subsidize its publication, the author is at pains to describe it in resolutely anti-commercial terms. Though the area includes the battle sites of both Troy and Gallipoli, there is nothing of historical or touristic interest in the work. It’s defiantly cerebral — resistant to summary, classification and perhaps easy comprehension as well. Like the movie, more or less.
+Sinan, a recent university graduate with uncertain employment prospects, seems at once brazenly ambitious and stubbornly self-undermining. A big, graceless guy with a hint of Adam Sandler in his slack, stubbled face, he isn’t the most pleasant company. But Ceylan’s characters rarely are.
+Over eight features in more than 20 years, this director, a fixture at Cannes and other international festivals, has charted the isolation, anomie and passive-aggressive gloom of modern, mostly secular Turks. Their failure to connect with one another or the better parts of themselves can feel symptomatic of a larger malaise. Young or old, artists, farmers or entrepreneurs, they tend to be frustrated, adrift and confused, at once alienated from their society and unable to break free of it.
+Sinan shares that condition with his father, Idris (Murat Cemcir), a schoolteacher whose gambling habit has brought embarrassment and financial hardship to the family. Sinan’s mother, Asuman (Bennu Yildirimlar), wavers between disgust and resignation. When he’s not hanging out at the betting parlor or cadging small loans in the town of Çan, Idris spends his time in the rural village where he grew up and where his father and parents-in-law still live. His main pastime is working on an ill-advised well that yields no water but plenty of metaphorical juice.BALTIMORE — Baltimore has both the highest murder rate among the nation’s big cities and one of the most broken relationships between its police and its citizenry. Only one out of four homicides were solved last year. And the city’s enforcement of marijuana laws has fallen almost exclusively on African-Americans.
+Given this dire set of facts, the city’s top prosecutor announced on Tuesday that she would no longer bother with marijuana cases, a controversial move that she argued would improve police-community relations and allow law enforcement to devote more time to serious violent crime.
+“If you ask that mom whose son was killed where she would rather us spend our time and our attention — on solving that murder, or prosecuting marijuana laws — it’s a no-brainer,” said Marilyn Mosby, the state’s attorney for Baltimore. She vowed at a news conference to no longer prosecute marijuana possession, regardless of quantity or prior criminal record, and said she would seek to vacate almost 5,000 convictions.
+Ms. Mosby’s move places her in a vanguard of big-city prosecutors, including Kim Foxx in Chicago, Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, Cyrus R. Vance Jr. in Manhattan and Eric Gonzalez in Brooklyn, who are moving away from marijuana cases, declaring them largely off limits and in some cases going so far as to clear old warrants or convictions off the books.It’s safe to assume that most perpetrators of sexual violence who have come to public notice through #MeToo didn’t suddenly become abusers after landing jobs in newsrooms and board rooms and on movie sets. Their idea that one can abuse with impunity is learned, and in many cases it is learned where most things are learned — at school.
+Violent sexual behavior that goes unchecked during college does not reach a natural end at graduation. In fact, many perpetrators of sexual violence are serial offenders: Of men who acknowledge using sexually violent or coercive behaviors, around one in five report committing repeat assaults. Another study found that men reporting a history of sexually aggressive behavior commit, on average, more than six sexual assaults.
+Examples of school perpetrators who skirted accountability and then offended after graduation are already emerging. Jameis Winston, who was accused of rape as a student at Florida State University and is now a professional football player, reached a settlement with an Uber driver who said he sexually assaulted her in her car in 2016.
+But the path from perpetrator of school sexual violence to workplace abuser need not be inevitable. Interventions including cognitive behavioral therapy have proved to be highly effective in preventing perpetrators from reoffending. Far from being unfair, responding seriously to perpetrators of school sexual violence is tough kindness . As the world grows increasingly intolerant of violent sexual behavior, early intervention and clear messages about appropriate behavior can prevent perpetrators from reoffending and facing more long-term career, legal and personal consequences.
+But the first step in effectively intervening must be more, not less, accountability. Ms. Mee suggests that Ms. DeVos should begin by devising policies responsive to school survivors’ needs. “The public conversations going on right now need to translate into action,” Ms. Mee told me. “Those in power have a responsibility to listen to the stories being told and use this momentum to improve the system through which survivors seek justice, not weaken them even further.” If they don’t, they risk emboldening perpetrators who offended in early in life to continue abusing the women in the workplace.
+I took the unusual step of suing Harvard for its handling of my case and was unsuccessful. The judge dismissed the Title IX claim because of her determination that the university was not “deliberately indifferent.” But as I’ve learned as a student activist, I’m far from alone in my experience of seeing a man accused of sexual assault assured by a college that his actions were not out of bounds — and wondering what that means for the women who will encounter him in the future.
+While I obtained a restraining order against the man who assaulted me in college, he graduated and got a coveted job , where he’ll only have more and more power as time goes on. While I hope he’ll never become the villain of another woman’s #MeToo story, I am not optimistic. The proposed rules make it even more likely that men like him will leave their college campuses and enter the work force believing they can abuse women and be assured “Nothing wrong occurred.”
+Alyssa Leader is a second-year law student at the University of North Carolina.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.A major bug in Apple’s FaceTime app surfaced on Monday that allows anyone with an iPhone, iPad or Mac computer to eavesdrop on other users without their knowledge. Apple said Monday evening that it was aware of the glitch, was working on a fix and would release it in a software update later this week.
+In the meantime, Apple has turned off Group FaceTime, the feature that allowed for surreptitious listening, which should temporarily resolve the issue. But for those who want an extra layer of security, follow these steps to turn off FaceTime on your devices.
+Step 1: Check if you’re susceptible
+Before you do anything, you need to make sure your Apple device was affected by the glitch. It exists on iOS devices with the most recent software updates, starting with iOS 12.1, which was released in October. That release introduced the Group FaceTime feature.Barney Fein is a depraved Hollywood mogul — “a bloated monster” — whose fall from grace can be seen in London’s West End starting in June.
+He is also based in part on Harvey Weinstein.
+“Bitter Wheat,” written and directed by David Mamet and starring John Malkovich, will open at Garrick Theater in London on June 7 for a limited run, the theater announced Tuesday.
+Mr. Mamet wrote the play in response to the #MeToo allegations against Mr. Weinstein and others in Hollywood, the theater said.
+On Tuesday, Mr. Malkovich told BBC radio that he expected “a lot of people” not to like the work, which he called a “black farce.”ANGOULÊME, France — It’s a big year for comic book anniversaries. Batman’s 80th is this year, and Asterix is turning 60. But at the Angoulême International Comics Festival in France, which finished on Sunday, there was a sense that the form’s best days may be yet to come — in the French-speaking world, at least.
+“It’s a kind of golden age,” said Jean-Luc Fromental, a comic book author who also runs a graphic-novel imprint for the publisher Denoël. “There has never been so much talent. There have never been so many interesting books published.”
+There are now more comic books published annually in France and Belgium than ever before, according to the festival’s artistic director, Stéphane Beaujean. “The market has risen from 700 books per year in the 1990s to 5,000 this year,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know any cultural industry which has had that kind of increase.”Indeed, “Police Story” — which Chan directed as well as starred in as a diligent but absent-minded cop — would be little more than a bang-bang procedural were it not for a number of impossibly kinetic set pieces. The scene in which Chan, who did all of his own stunts, employs the handle of an umbrella to hang on to a moving bus is easier to describe than the gyrations he uses to confound six bad guys armed with clubs or ride a large shopping mall chandelier down to the ground. The sound of broken glass is Chan’s theme song. His directorial stunts are epitomized by a choreographed sequence that destroys an entire hillside shantytown.
+“Police Story” is largely the sum of its action scenes although it’s also enjoyable to watch the villains wield cellphones the size of cinder blocks, or see the very young Maggie Cheung as Chan’s long-suffering girlfriend. (Brigitte Lin, another leading Hong Kong star, is also in the movie as the witness whom Chan’s police officer must protect.)
+“Police Story II,” showing as a separate admission, appears never to have been reviewed in The Times. Production values are higher and the havoc quotient is lower, despite several elaborate explosions. The tiresome toilet humor is partly compensated for by some impressively orchestrated gags — involving chain reactions worthy of Rube Goldberg — and a fireworks display that brings down the abandoned factory where the final battle is staged.
+The best part of a Chan production can be the humorous montage of outtakes that accompany the closing credits. As if to offset the diminished violence in “Police Story II,” the coda shows real injuries and actual blood.Not every new bar in New York needs to be an Instagram-seducing set for tourists or birthday revelers, invariably lodged in a hotel underbelly. Cue Ponyboy, which opened in late September in the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.
+Housed in the former Manhattan Inn (a piano joint that closed in 2016), Ponyboy flutters from cocktail bar to discothèque to music hall to underground sushi society by zephyr-like whim. On a recent evening, chef Michael Stember, one of the owners, wondered how to use an antechamber that contained a banquet table.
+“Maybe this will be a kaiseki tearoom,” Mr. Stember said. “Maybe it will be a wine club. We have no idea where this is headed.”
+The Place
+Nested in a heavily trafficked section of Manhattan Avenue aside dollar stores and laundromats, Ponyboy has a squeezed bar that funnels into an open kitchen and, eventually, a larger, dimly lit room with a stage, banquette seating and a distinctive pitched skylight.He sang anthems of social lament and timeless wisdom, typically in Shona, Zimbabwe’s predominant language, but also in English and Ndebele. His music pulled from traditional Shona rhythms and sounds while incorporating influences from South Africa’s more cosmopolitan, jazz-inflected mbaqanga tradition, as well as African-American dance music. What resulted — a kind of soundtrack to Zimbabwean life in the late 20th century — became known as its own idiom, called “Tuku music,” after Mr. Mtukudzi’s nickname.
+“I looked for a sound the guitar couldn’t make, in a guitar‚” he told the South African publication TshisaLIVE in an interview shortly before his death, remembering his early years. “Professional guitarists at the time used to laugh at me. I used to look for a mbira on the guitar strings,” he said, referring to a traditional Shona thumb piano.
+In the 1970s, as a member of the band Wagon Wheels, he played alongside the singer Thomas Mapfumo, who would become the only other Zimbabwean musician with a reputation to rival his. Mr. Mapfumo left the country in the 1990s and became well known in the West. Mr. Mtukudzi stayed, and cemented his status as the country’s most renowned musician.
+His popularity in Zimbabwe reflects the fact that in a country bitterly divided by political allegiances, he positioned himself as a unifier. While Mr. Mapfumo took a strong political stance in his music — pioneering a genre known as chimurenga (“revolutionary struggle music” in Shona) before the fall of white minority rule, then vigorously criticizing Robert Mugabe, who ruled the country from 1980 to 2017 — Mr. Mtukudzi generally avoided taking a political side. He sang at events for the ruling ZANU-PF party, as well as the wedding and funeral of the opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai.
+But his songs boldly told the stories of his communities, and he made no effort to avoid social issues. Perhaps his biggest hit was “Todii,” a cautionary song about the perils of H.I.V. from the 1997 album “Tuku Music.” Powered by a melancholy chorus of background singers and the gravelly lament of Mr. Mtukudzi’s lead vocal, it warned listeners of the virus that by then had infected a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population.Slide 1 of 10,
+Innovations in Mexican cuisine at restaurants like Cosme have beguiled the city recently. But Casa Enrique, in Queens, specializes in a fixed menu of traditional dishes, like the pozole that is served with a full complement of garnishes.ATLANTA — In 2000, the last time this city hosted the Super Bowl, the St. Louis Rams beat the Tennessee Titans, and Watershed had been frying its famous fried chicken in lard and sweet butter flavored with country ham for only a year.
+The new Southern food movement that the restaurant in nearby Decatur helped define had not yet moved North . Brooklynites weren’t worshiping biscuits, and American barbecue had not met kimchi. Only a few cooks or writers outside the South were giving serious thought to the connection between Southern food and that of West Africa.
+Even here, in the booming cultural and commercial center of the American South, diners had only begun to embrace a style of cooking that emphasized seasonality and history over carbohydrates and caricatur e. Atlanta’s most popular restaurants were local chains dipped in the glitzy, corporate sheen of the Buckhead neighborhood, and high-end steakhouses like Ruth’s Chris and Morton’s were abundant.
+Now, as the city prepares to show off its new $1.5 billion Mercedes-Benz Stadium on Sunday, when the New England Patriots meet the Los Angeles Rams, Atlanta is a more evolved food town than it was then.Mr. Aguilar has been frying, blending and stirring mole de Piaxtla since Casa Enrique opened in 2012, just off Vernon Boulevard, in Long Island City, Queens. In fact, he has barely changed his menu since our Hungry City critic, Ligaya Mishan, reviewed it the next year. Mr. Aguilar says he is emulating the restaurants he likes best in Mexico, ones whose kitchens make the same dishes year in and year out.
+Whether despite this or because of it, the restaurant seems to have improved in subtle ways. Acoustic panels tacked to the ceiling make conversation easier. Servers, always welcoming, have become experts at anticipating the meal’s ebb and flow. They’ll step in just when you’re ready for a fresh drink, maybe a margarita with some tamarind this time to offset the raw-sugar syrup. They’ll gauge the precise moment when you’re ready to have dinner plates cleared to make room for dessert.
+Or they’ll break away from your table just long enough to join in a full-throated singing of “Happy Birthday” around a slice of tres leches cake with a candle stuck in it on the other side of the room. This may happen three or four times a night, probably not because Casa Enrique looks particularly festive — from floor to ceiling, it’s done almost entirely in white — but, I’d guess, because regulars know it regularly outperforms any number of other restaurants that might seem to be more special on the surface but aren’t, really. Also, the tres leches cake, if not as soggy with condensed milk as it could be, is still pretty good, though I think the flan is almost mandatory, and it, too, is a perfectly credible birthday-candle holder.
+Although the guacamole is freshly mashed and pleasingly minimalist, I tend to skip it as long as the people I’m with don’t mind. Instead I’ll head straight for the two-bite sopecitos topped with refried beans and loose chorizo, or the albondigas in cumin-laced chipotle sauce, each of the three meatballs stuffed with hard-cooked eggs.The new play “Master of the Crossroads” has range: The tone goes from frenzied to hysterical to off-the-charts bonkers.
+Fine, so it is a narrow range. There may be nuances buried deep, but they’re hard to find when you’re being bludgeoned.
+Written and directed by Paul Calderon, the show, at Shetler Studios, depicts a harrowing, one-way trip to hell. This is not spoiling anything: When a story begins with its intensity needle as firmly in the red as this one does, there are no options left besides self-combustion.
+It all starts when Yolanda (Sarah Kate Jackson) visits Jim-Bo (Obi Abili, memorable in “The Emperor Jones” in 2017) to inform him of a sticky situation: Jim-Bo’s brother, Cornbread (who happens to be Yolanda’s ex-husband), is holding a man captive and threatening to crucify him. Cornbread, an Iraq war veteran like Jim-Bo, has gone off the deep end and kidnapped a Middle Eastern man — although Yolanda is pretty sure he is actually Hispanic. Why nobody is calling 911 is a question you will ask yourself repeatedly during the show.When did you become a full-fledged company?
+We all went off to college, and when we came back we reorganized and called ourselves the Thunderbird dancers, after the clan my mother belonged to in the Winnebago tribe. As we got older, we started traveling to learn dances from around the country.
+I think some of the dances we do now are no longer done on the reservations where they come from, and I’m so happy that we had an opportunity to learn them and keep them alive. That’s primarily what the group is for, to preserve the dances.
+There’s also an educational purpose, it seems.
+We wanted to perform for non-Native audiences, so they could have a better understanding of what these dances are all about — that they have an origin, a story, a purpose. We don’t just get out there and move around like you see in the movies.
+How are the dances passed down?
+For us, we travel to the reservations where they’re doing the dances. For instance, we’ve been up to the Iroquois people, to many of the reservations where they live in upstate New York, and we’ve been invited to come into the longhouse and dance with them. So that’s how we learn, by going there and participating in the dance.
+It’s also about growing up with it, the people you meet. I started dancing when I was about 5 or 6. I always tell people there isn’t a school where you can go to learn how to do Native American dancing. It has to come through family.“It’s so perfect, it makes you want to cry,” the soprano Aprile Millo said, her eyes getting moist just thinking about it.
+She was sitting in a rehearsal room last week, talking about a song she was about to practice. It is on the program of her recital on Wednesday at Zankel Hall, her first in New York in 10 years.
+But Ms. Millo could also have been describing her voice: an instrument of easy, opulent power and fiery yet sumptuous phrasing, a moving recollection of the great Italian singers who ruled 60 or 70 years ago.
+It was a voice that thrilled the Metropolitan Opera through the 1980s and ’90s, when Ms. Millo was among the house’s reigning divas: the grandly emoting star of new productions, opening nights and TV broadcasts opposite Plácido Domingo and Luciano Pavarotti.BRUSSELS — To try to preserve support within her own fractured Conservative Party, Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain said on Tuesday that she would seek to reopen the withdrawal agreement painfully negotiated with the European Union to alter what is known as “the Irish backstop.”
+That may have been a smart tactical move, as a domestic political matter. The problem remains, however, that the European Union has said flatly that it will not reopen the withdrawal agreement or remove the backstop, increasing the possibility of a “no-deal Brexit” on March 29 that would damage the economies of both sides, but particularly Britain’s.
+By trying to pressure the European Union to alter its stance on the backstop, which she negotiated and her cabinet supported, Mrs. May is essentially playing chicken with Brussels, trying to turn her own political vulnerability into a benefit.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+China, the world’s coal juggernaut, has continued to produce more methane emissions from its coal mines despite its pledge to curb the planet-warming pollutant, according to new research.
+In a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers concluded that China had failed to meet its own government regulations requiring coal mines to rapidly reduce methane emissions, at least in the five years after 2010, when the regulations were passed .
+It matters because coal is the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel, and China is, by far, the largest producer in the world.
+Coal accounts for 40 percent of electricity generation globally and an even higher share in China, which has abundant coal resources and more than four million workers employed in the coal sector. Scientists and policymakers agree that the world will have to quit coal to have any hope of averting catastrophic climate change.It’s Getting Very, Very, Very Cold Outside. Read About Someplace Warm.
+Looking for an escape route from the polar vortex? Here are a half-dozen possibilities that are guaranteed to be warmer than minus-14 degrees.
+No coat, boots, gloves or hat necessary. Credit... Damon Winter/The New York TimesIn her new book, “Zaitoun,” Yasmin Khan, a human-rights activist and food writer, explores the significance and history of the olive in the culture of the Palestinians and Jews, especially in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. Ms. Khan will discuss Palestinian home-cooking and the role of food in bridging the cultural divide at the Museum of Food and Drink with Kerry Diamond , a Brooklyn restaurateur and the editor in chief of Cherry Bombe magazine. The talk will be followed by a book-signing and snacks.
+“Zaitoun: A Conversation With Yasmin Khan and Kerry Diamond,” 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., Feb. 6, Museum of Food and Drink, 62 Bayard Street (Lorimer Street), Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 718-387-2845, mofad.org.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.But many gynecologists and women’s rights activists insist that the change would not go nearly far enough — the law should be scrapped, they say, not just altered. They argue that by preserving limits on what doctors can say publicly about their practices, the plan demeans women, by suggesting that they cannot be trusted to make informed decisions about their own bodies.
+“I am a doctor and I consider it my responsibility as a doctor to treat and inform women,” Dr. Kristina Hänel, a gynecologist who practices in Giessen, said in a speech she read out at one of several protests held over the weekend. “I consider it a question of conscience not to withhold such necessary assistance from women, leaving them instead to the coat-hanger or knitting needle.”
+Abortion is legal in Germany during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. But under the current law, passed in 1933, it is a crime for doctors to publicly advertise in any way that they perform abortions; health care providers can only discuss the subject directly with their patients.
+So while a woman can terminate a pregnancy, finding out where to go, or which procedures are offered by which providers, is a serious challenge.
+Among its neighbors in Western Europe, Germany is alone in imposing such a restriction.
+In 2017, Dr. Hänel was convicted of breaking the law and fined 6,000 euros, or about $6,850, by a court in Giessen, for stating on her website that she provided abortions and would send information on them, in German, English or Turkish, to anyone requesting it.JERUSALEM — The government of the Palestinian Authority tendered its resignation on Tuesday, a move that reflected rising public discontent and the failure of efforts to reunite the West Bank, where the authority is based, and the Gaza Strip, controlled by the militant Islamist group Hamas.
+The departing prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, a former university president, has led what was a largely technocratic administration, mostly made up of lawyers, business figures and academics who were technically politically independent but had the approval of both Fatah, the mainstream party that is the dominant force in the West Bank, and Hamas.
+But the reconciliation project it was designed to embody has made little progress, and its promotion of a contentious social security law prompted widespread street demonstrations.
+The cabinet’s resignation still has to be accepted by the authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, and cabinet officials said it would continue to function until a new government was formed.Jussie Smollett, one of the stars of the Fox television show “Empire,” was attacked in Chicago early Tuesday morning by two people who yelled racial and homophobic slurs and wrapped a rope around his neck, according to the police, who said they were investigating the incident as “a possible hate crime.”
+Smollett, who is black and publicly came out as gay in 2015, was walking on a downtown street when two people approached him and yelled the slurs, according to a statement from the Chicago Police Department. The attackers then began hitting Smollett in the face and poured an “unknown chemical substance” on him.
+One of the attackers also wrapped a rope around Smollett’s neck before the duo fled.
+“Given the severity of the allegations, we are taking this investigation very seriously and treating it as a possible hate crime,” the police statement said.
+The Chicago Sun-Times, citing a police spokesman, said that Smollett went to an apartment after the attack, and his manager called the police. When officers arrived, a “thin, light rope” was still around Smollett’s neck, said the spokesman.The partners in Beer Run — a compact, well-stocked new source for beer-buying and drinking — have a natural feel for the business. John Hyun was an assistant brewer at Peekskill Brewery upstate and knows his craft beers. So does his partner, Larry Good, who owns two restaurants with beer-drinking audiences, Toast and The Heights near Columbia University. Enter their narrow Chelsea store, and you’ll find bottled beers on shelves, though most of the inventory is in cans refrigerated and grouped according to style, like I.P.A., saison, wheat and so forth. Ciders, too. In the rear of the store is a bar where a dozen beers, often local and changing daily, are dispensed on tap. A few wines are also poured.
+Beer Run, 203 West 19th Street (Seventh Avenue), 212-749-7500, beerrun.nyc.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.During the Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project enlisted writers across the country to document American themes. In New York, there was a prolific output, which included works on architecture and a guidebook. “Feeding the City,” about the food of New York, was supposed to be a book, but was never published. Manuscripts and photographs from the project are on display through March in the Surrogate’s Court building.
+“Feeding the City: The Unpublished W.P.A. Federal Writers’ Project Manuscript, 1935-1942,” NYC Municipal Archives, 31 Chambers Street (Centre Street), 212-639-9675, archives.nyc.
+Follow NYT Food on Twitter and NYT Cooking on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.Until Prohibition, the Gundlach Bundschu wine company was known for its brandy and vermouth as much as for its table wines, made in Sonoma County, Calif., since 1858. These days, wine production dominates at the family-owned estate, but, with cocktails and aperitifs so popular, it is bringing back its martini-friendly white vermouth. It’s made from gewürztraminer grapes, the first varietal planted at the estate. Delicate and pale straw in color, the vermouth is at once floral and lightly fruited. Try it before dinner, on the rocks with a twist.
+Gundlach Bundschu Dry Vermouth, $55 from gunbun.com.The gunman at Mr. DeRogatis’s home was never identified and no threatening behavior has ever been tied to Mr. Kelly directly. But the worries of Mr. DeRogatis and Ms. Hampton are a reminder of the high stakes that have surrounded the journalistic pursuit of Mr. Kelly since the accusations against him first emerged.
+[Meet the prosecutor asking R. Kelly’s accusers to come forward.]
+After “Surviving R. Kelly” aired, one of the singer’s managers, Henry James Mason, was arrested in Georgia for “terroristic threats” against one of the families featured in the film. (Mr. Kelly, who was acquitted in 2008 of 14 counts of child pornography, has repeatedly denied having sex with minors or holding women against their will.)
+For Mr. DeRogatis, the trail began in 2000, when an anonymous fax led him to a number of scoops for The Chicago Sun-Times — including the existence of a videotape that was said to show Mr. Kelly having sex with a 14-year-old girl. It has continued into the social-media era, with a series of investigative articles published by BuzzFeed News in 2017 that rekindled outrage and led to the Lifetime series.
+Mr. DeRogatis veers from expletive-laden indignation to choked-back tears when describing the effects of Mr. Kelly’s alleged behavior with what he estimates to be at least 48 women. But he has a special frustration with the rest of the news media, which, he says, failed to follow The Sun-Times’s investigative lead, and for years made light of the charges or ignored them altogether.
+“Where was everybody else?” Mr. DeRogatis shouted in an interview last week, his voice bouncing off the tile walls of his home. “I wanted everybody in the world to write about this” and stop Mr. Kelly, he added.Alas, Michael Bloomberg. You aren’t the man I thought you were.
+On Tuesday, asked about Elizabeth Warren’s (very smart) proposal for a wealth tax, he responded with the favorite right-wing calumny of the moment – suggesting that her plan would turn us into Venezuela.
+That’s a shameful line of argument. In fact, whenever you see someone invoking Venezuela as a reason not to consider progressive policy ideas, you know right away that the person in question is uninformed, dishonest, or both. It basically shows that the speaker or writer isn’t willing to engage in serious discussion, preferring to scare people with a boogeyman of which he or she knows nothing.
+What, after all, do we learn from the Venezuelan experience? Yes, the country is a mess. Venezuela has always been a one-industry economy, with huge inequality. Hugo Chavez got into power because of rage against the nation’s elite, but used the power badly. He seized the oil sector, which you only do if you can run it honestly and efficiently; instead, he turned it over to corrupt cronies, who degraded its performance. Then, when oil prices fell, his successor tried to cover the income gap by printing money. Hence the crisis.
+It’s a bad story, and not without precedent: “Macroeconomic populism” has a long history in Latin America, and usually comes to grief.I keep a small rimmed sheet pan — nonwarping — in my oven, not for want of storage elsewhere, but because I frequently use it and like to have it ready. A new heavy-duty aluminum pan from Chicago Metallic has wire-wrapped rims to resist warping and textured surfaces to aid in food release. The sheet pans come in three sizes, 9-by-13 inches, 10-by-15 and 8-by-13, $11.99 to $16.99. The line also includes loaf, cake, pie and pizza pans.
+Chicago Metallic textured aluminum sheet pans, amazon.com.California’s Largest Utility Says It Is Bankrupt. Here’s What You Need to Know.
+Pacific Gas and Electric has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The state’s wildfires are at the heart of its insolvency.
+Pacific Gas and Electric, which is facing billions of dollars in liability claims from two years of wildfires, sees bankruptcy protection as its only viable option. Credit... Talia Herman for The New York TimesBefore the catastrophic Camp Fire destroyed Paradise, Calif., the Pacific Gas and Electric Company was worth more than $25 billion. Now its C.E.O. has stepped down and the company, which provides natural gas and electricity to 16 million people in California, has filed for bankruptcy as it confronts billions of dollars in potential liability claims following recent wildfires. It is perhaps not the first bankruptcy in which the changing climate played a role, but it is almost certainly the largest. And no doubt, it won’t be the last.
+Of course, it’s not easy to attribute any particular event to climate change, and it will take time to sort out all of the causes of the Camp Fire last November, add up the damages and assess liability. Last week, in a small bit of good news for the company, the state concluded that PG&E was not responsible for the 2017 Tubbs Fire in Sonoma County that burned nearly 37,000 acres, destroyed more than 5,600 buildings and left 22 dead. But the company says it still faces “extensive litigation, significant potential liabilities and a deteriorating financial situation” following the “devastating and unprecedented wildfires of 2017 and 2018.”
+Many fires in recent years have been caused by downed power lines. And even though the company took wildfires seriously and had a broad plan to protect equipment and trim branches — pruning or removing as many as 1.4 million trees a year — it wasn’t enough. The fires pushed the company over the edge.
+One message of the bankruptcy is that climate change is already creating calamitous conditions. As PG&E put it recently, “California faces an ever-increasing threat from catastrophic wildfires, extreme weather and higher temperatures.” In a statement, the company noted that the state’s most recent climate assessment “found the average area burned statewide would increase 77 percent if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise” and that “prolonged drought and higher temperatures will triple the frequency of wildfires.”What’s next for Huawei?
+U.S. officials are poised to formally request that Canada extradite Meng Wanzhou a day after the Justice Department laid out its case against her and Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company she helps lead. Ms. Meng was arrested nearly two months ago at the behest of the U.S. and is under house arrest in Vancouver.
+Huawei denied the charges, and China’s Foreign Ministry called for the release of Ms. Meng.
+But the developments could further damage relations between the U.S. and China, leaving Huawei — and Beijing — with very few options for responding or retaliating.
+The allegations: The indictments say Ms. Meng and Huawei defrauded four large banks — possibly including HSBC — into clearing transactions with Iran in violation of international sanctions. Prosecutors also claim that the company destroyed evidence, moved potential witnesses back to China and tried to steal a T-Mobile robot named Tappy that is used to test smartphones.Headliner
+The Ribbon Midtown
+Back in 2015, when they opened their first outpost of the Ribbon, on West 72nd Street, Bruce and Eric Bromberg said their menu was designed to be replicated in other locations. Now they’re finally testing it out. Except for a larger selection of seafood platters and a fried chicken that’s served daily instead of weekly, the 300-seat version of the Ribbon in Times Square, in the multilevel sprawl that once housed Guy Fieri’s restaurant, Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, has virtually the same menu. “The restaurant is really the same, even though there’s a different audience,” Bruce Bromberg said. “From the first Blue Ribbon in SoHo in 1992, our menus have had wide-ranging appeal.” Soups, smoked salmon, salads, burgers, a French dip, spit-roasted meats, pastas, steaks and prime ribs are served. There’s theatrical lighting throughout, from the ground-floor Marquee Bar, specializing in whiskeys , to the dining room, a space called the Oyster Bar , and other dining areas that can be used for à la carte dining or private parties. The décor is vintage New York, drawing largely from the 1920s to the ’40s, with old photographs, subtle references to The New York Times (which once occupied the building) and books from that era that are used to present the dinner check. (Opens Wednesday)
+220 West 44th Street, 212-944-2474, 44.theribbonnyc.com.
+Opening
+Avena Downtown
+You can mourn, but you can’t replace, Silvano Marchetto and his celebrity magnet, Da Silvano in Greenwich Village. The space has been taken over by Roberto Deiaco, who owns Avena, on East 57th Street, with his wife, Giselle Deiaco, and who was the well-regarded chef at Armani Ristorante and East 12th Osteria. Though his downtown menu is somewhat briefer, the elegance that defines his food is on full display, even in a hearty osso buco. Seafood crudo, beef carpaccio, seared sea scallops, baby artichoke salad, short homemade scialatelli pasta with seafood, vegetable lasagnetta, chicken Milanese and grilled lobster are among the dishes.
+260 Avenue of the Americas (Bleecker Street), 212-505-9252, avenadowntown.com .
+Dell’anima
+This West Village neighborhood spot, which closed in December, has reopened as a 22-seat kitchen counter in the Gotham West Market food hall. It replaces El Colmado, serving Spanish fare, and will offer a concise Italian menu that goes from north (Piedmontese tajarin alla carbonara) to south (spaghetti all’Arrabbiata with Calabrian chiles) with stops along the way (chicken diavolo panini, pork shoulder panini with pickled peppers). The food is sold to eat in or take away.
+Gotham West Market, 600 11th Avenue (44th Street), 212-366-6633, dellanima.com.One of Rusal’s major shareholders, SUAL Partners Limited, was founded by Mr. Blavatnik and the Russian oligarch Viktor Vekselberg. Mr. Blavatnik, a dual American-British citizen who was born in Soviet-era Ukraine, has not had sanctions placed on him. But Mr. Vekselberg, like Mr. Deripaska, came under sanctions from the Treasury Department last year and also has drawn the interest of the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.
+The administration’s decision to delay and ultimately lift the sanctions on Mr. Deripaska’s companies sparked outrage on the part of Democrats and Russia hawks while also leading to a surge in the stock price of Rusal.
+The document outlining the terms of the deal to lift the sanctions showed that SUAL will own 22.5 percent of Rusal after the restructuring of Mr. Deripaska’s holdings. The rise in Rusal’s stock price has increased the value of SUAL Partners’ holding in the company by about $800 million relative to the value last year shortly after the sanctions were announced.
+In a separate letter to Mr. Mnuchin on Monday, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, expressed concern about the influence that could be exerted on Rusal under the Treasury deal by SUAL and a Russian bank under sanctions, VTB, as well as by Mr. Deripaska, his family and entities connected to them.
+On Tuesday, the Democrats who lead the House Ways and Means, Foreign Affairs, Intelligence and Financial Services Committees said in a statement that they were “considering additional legislative actions to ensure that Treasury and these companies comply with the agreement in letter and in spirit, and to prevent something like this from happening again in the future.”
+And in a letter sent to Mr. Mnuchin last week, Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, who sits on the House Intelligence Committee, asked if the secretary had “ever influenced deliberations on sanctions applications when they involved an entity in which you had a financial interest or with which you had a relationship.”
+While Mr. Blavatnik had given mostly to Democrats through the end of 2014, his giving has escalated drastically and shifted sharply right since then. He did not donate to Mr. Trump’s campaign or the “super PACs” that supported it, but family members gave $243,000 to the Republican National Committee during the campaign. And two of Mr. Blavatnik’s companies, including his main United States-based company, Access Industries, donated $2.5 million to the super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidates in 2016, plus another $1 million in 2017, according to Federal Election Commission records.The Treasury’s move came after the Justice Department had indicted two other Iranians on charges of having used ‘‘Samsam’’ ransomware in a sophisticated scheme of attacks on American hospitals, government agencies and the city of Atlanta. The two men, Faramarz Shahi Savandi and Mohammad Mehdi Shah Mansouri, are now wanted by the F.B.I. and are thought to be hiding in Iran.
+During the attack on Atlanta, one of the most serious cyberattacks against a major American city, the pair broke into its computer systems and held the data hostage, eventually ransoming it for about $51,000 worth of Bitcoin. They made around $6 million in Bitcoin from the attacks, prosecutors said.
+When the hackers wanted to exchange their Bitcoin for Iranian rials they contacted two local traders through WhatsApp. The traders, Ali Khorashadizadeh, 29, and Mohammad Ghorbaniyan, 31, exchanged some into rials.
+When on Nov. 28 a friend told Mr. Ghorbaniyan his name was in the news, he thought it was a mistake. He discovered that the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control had placed him and Mr. Khorashadizadeh under sanctions, as well as the Bitcoin addresses they had used. Those addresses had been linked to their websites, making their names traceable.
+“Please let it be known that, like every trader or bank, I have no knowledge how my clients get their money,” Mr. Ghorbaniyan said. “I just trade. I’m not a hacker. I have nothing to do with those guys.”
+By the next week, however, Mr. Ghorbaniyan was back in business, using a new — this time anonymous — Bitcoin address he created in five minutes. “Perhaps my name remains sanctioned, but we don’t use names online,” he said.
+Mr. Ghorbaniyan said his only mistake had been making his Bitcoin address public. “Basically, Treasury just Googled me,” he said. “I’m not making the same mistake again.”To the Editor:
+Re “Another Giant May Soon Scrape the Midtown Sky” (news article, Jan. 19):
+I don’t live in New York anymore, but I love New York City — its energy, its vibrancy and diversity.
+But I am not impressed with tall and taller buildings. Beauty is the river, the parks, the brownstones. Those glass sticks in the air are impressive but cold and unimaginative.
+I’d much rather that someone (a city/state/private/federal collaboration) return Penn Station to the beauty and elegance it once had. Since I visit often by train, the first thing I see of Manhattan is this eyesore — a rundown, ugly, uncomfortable domain of plastic, dirt and escalators.
+Can’t we combine utility and beauty for all as opposed to the ho-hum oversize glass towers that are a homage to nothing but glitz?To the Editor:
+Re “How to Inoculate Against Anti-Vaxxers” (editorial, Jan. 20):
+We agree: We need a coordinated strategy to strengthen parents’ confidence in the lifesaving power of immunizations. As pediatricians, we know firsthand the devastating toll of diseases like measles, pertussis and pneumonia. Pediatricians with long careers behind them have seen children suffer or die from diseases that are now preventable by a vaccine.
+Parents used to fear these diseases, too. Now, thanks to dangerous misinformation, some parents fear the vaccines more. This is happening both in the United States and in other countries.
+Doctors spend a significant portion of their days counseling families about why immunizations are safe, effective and important to keep their child healthy. This is not enough. It’s time for organizations to come together on an international strategy to increase these efforts beyond the clinic walls.
+The United States and many other countries are fortunate to have vaccines to protect our most vulnerable children and adults, but that protection is not ironclad; it depends on the continued and widespread use of vaccines.To the Editor:
+Re “When to Start With a Gynecologist” (You Asked column, nytimes.com, Jan. 10):
+Dr. Jen Gunter suggests that women should see a gynecologist for their first cervical cancer screening exam at 21. But most family physicians and family nurse-practitioners are also entirely comfortable performing this examination.
+When a young woman has been receiving all her routine health care from a primary care clinician for many years, they have usually established a high level of comfort and trust and have had ample opportunity not only to discuss sexual activity, sexually transmitted infections, contraception and other common gynecological concerns, but also to prepare for a first speculum examination.
+Often this clinician will continue to provide a woman’s periodic cancer screening and other primary health care into her adult years, and there is no need for a “get to know you visit” — or any other visit — with a new and unfamiliar physician.
+Bruce Soloway
+New Rochelle, N.Y.
+The writer is a family physician.To the Editor:
+Re “After Trump, It’s — Oh, No!” (column, Jan. 19):
+As a Hoosier, I found Gail Collins’s description of Mike Pence spot on. As the parent of a gay adult, I say yes, it could be even worse under a Pence administration, because Mr. Pence has more focus than Donald Trump and the Koch money to back him up.
+One fact not mentioned in Ms. Collins’s summary of Mr. Pence’s career is that he signed an anti-abortion bill in Indiana requiring, among other things, that miscarried fetuses be cremated or buried, thus inserting the state into an event that is already painful for families. The bill was blocked by a federal court, but it’s just another example of what Ms. Collins describes as “the world of the old order ,” where women and gay people have fewer rights.
+Since Mr. Pence has stood by while Donald Trump has broken laws, violated ethics rules and damaged America’s standing in the world, I personally would vote to impeach them together.
+Susan Eleuterio
+Highland, Ind.
+The writer is a former board member of Planned Parenthood of Indiana/Kentucky.The surveillance footage is remarkable in its banality. It shows Stephen Paddock, the Las Vegas gunman, in the days before his mass shooting. He cuts a lonesome figure as he moves through the Mandalay Bay hotel — playing video poker for hours in the casino; buying snacks at a newsstand; watching a LeBron James interview in a restaurant; and at times, chatting with hotel staff. But this picture of an ordinary gambler disguises a far more sinister intent. Through this previously unseen footage, we’ll show how Paddock methodically planned his attack, and how, over seven days, hotel staff unwittingly helped him to move bag after bag of weapons to his room. The videos, obtained exclusively by The New York Times from MGM Resorts, begin on Monday, Sept. 25. At the V.I.P. counter, he checks into a suite on the 32nd floor, and books an adjoining room, which he will check into four days later. He doesn’t immediately bring in suitcases. Instead, he spends two hours in the hotel, going to his room and eating at a sushi restaurant downstairs. Just before 5 p.m., he drives his Chrysler Pacifica minivan to the valet area, where a bellman loads the luggage cart with five suitcases. Paddock asks to stay with his luggage, so the bellman brings him through the service elevators to his room — something hotel management says is not unusual. Paddock spends the next four hours in his room, and at 9:40 that night, he leaves the hotel, bringing two suitcases with him. He drives one hour to Mesquite, where he lived. Cellphone records show that he stays the night and spends most of Tuesday here. Around 8 p.m., Paddock returns to Las Vegas, but he stops at the Ogden, a downtown condominium complex. This is interesting for a few reasons. Paddock was also renting rooms here for the entire week. He checked in the previous Friday, when a music event called the Life Is Beautiful festival was being held in the surrounding streets. Internet records recovered by the police show that he searched for that festival’s lineup and its expected attendance. This was similar to his research of the Mandalay and the Route 91 Harvest Festival, which he would later attack. So, the Ogden and the Life is Beautiful festival could have been used for planning, or may even have been a target. Later Tuesday night, Paddock returns to the Mandalay and a different bellman helps him to move seven more suitcases to his suite. Again, he uses the service elevator. He tips the bellman, who had no way of knowing these cases were packed with guns and ammunition. He gambles for eight hours until morning. Paddock was a regular at the Mandalay, and several casino hosts knew him. The videos show their interactions as being completely normal and in no way alarming. Remember, in two days, Paddock has brought 12 cases upstairs. He spends most of Wednesday in his room, and that evening repeats a similar pattern. He leaves the Mandalay, again carrying two suitcases. He stops at the Ogden and drives home to Mesquite. On Thursday, he buys a .308 bolt-action rifle from a gun store and visits a nearby gun range before driving back to the Mandalay. That night, he again uses the valet service and a bellman to carry a white container and three suitcases to his room. His arsenal of weapons is growing. Again, he gambles through the night. It’s now Friday, and at 8 p.m., the Route 91 Harvest Festival will open in the fairgrounds across from the Mandalay. Paddock stays in his room until around 3 p.m. and uses his laptop while the suite is cleaned. He checks into the adjoining room, 134, using the name of his girlfriend, Marilou Danley. He also tells cleaning staff to leave behind the food-service cart. Two days later, Paddock would use this, and one other service cart, to create a surveillance ring during his attack. Overnight, he makes a brief trip to Mesquite. Arriving back at the Mandalay at 6 a.m. with two more suitcases. Soon after noon on Saturday, he places do not disturb signs on both room doors. He declines housekeeping. He takes an elevator to the valet area and sits, waiting for his car. He carries two more bags to his room. He gambles some more, and that night he makes a final trip to Mesquite, returning to the Mandalay at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. He gambles through the night in the high-limits slots area, and returns to his room at 7:37 a.m. It’s 12:16 p.m. when we see Paddock going back to the parking garage. The guests exiting the elevator have no idea that in 10 hours, this unremarkable figure would commit the worst mass shooting in modern American history. He returns from his car, bringing two suitcases and a smaller bag inside. Since Monday, he has brought at least 21 cases, two smaller bags, a laptop bag and a container to his room. This is the last time we see Paddock, arriving at the 32nd floor. Through the day, he opens, closes and locks both rooms repeatedly. At thirty-six minutes after 9, he locks the deadbolt to room 135 for the last time. Four minutes later, Jason Aldean, who’s headlining the Route 91 festival, begins his act. Paddock then turns the deadbolt to room 134. At 10:05, his shooting rampage begins. In under 10 minutes, he would kill 58 people and injure over 700, before taking his own life. He had amassed 23 guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition. Almost six months since the attack, Paddock’s motive remains unknown.The internet’s business model is tailored advertising. Internet firms hoover up information about what you do and say on the web, in apps and even in physical locations. They then sell advertisers the ability to figure out whether you’re valuable enough for them to want to reach you, and if you are, how they should try to persuade you.
+In a recent Wall Street Journal commentary, Mark Zuckerberg claimed that Facebook users want to see ads tailored to their interests. But the data show the opposite is true. With the help of major polling firms, we conducted two large national telephone surveys of Americans in 2012 and 2009. When we asked people whether they wanted websites they visit to show them commercial ads, news or political ads “tailored to your interests,” a substantial majority said no. Around half did say they wanted discounts tailored to their interests. But that too changed after we told them how companies gathered the information that enables tailoring, such as following you on a website. Bottom line: If Facebook’s users in the United States are similar to most Americans (and studies suggest they are), large majorities don’t want personalized ads — and when they learn how companies find out information about them, even greater percentages don’t want them.
+To Mr. Zuckerberg, protecting ad personalization from privacy rules is key. His essay argues that regulatory intervention would take away a “free” goody from the public. Facebook makes virtually all its revenues from advertising, and it has created enormous amounts of data about the people who use Facebook and the larger internet. In his essay, Mr. Zuckerberg defends Facebook from a chorus of critics who rail against a business model that they argue uses and abuses people’s information under the guise of transparency, choice and control. Mr. Zuckerberg therefore has an interest in arguing that he and his colleagues well understand what his audience wants. “People consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant,” he writes. “That means we need to understand their interests.”
+But consider how deeply the specifics of what we found contradict Mr. Zuckerberg’s case. In one of our surveys, we asked 1,503 Americans four different questions: whether or not they wanted “the websites you visit” to show them (1) tailored ads for products and services, (2) tailored discounts, (3) tailored news and (4) tailored political ads. If a respondent answered yes to any of the above questions, we went deeper, asking whether the tailoring to their interests would be acceptable if based on the user’s behavior on the website the user was visiting, on the user’s browsing on other websites and on offline activities, such as store shopping or magazine subscriptions.“Love Is My Husband Rubbing My Mother’s Feet”
+The most grueling, rewarding and loving act you can perform is to help keep someone alive. When I found the love of my life, he immediately signed up for this journey. We knew we would do everything we could to care for my mother and, eventually, we would watch her die. For us, love isn’t chocolates and date nights and expensive trips. Love is my husband rubbing my mother’s feet after her bath, making her laugh as he pretends she is kicking him in the stomach, helping her take her medicine and holding me after she was gone. — Jessica McLeanThe writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988, at the age of 46 — young, brilliant and, for the most part, unknown.
+It was a tragic if not entirely unusual fate. What was striking was how instantly her work was embraced after it was rediscovered — like a missing piece somehow anticipated and long yearned for.
+In 2015, her film “Losing Ground,” which had shown at festivals in 1982, had an official wider release and was heralded as a pillar of American independent cinema. The next year, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” a collection of her short stories, written in the 1960s, lampooning racism as well as racial pieties of all kinds, was published for the first time, to much praise. Now a new book has arrived, “Notes From a Black Woman’s Diary,” a grab bag of letters, diary entries, short stories, plays and screenplays (including “Losing Ground”).
+Let me get my grousing out of the way. The revival has been slightly shoddy. Some of the stories and plays are drafts, at best. The collections contain little in the way of biographical information — no context for when particular pieces were produced or reasons for their inclusion. These omissions prove especially frustrating in the case of the new book. In interviews, Collins’s daughter (and editor), Nina Lorez Collins, has described coming across packets of her mother’s correspondence — “I could practically trace the arc of her development as a woman, as an artist, as a mother” — as well as a diary of her final year, as she succumbed to breast cancer. Why serve us such slender portions? We see only smatterings of the writing she alludes to and none of the truly interesting letters. Without any explanation, the selection feels desultory, designed to show off the artist’s range, rather than her strengths.Cash bribes were called “monopoly money,” and handed out to high-ranking members of South Africa’s governing party on monthly retainers. When that payoff wasn’t enough, $22,000 was stuffed into a Louis Vuitton handbag and delivered to a close ally of the president at the time.
+That sent the recipient “over the moon,” according to Angelo Agrizzi, a businessman — and now whistle-blower — who detailed, at a continuing government inquiry into public corruption, extravagant bribes doled out to members of the party, the African National Congress, at the highest levels of government.
+A current government minister, he testified, liked receiving an annual Christmas basket that included “four cases of high-quality whiskey, 40 cases of beer, eight lambs — cut up, obviously.” Her daughter was partial to high-end convertibles, Audi A3 Cabriolets, but kept crashing the cars given to her.
+“So I actually called her in one day and sat her down and said, ‘Can I arrange for driver training, special driver training for you,’ because it was getting embarrassing,” Mr. Agrizzi said.CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — The polar vortex is bringing dangerously low temperatures to a wide swath of the Midwest, forcing schools and universities to close and leading the governors of Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin to declare emergencies.
+Here are some of the salient facts about this brutal cold front.
+The Midwest will be colder on Wednesday than parts of Antarctica and Alaska.
+The high on Wednesday in Des Moines will be a bitter minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit. Wednesday’s high at McMurdo Station in Antarctica will be a comparatively mild 17 degrees, according to weather.com. Fairbanks, Alaska, will also be warmer during the day on Wednesday than Des Moines, with a high of 4 degrees.
+[Read cold weather tips from Chicagoans.]
+More than 50 million people will be affected
+A large expanse of states, from the Dakotas to western Pennsylvania, are under wind chill warnings or advisories from the National Weather Service.
+[Read more about how it’s possible that such a cold snap can occur during a period of climate change.]To the Editor:
+Re “U.S. Pummels Reeling Venezuela With Sanctions” (front page, Jan. 29):
+Congratulations to President Trump and his administration. The president has made one of the first, if not the first, positive diplomatic moves of his tenure. He has joined a number of other countries in denouncing Nicolás Maduro’s claim to be the legitimate leader of Venezuela and recognizing Juan Guaidó as the opposition leader and potential president of the country.
+Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s announcement on Monday that the United States had imposed sanctions against the state-owned oil company brings additional pressure against Mr. Maduro and his beleaguered government.
+Moral and perhaps financial support of the opposition is essential. Physical intervention on the part of the United States and the other governments must, however, be avoided. Intervention would only increase Russia’s influence not only in Venezuela but also throughout the region. It would give the Russians an opportunity to claim plans for regional domination by the United States and the other nations recognizing Mr. Guaidó’s legitimacy.
+Franklin T. Burroughs
+Walnut Creek, Calif.
+To the Editor:
+Re “Between Mr. Maduro and a Hard Place” (editorial, Jan. 25):
+No, the Trump administration is not “right to support Mr. Guaid ó.” Regardless of the economic hardship caused by mismanagement by President Nicolás Maduro, falling oil prices and U.S. sanctions, American support of last week’s coup attempt violates both national sovereignty and international law.My career has been propelled by mentors and managers who spotted glints of potential in me when I was toiling away on the bottom rungs of the journalistic ladder. They reached out with opportunities, helping me take each step up. And they were mostly men. Of course, newsrooms, like so many industries, are old boys’ clubs in flux — meaning men still mostly run the show, but that’s slowly changing.
+But what if these men hadn’t put their weight behind me because they felt it was risky to mentor a woman? It’s a question I couldn’t shake as I read a dispatch from Davos, Switzerland, by my colleague Katrin Bennhold about an unintended consequence of #MeToo: Companies minimizing contact between female employees and male executives, effectively putting women at a disadvantage.
+As Pat Milligan, who advises multinational companies on gender and diversity issues, told Ms. Bennhold: “If we allow this to happen, it will set us back decades. Women have to be sponsored by leaders, and leaders are still mostly men.”
+[Sign up here to get this column, In Her Words, delivered as a newsletter to your inbox.]
+The article raised plenty of questions, many of which were voiced on social media: Are women now expected to cater to the fears of men who are their superiors — fears that women would ultimately pay the price for? If these men are not doing anything wrong, what are they worried about? Were powerful men really clamoring to help that many women before #MeToo? Is this behavior actually becoming commonplace, or is it simply a narrow outlier expressed by a privileged few?
+Vice President Mike Pence has said that he never dines alone with a woman other than his wife, a maxim that has become widely known as the Pence Rule. As Jia Tolentino put it in The New Yorker: “No successful woman could ever abide by the same rule.”WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is poised to send at least 2,000 more active-duty troops to the southwestern border, Defense Department officials said Tuesday, deployments that have already cost the military hundreds of millions of dollars and thrust the department into the center of the debate over border security and President Trump’s proposed wall.
+The acting defense secretary, Patrick Shanahan, told reporters that the United States would be sending “several thousand” additional troops to provide more support for the Department of Homeland Security’s border patrol efforts. Defense Department officials later said that they expect that number to be around 2,000.
+That would come on top of the 2,400 troops who are there now, bringing the deployed number at the border close to the high of 5,900 that it reached in the weeks surrounding the midterm elections in November.
+The deployment of several thousand military troops to secure the southwestern border will total more than $600 million by the end of the fiscal year in September, Pentagon officials also told the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.The real estate developer behind those buildings, Jerry Wolkoff, pointed out that the construction has been going on for a while. “Whatever I have there to my knowledge has been there for the last two years,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday.
+Mr. Wolkoff says that the structure visible in pictures taken at the installation — a hoist used to move building materials — will be taken down by May.
+The pictures are believed to have been reported on first by Gothamist.
+The condos were already the subject of consternation from artists: They’re being built on top of what was previously the building known as 5Pointz, a warehouse once prized as a haven for legal graffiti. Last year, 5Pointz was the subject of a lawsuit when Mr. Wolkoff, who owned the building, was fined $6.7 million for painting over the works of 21 graffiti artists in 2013. The building was demolished in 2014 to make way for the apartment buildings.
+It’s not the first time a high-rise development has led to the closure of Mr. Turrell’s work. The artist previously asked the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas to shutter another, similar installation, “Tending, (Blue),” because a luxury condo tower had intruded on the view.
+Ms. Kurzius said that “Meeting” will remain inaccessible to the public until the view is no longer obstructed, adding that the construction was “only visible from a part of the installation.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The most common methods the drug lord Joaquín Guzmán Loera used to avoid imprisonment in Mexico were to escape (which he did twice) or to not get caught in the first place.
+But now that the kingpin, known as El Chapo, is standing trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, his lawyers have been forced to mount an actual defense. On Tuesday, as many had suspected, it emerged they did not offer one.
+Mr. Guzmán’s case to the jury began at 9:38 a.m. when one of his lawyers, Jeffrey Lichtman, called to the stand an F.B.I. agent who explained his own small role in obtaining a piece of evidence that did not relate to the defendant. Mr. Lichtman also read aloud a stipulation, noting that for several years, his client was in debt.
+Mr. Lichtman finished his presentation at 10:08 a.m. “And with that, Judge,” he said, “the defense rests.”After narcotics officers knocked down the door of a Houston home, the first one to enter was greeted by a charging dog and gunfire from a man wielding a .357 Magnum revolver, the authorities said on Tuesday.
+Nine undercover officers executed a search warrant on the home just before 5 p.m. on Monday; four were shot and one other officer was injured. The two people in the home, a 59-year-old man and a 58-year-old woman, were killed in the shootout, Chief Art Acevedo of the Houston Police Department said at a news conference on Tuesday morning.
+A Houston police official said Tuesday evening that the two most seriously wounded officers were expected to survive. They were in serious but stable condition.
+A third officer, who was shot in the shoulder, had been released from the hospital on Monday night, and another who was shot in the face was released Tuesday. A fifth officer, who was not shot but underwent knee surgery, was hospitalized in good condition, the police said.In his teens and after he made creditable sketches and watercolors of New York, mostly in a style aligned with Ashcan School realism. You’ll find here several jagged youthful self-portraits, sketches of faceless figures by a subway entrance, and a gouache from around 1940 that depicts a Manhattan street corner as a shadowy stage, ringed by billboards and spotlighted with electric lamps.
+Robbins turned to dance in his 20s — he was the resident choreographer at Camp Tamiment in the Poconos — and met George Balanchine while performing in Broadway musical revues like “Keep Off the Grass” (1939). He then joined the fledgling Ballet Theater (now American Ballet Theater), where he spurned the western Americana of choreographers like Agnes de Mille and Eugene Loring. What he wanted was a dance rooted in city life.
+“Ballet — à la Living Newspaper on the History of N.Y.,” he wrote the day after Christmas in 1940, sketching out a new project. “Fast — entertaining. American in scope and view.” (The draft board exempted him for wartime service. His rejection notice, here, cites his “inadequate personality,” presumably a code for homosexuality; Robbins had romances with men and women throughout his life.)
+That urban aim would come to fruition in “Fancy Free” (1944), in which three sailors on shore leave — including Robbins as the third, swaggering soloist — engage in a dance-off to woo New York’s street-smart single ladies. Robbins made sketches of jumping and prancing seamen, drawing perhaps from the sexed-up paintings of Paul Cadmus, and plotted out scenes with Leonard Bernstein, author of the ballet’s syncopated score. It was a wartime hit, and the inspiration for “On the Town” (1944), a Broadway musical also choreographed by Robbins, with a rare multiracial cast — essential, he said, if the work were to look like the city.“My freshman year at a Catholic college, I became suicidally depressed and I can say with complete confidence that if I didn’t go to that school, I would be dead. I felt like I mattered there. When you struggle with your mental health like I do, it can be hard to connect with a faith community. We’re just supposed to ‘pray harder’ and ‘sin less,’ according to religious people who clearly don’t know Jesus. The community at my college, however, never held that viewpoint and I was always welcome to be completely honest and transparent. I was never judged for my pain. My experiences helped my faith flourish.”
+— Mae L’Heureux, 26, Augusta, Me.
+“I was elected class chaplain nearly every year and when I wasn’t working with the theater department, I was actively involved in prayer meetings and Bible studies. However, there was a part of my life I felt I had to bury to survive. After finding out I was gay, my parents sent me to a school-endorsed spiritual retreat called ‘The Encounter.’ The final session was a mass exorcism that lasted for two and a half hours. Other students and I were forced to sit down while a man read his list of spirits and demons, which included homosexuality. If I didn’t find a way to be rid of it, I couldn’t live at home. Back at school, my facade said, ‘cured’ but there were teachers who saw my depths and loved me for it. They’re how I survived.”
+— Sebastian Summers, 22, Chicago
+Readers told us about lasting pain and confusion
+“Sex as a theme was very pervasive there. I took a vow of purity when I was 11. I was sexually abused starting at age 4, so by the time I put on that promise ring, in my mind I was already lying because I was already corrupted. My biology teacher taught us that sex creates an unbreakable soul bond through the exchange of blood and fluids. The idea is, if I slept with someone and then married someone else I wouldn’t be coming into that marriage as a whole person. Coming from a home where there was sexual abuse, learning that was heartbreaking and it took me years to undo that damage.”
+— Melissa Stewart, 28, Pioneer Valley, Mass.
+“My Christian school had ‘Slave Day.’ One day a year, each member of the junior class was auctioned off to other students to be owned for a day. The auctioneer — a teacher — sometimes held a whip. Students stood on a box while being auctioned. It was a fund-raiser for our prom — real money was exchanged. Sometimes, the auction took place in the sanctuary. In 2001, it was changed — in name only — to Servant Day. I do not recall any conversations about race and white supremacy.”
+— Laura Hagen, 31, South Saint Paul, Minn.
+“My education was filled with Christian alternative facts. Things like dinosaurs walked with man, men and women have a different number of ribs (due to the biblical creation story), and Noah’s son, Ham, who was cursed, was the ancestor of African nations. We were taught we would likely never get to grow up, because the rapture would happen so soon. I struggle to this day with anxiety that I will not get to live the life experiences I very much want, such as having a real career, and being stable enough to give back in a meaningful way, because the world could end at any moment.”
+— Ashlyn Cancellieri, 26, Philadelphia
+And many shared stories of love and acceptance of others
+“Teaching from a Gospel perspective is not so much about shielding kids from reality, but rather about teaching kids to see God at work in their day-to-day lives and in their studies. In many of my classes, we had many different points of views presented to us — each with good arguments, and we were left to come to our own conclusions. Christians are called bigots, racist, idiots, backward, and the one I hear the most, ‘on the wrong side of history.’ We feel attacked and misunderstood. Yes, we have beliefs that in this day and age are countercultural, and we will stick to them, make no mistake about that. However, we are also called to love others, showing them the kindness of Christ.”
+— Allyson Payne, 21, Birmingham, Ala.
+“At my school, the students were always encouraged to pursue a relationship with Christ and further our faith but it was never a prerequisite for attending the school. They taught that no one is ever too far gone. That everyone has our mistakes and we need to be accepting of all. Racism and homophobia were not present in my school and if there were incidents, they were dealt with by the administration. Everyone was taught to be accepting and to be a friend to the friendless.”
+— Kearney Moss, 24, Midland, Tex.
+“I am an alumnus of the Diocese of Covington school system in Kentucky. One time at Bishop Brossart High School, I said some things that were derogatory toward the L.G.B.T.Q. community. I really didn’t mean what I said, yet I was wrong and paid the price. I ended up getting detention and was scolded for the way I acted. I learned a valuable lesson for the first time that your words hold meaning no matter if you meant them or not. Bishop Brossart taught me how to respect others and how to be open to seeing different viewpoints. While we are not all perfect human beings, with the right guidance and discipline, we can be transformed into good people.”
+— Andrew Graus, 22, Lawrenceville, Ga.Major League Baseball officials claim to see no problem. The deputy commissioner, Dan Halem, helped negotiate the last collective bargaining agreement with the players union, and he says labor’s portion of nearly $11 billion in baseball revenues has held steady. His estimate includes players in baseball’s vast minor league system, though, none of whom are in the union and some fair number of whom — thanks to baseball’s lobbying with Congress — make less than the minimum wage.
+Baseball drove down a road that looked suspiciously like this one between 1985 and 1987 and that ended in a multicar collision with three separate findings that its owners had engaged in illegal collusion to hold down player salaries. The owners paid penalties of $280 million plus interest to the players, and in the 1990s the sport weathered brutal strikes that owed to the residual bitterness.
+The former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, appointed by the owners and no Marxist, was moved at that time to remark to the owners: “The single biggest reality you guys have to face up to is collusion. You stole $280 million from the players, and the players are unified to a man around that issue, because you got caught and many of you are still involved.”
+I possess no proof the current generation of extremely rich owners have acted as stupidly as their predecessors. For now the flaccid free-agent market is simply … odd.
+The management of this column readily acknowledges the best of the marooned free agents will not be left to scratch nickels together. Harper seeks a contract north of $300 million for 10 years, and Machado entered free agency entranced by similar sugarplum visions. It is all but assured that one day their descendants will decant a fine Bordeaux and offer a heartfelt Thanksgiving toast to dear old grandpa Bryce and Manny.
+And so what? Megawatt talents in many professions profit handsomely, a point lost on a writer from Bleacher Report who loosened an ancient grouse: These free agents are paid “silly” money to “play a children’s game.”When the ax finally emerged, how did you know it was genuine?
+KEITH MELTON No. 1, I have a paper trail going back to the Mexican police evidence room since 1946. No. 2, this was a very obscure type of ax made only in 1928. Third and most definitive is the rust pattern on the blade. Photos taken on the evening of the assassination reveal a bloody fingerprint. A friend at the F.B.I. helped confirm every speck of this rust is exactly consistent with the contour of the fingerprint.
+What was the price? Six figures?
+KAREN MELTON [smiles and silently jerks her thumb skyward]
+MR. MELTON No, no [blushing]
+You paid seven figures for the ax?
+MR. MELTON The assassination of Trotsky was the crime of the century! Relative to its time, it exceeded the publicity of the killing of Kennedy.
+Why was it so important to own the ax?
+MR. MELTON To relate to history, I need to touch and hold an object. It’s one thing to read about it, but I need to hold it.
+MRS. MELTON Some homes have deer antlers mounted on the wall. Other homes have golf trophies. [Sighs good-naturedly] We have murder weapons.This could get messy.
+Facing tens of billions of dollars in wildfire liabilities, Pacific Gas and Electric on Tuesday filed for bankruptcy protection, a step that the company has said was its “only viable option.” But some PG&E investors, elected leaders in its home state of California and public interest groups contend that bankruptcy is not needed and will hurt millions of ratepayers and anybody who owns shares in the utility or does business with it.
+That fundamental disagreement about the company’s financial health is one of the main reasons the utility’s bankruptcy case could drag on for months. The filing will create uncertainty for the company’s creditors and people who have lost homes and loved ones to fires that were started by PG&E’s equipment and are seeking compensation from the company. The case could also cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, to Wall Street and white-shoe law firms.
+PG&E’s bankruptcy could have consequences far beyond its immediate winners and losers. The bankruptcy could shape California’s response to climate change and the threat of catastrophic wildfires.
+Why did PG&E file for bankruptcy protection?
+At first glance, PG&E appears to be solvent. At the end of September, the company’s assets exceeded its debt by about $20 billion. What is at dispute is just how much the company owes for starting wildfires in 2017 and 2018. The utility says it could be on the hook for $30 billion.The designation provides Ms. Abrams, 45, with a nationally televised platform to burnish her profile at a time when she is said to be considering her next political steps, including a possible run for Senate in 2020 against Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia. But it also carries substantial risks: A notoriously awkward format, State of the Union responses have been more memorable in recent years for the memes they have produced than persuasive oratory.
+They have damaged rising stars of the past. Bobby Jindal was widely panned in 2009 when, as governor of Louisiana, he delivered the Republican response to Barack Obama’s joint address to Congress, and Senator Marco Rubio’s response in 2013 is remembered more for his sudden lunge for water than his answer to Mr. Obama.
+The buildup to this year’s address has been more dramatic than past years. Speaker Nancy Pelosi originally invited Mr. Trump to deliver the annual address to Congress in the House chamber this week, but she rescinded that invitation amid the government shutdown. On Monday, with the government reopen, the speaker and the president agreed to a new date, Feb. 5.
+Mr. Schumer alternates with Ms. Pelosi each year on choosing the Democratic respondent. Last year, Ms. Pelosi selected Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III of Massachusetts, the scion of a Democratic dynasty who is among the party’s most popular young figures. Without using Mr. Trump’s name, Mr. Kennedy chastised the Trump administration for “a rebuke of our highest American ideal” and pledged to fight for the millions of immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers.
+In 2017, Mr. Schumer chose Steve Beshear, the former governor of Kentucky, to deliver a response to Mr. Trump’s first joint address to Congress.Apple said on Tuesday that profits were flat and revenues were down in its most recent quarter, indicating a difficult road ahead for a company that five months ago became the first American firm to be valued above $1 trillion.
+The disappointing financial performance had been expected since Jan. 2, when Apple, for the first time in 16 years, revised its forecast for the quarter because of an economic slowdown in China and diminishing demand for new iPhones.
+Now, after years of expansion and record-setting profits, Apple appears to be entering a period of vulnerability. While it has had some success with new products like the Apple Watch, the company has not found another product with the global impact of the iPhone, which was introduced more than a decade ago. Apple is also uniquely vulnerable to slowing consumer demand in China, as well as potential tariffs on Chinese-made products.
+Apple’s stock price is down a third since its peak last summer, and now it is worth less than several of its longtime rivals in the tech industry.When a rumor circulated on Twitter this week that Diamond Crystal kosher salt was being discontinued, cooks who were used to seasoning with it became remarkably anxious. A few fans even stocked up on the red-and-white boxes, just in case.
+“I didn’t pay it too much mind at first, because I couldn’t process a world where this would happen,” said Francis Lam, a cookbook editor and the host of the radio show The Splendid Table. “But a handful of people kept talking about it.”
+So Mr. Lam left work early and bought 10 three-pound boxes of the salt at his local grocery store in Brooklyn, then carried them half a mile home. “Taking no chances,” he wrote on Instagram.EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — Lisa Kerney once earned her living hosting “SportsCenter” on ESPN, making her a nightly fixture in the vast American conversation between sports fans and their favorite athletes, teams and leagues. Her latest endeavor, she believes, is just as all-American.
+Every Saturday, Kerney slips into the anchor’s chair of a very different kind of television program: a sports betting show from a makeshift studio at the Meadowlands Racetrack. Instead of reporting just scores and news, Kerney now also rattles off N.F.L. point spreads and money-line odds as easily as a CNBC host talks stock prices and P/E ratios.
+She will be on the air again this Sunday, serving up information on the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams in the hours before Super Bowl LIII. The game will take its place in American gambling history because, for the first time, bettors will be allowed to wager on the N.F.L.’s championship game legally, not only in Nevada but also in seven other states.
+By next year, gambling may be legal in more than a dozen more states, a shift that is already moving betting on games into the mainstream of American culture and teaching fans to look at the sports contests they love as investment opportunities as well as entertainment.Let’s Figure It Out
+Hannah sent us a problem to figure out this week:
+I’m in my freshman year of college at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. At the beginning of my first semester, I joined a varsity team in a sport I had performed well at in high school and declared my major in a STEM field that I was curious enough about. With the first semester of college down, I can safely say that I excelled in both. I feel really bored in each place as well as my university at large, where despite being part of the honors college and getting to know a lot of people around me, I still find that I’m at the top of my classes and have trouble finding people who are as passionate about academics as I am. As I look to the next semester, I find that I want to quit my sport, change my major, and transfer — all in search of topics, activities, people and places that inspire and excite me in ways that my current surroundings lack. By exceeding where I am, I’ll prepare myself with skills that will benefit me later on: be it my sport’s work ethic and physical fitness, the critical thinking involved in my major, or a G.P.A. that might be higher than it could be at another school. Is it better to try to find places where I might be happier (and more excited) or to stay where it’s clear that I’ll be able to be ok? And should I try to modify my current situation in order to try to challenge myself more so that I at least stay engaged in what I’m doing vs. zoning out because things are too easy?
+Theo Balcomb, the managing producer of The Daily, weighed in on this one:
+I was right there with you midway through my first year. I can hear in your letter the care and time that you’ve put into this decision. I mean, my goodness, visiting colleges, getting into one, choosing your home for the next four years in the midst of saying goodbye to your childhood one is hard enough.
+Now you’re thinking about reversing all those decisions, and you’re looking over an abyss of more unknown. Acknowledging all that, let me say: You are doing the work that so many people don’t do.
+You are questioning whether you’re in the right place. Lots of people do that. You are worrying that your choices won’t lead you to where you want to be and won’t make you happy in the meantime. Lots of people do that. But you are thinking about a new way forward. You are putting yourself out there and jumping into something new. Lots of people don’t do that. I think they’re usually unhappier for it.
+I can’t say exactly what will happen if you choose to apply to transfer. I can’t say that you’ll get into another school that you’ll like. I can’t say that you will, and then you’ll go, and once you’re there you won’t think about all the things you missed by making that choice. I can say that I felt many of the absences you’re feeling. Being in a place I thought I wanted that wasn’t quite right, being afraid to accept that I made the wrong choice, being angry that I was surrounded by people who didn’t want to read books as much as I did.
+I think you can’t ignore those feelings too long. I ended up making my choice to apply to transfer because I needed to just try to see if there was another option. I had been burned by the college search once before. I hadn’t gotten into my dream school the first go around. I had settled and I thought it might be fine to settle for so many similar reasons that you cite: the honors program, the friends you’ve already made, your grades.Slide 1 of 6,
+The work of the Venezuelan-born artist Luchita Hurtado, 98, will go on show at a pair of solo exhibitions this year and, in 2020, at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City. The latter show, which will open the year she turns 100, will be her first international retrospective.
+Pictured here, at the warehouse in Los Angeles where she stores much of her work, is a series of 24 oil paintings that Hurtado made in 1975. The radiant compositions were intended to attract moths to their centers. Hurtado often made her own paints and sponge-based brushes, “to get the fastness” in each stroke, she says. While nursing each of her four sons, she sketched plans for future paintings.In her expansive oil paintings, ink-based drawings, fabric collages and patterned garments, Hurtado explores what she sees as the interconnectedness of all beings. Her paintings from the ’70s — sinuous bodies that morph into mountains, bare nipples that juxtapose spiky leaves, bulbous fruits that echo curving belly shapes — represent women as sacred beings, powerful subjects of their own lives. Hurtado also incorporated womb imagery into her work before the feminist art movement made popular the same subject matter in the late ’70s.
+Born in the seaside town of Maiquetía, Venezuela, in 1920, Hurtado migrated to New York at age 8. At the then-all-girls high school Washington Irving, she studied fine art and developed a keen interest in anti-fascist political movements. After graduating, she volunteered at the Spanish-language newspaper La Prensa and met her first husband, a Chilean journalist twice her age. When he abandoned her and their infant son, she supported herself by creating imaginative installations for Lord & Taylor and fashion illustrations for Vogue — at night, she created totemic figure drawings with watercolor and crayon. (In 1946, at age 26, she met and married the Austrian-Mexican painter Wolfgang Paalen, moving with her two sons to join him in Mexico City.)
+“Luchita has always had this very fluid identity, which makes her art so 21st century,” says the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who is organizing her retrospective in London. “We have to contextualize her clearly with the historic avant-garde, because she is a contemporary of Frida Kahlo, she knew Diego Rivera and was married to Wolfgang Paalen, a key figure of surrealism — and she is a key figure of spiritual surrealism, with a connection to pre-Columbian art, but we cannot lock her in that.” Hurtado’s work blurs the lines between micro- and macroscopic worlds; she was at the forefront of not just spiritual surrealism, but also the environmental and feminist art movements. As Obrist puts it, “she navigated a century of different contexts and played an important role in all of those.”The rise of President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has put the environment and human rights in peril. His promises to open the Amazon for business could result in huge deforestation and the release of vast greenhouse-gas emissions. His threats to slash fundamental environmental and indigenous rights standards that help keep the Amazon standing are a threat to climate stability.
+Mr. Bolsonaro, however, wouldn’t be the only one to blame for devastating the Amazon. Companies that accept his invitation to reap profit from Amazon destruction, and the financial institutions that provide the capital, will also bear great responsibility. And those poised to benefit from Mr. Bolsonaro’s reckless policies include American companies and financial institutions.
+Two of the largest publicly traded agribusiness firms operating in the Brazilian Amazon — Archer Daniels Midland and Bunge — are American-based companies. Agribusiness, in particular soy and beef production, is a leading driver of forest loss and human-rights abuses in the Brazilian Amazon, and A.D.M. and Bunge are two of the largest soy traders in Brazil. As producers seek more and more land for growing crops and grazing cattle, they push ever deeper into the Amazon. According to a report published in 2014, an estimated 90 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon is due to agribusiness activities.
+Where would these powerful agribusiness companies get the capital they need to bulldoze deeper into the Amazon, if they should take Mr. Bolsonaro up on his offer to eliminate environmental protections?[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+ALBANY — New York lawmakers on Tuesday approved the most comprehensive set of gun bills in the state in six years, including measures that would ban bump stocks, prohibit teachers from carrying guns in schools and extend the waiting period for gun buyers who do not pass an instant background check.
+In total, six gun bills passed easily through the State Senate and Assembly, a remarkable sight in a Capitol that for years had resisted almost all new legislation on the subject.
+Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, a Democrat, last ushered a major gun safety package into law in 2013, after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The governor successfully corralled recalcitrant Senate Republicans into supporting the so-called Safe Act that expanded the state’s ban on assault weapons, tightened certification requirements, increased criminal penalties for illegal guns and closed private sale loopholes.
+Mr. Cuomo has described the Safe Act as one of his signature achievements. But it has also become a rallying cry for some gun owners and Republican politicians who felt it overreached.Like many other departments across the country, the New York Police Department has taken steps to improve fairness.
+“It is absolutely not in our best interest to do something that is going to be suppressed,” said Dermot Shea, the city’s chief of detectives.
+To minimize differences between the suspect and fillers, detectives will cover up tattoos and use hats to obscure differences in hair styles, Chief Shea said. “Fairness is driving everything that we do to make sure that we get the best prosecutable case, and that includes having a fair lineup,” he said.
+But suggestive lineups are not yet a thing of the past, as the shackle on the floor in the Queens lineup would seem to indicate.
+Detectives, for instance, sometimes still place teenage suspects in lineups alongside grown men, The New York Times found. A year ago, a 17-year-old robbery suspect in Brooklyn was the only teenager in the lineup. Three of the five fillers next to him were in their 30s.
+Lineups, say experts who study witness memory, can be thought of as an experiment administered by the police. Detectives have a suspect. Now they want to use the memory of a witness to test whether their suspect committed the crime.
+“In the witness's mind is a recollection, an image,” said William Brooks, the police chief of Norwood, Mass., a town of 30,000, and a longtime advocate for improving lineups. “You can’t see it or touch it, so how do you use it? You give it a stimulus, and you see the reaction, and see if there is a match.”In such extreme cold, exposed skin can develop frostbite in as little as five minutes, said George T. Chiampas, an emergency medicine doctor and professor at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago.
+The body’s first reaction to extreme cold is to restrict blood and oxygen flow from its extremities, in order to preserve major organs, Dr. Chiampas said. The first signs of frostbite including tingling or pain in the affected areas. If you think you have frostbite, you should immediately go inside and check yourself for any discoloration or other clear sign of frostbite. Fingers, toes and the face are most often affected.
+People with frostbite sometimes don’t realize what is happening, because their fingers or other parts of their bodies go numb as it sets in. And if they are also experiencing hypothermia, which can be deadly, their judgment could be seriously impaired. (More on that below.)
+Signs of frostbite include skin that has blistered or become discolored, or that feels unusually firm or waxy. It can result in permanent damage and amputation, and can be more dangerous the longer it goes without treatment.
+Speaking on Tuesday afternoon, Dr. Chiampas said his department had treated 15 patients with weather-related complaints in the previous 36 hours, including one who had a finger amputated because of frostbite — a much higher number than is typical for this time of year. The hospital, which is operating a warming center, has prepared for a spike in such patients over the next two days.WASHINGTON — Members of Congress from both parties served notice on pharmaceutical companies on Tuesday that the days of unchecked drug-price increases were over and that they would be held politically accountable for exorbitant prices.
+The new reality became apparent at simultaneous but separate hearings of House and Senate committees where lawmakers said that the relentless increases were unsustainable and unacceptable.
+“There is a strong bipartisan consensus that we must do something to rein in out-of-control price increases,” said Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and the chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. “Drug companies make money hand over fist by raising the prices of their drugs — often without justification and sometimes overnight — while patients are left holding the bill.”
+On the other side of the Capitol, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Finance Committee, and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the senior Democrat on the panel, denounced drug company executives who they said had refused to testify voluntarily.2. It’s so cold that…
+This is not the setup to a bad joke. Temperatures are growing dangerously low across the Midwest this week. You could get frostbite in as little as five minutes; it will be warmer in Antarctica than in Des Moines; it could feel like minus 65 in Minneapolis.
+Hundreds of schools are being closed, and the governors of Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin have declared emergencies. Above, Lake Michigan freezing over in Chicago.
+How can it get so cold if the Earth is warming? Because climate and weather are not the same thing.
+_____Rodulfo Figueroa, an official with Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said the man in the brown jacket, whose name was not revealed, would be the only migrant returned to Mexico on Tuesday under the new policy, but that more are expected soon.
+“We’re just reacting to a unilateral decision,” said Mr. Figueroa, a top federal migration official in the Mexican state of Baja California.
+Since the Trump administration’s announcement of the new asylum policy, Mexican officials have been negotiating with their counterparts in Washington to define the conditions under which they would accept the migrants.
+On Monday night, Tonatiuh Guillén López, the commissioner of Mexico’s National Migration Institute, said Mexico would only accept migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras between the ages of 18 and 60. He also said that Mexico would only receive returned asylum seekers through the border crossing that connects Tijuana with San Diego, California.
+The returned asylum seekers will be granted special four-month, multiple-entry visas that would allow them to travel to the United States for their court dates and then once again return to Mexico, Mexican officials said. Some of the returnees will already have one-year humanitarian visas which allow them to work and travel freely in the country. Asylum cases in the United States can take years to resolve, yet it remained unclear whether and under what terms the Mexican visas would be extended.
+The American policy change applies to some asylum seekers who try to enter the United States at official crossings on the country’s southern border, or are apprehended on American soil after trying to cross illegally. But it will not apply to Mexican asylum seekers who might risk harm if returned to Mexico, the very place where they are claiming fear of persecution as grounds for their asylum claim.Edwin Birdsong, a keyboard player and producer whose blend of funk, jazz and disco music from the 1970s and ′80s developed a cult following and was sampled by a later generation of artists, died on Jan. 21 in Inglewood, Calif. He was 77.
+His daughter Angela Birdsong said on Tuesday that the cause was not certain, but that Mr. Birdsong had suffered several strokes in the past and had congestive heart failure.
+Mr. Birdsong released a handful of solo albums, among them “What It Is” (1972), “Super Natural” (1973) and “Edwin Birdsong” (1979), but they achieved only limited success, and he turned to working as a sought-after session musician and producer for better-known acts.
+In the late 1980s, however, sample-hungry producers rediscovered Mr. Birdsong’s work, notably the songs “Rapper Dapper Snapper” and “Cola Bottle Baby.”The 91st Academy Awards are less than a month away, which means it’s about time to get caught up on the nominated movies. Many contenders made their theatrical debut in December and are still available on the big screen (“Mary Poppins Returns,” “If Beale Street Could Talk” and “Mary Queen of Scots,” to name a few).
+Others, like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “A Star Is Born,” debuted earlier but expanded to more screens after snagging promising awards and nominations. And then you have the films that are getting revival runs with a look ahead to the Oscars: “Black Panther” will screen for free in early February and “BlacKkKlansman” returned to 33 states this month. Below is more information on where to watch those and other nominees.
+[Here’s where to stream other nominated movies.|Here’s your Oscar ballot.]
+Back in Theaters
+These movies are getting new life on the big screen.We’re still reeling from a presidential election that was colored if not corrupted by unfair advantages, undue meddling and disrespected rules, and here we have a Super Bowl that’s colored if not corrupted by unfair advantages, undue meddling and disrespected rules. Many fans are rejecting its legitimacy — sound familiar? There are conspiracy theories afoot.
+Americans are so down on, and distrustful of, major institutions and authorities that we’re primed to declare their fraudulence, and the National Football League and the Super Bowl are on the receiving end of that. They’re not fresh targets, not by any stretch. But this time we've lost all sense of perspective .
+The missed pass-interference call in the clash between the Rams and Saints was certainly egregious, but every football game is a compendium of good and bad breaks; luck is always a factor and often the deciding one. The Saints had home-field advantage, and their fans created enough noise to addle and even paralyze the Rams on offense. The Saints also made errors galore, blowing the possibility of a lead too commanding to be erased by poor officiating. On a recent episode of his podcast, the sports commentator Bill Simmons methodically broke down the game en route to this conclusion: “I really thought the Rams were better.” He added that “if that’s a neutral field, I think the Rams win.”
+That the Rams did win, with an assist from somnambulistic referees, has not gone over well in New Orleans. The Louisiana governor wrote a letter of condemnation to N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell. The New Orleans City Council is considering a formal resolution declaring the outcome an “injustice” and demanding that the N.F.L. thoroughly review its rules. One of Louisiana’s senators has called for a congressional hearing on the matter.
+Several Saints ticket holders have filed lawsuits against the N.F.L., variously claiming that they have endured mental anguish, lost the enjoyment of life and been defrauded by the league. A movement in New Orleans to boycott the Super Bowl involves the staging of competing events, vows by many bars not to show the game and pledges by many other bars to show, instead, the 2010 Super Bowl, in which the Saints beat the Indianapolis Colts.A day after Senator Kamala Harris of California endorsed ending private health insurance in favor of a “Medicare for all” government plan, Michael R. Bloomberg, a possible rival of hers for the Democratic presidential nomination, said the proposal would “bankrupt us for a very long time.”
+Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is considering a 2020 bid on a centrist Democratic platform, rejected the idea of “Medicare for all,” which has been gaining traction among Democrats.
+“I think you could never afford that. You’re talking about trillions of dollars,” Mr. Bloomberg said during a political swing in New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary in 2020.
+“I think you can have ‘Medicare for all’ for people that are uncovered,” he added, “but to replace the entire private system where companies provide health care for their employees would bankrupt us for a very long time.”CHICAGO — As temperatures in Midwestern cities plunged to levels colder than parts of Antarctica and officials warned people not to step outside even for a few minutes, Tony Neeley stood on a downtown Chicago street corner Tuesday, wearing wet sneakers and clutching a hand warmer packet in each of his bare hands. He had already been there for hours.
+“I’m cold and I’m afraid,” Mr. Neeley said, adding that he was trying to raise enough money from the bundled commuters rushing past to pay for a $45 motel room on a night that weather forecasters warned would send the Midwest into a deep freeze unlike anything even this region has seen in years.
+[Read the latest on the deep freeze.]
+What about the prospect of going to one of the scores of shelters officials in Chicago — and in cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Detroit — had urged homeless people to seek warmth in during the stretch of dangerous and extreme cold?
+“You don’t understand,” Mr. Neeley said. “A lot of us don’t go to the shelters because of bedbugs, we don’t go because people steal from you, we don’t go because you can’t even really sleep in the shelter. But my feet are cold, and these clothes are all I’ve got.”WASHINGTON — In an interview on Monday on “Good Morning America,” Cliff Sims, a former White House aide promoting a tell-all book about life inside the West Wing, wanted to make clear that he had left his job on his own terms. Anticipating pushback from the White House, he told George Stephanopoulos, the host, that he had brought his resignation letter along to prove it.
+White House aides have been telling reporters for weeks that Mr. Sims was fired, but did not want to comment about him on the record. A former official noted that Mr. Sims was “instructed to leave due to a major security breach” — a reference to what Mr. Sims said was the time he recorded President Trump in the White House on his government phone and then emailed those files to himself, but insisted that was not the reason he left.
+The Trump White House has set a record for turnover — more than double that of President Barack Obama’s after two years in office — but somehow leaving it is never simple.
+Omarosa Manigault Newman, a former communications adviser, was abruptly fired in the Situation Room, though she said Mr. Trump later claimed that he knew nothing about her dismissal and she denied that she had abused the White House car service, as aides claimed. Lesser known aides, like Sean Cairncross, a former senior adviser, have announced their resignations and then lingered for months in a building next door to the White House, continuing to collect government salaries while waiting for their next gig.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The messages landed in mailboxes across Queens like clockwork: glossy fliers, such as those from a political campaign, extolling a deal that would bring Amazon to Long Island City, paid for by Amazon.
+With smiling faces and iconic Queens scenes, three rounds of fliers arrived in recent weeks as part of a concerted effort by the company to reset its image after the mostly disastrous rollout of its plans for a corporate campus in New York City. The opposition was fueled by Democratic activists and others inspired by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
+Now Amazon is striking back.
+The company offered a few salves to skeptics on Wednesday at a City Council hearing: It will hire public housing residents to work at a new 30-person customer service center and establish a certificate program at LaGuardia Community College to help students gain entry-level technology jobs. The company also announced that it would fund computer science courses at more than 130 New York high schools.
+But Amazon executives, during their testimony, referred obliquely to the company’s displeasure at the local opposition that has greeted it and appeared to entertain the idea of backing away from the deal.This year’s “ Worldwide Threat Assessment” — compiled by the country’s 17 intelligence agencies — is lengthy and growing : terrorism, climate change, hostile foreign powers, rising nationalism, illegal drugs, cyberattacks and organized crime. Those threats will “expand and diversify” in 2019, the director of national intelligence, Dan Coats, told the Senate Intelligence Committee at a hearing on Tuesday.
+Many critics were quick to note where the consensus judgments of the intelligence community differed with the statements and policies of the Trump administration.
+No, North Korea is not going to give up its nuclear weapons program, as the administration has promised. “Its leaders ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival,” Mr. Coats said.
+No, Iran is not close to building a nuclear weapon or trying to, as the White House has asserted. “We continue to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activities we judge necessary to produce a nuclear device,” the report says.A new survey from the National Association of Business Economists found business investment growth slowing across the economy, with 84 percent of respondents saying that Mr. Trump’s tax cuts are not encouraging their companies to increase investment. Slowing global growth, particularly in China, has caused other forecasters to lower their growth estimates for the United States this year.
+Mr. Trump’s advisers have not yet released their official forecast for the year. But White House officials say they continue to believe the economy will significantly outperform the expectations of more pessimistic projections, for several reasons.
+The Council of Economic Advisers’ forecasting model is more bullish than the C.B.O., in part because the administration finds that much of the sluggish growth in the decade preceding Mr. Trump’s election was a hangover from the 2008 financial crisis. The Trump administration also projects a more sustained boost to growth from the $1.5 trillion tax cut package that went into effect last year and deregulatory efforts at agencies across the administration.
+Administration officials, who are set to meet with their Chinese counterparts on Wednesday to try to end a trade war, dismiss concerns that trade policy or the shutdown have provided an economic drag.
+“We think there's still a very good case for 3 percent this year,” Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, said Tuesday on Fox Business Network.
+Larry Kudlow, the chairman of the National Economic Council, told reporters on Monday that he believed the administration’s economic model was working. “The program of lower tax rates and regulatory rollback and opening up energy and so forth is working and continuing to work,” Mr. Kudlow said in a briefing at the White House. “And I think frankly the optimists, the guys that took the over, will be right.”
+Mr. Trump could need that prediction to come true if he hopes to win in 2020. His approval ratings have sagged below 40 percent under the weight of the shutdown, even after recording in 2018 what appears to have been highest annual growth rate since the financial crisis, according to a polling average by the website FiveThirtyEight.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+In Chicago, officials warned about the risk of almost instant frostbite on what could be the city’s coldest day ever. Warming centers opened around the Midwest. And schools and universities closed throughout the region as rare polar winds streamed down from the Arctic.
+At the same time, on the other side of the planet, wildfires raged in Australia’s record-breaking heat. Soaring air-conditioner use overloaded electrical grids and caused widespread power failures. The authorities slowed and canceled trams to save power. L abor leaders called for laws that would require businesses to close when temperatures reached hazardous levels: nearly 116 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47 Celsius, as was the case last week in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia.
+This is weather in the age of extremes. It comes on top of multiple extremes, all kinds, in all kinds of places.
+“When something happens — whether it’s a cold snap, a wildfire, a hurricane, any of those things — we need to think beyond what we have seen in the past and assume there’s a high probability that it will be worse than anything we’ve ever seen,” said Crystal A. Kolden, an associate professor at the University of Idaho, who specializes in wildfires and who is currently working in Tasmania during one of the state’s worst fire seasons.Over the last decade, these advances in the speed of connectivity and the elimination of complexity have grown exponentially. Because as big data got really big, as broadband got really fast, as algorithms got really smart, as 5G got actually deployed, artificial intelligence got really intelligent. So now, with no touch — but just a voice command or machines acting autonomously — we can go so much deeper in so many areas.
+Scientists and doctors can now find the needle in the haystack of health data as the norm, not the exception, and therefore see certain disease patterns that were never apparent before. Machines can recognize your face so accurately that the Chinese government can punish you for jaywalking in Beijing, using street cameras, and you will never encounter a police officer.
+Indeed, with today’s facial recognition technology, I can dispense with the card reader at my office’s security gate and instead use each employee’s face as an ID. And cars can drive on their own.
+DeepMind, the artificial intelligence arm of Google’s parent, developed an A.I. program, AlphaGo, that has now defeated the world’s top human players of the ancient strategy game Go — which is much more complex than chess — by learning from human play.
+As The Times reported, DeepMind “showed yet another way that computers could be developed to perform better than humans in highly complex tasks” and to “mimic the way the brain functions.” DeepMind’s next breakthrough, AlphaZero, did not even need to learn from humans. It learned even faster by repeatedly playing against itself!
+Today “virtual agents” — using conversational interfaces powered by artificial intelligence — can increasingly understand your intent when you call the bank, credit card company or insurance company for service, just by hearing your voice.
+It means machines can answer so many more questions than nonmachines, also known as “humans.” The percentage of calls a chatbot, or virtual agent, is able to handle without turning the caller over to a person is called its “containment rate,” and these rates are steadily soaring. Soon, automated systems will be so humanlike that they will have to self-identify as machines.“This sprawling, comprehensive proposal is basically the far left’s entire Christmas wish list where our nation’s political process is concerned,” Mr. McConnell, a longtime opponent of campaign finance disclosures, said in remarks on the Senate floor, again declaring that the bill “may pass the House, but not the Senate.”
+For Democrats, passage of such a sweeping measure is not necessarily the point. The bill, the first of the new House, forms something of a platform for the 2020 campaign. Democrats on the committee seized the opportunity to press for the bill’s efforts to counter state tactics to remove voters from the rolls and require automatic registration for eligible voters. Many of the issues, they believe, will have bipartisan appeal beyond Washington, in a country convinced that the capital is rife with corruption and in the thrall of the rich and connected.
+“This should be a bipartisan issue, and yet there is not a single Republican member of Congress that’s a co-sponsor,” said Vanita Gupta, who testified before the panel in her role as the president and chief executive of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
+Republican lawmakers on the committee, vociferous in their condemnation and occasionally inflammatory in their language, argued that the bill violated the right of states to control their own elections and decide their own districts. Representative Ken Buck, Republican of Colorado, chalked it up to the Democratic Party’s “long history of stealing elections.”
+Representative Doug Collins of Georgia, the committee’s ranking Republican, said, “Contrary to its name, this bill takes power away from the people, and it does this by violating the Constitution.”WASHINGTON — After four years of free Republican rein, President George W. Bush’s administration came up with what it thought was a sure way to counter the emboldened new Democratic majority on Capitol Hill when it came to the Iraq war in 2007: divide and conquer.
+It failed. Democrats, who had just won the House and Senate by running against the war, were not about to suddenly change course. They remained united against the White House, spurring a furious funding fight. The events made it clear that the era of unfettered Republican control of Washington was over and that the two sides needed to come to an accommodation.
+The parallels to today are obvious. Democrats believe that they won the House last year partly because of President Trump’s stridency on immigration and aren’t about to accede to his wall demands. The White House and congressional Republicans are finding that Democrats won’t be easily divided. And the two sides are going to need to come to an accommodation through the negotiations that begin on Wednesday or face another conflagration.
+The government shutdown was a test of wills; the border funding talks are a test of governance.
+Negotiations over border funding, which will have only a couple of weeks to bear fruit before another potential shutdown looms, are the first real experiment in how divided government will or won’t work for the next two years. They could chart a course for future conflicts between Democrats, newly empowered in the House, and Mr. Trump and Senate Republicans, who face a difficult electoral landscape and a need to maintain their base of support.CARACAS, Venezuela — Reeling from American oil sanctions, President Nicolás Maduro’s government on Tuesday fought to keep its grip on Venezuela, opening an investigation into what it called the “violent acts” of the nation’s opposition leader, freezing his assets and barring him from leaving the country.
+The announcement came only hours after the Trump administration said that it had handed control of Venezuela’s bank accounts and property in the United States to the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, hoping to give him the tools to start running the country.
+It was one of Washington’s most overt attempts in decades to carry out regime change in Latin America. In recent days, the Trump administration has recognized Mr. Guaidó as Venezuela’s legitimate president and imposed sanctions to cut off Mr. Maduro’s access to a major source of the nation’s cash: oil sales in the United States.
+Now the fierce struggle to shape Venezuela is entering a new, uncertain phase. For many in the capital, the only question about Washington’s aggressive bid to oust Mr. Maduro and help install an opposition-led interim government is, what took so long?When Mr. Jones discovered him, Mr. Ingram had been inching his way into the music business for about a decade. He had been a pianist for Ray Charles; played in a band, Revelation Funk, which contributed a song to the soundtrack of the 1975 movie “Dolemite”; played in one of Dick Clark’s support bands; and done side work as a demo singer.
+After the success of “Just Once” and “One Hundred Ways,” Mr. Ingram became a force in R&B. In 1982 he recorded a duet with Patti Austin, “Baby, Come to Me,” which reached No. 1 on the Hot 100. In 1983 he released his first solo album, “It’s Your Night,” which featured several hits, including another duet with Ms. Austin, “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?,” and “Yah Mo B There,” a duet with Michael McDonald that would earn Ingram his second Grammy, in 1985. (He was nominated a total of 14 times.)
+Throughout the 1980s, Mr. Ingram worked with Mr. Jones on several other projects: participating in the all-star charity single “We Are the World”; writing for the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s film “The Color Purple” (1985); singing on Mr. Jones’s 1989 album, “Back on the Block”; and, most crucially, writing, with Jones, Michael Jackson’s 1983 Top 10 hit “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing).”
+“It’s almost like I got the chance to go to Oz and Quincy was the Wizard of Oz and Michael Jackson was who he was dealing with in his world,” Mr. Ingram told Jet magazine in 2007.
+In a statement, Mr. Jones said: “There are no words to convey how much my heart aches with the news of the passing of my baby brother James Ingram. With that soulful, whisky-sounding voice, James Ingram was simply magical.”
+Later in the 1980s and into the ’90s, a time when songs from hit films often became radio hits too, Mr. Ingram was a soundtrack favorite. “Somewhere Out There,” a duet with Linda Ronstadt from the animated feature “An American Tail,” was one of biggest chart successes, reaching No. 2. He was heard on the soundtracks of “Beverly Hills Cop II,” “Forget Paris” and “City Slickers.”SAN FRANCISCO — On Jan. 19, Grant Thompson, a 14-year-old in Arizona, made an unexpected discovery: Using FaceTime, Apple’s video chatting software, he could eavesdrop on his friend’s phone before his friend had even answered the call.
+His mother, Michele Thompson, sent a video of the hack to Apple the next day, warning the company of a “major security flaw” that exposed millions of iPhone users to eavesdropping. When she didn’t hear from Apple Support, she exhausted every other avenue she could, including emailing and faxing Apple’s security team, and posting to Twitter and Facebook. On Friday, Apple’s product security team encouraged Ms. Thompson, a lawyer, to set up a developer account to send a formal bug report.
+But it wasn’t until Monday, more than a week after Ms. Thompson first notified Apple of the problem, that Apple raced to disable Group FaceTime and said it was working on a fix. The company reacted after a separate developer reported the FaceTime flaw and it was written about on 9to5mac.com, a news site for Apple fans, in an article that went viral.
+The bug, and Apple’s slow response to patching it, have renewed concerns about the company’s commitment to security, even though it regularly advertises its bug reward program and boasts about the safety of its products. Hours before Apple’s statement addressing the bug Monday, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, tweeted that “we all must insist on action and reform for vital privacy protections.”Paul declined to comment on Tuesday. Davis refused to speak to reporters before New Orleans’s game on Tuesday night against the Houston Rockets.
+In another high-profile case of a player’s trade request this season, Jimmy Butler was not fined after pressing to be dealt from the Minnesota Timberwolves in September, because neither Butler nor his agent, Bernie Lee, openly discussed Butler’s wishes with the news media. The Timberwolves ultimately traded Butler to the Philadelphia 76ers on Nov. 10.
+But in a subsequent example, Cleveland’s J. R. Smith — who is also represented by Paul — dodged a fine after he publicly requested a trade in November. Smith was sent away from the Cavaliers in a mutual decision between the team and Paul to allow Cleveland to try to find a new home for Smith.
+The Los Angeles Lakers are at the forefront of teams trying to persuade the Pelicans to surrender Davis before the Feb. 7 trade deadline.
+The Knicks are also determined to establish themselves as a factor in the bidding for Davis, according to a person with knowledge of the team’s plans. The Knicks, though, realize that they might not be able to make their bid for Davis until May, when the order for the top of the June draft is set, according to the person, who was not authorized to discuss the situation publicly.[Check out the Democratic field with our new candidate tracker.]
+The mayor praised Ms. Harris and said he was “proud” and “excited” about her candidacy; he did not make any endorsements, however. He also had good words for several Democrats who are now considering 2020 bids: He said Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey was a close friend of many years, and called former New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg a “good friend and mentor.”
+Asked if he would consider being a vice-presidential candidate, he said, “I think I got a better job than that.”
+Mr. Garcetti, 47, is a former Rhodes Scholar who has spent much of his professional life in city government, and reflects the diversity of the city he leads, with Italian, Jewish and Mexican roots. In a city that is majority Latino, Mr. Garcetti, when speaking publicly, often switches back and forth between English and Spanish. He grew up as the son of a prominent public official in the city — his father, Gil Garcetti, is a former district attorney who became nationally known as the prosecutor leading the O.J. Simpson trial.
+Mr. Garcetti, along with other leaders in a state that has steadily become more liberal, has eagerly touted Los Angeles — and California — as a counterweight to the agenda of President Trump, giving him a national profile that he, at one point, thought could make him a viable national candidate. He has embraced Los Angeles’s role as a sanctuary city that protects undocumented immigrants from federal immigration authorities, and sought to shape the agenda of the Democratic Party by pushing for more liberal policy goals.
+In an interview in late 2017 with The New York Times, as he was already thinking about running for president, Mr. Garcetti described himself as a member of the “impatient next generation” of Democratic leaders.Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, Beyoncé, Madonna, The Black Eyed Peas and The Who all took their turns on the podium in recent years.
+Prince, the 2007 performer, was expected to avoid interviews, but he showed up for the news conference — then turned it into a mini-concert, without taking questions.
+Yet this year’s artists almost certainly would face questions about Colin Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback who, by kneeling during the national anthem, started a protest movement against racial injustice and police brutality in 2016. He has not been on an N.F.L. team since that season.
+According to news reports, some chart-topping performers turned down invitations to perform at the Super Bowl, out of support for Kaepernick. Scott said he had talked by phone with Kaepernick before it was announced that he would be performing, according to Variety, which cited a source close to Scott as saying the two had come to a “mutual respect and understanding.” That account was later disputed on Twitter by Nessa Diab, a radio host who is also Kaepernick’s girlfriend.“There’s no dearth of evidence of the disconnect between the president and Republican orthodoxy,” said Mr. Edelman, a longstanding critic of Mr. Trump. But Mr. Edelman noted that the disagreement has been rooted in Congress. “As you look at the Republican Party in the electorate, I think it’s lining up a little more with the president because I think he’s shifting Republican voters more on things like trade and Russia, maybe on Syria and Afghanistan.”
+Indeed, many of Mr. Trump’s supporters have cheered his more protectionist stance on trade and the tariff wars with China as well as American allies. Likewise, many Trump supporters have grown weary of overseas military ventures that never seem to end and therefore applaud his moves to bring home American troops. Polls have even detected a shift in Republican views on Russia, which throughout the Cold War was a unifying force in the party.
+In Republican circles in Washington, however, the unease coincides with a critical juncture in Mr. Trump’s foreign policy. His pullouts from Syria and Afghanistan come as trade talks with China head toward a climactic deadline and Mr. Trump prepares to get together next month with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, for their second summit meeting after an initial encounter in Singapore last year.
+Olivia Enos, a policy scholar on Asia at the Heritage Foundation, said doubts had grown about Mr. Trump’s negotiations with North Korea to eliminate its nuclear program.
+“Many initially welcomed the president’s pursuit of diplomacy in North Korea,” she said. “But after Singapore, many questioned whether North Korea was sincere in coming to the negotiating table. Since that time, North Korea has continued to play hard to get, calling its sincerity to denuclearize into further question.”
+Some analysts said it was the way Mr. Trump makes his decisions as much as the decisions themselves that rattle the foreign policy establishment. Announcing the Syria pullout by Twitter without preparing the allies or framing the public explanations left even some of the president’s strongest supporters in Washington unnerved.
+“I don’t think Leader McConnell or anyone else wants to take the wheel from the president or even give him rudder direction,” said Frederic C. Hof, a former State Department official who worked on Syria and is now diplomat in residence at Bard College. “They want to be sure he’s at the helm and he knows he has a crew. They want real deliberation to take place on these tough issues. They want the president to be part of it.”Word of possible massacres around Yumbi first surfaced a few weeks ago, when the United Nations’ human rights office said it had reports from “credible sources” of horrific violence between Dec. 16 and Dec. 18 that had killed 890 people. Michelle Bachelet, the top human rights official at the United Nations, said it was “crucial that this shocking violence be promptly, thoroughly investigated and the perpetrators be brought to justice.”
+A fact-finding team sent to Yumbi and the nearby town of Bongende by the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in Congo, known as Monusco, found the burial sites, a spokeswoman, Florence Marchal, said Tuesday in a telephone interview.
+In Yumbi, she said, “if you walk along the main road you see the graves.”
+Ms. Marchal said Monusco had yet to establish an exact death toll. But confirming her remarks quoted in a Reuters report from Kinshasa, she said that “several hundred people, including women and many children, were killed in unbearable circumstances.”
+Abdoul Aziz Thioye, the director of the United Nations Joint Human Rights Office in Kinshasa, said the graves had been dug by local Red Cross workers and family members who initially fled the violence and had returned to bury the dead.
+“Very often when you talk about mass graves, everyone has in mind people who have been summarily executed and thrown into a hole, which was not the case here,” he said in a telephone interview.“Once in a while, you’d meet a great human being who would help you get down the stairs.”
+CHRISTINE ANN DENNY, a mother of two who said the stress of carrying a child on the subway — in which only a quarter of stations have elevators — was one reason she moved out of New York.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Sunday about the Trump administration’s efforts to block an expansion by the Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei described incorrectly the official status of two Canadian citizens detained by the Chinese government since a Huawei executive was arrested in Canada in December. Only one of the two was a diplomat. They were not both diplomats.
+•
+A picture caption with an article on Monday about the reaction to a lack of diversity among the 2019 class of partners with the law firm Paul, Weiss misidentified the previous position of one of the firm’s partners. Jeh Johnson is a former Homeland Security secretary, not a former defense secretary.
+NATIONAL
+An article on Saturday about a Chicago prosecutor who encouraged people with allegations of sexual assault against R. Kelly to come forward misstated Mr. Kelly’s academic history at Kenwood Academy. Mr. Kelly attended the high school, but did not graduate.
+FOOD
+Because of an editing error, a brief report in the Front Burner column last Wednesday about brisket cooked by Truth BBQ in Brenham, Tex., ran with a picture of meat that was not from the company.A claim made last week by the Texas secretary of state — that 95,000 registered voters had a citizenship status that could not be determined — appeared to fall apart on Tuesday when local election officials said many of the people were known to be United States citizens.
+Some registered to vote when they applied for a driver’s license at the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires them to prove citizenship status to state officials. Others registered at naturalization ceremonies, a data point to which state officials said they did not have access.
+Election officials in Harris County, home to Houston, said they received 30,000 names — the largest single batch of potential noncitizen voters — from the secretary of state’s office on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon, they had determined that roughly 400 of those names were duplicates and 60 percent so far of the others were United States citizens.
+“We are not willing to conclude at this point that we know of anybody on this list who is not a United States citizen,” Douglas Ray, special assistant attorney for Harris County, said. “We may determine that at a later time, and we are going to investigate that very carefully, but as you can tell by the numbers, so far things ain’t looking good for this list,” referring to the state’s claim.Whether identifying as black, female, Latinx, queer, trans, Native American, Asian-American, Arab-American, disabled, Muslim, biracial or any combination thereof, playwrights traditionally marginalized in the theater face a second problem if their work finally ekes its way to the stage. They often feel pressure, from critics and producers, to depict globally and endorse unequivocally their diverse communities — which is bad for them and worse for their stories.
+Call it vexation without representation.
+Leah Nanako Winkler isn’t having it. In a note to the script of “God Said This,” which opened on Tuesday at the Cherry Lane Theater in a bumpy ride of a production, she urges directors and actors — and, by implication, audiences — to see the multiethnic family at the heart of her play as “deeply flawed, complex people” who are “not defined by their race.”
+Nor by much else, it seems. She sets out not only to bust stereotypes about submissive Japanese-American women but also to rescue hick Kentuckians, intolerant Christians, “tiger moms” and even the dying from the broad brush of caricature.
+Mission accomplished, though at a cost to coherence. Hiro, the daughter of a Japanese mother and a white American father, is no meek good girl; she’s more like a hot mess. The last time she came home to Lexington from New York — a disastrous visit that was the subject of Ms. Nanako Winkler’s “Kentucky,” seen in New York in 2016 — she nearly ruined her sister Sophie’s wedding and wound up having sex with an acquaintance on the roof of their old school.In the barely inhabited steppes of Central Asia, it is establishing the next foothold in its trillion-dollar campaign to transform global infrastructure.
+The Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility is a striking name for an absence. It is the point farthest from a sea or ocean on the planet. Located in China just east of the border with Kazakhstan, the pole gets you a good distance from harbors and coastlines — at least 1,550 miles in any direction — into an expanse of white steppe and blue-beige mountain that is among the least populated places on earth. Here, among some of the last surviving pastoral nomads in Central Asia, nestled between two branches of the Tian Shan range on the edge of Kazakhstan, the largest infrastructure project in the history of the world is growing.
+About 80 miles from the Pole of Inaccessibility, just across the border in Kazakhstan, is a village called Khorgos. It has spent most of its existence on the obscure periphery of international affairs, and its official population is just 908. But over the last few years, it has become an important node of the global economy. It is part of an initiative known informally as the new Silk Road, a China-led effort to build a vast cephalopodic network of highways, railroads and overseas shipping routes, supported by hundreds of new plants, pipelines and company towns in dozens of countries. Ultimately, the Belt and Road Initiative, or B.R.I., as the project is more formally known, will link China’s coastal factories and rising consumer class with Central, Southeast and South Asia; with the Gulf States and the Middle East; with Africa; and with Russia and all of Europe, all by way of a lattice of land and sea routes whose collective ambition boggles the mind.
+Khorgos is a flagship project of this work in progress, an international shipping hub and free-trade zone that its promoters say is poised to become the next Dubai. Thanks to its location at the junction of the world’s soon-to-be-largest national economy and its largest landlocked country, Khorgos has become an unlikely harbinger of the interconnected planet: a zone fully enclosed by the logic of globalization, where goods flow freely across sovereign borders, following corridors designed to locate every human being on the planet within a totalizing network of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers.
+[Read about China’s $1 trillion plan to shake up the economic order.]
+Such victories of the global and industrial over the local, isolated and rural are heralded as the inevitable future — if there is to be a future — of our species. What would that future look like? Whom would it benefit? What would it cost? To find out, last July I caught a sleeper train from Almaty, Kazakhstan’s largest city, to the Chinese border, where I woke up in a train yard surrounded by desert.
+Khorgos is one of a cluster of villages encircling a former trading post of the ancient world called Zharkent. From Zharkent, I hoped to arrange a ride to the border. Frescoes of camel caravans flanked the entrance gate on Silk Road Avenue. In a central square stood a rainbow-colored mosque with the sweeping eaves of a Chinese pagoda and an inscription in Uighur enjoining visitors not to forget their past. Next to the mosque was the warren of chopped-up shipping containers that serves as Zharkent’s central market. Taxi drivers hung unhopefully around the watermelon stands.
+Nunur, a farmer and taxi driver whose family fled from China’s Xinjiang region into Kazakhstan when he was a child. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+Among the drivers was a farmer named Nunur, who had come to Kazakhstan from China in 1962, when he was a young boy and Kazakhstan was a Soviet Socialist Republic. That year, more than 60,000 Chinese Uighurs and Kazakhs escaped to the Soviet Union, crossing with Soviet passports they received from the consulate in Xinjiang and with the apparent cooperation of Chinese border guards. Nunur remembered his parents walking him over red hills at night toward the checkpoint at Khorgos. “They opened the border and let us go into Soviet territory,” he recalled. There were rumors that his relatives who stayed behind were imprisoned or killed. (Nunur, fearing trouble from the authorities, asked that I use only his first name.) His parents, who had raised wheat in China, found work on a collective farm. His mother became a cook while his father learned to drive tractors and Nunur to repair them. He became an expert mechanic. “I’m a master without a diploma,” he said.
+I asked Nunur to drive me to a place near the border where we could take in the booming hub of Khorgos at a glance. On the way, we passed his cornfields, apportioned to him after the breakup of the collective farm. Even as Kazakhstan modernized following its 1991 independence, growing rich by regional standards from the sale of oil and outfitting a new capital city with glossy architectural marvels, the eastern border with China remained sparsely developed, its economy dominated by livestock and grain production. Nunur said his village still had no indoor plumbing, and as we left his fields we passed some of the ruins of centralized planning the Soviets left behind: a former winery, a shuttered milk plant.
+China’s plans are significantly more ambitious, and they reach far beyond eastern Kazakhstan. The “belt” of the B.R.I. refers to the Silk Road Economic Belt, a tangle of rail and highway routes currently vining their way untidily across the continent from eastern China to Scandinavia. The “road” is the Maritime Silk Road, a shipping lane that will connect Quanzhou to Venice, with prospective stops along the way in Malaysia, Ethiopia and Egypt. To date, at least 68 countries, accounting for nearly two-thirds of the planet’s total population, have signed on to bilateral projects partly funded by China’s policy banks and other state-owned enterprises. Chinese firms are building or investing in new highways and coal-fired power plants in Pakistan, ports in Greece and Sri Lanka, gas and oil pipelines in Central Asia, an industrial city in Oman and a $6 billion railway project in Laos, which in 2017 had a G.D.P. of less than $17 billion. China’s port holdings stretch from Myanmar to Israel and from Mauritius to Belgium. It has spent an estimated $200 billion on B.R.I. projects so far, mostly in Asia, and has implied it will spend a total of $1 trillion on hundreds of projects around the world in the coming years, dwarfing the Marshall Plan by roughly an order of magnitude. When the investments from all the participating countries are combined, the estimated cost rises to $8 trillion.
+The B.R.I. is so big and multifarious that describing it can feel like trying to narrate the weather conditions of the entire planet. Some individual components span hundreds of miles and are themselves dauntingly complex and international, like the $68 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, or the stalled and scandal-mired Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar Corridor. Taken as a whole, the B.R.I. is unfathomable. But I had heard that, at Khorgos, a pioneering outpost, I could get closer than anywhere else to appreciating the scope of its aspirations.
+Nunur drove me through his village to an overlook within view of a border sentry post, a few miles from the spot where he crossed into Kazakhstan almost six decades before. We parked near a small rock-crushing plant above a valley of bright green cornfields. Beyond the fields, through a blue haze, I could see this improbable new crossroads of the global economy.
+Khorgos Gateway, a dry port where goods can be transferred among the trains crisscrossing Asia and Europe. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+The Chinese side of the border was easiest to spot. Since 2014, an instant city of 100,000 people, also called Khorgos (sometimes spelled Horgos), has appeared; its dark high-rises glittered in the sun. The Kazakh side of the border was less impressive from afar, but I knew it now hosted a first-of-its-kind free-trade zone, opened on territory shared with China. Behind a copse of cypress trees, I could also make out the gantry cranes of the new dry port — an inland shipping-and-logistics hub for freight trains — that began operating in 2015 and could soon be the largest port of its kind in the world. Adjacent to the dry port was a nascent railroad company town, and other plots nearby were cleared for factories and warehouses to be staffed by some of the future residents of the city of 100,000 that, if all goes as planned, will soon rise to match the one across the border.
+[ The Times’s special report on how China became a superpower.]
+The manager of the plant wandered over. He asked whether we wanted to get through the checkpoint, beyond which was the last village in Kazakhstan and, beyond that, China.
+We got back in the car and pulled up to two guards who stood at the gate, rifles slung over their shoulders. They looked young and bored. The manager shouted the name of one of them, who walked shyly up to the passenger-side window. It seemed as if everyone in town knew everyone else.
+“Give me some sunflower seeds,” the manager said. The guard pulled a bag from his pocket and poured seeds into the manager’s cupped hand until it overflowed. The manager explained that we wanted to see China. The guard shrugged and raised the boom gate.
+Two miles beyond the checkpoint, across a valley of farmland, a tangerine ridge signaled the start of China’s largest territory, Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region. The border was somewhere in the valley beneath us. If we kept going, we would arrive at the Chinese sentry post we could just make out at the top of a train of switchbacks. We didn’t test it, however. In recent years, the Chinese government has erected the most advanced police state in the world in Xinjiang, targeting the region’s Turkic Muslims, especially its Uighur ethnic group, who make up about half the region’s population. As part of what Chinese Communist Party literature describes as “de-extremification” efforts to combat terrorism, authorities have created an exclusion zone of state surveillance, arbitrary mass internment, brainwashing and torture that covers an area more than four times the size of Germany and includes a population almost as big as Australia’s. According to the United States State Department, between 800,000 and two million people, or up to 15 percent of Xinjiang’s Muslim population, have been incarcerated in a growing network of more than 1,000 concentration camps.
+Zharkent’s central market, where chopped-up shipping containers are repurposed into stalls. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+You couldn’t see any of that from our perch at the border. Everything looked peaceful. To our left, a shepherd’s path ascended into white-capped mountains where herdsmen grazed sheep and cattle in summer, far above the fields of corn and sunflowers. To our right, beyond the ridge, the high-modernist future of international commerce was springing up out of the ground. You could squint and imagine you were looking at a time-lapse photo of the entire history of collective human activity, from the first wandering goat-herder all the way to the present.
+China has never released any official map of Belt and Road routes nor any list of approved projects, and it provides no exact count of participating nations or even guidelines on what it means to be a participant. But this fuzziness may be one of its defining advantages. Rather than a list of megaprojects and bilateral deals, some of which might stumble or fail, the B.R.I. can be understood as a vaguely visible hand guiding all the interlocking developments in infrastructure, energy and trade where China plays any kind of role.
+It is also a framework through which China’s leaders can present virtually any component of its foreign policy, from a soda-ash plant in Turkey to China’s first foreign military base, in Djibouti, as part of a nonthreatening vision of what party representatives like to call “win win” global development. In recent years, China has floated several expansions of President Xi Jinping’s initial Belt and Road vision that make its scope seem all but limitless: the “Digital Silk Road” into the frontiers of the virtual, the “Pacific Silk Road” to South America, and the Arctic-crossing “Silk Road on Ice.” Xi himself has meanwhile extolled the merits of globalization at Davos and worked to brand his “project of the century” as a natural extension of the spontaneous trade routes that once laced across the Eurasian continent.
+Critics have described the B.R.I. as a new kind of colonialism or even part of a strategy of “debt-trap diplomacy,” seducing cash-poor countries with infrastructure projects that are unlikely to generate enough revenue to cover the interest on the loans that funded them. That is the unhappy situation at the China-funded Port of Hambantota in Sri Lanka, which the China Harbor Engineering Company took over after Sri Lanka fell behind on debt service. The Center for Global Development lists eight countries that face high risk of “debt distress” from B.R.I. projects that they can’t afford.
+[Read about China’s growing influence in Latin America.]
+Kazakhstan is poised to play a literally central role in China’s plan. The B.R.I. was first announced in Astana, at a 2013 ceremony attended by Xi and Kazakhstan’s longtime president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. At the same event, Xi and Nazarbayev also celebrated the opening of a joint gas pipeline and signed $30 billion worth of trade and investment agreements. Although in the past Kazakhstan’s economy has tended to orbit Russia’s, in 2007 China edged out Russia as Kazakhstan’s top importer, and some critics fear that the B.R.I. is leading the country deeper into economic vassalage. “Some people think that China is too big,” Nygmet Ibadildin, an assistant professor of international relations at Kimep University, in Almaty, told me. “Kazakh people want a win-win with the B.R.I., but in these situations China wins more often.”
+The Nurkent workers’ settlement. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+Even in a country with few meaningful democratic rights, there are risks to courting foreign investment. In 2016, a proposed law that would have permitted parcels of farmland to be leased to Chinese companies sparked nationwide protests, leading Nazarbayev to table the measure.
+The human rights crisis in Xinjiang has not helped China’s standing in Kazakhstan, either, although the Kazakh government has been careful not to make any public statements that might alienate an important economic partner. While diplomats may be negotiating on behalf of ethnic Kazakhs in Xinjiang behind closed doors — in January, the Kazakh foreign ministry announced that China would allow 2,000 ethnic Kazakhs to give up their citizenship and cross the border into Kazakhstan — the government is not letting the presence of a prison state across the border interfere with its collaboration with China.
+That may be largely thanks to the immediate economic concerns of both states, not to mention a shared penchant for autocracy, but it may also owe something to the unprecedented nature of the B.R.I. In many participating countries, the project’s very novelty seems to lend itself to gauzy optimism. In September, the Chinese state-run media group People’s Daily commemorated the fifth anniversary of the B.R.I. with a music video modeled after Coca-Cola’s famous 1971 “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” TV spot. The new video featured altered lyrics like “I’d like to build the world a road/And furnish it with love,” sung by smiling representatives of dozens of participant nations, decked out in ruquns, hijabs and dashikis. Rather than defining the initiative in any concrete way, the video slyly co-opts Coke’s ability to serve as empty cipher, meaning anything to anyone. Whatever it is, the B.R.I. is “what the world needs today/It’s the real thing.”
+Khorgos Gateway rises out of the flat desert basin, a pale yellow moon base of cranes and storage silos into which, every so often, a freight train slowly rolls. A trio of rail-mounted gantry cranes loomed 50 feet overhead as I arrived on a damp, overcast morning. Khorgos Gateway may be the most advanced port in Central Asia, but it retains some of eastern Kazakhstan’s rustic atmosphere. When I walked into the lobby of the dry port’s main offices, a security guard was handing out apples he had picked in his garden.
+The chief executive of Khorgos Gateway, Zhaslan Khamzin, welcomed me into a tidy office overlooking the freight yard. “The future lies here,” he said proudly. Khorgos was blessed by its position in the middle of Eurasia. “Look at a map, and you’ll see China on one side, Europe on the other, Russia to the north and the Caucasus and Iran to the east. Why am I pointing this out? Precisely because 90 percent of cargo traffic to these countries is currently made by sea.”
+Tourist attractions at the International Center for Border Cooperation, a free-trade zone straddling the Chinese-Kazakh border. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+Since the dry port’s inaugural train passed through in 2015, Khamzin said, companies who manufacture goods in China have begun to recognize the advantages of a modernized overland trade route across Asia. The dry port has transferred John Deere combines to Azerbaijan, he claimed, and Hewlett-Packard parts to Western Europe. He added that it may be much cheaper to ship containers by sea, but it can take more than three times as long, and air transit is the most expensive by far. By contrast, a container passing through Khorgos can travel from a Chinese point of origin to Europe in about 14 days, faster than the sea and cheaper than the air. “We’re going to be a central distribution point,” he concluded. If all goes well, according to company forecasts, in a few years Khorgos Gateway will be the largest dry port in the world.
+Out in the shipping yard, wild dogs sniffed at stacked containers. It started to rain. A train had just pulled into port, and workers in yellow slickers were jogging out to meet it. Friendship between nations notwithstanding, Chinese border authorities are tight-lipped about freight schedules. The port sometimes learns about an impending arrival only an hour before it appears on the horizon, whereupon a swift ballet of machine and human movement begins. A siren blared as a gantry crane began to creep toward me through the mist. The three 41-ton cranes straddled six rail lines — three are the wide-gauge rails that stretch across the post-Soviet world from Helsinki to Ulaanbaatar; three are the standard gauge used in both China and Europe — and from my perspective they appeared to tower impossibly over the mountains around us. From a dangling control booth, a crane operator lowered containers onto their beds with dull-eyed expertise.
+[What the world’s emptiest international airport says about China.]
+The national railway company of Kazakhstan owns 51 percent of Khorgos Gateway. The remaining 49 percent is split between two Chinese state-owned companies. Khamzin viewed China’s participation not as economic imperialism but as proof of the port’s likelihood of success. The Chinese, he explained, “are the kind of people that if they saw no commercial opportunity, they wouldn’t invest here.”
+Such arrangements are less one-sided in Kazakhstan than in some of the more debt-strapped B.R.I. countries, so it’s very unlikely that what happened in Sri Lanka will happen here. But Chinese investments have in all likelihood muffled Kazakhstan’s response to the crackdown in Xinjiang.
+Each train that arrives at Khorgos has to pass through the Chinese region, which is home to 24 million people, including more than 12 million Uighurs and about 1.5 million Kazakhs. Although political unrest has troubled the region for decades, including, in recent years, a spate of knife attacks and bombings by Uighur separatists, authorities in Xinjiang have responded with brutal asymmetry, rounding up hundreds of thousands of Uighurs alongside thousands of ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz residents in a sweeping internment drive the scope of which rivals Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Their “offenses” range from open displays of religious belief — wearing a beard, praying in public, owning a Quran or refusing to smoke or eat pork — to simply traveling with or even speaking to relatives abroad. For those not yet detained, Xinjiang has become a dystopian zone of extralegal checkpoints, patrols, GPS tracking and random home inspections.
+A Kazakh man carting goods out of the I.C.B.C. Local ‘‘carriers’’ regularly help shoppers circumvent customs limitations on purchases. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+Some experts say the camps and other security measures are partly in reaction to the increased freight traffic across Xinjiang, much of which now comes through Khorgos Gateway. “The role of Xinjiang has changed greatly with the B.R.I.,” Adrian Zenz, an academic expert on China’s minority policy, told me. China’s B.R.I. ambitions have transformed Xinjiang from a fringe territory into what party leaders call a “core region” of development. That’s why awareness of the camps among people in places like Kazakhstan was such an issue, Zenz said. “It has significant potential to cast a very negative light on the Belt and Road.”
+After my tour of the dry port, I headed a mile down the road to Nurkent, a newly built town of low bungalows and apartment blocks. For all its symbolic importance, Khorgos Gateway is still a modest operation; if it were a United States seaport, its 2018 throughput would place it somewhere around the 26th-largest in the country, beneath the ports of Mobile, Ala.; Boston; and Gulfport, Miss. There are just 190 employees, which Khamzin said was close to capacity, and most of them live in Nurkent, alongside railroad workers, police officers, border guards, customs officials and other agents of the new frontier. Except for the cawing of crows nesting within an apartment building’s crumbling gables, the town was silent. During a visit to the region in 2016, Nazarbayev predicted the population would grow and merge with Zharkent to form a large city, but this was hard to visualize. The site of a planned expansion was marked by a roundabout with a tiered silver gateway — the “2001” obelisk as imagined by Frank Gehry — through whose arch I could see only an untended field of scrubland.
+As I stood looking at the archway, a car pulled up. A man in straw hat and sandals hoisted himself out of the passenger side. “I guard this place,” he said. He uncoiled a hose on the ground and began watering the grass around the gate. “This is the double door to the future of Nurkent, where the city will rise up.”
+Khorgos’s other major landmark is a boomtown of open borders known as the International Center for Boundary Cooperation, or I.C.B.C., which China and Kazakhstan established in 2011 about six miles from the dry port. Here it is not only the goods that move freely back and forth but also the people. In this duty- and visa-free zone, Kazakh citizens willing to brave the hourlong wait at customs control are permitted to enter a walled section of the Chinese side of Khorgos across the border to buy cheap linens and electronics, and Chinese tourists may enter a walled leisure area inside Kazakhstan to buy souvenirs and eat Kazakh delicacies like shashlik and laghman.
+A United Nations human rights panel describes the entirety of Xinjiang as a “massive internment camp,” but that didn’t stop workers I met at the dry port from suggesting I cross into China by way of the I.C.B.C. Khorgos Gateway and the I.C.B.C. are the products of special economic development zones set up in coordination with China: industrial and commercial arenas designed to foster jobs and investments. There are dozens of such zones within China — the first, Shenzhen, is now a megacity of more than 12 million people — but Khorgos is the first to exist partly outside China’s own borders. That will soon change. Chinese officials have announced plans to build 50 more international zones in countries from Algeria to Vietnam.
+The night train that runs between Almaty, Kazakhstan, and the eastern terminus, Altynkol. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+At Khorgos, the I.C.B.C. seems intended to complement the dry port’s vision of frictionless trade with an equivalent vision of borderless commerce, even if most Kazakhs understand the project as a wholesale depot for cheaply made Chinese goods. A popular hustle among shopkeepers from Almaty is to hire one of the locals who wait outside the I.C.B.C., and who are euphemistically called “carriers,” to help circumvent the weight limits on imports. By all accounts, customs officials tend to look the other way.
+My state-assigned guide picked me up at my hotel in Zharkent in a sleek Mercedes sedan that he drove as if we had just robbed a bank. “Are you nervous?” he asked, laughing, as we careered around a watermelon truck. His name was Marat Abaiuly. If the I.C.B.C. was the most important of China’s outposts in Kazakhstan, Abaiuly was its ambassador, the handsome liaison to opinion makers and potential investors. He made his power known by blowing through checkpoints with a friendly honk or, if necessary, by leaping out of the car to grip the soldier on duty by the forearm.
+It was 10 in the morning, and a line of wholesalers and hopeful carriers had formed beyond a fence topped with concertina wire. Bus drivers reclined inside their open cargo holds, chain-smoking and preparing to nap through the day. Inside the customs-control building, a construction worker was destroying the tile floor with a jackhammer. Improvised lines formed around the rubble.
+China is said to be spending billions of dollars building up its side of Khorgos. By contrast, Kazakhstan’s share of the I.C.B.C. is mostly a dream of the future. Projects like a constellation of luxury hotels, a sports complex and a Disneyland-style theme park called Happy Land Khorgos have languished for lack of funding. Fields of rubble and stalled construction projects are scattered among the few small retail buildings and the yurt-shaped gift shops that are the Kazakh side’s most distinctive feature.
+In recent years, the name Khorgos has instead become synonymous among Kazakhs with smuggling rings and high-profile corruption cases. In 2011, authorities arrested the head of customs at Khorgos as part of a larger takedown of a $130 billion smuggling ring. In 2016, the former head of the I.C.B.C. was caught on tape accepting a $1 million bribe for a construction bid. Locals do not tend to figure in these public scandals, but based on the crowds I saw in front of the border checkpoint, informal gray-market carrying at Khorgos seems to have replaced animal husbandry as the region’s main line of work. “Most locals work at the I.C.B.C. carrying cargo,” the chief executive of an Almaty-based truck transport company later told me, describing the work as a kind of pseudolegal smuggling. “That’s how they make money.”
+Kazakhs in the mountains above Khorgos preparing to play their national sport, kokpar, in which they will try to put a headless goat carcass into a goal. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+Abaiuly arranged for an I.C.B.C. van to drive us across the open border into China, where the main attractions for visiting Kazakhs are four large, windowless malls. The malls are honeycombed with shops where women of all ages and a few older men sell underwear, electronics and an array of other inexpensive products under fluorescent lights. One mall was dedicated entirely to fur coats, a gift of ritual significance in Kazakhstan, particularly between in-laws at weddings. It was early, and there were no customers anywhere. Floor after floor of identical shops stood empty, their racks of odorless pelts doubled and tripled by wall-length mirrors.
+Some workers I met were Chinese citizens from Xinjiang. I had heard that, in some towns, even talking to a journalist is considered grounds for detention, so I didn’t say much, and I was relieved to come across an outspoken furrier from Kazakhstan, Zhannur Erkenkyzy, who had worked at the border for six months. She got the job because she could speak Chinese, Russian, Uighur and Kazakh. She was also the store’s model, she said, and she showed me her Instagram page, on which she appeared nestled inside the furs of minks, foxes and beavers, although at the moment she was wearing no fur at all, just a black cocktail dress that reflected no light.
+Erkenkyzy said she worked seven days a week unless she happened to ask for a day off. The time involved in crossing the unpredictable border meant that the job occupied most of her waking life, of which one highlight was catching thieves. “When we see a shoplifter, we put on red armbands and beat them with sticks,” she said excitedly. Abaiuly interrupted, whispering in low, snappy Russian: “Why are you saying such nasty stuff about us to the reporter?”
+Back on the Kazakh side, we wandered the yurts, which were staffed by Chinese clerks who spoke no Russian or Kazakh. Tourists were milling about inside one of them, browsing rows of instant coffee, jade eggs and taxidermic hawks and antelopes. Outside, a row of golf carts and one stretch limousine waited to take the tourists back. I watched a group of women in ankle-length skirts cross a moonscape of rocks, heading toward China and dragging uselessly wheeled luggage behind them. When I asked Abaiuly about the prevalence of the carriers, he smiled. “On that subject I cannot speak,” he said.
+At an outdoor restaurant, I met a shashlik cook who lived inside one of the yurts where Chinese tourists ate. He left and re-entered the I.C.B.C. once a week to stay out of legal trouble, and said it was cheaper than living anywhere else.
+Zhannur Erkenkyzy, a Kazakh furrier and an in-house model who works on the Chinese side of the I.C.B.C. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+One way to read the history of Central Asia is as a record of interactions between the mounted nomads who were long the primary occupants of the Eurasian Steppe and the sedentary populations who lived among them. As late as the 1930s, the dominant activity on the steppe was pastoral: herding sheep, goats and other livestock. Herders roamed in large, shifting clans on either side of the Tian Shan and Altai ranges, traveling on horseback and occasionally fragmenting or forming political alliances. These nomadic hordes proved unconquerable until the late 18th century, when they began to fall to Chinese conquest and, in what is now Kazakhstan, to Russian — later Soviet — rule.
+In 1929, the leaders of the Soviet Union determined that Kazakhstan’s pastoral work force would go to work on farms. This forced collectivization was framed as a civilizing mission to modernize a population whom many Russians had long viewed as primitive barbarians. Land formerly devoted to grazing was irrigated and turned over to wheat production, with the immediate result that around 90 percent of the country’s livestock died. The subsequent famine caused the deaths of one-quarter of the population of Kazakhstan and anywhere from one-quarter to one-half of all ethnic Kazakhs, a human-made catastrophe that ended nomadism as it had been practiced in the region for thousands of years. Kazakhs became a minority in the nation the Soviets had founded in their name.
+Nomadic pastoralism remains central to Kazakh mythology — Nazarbayev describes himself as “the son, grandson and great-grandson of herders” — but as a practice it has retreated to the periphery of the country’s economy. Most of the surviving herders in this part of Kazakhstan practice a form of seminomadism known as transhumance, alternating between winters in a low-altitude village and summers in a pasture, or zhailau, in the mountains. I wondered how those in the mountains above Khorgos were reacting to the economic foment that had emerged around their winter homes. One morning I visited a village of herders in the Zhongar Alatau, a northern stretch of the Tian Shan named for the last nomadic khanate to rule over the steppes of western China.
+It was Friday, and most of the men were at the village mosque. I asked the local damkeeper’s son, who said his name was Turar, to take me farther into the mountains where families graze their herds throughout the summer. I got into Turar’s old Lada four-wheel drive, and we rattled and bounced up the edge of a steep bank that commanded a wide prospect of sand dunes and crumpled foothills. Hawks gyred overhead. I thought to myself that the beauty of Kazakhstan defied description, but Turar, who had lived here all his life, managed to capture its pristine emptiness. “It’s like a screen,” he said cryptically. Then, to clarify: “Like a computer. Like the Windows screen.”
+To reach the zhailau, we left Turar’s car at the dam where his family controls the flow of snowmelt and mountain spring through a Soviet-era irrigation canal. Before long, we arrived at an emerald slope where a single yurt sat embosomed in alpine lushness. Turar said this area was called the Black Gorge.
+Cousins Arsen Akhatay and Temirlan Kamil in Kazakhstan. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+A friend of Turar’s emerged from the yurt, blinking at the sun. His name was Arsen Akhatay, and he’d been napping. Every spring, he helped drive the family livestock, a few hundred sheep and 50 cows and horses, up to the zhailau and tended them. He returned to the village when school started in the fall, leaving his parents to drive the animals back down. In between, there was a lot of free time. Sometimes he passed it playing kokpar, a popular Central Asian sport in which players fight over a headless goat carcass while on horseback. Akhatay was the attacker on his local team and was meant to be at training camp this week for nationals, but he’d fallen sick instead. He surveyed his sheep without enthusiasm. Each was labeled in resin with a large “5” marking it as a member of his family’s flock. A solar panel staked into the ground near the doorway to the yurt powered a Chinese-made radio and a four-inch TV set. Turar gestured farther into the gorge, where Akhatay’s family pastured their horses a mile or so in, and said that if you kept on in that direction, you’d hit China.
+Akhatay was wearing a blue camouflage jacket, the kind worn by Kazakh police officers on field exercises. His cousin came out of the yurt wearing the same thing. During the school year they lived in a village near Zharkent called Turpan. Akhatay, who was about to start his senior year of high school, said he did not intend to look after sheep his whole life. I asked whether he wanted a job at Khorgos.
+“Many people from the village work at the border as carriers,” he said. “There are many official jobs but also many unofficial.” All things being equal, he said, he wanted an official one. When he graduated, he planned to enroll at the military institute in Almaty to become a border guard.
+On our drive down the mountain there was nothing to displease the eye, and before long we arrived at yet another small mountain village of white birches and potato gardens. Turar parked the car by a water pump and introduced me to a former classmate, a Kazakh named Zholaman Tashimkhan, who had come out to greet us.
+We sat on the curb near the pump. Like Arsen, Tashimkhan spent most of the summer up in the mountains, but he was older and had already been drawn to the jobs at the border. He worked for a year for the railroad, a good job that is hard to come by through normal channels — “I used my connections,” he said, and laughed — but then his sister’s husband found him work as a carrier. “It’s not an official job,” he said. “Not a public job.”
+The trial of Sayragul Sauytbay, behind glass, a Chinese-born Kazakh woman who requested political asylum in Kazakhstan after fleeing Xinjiang. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+A few men from the village began to gather around the pump as we talked. Tashimkhan explained that he had worked for a wholesaler based in Zharkent, crossing into the I.C.B.C. four or five days a week to bring household products, mostly bedsheets and linens, back into Kazakhstan. He was paid according to how much he managed to get through customs. On an average day, he might earn $15 or $20 — good money — and occasionally as much as $60. Customs enforcement was lax. “For us, you talk to the official working there, and you just bring things out,” he said.
+More villagers had come out to the road until they completed a circle around us. Tashimkhan changed the subject, then joked with a friend that he was starting to think he would regret talking to me. An older man who had been pacing the street squatted down beside us and began conspicuously sharpening a sickle a few inches from my head. Turar suggested it was time for us to continue down the mountain. We got into the Lada and drove off.
+The great commonplace of our time also happens to be true: The world is more connected than ever before. But if it is more connected, the world is also more administered — its people more coerced and surveilled, more susceptible to the designs of authoritarian leaders and more dependent on the fortunes of mercurial international markets — than at any point in human history. If the first fact has made some parts of the world freer, the second has made the rest of it less so.
+A continuing trial at the local courthouse in Zharkent underscored this inversion, which seemed to me to lie at the heart of the developments at Khorgos. The case concerned Sayragul Sauytbay, a Chinese-born Kazakh woman who had fled Xinjiang and was requesting political asylum in Kazakhstan. Before the crackdown in Xinjiang, ethnic Kazakhs freely crossed the border to visit friends and relatives. But in 2016, as crossings became increasingly fraught, Sauytbay’s husband and two children decided to move permanently to Kazakhstan. Sauytbay, who was working in Xinjiang as a kindergarten director, remained in China with plans to join them; the rest of the family became Kazakh citizens in 2017. For more than a year, they met only in the free-trade zone at the I.C.B.C.
+On April 5, 2018, without telling anyone, Sauytbay entered the I.C.B.C. with forged identity papers, then slipped into Kazakhstan by posing as a member of a tour group. A few weeks later, she was arrested and charged with entering the country illegally, and then her story began to emerge. Not long after her family had left China, Sauytbay was assigned to work at one of Xinjiang’s notorious detention camps. In her testimony, she described it as “a prison in the mountains,” with high walls and barbed wire that kept in some 2,500 inmates. She said she was forced by authorities to accept a teaching job there, indoctrinating the inmates in state propaganda, and she was warned that the penalty for revealing any information about the camps was death. The authorities confiscated her passport.
+Sauytbay and her son following her unexpected release by the courts. Her legal status remains uncertain. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+At her trial, Sauytbay provided some of the earliest testimony about life in Xinjiang’s camps. Her case made headlines in Kazakhstan’s national newspapers. She was married to a Kazakh citizen and was herself a “returnee,” a member of the diaspora of ethnic Kazakhs the government has been courting for years. But now prosecutors at Sauytbay’s trial were arguing that she should be deported back to China, where she claimed she would be arrested or even killed for having made public her knowledge of the camps.
+Most people I’d met in Almaty seemed to think she had little chance of receiving asylum, much less Kazakh citizenship. The acquittal rate in criminal trials in Kazakhstan is around 1 percent, and hasn’t changed since the days of the Soviet Union. There was also the B.R.I. to consider. Kazakhstan might decide Chinese investment was more important than any international agreements on refugees. It wouldn’t be the first time a country was so swayed. In 2017, Greece vetoed a European Union statement criticizing China’s human rights record at the United Nations, a decision that critics linked to China’s controlling interest not just in Greece’s largest port but also in its public power grid. In January, China hosted a Silk Road Celebrity China Tour, inviting journalists from six B.R.I. partner countries — Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka — on a highly choreographed tour of a “vocational center” in Kashgar, another famous stop on the ancient Silk Road. According to the state-run Xinhua news agency, the visitors uniformly “praised the development and stability” of Xinjiang. An editor from Bangladesh singled out the region’s contributions “to the nonoccurrence of violence and terrorism.”
+My last day in town coincided with what turned out to be the last day of Sauytbay’s trial. About 100 supporters had risen early and driven out from Almaty to the courthouse, which was opposite a park where marble busts of Soviet heroes watched over a playground. When the courtroom opened, the crowd crushed against the glass doors. I made it through with a handful of other reporters thanks to some strategic shoving by a few veteran activists; most of the crowd remained on the courthouse steps.
+As the proceedings began, Sauytbay’s lawyer introduced into evidence a copy of the asylum application that she had just filed. Both the judge and prosecutor interrogated Sauytbay, who from behind a clear protective wall related how, when she was arrested by the Kazakh police, an official told her that she would be sent back to China to die and her children would become orphans.
+Sauytbay freely admitted she’d escaped China illegally. She was willing to serve a prison sentence. She just didn’t want to be sent back. “There is no reason for me to live if I am not with my children,” she told the judge. Her family sat across the room, near an open window through which we could hear the crowd murmuring outside.
+The view from a summer pasture, or zhailau, for seminomadic Kazakhs in the Tian Shan mountain range. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times
+The prosecution had previously rejected any kind of a plea deal. So what happened next was that rare thing: a dramatic courtroom reversal. In a closing statement, the prosecutor cited the outpouring of support the case had received across Kazakhstan. She requested that the judge allow Sauytbay to serve out a period of probation at her husband’s house. “I ask you not to apply deportation,” she said. “I ask you to set her free in the courtroom.” Sauytbay’s eyes went wide. Her lawyer, who seemed stunned, agreed. A few moments later, sounds of cheering rang out on the courthouse steps.
+“I was surprised the law was kept,” Rysbek Sarsenbay, a prominent opposition activist, told me later. He reasoned that the government must have weighed the consequences of deporting Sauytbay carefully against the risk of alienating China’s leadership. “Even as a dictatorship,” he said, “Kazakhstan must honor its international commitments.”
+Once the judge issued the expected ruling — prosecutors and judges in Kazakhstan rarely disagree — Sauytbay was ushered from the courthouse to the top of the steps, where she embraced her son and thanked President Nazarbayev for his beneficence. A poet took the stage to extemporize a victory verse in Kazakh. The crowd repaired to a restaurant a few miles outside Zharkent, where a spontaneous release party began with the singing of the national anthem. Waiters descended with plates of beshbarmak, a national dish of boiled noodles and horse meat in onion sauce. When Sauytbay arrived, holding her son in her arms, everyone stood up and clapped. She told me she hoped her testimony would “shine a light of hope” for her compatriots in China. “They know there is a country that will always protect them,” she said.
+The celebration may have been premature. As Sauytbay later told The Globe and Mail of Toronto, within a day of her release, her sister and two friends were arrested in Xinjiang — they have since disappeared into camps — and in October Kazakhstan denied Sauytbay’s asylum claim. For the time being, she is living at home with her family, but her legal status in Kazakhstan is uncertain.
+Even if she manages to avoid deportation, Sauytbay is one of thousands of people with ties to Kazakhstan who have found themselves caught up in Xinjiang’s detention centers. At the release party, I found myself sitting next to a Kazakh woman named Qarlyghash Ziparova, whose nephew, a former Xinjiang official named Askar Azatbek, had disappeared inside the ostensibly neutral free trade zone of the I.C.B.C. Azatbek, who had become a Kazakh citizen a few months earlier, entered the I.C.B.C. in 2017 with a friend, whereupon a group of men drove up in two cars and detained them. The friend was released, but Azatbek was hauled off. They hadn’t even been on the Chinese side, the friend had said. Ziparova tried to complain to authorities in Kazakhstan, but without any luck. The I.C.B.C. told her there was no surveillance video, although she didn’t believe it. She didn’t understand how a Kazakh citizen could be taken away by China like that — without even a trial.
+The ancient Silk Road was equal parts trade route and social network. The routes themselves were in constant flux and administered by no one, and they succeeded through incremental growth and local knowledge in response to changing needs — the exact opposite of the Ozymandian ambitions and sweeping autocratic statecraft that characterize the Belt and Road. For all its potential to create jobs and modernize infrastructures, the project has also created a halo of mass internment camps for the powerless and gray-market economies for the poor. While new official jobs in Khorgos are lifting a lucky few out of poverty, it is far more common to find farmers and herders moonlighting as taxi drivers, security guards or smugglers, part of a precarious network of low-paid freelancers. Such work is susceptible by design to sudden changes in enforcement and depends on a constant influx of disposable workers. It seemed like a high cost for connecting the world.
+I hired a taxi to drive me back to Almaty. We took a new highway that opened last year, part of a growing highway system affiliated with the B.R.I. and known as the Western Europe-Western China International Transit Corridor. The highway cuts the travel time in half, from six hours to just over three hours, and driving atop it felt like riding an air-hockey puck. There were no rest stops or gas stations, and the few landmarks I could see stood at an unobtrusive distance. They included an old train station, a pumping house for a Chinese oil pipeline and the alien forms of a half-built wind farm courtesy of SANY Group, the Chinese manufacturing behemoth. As the sun became a narrow red eye on the horizon, a dust storm descended the cliffs to our left and crossed the road into empty veld. There were no cars in sight. It was less a road than the idea of a road.
+The driver didn’t know anything about the trial whose outcome I had just seen. He had never heard of Sayragul Sauytbay. He was happy to have such a fine new highway on which to drive his customers back and forth between Khorgos and Almaty. Kazakhstan, we agreed, was a beautiful country. He pointed to some fields he said would be full of cattle in the fall, then opened the sunroof and stuck his hand into the night air.
+This article was researched with support from New York University’s Matthew Power Literary Reporting Award.WEDNESDAY PUZZLE — My idea of torture would be to have someone make me something delicious to eat and then, just as I was about to take a bite, take it away. An even worse scenario would be if the delicious food departed of its own accord.
+But that’s silly, especially because there is no way for that to happen in Emily Carroll’s punny puzzle.
+Is there?
+Tricky Clues
+The clues were kind today, enabling me to jump right in and get the theme entry, GRAPE LEAVES, right away. On the other hand, Greek food is tucked neatly in the refrigerator inside the kitchen of my wheelhouse, so maybe that was just me.
+The vocabulary definitely makes this a Wednesday puzzle, though. It helps to know what an APIARY and a SCOW are, who KOOL and the Gang were, what the name of the seaport near Buenos Aires is, what AREPAS are, and so on. It also helps to know basic French and Spanish terms.French report on restitution of tribal art has dealers nervous
+Belgium and France — two of the largest former colonial powers in Africa — are central trading hubs for artworks from sub-Saharan Africa. And dealers are alarmed by a November report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron of France that recommends French museums permanently return artworks removed from Africa without consent, if their countries of origin ask for them back.
+Effects: The impact of the report so far is unclear, but dealers are grousing about possible implications for their bottom lines and insisting their trade is moral. They also wonder what the report means for collections like that of the Africa Museum in Belgium, many of whose 120,000 items were acquired during a brutal campaign by Belgian colonial leaders that killed millions of Congolese.
+One take: Didier Claes, a tribal art trader in Brussels of Congolese ancestry, was critical of the report and said that, as a member of the African diaspora, he appreciated being able to see his heritage in European museums. “I’m so proud to go to an important museum and see my culture next to a Modigliani,” he said.
+Looking ahead: Mr. Macron has called for an international conference to be held in Paris this year to develop a policy based on exchanges of artifacts. Sharing, rather than restitution, could prove to be the preferred solution for problematic objects.The Trump Organization said late Tuesday that it was implementing a system to weed out undocumented immigrants who try to get jobs at its properties. The move followed reports in The New York Times last month that the president’s company was employing people at its flagship golf club in New Jersey who are in the country illegally.
+“We are actively engaged in uniforming this process across our properties and will institute E-verify at any property not currently utilizing this system,’’ Eric Trump, an executive vice president of the company, said in a statement. “As a company we take this obligation very seriously and when faced with a situation in which an employee has presented false and fraudulent documentation, we will take appropriate action.”
+Thousands of employers have enrolled voluntarily in the government’s E-Verify electronic system, which checks documents provided by new hires against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records. A mismatch suggests that the person is unauthorized to work.
+All federal contractors must use E-Verify, and 22 states require at least some private and public employers to do so. The federal E-Verify database suggested that the Trump Organization did not use heightened employment document verification procedures at several of its properties, meaning that the chances of employing undocumented workers was high.Anthony Stolarz made a career-high 38 saves, and Oskar Lindblom scored the lone goal Tuesday night as the Philadelphia Flyers defeated the host Rangers, 1-0.
+Lindblom scored in the first period for the Flyers, who have won five straight. The Rangers had a three-game winning streak snapped.
+Stolarz, who grew up about 35 miles from Madison Square Garden in Edison, N.J., recorded his second N.H.L. shutout. He was making his first appearance for the Flyers since he sustained a lower-body injury Dec. 15.
+The Rangers peppered him throughout a third period, outshooting the Flyers by 13-4. Stolarz stopped Brendan Smith at point-blank range with 2 minutes 2 seconds left and survived a fluky opportunity with 57 seconds remaining, when Vladislav Namestnikov’s redirection bounced over the top of the net.MANILA — A grenade was lobbed into a mosque in the southern Philippines before dawn on Wednesday, killing two Muslim religious leaders, in the second attack in days on a place of worship in the restive south, officials said.
+The attack, in the city of Zamboanga, occurred three days after a bombing at a cathedral on the nearby island of Jolo, which killed 20 people outright. More than 100 people were wounded in that attack, one of whom died on Tuesday, bringing the death toll to 21.
+The police said it was too soon to identify a motive for the Wednesday mosque attack.
+The country’s defense secretary, Delfin Lorenzana, said it was “unlikely” that the two bombings were connected.
+“We’re still looking at it, but we haven’t seen any connection,” Mr. Lorenzana told reporters, discounting the possibility that the mosque attack was revenge for the cathedral bombing. “The president has said in Jolo that the Christians and Muslims have been coexisting for a hundred years and there have never been revenge attacks.”Sandy Alderson, who left his post as the Mets’ general manager last summer because of a cancer recurrence, will return to his baseball roots now that his health has improved.
+The Oakland Athletics announced on Tuesday that Alderson, 71, would rejoin the club as a senior adviser in the baseball operations department, two decades after he left the team in the hands of Billy Beane.
+Alderson announced on Saturday at the New York Baseball Writers’ Awards dinner, where he received an award honoring his career, that he had been cancer-free for four months. He received a standing ovation.
+Alderson began his baseball career with the A’s in 1981 and was one of the sport’s pioneers in sabermetrics. Back then, he counseled Beane, his successor, whose reliance on advanced statistics kept the small-market team competitive and was famously documented in the book “Moneyball.”A “Star Wars” spinoff is on TNT. And Brad Bird’s superhero family sequel hits Netflix.
+What’s on TV
+ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY (2016) 7 p.m. on TNT. Disney and Lucasfilm may have marketed this “Star Wars” story as an offshoot, but fans of the galaxy way, way out there will find many familiar things here: Yes, there are impossibly big spaceships looming over the plains of far-off planets; yes, our heroes have smaller, rustier laser guns than their clean, evil opponents; and yes, there’s a witty robot chiming in at inopportune moments to tell them the odds. (He’s played, through motion capture, by Alan Tudyk.) Felicity Jones stars as Jyn Erso, a young woman who becomes involved with heroic resistance fighters while the Death Star is being built. Forest Whitaker plays Jyn’s mentor, a galactic extremist. Jyn’s rebel crew includes: Diego Luna as a resistance fighter, Riz Ahmed as a pilot and Donnie Yen as a blind monk. “The cast is wonderful,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. But the movie that this fine ensemble operates in, Scott cautions, is “thoroughly mediocre.”
+THE WOLVERINE (2013) 5 p.m. on FX. The director James Mangold brings an artful, small-scale sensibility to the X-Men franchise with this film, which stars Hugh Jackman as Wolverine, the clawed antihero, in Japan, where he battles samurai and a guilty conscience. “A modest superhero picture may sound like a contradiction in terms,” A. O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times. “But really it is a welcome respite.”The man pauses. He shuffles the bills, and chooses a purple £20. He slips it inside the bucket, and hurries after his group. He picks up the refrain effortlessly. He is back to taunting Shearer, and Newcastle, before Corcoran has even had a chance to thank him.
+Over the next hour or so, dozens of fans stop at the same spot. Some donate money. Some come bearing bags of groceries, filled to the brim with canned fruit and breakfast cereals and dried pasta, to be dropped off at the makeshift booth behind Corcoran.
+Today is not a special occasion: the same thing happens every time Newcastle plays at home. So acute is the hunger in Newcastle now, so intense is the demand, that Corcoran, and a handful of other volunteers, do this every two weeks.
+Everything they raise — and they have raised a lot, somewhere in the region of £200,000 ($258,000), they believe — is sent to the West End Food Bank, in one of Newcastle’s most deprived areas. It is the largest institution of its kind in Britain. “We can’t have people in this city starving,” Corcoran said. “It is a badge of shame.”
+That dire state of affairs is not, though, unique to Newcastle. The demand for food banks in Britain has soared in recent years: the Trussell Trust, which runs more than 400 such programs, said it distributed some 1.3 million food parcels from its centers in the fiscal year ending in March , an increase of 13 percent.Before reading the article:
+In the article you are about to read, the Trump administration contends that the United States and China are in an “arms race” to control fifth-generation cellular networks — known as 5G. What do you know about 5G?
+For some context, here is the opening to “What Is 5G? Here’s What You Need to Know About the New Network.” Don Clark writes:
+In 2019, a big technology shift will finally begin. It’s a once-in-a-decade upgrade to our wireless systems that will start reaching mobile phone users in a matter of months. But this is not just about faster smartphones. The transition to new fifth-generation cellular networks — known as 5G for short — will also affect many other kinds of devices, including industrial robots, security cameras, drones and cars that send traffic data to one another. This new era will leap ahead of current wireless technology, known as 4G, by offering mobile internet speeds that will let people download entire movies within seconds and most likely bring big changes to video games, sports and shopping. Officials in the United States and China see 5G networks as a competitive edge. The faster networks could help spread the use of artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies.
+— Based on this information and your own knowledge, why might the United States be in a “race” with China to dominate 5G networks?
+— Make some predictions: What might the world look like if the United States controlled this new technology? What would it look like if China did?
+Now, read just the first section of the article, “In 5G Race With China, U.S. Pushes Allies to Fight Huawei” (stop when you get to “A New Red Scare?”), and answer the following questions:
+1. What are some of the ways the Trump administration is trying to prevent Huawei, China’s leading telecommunications producer, from building its 5G network?
+2. The administration contends that the world is engaged in a new “arms race.” What does it mean by that?Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who clashed with Jared Kushner during his brief stint running President Trump’s transition team, issued a sharply personal attack on Mr. Kushner’s father on Tuesday, saying he had committed a “loathsome” and “disgusting” crime.
+The former governor’s new memoir, released this week, depicts Mr. Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, as being hellbent on retribution for Mr. Christie’s prosecution of his father more than a decade ago, when Mr. Christie was a United States attorney. Mr. Christie says Stephen K. Bannon, the former Trump strategist, told him Mr. Kushner had directed his firing from the transition team, and he paints Mr. Kushner as a shadow campaign manager and chief of staff who offered questionable advice.
+Mr. Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, a multimillionaire real estate executive, pleaded guilty in 2004 to 18 counts of tax evasion, witness tampering and making illegal campaign donations. He admitted hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, who was cooperating in a federal campaign finance investigation, then videotaping the sexual encounter and sending it to the man’s wife, Mr. Kushner’s sister.
+“Mr. Kushner pled guilty, he admitted the crimes. So what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor?” Mr. Christie said in an interview on “Firing Line With Margaret Hoover” on PBS. “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister to attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”But others say that having to meet the criteria is slowing them down.
+Mr. Coleman, who grew up in regional Victoria, found that he was not eligible for government grants because he did not live in a remote area and had not been denied a loan from mainstream banks.
+He was also excluded from some grants because his business is not directly aimed at Indigenous communities. So he has funded Vets on Call with his own assets instead. He has yet to make a profit, though the app is growing.
+And many do not have assets or a financial safety net. “They haven’t got that intergenerational wealth like the Bill Gates or the Mark Zuckerbergs,” said Dean Foley, 30, a Kamilaroi who founded Barayamal, a start-up accelerator for Indigenous entrepreneurs.
+Still, that has not stopped Indigenous Australians from pitching, designing and brainstorming, he said. “It’s called sweat equity. You just have to work hard.”
+It is that type of ethic that drives Ms. Uppill, whose mother, a member of what came to be known as the Stolen Generations, was taken from her home in the South Australian Flinders Ranges when she was 7.
+Ms. Uppill, who did not deeply understand her Adnyamathanha heritage until she revisited her home nation as a teenager, said she had not seen herself as an entrepreneur early on. But she was struck by the mind-set of her elders.Temperatures will plummet to minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago and minus 31 degrees in Madison, Wis., on Wednesday night — the worst cold to grip the Upper Midwest in a generation. Parts of Alaska, on the other hand, are unseasonably warm.
+What is causing such extreme weather across the United States? The polar vortex, an ominous-sounding system of wind and cold air over the North Pole, broke apart this month. Here’s how it’s bringing dangerous cold nationwide.
+The Vortex Forms ... The polar vortex spins to life every winter 10 miles above the ground, seen here on Dec. 22. Typically, it has a single center, surrounded by a wall of powerful winds. But sometimes it weakens — shifting, and even breaking into pieces. … Splits Apart … On Jan. 3, 2019, the polar vortex split into parts. It's a pattern that is happening more frequently and is often followed by severe cold and winter storms, said Judah Cohen, a climatologist at Atmospheric and Environmental Research, a weather risk-assessment firm. … Then the Cold Arrives The split takes two weeks to affect the weather: It warps the polar jet stream, bringing freezing arctic air south and warm air north. Parts of the Midwest were expected on Tuesday night to have a wind chill of minus 60 degrees.
+Dr. Cohen said extreme weather could continue for six to eight weeks after the split.
+The effects of the polar vortex could become more frequent and severe. Scientists looking at links between climate change and the polar vortex believe that the rapidly warming Arctic could bring about more intense periods of cold snaps and storms, even as winters become shorter and warmer.Bone-chilling cold is descending on the Midwest. The last time Chicago faced temperatures this low was more than 30 years ago. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has offered tips for getting yourself, your home and your car ready for winter weather. We asked people in Chicago who work in extreme cold for their practical tips for survival. Here’s what they said.
+[For the latest developments, read our Thursday live briefing on the polar vortex here.]
+Wear rubber gloves.
+Anita Ellis, a crossing guard who was stationed outside John T. McCutcheon Elementary School in Chicago on Tuesday, said that her secret weapon against the cold was hidden inside her thick winter gloves: a thin pair of rubber gloves.
+“They keep the moisture in, so the air can’t float through,” she said, adding that any kind of thin, rubbery gloves — the kind that doctors and nurses wear — are effective.
+Ms. Ellis, who works as a crossing guard one hour in the morning and one hour in the afternoon, said she had picked up the tip from her father, who owned a carwash and spent many hours of his day outside in the Chicago winter.How familiar are you with the growing world of podcasting? Do you have some favorites? What do you like about them? When and how do you tend to listen?
+If you’ve never listened to a podcast, what subjects do you think might interest you?
+Rachel Holliday Smith introduces “A Beginner’s Guide to Getting Into Podcasts” by writing:
+As a content-obsessed millennial, podcasts have long been ingrained in my daily routine. I listen while commuting, cooking, running errands, putting away laundry, washing dishes or during any relatively mindless activity that can be done while wearing wireless headphones. My bond with podcasts is so cemented that it comes as a shock when someone I meet at a party — or someone in my family, or a friend I thought I knew — tells me that they, in the year 2019, do not listen to podcasts. And never have. And don’t really get what it’s all about. And, worse, don’t quite know how to start. Their reasons range from “I don’t have time” to “It’s passed me by” to “What should I even listen to?” Luckily, those concerns are easily answered and dispatched. For anyone who wants to become a full-fledged podcast listener, here’s what you need to know to get into it, from experts who know best.
+She then goes on to give some advice, including ...
+Take the show on the road Podcasts are all about killing two birds with one stone by listening while you do other things. For Mr. Quah of Hot Pod, “that’s part of the fun of it.” “A lot of the world feels a little boring sometimes, so having that layer on top of it is great,” he said. Find the things you really want to hear ... If it feels overwhelming, it’s not just you: Though podcasts have been around for at least a decade, there’s still no central database or clearinghouse for the thousands of podcasts out there, Ms. Gerber-Margie said. “A lot of discovery happens via the way you choose to listen. There’s no ‘New York Times best-seller list,’” she said. However, big podcasting powerhouses are a great first place to look. National Public Radio produces many worthwhile podcasts, including “Invisibilia,” “Planet Money” and the daily news show “Up First.” Likewise, public radio stations across the country produce a ton of great shows, like “Last Seen” by Boston’s WBUR and “Making Obama” by Chicago’s WBEZ, and large podcasting studios — Radiotopia, Gimlet Media, Maximum Fun — will give a range of solid choices with excellent production value. (We list some of our favorite shows below.) To mix in niche or offbeat podcasts with your brand-name shows, Mr. Quah of Hot Pod suggests going the old-fashioned route: word-of-mouth endorsements. “Find your local young person who listens to podcasts and get that person to cough up a few recommendations,” he said. “Part of the pleasure is combining your listening playlist with something everybody knows and loves — like ‘This American Life’ or something like it — with something that’s roughly edited, but feels specifically for you.” For him, that means hourslong shows on N.B.A. predictions. For James T. Green, a Brooklyn-based artist and audio producer, it means experimental audio like the work showcased on “Constellations,” a Canadian audio art podcast, and “The Black Guy Who Tips,” a comedy and current events talk show created by Charlotte, N.C., husband-and-wife pair Rod and Karen Morrow. Mr. Green has listened to the couple for years, ever since a dull desk job led him to search “black podcast” in the Apple podcast directory.
+Students, read the entire article, then tell us:
+— Did you find any advice in this article especially useful? What? Why?
+— If you are already a podcast fan, tell us about some of your favorites. Would you recommend them to others? Why?
+— If you don’t know much about podcasts, did this article persuade you to try listening? What subjects do you think would interest you most?
+— Scroll through some of the recommendations given at the end of this article, or take a look at some of the top podcasts on the Stitcher app or the top-ranking shows on iTunes. Which of these look interesting? Why?
+— How is listening to a podcast different from, say, watching a TV show, listening to the radio or reading a book? Do you think instead of reading, say, “Moby-Dick,” you might enjoy a podcast in which chapters of the novel are read by different actors? Can you imagine a sports podcast that would be as interesting as watching a game live?
+— This article suggests that one way to add podcasts to your daily life is to listen while you do other things. When during your average day might you fit in listening to a podcast?
+Related: This April we’ll be running our Second Annual Student Podcasting Contest. Take a listen to some of the many teenage winners of our 2018 contest, and consider joining us this year.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.
+: someone who has been admitted to membership in a scholarly field
+_________
+The word savant has appeared in 59 articles on NYTimes.com in the past year, including on Jan. 9 in “Train Your Brain Like a Memory Champion” by Bryan Clark:
+In training like a memory champion, it’s really the visual that’s most important. Each technique we covered capitalizes on the ability to visualize memories rather than simply attempting to recall them. This, as our team of experts notes, is an exercise in futility.
+There’s nothing, physiologically speaking, separating memory athletes from people who forget where their keys are or can’t remember what they had for breakfast this morning. The difference is in the training methods, and the time spent in mastering them.
+“Overall, I’d say you definitely don’t need to be a savant to have a great memory,” Mr. Mullen said. “If you’re sincerely engaged with a few tricks up your sleeve, you might surprise yourself.”Good Wednesday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• A new American intelligence assessment of global threats concluded that North Korea is “unlikely to give up” all of its nuclear stockpiles and that Iran is not “currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-development activity” needed to make a bomb. Their conclusions challenged President Trump’s assertions on both countries.
+• As Senator Kamala Harris attempts her own version of former President Barack Obama’s historic rise from first-term senator to the White House, she is likely to need the same strong support from black voters that Mr. Obama attracted in 2008. It may not come easily.
+• The State Department said that it had given the Venezuelan opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, the right to control assets and property in the United States bank accounts of the government of Venezuela.Note for Teachers: Join our Feb. 6 free webinar on teaching with New York Times-inspired writing prompts. Sign up here.
+_________
+What story could this image tell?
+Use your imagination to write the opening of a short story or poem inspired by this illustration.
+Post it in the comments, then read the related article to find out what this image is all about.“They always just focused on it …” — as in her husband’s detached and reattached and then, a couple of years later, surgically kind-of enlarged penis. That was all the media, before now, before the Women’s March and the #MeToo movement, when we were all less evolved as humans, wanted to talk about. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care why I did what I did,” she said.
+Lorena is correct, of course, that most people forget that before she was tried for what she did, John was charged with marital sexual assault. (He was acquitted.) At the time, marital rape only recently had been made a crime in all 50 states and was nearly impossible to prove in Virginia. Many in the media, including Ladies’ Home Journal and Gay Talese on assignment for The New Yorker, questioned whether it was an oxymoron. (“Wife Rape? Who Really Gets Screwed?” an earlier column in Penthouse read.) Al Franken, as the character Stuart Smalley on Saturday Night Live, implored Lorena to apologize to John’s penis. And, she is correct, that people forget that a jury found her not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. We forget about the string of witnesses at her trial who testified that they had seen bruises on her arms and neck and that she had called 911 repeatedly and that John had bragged to friends about forcing his wife to have sex. In the years since the trial, he was arrested several times and served jail time for violence against two different women. (He denied the allegations.) “This is about a victim and a survivor and this is about what’s happening in our world today,” Lorena told me.
+[Ashley Judd, Gwyneth Paltrow and others on how #MeToo changed their lives.]
+That is the story she tells in “Lorena,” a four-part, Jordan Peele-produced documentary that will debut on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 15. And that is why she took a break from volunteering with her daughter’s volleyball team and her work at her nonprofit, Lorena’s Red Wagon, that helps survivors of domestic violence, to have lunch and show me around this bedroom community outside Washington, where it all went down.
+It has been 26 years since Lorena Bobbitt, a 24-year-old wounded bird of a woman with dark, wiry hair and sad, penetrating eyes became so enshrined in the annals of popular culture that she makes a cameo in both a Philip Roth novel and Eminem lyrics. Today, Lorena is shy, a petite 117 pounds in a black blazer, tasteful black stilettos, diamond hoop earrings and a Louis Vuitton handbag. (She told me her weight because she had weighed 95 pounds in 1993, when John said she had assaulted him.) Even though she has physically transformed, now the picture of an upwardly mobile 49-year-old suburban mom with wispy blond hair, she has the same, sad, dark, orb-like eyes. And even though she goes by her maiden name and, shortly after the trial, the media moved on (thank you, Tonya Harding), people meet Lorena in Manassas and it doesn’t take long for them to make the connection that she is that Lorena in Manassas. “I live here. This is my home. Why should he have the last laugh?” she said when I asked why she didn’t move away.CARACAS, Venezuela — President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela warned Americans in a video posted on Wednesday that intervening in his country “would lead to a Vietnam worse than they can imagine.”
+The video, posted on his social media accounts, came out on the same day Mr. Maduro gave an interview to Russia’s RIA news agency in which he seemed more conciliatory, saying he was open to talks with the country’s opposition but rejecting calls for a new election.
+“I am ready to sit down at the negotiating table with the opposition,” Mr. Maduro said, naming Mexico, Uruguay, Bolivia and Russia among possible mediators, but giving no indication of having made progress in arranging the talks.
+The United States last week recognized Venezuela’s opposition leader, Juan Guaidó, as the country’s acting president, as have 26 other countries.In recovery from my initial surgery, I shared a room with a man whose face I never saw but who seemed much sicker than I was. From the noises coming from behind the curtain, he seemed to be in a lot of discomfort, wandering in and out of consciousness. I was recovering from a freak illness, I told myself, but this man was very ill — a different kind of patient altogether. He couldn’t tell that the blaring television was keeping me awake because most of the time he didn’t seem to know what was going on around him. Eventually I was discharged and got some rest at home, but I still sometimes wonder how he had fared.
+In the year since that initial operation and recovery, I’ve begun to realize how much denial there was in my first assessment of that man. Refusing to believe that I might share his path may have been protective in the short term, letting me live this last year with love and laughter, work and play as though I could keep it up until my 90th birthday.
+But my denial didn’t do anything to prevent the anguish I felt when my cancer sprouted a new nodule in my right lung 10 months later. It didn’t reduce the pain I felt finding out that those tiny nodules in my lungs at the time of diagnosis were cancer all along. Cancer patients usually attempt to maintain a positive attitude, and I appreciate how much better it is to do so than to be consumed by negativity, but no mind-set would have meaningfully muted the shock of my recurrence and the burden of having to tell my family that actually I’ve been in Stage 4 all along. We just didn’t know it.
+This last year, I’ve lived more fully than ever before in my life, holding my wife and son tighter and saying “no” more readily to work projects and other demands on my time that wouldn’t enrich my life. I’ve learned to let life’s frustrations roll off me more casually, though the hospital parking garage still manages to make my blood boil. I’ve made sure to tell my family and friends that I love them.
+No one can tell me with any certainty about what lies ahead. Will I be ready for it? These questions circle in my mind on an ever-present loop without resolution. I know that I can’t predict what comes next, but since my cancer recurred I have become committed to living in each moment and listening for clues about tomorrow.It was only the third awakening that left me haunted by flashbacks and nightmares. What had gone wrong?
+I soon learned that I am part of only a tiny percentage of people who remember unsettling experiences under conscious sedation. Only three out of every 10,000 people report “undesired awareness” from nongeneral anesthesia, a number only slightly higher than the two out of every 10,000 patients who report this under general anesthesia, according to a study led by Dr. George Mashour, a neuroanesthesiologist at the University of Michigan and one of the world’s experts on anesthesia awareness. While some patients expect, or even want, to be awake during certain procedures, especially colonoscopies, “I don’t think any clinician would want somebody to be terrified or in pain,” Dr. Mashour said.
+But it happens.
+His research, using the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Anesthesia Awareness Registry, a voluntary registry of patients with memories under conscious sedation or general anesthesia, showed that 78 percent of those reporting awareness under conscious sedation felt distress, and 40 percent had long-term psychological sequelae, including post-traumatic stress disorder.
+There has been extensive research and debate on how to prevent these awakenings, known as “anesthesia awareness,” under general anesthesia. But far less is known about their impact on people undergoing conscious sedation, which is growing in popularity and estimated to account for half of all anesthesia administrations in the United States within 10 years.
+Often requiring no anesthesiologist, no operating room and not even a hospital setting, conscious sedation is now being used increasingly for dental work, plastic surgery, heart rhythm corrections and many more procedures performed by a growing range of practitioners, including certified anesthesiologist assistants and nurse anesthetists.
+Part of the problem is that there is no firm definition of conscious sedation, which involves a cocktail of pain control, anxiety control and amnesia in amounts that can vary between patients, procedures and practitioners, says Dr. Andrew Davidson, head of anesthesia research at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia.
+“Conscious sedation is a bit of an art,” Dr. Davidson said. “Some people say it’s actually harder to do than general anesthetic, because it’s actually more difficult to titrate the drugs to get exactly what you want.”It should have been easy, traveling through Argentina, to find a bottle of soy sauce. My sons, born and raised in Asia, have a habit of seasoning their food with a few drops of it, and Argentina happens to be one of the world’s leading producers of soybeans. Flying over the country’s heartland — the fertile expanse known as the pampa húmeda — we could see endless fields of the legume. Over the past three decades, soybeans have gone from being a tiny part of Argentina’s agriculture-dependent economy to occupying nearly 50 percent of its cultivated land. Yet in every restaurant we visited, my sons’ requests for soy sauce were met with a quizzical look and a shrug: No hay. (“There is none.”)
+The vast majority of Argentina’s soy products are exported, mostly to China. Rising Asian demand — for soy sauce, tofu, animal feed — has fueled the explosion of the soybean industry across Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay. The pattern is a familiar one for Argentina. A century ago, it became one of the world’s wealthiest countries on a per-capita basis by shipping the pampa’s abundant yields of grain and beef to Europe. The opulent 1929 Beaux-Arts building that houses the Board of Trade in Rosario, Argentina’s agricultural capital, evokes those days of grandeur. Today, however, it is the price of soybean futures that dominates the electronic tickers on the wall. Last year, Argentina exported $17 billion in soybean products, more than a quarter of its overall export earnings. Half the ships leaving the country are now full of soy goods — beans, meal, oil, etc. — and heading to Asia. “The old saying in Argentina is still true: ‘With a good harvest, we are saved,’ ” says Patricia Bergero, the board’s deputy director for economic research. “Our economy is very dependent on soybeans and China — perhaps too dependent.”
+The beans, however, are just the beginning. Over the past decade, China has more than doubled its overall trade with Latin America and the Caribbean, to $244 billion in 2017, elevating China past the United States as the region’s top trading partner, a stunning development in America’s own backyard. Early on, China focused on gobbling up the resources it needed to feed its voracious economy: oil from Venezuela and Ecuador, copper and iron from Peru and Chile, soybeans from Brazil and Argentina. In the past few years, though, Chinese engagement has spread and deepened, especially with left-leaning governments that are in financial trouble and looking for an alternative to American influence. In Argentina, the president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, turned to China in 2014 after her government defaulted on $100 billion of international debt. In addition to offering $11 billion in currency swaps to increase Argentina’s depleted reserves, China began rebuilding a rail line across Argentina’s agricultural heart, constructing two hydroelectric dams and erecting a space station in the arid plateau of northern Patagonia.
+When the conservative businessman Mauricio Macri succeeded Kirchner in December 2015, he seemed eager to do something few other leaders have dared: to push China away. Macri immediately suspended construction of the two dams in southern Patagonia, citing the lack of transparency and environmental impact surveys. Three months later, the Argentine Coast Guard sank a Chinese fishing boat that refused to leave the country’s territorial waters. The resistance didn’t last long. Not only did China quickly reduce its soybean imports by 30 percent in the first seven months of Macri’s government, but Chinese officials also reminded Macri that its investments in Argentina were linked. The dam contracts even had default clauses stipulating that the suspension of work would trigger the suspension of China’s railroad project, too. It was all or nothing. Did Macri want to end up with nothing?Could competitive cyclists be putting their bone health at risk?
+A disquieting new study of bone density in elite cyclists and runners suggests that the answer might be yes. The study found that the cyclists, both male and female, had thinner bones than the runners, even though all of the athletes were young, healthy and enviably fit, and many of the cyclists lifted weights.
+The results underscore the divergent effects of various sports on our skeletons and also stir a little unease about the long-term impacts of pursuing low-impact exercise at the expense of more high-impact activities.
+By and large, the available scientific evidence shows that physical activity is desirable and even necessary for bone health. Children who run, hop and play develop thicker, stronger bones than those who remain sedentary, as do teenagers and young adults who participate in sports involving sprinting and leaping.
+Most scientists agree that these kinds of activities build skeletal strength by generating sudden, sharp forces that minutely bow or deform the affected bones. Such activities jump-start processes within the body that increase the number of bone cells and help to prepare those parts of the skeleton to withstand similar forces in the future.In early interviews, Mr. Schultz has positioned himself as a centrist who could win voters who are dissatisfied with both parties. This is somewhat more like Mr. Perot, who capitalized on populist dissatisfaction in 1992. Perhaps a Schultz bid could even be thought of as the reverse of Mr. Perot’s bid: a revolt of pragmatic, centrist voters against newly resurgent populism.
+Dissatisfied centrists are well represented in the American elite, but not across the American electorate. According to a Pew Research survey of more than 5,000 Americans in 2017, 78 percent of registered voters have a favorable view of at least one major party, and only 18 percent have an unfavorable view of both. Similarly, only 16 percent say both parties are “too extreme,” according to the survey.
+These dissatisfied centrist voters fit the profile of affluent, socially moderate and fiscally conservative suburban voters. They are twice as likely to make more than $100,000 per year than voters who have a favorable view of a party, and 78 percent of these voters say Democrats “too often see government as the only way to solve problems.”
+Like Mr. Schultz, who built up Starbucks starting in Seattle, these affluent voters also tend to be men and are overrepresented in the West. On balance, it is a group with libertarian instincts and corporate sympathies.
+Mr. Schultz could certainly play to these voters, but it is not a particularly electorally fruitful group. In an analysis of the Voter Study Group, Lee Drutman, a political scientist, found that just 4 percent of voters were conservative on economic issues and liberal on cultural issues. In comparison, populists represented 29 percent of the 2018 electorate. Mr. Schultz’s candidacy might be the reverse of Mr. Perot’s, but Mr. Perot’s pitch probably had broader appeal.
+During parts of the 1992 campaign, Mr. Perot also had the benefit of a president with an approval rating in the low 30s and upper 20s. In theory, that was low enough to create an opening for a centrist independent candidate who could win with as little as 35 percent of the vote if he drew evenly from both parties. In the end, Mr. Perot won 19 percent, though at times he held significantly more support in the polls.Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who met with Mr. Liu on Wednesday, said a day earlier that the Huawei case was being handled on a separate track from the trade talks. But given China’s heated reaction to the arrest and indictment, it is hard to imagine that Chinese officials will not raise the issue.
+“I think it’s very difficult to keep them separate,” said Weijian Shan, a private equity investor based in Hong Kong and the author of “Out of the Gobi,” a memoir that depicts China’s modern history. “To the extent that China feels that this is a major issue with America, they will bring it up.”
+For now, both sides appear eager to find areas of agreement, including on purchases of more American goods. China has demonstrated a willingness to address Mr. Trump’s concerns about the United States’ bilateral trade deficit with big purchases of goods and services, like chicken, soybeans and tractors. That is the easy part. More difficult is persuading China to overhaul its economic policies.
+The Trump administration has been pushing China to scale back subsidies of state-owned enterprises, sharply open its markets to foreign investment and end its longstanding practice of forcing American companies to hand over trade secrets as a condition of doing business there. China has made a series of moves in the last month that suggest it is willing to accept some of those changes, but there is division in the Trump administration over whether they are merely symbolic — and empty — gestures.
+“None of China’s domestic reforms since December have really addressed the structural issues in the relationship,” said Nick Marro, an Asia and China analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit. “Progress on increasing U.S. imports or tackling questions over China’s currency don’t really address what the U.S.T.R is really looking at, which are fundamental market access issues facing U.S. companies.”
+One of the biggest questions hanging over the trade talks is whether the United States can truly enforce any deal agreed to by Beijing.
+Mr. Trump has wielded tariffs as a stick to get Beijing to the bargaining table. But if the tariffs are lifted as part of a trade deal, there is no guarantee that China will live up to any commitments. American officials, who say China has broken promises in the past, have discussed mechanisms such as “snapback” tariffs that would be reimposed if China does not follow through. Another option is “carousel” tariffs that would hit different portions of Chinese products to prevent its economy from becoming immune to the pain of the duties.But there’s a good thing about a majority of the Camembert sold in France, and so much of the Camembert made and sold around the world — the cheap, substandard, deodorized, dead-inside wheels — which are much easier to get your hands on at the supermarket. These cheeses are at the heart of a different tradition: the baked Camembert. Baking has always been a way for cooks to coax an overripe, or a just-O.K. cheese, in the direction they like, to bring up the herbs and the florals, to fill out whatever might be missing. And yet pastry-wrapped baked cheese now seems like a relic. In our collective imagination, it’s the snack at a book-club meeting where no one has read the book. It’s the most exciting appetizer at a 1970s suburban dinner party. But it’s also, regardless of how you feel about its style, one of the most reliable ways to delight a small group of omnivorous people.
+The idea is simple: Wrap a whole wheel of Camembert in puff pastry, making sure it’s sealed tight, and then bake it until the pastry is browned. But that’s just the blueprint, and you can build on it. You could cut the cheese in half horizontally and fill it up with caramelized onion and bacon and a spoonful of fruit preserves before you wrap it. (On YouTube, French bloggers love to add a layer of sliced boiled potatoes to the onion-bacon mixture.) Others leave the cheese whole but douse it with honey and walnuts, then sprinkle some thyme leaves over it. You could roughly chop a mixture of dried fruit and mix it with a spoonful of Cognac and let it all steam inside the cheese, sinking into the Camembert as it roasts. Slide the pastry onto a platter and surround it with a lot of salad leaves dressed simply in oil and vinegar — bitter leaves like radicchio tend to work best, but do what you like. There may be bad Camembert, a lot of it, in fact, but there’s no such thing as a bad baked Camembert.The school district later ended that program, and in 2014, Mr. Caputo-Pearl was elected president of the United Teachers Los Angeles, the local union. He represented a new, more militant generation of teachers’ union leaders. This month, he led 30,000 educators in a weeklong strike for higher pay and more classroom funding, and against the growth of the charter school sector. It’s a story I covered with Jennifer Medina, my fantastic National desk colleague in Los Angeles, and our editors Julie Bloom, Dave Kim and Marc Lacey.
+I’ve been reporting on education for 13 years, but I am absolutely stunned by the extent to which teachers’ strikes and walkouts are now a day-to-day part of my job. The Los Angeles action was the eighth mass teacher protest I’ve reported on in just 11 months, shutting down schools for one million students across the country. The reappearance of Mr. Caputo-Pearl in my professional life was just one of several uncanny moments that have made me, at age 34, feel old in beat-reporter years. So much has changed in education, as the focus shifts from calling out and overhauling bad teachers and schools to listening more carefully to what educators say about their working conditions and how students are affected by them.
+I was at the Democratic National Convention in 2008, when one of the hottest tickets was to a panel discussion in which rising stars in the party, including Cory Booker, then the mayor of Newark, spoke harshly of teachers’ unions and their opposition to charter schools, which are publicly funded, privately run and generally not unionized. Union leaders argue that charters draw public dollars and students away from traditional schools like Crenshaw High.
+Back then, it was hip for young Democrats to be like Barack Obama, supportive of school choice and somewhat critical of teachers’ unions. But now, the winds have changed pretty drastically. The revival of democratic socialism within the party has left many elected officials — even Mr. Booker — much more hesitant, it seems, to critique organized labor. Across the country, red-clad teachers on strike, sometimes dancing and singing, have won the affection of grass-roots progressives over the past year, leading to a new political dynamic around education, just as the Democratic primary field for 2020 emerges. The emphasis now is on what education experts call “inputs” — classroom funding, teacher pay, and students’ access to social workers and guidance counselors — and less on “outputs,” like test scores or graduation rates.
+The truth is, both inputs and outputs are important. In some ways, continuing to cover the war between union leaders and charter school supporters frustrates and exhausts me. Charter schools are a growing part of our educational landscape because parents are always looking for more good options when it comes to how and where to educate their children. On the other hand, while politicians and wealthy philanthropists have always given outsize attention to charters, they educate just about 6 percent of American public school children, some three million students. In many ways, the battle is ideological, over what role choice should play in our education system. Will public-sector competition between charters and traditional schools lead to improvement, or simply provoke a melee over scarce taxpayer dollars? So far, both outcomes, I’ve observed, are very real across the country.But in general, prices jumped. That was surprising given that product costs typically fall as technologies mature and parts become widely available, which was what happened with televisions.
+The more I examined the pricing, though, the more evidence there was that the latest Apple products are more expensive to make. Apple also appears to be under pressure to introduce more complex innovations to compete in the brutal technology market.
+Take a look at the company’s gross profit margin, or the money it makes from products after the cost to make and sell them is factored in. If Apple’s gross margins are lower today even though prices are higher, that indicates the products cost more to make.
+And that is indeed the case. Toni Sacconaghi, a financial analyst for Sanford C. Bernstein who has studied Apple for years, estimated that the company’s gross margins for the iPhone were below 40 percent, down from more than 50 percent several years ago.
+Mr. Sacconaghi said the shrinking margins demonstrated how tough it had become to compete in the technology market. Apple has had to add features like stronger metals, sophisticated cameras, high-resolution displays, advanced chips and faster wireless connectivity while trimming back on some profit given that rival products from the likes of Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo have become very capable. If Apple had wanted to keep profit margins consistent with past years, he said, it would have had to raise prices even higher and risk losing sales.
+“You have to put in more to stay competitive, or you’re going to lose share,” he said.
+Jared Wiesel, a partner at Revenue Analytics, a pricing and sales consulting firm, said Apple was still in a unique position to introduce broad price increases. Other companies, such as grocery brands, lack the clout to do so because their competitors might undercut them and lure away customers.
+“They’re in the very enviable position that they can, by and large, take major action across the board without, so far, seeing a major erosion of loyalty as a result,” Mr. Wiesel said.Cander writes that the Blüthner in “The Weight of a Piano” always “sounded melancholy,” even when the music was supposed to be upbeat. Mostly what we hear is by Alexander Scriabin. He dreamed big dreams, bigger than études or sonatas. His sprawling work “Mysterium,” the New York Times critic Donal Henahan once wrote, “apparently would have pitched all the senses into one big Cuisinart and set the control on pulse.”
+“The Weight of a Piano” throws a lot into the Cuisinart — it’s immense, intense and imaginative. Clara’s Blüthner once belonged to a Russian named Katya. It was bequeathed to her by a notorious neighbor in the Khrushchev-era apartment building where she grew up. She turns out to be talented. After the Leningrad Conservatory, she marries Mikhail, an engineering student who insists on emigrating with their son, Grisha.
+Also in the mix are Bruce, a U.C.L.A. professor who is one of Katya’s few adult pupils when she’s giving piano lessons in California (they go from the Blüthner to bed); Bruce’s wife, Alice, who draws the line at living under the same roof as the Blüthner (Mikhail having flown into a vodka-stoked rage and Katya having asked Bruce to take the Blüthner for safekeeping); and one of Alice’s Virginia Slims, which starts a deadly fire.
+Katya, who assumes the piano has been destroyed, thinks she can’t live without Bruce or the Blüthner. But the Blüthner is fine because Bruce had sent it out for a tuning and some touch-up work. Clara, who is Bruce’s daughter, is fine, too, because she was away at a sleepover that night.
+She grows up with relatives in Bakersfield, Calif., and becomes an auto mechanic just like Uncle Jack. The Blüthner is her one inherited possession, even if she’s no pianist. And of all the Blüthners in all the online ads in all the world, it’s the one that Grisha — who now goes by Greg — spots as soon as Clara, now in her mid-20s, decides to list it.Very few issues can bring together lawmakers of both parties. Animal cruelty is one of them.
+That’s why a bipartisan pair of congressional lawmakers from Florida is trying to close a gaping loophole in federal law: If you record yourself abusing an animal, you can face federal charges for documenting it, but not for the act of cruelty itself.
+The lawmakers, Representative Vern Buchanan, a Republican, and Representative Ted Deutch, a Democrat, introduced a bill this month that would impose a federal ban on animal abuse.
+What would the bill do?
+The bill, known as the Preventing Animal Cruelty and Torture Act, was introduced last week. It would build on a 2010 law that criminalized making or distributing videos depicting the killing or torture of animals.
+While the 2010 law targeted the documentation of such acts, the new bill targets the acts themselves. Anyone convicted of intentionally crushing, burning, drowning, suffocating, impaling or otherwise seriously harming an animal would face federal felony charges, fines and up to seven years in prison.For the latest developments, read our Thursday live briefing on the polar vortex here.
+CHICAGO — A merciless cold crippled the Midwest on Wednesday, halting planes and trains, shuttering schools and prompting officials in Detroit, Minneapolis and Chicago to open emergency warming centers for the homeless and vulnerable.
+The bitter weather was believed to be tied to the deaths of at least eight people, including a man thought to have collapsed after shoveling snow and frozen to death in his Milwaukee garage. Hospitals saw a steady stream of patients reporting symptoms of frostbite.
+Temperatures in Minneapolis dipped as low as minus 28, with the wind chill reaching minus 53, the National Weather Service said. Fargo, N.D., reached minus 33; Milwaukee, minus 20. The worst of the cold was feared overnight into Thursday, when meteorologists predicted that temperatures could dip to minus 27 in Chicago, a record for the city. The Midwest was expected to see miserable temperatures through Thursday, and the cold air was moving east.
+Across the Midwest on Wednesday, residents who are used to carrying on with life’s routines despite bad weather had little choice but to shiver, stay indoors and make the best of it, even as the insides of their windows became ominously lined with ice. Office workers were stuck at home. Parents scrambled for last-minute child care. In Michigan, a gas company asked customers to use less natural gas to heat their houses after a fire at a compressor station.The road to the Democratic nomination would likely be fraught for any moderate, especially one who would not break a historic barrier by virtue of identity, as Barack Obama did in 2008. To some Democrats, a more centrist message might too closely echo Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 campaign, which left many in the party determined to focus on mobilizing the left over pursuing the middle. And the most vocal Democratic factions have shown little interest so far in settling for something other than a liberal champion, on issues from taxation and business regulation to criminal justice and gender equality.
+Ms. Warren has emerged as something of an intellectual pacesetter for liberal Democrats on economic issues, including her proposal to tax the wealth of households with assets greater than $50 million at a rate of two or three percent per year. And on Monday Ms. Harris, whose signature proposal has been a more conventional middle-class tax cut, called in a CNN interview for the elimination of private health insurance as part of a shift toward a “Medicare for all” single-payer health care.
+Several other liberals of differing stripes are likely to join the race soon, including Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Cory Booker of New Jersey; others are considering it seriously, like Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Jeff Merkley of Oregon.
+Polls of Democratic voters offer mixed signals about how liberal they want their nominee to be. There is no question the party has moved leftward: the Gallup Poll found this month that for the first time in decades, a majority of Democrats describe themselves as liberal, while just 34 percent now call themselves moderate. And taxing the rich is broadly popular, with a sizable majority of Americans believing wealthy people and corporations pay too little to the government.
+“People have grown more liberal and more willing to call themselves liberal,” said Lydia Saad, a senior editor at Gallup, cautioning that ideology did not necessarily predict voting behavior: “The public is very fungible in terms of who they will accept as a leader, based on things that seem to go beyond ideology.”
+Arkadi Gerney, a Democratic strategist who runs the Hub Project, a liberal advocacy group that has focused heavily on taxes, said that intensive issue polling had consistently found powerful support for raising taxes on the wealthy, not just among Democrats but also among working-class white voters in Mr. Trump’s base.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+In the past month, Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of the drug lord known as El Chapo, has become a controversial central character in her husband’s trial.
+A witness named her as a co-conspirator in his infamous maximum-security prison break in 2015. Transcripts of text messages between the husband and wife showed him asking her to stash his weapons ahead of a raid. The morning one of El Chapo’s mistresses took the stand, Ms. Coronel and her husband wore matching maroon velvet suit jackets in what appeared to be a show of solidarity.
+Over the course of Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s three-month trial, witnesses for the prosecution have described a grim life for the women in and around the cartel who are often expected to balance a role that walks the line between lover and accomplice. Most fail, usually wanting to be too much of one, and not enough of the other. They often end up behind bars or in hiding.
+But Ms. Coronel, the most prominent female presence in a trial of almost exclusively male players, has emerged as the exception.She was dying.
+Ms. Dockery’s death at age 36 underscores the dangers of the nation’s jails, where inmates are either doing time for the least serious crimes or have not been convicted of the charges against them. Jails often have fewer resources than prisons and, like the work-release center here in Goshen, lack medical staff. Illness and injury can go untreated and every week, it seems, brings a new report of an unsafe jail or a death that was likely preventable.
+“It would be a national scandal if people realized exactly how bad it was and how much abuse inmates are subjected to when they become sick inside prisons and jails,” said William R. Claiborne, a lawyer in Savannah, Ga., who specializes in cases of inadequate medical care, such as one in which an inmate was told he was faking fainting spells, only to die of congestive heart failure. “The more marginalized that you are, the more likely you are to not be believed, the more likely you are to get denied care,” Mr. Claiborne said.
+The problem is worse, he said, for those already discounted by society: As a black woman and a drug user, Ms. Dockery was in that category. Jails have not adapted to the growth of the number of female inmates, which has far outpaced the growth in the number of men, according to the Vera Institute of Justice, a group that advocates criminal justice changes and is focused on jail, and experts say that racial bias has contributed to worse health outcomes for black women.
+In 2015, Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old black woman jailed after a traffic stop in Waller County, Tex., hanged herself in a cell. In December in Bexar County, Tex., Janice Dotson-Stephens, who was black and mentally ill, was “ignored to death,” as her lawyer put it, after her family had been told that she was not even in custody.
+Ms. Dockery was sent to the work-release center for just shy of a year after she violated probation on a shoplifting conviction. Because she had failed a drug test on arrival, officers dismissed her complaints as those of a user in withdrawal, an ordeal that is rarely life-threatening. But she died of sepsis, probably caused by a perforated ulcer in her intestine, according to James P. Elliott, the Elkhart County coroner.Erica Baum
+Through Feb. 17. Bureau, 178 Norfolk Street, Manhattan; 212-227-2783, bureau-inc.com.
+Erica Baum has been included in several exhibitions devoted to abstract photography, but this is misleading. Ms. Baum actually photographs concrete objects but presents them from unfamiliar angles, perspectives or distances so that the images appear abstract. She shows how the edges of a book, fragments of text or sewing patterns from the last century, displayed in her current show — “A Long Dress” at Bureau — offer a wealth of information that initially seems like innocent or irrelevant minutiae.
+The sewing patterns are captured with such detail that you can see their fibrous texture; they resemble fabric rather than photographic prints. With their red, green and black lines and numbers blown up in the images, some like “Edges Fold Fold” look like abstract geometric paintings from the early 20th century.
+Texts and direction lines on the patterns offer instructions about the alignment of busts, waists and shoulders. One pattern, for a bunny costume, orders you to “turn head right side out,” pushing the show into a kind of surreal post-human zone . The exhibition’s title, “A Long Dress,” comes from Gertrude Stein’s prose-poem “Tender Buttons,” a contemplation of everyday objects. It adds to the sense that you’re reading poetry rather than viewing templates contributing to a uniform language about human forms.
+Ms. Baum’s work can be read through various filters, including conceptual photography and the philosopher Michel Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish ” (1975), a classic text on the institutional policing of bodies. The sewing pattern, with its basic lines and neutral color, seems like a bland and simple thing, but Ms. Baum reminds us that the devil is in taking such details for granted. MARTHA SCHWENDENERImage Big mountain skier Alexis “Lexi” du Pont Credit... Jon Mancuso
+Nestled in the Rocky Mountains of south-central Idaho lies Ketchum, an outdoors-obsessed city and home to America’s first destination ski resort, Sun Valley. At 9,150 feet, Bald Mountain, called Baldy, presides over Ketchum with 12 lifts, 105 trails, a sophisticated snow-making operation and impeccably groomed runs. While new hotels (Limelight Hotel on the south end, Hotel Ketchum on the north) bookend Main Street, the half-mile stretch still exudes plenty of the old-time charm from Ketchum’s mining and sheep ranching heyday with cabin-style shops and historic brick buildings. Professional big-mountain skier and native Alexis “Lexi” du Pont describes Ketchum as “classy Western.” She says the area offers a great deal of history and a European influence from Sun Valley resort, which opened in the 1930s, “but at the same time it’s Wild West Idaho.” Here are five of her favorite places.
+1. The Covey
+In December, Ms. du Pont’s childhood friends Jane and Jesse Sheue opened their first restaurant, dishing out New American food in a building resembling a small red barn. The cozy restaurant is centered around a big colonial-style hearth and features housemade pastas and meats like pheasant and elk, grilled on apple wood. “It’s cool to see a local chef who was born and raised here” at the helm of a restaurant with such high-quality dishes, Ms. du Pont said. With 24 taps and 30 wines by the glass, guests can pair drinks with food and stay a while to enjoy what Ms. du Pont calls “cool vibes” and a rotating art collection, courtesy of a local gallery, Lipton Fine Arts, that includes original works by Alexander Calder, Keith Haring and Marc Chagall.
+520 Washington Ave; thecovey.comMr. Powell did not directly address how long the Fed planned to remain patient but suggested any future rate increases would depend largely on signs of inflation, which has consistently fallen below the Fed’s 2 percent target.
+“I would want to see a need for further rate increases, and for me a big part of that would be inflation,” he said.
+Brian Coulton, chief economist at Fitch Ratings, said he expected economic growth to continue and therefore he expected the Fed to resume rate increases this year. “This reads more like a pause than a strong signal that they believe that they are the end of the hiking cycle,” Mr. Coulton said. “Barring a very significant global downturn, we still see further rate increases later this year.”
+Others, however, said the Fed may well have raised rates for the last time during the current economic expansion. “It does feel like the top of the cycle,” said Tim Duy, an economist at the University of Oregon who follows the central bank closely. “With the economy poised to slow over the next year, the Fed is not interested in risking turning that slowdown into a recession.”
+The shift left some Fed watchers puzzling over why the central bank had reversed course so quickly.
+In early October, Mr. Powell described the Fed’s benchmark interest rate as “a long way from neutral.” The comment was read by markets as implying that the Fed planned to continue raising rates for some time.
+Mr. Powell sought to soften that impression in subsequent public appearances. After the Fed raised the benchmark rate by a quarter point at its December meeting, Mr. Powell said that the rate was at the lower end of what Fed officials consider the neutral zone: the region in which rates would neither stimulate nor restrain the economy. That implied the Fed was closer to pausing.
+But Mr. Powell still said the Fed expected to keep raising its benchmark interest rate. And the Fed released projections showing most of its officials predicted at least two rate increases in 2019.It’s common while traveling to be approached by locals trying to make a few a bucks by offering to show you around. I typically respond with a polite “no,” but on this particular morning in Kandy, a small city in the center of Sri Lanka, I was looking for someone to take me on a tour of the sights. Santha, a small, middle-aged man with a big smile, must have sensed it, because he made a beeline for me as I approached the small park near the Kandy Municipal Market on Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe Mawatha Street in the center of town.
+After a quick negotiation we were off, crammed into the back of a blue tuk-tuk, zooming down streets slick from the morning’s rain and smelling of wet leaves. Santha yelled to me over the loud buzz of the auto rickshaw’s engine: “I was born in Kandy, raised in Kandy and married in Kandy.” He added, “And I will die in Kandy!”
+I could easily have spent months in Sri Lanka, the small island nation off the southern tip of India. Full of fantastic food, kind people and astonishing natural wonder, Sri Lanka is a place best seen slowly, even if you only have four days on the ground like I did. The train was my preferred means of transport (when I wasn’t in a tuk-tuk), winding from Colombo to Kandy, in the middle of the country, before taking another train down to Ella, on what was one of the most beautiful and scenic train rides I’ve ever experienced. And as far as cost goes, I was able to keep my expenses comfortably under control.
+First, some logistics: A train trip in Sri Lanka requires planning. Many popular routes, including the one from Kandy to Ella, can sell out reserved seats weeks in advance. The Sri Lanka Railways website isn’t going to be much help here: you can only reserve tickets in person or through your local mobile phone. I consulted the website The Man in Seat 61 and eventually decided to place my trust in Visit Sri Lanka Tours to make my bookings.Living In ... Massapequa Park, N.Y.
+Buyers will find a range of options in this village on the South Shore of Long Island, from modest starter homes to waterfront houses with docks.Slide 1 of 12,
+This three-bedroom lodge in Quebec, set on 100 wooded acres overlooking the St. Lawrence River, is on the market for about $1.85 million. Completed in 2009, the house includes a sauna and a large terrace overlooking the water.“There really is a ‘village’ feel, a real community,” said Dina Santorelli, a 20-year resident, who raised three children in Massapequa Park with her husband, Thomas Rhein, a former captain with Rescue Company 3 of the Massapequa Fire District. “From the Turkey Trot around Thanksgiving to the Christmas tree lighting to the annual fireworks at Walker Park every Fourth of July, there really is that old-time, best-of-Long-Island-days-gone-by sense here. Friendly people, good neighbors.”
+Driving around the village, “it’s not uncommon to see people renovating their homes, putting on extensions, new roofs, new siding and new fences,” said Ms. Santorelli, 50, a novelist whose “Baby Grand” trilogy includes a scene in Brady Park, which has a tournament-grade Little League field, a trio of picnic areas overlooking a trout-stocked lake and a community center.
+Patricia Birney, 61, downsized from a five-bedroom house in neighboring Massapequa, which she sold for $565,000, to a three-bedroom home in the village that she bought for $505,000 last summer. The upkeep is less expensive and the taxes are lower, but also, “in this neighborhood there are kids playing all the time,” said Ms. Birney, whose children are grown and out of the house. “It’s like a small town. It was a good move.”
+What You’ll Find
+The village of Massapequa Park is 2.2 square miles, on the southeastern edge of Nassau County. Bordered by the Southern State Parkway to the north and South Oyster Bay to the south, the village cuts a rectangular swath through the unincorporated areas of the Massapequas.
+Sunrise Highway plows a four-lane, east-west path through the village, bracketed on the north by the elevated Long Island Rail Road tracks and commercial ventures to the south.A Three-Bedroom Lodge Overlooking the St. Lawrence River
+$1.85 MILLION (2.45 MILLION CANADIAN DOLLARS)
+This three-bedroom lodge is in La Malbaie, a resort village on the banks of the St. Lawrence River, in the mountainous Charlevoix district of Quebec. Built into a slope, the house sits on about 100 forested acres, an unusually large lot for the area, said Eric Gagnon, an agent with Engel & Völkers, which has the listing.
+Completed in 2009, the property includes a three-story guesthouse, a detached two-car garage with living quarters and a balcony above, and a man-made lake, all with sweeping views of the St. Lawrence River to the east and the Laurentian Mountains to the west.
+A wooded driveway winds its way to the 2,700-square-foot lodge. Inside, the foyer leads to a spacious open living area with oak-beamed cathedral ceilings, cedar wall siding and heated ceramic-tile floors. A four-sided fireplace anchors the space, surrounded by the living room, dining room and a kitchen with stainless-steel appliances, open shelving and a granite-topped island. Several glass doors open to a broad outdoor terrace that runs the length of the house and overlooks the hillside.
+The master bedroom, off the living area, has an unusual birch-bark wall behind the bed, as well as a vaulted ceiling with a glazed gable, and glass doors that open onto the terrace. The master bathroom has two trough sinks and a deep tub.ATLANTA — To miss a Super Bowl because of an injury is bad enough. To have it happen in your first Super Bowl seems especially cruel. In the case of Cooper Kupp, the standout slot receiver for the Los Angeles Rams, it’s hard to say whether the anguish this weekend will be greater for him or for his team.
+Kupp, 25, entered his second season as one of the Rams’ top three wide receivers, alongside Brandin Cooks and Robert Woods, but in the team’s 5-0 start he emerged as the one quarterback Jared Goff would look for when things got particularly difficult. Kupp earned that trust by catching 75 percent of the passes thrown his way and scoring five touchdowns in those five games.
+But on Sunday, as the Rams try to beat the New England Patriots and win the franchise’s first championship since the 1999 season, Kupp will be reduced to a spectator. A knee sprain cost him most of Weeks 6 through 8 and a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee, which he sustained in Week 10, ended his season. Several high-profile players, like Carson Wentz, Von Miller and Jeremy Shockey, have found themselves in the same position in recent years, all feeling a deep sense of loss even as they tried to share their teammates’ joy.SEOUL, South Korea — A close political ally of President Moon Jae-in of South Korea was sentenced to two years in prison on Wednesday for conspiring with bloggers to illegally influence public opinion before Mr. Moon’s election in 2017.
+The politician, Gov. Kim Kyoung-soo of South Gyeongsang Province in the country’s southeast, was taken to prison shortly after Seoul Central District Court convicted and sentenced him on Wednesday.
+No evidence has emerged that Mr. Moon was aware of Mr. Kim’s activities. But the verdict is a political setback for the president, for whom Mr. Kim was a key adviser during the 2017 presidential campaign, in which Mr. Moon ran as a champion of clean politics.
+Mr. Kim was accused of working with a blogger named Kim Dong-won, known widely by his alias, Druking, to sway online opinion in favor of Mr. Moon, both before and after the election.Here are the cold, hard facts about the dangerously low temperatures in much of the U.S. this week.
+In Australia, temperatures reached 116 degrees Fahrenheit last week in Adelaide. The country has experienced drought for so long that some children have hardly experienced rain.
+While not all of these extreme events can be attributed to climate change, the profound changes in the earth’s atmosphere raise “the likelihood of a large number of extreme events,” one scientist said.
+The details: Our maps show the polar vortex.
+Voices: “I’m cold and I’m afraid.” The lowest temperatures are expected tonight, and homeless people are particularly at risk.BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo — A young mother stepped out of the ambulance into the triage area of our Ebola transit center here in the northeast of the country. She moved slowly, careful not to wake the sick baby, swathed in layers of linens, that she carried in her arms. They had been brought to the center for testing because health workers suspected the baby might have Ebola.
+We are six months into this latest Ebola outbreak. It is the worst on record for the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the second largest ever, after the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa. We’ve come a long way since then. An estimated $60 million is being allotted for this outbreak, and most patients can now expect to receive one of four experimental drugs as part of their treatment regimen. There is also a promising vaccine that is used to protect those most at risk of contracting the disease, like health care workers and people who have come into contact with the ill. And yet Ebola continues to find new people to infect.
+According to the Congolese Ministry of Health, as of Tuesday, there had been 743 reported cases and 461 deaths — a 62 percent mortality rate. There were 14 new cases last Wednesday alone. Six of them died at home, without having been to any Ebola treatment center.
+That day when the mother and baby came to our center, I was standing on the other side of a fence that isolates the possibly contagious from the rest of us. I watched the young mother for a while, but I couldn’t catch her gaze. She appeared lost in her thoughts.These political movements “are strongly and causally associated with an individual’s or an area’s exposure to austerity since 2010,” Fetzer writes. Examination of economic trends, welfare policy and polling data shows, according to Fetzer, that
+the EU referendum (Brexit) could have resulted in a Remain victory had it not been for a range of austerity-induced welfare reforms. These reforms activated existing economic grievances. Further, auxiliary results suggest that the underlying economic grievances have broader origins than what the current literature on Brexit suggests. Up until 2010, the UK’s welfare state evened out growing income differences across the skill divide through transfer payments. This pattern markedly stops from 2010 onward as austerity started to bite.
+There are significant parallels between voting patterns for and against Brexit and the patterns in the 2016 and 2018 elections in this country.
+In a separate 2017 paper, “Who Voted For Brexit,” Fetzer and two fellow economists at the University of Warwick, Sascha O. Becker and Dennis Novy, found that “in particular, fiscal cuts in the context of the recent U.K. austerity program are strongly associated with a higher Vote Leave share.” This held
+all across the board: more deprivation is tightly associated with a larger Vote Leave share or, vice versa; less deprivation is tightly associated with a lower Vote Leave share.
+The results here and in England reinforce the conclusion that the worse things get, the better the right does.
+As a rule, as economic conditions improve and voters begin to feel more secure, they become more generous and more liberal. In the United States, this means that voters move to the left; in Britain, it means voters are stronger in their support for staying in the European Union.
+In his forthcoming book, “Democratic Capitalism at the Crossroads: Technological Change and the Future of Politics” Carles Boix, a political scientist at Princeton, describes how postwar prosperity from 1945 to the mid-1970s led to a liberal international consensus:
+In light of the historical experience of advanced countries, embracing the program of embedded liberalism made economic and political sense. Twentieth-century democratic capitalism had proved to be both successful and resilient: it had delivered high growth; it had allowed governments to fund generous social programs; and it had sent its main political and economic competitor — communism — to the ash heap of history.
+As global competition, outsourcing and later, automation, began to produce significant economic disruption, beginning in the 1970s, this liberal consensus frayed.
+Boix writes,
+The structure of electoral participation became strongly polarized across the Atlantic — very much in line with the economic transformations brought about by the decline of industry and by globalization in the last forty years.
+In the United States, economic adversity helped produce Trump, whose inaugural speech (reportedly the handiwork of Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller) Boix cites as emblematic of the hostility emerging with the fall of liberalism:
+For too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left. And the factories closed. The establishment protected itself but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories. Their triumphs have not been your triumphs. And while they celebrated in our nation’s capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. That all changes starting right here and right now.
+Together, the trends described above raise an intriguing question: If the Republican Party now depends on the votes of those who are falling behind, does the party have a vested interest in economic stagnation and decline?
+I asked scholars and officials at the Niskanen Center — a Washington think tank that recently received favorable coverage for its efforts to resolve contemporary ideological division — whether they thought the Republican Party has come to recognize that prosperity helps Democrats, while economic adversity engenders hostility to immigrants, resentment of liberal elites and animosity among rural voters toward urban America. Does this awareness give politicians on the right a motive to support policies and actions that foster government dysfunction and further impair sections of the country that are in decline?
+Jerry Taylor, president of Niskanen, replied to my inquiry by making the case that “as conservatives see it, the more visible government dysfunction is, the better. It provides civic education.”michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today: For weeks, House Democrats, new to power, have found their agenda overshadowed by the struggle to reopen the government. Now that it’s open, they have a plan. It’s Wednesday, January 30.
+archived recording
+The 116th Congress is here, and Democrats are eager to get moving on their goals for the next two years.
+nicholas fandos
+When Democrats took control of the House at the beginning of the month, they came to office wanting to lay out what their priorities were, what they were all about, what they would do with power.
+archived recording
+So what is on their agenda? Well, the most pressing issue will be trying to end the government shutdown.
+nicholas fandos
+Instead they were greeted on day one with a government shutdown.
+michael barbaro
+Nick Fandos covers Congress for The Times.
+archived recording
+The longer the shutdown goes on, the worse it is for everybody. And certainly Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats want to go back to their agenda. They want to start their agenda, so — That’s kind of crazy, the idea that anybody thinks that they should be doing anything right now other than opening the government. Democrats have an agenda, whether you like it or not. They can’t get that agenda going with the government shutdown.
+nicholas fandos
+So it’s only now, basically, that — the shutdown ended last Friday — that we’re kind of hitting reset in Congress. And they’re getting a little bit of a do-over to introduce the kind of policies, the legislation and the other things that are going to be priorities for this Democratic Congress, and that they really want the American people to clue in on — hey, this is what Democrats are about.
+michael barbaro
+So what exactly are they doing?
+nicholas fandos
+So Democrats are laying out a kind of two-pronged strategy.
+archived recording
+Today we have a new speaker, and today we have a new majority. And today we’re going to take decisive action — very decisive action. [APPLAUSE]
+nicholas fandos
+One is a set of bills that are long-held liberal priorities, that are poll-tested or very popular with the American people but are probably unlikely to become law. And these are bills that are basically messaging, that they can tell the American people, “Hey, if you give Democrats more power, these are the kind of policies that we’re going to put in place — that you say you want, and we’ll deliver.”
+archived recording
+And we’re here today because we know that American workers need a raise. The Raise the Wage Act will increase the pay and standard of living for nearly 40 million Americans across this country.
+nicholas fandos
+There’s a minimum wage bill that would raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024, universal background checks for gun purchases —
+archived recording (speaker nancy pelosi)
+We say enough is enough, by finally bringing commonsense bipartisan background check legislation to the floor of the House. [APPLAUSE] Isn’t that exciting?
+nicholas fandos
+A provision which is wildly popular with voters, but basically the Republican-controlled Senate has struggled to move any kind of legislation on this. And so, you know, the idea here is that rather than, say, pass an assault weapons ban, which would be a much more liberal policy proposal, you take a little bit more popular or moderate stance and basically dare Mitch McConnell to not take it up.
+archived recording
+We carried a message of reform, of fighting corruption, of cleaning up Washington. We made a promise to the American people. The new members who’ve come made that promise and made it clear they wanted this to be the first order of business.
+nicholas fandos
+Another example is a broad, kind of good governance, anti-gerrymandering law that expands voting rights. It tries to add transparency to money in politics. It’s basically a wish list of liberal priorities in the kind of voting and election space. I mean, a lot of the newest Democrats who flipped districts from red to blue last fall were running on getting money out of politics, not accepting corporate money. They found that this idea of cleaning up what is widely viewed as a kind of corrupt pay-for-play system in Washington is popular politics.
+archived recording
+In return for you giving us the gavel, we are going to do everything we can every single day to give you your democracy back, and make sure that this truly is a government of, by and for the people. So thank you for being here today. [APPLAUSE]
+michael barbaro
+So these are by and large bills that the Democrats think are quite popular with Americans, but that for whatever reason, they know the Republican-controlled Senate won’t pass. And that’s part of the idea.
+nicholas fandos
+That’s right. Because the strategy that Speaker Pelosi is laying out here very consciously is that she can use now the platform of the House to basically give voters an example of what Democrats would do. Democrats are basically trying to send a message that —
+archived recording
+My colleagues on the other side of the aisle, unfortunately, are fighting for millionaires, billionaires, mega-corporations, lobbyists, big donors, all to subsidize the lifestyles of the rich and shameless.
+nicholas fandos
+Republicans are owned and accountable to narrow moneyed interests who do not have the best interests of the people in mind, and that they are, you know, essentially kind of for the 1 percent ruling class.
+archived recording
+We’re fighting for working families, middle-class folks, senior citizens, the poor, the sick, the afflicted, veterans, people in rural America, urban America, suburban America. Democrats are fighting for the people.
+michael barbaro
+It’s another way of saying about the president, he might have convinced you that he and the Republicans are for the little guy. And this is the Democrats saying, “No, it’s actually us.”
+nicholas fandos
+That’s right. And, you know, this should sound pretty familiar to what they were talking about on the campaign trail. This legislative strategy is supposed to be generally a continuation of how they were running last fall. And they’re trying to say, you know, “If President Trump, who ran on some of these things and claims to be for them won’t sign these things,” well, you know, “how can you believe him on anything? He’s not actually for these things. He was just selling you a bill of goods that was empty.” And in that way they can try and start rebuilding the Democratic brand nationally as it relates to President Trump, something that, obviously, after the 2016 election, there was a whole lot of hand-wringing about. You know, the Democrats don’t have a clear message. Voters don’t know what the Democrats would do for them. These next two years are really important for Democrats as a party to be able to redefine that before running against President Trump in 2020. And the House is a huge part of that — maybe the biggest piece of it.
+michael barbaro
+O.K. So what’s the second thing that House Democrats are trying to do?
+nicholas fandos
+So the second part of House Democrats’ plan involves putting forward legislation where they think maybe they actually could get a compromise with President Trump and with Republicans.
+archived recording
+Ladies and gentlemen, and I say to the president, no more talk, no more tweet, no more commotion, emotion and motion and no results. The American people want action. They should not have to decide between paying their bills or paying for prescription drugs.
+nicholas fandos
+These are issues which, again, they ran heavily on and were successful with last fall, particularly in some of the districts that they flipped from red to blue.
+archived recording
+Medications are too expensive and we must act boldly to lower prices.
+nicholas fandos
+Things like prescription drug pricing.
+archived recording
+And instead of taking donations from pharmaceutical industry, we need to hold them accountable for taking advantage of the American people.
+nicholas fandos
+We’ve been talking about the kind of messaging element of this, of telling voters ahead of 2020 what they stand for. A lot of their new members also have to try and come back with results. They were elected to be in Congress for these two years. And if they come back having accomplished very little or nothing legislatively, you know, that’s a hard thing to sell the voters too.
+michael barbaro
+So if part one of the Democratic agenda is really about establishing what the party stands for, part two is kind of on behalf of these new members who convinced moderate voters to give them a chance.
+nicholas fandos
+That’s right. And if you listen to a lot of these freshmen who were newly arriving here in Washington, their voters don’t necessarily care about Democratic or Republican Party identity messages, et cetera. You know, they’re paying way too much for prescription drugs. And they just want to see Congress take actions on these issues. They don’t care if it’s necessarily a liberal or conservative solution or tagged that way. And so a lot of these members are feeling a real itch to get to work on this stuff and bring something back to their voters and at least show, hey, we’re trying — and, ultimately, if President Trump backs away from the table, or Senate Republicans do, or they can’t meet somewhere in the middle, they can at least show, we give this a real run.
+michael barbaro
+I’m interested, Nick, in the fact that Democrats are looking at prescription drug pricing as one of these pragmatic opportunities. We learned in the midterms that a lot of these moderates who flipped districts did so by running on protecting people’s health care coverage. It was sort of a surprising development, where voters who used to hate the Affordable Care Act have grown to love it and didn’t want it taken away. Is the idea with prescription drug pricing to sort of expand on that discovery about voters now that these moderates are in office?
+nicholas fandos
+I would frame it a little bit differently. So Republicans and Democrats, I think for a long time, agree that prescription drug prices are going through the roof. Voters of all kinds of political persuasions are fed up about this and want solutions. The difference this time has to do with a weird confluence of factors.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Everyone involved in the broken system — the drug makers, insurance companies, distributors, pharmacy benefit managers and many others — contribute to the problem.
+nicholas fandos
+You know, where Republicans and Democrats had very different approaches to this — Republicans were disinclined to have the government meddle too much in pharmaceutical industry — you now have a kind of unorthodox Republican in the White House in President Trump, who — one of his more populist impulses is to try and see if he could use the government to drive down drug prices.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Government has also been part of the problem because previous leaders turned a blind eye to this incredible abuse.
+nicholas fandos
+You have, at the same time, a new chairman of the Senate Finance Committee —
+archived recording (senator chuck grassley)
+When it comes to drug prices, you should not need a Ph.D. in economics to understand how much your prescription costs.
+nicholas fandos
+Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who happens to, like Mr. Trump, be a little bit more populist on this issue than other Republicans in his party.
+archived recording (senator chuck grassley)
+For some people on fixed income, sky-high drug prices are eating up every spare penny that they can scrape together to pay for their prescriptions. So it’s time that we talk turkey to our friends at big pharma.
+nicholas fandos
+Now, you know, somebody like Chuck Grassley and President Trump are not in the exact same position the Democrats are, but they think they’re similar enough that they could come to the negotiating table and maybe come up with some sort of bill here.
+michael barbaro
+What’s another interesting example of where the Democrats are looking for a chance to compromise?
+nicholas fandos
+So the other big example is infrastructure. This was an issue that President Trump really seized on in his 2016 campaign.
+archived recording (president trump)
+We will build the next generation of roads, bridges, railways, tunnels, seaports and airports. That, believe me, folks, is what our country deserves.
+nicholas fandos
+This is another issue where President Trump is a little bit out of step with probably congressional Republicans. Republicans tend to view infrastructure a little bit differently, or at least how to pay for it. They’re in favor of more private money and spurring investment. Democrats would prefer to pay for it with federal funding. And they think that they can essentially convince, or may be able to convince, President Trump — himself a builder, somebody who does not shy away from spending federal money — to maybe come over to their position.
+archived recording (speaker nancy pelosi)
+Last night, I had a conversation with President Trump about how we could work together. One of the issues that came up was part of our For the People agenda, building the infrastructure of America. And I hope that we can achieve that. He talked —
+nicholas fandos
+And in that way, they could have leveraged against Republicans and end up with a more liberal infrastructure plan than otherwise.
+michael barbaro
+So the government shutdown has already delayed the timing of this two-part Democratic strategy. How is it going to impact the politics and dynamics of the strategy?
+nicholas fandos
+I think that’s the biggest open question facing Washington right now. Is divided government going to be able to bear fruit or not? And the earliest test of that has been these negotiations over a wall at the southwest border and —
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+Shut it down.
+archived recording (president trump)
+Ah, no, no, no.
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+You keep talking about it.
+archived recording (president trump)
+The last time, Chuck, you shut it down.
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+No, no, no.
+archived recording (president trump)
+And then you opened it up very quickly.
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+Twenty times. Twenty times.
+archived recording (president trump)
+I don’t want to do what you did.
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+Twenty times you have called for — “I will shut down the government if I don’t get my wall.” None of us have said —
+archived recording (president trump)
+You want to know something?
+archived recording (senator chuck schumer)
+You’ve said it —
+archived recording (president trump)
+O.K. You want to —
+nicholas fandos
+So far, at least, they have not gone well.
+archived recording
+It certainly was a tale of two meetings, as you said, Heather, with Democratic leaders saying President Trump threw a temper tantrum, slammed his fist on the table. Meanwhile, Republicans, like Vice President Mike Pence, say that he kept his cool and even passed out candy. That aspect —
+nicholas fandos
+We now have a three-week clock ticking on finding a solution. And I think the outcome of this three-week period, or of this wall debate, will go a long way in determining whether or not there’s going to be a model or the goodwill for Democrats to work with the president.
+archived recording
+This idea that Democrats are for open borders is gibberish.
+michael barbaro
+So the longest shutdown in U.S. history could logically be seen as a pretty bad start, if we’re looking for signs of compromise. But, on the other hand, as best I can tell, we’re now at this moment where Democrats, Republicans and the president all want border security. And they basically just need to find a way to claim victory on all sides. But they really do seem to agree on the terms — some fencing that the president can call a wall but really probably isn’t a sea-to-sea wall, some technology, maybe some drones and so on. But there’s a consensus that’s emerging.
+archived recording
+What I’m confident is, is that Democrats are willing to sit down with Republicans. And I do believe that there is a like-minded consensus among Republicans and Democrats, that we can and we will strike a balance, a compromise, on comprehensive border security. It’s not grounded in a physical barrier. It could include some physical barrier.
+michael barbaro
+And so, kind of counterintuitively, if we find ourselves in a couple of weeks with Congress and the president reaching a compromise on something as intractable as border security and immigration, I wonder if that could lay the groundwork for a lot of these other compromises?
+nicholas fandos
+Yeah. I think that one can see a scenario where they come up with an agreement that both sides can claim, for semantic reasons, for tactical ones, were a success for them, where President Trump comes out of it feeling good, where Democrats feel like they themselves won. And both sides have a kind of desire to replicate that experience and think, “O.K., we got ourselves out of this.” Democrats are thinking to themselves, “Well, Trump may have manufactured a crisis. But, in the end, we got the better of him.” And Trump’s thinking, “Well, I got money for my wall. I can work with these guys.” And they start to look at these other issues and think, “Hey, all those interests we had in common, maybe we can find a way to come together on them.” The alternative, of course, is that this goes poorly. We enter another shutdown. Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump are in a kind of feud that they can’t get past, and we see none of this legislation coming into law.
+michael barbaro
+So what happens in these next couple of weeks in the border security negotiations seems to have the greatest implication for the second part of the Democratic strategy — the compromise agenda — and less so for the first part, the symbolic agenda?
+nicholas fandos
+Right. It’s easy to move legislation on the House floor. And Democrats, despite the shutdown, already started advancing some of these bills. They’ve been rolling out one a week so far, starting to put them through hearings and on the House floor. They can do that regardless of President Trump. They’ll never become law. But, you know, Nancy Pelosi can put her signature on them. And candidates all over the country can go out and say, “Look, the House passed this legislation.” But you’re right. Unless they can come out of this with some goodwill, or perhaps the president and Democrats can totally compartmentalize the wall fight, any other success that the government is going to have functioning and compromising to tackle a big issue is probably going to depend on the outcome of this.
+michael barbaro
+So if the shutdown negotiations go poorly, basically the Democrats are quite likely to abandon this second part of the strategy — the compromise part — and double down on part one, passing these ideologically symbolic bills in the House and making the Republicans reject them?
+nicholas fandos
+In a way. I mean, I think part two then becomes part 1B. I think they’re going to go forward with Democratic ideas about infrastructure and prescription drugs, and continue to try and dare President Trump to not meet them at the negotiating table. But, at that point, then they become a message, and it becomes a matter of politics. You can score points by saying, “Democrats are trying to address this big issue. President Trump won’t meet us there. You really ought to vote him out of office.” That’s kind of the extension of that message. The risk is that for the 20 or so new Democratic lawmakers who helped give them the majority but are in traditionally redder districts, they come back and have nothing really to show for their work. If, instead, this Democratic house becomes known for its aggressive subpoenas towards the Trump White House, or a path to impeachment, and they have accomplished nothing legislatively or on a policy point of view, I think there’s a big risk to Democrats that it looks like they got power and essentially used it for political retribution rather than trying to achieve results for average people.
+michael barbaro
+And then you’re back to a place that the Democratic Party worked really hard to get away from in the midterms. They’re not showing everyday Americans that it’s the Democratic Party that’s actually working for them, rather than Republicans.
+nicholas fandos
+That’s right and that’s what Democratic leaders and, I think, new rank-and-file lawmakers are most fearful of. And to some extent they obviously can’t control where President Trump is going to meet them. I think they feel like the best they can do is try and make a good-faith effort to meet him. And if he won’t meet them, they will go ahead and remind every voter of that, that they tried to address an issue and he wouldn’t help them, and try and use it to reinforce their message that, look, in 2018, we ran promising these things and you rewarded Democrats with a branch of the Congress. But if we’re really going to enact a lot of this legislation that we’re talking about, you have to give us another lever of power. You have to give us the presidency or the Senate. And, ultimately, in the big picture, that’s as much what this strategy is about as it is making law. It’s about setting the party up for 2020 and continuing the kind of Democratic clawback to power, not just in Washington, but in statehouses and governorships all over the country where the brand became — at least for some people — quite toxic during the Obama era.
+michael barbaro
+Nick, thank you very much.
+nicholas fandosBut Deng’s statement was also an admission of the inherent frailty of performance-based legitimacy: In a top-down, state-dominated political system, the link between performance and legitimacy is dangerously tight. When I was conducting research about the health effects of pollution in China last summer, I was amazed to hear so many people, academics and ordinary Chinese, treat a policy failure (like a food safety crisis) or an economic problem (like rising income inequality) as failures of the “system” (tizhi) itself.
+The centralization of power since late 2012-early 2013, when Mr. Xi became the C.C.P.’s general secretary and then president of China, has only highlighted the system’s fragility. Thanks partly to the removal of presidential term limits and his vast, terror-inducing anticorruption campaign, Mr. Xi has become China’s paramount leader. But his extraordinary authority has deeply unsettled officials at all levels, with unwanted effects.
+Lower-level officials have strong incentives to jump onto Mr. Xi’s bandwagon, especially when he signals a policy priority clearly and consistently. With pollution control, for example, they have sometimes become overzealous and have overshot. But with issues that have gone on and off the government’s agenda, such as vaccine safety, local officials are more likely to adopt a wait-and-see attitude for fear of making a mistake — paying lip service to directives but essentially shirking their responsibilities. As the independent scholar Deng Yuwen has argued, extremely centralized leadership leads to the paradoxical situation in which strict regulation backed by tough penalties can actually translate into no regulation and little accountability.
+A preliminary investigation by the Jinhu government found that vaccine-management personnel at the township’s health center had failed to follow protocols for the use and stockpiling of vaccines. And that the local center for disease prevention and control had then failed to report the problem or take follow-up supervisory measures. The report attributed those oversights to “chaotic management, neglect of duties, and regulatory failure.”
+Even as policy paralysis at the local level makes major policy failures and scandals more likely, the social discontent spurred by scandals tends to unnerve the government, which then sometimes overreacts. Within a week or so of last summer’s outburst of public outrage, the word “vaccine” became one of the most restricted words on Chinese social media. This month after the scandal in Jinhu, a video circulated on Weibo and WeChat showing a meeting with local officials and residents from a neighboring district, Hongze. A woman can be heard angrily asking about “unknown disturbance” to her phone line and, singling out the local security chief, saying, “Is this way the government treats us? ”
+So how can the Chinese government get out of its legitimacy bind? To limit the chances of being perceived as under-delivering public goods, it should stop over-promising them, and concentrate on the ones that the people think are of the utmost importance to their well-being, such as food and vaccine safety. To improve its performance in delivering those, the government should allow economic and social forces to play a bigger role. For example, it should open the vaccine market to foreign products, while encouraging citizens to participate in oversight and formalizing ways they can report any violations of safety standards. Setting clearer directives but less draconian and less arbitrary-seeming penalties would also reduce fear among lower-level officials, giving them reason to do their fair share of work and mitigating the policy-paralysis problem.
+China’s people have no institutional recourse to replace the country’s top leaders: They are stuck with the government whether they are pleased with its performance or not. Still, the party-state is generally unwilling to pursue widely unpopular policies and risk triggering mass discontent. In this sense, even the C.C.P.’s rule is an extension of the “mandate of heaven” of imperial times — and in that lineage lies some reason for optimism about the future of vaccine safety in China, more rational and more effective policymaking overall and maybe even some measure of decentralization within the party itself.
+Yanzhong Huang is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations and a professor at Seton Hall University’s School of Diplomacy and International Relations.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.As she eyes an impending exit from political life, however, and contemplates her legacy — Ms. Merkel has announced that she will not run again as chancellor when her term expires in 2021 — her reticence to discuss such issues is clearly changing. The interview in Die Zeit is the clearest example yet, but follows a string of markedly more frequent comments about gender and women’s representation: The same day last fall when she announced she would step down as leader of the Christian Democrats, Ms. Merkel opined on the gender pay gap at an event; earlier that month, she’d called out the youth wing of her party for its disproportionately male leadership; that same month, appearing on a business round table in Israel with only men, she said “it would be better” if the next such gathering included a woman.
+Those hoping for a full-throated embrace of the role of feminism in politics were likely still disappointed by the interview. Ms. Merkel drew a distinction between herself and those she considers real “feminists” — those who “fought all their lives for women’s rights” — and people like herself, who merely had to find “my way” to contribute. Throughout, Ms. Merkel suggested her importance to women came “automatically” — that is, by simply being a woman and being powerful — rather than from any specific outreach or advocacy on her part. “I rarely address only women,” she said. “The fact that women compare themselves to me arises from the fact that I am a woman and other women also sometimes face difficult tasks.”
+She downplayed the idea that she’d been an important role model, calling it “a bit exaggerated” and noting that other women on the world stage — Hillary Clinton, Theresa May and Margaret Thatcher among them — have contributed to women’s equality.
+Still, Ms. Merkel called for gender parity in all areas, by saying such an idea “just seems logical.” And she spoke of her own personal experience as a female politician, from how to be taken seriously — “radiating authority” is something women must learn, she said — to the focus on her wardrobe. “It’s no problem at all for a man to wear a dark blue suit a hundred days in a row,” she said, “but if I wear the same blazer four times within two weeks, the letters start pouring in.”
+Of course, drawing attention to an issue is different than actively advocating change. Ms. Merkel’s historic ascension to the chancellery has had seemingly little effect on women’s representation at the mid- and high-levels of business, politics and technology here, a point on which women’s rights activists have long criticized the chancellor. Less than one-third of positions on the supervisory boards of German public companies are held by women, statistics from 2018 show. And while several of Germany’s major political parties are led by women, the percentage of women in the German Bundestag (31 percent) actually declined after the 2017 elections; women are underrepresented in local- and state-level politics.It was surely no accident that on Jan. 23, the Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó declared himself the country’s legitimate president. That challenge to President Nicolás Maduro occurred on the anniversary of a military coup in 1958 that ended a decade of dictatorship and ushered in an era of Venezuelan democracy and economic progress.
+Venezuela’s military has long been a kingmaker at defining democratic moments. In addition to the 1958 coup, it helped to install a lion of Venezuelan democracy, Rómulo Betancourt, in the presidency in 1945 and was central to returning Hugo Chávez to office after he was displaced in a coup in 2002. That helps explain why Mr. Guaidó has appealed to the military by, for instance, persuading the National Assembly to pass an amnesty law for those who act “in favor of the restitution of democracy in Venezuela.”
+Venezuela is not exceptional. In many countries, the military has played a critical role in establishing democracy. To be sure, it often exacts a steep price in the process, pushing for economic and institutional distortions to democracy that hamper its responsiveness to the will of the majority. In countries like Chile, Indonesia, Myanmar and Pakistan, coaxing powerful and entrenched militaries from power has required not just amnesty guarantees but also carving out economic domains for them to run autonomously and in many cases shunting profits directly to the military without any congressional authority to the contrary. Often these perks are then protected politically through constitutional provisions that grant outgoing authoritarians disproportionate political power or make the transition deal very difficult to overturn.
+In Venezuela, Mr. Guaidó’s outreach, at least initially, was not persuasive: The defense minister, Vladimir Padrino López, flanked by Venezuela’s top military brass, publicly cast the military’s lot with Mr. Maduro. He proclaimed that Mr. Guaidó’s declaration represented a grave danger to national sovereignty and public order and that the military would remain loyal to the Constitution.Now, something that I have noticed here and there, talking to sundry folk over the past couple of years, is a renewed interest in antiquity: Greek, Roman, Babylonian, Chinese, Mayan, or whatever. This is partly because the ancient past offers some kind of solace and escape from the seeming urgency of the present — and such consolation cannot be disregarded. Antiquity can be the source of immense pleasure, a word that feels almost scandalous to employ. For a time, we can be transported elsewhere, where life was formed by different forces and shaped with patterns slightly alien to our own.
+But also — and most importantly — the ancient past can give us a way of pushing back against what Wallace Stevens called “the pressure of reality,” of enlivening the leadenness of the present with the transforming force of the historical imagination. As such, antiquity can provide us with breathing space, perhaps even an oxygen tank, where we can fill our lungs before plunging back into the blips, tweets, clicks, and endless breaking news updates that populate our days, and where we are “distracted from distraction by distraction,” as T.S. Eliot said. By looking into the past, we can see further and more clearly into the present.
+Having emphasized the connection between memory and location, let me tell you something about the place where I will be writing these essays, as it is rather grand.
+I have a desk and a lamp (and access to strong Greek coffee) in the Onassis Foundation Library, close to Hadrian’s Arch. Out of the window, across the near constant hum of thick traffic on Syngrou Avenue, I can see the vast columns of the Temple of Olympian Zeus. Their tall Corinthian capitals shine in the cool winter sun. It is a mere slingshot distance from the Acropolis and a truly privileged spot in which to work. I am sitting across from the first printed edition of Homer’s Opera, which was published by Greek printers in Florence in 1488-89 , and the “Etymologicum Magnum,” which was the first printed lexical encyclopedia in Greek, produced by Cretan printers in Venice in 1499. There are many other dizzyingly beautiful treasures in this library, which was based on the personal collection of Konstantinos Sp. Staikos.
+I met with Mr. Staikos in the library last week. He is also an architect, and he designed the library in which we sat. He is a person of great erudition and carefully chosen words, and I could not help but be impressed. We talked for a long while about the history of libraries in the Hellenic world and their connection to the various philosophical schools of Athens and elsewhere. My mind began to whir and spin with possibility. For a library is also a memory theater. Being inside this library is a little like being inside the head of Mr. Staikos, and I have spent the last week reading his many volumes on the history of libraries, where he offers detailed architectural reconstructions of their design, their function and even their holdings.
+One of Mr. Staikos’s lifelong passions is the attempt to reconstruct the library and the entire architecture of Plato’s Academy from the fourth century B.C.E. This will be the topic of next week’s essay.2. Sleep Easy and Roll Away Stress
+The night before the wedding can be especially stressful. If you’re worried about getting a restful night’s sleep, the all-natural, roll-on sleep aid Sleep Well, by Saje Natural Wellness, might help. It features a relaxing blend of essential oils, including jasmine, chamomile and orange, designed to lull you into a deep slumber. Apply on the soles of your feet, under your jawline or on your wrists just before bed time. You can also combat nervousness and anxiety on the day of the wedding with the Stress Release roll-on of essential oils. It can be added to a tissue and inhaled or dropped into a warm bath.
+Both $26.95 for 0.34 fluid ounces; Saje.com
+Image Innisfree sleeping mask and lip sleeping pack with canola honey
+3. Korean Sleeping Beauty Duo
+Innisfree, a Korean beauty brand that is now available in the United States, has developed a brightening and pore-caring sleeping mask, enriched with vitamin C to improve the texture of your skin while you sleep. The lip sleep pack with canola honey oil, which also works overnight, is a balm that provides moisture through a combination of petals of canola flowers and canola honey from Korea’s Jeju Island. Both overnight treatments will allow your skin and lips adequate prep time for flawless makeup application on your wedding day.
+Brightening & pore-caring sleeping mask, $25 and lip sleeping pack with canola honey, $15; us.innisfree.comBANGKOK — The monsoons are no longer lashing Bangkok, in that soggy season when my sons sometimes have to wade through waist-high floods to get to soccer practice.
+So why did I get soaked last week, as I walked along a major avenue in the Thai capital?
+The liquid, which soon flooded one of Bangkok’s busiest intersections, came from water cannons aimed at alleviating the smog that has shrouded Bangkok for weeks.
+Pedestrians squealed as the plumes of water shot into the air. A vendor of coconut ice cream failed to stop his pushcart from careening into a sewer. A rat scurried, then swam.
+Some of the giant hoses were connected to trucks that only contributed to the bad air afflicting Bangkok. Smoke spewed from the trucks’ exhaust pipes. Officials from Thailand’s Pollution Department estimate that vehicle emissions account for roughly 60 percent of the city’s chemical haze.On Monday night, a young mother carrying her toddler in a stroller fell down subway stairs in Manhattan and died.
+Malaysia Goodson, 22, died doing what countless others are forced to do each day: navigate a subway system notoriously lacking in accessibility.
+Ms. Goodson’s death, in a Midtown station that has no elevator, could be a crystallizing moment for advocates who have been pushing the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to make more stations accessible to disabled riders and to those who find stairs an obstacle.
+[Read our story about Ms. Goodson’s death and the battle to make the subways more accessible.]
+The numbers are daunting.
+• Only 24 percent of the 472 subway stations have elevators, and the elevators that exist break down an average of once a week.Security concerns: Customers said a flaw in the iPhone let people eavesdrop on phone calls. The problem was in the FaceTime app, which Apple promised to fix by the end of the week, but it has been criticized for moving too slowly. A lawyer in Houston sued Apple over the glitch.
+More Apple news: Shares rallied after the company outlined plans for life beyond the iPhone. And it plans to lower prices on some phones outside U.S. to offset a strong dollar.
+PG&E bankruptcy: What happens next?
+Pacific Gas and Electric filed for a corporate reorganization on Tuesday that “is shaping up to be one of the most complicated and difficult in recent years,” writes Ivan Penn.
+Facing tens of billions of dollars in claims related to 17 major wildfires in California in 2017, with its equipment under investigation in several other blazes last year, PG&E decided to declare bankruptcy despite having a stable income stream and several offers of financing.
+Now creditors and suppliers of the state’s largest utility will face off against California officials and fire victims to be paid, while renewable energy companies and climate change activists jockey for position. Lawyers, bankers and consultants are likely to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in fees.
+This is PG&E’s second bankruptcy in less than 20 years; the first came after California tried to deregulate utilities. Dan Reicher, who was an assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration, called it “a real mess,” adding:
+“It comes down to lots of needs: Take care of the fire victims, keep the lights on, ensure progress on climate change and protect ratepayers. That’s at least a partial list.”
+Revolving door
+Roger Lynch will step down as chief executive of Pandora, the company announced, after stockholders approved a $3.5 billion acquisition by SiriusXM. (Billboard)
+John Startin will join Evercore in April as a senior managing director in the advisory practice of its investment banking business, moving from Goldman Sachs. (Evercore)Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+‘We Get It!’
+With a polar vortex sweeping much of the United States, Stephen Colbert took a short break from Trump-bashing on Tuesday to make a few jokes about the bone-chilling cold.Purchases of big-ticket items like cars and smartphones have fallen off especially quickly. Apple said on Tuesday that profits were flat and revenues were down in its most recent quarter, in part because of weakness in sales in China. Data from the research firm Canalys showed that smartphone sales in China had fallen 14 percent in 2018, to their lowest levels since 2013.
+During an earnings call, Alibaba executives sought to play down concerns about the Chinese economy and the smoldering trade war between Beijing and Washington. Joseph C. Tsai, the company’s executive vice chairman, said Alibaba’s exposure to the trade war was low, and he emphasized that e-commerce had generally grown much faster than China’s economy.
+“The slowdown of macro might cause concerns in the market; however, what we see from Alibaba’s platforms is Chinese consumption growth is still strong,” Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, said. He added that although there had been weakness in sales of goods like appliances and smartphones, other sectors, like apparel and home furnishing, had had fast growth.
+Alibaba has suffered, however. Its shares have fallen about 16 percent in the past six months. It has also cut its estimate of revenue growth for the current fiscal year, which ends in March, by about 5 percent. On its blowout Singles Day sale in November, Alibaba sales grew from a year earlier, but also at a much slower rate. A bike-sharing company it backed, Ofo, has also fallen into trouble, and millions of users are demanding deposits back.
+“We expect a tougher macroeconomic outlook for China to weigh on Alibaba’s commissions and advertising revenue for the next few quarters,” said Shelleen Shum, an analyst with the research firm eMarketer, in a report.TOKYO — Carlos Ghosn, the embattled auto executive indicted on charges of financial wrongdoing, says he was the victim of “plot and treason” by other Nissan leaders who wanted to thwart his plans to bring the automaker closer to its alliance partners, Renault of France and Mitsubishi Motors of Japan.
+In an interview with Nikkei Asian Review, his first since he was arrested on Nov. 19, Mr. Ghosn blamed rivals at Nissan for misrepresenting facts to prosecutors and removing him as chairman of the company he helped rescue nearly two decades ago. He said that he had wanted to unite the three alliance partners in “autonomy under one holding company.”
+“People translated strong leadership to dictator, to distort reality” for the “purpose of getting rid of me,” he said. Mr. Ghosn spoke to the Nikkei reporters for 20 minutes, and the article published on Wednesday was accompanied by an illustration. There were no photographs or audio files with the interview.
+Prosecutors, who have been questioning Mr. Ghosn for more than two months, charged him with underreporting $80 million in income to the Japanese financial authorities and temporarily transferring personal losses to Nissan’s books. He has spent more than 70 days in jail and been refused bail twice.Our discomfort with the marketing machine that the red carpet, once the province of all-too-human fashion inspiration and mistakes, has become is nothing new. It was expressed in #AskHerMore, that movement to banish the mani-cam and acknowledge actors on their way into a ceremony as more than advertisements for whatever brands they were representing officially (as paid ambassadors) or unofficially (as the recipients of free clothes). Not to mention the brief Globes and Cannes all-black fashion rebellions of last year.
+Yet, as much currency as those moments had, they have not succeeded in changing the game in any real sense. E! still asks: “What are you wearing?” Websites and apps (including The New York Times) still run slide shows of arrivals with brand names attached to dresses. Readers, whether they want to admit it, still click on them in the millions (and if you don’t ID the dress, they complain).
+And celebrities — male and female — still need the paychecks that come with the endorsement gigs in order to finance their passion projects, indie films or stage forays.
+You can’t put the genii back in the bottle. Ms. Phillips and Ms. Martin aren’t trying to, anyway. It’s their day job (or part of it), after all. They are just adding another element.
+The pitch is simple: Stylist and celeb pick the dress or tux (and shoes and jewels and watch) said celeb wants to wear, whether because of a contract or because they love it or both. Then RAD goes to the brand and asks it to donate to the charity of the star’s choice. (The brand decides how much.)“If you’re going to ignore that information, then you’re going to make poor decisions,” Mr. Schiff said in an interview on Wednesday. He added, “It means the country is fundamentally less safe.”
+Representative Mike Gallagher, Republican of Wisconsin, defended the intelligence agencies on Wednesday, saying, “They are doing a very difficult job and they are actually trying to advance the president’s priorities.”
+Tuesday’s testimony was linked to the release of the annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” a report to Congress that ranks threats to American national security from around the world and provides the public with an unclassified and up-to-date summary of the most pressing threats.
+Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, had told lawmakers that North Korea’s leaders “ultimately view nuclear weapons as critical to regime survival.” He said that there was “some activity that is inconsistent with full denuclearization” in the country and that most of what it had dismantled was reversible. Mr. Trump is expected to meet with North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un, next month.
+Mr. Trump announced in December a plan to withdraw American troops from Syria after concluding that “we have won” against the Islamic State. Prominent members of his own party have denounced what Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, on Tuesday called “a precipitous withdrawal” of American troops from Syria and Afghanistan.
+While it is unusual for a president to pick a fight with his intelligence chiefs, this is not the first time for Mr. Trump. After the 2016 election and before he took office in 2017, Mr. Trump was publicly skeptical of intelligence conclusions that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, and he mocked intelligence agencies for their role in the lead-up to the Iraq war.This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+A couple of weeks ago, one of the country’s most respected health care pollsters — Kaiser Family Foundation — conducted a survey on “Medicare for All.” And the top-line results looked great for advocates of the idea, like Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris.
+Some 56 percent of respondents said they favored “a national plan called Medicare for All in which all Americans would get their insurance through a single government plan.” A large majority of Democrats backed the idea. Almost a quarter of Republicans did, too.
+The poll’s details, however, were a lot of less positive about Medicare for All. In fact, they showed why single-payer health care may turn out to be one of the few problematic issues for Democrats heading into 2020 — if the party isn’t careful. Harris has highlighted the tensions this week, saying on Monday night that she supported the most aggressive version of Medicare for All before moderating her position, via aides, late yesterday.Slide 1 of 24,
+A Norman-Mediterranean-storybook-style 1928 house in Los Angeles, with four bedrooms and two bathrooms, is on the market for $1.495 million.Los Angeles | $1.495 Million
+A 1928 house with four bedrooms and two bathrooms
+Set amid the French Tudor and Mediterranean revival houses of the Wilshire Vista district, this home is east of Beverly Hills and west of downtown Los Angeles. The Miracle Mile neighborhood, with cultural institutions like the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is to the north. The restaurants of Little Ethiopia and popular cafes of Pico Boulevard are a few blocks away.
+Size: 1,996 square feet
+Price per square foot: $749
+Indoors: The house has been refreshed within the last dozen years, with systems updated and period features preserved. Set in a Norman-style tower, the front door opens to a living room with arched windows, plaster walls and a fireplace surround trimmed in Batchelder tiles. Dark hardwood floors continue into the dining room, which has a tray ceiling and a wall of diamond-mullion windows.
+The dining room leads to a sunny breakfast room and a kitchen with linoleum or Marmoleum floors, new marble counters and a restored vintage stove. Passing through the kitchen takes you to a bedroom and en suite bathroom with turquoise subway tiles and bird-pattern wallpaper. Among the three additional bedrooms, one is currently used as a family room and another as a study that opens to a rear deck. All three rooms have closets and share a vintage hallway bathroom with a tiled walk-in shower, cast-iron tub and built-in vanity with twin medicine cabinets.
+Outdoor space: The rear deck steps down to a partially paved backyard on the 0.14-acre property. The detached two-car garage was converted into a gym, with rubber-tile flooring. There is also a loft office space with a dormer window. The driveway is currently used for parking.Early to bed and early to rise is a maxim that’s easy to follow for some people, and devilishly hard for others.
+Now, in a study published Tuesday in Nature Communications, researchers curious about the genetic underpinnings of chronotype — whether you are a morning person, a night owl or somewhere in between — looked at about 700,000 people’s genomes. They identified 351 variations that may be connected to when people go to bed. While these variants are just the beginning of exploring the differences in chronotypes, the study goes on to suggest tantalizing links between chronotype and mental health.
+[Like the Science Times page on Facebook. | Sign up for the Science Times newsletter.]
+The researchers drew on data from 23andMe, the genetic testing company, and the UK Biobank, which tracks hundreds of thousands of volunteer subjects in Britain, about 85,000 of whom wear activity monitors that record their movements.
+Those data were key, said Michael Weedon, a bioinformaticist at University of Exeter in England and an author of the new paper; earlier studies had relied only on people’s subjective opinions of whether they were morning people. Using the activity monitors, however, the team was able to confirm that self-reported morning people did go to sleep earlier — and people with the most morning-linked gene variants went to bed 25 minutes earlier than people with the fewest. Morning people did not sleep longer or better than night people; all that differed was the time that they went to sleep.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+The Los Angeles teachers’ strike is over. Mayor Eric Garcetti even put to bed speculation that he was planning a presidential run — speculation that had been fed in part by his late moves to help negotiate a deal to end the strike.
+But debates about the role charter schools should play in educating California’s children haven’t simmered down. Once again, Jennifer Medina, my colleague who’s been covering the issue on the ground here in L.A., has the latest:
+There were two key votes on the agenda for the Los Angeles Board of Education on Tuesday. The first, to approve the contract deal reached last week to end the six-day teachers’ strike — passed unanimously.
+The vote that received far more attention, drawing hundreds of protesters and hours of public comment, was more symbol than policy: a resolution calling on the state to enact a moratorium on new charter schools while studying their impact.
+The resolution has no legal impact; only the State Legislature has the authority to enact a moratorium or any other strict limits on charter schools. Ever since the deal was announced, charter school supporters have been playing defense, making a huge effort to persuade the school board to defeat the resolution. Such a defeat would have undermined Austin Beutner, the superintendent, who has consistently said he supports charter schools, but was willing to agree to the side deal on charter schools to end the strike.But perhaps no moment has been so primed for grift as our current one. As Jia Tolentino wrote in The New Yorker last year: “At some point between the Great Recession, which began in 2008, and the terrible election of 2016, scamming seems to have become the dominant logic of American life.” The mantras of Silicon Valley — Think big! Think different! Move fast and break things! — encourage harebrained scheming. Venture capital requires business ideas to reap more than profits; they must promise explosive growth. And moving fast is presented not as a shortcut to getting rich but a necessary aspect of any successful venture. The grandiose expectations placed on actual children have grown wildly out of proportion with the economic reality into which they’ve been born. Only a scam could bridge the gap.
+One of the greatest modern scams is the entrepreneurial fetish itself, and its marks are getting younger and younger. Silicon Valley has always romanticized the college dropout, from Gates and Jobs to Zuckerberg and Holmes. (The ABC News projects on Holmes are titled “The Dropout.”) Now a broader effort seeks to enlist children into ventures at an age before their prefrontal cortex is fully formed. In 2017, the magazine Teen Bo$$ debuted to set preteens on the fast track to wealth under the tagline “Dream big & learn fast!” And last year, Entrepreneur magazine ran its own issue on teen titans, featuring a 13-year-old candy C.E.O. on its cover. Her secret? “I just felt like I had nothing to lose.” By the time she was 10, Holmes had decided what she wanted to be when she grew up: “a billionaire.”
+Meanwhile, the tools of grift have rarely been more attainable. Early chat rooms introduced a generation of kids to the pastime of pretending to be other people online. Now, everyone with a smartphone can create and manipulate images. And in this hyper-visual culture, constructing an image of something can feel like the most important step in conjuring the thing itself. Just ask the Chinese manufacturers that hawk clothes online with images of glamorous magazine spreads, then ship out disfigured imitations to unsuspecting customers.
+Holmes was obsessed with the image of a finger-prick drop of blood unlocking a wealth of medical information, and many powerful people liked the picture, too. (“The Inventor” makes much of a photo shoot in which Holmes holds a tiny red vial between her fingertips.) The only thing the Fyre Festival did well was create a viral ad featuring famous models cavorting on yachts and swimming with pigs. At some level, we are all growing familiar with this kind of sleight of hand. On Instagram, we are training to create beautiful images of ourselves with no possibility — or really, expectation — that they be replicated in person.Another year, another persistent worry that the Grammy Awards will once again fail to recognize boundary-pushing black performers.
+The nominations are led by Kendrick Lamar, Drake and a crop of female artists — a promising shift after years of complaints about a lack of diversity at the music industry’s big night. However, nominations don’t necessarily turn into wins: Two years ago, Beyoncé was snubbed in the major categories; in 2018, Jay-Z received the most nominations of any artist and walked away empty-handed.
+But at this year’s ceremony, which will take place Feb. 10, there is one category in which the Recording Academy has nominated a surprisingly sophisticated set of performers, all of whom are black: best music video. (In addition to the artist, this Grammy is awarded to the video’s director and producer.)
+In the Grammy context, the music video category — No. 83 out of 84 on the official list — is generally an afterthought. It was instituted in 1984, the same year MTV inaugurated its Video Music Awards, just as the medium was becoming central to star-making. At this moment — when artists are as likely to develop their audiences on YouTube as on any audio-only platform, and in which expertise in self-presentation and self-promotion is mandatory — the category feels essential. The nominations recognize clips that shaped conversation as much as the songs they illustrate. Some of these videos are wholesale pieces of art in which the visuals and music are fundamentally inseparable; sometimes the importance of the video itself trumps that of the song.LONDON — Parts of seat cushions believed to be from the small plane carrying the Argentine soccer player Emiliano Sala and his pilot that disappeared over the English Channel have been found on a French beach, the British authorities said on Wednesday.
+The cushions were discovered by the French authorities on Monday near Surtainville, a coastal area in northwestern France, Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch said in a statement.
+British investigators have identified a search area of approximately four square miles based on the plane’s path and last known radar position. A specialist vessel will search the seabed for the wreckage at the end of this week, weather permitting, the statement added.
+“We are aware that a privately operated search is also being conducted in the area, and we are liaising closely with those involved to maximize the chance of locating any wreckage and ensure a safe search operation,” the statement said.Good morning. There were flash-frozen wild American shrimp in the market the other day, fat boys, more than 20 in a pound, and the cost wasn’t so dear as lobster or skirt steak, so I took the lot. I had cold sesame noodles (above) in the fridge at home, leftovers from the night before when I’d paired them with some skillet-seared bulgogi, Maangchi-style. Dinner flashed into focus as I pushed my cart toward the checkout line: salt-and-pepper shrimp, hot next to the cold noodles.
+Here’s a truism someone who makes a living slinging recipes oughtn’t repeat too often: You don’t need a recipe to make salt and pepper shrimp. You just need good shrimp, salt, pepper, cornstarch, oil and a wok in which to combine them all.
+Here’s how to make the dish, roughly. Heat about a cup of neutral oil in a wok until it is almost smoking. Meanwhile, for every half pound of shrimp you’ve got, figure about a tablespoon of cornstarch and half that of salt and black pepper each. (If you have Sichuan peppercorns to add to the mix, great: I like a teaspoon and a half there, too.) Mix the dry ingredients together, and toss with the shrimp, shell-on but split up the back and deveined.
+Then fry the shrimp in the hot oil, in a couple of batches if necessary, until they are pink-gold, crisp at the edges and just cooked through. Remove to a platter, sprinkle with a little more salt and chopped cilantro, and serve. I did so with the noodles and was still thinking about the taste the next morning, riding the subway with a smile on my face.Tesla has now shown it can make money — it reported its second consecutive quarterly profit on Wednesday, the first time it has done so — but the automaker still faces many challenges as it seeks to keep its growth going.
+The Model 3 sedan still costs too much to produce. The company has set an ambitious goal of churning out cars from a new factory in China by the end of the year. And it struggles to provide the kind of customer service that buyers of luxury automobiles expect. Tesla also is planning to spend heavily on a new model even as a big bond payment reduces its cash reserves.
+Still, Elon Musk, the chief executive, says he believes Tesla’s toughest times are behind it.
+“This is going to be an amazing year for Tesla,” he said on a conference call to discuss the company’s fourth-quarter earnings. “I’m optimistic about being profitable in the first quarter, and all quarters going forward.”
+The automaker’s earnings in the final three months of 2018 leave some doubt about whether its profits will continue to grow. It reported $139 million in earnings in the fourth quarter, a substantial drop from the third quarter, despite a nearly 6 percent jump in revenue, to $7.2 billion.Nearly 3,000 users agreed and filled out extensive questionnaires, which asked about their daily routines, political views and general state of mind.
+Half the users were randomly assigned to deactivate their Facebook accounts for a month, in exchange for payment. The price point for that payment was itself of great interest to the researchers: How much is a month’s access to photos, commentary, Facebook groups, friends and newsfeeds worth? On average, about $100, the study found, which is in line with previous analyses.
+During the month of abstinence, the research team, which included Sarah Eichmeyer and Luca Braghieri of Stanford, regularly checked the Facebook accounts of the study’s subjects to make sure those who had agreed to stay away had not reactivated them. (Only about 1 percent did.)
+The subjects also regularly received text messages to assess their moods. This kind of real-time monitoring is thought to provide a more accurate psychological assessment than, say, a questionnaire given hours or days later.
+Some participants said that they had not appreciated the benefits of the platform until they had shut it down. “ What I missed was my connections to people, of course, but also streaming events on Facebook Live, politics especially, when you know you’re watching with people interested in the same thing,” said Connie Graves, 56, a professional home health aide in Texas, and a study subject. “And I realized I also like having one place where I could get all the information I wanted, boom-boom-boom, right there.”
+She and her fellow abstainers all had access to Facebook Messenger throughout the study. Messenger is a different product, and the research team decided to allow it because it has similarities with other person-to-person media services.
+When the month was over, the quitters and control subjects again filled out extensive surveys that assessed changes in their state of mind, political awareness and partisan passion, as well as the ebb and flow of their daily activities, online and off, since the experiment began.Facebook’s figures also imply that over the past year, it has caught and taken down roughly 90 percent of fake accounts that are created on its site — most, it said, “within minutes of registration.” Facebook said it also stopped millions of fake accounts from registering each day.
+Mr. Schultz said such a success rate was possible because “the vast majority of accounts we take down are from extremely naïve adversaries,” who typically create automated accounts that are easy to spot. The smaller number of fake accounts that elude detection are generally manually created accounts.
+Mr. Schultz added that Facebook was cautious in removing manually created accounts because it didn’t want to erase authentic profiles. “We don’t want to over-enforce,” he said. “So what we actually focus on is the harmful behavior.”
+Yet obvious fake accounts that are engaging in harmful behavior slip through. Last year, I found dozens of fake accounts masquerading as the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, to scam Facebook users out of cash. Some had been up for years.
+Facebook also said the vast majority of fake accounts it removed were ones that it had spotted, rather than ones that users had reported. Of the 2.8 billion fake accounts it took down in the year that ended Sept. 30, Facebook said, it found 99.3 percent on its own.
+Those numbers also contradict my experience. Last year, I easily created 11 Facebook accounts that used the same name, occupation and profile photo as my verified account. They remained live for five days, until I reported them to Facebook. Instagram, which Facebook owns, also left up 10 impostor accounts I had created until I reported them; it took down only five, until I alerted a Facebook spokesman.
+If an account appears to be impersonating another user but isn’t “engaged in harmful behavior,” Facebook often leaves it up, Mr. Schultz said. He said such duplicate accounts could be from people who had lost their password or were confused.Occasionally I find myself retracing a boyhood route, or part of a route, through my old neighborhood. With my father, or Uncle Harry, I used to head up Sixth Avenue in Greenwich Village toward the 8th Street Bookshop, lose myself for a while at Discophile, the classical record store, then hit some of the used book dealers that constituted Booksellers Row along Fourth Avenue and Broadway.
+More often than not, we ended up at the Strand bookstore.
+Save for the Strand, the city’s biggest and most famous indie book shop, nearly all the rest is long gone, like the small-town, scruffy Village of the 1970s. What’s there now is a scrubbed, wealthy enclave punctuated by new luxury high rises and vacant storefronts.
+You might think this would make the site of the Strand a no-brainer for landmark status. But its third-generation owner, Nancy Bass Wyden, is having none of it. Rallying its devotees, she has been scrambling to keep her beloved shop’s 11-story, 1902 Italianate building, 828 Broadway, designed by William H. Birkmire, off the city’s registry of designated landmarks. She says that landmark regulations would saddle her unionized, thin-margin business with potentially crippling burdens.None of these planes will be manufactured in India, and Mr. Modi has not explained how and when the deficit will be made good. Mr. Modi has also failed to explain how jettisoning Hindustan Aeronautics Limited sits with his “Make in India” project to boost manufacturing in India and his promise of ensuring technology transfer in defense manufacturing.
+Serious questions have been raised about Mr. Modi approving the purchase of Rafale fighters at an exorbitant cost. The whole package, including maintenance, spares and weapons, was valued at 7.8 billion euros. Experts at India’s defense ministry had estimated that the deal should cost 5.2 billion euros.
+A seven-member federal team of military and civilian defense officials was mandated to negotiate weapons prices, delivery schedules, maintenance and other terms of the Rafale deal. Three financial experts on the team supported the lower price benchmark but were outvoted, their objection was ignored, and a higher level body increased the benchmark. The final higher price was ratified by the Cabinet Committee for Security, led by Mr. Modi.
+In my reporting, I also found that Mr. Modi’s arbitrary decision to reduce the number of Rafale planes purchased to 36 from 126 raised the price of each plane by 41 percent over the price quoted by Dassault in 2007 and 14 percent over the 2011 price that factored in escalation costs.
+Dassault Aviation sought an exorbitant fixed cost of 1.3 billion euros for “design and development” of 13 India-specific enhancements of the Rafale fighters. Despite objections from three members of the team, the Indian government accepted the demand and the consequent inflation in the cost of the Rafale fighters.
+In July 2014, the Eurofighter Typhoon Consortium, which had lost the original bid, made a new offer with a 20 percent discount. The dissenting experts wanted Mr. Modi’s government to consider it, but the prime minister had already spoken his mind and the idea was discarded.
+Had Mr. Modi heeded the dissenters, India could have saved about 2.6 billion euros — a sum that is significant for a country where tens of millions are deprived of a living wage, nutrition, schooling and health care. Saving even two billion euros on a weapons deal could easily go toward building several thousand schools and hospitals in India’s villages.With the political madness of recent weeks — the shutdown and the smackdowns, the incitements and the indictments — it’s easy to forget there is much actual governing to be done by the new Congress: bills to introduce, nominees to consider and, for House Democrats in particular, oversight of the executive branch to conduct. Major oversight.
+Attempting to hold this administration to account will be among the new Democratic majority’s most vital, and most fraught, duties — especially after two years of cowed Republicans letting the president operate unchecked. A White House has perhaps never more vividly demonstrated the need for some countervailing force to check its corruption and incompetence, its disdain for the Constitution and its assault on democratic norms.
+But precisely because there are so many legitimate avenues of inquiry, Democrats must proceed with caution to avoid looking as though they’re piling on in a punitive or grossly partisan manner. While many Democrats and not a few anti-Trump Republicans would doubtless be delighted to see the president subjected to daily investigative torture, House Democrats cannot afford to alienate the independents and swing voters needed to send him packing in 2020. A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that a plurality of independents already expect the new House majority to go overboard with its oversight, and even some Democratic lawmakers have expressed unease. Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the new Budget Committee chairman, recently joked that Congress would “have to build an air traffic control tower to keep track of all the subpoenas flying from here to the White House.”
+Eager to fuel this perception, Team Trump has been smearing Democrats as engaged in a campaign of “presidential harassment.” It’s the president’s signature move: attack anyone or anything that displeases him — the news media, the courts, the electoral process, insufficiently obsequious Republicans, his own Department of Justice, science — to undermine its legitimacy in the eyes of his base.A wall would prevent asylum seekers from asking for protection at any point along our border — their right under the law — and would leave many of them at the mercy of drug cartels and other criminal groups in northern Mexico. More humane ways to achieve border security can be found to avoid these harmful consequences, through technology, additional legal avenues for entry and policies that address the factors pushing migration.
+You must also look at the intent of someone who wants to construct a wall in order to determine its morality. In this case, it is clear that Mr. Trump wants to deny entry to anyone crossing the southern border, even those who have a right to cross and seek protection and are no threat to us. The administration has just instituted a policy known as “Remain in Mexico,” which requires asylum seekers to stay in that country until their hearings, a process that could keep them vulnerable to organized crime for months or years.
+Mr. Trump is not acting with concern for the impact of the wall on their lives, including those of children, who would remain subject to danger. He also ignores the adverse impact of the wall on the environment, landowners and border communities, like the harm it can cause to wildlife and vegetation, the livelihoods of ranchers and farmers and cross-border commerce.
+Other policies his administration has pursued, including family separation, the rollback of asylum laws, family detention, the elimination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and termination of Temporary Protected Status for most of its beneficiaries, show that the administration’s intent is to rid the United States of as many immigrants — legal or otherwise — as possible.
+The way in which Mr. Trump has argued for a wall also is instructive. In trying to secure funding, he has cast all immigrants as criminals and threats to national security by spreading misleading and inaccurate information about them. His justification for the wall is based upon lies and smears against the vast majority of immigrants who are law-abiding and moral, but whom he paints as less than human.Charles J. Hynes, who as Brooklyn district attorney for 24 years sent corrupt officials to jail and won praise for his approach to nonviolent drug cases, but who lost his bid for a seventh term in a swirl of controversies, died on Tuesday while on vacation in Deerfield Beach, Fla. He was 83.
+His son Sean said a specific cause had not been determined. In the past Mr. Hynes had undergone heart surgery and been treated for leukemia, and he had been hospitalized again while he was in Florida. He died in the hospital.
+Hearty, gregarious and blunt, Mr. Hynes was first elected Brooklyn district attorney in 1989 after his success as a special state prosecutor in a 1986 racial attack on three black men in Howard Beach, Queens. A gang of white teenagers chased one of the men, Michael Griffith, onto a highway, where he was struck and killed by a car.
+The surviving victims and their lawyers said they distrusted the Queens district attorney’s office and refused to cooperate with its investigation. Mario M. Cuomo, then the governor, appointed Mr. Hynes to take over the case, and he won manslaughter convictions against three of the main defendants.WASHINGTON — Veterans who live as little as a 30-minute drive from a Veterans Affairs health care facility will instead be able to choose private care, the most significant change in rules released Wednesday as part of the Trump administration’s effort to fix years-old problems with the health system.
+Veterans who can prove they must drive for at least 30 minutes to a Department of Veterans Affairs facility will be allowed to seek primary care and mental health services outside the department’s system. Current law lets veterans use a private health care provider if they must travel 40 miles or more to a V.A. clinic. Measuring commuting time rather than distance will greatly open the private sector to veterans in rural and high-traffic urban areas.
+Supporters say the new policy, which is likely to go into effect in June, will help veterans get faster and better care. But critics fear it will prompt the erosion of the largest integrated health care system in the country as billions of dollars are redirected to private care.
+The goal of the new policy, officials say, is to provide veterans with easier, streamlined access to health care.What do you get the composer who has everything? More everything.
+Beethoven hardly lacks for exposure, but to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, in 1770, Carnegie Hall announced on Wednesday that it would go all in, and devote roughly a fifth of its 2019-20 season to his music.
+All his piano sonatas. All his string quartets. Lots of his chamber music. And not one but two cycles of all nine symphonies: one performed on period instruments, with John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique, and another on modern instruments, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
+“We all feel this is really the pivotal figure in the history of Western classical music,” Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “Everything he touched, he changed and transformed.”
+Mr. Nézet-Séguin, who became music director of the Metropolitan Opera this season, will be the subject of a Perspectives series that will give New Yorkers a chance to hear him conduct all three of his ensembles: the Philadelphians, the Met Orchestra and the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montreal. The mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the singer-songwriter Angélique Kidjo and Mr. Gardiner will also have Perspectives series, and Jörg Widmann will hold the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair.The director Peter Jackson, known for the “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” trilogies and the new WWI documentary, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” has a new project on his hands: an archival documentary on the Beatles.
+The film, which is still untitled, will cull from roughly 55 hours of never-released footage of the band’s 1969 studio sessions that led to their final album, “Let It Be.”
+The announcement of the movie comes on the 50th anniversary of the Beatles’ final show, that much loved performance on a windswept roof in London.
+[How Peter Jackson Made WWI Footage Seem Astonishingly New With “They Shall Not Grow Old.”]
+“This movie will be the ultimate ‘fly on the wall’ experience that Beatles fans have long dreamt about,” Jackson said in a statement. “It’s like a time machine transports us back to 1969, and we get to sit in the studio watching these four friends make great music together.”“From The New York Times Magazine, this is Behind the Cover.” “I’m Jake Silverstein, editor in chief.” “And I’m Gail Bichler, design director.” “Our cover story this week is a portrait of a small town in Kazakhstan, Khorgos, that is quickly expanding as it becomes one of the hubs of China’s belt and road initiative, which will connect many, many parts of the world.” “We sent the photographer Andrea Frazzetta to capture this really austere landscape near the border of China. Most of Andrea’s images capture the idea of it being this kind of sleepy place that will be transformed.” “We knew we were working with that kind of imagery and that we would write a line that would play against that.” “Right. We decided to try out some very aggressive type treatments.” “And while we liked the handwritten type, it felt a bit too playful for a story about business.” “We did a number of explorations with arrows, and that didn’t quite feel right until we tilted it.” “It needed a wink.” “Yeah.” “Because this is fundamentally a business story, you want to really grab a reader by the lapels and make them understand what’s exciting about perhaps the most ambitious infrastructure project in world history.”For the many who have grumbled that Broadway is too commercial and the very few griping that it isn’t commercial enough, Skittles has a show for you.
+On Sunday, just before the Super Bowl, Skittles, the tasty ellipsoid confection, will present “Skittles Commercial: The Broadway Musical.” A half-hour show, with songs by Drew Gasparini (“Smash”) and a book by the playwright Will Eno and the copywriter Nathaniel Lawlor, it will play Town Hall — just once — for a paying audience of 1,500. (Town Hall is not exactly a Broadway theater, but still.) While some teaser ads have aired, the show itself won’t be broadcast.
+“Skittles Commercial” stars Michael C. Hall, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Eno’s (“The Realistic Joneses,” “Thom Pain”). After a run through at a Greenwich Village rehearsal space last week, I asked Mr. Hall whether he was afraid that appearing in a candy commercial might cheapen his actorly credibility.============================================= LUKE: “An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scottishman walk into a bar. The Englishman wants to leave, so everyone has to leave” TOUTS: music “This paranoia ,...” TITLE: DISPATCH FROM NORTHERN IRELAND TOUTS: Singing KASSIE: How was Northern Ireland considered when this was - MATTHEW CROSSAN / LUKE MCLAUGHLIN - I don’t think it was considered at all. JASON FEENAN: Brexit is the exit of the United Kingdom based on the wishes of Great Britain. MATTHEW: (When Article 50 was actually triggered) The exact words that Theresa May used was that because of the wishes- THERESA MAY file: Under accordance with the wishes of the British people, the United Kingdom is leaving the European Union MATTHEW: Great Britain consists of Scotland, England and Wales. And the United Kingdom consists of Scotland, England and Wales and Northern Ireland. (MAP) So even in her language it shows that definitely when it first happened there wasn’t much thought. MATTHEW: I am struggling to see any positives for the North of Ireland. But that didn’t last long. The question of Northern Ireland and its border has frustrated negotiations over Brexit. We came here to find out why. And to understand the consequences for people who live here. For the last century, Northern Ireland has had to wrestle with its identity- torn between Protestants who consider themselves British Unionists and Catholics who mostly identify as Irish Nationalists. The divide has brought years of conflict. In 1968 the Catholic minority rose up against Unionist and British control, spurring 30 years of brutal sectarian violence known here as The Troubles. In 1998 both sides came together under the Good Friday Agreement, It created a somewhat unique reality here. Northern Ireland would continue to be a part of the UK, but also, open its border completely with the rest of Ireland. But the history of The Troubles is inescapable. Murals are everywhere. And Neighborhoods are color coded along sectarian lines. Here in Londonderry, or Derry, depending on whom you ask, there are walls that separate Protestants from Catholics. And the gates are locked every night. For punk band Touts, this us and them mentality, has informed more than just their music. LUKE: I’ve lived here 22 years - me whole life, basically and there’s places in Derry I’ve never been, or I’ve never walked to. I think that’s crazy. MIRIAM WHYTE: Well it’s kind of rough,cause there’s the Bogside - the mostly Catholic area then there’s here, which is clearly the more Protestant area, but very divided, even though there’s trying to do more what is it called when they like - integration or something. People told us those divisions have deepened since the Brexit vote. Under Brexit, Northern Ireland would leave with the UK, and the Republic of Ireland would remain in the EU. An idea that appears to overlook the reality on the ground here. We headed east, thinking we could drive along the border - but it wasn’t so simple. In part because the border is mostly invisible. To get from one town in Northern Ireland to another, we crossed into the Republic of Ireland multiple times - without even realizing it. The roads continuously zigzag across international lines. Nat sound Kassie: Oh! We just crossed. Speaker: Ah good morning everyone, my name is Florence and welcome to our cross-border conference, Brexit and Young People, Can You Hear Us? These high school students live in border communities. Many commute seamlessly from one side to the other to attend school. SPEAKER: The project recruits young people from both Protestant and Catholic communities on both sides of border. LARRY: Now does anyone have some strong views on that like how would you see yourselves different than someone in the north? GIRL: If you have an Irish passport, in my mind you’re Irish, doesn’t matter where you’re parents are from, doesn’t matter what background you have, if you carry an Irish passport, you’re Irish. It’s part of the Good Friday agreement: residents of Northern Ireland can choose a British or Irish passport. Or both. DOIRE FINN: People living in Northern Ireland are allowed to have a British passport and an Irish passport and I think I identify as Irish but I mean I hold a British passport so really, for my identity isn’t ever something that in my family was a massive issue. My parents kind of said, “You identify as how you feel” and I think that that was a really nice way to bring us up. DOIRE: The census that was happening here you could either say you were Irish or British my mum wanted to identify as European and they were like, “Well, you’re not allowed” and she was like, “No, I’m identifying myself as European.” And they were like “You have to pick.” By aiming to separate the UK from the EU, Brexit could interrupt the free flow of people and goods - and violate the Good Friday Agreement. ALAN (walking with Kassie) - I hope, I hope when you’ve got photographs my cows now, that we finish up getting a better price for these cows. Alan Mc Farland raises cattle and sheep a few miles north of the border. But he gets his feed from a distributor in the South. It’s a transaction that happens regularly, without border checks, customs duties or tariffs. ALAN McFARLAND: No one knows what the final result is yet going to be - we just approach our business each and every day having made an assumption that post-Brexit we will be trading with the same people on the same terms. KASSIE: Did you feel strongly about staying or leaving? ALAN: I was actually undecided in the matter, to the extent that I didn’t vote at all. But having that said in Northern Ireland the majority of the vote was remaining in the E.U. **GRAPHIC of vote breakdown** ALAN: But one thing I would say you always have the right to change is to change your mind - I would be in favor of a second referendum, to do away with the ambiguity. That’s because many people here remember the border as a source of hostility and violence. And a whole generation since then has grown up without one. HARD BORDER MONTAGE FARMER: NO HARD BORDER GIRL: HARD BORDER LEAD TO TROUBLE SOMEONE ELSE: IT JUST MAKES THINGS HARDER But when Prime Minister Theresa May tried to introduce a provision.. MONTAGE: BACKSTOP BACKSTOP ..that would guarantee an exit without a hard border in Northern Ireland, hardline Brexiters rejected it...arguing an open border would essentially keep the UK tethered to the EU. So no hard border, no deal, and so far no Brexit. ... Also, no sense of where all this could lead. ALAN: I think there should be a second referendum FR. McVEIGH (287_2358.MFX 09:08): I want to see Ireland reunified. Because I think it’s the only hope for this island. Economically, culturally. ANGLICAN: We need to stay with England for their money And while everyone saidsays they didn’tdon’t want a return to violence, the uncertainty seems to be threatening what is already a fragile peace. //testing the country’s fragile peace. (i think that can cover the pessimists and optimists) Police are investigating a recent bombing outside the courthouse in Londonderry reminder that the past is not far behind. ANGLICAN: We were in the sun and now Brexit destroyed the sun SIOBHAN: If there is a hard Brexit I think there will be damaged but we will have to be OK at the end of it. And we’ve been through harder times than this before. FIRST NAME, LAST NAME Siobhan is a mental health expert who studieds? the effects of the country’s history on mental health. SIOBHAN: Well, we’ve got to adopt a trauma-informed approach and think about everything from the perspective of those who’ve been a victim of violence. We have no way of describing it. We have no common narrative. And it’s going to take a while for us to generate those materials. TOUTS: This paranoia, when will it end, I’ve heard it all before and I’m hearing it again. DAOIRE: I think I’m just really scared about the future of Northern Ireland. I love living here and I think it’s a lovely place to be. The craic’s really good and everyone’s really friendly and I don’t want that to be dragged backwards into a past that was really, really dark for so many people. And I think, you know, there’s so many good things about Northern Ireland and I just don’t want those to go away. (credits with funny tag of Farmer asking about our Mexican border) Producer Kassie Bracken Cinematography Souki Mehdaoui Editor Shane O’Neill Senior Producer Mona El-Naggar Graphics Aaron Byrd Nicole Fineman Dave Horn Archival Research Dahlia Kozlowsky Archival Footage Tktktk Tktktk Tktktk Aerial Cinematography Adithya Sambamurthy Executive Producer Marcelle Hopkins SIOBHAN: In 2008 we studied the Northern Ireland population and we asked people whether they had witnessed violent events that were related to the troubles such as bombings and shootings and we found that 39% of the population had. There’s some evidence that biological changes that happen in response to trauma, that that’s passed to the next generation and in effect it’s programming the next generation to be able to respond more quickly and rapidly if there’s a bombing or a shooting or whatever. But of course when a child has that it increases the risk of mental illness. Um, there’ve been more deaths by suicide since the signing of the Good Friday agreement than there were through the whole of the troubles through violence. END!!!******* BENCHWARMERS SIOBHAN O’NEILL: I mean the hard border is very symbolic I think if that happened there’s a place to attack there’s a place to focus that anger. Siobhan O’Neill is a leading mental health researcher who has studied the legacy of the Troubles SIOBHAN: Part of the GFA was that British forces that were there that that would no longer be the case and that there would be free movement. Anth the remove of the border was an amazing think and now if you pass through the border there’s absolutely no evidence of it. You would maybe see that the signs that the speed limits were miles and then kilometeres and that would really be it. Or “It’s called bomb scare” “We grow up with it, not as bad as it used to be” Match shots of Northern Ireland today Match shots of The Undertones with the Touts OPEN BEAT ONE - INTRO TOUTS An afterthought during the Brexit referendum in 2016, Northern Ireland and how do deal with its Southern Border if and when it leaves the EU has been the main issue threatening the entire deal. (MAYBE A MAP HERE THAT SHOWS REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (E.U) and NORTHERN IRELAND (U.K) But to understand why this remains unresolved two years later, and what’s at stake in the decision you need to know a bit about recent history in Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland was created in 1922. But since its creation its been characterized by conflict between two groups, each claiming the In 1968 hostilities intensified during the period known as the troubles An afterthought during the Brexit referendum in 2016, Northern Ireland and the unresolved issue of how do deal with its Southern Border when it leaves the EU now threaten the deal’s collapse. (MAYBE A MAP HERE THAT SHOWS REPUBLIC OF IRELAND (E.U) and NORTHERN IRELAND (U.K) But to understand why this remains unresolved two years later, and what’s at stake-you need to know a bit about the history of Northern Ireland and the border itself. In Derry, The Touts’ singer and drummer weren’t old enough to vote in the referendum, but they live in the country many expect to be most impacted by the deal. We drove The singer and drummer weren’t old enough to vote in the referendum, but they live in the country many expect to be most impacted by the deal. Theirs is the generation that grew up after the good Friday agreement that ended decades of sectarian violence has only known relative peace in the region. ASSEMBLY 031019 - KASSIE NOTES Notes - I think we need in the narration a sense that, despite the fact this generation is defined by growing up in peace, there are still deep divides and conflict. Brexit has already impacted this by exacerbating polarization and creating economic uncertainty and anxiety that violence could return. I would love to try to use the Touts/kids in park/Derry to establish the “us” v “them” nature of Northern Ireland - I agree the piece is not about sectarianism per se, but it sets up and personalizes the visual sense of place - the “dispatchy-ness” - peace walls and murals, and also then might have more impact when we see that it seems most young people are united in the feeling like they weren’t considered. Also, Brexit was prompted in large part by the us v them mentality in England, but in NI, as compared to the rest of UK, they already have their own us v them which continues today. **** It’s here in Derry where many say “The Troubles” began, in 1968, - when the predominantly Catholic community protested against housing and employment discrimination. A civil rights march was brutally shut down by police/army. It led to roughly 30 years of sectarian violence between the predominantly Catholic Nationalists who consider themselves Irish, and the Unionists, who consider themselves British, the majority, Protestant. BEAT TWO: THE BREXIT Generation in Northern Ireland - Youth/Derry/Recent History - fear of retriggering violence felt most acutely by people nearest the border BEAT THREE: YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONFERENCE Challenging Identity, Good Friday - which allowed people to claim Irish or British citizenships - the idea that the fluidity of movement will be stopped BEAT FOUR: along the actual border between the countries, it is much more complicated - interwoven - FARMER BEAT FIVE: The members of Touts call Derry their home. Many say it’s here where the period known as the “The Troubles” began, in 1968, - when the predominantly Catholic community protested against housing and employment discrimination and unfair voting policies under British rule. But some claimed it to be a cover for paramilitary actors, and a peaceful civil rights march was halted by police in a brutal crackdown. 30 years of deadly sectarian violence followed between the predominantly Catholic Nationalists who consider themselves Irish, and the Unionists, who identify as British - the majority, Protestant. Sound up on Touts Touts may have grown up in the comparatively peaceful era marked by the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. But their city, called Derry by nationalists and Londonderry by unionists remains fractured. The tensions never way and in fact many say Brexit has exacerbated it TOUTS: Line about divisions still there Schools are still mostly segregated along sectarian lines. As are neighborhoods. A TKTK fence/wall helps secure the border between a Catholic community and a Protestant community. Every night, it is locked for protection. TOUTS Line about impact of Brexit already? Or line about Brexit? Just 100 feet away from the wall, in the mostly Protestant community The Fountain, we spoke with a group of teenagers about TKTK MIRIAM: Nearly everyone I spoke with mentioned/agreed the same worst case scenario HARD BORDER MONTAGE To impose a hard border, with check points and official crossings would cause headaches both practically and symbolically. And that’s where the Irish backstop comes in. THERESA MAY: The Irish backstop was the UK’s provision to ensure that Brexit would not Sounds good, but The problem is, Northern Ireland is in a custom’s union that requires a custom’s border PROTESTANT PRIEST: WE had a number of years that we thought we were seeing the sunshine, and now with Brexit it’s as if the sun has gone behind the clouds. GIRL: It’s going to become again a situation of us and them. LARRY: Who is them and us? GIRL: LIke Catholics and Protestants or Irish people and people from Northern Ireland, we’re not going to see each other as the same country LARRY you’re saying we’re both live in the same country, in my mind that’s true, but yet I live under a British jurisdiction, Kassie: they have a lot to be fucked about Cut to: kids workshop Yeah, these kids are confused because this shit is confusing. Brexit, and Northern Ireland itself. 45 second history lesson of Northern Ireland And this is the legacy they’ve inherited. NOW made worse by… Brexit! Borders are usually about keeping people in or keeping people out, In this case, But it’s about something more nuanced and complicated, like the border itself DRONE SHOT OF MEANDERING BORDER And Ireland, with its taste for storytelling and humor has a singular relationship with its own border People wandering in and out, funny smuggling stories. LOYALISTS EQUANIMOUS STATEMENT ABOUT BREXIT (maybe from mental health professor) CONCLUSION: AT THE BAR IN DERRY WITH THE TOUTS (with compelling TOUT SOT) One of the other key stipulations of the Good Friday agreement was a free border with the south. Now, Brexit is threatening this. It’s the thing people I spoke with said worried them most. HARD BORDER Montage. Before I got here I’d planned to drive along the border - it wasn’t so simple. Here’s the border. On my TKTK mile journey from TK to TK, I crossed international lines/crossed TKTK times. THIS SECTION TBA BASED ON GRAPHIC I often didn’t even realize I’d crossed. Thirty years ago, this crossing would have looked more like this: FR. McVEIGH (287_2356.MXF 03:23)): The hardline Brexit people are determined to leave without a deal if necessary, or with a deal without a backstop - (that’s the only thing that’s going to satisfy them, and the DUP who are propping up the London government) 04:50 The Brexiteers in London don’t care all that much. Father Joe McVeigh grew up along the border and remembers the checkpoints as violent hotspots. Sound up: Fr. McVeigh shows Kassie photos of the border But this bridge at the border in Belleek shows none of the vestiges of That’s help spur a new momentum for a united Ireland. 13:35 If the Brexit people want to continue their line, they have to consider what’s going to happen to us. We needed to be treated separately and differently. The fear of a hard border, with all of the economic and practical implications has given rise to another potential outcome. FR. McVEIGH (287_2358.MFX 09:08): I want to see Ireland reunified. Because I think it’s the only hope for this island. Economically, culturally. (08:54 It has to happen, it just has to happen 09:45 Partition has run out of road. ) FARMER: Voted to remain in the EU. So leaving the EU would go against the voting majority of Northern Ireland. But leaving the UK altogether would go against the wishes of some of Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority. ANGLICAN: Protestant people would certainly be nervous of any changes. There’s a huge amount of money that comes from Westminster and London. Ironically, the hardline Brexit position has revived some calls for a United Ireland FR. McVEIGH : I want to see Ireland reunified. Because I think it’s the only hope for this island. But positions like Friar McVeigh’s aren’t very popular, especially among Protestants in Northern Ireland’s 6 counties, who would become a minority overnight if they joined Ireland’s 26 as one country. So maybe they could have a political border that remains somewhat relaxed. That’s called a Soft Border or an Irish Backstop. Theresa May: Irish Backstop montage But no one really knows how that would work or what it would look like, which is why it’s been such a bee in the bonnet of the Brexit process. Some hardline Brexiters are calling for the re-establishment of a hard border, a fringe position that proved very unpopular with most of the people I met while I was here: HARD BORDER MONTAGE The hard border was both inconvenient and psychologically fraught. TO SIOBHAN Leaving the United Kingdom altogether would mean losing money from England. The DUP advocates it effectively mean keeping the And that’s why the Irish backstop came up and failed?. THERESA MAY: BACKSTOP MONTAGE. When May tried to introduce a deal that said no hard border, hard brexiteers, including forcing Britain to play by the rules of a single European market even after it separates from the EU, it wouldn’t pass. It was meant to guarantee that there would be no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland after the UK separates from the EU. But then, how and where would goods undergo checks as they travel between the UK and the EU. There’s no easy answer? The backstop provision says Britain should continue to play by the rules of a single European market until politicians can agree on how and where goods will undergo checks as they travel between the UK and the EU. But how can the UK leave without violating the terms of the peace treaty that calls for an open border here? Which is, in part, why politicians do not agree on the terms of the backstop, and it’s unclear if they ever will. They didn’t want to feel tethered to the EU. It leaves the question of Brexit unsolved and opens up new questions for Northern Ireland. It all leads to this renewed interest among some people for a united ireland. Of leaving the UK altogether. Siobhan O’Neill is a leading mental health researcher who has studied the legacy of the Troubles, And the border debate has, somewhat ironically, revived an old argument (for reuniting the north with the south) Is FR. McVEIGH (287_2358.MFX 09:08): I want to see Ireland reunified. Because I think it’s the only hope for this island. Economically, culturally. The present is more closely tied to the past here than There’s been a fragile peace here for 20 years but Brexit Well, we’ve got to adopt a trauma-informed approach and think about everything from the perspective of those who’ve been a victim of violence. We have no way of describing it. We have no common narrative. And it’s going to take a while for us to generate those materials. But despite 20 years of fragile peace And Brexit has also had a real psychological impact on the citizens of Northern Ireland For a country that is only a generation away from one of the most bitter conflicts in modern history the tumult How will Northern Ireland SIOBHAN: LINE ABOUT HOW BREXIT HAS ALREADY HAD AN IMPACTISTANBUL — A Turkish court ordered the release of an American consular employee on Wednesday after almost two years in jail, while also convicting him of terror-related charges.
+Hamza Ulucay, a translator who had worked at the United States Consulate in the southern city of Adana for over 30 years, was one of three employees of American consulates in Turkey detained over the past two years, along with several American citizens, in a growing confrontation between the two countries.
+Mr. Ulucay was sentenced to four and a half years in jail for aiding an armed terrorist group, but he was ordered released with reductions for time served, the private Demiroren news agency reported.
+The court, in the southeastern town of Mardin, ordered that he remain under travel restrictions that will prevent him from leaving the country, but he was able to return home on Wednesday.It was heralded a year and a half ago as the start of a Midwestern manufacturing renaissance: Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics behemoth, would build a $10 billion Wisconsin plant to make flat-screen televisions, creating 13,000 jobs. President Trump later called the project “the eighth wonder of the world.”
+Now that prospect looks less certain.
+Pointing to “new realities” in the market, the company said Wednesday that it was reassessing the plans, underscoring the difficult economics of manufacturing in the United States. “The global market environment that existed when the project was first announced has changed,” Foxconn said in a statement.
+Company officials had signaled for months that their emphasis was increasingly on research and development rather than large-scale production, dampening the potential for blue-collar job creation.
+That turn runs counter to Mr. Trump’s vision for the project, which he had cited as a milestone in reversing the decline in factory jobs. The twist also brought new friction in Wisconsin, where the initiative has been politically fraught from the start because of its billions of dollars in tax subsidies.THE WIFE
+By Meg Wolitzer
+[This is an excerpt from the original book review, “In the Shadow of the Big Boys.”]
+Here are three words that land with a thunk: “gender,” “writing” and “identity.” Yet in “The Wife,” Meg Wolitzer has fashioned a light-stepping, streamlined novel from just these dolorous, bitter-sounding themes. Maybe that’s because she’s set them all smoldering: Rage might be the signature emotion of the powerless, but in Wolitzer’s hands, rage is also very funny.
+As the book opens, Joe and Joan Castleman are on a plane to Helsinki, where Joe is to receive a prestigious literary prize. Joan, the narrator, tells us that her husband is “one of those men who own the world” and describes him with a nice mixture of wifely regard and satirical distance: “There are many varieties of this kind of man: Joe was the writer version, a short, wound-up, slack-bellied novelist who almost never slept, who loved to consume runny cheeses and whiskey and wine … who derived much of his style from ‘The Dylan Thomas Handbook of Personal Hygiene and Etiquette.’ “
+Image “The Wife” is also a movie for which Glenn Close has received an Oscar nomination for best actress.
+The story of the Castleman marriage is told in a series of flashbacks. Joan, painfully alive to the hackneyed nature of their match, recalls their early days: “It kills me to say it, but I was his student when we met. There we were in 1956, a typical couple, Joe intense and focused and tweedy, me a fluttering budgie circling him again and again.” The entire novel, in fact, is a kind of paean to the notion that clichés are clichés because they’re often true. The pathetic thing about the younger version of Joan is not that her story is unique; it’s the fact that there were — and still are — so many Joans, circling like so many budgies.MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has long made the buttressing of beleaguered despots a pillar of his foreign policy — most successfully by deploying the military in Syria — to drive home the point that outside powers should not dabble in other countries’ internal affairs.
+On the face of it, the upheaval in Venezuela would seem to check all his boxes. Venezuela, however, is not Syria.
+It is separated from Russia by thousands of miles of ocean; there is no allied regional power like Iran that Moscow can rely on to do the dirty work on the ground; and with the Russian economy suffering long-term anemia, the Kremlin does not really have the means or the domestic support for another costly overseas adventure.
+Nevertheless, the question “What should Russia do?” is raised daily by newspaper columnists and television pundits.[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+Creevy was 15 when she uploaded home-recorded songs to SoundCloud in 2012, under the name Clembutt. They caught the attention of the independent label Burger, which initially released them on the cassette “Papa Cremp” in 2013. The band remade some of those first songs for Cherry Glazerr’s official debut album, “Haxel Princess” in 2014, followed by the more professionally produced “Apocalipstick” and now “Stuffed & Ready.” The band lineup has changed around her with each album; there’s no question who’s in charge.
+While Creevy’s music has stayed grounded in 1980s and 1990s alternative rock — bands like the Breeders, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Cure — she has expanded her sounds and dynamics with each album. Live, Cherry Glazerr is a guitar-bass-drums trio, but in the studio, the band uses layers of guitars and occasional dollops of synthesizer to make each song evolve from within: fragile or eerie at one moment, ironclad the next. Creevy’s voice is high and thin but determined, and bolstered by the studio; her melodies take unexpected, angular leaps, while her guitar parts underline her solitude or blast it away.
+Image “Stuffed & Ready” is Cherry Glazerr’s third album.
+Throughout the album, the songs negotiate intimacy and independence, responsibility and personal needs. In “Daddi,” she grapples with her own reflex of deferring to a man. The verses are high, hesitant, whispery lines — “Where should I go Daddi/What should I say” — but a drum stomp and a blaring guitar take over for the chorus: “Don’t hold my hand, don’t be my man.” She worries about her cultural role in “That’s Not My Real Life,” a barreling punk rocker: “The suits, they don’t want me to go/They just want me to bear it all for all the women.” At the album’s midpoint, she slows down to ballad speed and guiltily craves time for herself in “Self Explained” and “Isolation.”
+But by the end, she’s back in the fray. In “Distressor,” she moves from home and seclusion — hollow, circular guitar-picking patterns — to the powerful mask of performing onstage: “I just wanna drown in my own noise,” she sings, with a drumbeat looming under her voice and, soon, a titanic, heaving guitar riff. At the end, she’s shouting: “So I can just be!”How do New York Times journalists use technology in their jobs and in their personal lives? Emily Bazelon, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, discussed the tech she’s using.
+What are the most important tools that you, as a magazine writer who does investigative reporting, rely on?
+Honestly, the vital tool in my work is people’s willingness to trust me with their stories and to patiently explain to me what I don’t understand. That’s what I need to do my job.
+Everything is a means to that end. Talking to people face to face is still the best, and when I can’t meet someone in person, Skype is my substitute. When I Skype from my laptop, it looks like I’m calling from my cellphone number. I use a software addition called Call Recorder to tape calls (after asking people’s permission). It pops up when the call begins, which makes me remember to hit the button, and then it saves the calls in Ecamm Movie Tools. From there, it’s easy to export the files and play them.When it comes to experiencing music, our ears tell us only so much. In “Go Ahead in the Rain,” his book about A Tribe Called Quest, the poet and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib recalls the determination with which he listened to the hip-hop group’s fourth album, “Beats, Rhymes and Life,” when it was released in 1996. Thinking it would be their last, he was intent on loving it.
+His hands, though, were narrating another story. At the time, Abdurraqib was a teenager in Columbus, Ohio, where it would get unbearably cold during the winter; fiddling with the buttons on his Walkman to skip a song on the cassette entailed exposing his skin to the frigid air. And yet: “I would pull my fingers out of gloves and rush to fast-forward what I could before the wind forced my hands back to the warmth they craved.”
+Abdurraqib’s slender book is full of tactile moments like this, remembrances making it clear that A Tribe Called Quest will always evoke more for him than just a sound. “Go Ahead in the Rain” traces the story of the group over the past three decades. It pays attention to the larger changes in the culture, but its overall tenor is warm, immediate and intensely personal.
+Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times
+Abdurraqib begins with a soaring, wide-angle view of the musical traditions that slaves brought to America from West Africa — drawing a path from a percussion that was outlawed by 18th-century slave codes to a jazz that was “born out of necessity” — before landing on his own childhood as a “shy and nervous kid” who took up the trumpet in an attempt to connect with his father. A Tribe Called Quest offered another chance for connection; their early albums, like “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm” (1990) and “The Low End Theory” (1991), with their jazz samples and socially conscious lyrics, were deemed “acceptable” in his parents’ house, where a lot of rap was not.Now they do.
+For the time being, the judge will not release the data to the public. But a passage from a congressional report gives a sense of the granular information in the data: during 10 months in 2007, one distributor, McKesson, shipped three million prescription opioids to a single pharmacy in a West Virginia town with 400 residents.
+The data has turned out to be a modest help to some of the defendant companies, too: because the D.E.A. reports show that certain medications were not sold in large quantities in some communities, companies that make and distribute them have been dropped from a few cases. In the Cuyahoga County, Ohio lawsuit, for example, the Kroger Company, which owns grocery stores that include pharmacies, was dropped because they turned out not to have a location in the area.
+Going to trial is a win for plaintiffs
+In a 39-page decision last month, Judge Polster shot down the drug industry’s efforts to dismiss the Ohio trial. Instead, h e gave the lawyers the go-ahead to test just about every legal theory the plaintiffs raised.
+They include: that the companies conspired; committed fraud; were negligent; violated public nuisance laws — this last being a relatively recent, novel way for communities to redress health crises.
+Of course, legal theory is one thing. Next comes the hard part: the plaintiffs will actually have to prove those allegations to a jury.
+The companies demand personal medical records
+Typically, patients who sue for medical malpractice or product liability must turn over their own medical records as proof. They forfeit conventional privacy rights.
+Here, the overwhelming majority of plaintiffs are government entities, not individuals. They are seeking to be reimbursed for the accumulated costs of drug addiction and its collateral damage. The defendants want them to produce precise evidence showing how those costs are calculated, including the chain of events — for example, from a drug’s development, to its delivery, to a pharmacy-filled prescription to, eventually, bills from hospitals and others.Unlike other gyms, which take a percentage of trainers’ earnings, the House lets them keep every penny of their wages, which can go as high as $300 an hour. The trainers are also given access to the House’s content studio, replete with a videographer and editor.
+“In this day and age, trainers are influencers,” Mr. Hesse said. “They’re focused on creating content that’s valuable to their followers. Say Devon Levesque or Joe Holder wanted to do a two-minute video on the best ab exercises. We would help them shoot that.”
+If this sounds as if the House is a little focused on its image, that’s because it is. And that’s exactly the point. Because Performix House was actually not created as a gym, but as a marketing vehicle for Performix, the line of “performance-driven” supplements, protein powders and vitamins founded by Mr. Hesse in 2012. Which explains why energy- and recovery-boosting Performix slushies are among the House offerings.
+“Performance-driven” are two words Mr. Hesse uses often, and they’re words he kept in mind while he built his business. He grew up in a small town in Nebraska. He broke his neck in high school wrestling and credits physical therapy, nutrition and supplements with helping him bounce back.
+“I had somewhat of a troubled youth, and I ran into the service as an escape from the real world,” he said. After a four-year stint in the Army, he moved to New York and made his way to work with Bethenny Frankel’s Skinnygirl brand, manufacturing nutrition bars. In 2008, he introduced Corr-Jensen, which manufactures Performix and other products. (There’s also a nonprofit arm, the FitOps Foundation, which trains veterans to become certified personal trainers and helps find them jobs in the industry.)Slide 1 of 11,
+Victoria Beckham, far right, hosted a dinner at the Frick Collection on Jan. 24 for a Sotheby’s auction of old master works by female artists. She posed with, from left, Aimee Ng and Calvine Harvey.A pop star turned fashion designer may seem like an unlikely figurehead for a sale of old masters. But as in Titian’s 1545 masterpiece “The Descent of the Holy Ghost,” Ms. Beckham’s luminous celebrity cast its glow both at Sotheby’s galleries during a V.I.P. preview and the intimate dinner that followed.
+“Myself and David, we don’t claim to know an enormous amount about art,” Ms. Beckham said, referring, of course, to David Beckham, her footballer husband. “But when I first came to the Frick a few years ago, I fell in love with the old masters. And then I got introduced to the team at Sotheby’s, so I’ve been learning more.”
+Dining on potatoes dauphinois and tough pucks of beef were Xavier Salomon, the Frick’s chief curator; Aimee Ng, an associate curator; Mario Sorrenti, the fashion photographer; Prince Pavlos and Princess Marie-Chantal of Greece; and Larry and Toby Milstein, the young philanthropists and séance enthusiasts.
+Casey Kohlberg, a young producer of short films, said she had been a fan of Ms. Beckham’s since her pop music days, and owned several items from her fashion line. She bonded with a table mate, Melissa Jacobs, about role-playing the Spice Girls with their friends in middle school.
+And which one of the group had they portrayed?
+The two young women declined to answer, but each stole a look at the woman sitting at the head of the table.The wife of Alejandro Jodorowsky, a Chilean-born artist whose show was canceled this week by El Museo del Barrio over concerns about reports that he had said decades ago that he raped an actress in a movie he directed, issued an email statement on Wednesday defending him.
+“Words are not acts,” wrote Pascale Montandon-Jodorowsky, adding that her husband “never raped anyone.”
+In announcing the cancellation on Monday, El Museo cited events during the making of the surreal 1970 western “El Topo.” In 2017, The Telegraph, in Britain, published an article citing a 1972 book “El Topo: A Book of the Film,” that included a statement by Mr. Jodorowsky who played a character in the movie, saying that a scene that depicted him raping the actress was real and not staged.
+According to the book, Mr. Jodorowsky said: “I really raped her. And she screamed.”
+Over the years Mr. Jodorowsky has disavowed that account, The Telegraph reported, saying that he was trying to shock people or arguing that an actual rape would not have been possible on a film set. But El Museo’s executive director, Patrick Charpenel, said in a statement on Monday: “While the issues raised by Jodorowsky’s practice should be examined, we have come to the conclusion that an exhibition is not the right platform for doing so at this time.”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Two days after a 22-year-old woman with her 1-year-old daughter in a stroller fell down the steps of a Manhattan subway station, the city’s medical examiner suggested that the woman’s death was not caused by the fall but “appears to be related to a pre-existing medical condition.”
+The chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, did not provide details but said “no significant trauma” was involved in the death of the woman, Malaysia Goodson. She said the cause of Ms. Goodson’s death had not yet been determined. Ms. Goodson’s daughter Rhylee, who was tucked in the stroller, survived.
+Malaysia had been healthy all her life, including the past year after the birth of Rhylee, Tamika Goodson, her mother, said. She said she was awaiting word on an autopsy. “I need to know,” she said. “We’re going to find out. If there’s anything, we’re going to find out.”
+Whatever the circumstances that resulted in Ms. Goodson ending up at the bottom of the stairs, her death shaped an anguished dialogue about life in New York City — about how people so rarely offer to lend a hand to those with strollers, about how so many subway stations lack elevators, about how the elevators in stations that have them are so often broken and about how the limitations of the city’s old and creaking transportation system create obstacles, not just for people with small children but for older passengers and people with disabilities.Over the past decade, the Denisova Cave in Siberia has yielded some of the most fascinating fossils ever found. To the naked eye, they are not much to look at — a few teeth, bits of bone.
+But the fossils contain DNA dating back tens of thousands of years. That genetic material shows that Denisovans were a distinct branch of human evolution, a lost lineage.
+At some point in the distant past, the Denisovans disappeared — but not before interbreeding with modern humans. Today, people in places like East Asia and New Guinea still carry fragments of Denisovan DNA.
+One of the biggest obstacles to understanding the Denisovans is their age. Standard methods for dating these fossils have left scientists perplexed.ANTISEMITISM
+Here and Now
+By Deborah E. Lipstadt
+As recently as the turn of this century, it was just about plausible to hope that anti-Semitism might soon go the way of fear of witches — not extinct, but too manifestly absurd for all but the dumbest of bigots to avow. In the United States, there was hardly an institution where Jews weren’t welcomed and fully (if not over-) represented. In Europe, taboos against anti-Semitism continued to hold firm two generations after the end of World War II. In the Middle East, it seemed possible that the peace process would lead at least to a softening of hatred toward the Jewish state.
+And in London, Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish history at Emory, was fighting a defamation suit brought against her by the Holocaust denier David Irving. When the 349-page verdict against Irving was handed down in April 2000, it felt as if a concluding chapter in the history of an infamous lie had been written.
+Lipstadt’s new book, “Antisemitism: Here and Now” — completed long before the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, but made all the more timely in its wake — underscores how vain that millennial hope was. Written as a series of letters to two composite characters, a “whip smart” Jewish college student and a well-meaning gentile law professor, Lipstadt’s book aims not to break new scholarly ground but to awaken her audience to the nature, persistence and scale of the threat, along with the insidious ways in which it seeks to disguise itself.
+Image White nationalists at the University of Virginia, August 11, 2017. Credit... Stephanie Keith/Reuters
+She succeeds. Even readers who try to keep current with the subject may have missed the story of Ken Loach, the acclaimed British filmmaker and Labour Party activist, slyly refusing in 2016 to condemn Holocaust denial because “history is for us all to discuss.” Or a 2013 survey by German researchers of thousands of anti-Semitic messages received by the Israeli Embassy in Berlin and the Central Council of Jews in Germany, 60 percent of which “came from educated, middle-class Germans, including lawyers, scholars, doctors, priests, professors and university and secondary school students.” Or a 2015 protest by Students for Justice in Palestine at the City University of New York, in which activists blamed planned tuition hikes on the “Zionist administration [that] invests in Israeli companies.”In other words, the Oscar telecast has become an entertainment program determined to divest itself of all entertainment.
+Does the academy understand why we still tune into this show? When I think back on the Oscars of yesteryear, I remember moments, not minutes: a speech that surprises, a musical performance that connects, an unplanned line that becomes a part of history. If the academy isn’t going to leave room for those moments to happen, it might as well issue a press release instead of a broadcast.
+The Oscars ought to take a few cues from the Super Bowl, another mammoth entertainment event that refuses to be ashamed of its size. When the Super Bowl is broadcast this Sunday, producers won’t be forced to choose between either the national anthem or the halftime show, or eliminate overtime if the game goes long. They understand that people want the Super Bowl to be as maximal as possible, a communal watching experience that gives us plenty to talk about. Why can’t the Oscars be as unabashed?
+Even the Super Bowl’s most annoying feature — endless commercial interruptions — has been rebranded as one of its greatest strengths: You now watch not just to see which team prevails, but to debate what high-profile ads won the night, too. Instead of apologizing for the Oscars’ length, ABC could take similar advantage of it by stuffing the commercial breaks with exclusive footage from “Avengers: Endgame” or “Toy Story 4,” two films to be released by the network’s fellow Disney subsidiaries Marvel and Pixar.
+There are plenty of other organic, exciting ways to work those blockbusters into the broadcast, and they can even help restore some of the categories the academy wants to cut from the show. Is a sound-mixing Oscar the most scintillating thing to present during the telecast? On its own, perhaps not, but what if you could show a clip of Beyoncé and Donald Glover mixing their duet of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” from the forthcoming redo of “The Lion King”? The presentation might take a little longer, but I doubt anyone would complain.
+So let’s embrace that attitude: Instead of apologizing for the show’s length, the academy should resolve to pack the Oscar broadcast full of major moments, no matter how long it goes. Instead of antagonizing the craftspeople who should be celebrating the biggest night of their careers, the Oscars should find a way to honor them by making every presentation a blockbuster event.
+As a kid, Lin-Manuel Miranda tuned in to the Oscars simply because he loved a movie, and there was no show on earth that loved movies more. It’s time for the Oscars to prove they can still be that show.“I don’t think adding an official is an answer to all of the issues, and particularly this issue,” Goodell said.
+Goodell’s 40-minute question-and-answer session was dominated by the play in New Orleans, but Goodell also was asked about a number of other hot-button topics, including Colin Kaepernick; the effectiveness of the league’s Rooney Rule in diversifying coaching staffs; President Trump; the messy inheritance fight over the Denver Broncos; and league investigations of the players Kareem Hunt and Reuben Foster.
+The most pointed question invoked Atlanta’s past as a hub of the civil rights movement, and how history will judge Kaepernick’s continued absence from the league. Kaepernick, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, has filed a grievance accusing owners of colluding to keep him out of the N.F.L. because of his social activism.
+Goodell said the league office had no role in the personnel decisions of individual teams. “Our clubs are the ones that make decisions on players that they want to have on their roster,” he said, adding, “That is something we as the N.F.L. take pride in.”
+He also was asked if the league’s Rooney Rule, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for head coach openings, was still effective. The rule was strengthened in December, but the number of minority coaches in the league has dropped precipitously after four black head coaches were fired after the season.
+Goodell said the league did not view the success or failure of the Rooney Rule, which was adopted in 2003, in one-year increments. He said the league was talking with coaches about how to provide greater opportunities to minority coaches, and announced that a quarterback summit would be held in June at Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, to train new coaches.
+The commissioner refused to take the bait when asked about President Trump, who said two years ago that the N.F.L. should allow more and harder hits. Goodell noted the irony of his being asked about officials throwing too many flags at a news conference dominated by criticism of a game in which a flag was not thrown, before saying simply that the N.F.L. strives for games to be officiated at the “highest level.”Send Us Your Ideas for What to Do During the Polar Vortex. We Want to Hear From You.
+It’s so cold in much of the Midwest today that you could get frostbite within five minutes once you step outside. If you’re living through it indoors, g ive us your tips.
+A commuter during an extremely light morning rush hour in Chicago on Wednesday. Businesses and schools have closed as the city copes with record low temperatures. Credit... Scott Olson/Getty ImagesBRUSSELS — After Britain voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, its leaders were in a panic. The bloc was mired in a migration crisis, and anti-Europe, populist forces were gaining. Britain’s decision seemed to herald the start of a great unraveling.
+Two years later, as Britain’s exit from the bloc, or Brexit, looks increasingly messy and self-destructive, there is a growing sense, even in the populist corners of the continent, that if this is what leaving looks like, no, thank you.
+Nothing has brought the European Union together quite as much as Britain’s chaotic breakdown.
+“A country is leaving and has gotten itself into a right old mess, making itself ridiculous to its European partners,” said Rosa Balfour, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Brussels.
+The challenges facing Europe — low growth, eurozone governance, migration, debt, border security and populism — have by no means gone away. Nor has Europe found consensus on how to deal with them.Want climate news in your inbox? Sign up here for Climate Fwd:, our email newsletter.
+In 2013, starfish — including the morning sun star, the richly hued och re star and the sunflower star, whose limbs can span four feet across — started dying by the millions along the Pacific Coast from Mexico to Alaska.
+They were succumbing to a wasting disease. It began with white lesions on their limbs, the dissolution of the surrounding flesh, a loss of limbs and finally death. Understanding, let alone solving, the problem would take research.
+One day, shortly after the epidemic began, Drew Harvell, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell University who had been sounding the alarm about the disease, received a curious letter.
+“I received a $400 check in the mail from a group of schoolchildren from Arkansas,” Dr. Harvell said. “These kids were so upset about the idea of starfish disappearing from the oceans that they went out and they did this fund-raiser and raised 400 bucks for us to help in our research. I never asked them to do this. They just did it.”Details: Between 2013 and 2015, the Pacific Ocean became unusually warm. At the same time, millions of starfish started succumbing to a wasting disease. The study found that, in fact, there was a correlation between the two events. Everywhere the ocean warmed, the sunflower stars sickened and died.
+Background: The ocean, which absorbs 90 percent of atmospheric heat trapped by greenhouse gases, has been warming faster than previously thought, which in turn is killing off marine ecosystems, raising sea levels and creating more extreme weather patterns.
+Speaking of extreme weather: While parts of the U.S. are suffering through a polar vortex, wildfires are raging in Australia’s record-breaking heat. Scientists say climate change could be the culprit.
+Here’s what else is happening
+Facebook: Despite the privacy scandals, the social media company said that its revenue and profits climbed in the most recent quarter as did the number of new users. As for the number of fake accounts, that’s something that hasn’t added up in the past.
+India: On Friday, Amazon and its local competitor, Flipkart, will hike up prices for or pull thousands of products on their platforms, after the Indian government effectively barred them from selling products by affiliated companies .
+Tesla: The electric-car maker reported a rise in revenue and vehicle sales but anticipated slower sales in America in the next quarter .TEHRAN — Iran, squeezed by punishing American sanctions, is confronting its most severe economic challenge in 40 years, President Hassan Rouhani said on Wednesday, arguing that the Iranian government “should not be blamed” for the crisis.
+The Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran last year after President Trump decided to withdraw from the international nuclear accord reached with Tehran in 2015, calling it a “horrible one-sided deal.” Under the pact, Iran agreed to essentially freeze its nuclear program for at least 15 years in exchange for relief from oil and financial sanctions.
+Under American pressure, dozens of European companies have abandoned operations in Iran that they had started after the signing of the nuclear agreement, leaving thousands of Iranians jobless. Reimposed banking sanctions have sharply curtailed foreign investment and access to international credit, and oil sanctions have more than halved Iran’s crude exports, its main source of income.
+“Today the country is facing the biggest pressure and economic sanctions in the past 40 years,” since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Mr. Rouhani said in a speech commemorating the anniversary that was broadcast on state television.Welcome to the Climate Fwd: newsletter. The New York Times climate team emails readers once a week with stories and insights about climate change. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.
+Hi, everybody! If you are in the areas of the United States affected by the polar vortex (and do click that link for a dazzling visual explanation of the phenomenon), we hope you’re bundling up. LAYERS, PEOPLE.
+Some of the temperatures we’re seeing in the Midwest are the frostiest in decades, a reminder of colder times. But let’s all please put one much-discussed line to rest: Yes, it’s colder in Chicago or Des Moines than in some parts of Antarctica. But it’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, so it’s not that shocking. (Yes, The New York Times used this factoid, too.)
+If you are chilling out in the United States, you might be asking what this deep freeze could have to do with climate change. (Or you might want to know how to respond to an argumentative friend or relative.) We’re here for you. Kendra Pierre-Louis has the answer in a story that explains that, while climate can affect weather extremes, climate is not weather.
+As Kendra put it: “A billionaire who has forgotten his wallet one day is not poor, any more than a poor person who lands a windfall of several hundred dollars is suddenly rich. What matters is what happens over the long term.”Coming in a time of economic prosperity, at world-historical levels of interest in the news, last week’s cuts tell a story of impending slow-motion doom — and a democratic emergency in the making, with no end in sight.
+Consider: We are in the midst of a persistent global information war. We live our lives on technologies that sow distrust and fakery, that admit little room for nuance and complication, that slice us up into ignorant and bleating tribes. It is an era that should be ripe for journalists and for the business of journalism — a profession that, though it errs often, is the best way we know of inoculating ourselves against the suffocating deluge of rumor and mendacity.
+And for a while, it looked like we could do that. The past half decade has been a season of bold and optimistic innovation in media. In addition to the Trump bump, there was new money from venture capitalists, and giants in cable and telecom. Big brands, looking to attract millennials, began to spend haltingly and then generously on advertising, leading to a Cambrian explosion of new sites, new formats, new business models. And consumers began opening up their wallets to support journalism, turning around the fortunes of The New York Times.
+Many in the industry remain optimistic about these ways forward. There’s a doubling-down on subscriptions, a rush to podcasts and high-end video, and a return to smaller and more calculated media ventures, like Bill Simmons’s tiny but profitable start-up, The Ringer. Then there is the charity of digital billionaires. The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, Laurene Powell Jobs’s Atlantic magazine, Marc Benioff’s Time and Farhad Manjoo’s Color Me Skeptical That the Billionaires Who Got Us Into This Mess Will Save Us Gazette.
+But it takes only a quick jaunt through the particulars of last week’s layoffs to snuff out much reason for optimism.I’m Dan Gilroy. I’m the writer/director of “Velvet Buzzsaw.” [playful music] This sequence is the gallery opening of the deceased outsider artist Vitril Dease, who inhabits and — and lurks through our film. We started with the split screen. And we come to our split screen, Jake Gyllenhaal is our protagonist. He’s there. All of our characters are there in a Robert Altman-like way. And now, the reason we came through a champagne glass was we were trying to sort of show this — this world out of balance and maybe slightly supernatural. “He came from nowhere, knew no one” And Rene Russo is the foremost gallery owner in Los Angeles. The wonderful Zawe Ashton is her protégée who’s found all this outsider art and kept it for herself. “I spotted it by streetlight over a dumpster.” And what you’ll notice if you start to watch is that we’re going to stay in this tracking shot for quite a while. Robert Elswood, our cinematographer, did an amazing job with this, and we had a great Steadicam operator named Colin Anderson. “There’s one we’re very interested in.” “Just know demand has people ready to kill.” “Ah.” Toni Collette plays a museum curator who’s become an advisor. She’s sold out. And from a camera standpoint, we’re doing something which I think is interesting. We’re sort of — we’re staying with them, but were pinballing back and forth, which we decided to do on the day, and I thought conveyed the scene really well. “Well, how hilarious for you.” What they’re talking about is the shenanigans economically in the contemporary art world, how a curator for a museum can become an advisor and advise people with money to buy things that they might not be inclined to buy in order to establish a relationship with the gallery owner. “I’ll sell you two Dease if you buy three pieces at Damrish’s opening next month.” “What if my client doesn’t respond to Damrish?” “Well, you’re the advisor. Advise.” John Malkovich plays the foremost contemporary art in the world who has stopped drinking and is now utterly creatively blocked. He’s come to see this outsider artist because he’s represented by Rene’s character. And he’s walking this space, and he comes upon Daveed Diggs, wonderful, wonderful actor. He’s a street artist who’s up and coming, and they are both now looking at this outsider artist’s piece of work, which has to deal with childhood trauma. In our film, artists see something in the paintings that other people do not see, and are deeply affected and touched by it, which is what’s happened now. John Malkovich, after two years now, has decided he’s going to have a drink. And I love Marco Beltrami’s ascendant score as he raises the glass to his lips.Last month, I bought a big new computer screen, thinking that if I stopped crouching over my laptop like a turtle, my lower back would stop hurting. It worked great — for about 48 hours. Then I started getting searing pains in my neck, which prevented me from turning my head to the right, which then almost got me into a car accident. All because, I eventually figured out, I had positioned my new screen about two inches too high.
+About $1 billion a week is spent in the United States to deal with entirely preventable work-related musculoskeletal injuries, many of which are caused by small flaws in body positioning. You can do a surprising amount of damage to your body if you hold parts of it in strange positions for hours at a time, five days a week. But some research suggests that you can also prevent and even reverse damage by engineering your office work environment properly. I talked to experts to find out how.
+If possible, invest in ergonomically sound office furniture.
+A healthy workstation is one that allows you to work in a neutral, relaxed position. That setup “requires the least force, the least strength, the least effort,” said Alan Hedge, director of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Research Group at Cornell University, “and that means you’re putting the least amount of strain on your body.”
+To get there, you will want furniture that can be adjusted to your body size and shape — basically, “the more adjustability, the better,” said Justin Young, an industrial and operations engineer at Kettering University in Michigan.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The blood has been mopped up. The tables are bustling again and the smell of Chinese food fills the air at Seaport Buffet, an unpretentious restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, where Asian and European immigrants gather to eat, sometimes bringing their own bottles of liquor.
+But the trauma of what happened in this peaceful gathering spot on Jan. 15 has etched itself into the minds of the people who were there when a man, identified by the police as Arthur Martunovich, came in shortly after 5 p.m. with a hammer in his hand and bludgeoned three employees to death.
+The triple killing has reverberated through Sheepshead Bay, leaving workers and customers struggling to recover from the events. Some local politicians have said that Mr. Martunovich, whose family is Russian by way of Estonia, had racist motives and should be charged with hate crimes.
+Dermot Shea, the city’s chief of detectives, said on Wednesday that he expected Mr. Martunovich to be indicted soon. “We anticipate some kind of hate crime charges,” he said.Last month hundreds of Western water managers, farmers and scientists gathered at a conference with state, federal and tribal officials in Las Vegas, where they heard a sobering address about the Colorado River.
+The crowd knew the situation was grim. But it was up to Colby Pellegrino, the director of water resources at the Southern Nevada Water Authority , to set the scene. She methodically laid out how bleak the situation had become for the river, which supports roughly 40 million people in the Southwest.
+So bleak, in fact, that the federal government could soon begin restricting Colorado River water allocations if the seven states that share the water don’t approve their drought plans to reduce water consumption. The deadline for those approvals is Thursday.
+Warnings of doomsday on the river are nothing new. Too many people, farms and factories depend on too little water, which is why the Colorado now rarely flows to its end point at the Gulf of California. The sprawling Southwest has sucked the river dry. Yet the region has thrived in spite of the naysayers.#SpeakingInDance is a weekly visual exploration of dance on Instagram. Watch the video from our most recent post below, and follow us at @nytimes.To the Editor:
+Re “A DNA ‘Magic Box’ Can Snare Criminals, but Also the Innocent” (front page, Jan. 21):
+A Rapid DNA machine does more to threaten communities than protect them. It combines a potentially unreliable testing method with an ever-expanding and often unregulated DNA databank. New York City residents should be concerned because this practice is coming to their neighborhood police precinct very soon.
+The New York City Police Department recently announced that it intends to use Rapid DNA in conjunction with the local DNA databank operated by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. Unlike other state databases, the medical examiner’s database stores DNA from juveniles as well as from people who were never charged with a crime, or who had their cases dismissed or who were acquitted.
+The people whose DNA is stored in the medical examiner’s databank largely come from the same communities plagued by stop-and-frisk and “broken windows” policing: underserved communities of color.
+The medical examiner’s databank, alone or combined with Rapid DNA, threatens wrongful arrests, prosecutions or even convictions. Unless lawmakers start to truly regulate the medical examiner’s database before technologies like Rapid DNA come online, our clients will continue to suffer because of the color of their skin.The vaccine that prevents rotavirus, which can cause severe gastric problems in children, may have another benefit: lowering the risk for Type 1 diabetes in toddlers.
+Rotavirus can leave children badly dehydrated and is sometimes fatal. Fortunately, there are two vaccines for the disease, easily administered by putting drops in the child’s mouth at ages 2 months, 4 months and (for one version of the vaccine) 6 months. Both vaccines are more than 90 percent effective.
+An Australian study, published in JAMA Pediatrics, examined the prevalence of Type 1 diabetes in the eight years before and after the rotavirus vaccine came into use in 2007. They found that in children up to 4 years old, born after the introduction of the vaccine, the rate of Type 1 diabetes decreased by 15 percent in the years following the vaccine’s introduction. In children older than 5, there was no difference in rates of Type 1 diabetes before and after the use of the vaccine.
+The lead author, Kirsten P. Perrett of the University of Melbourne, said that these results, while not conclusive, show that it is possible that preventing rotavirus will reduce the risk for Type 1 diabetes in some infants at genetic risk. “The takeaway message is: Vaccinate!”To the Editor:
+Re “Young Mother, Hauling Child and Stroller Down Subway Steps, Dies” (news article, Jan. 30):
+I was saddened and quite outraged to read about the young mother who died carrying her child in a stroller down the subway steps where I frequently travel.
+As a young mother 20 years ago, I would frequently be faced with trudging through the snow and having to carry my son and stroller down treacherous stairs. Like Christine Ann Denny, who is quoted in the article, just as I had about given up, someone would help, restoring my faith in humanity.
+Fast forward to my B/C train stop at 72nd and Central Park West recently being closed for six months for “extensive renovation.” Did they put in an elevator or escalator? No! Instead, they widened the platforms and put up pictures of clouds with the word “Imagine” on them.
+How about imagining an elevator or escalator?
+Renée Arnold
+New YorkTo the Editor:
+Re “Today’s Weather: Stifling to Frigid” and “U.S. Intelligence Disputes Trump on Global Peril” (front page, Jan. 30):
+Since the time of Galileo, humankind has reserved special enmity for those cursed with the ability to challenge orthodoxy and see far into the future. In 1992, Al Gore wrote “Earth in the Balance.” A quarter century later, it is clear that Mr. Gore’s warnings, widely mocked and derided to this day, were ignored at our peril.
+On a day when you also report that President Trump’s rhetoric and policies do not accurately address or even acknowledge the long-range threats posed to the United States, according to the “Worldwide Threat Assessment” issued by our nation’s top intelligence agencies, a peculiar American malady comes into focus.
+Until we overcome our shortsightedness individually, we cannot overcome it collectively. We must begin sensible, nonideological, evidence-based strategic planning, or I fear the world will witness the ebb of the American moment.
+David D. Turner
+New York
+To the Editor:
+“Today’s Weather: Stifling to Frigid” helps explain how the extreme cold in the Midwest can be consistent with global warming.To the Editor:
+Re “12 White Faces Reflect Blind Spot in Big Law” (front page, Jan. 28):
+In the summer of 1990 — almost 30 years ago — I was a summer associate at Paul, Weiss. I had just written a letter published in these pages defending protests seeking more diversity among the faculty at elite law schools and decrying the trope so consistently offered that law schools had to choose between “excellence” and “diversity.”
+Partners, all of whom were white and most of whom were male, called me into their offices to talk about how the firm tried to find and recruit “qualified” minority candidates. Uh huh. Meanwhile, my office mate, a black man and fellow summer associate, was routinely mistaken for a copier repairman by associates and partners alike. He did not return to the firm after the summer.
+When I was interviewing for that summer job, in the fall of 1989, many of my Columbia classmates and I wore buttons with a question mark. We had committed to asking questions about law firm diversity practices and plans during our job interviews. It was our goal to take action in this little sphere of influence to make clear that we deeply valued diversity and would make decisions based on those values. I wonder if any of those questioners are partners at Paul, Weiss now.
+Perhaps today’s law students and associates will keep fighting — and we won’t be reading in another 30 years about the white male lock on powerful institutions. Hope springs eternal ...The singer, Samuel Schultz, said in an interview in August that the two men assaulted him in May 2010, when, as a graduate student at Rice University in Houston, he had gone to hear Mr. Daniels in Handel’s “Xerxes” at Houston Grand Opera. After attending the performance and cast party, Mr. Schultz said, he was invited to Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters’s apartment. There, he said, he was given a drink that caused him to lose consciousness. He awoke alone, he said, naked and bleeding from his rectum.
+A lawyer for Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters denied the accusations. “David and Scott are innocent of any wrongdoing,” their lawyer, Matt Hennessy, said in a statement. “Sam Schultz is not a victim. He never would have gotten this much attention from his singing, and he knows and resents that fact. He waited eight years to complain about adult, consensual sex to ride the #MeToo movement to unearned celebrity. We will fight this.”
+Mr. Schultz said in an email that he had been told about the arrests by the Houston police, but he declined further comment.
+Mr. Schultz said over the summer that he had initially been afraid that making the accusations would damage his fledgling career. But he went public last summer — first anonymously, in an online post, and then naming Mr. Daniels and Mr. Walters as his attackers in an interview with The New York Daily News.
+A Houston police officer, D.H. Escobar, wrote in the charging documents that he had found Mr. Schultz, who was identified in the report only by his initials, to be “credible and reliable.” The officer said that he had met with a therapist Mr. Schultz consulted in 2010, and that her notes were consistent with what Mr. Schultz had told the police. The officer said that he had also reviewed medical records which showed that Mr. Schultz had sought medical attention “as a result of the sexual assault” on June 1, 2010.That’s cold enough to get frostbite on exposed skin, so cover everything up. North and west of the city it is colder still: 9 below zero in Sussex, N.J., with a wind chill of -20.
+In the city, the mercury will creep up to only 16 degrees by afternoon. Overnight, more of the same, down to 10, with below-zero wind chills.
+By tomorrow afternoon, the worst should be over. Temperatures are expected to crawl up to the low 20s, then the 30s on Saturday, the balmy 40s on Sunday and into the 50s early next week.
+Brace yourselves: City officials are warning people to stay indoors as much as possible today, and use mass transit instead of driving. But city public schools and government offices will remain open.
+In the suburbs, dozens of school districts are opening late, and several are closed, including Bloomfield and Belleville, N.J.LONDON — Farmers, bakers and food producers have added their voices to warnings that Brexit could become a dinner plate issue. And they weren’t mincing words: they called Brexit a catastrophe and said they were too busy preparing for it to deal with any other business issues.
+In a letter to Michael Gove, the secretary of state for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, trade associations said, “Business throughout the U.K. food chain — and their trade associations — are now totally focused on working to mitigate the catastrophic impact of a no-deal Brexit.”
+“Neither we nor our members have the physical resources nor organizational bandwidth to engage with and properly respond to non-Brexit related policy consultations or initiatives at this time,” they wrote on Friday.
+The department responded on Tuesday that it was meeting with representatives on a weekly basis. “While we have intensified our no-deal planning, we are continuing to tackle other priority issues that matter to people, including our plans to reduce plastic waste and deliver a Green Brexit,” it said an email.Morton Sobell, who was convicted in the Cold War spy trial that delivered Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths and divided the nation for decades, died on Dec. 26 in Manhattan, his son, Mark, confirmed on Wednesday. He was 101.
+Mr. Sobell, whose death was not reported at the time, had lived in the Bronx and then on the Upper West Side and had recently been in a nursing home.
+Serving 18 years in prison until 1969, Mr. Sobell asserted his innocence until 2008, when, in an interview with The New York Times, he startled his defenders by reversing himself and admitting that he had indeed been a Soviet spy.
+“Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that,” he said. “I never thought of it as that in those terms.”
+In the interview, he also implicated Mr. Rosenberg in a conspiracy that supplied the Soviets with non-atomic military and industrial secrets stolen from the United States government.Dumisani Kumalo, who was pivotal in the anti-apartheid campaign to halt investment in South Africa and, after white minority rule ended in the 1990s, spent a decade as the country’s representative to the United Nations, died on Jan. 20 at his home in the Johannesburg suburb Midrand. He was 71.
+The Sunday Times of South Africa said the cause was an asthma attack. His life was celebrated in a state funeral in Midrand on Saturday.
+Early in his career Mr. Kumalo was a reporter for various South African publications, and in the 1970s he became increasingly involved with anti-apartheid causes. He left the country to live in the United States after “the police wrecked my home and threatened me” in 1977, he told The Weekly Mail in 1985.
+He was soon working for the American Committee on Africa and the Africa Fund, promoting divestment. He traveled the United States urging pension funds, universities, cities, states and the federal government itself to shed investments in companies doing business with South Africa.In recent years, Dr. Wright’s focus had shifted “to the democratization of the economy and to the ruling class,” said Mitchell Duneier, a former Madison colleague who is now chairman of Princeton’s sociology department.
+Dr. Duneier, who interviewed Dr. Wright in December for a sociology textbook, quoted him as saying:
+“If I were to write a 50-page text on how to think about class in the 21st century, I would begin by saying the problem of class is not the problem of the poor, the working class or the middle class. It’s the problem of the ruling class — of a capitalist class that’s so immensely wealthy that they are capable of destroying the world as a side effect of their private pursuit of gain.”
+In addition to scholarship, Dr. Wright loved teaching, and his courses attracted many non-Marxists. When he accepted the university’s distinguished teaching award in 1998, he said his best ideas came from dialogue with students.
+“Scholarship remains a passion,” he said, “but teaching is a joy.”
+Erik Olin Wright was born on Feb. 9, 1947, in Berkeley, Calif. He grew up in Lawrence, Kan., where his father, M. Erik Wright, and his mother, Beatrice Ann (Posner) Wright, were professors of psychology at the University of Kansas, although his mother’s appointment was delayed several years because of an anti-nepotism policy.
+Erik was planning to attend the University of Kansas and, because of his advanced studies, would have entered as a junior. But a family friend gave him an application to Harvard as a gift. He applied and was put on the wait list. In the meantime, he won first place in mathematics at the 1964 National Science Fair (now called the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair) with a project on Möbius strips.
+He was accepted at Harvard, received his bachelor’s degree in social studies in 1968 and studied history for two years at Balliol College, Oxford. He met Marcia Kahn at Harvard; they married in 1971.
+In addition to his wife, Dr. Wright is survived by two daughters, Jennifer Wright Decker and Rebecca Wright; a sister, Colleen Rand; a brother, Woodring Wright; and three grandchildren.If you’re a New Yorker with disposable income and a fondness for restaurants, you’ve likely done one of the following things: eaten a locally sourced carrot; purchased New York-raised cuts of meat at a small neighborhood shop; had dinner in Williamsburg; listened to a server rattle off the provenance of each component of your dish; sipped a glass of natural wine to the tune of some cool but obscure music.
+You can trace all of these experiences — now so common they’ve evolved into clichés — back to one place: Diner, a 60-seat Williamsburg restaurant that serves locally sourced and simply prepared food out of a refurbished dining car, which opened 20 years ago this month. Over the past two decades, it’s proven to be one of the city’s most influential restaurants, turning a neighborhood full of artists’ lofts and not much else into a culinary destination. Through its casual-hip service and ad hoc vibe — and a fanatical interest in all things locally and sustainably sourced — it has created a new blueprint for restaurants and hospitality that has since been copied around the world.
+[Sign up here for the T List newsletter, a weekly roundup of what T Magazine editors are noticing and coveting now.]The official said the language of Mr. Ghani’s letter was broad — asking for teams from both sides to discuss details of where costs could be reduced, and how the troop levels could be brought down from the current 14,000 to a “more efficient level.”
+The official said the possibilities they had envisioned could save as much as $2 billion a year for the United States, drawing from areas such as maintenance contracts, and reduce the level of American troops to as low a 3,000.
+Mr. Ghani alluded to such savings during an appearance last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in which he argued for caution in any American withdrawal.
+“The United States as a sovereign power, as a global power, is entitled to leave,” he said. “But we need to get the departure right. Are the fundamental reasons that brought the United States to Afghanistan — are those objectives accomplished? The first issue is cost. We completely agree that the cost must come down, must become more efficient.”
+The United States Embassy in Kabul declined through a spokesperson to comment on Mr. Ghani’s letter to Mr. Trump, saying “we are not going to get into the specifics of diplomatic conversations.”
+It was not immediately clear on Tuesday whether Mr. Trump had received the letter yet. It was sent to him via Alice Wells, the principal deputy assistant secretary for South and Central Asia, who had been visiting Kabul. A spokesman for Mr. Ghani also declined to discuss the letter.
+Mr. Ghani has found himself increasingly at odds with other members of the Afghan political elite, who are now rallying around the American effort to negotiate with the Taliban. They are painting Mr. Ghani as an obstacle to peace.The Food Safety and Inspection Service’s main worry is that consumers may have bags of the nuggets in their freezers and will not be aware that the packages were included in the recall.
+“Consumers who have purchased these products are urged not to consume them,” the agency said. “These products should be thrown away or returned to the place of purchase.”
+I’m a chicken nugget enthusiast, and this news disturbs me. Which ones should I avoid?
+The Tyson nuggets, labeled Tyson White Meat Panko Chicken Nuggets, were produced on Nov. 26; have a “best if used by date” of Nov. 26, 2019; and were being sold at club stores nationwide in five-pound bags. Before that, the packages had been shipped to club store distribution centers in Arizona, California, Illinois, New Jersey and Utah. The packages being recalled have “P13556” inside their U.S.D.A. mark of inspection.
+In total, Tyson is recalling more than 7,200 bags of chicken nuggets across the country. The list of where its packages were distributed will be posted on the Food Safety and Inspection Service website when available.
+The Perdue nuggets that were recalled on Monday were labeled Perdue Fun Shapes Chicken Breast Nuggets and were distributed to stores in Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.
+The Perdue nuggets that were contaminated with wood were labeled Perdue SimplySmart Organics Breaded Chicken Breast Nuggets Gluten Free, were produced on Oct. 25 and were distributed nationwide, the U.S.D.A. said. The expiration date on the packages is Oct. 25, 2019.
+If you happen to have bought these nuggets: Contact Tyson’s consumer relations department at 1-888-747-7611. Consumers who have bought one of the contaminated Perdue packages can contact the company at 1-866-866-3703 for a full refund.One day, two women from the Midwest walked into the store. “We came to New York to see different, great things and there is magic in your store,” one told Mrs. Bauman.
+Some years later her husband went to visit a cousin working on a project in Las Vegas. “I realized that there was over one million feet of convention space underneath the hotels,” he said. “Casinos have studied everything about their customers. They were making more money from the stores than from the casinos.”
+He realized that the millions of visitors who arrive in Las Vegas each year “are there to enjoy themselves. They have the time to look at books and put a toe in the water. When you are on vacation, you have more discretionary income and more time to spend it.”
+Buzz Aldrin’s Teletype
+Still, for the Baumans, opening in Vegas was a big investment. They wanted a store that had the elegance of a wonderful library. ”We believe we sell beautiful things so they should be housed in a beautiful place,” Mr. Bauman said. The store also required a staff of nine people, since it is generally open 13 hours a day.
+Its sales staff has to be very knowledgeable. “He would quiz us,” Eric Pederson, who now manages the Manhattan store, said. “David would point to a book and ask us to tell us everything we knew about it.” Today a 32-person staff works in New York, Las Vegas and Philadelphia, where much of the research and online business takes place.
+Over time experts learn what makes a book valuable. For example, Mr. Pederson explained, the earliest copies of the first edition of Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” said “author of ‘In Our Times’” on the dust jacket. “You had to know it was an error that was soon “corrected to “In Our Time.” “The mistake told you that book was an earlier copy.”Employer-led I.V.F. coverage also forces us to grapple with some thorny issues, such as the unfairness of the possibility that only the infertile affluent or employed can have their own children (minus the residents of Massachusetts or other states with mandates).
+And it’s also a way to sidestep a national conversation about the merits of universal infertility coverage, which would include bigger questions, like whether bringing more children into an overpopulated, globally warming world is morally defensible. Or if people who would eventually conceive on their own are pushed into treatment by some of the nation’s greedy fertility clinics. Or if the childless population must help other people bear children, even if children bring people health and happiness, and thus are perhaps justifiable medical expenses, like psychotherapy or some knee surgeries.
+For now, the debate will center on practical, simpler questions, like: How many rounds of I.V.F. should be covered? When is infertility no longer considered treatable? Should employers cover the price of creating and transferring an embryo into a surrogate’s womb? Should a woman using her own eggs become ineligible in the final childbearing years, say, at 43?
+And what do doctors think of this? Some, like Dr. James Grifo, the program director of the New York University Langone Fertility Center, say of the increase in coverage, “in general, it’s a good thing — people have coverage, and they can get the care they deserve.” He added, “but insurance companies dictate what kind of care you can provide, and what you can do. They dictate protocols for clinical practice, and patients aren’t protocols.”
+If infertility rates continue to rise in America, employers may be spending more on employees’ health care plans, but be partly compensated by their loyalty and beavering work ethic. For Ms. Burns, the experience of looking around for another position in her field and learning that Sharp HealthCare’s premium insurance included three rounds of I.V.F. coverage, and other businesses didn’t, kept her in her current job. In fact, figuring out that some companies didn’t cover I.V.F. made her “mind blown,” as she put it.
+“It’s changed my appreciation for a company that makes the choice to offer this, because there’s not really any gain for them, and maybe there will be younger women who come up under me who will benefit,” she said. “It made me take a step back and realize the type of people I work for.”
+Valeriya Safronova contributed reporting.NEW DELHI — On Friday, Indian consumers will wake up to an emptier, more expensive version of Amazon’s shopping service.
+Gone will be iPhones and cheap jumbo packs of Pampers diapers. Fewer varieties of Maybelline cosmetics will be available, and Amazon’s own Echo smart speakers will vanish entirely.
+In all, more than 400,000 items that account for nearly a third of Amazon’s estimated $6 billion in annual sales in India will probably disappear at least temporarily from the local version of the company’s service, as Amazon tries to comply with new e-commerce rules imposed by the Indian government.
+Amazon, which had structured its operations carefully to adhere to a 2016 revision to the country’s e-commerce rules, said it had asked the Indian government to clarify the new policy and give it an additional four months to comply. “We remain committed to be compliant to all local laws, rules and regulations,” Amazon said in a statement.“Health professionals have been reluctant to recommend their use because of the lack of clear evidence from randomized controlled trials. This is now likely to change,” said Peter Hajek, the lead author of the study and a professor of clinical psychology at Queen Mary University of London, which coordinated the clinical trials through public “stop-smoking clinics.”
+The New England Journal devoted much of its current issue to e-cigarettes, publishing two editorials and a letter, and the collection embodies the tangled public health debate over the devices. One editorial — written by Belinda Borrelli, a behavioral health expert and Dr. George T. O’Connor, a pulmonologist — pumped the brakes on inclinations to embrace e-cigarettes.
+They noted that 80 percent of the study participants who had quit by using e-cigarettes were still vaping at one year, while only nine percent of the nicotine replacement therapy group was still using nicotine products. That raised concerns, they wrote, about sustained nicotine addiction and the unknown health consequences of long-term e-cigarette use.
+The editorial recommended that e-cigarettes be taken up when other cessation approaches, including behavioral counseling, have failed; that patients use the lowest dose of nicotine possible; that health care providers establish a clear timeline for e-cigarette use.
+Another editorial implored the Food and Drug Administration to ban all nicotine flavors for vaping devices because of their appeal to adolescents.
+The clinical trial took place from May 2015 to February 2018. Because the smokers were recruited at the clinics, they were already predisposed to quitting, a feather on the scale that could slightly have affected results. The participants were typically middle-aged, smoked between half a pack and a pack a day and had already tried quitting.
+The e-cigarette subjects were given a starter kit with a refillable device and one bottle of tobacco-flavored nicotine e-liquid, with 18 milligrams per milliliter — the most common product in England.A young man nearly lost his life to a toothpick he didn’t even know he had swallowed, according to a harrowing report published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine.
+The three-inch wood pick, from a sandwich, traveled through most of his digestive tract without doing any harm. But then it poked through the intestinal wall and pierced an artery, creating a conduit for bacteria to invade his bloodstream and damaging the artery enough to cause serious bleeding.
+For nearly three weeks, his symptoms — abdominal pain, fever, distressing gut trouble — mystified doctors. By the time they figured out what was wrong, he had a potentially fatal infection. It took extensive surgery to save him.
+Injuries like this are not common, but cases have been reported in medical journals over the years.
+Toothpicks are everywhere, jabbed into sliders, wraps, club sandwiches and cocktail garnishes. Often, people have no idea they swallowed one, maybe because they were distracted or eating in a hurry.SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook’s worst year ever was its best year ever when it came to its business.
+After a string of scandals in 2018 damaged its reputation and raised questions about its handling of people’s data, the social network said Wednesday that it had gained new users around the world in the fourth quarter and reported a record profit. Facebook also posted its full results for 2018, which showed its total revenue and profit reaching record levels.
+The results suggested that advertisers had continued to spend money on the site and that users were not deterred by Facebook’s issues, which include the spreading of disinformation and election meddling. The company had said last year that it expected its growth to slow as it spent to improve the privacy and security of its users.
+“One of the biggest questions people have about Facebook is whether we can make the massive investments we’re making to monitor and protect the platform while we keep growing our business,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said in an interview on Wednesday. “This quarter shows we can do both.”
+Yet even as its growth continued, Facebook began de-emphasizing its core social network and started highlighting its family of apps, which include Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Facebook said it would eventually stop sharing user numbers for each individual service and instead provide one combined figure for all of its apps.This week the Modern Love podcast features two readings by the Academy Award nominees Rachel Weisz and Willem Dafoe.
+Ms. Weisz, who is nominated for best actress in a supporting role for “The Favourite,” narrates “When Eve and Eve Bit the Apple.” The essay follows a devout Christian woman’s realization that she does not need to choose between the love of God and the love of her girlfriend.
+Mr. Dafoe, who is nominated for best actor for “At Eternity’s Gate,” reads “Missing a Father I Hardly Knew,” an essay about a man mourning the death of his enigmatic father.
+To read past Modern Love columns, click here. Continue following our fashion and lifestyle coverage on Facebook (Styles and Modern Love), Twitter (Styles, Fashion and Weddings) and Instagram.I think for me, personally, my total is honestly probably in the thirties. Which is a lot!
+Were you surprised by how quickly “Binge Mode: Harry Potter” found a dedicated audience, even separately from “Game of Thrones”?
+RUBIN Well, people have done stuff on Harry Potter for a very long time. My freshman year of college, I was just walking around listening to The Leaky Cauldron and Mugglenet podcasts, all the time. Some of my first exposure to podcasting, was listening to those podcasts. So people have been doing this for a while.
+We knew the appetite for coverage and thoughtful discussion about these stories was insatiable. People love them. The thing that means the most to us, and that we hoped would matter the most to other people, is finding somebody you can talk to about a story who really feels the same way about it that you do.
+Did we know it would be like this? No. Of course not. But we knew there was the potential for an audience.
+What kind of Harry Potter readers are listening to the show? Are they die-hards, casual fans, people coming to the books for the first time? What has been your experience engaging with the fandoms?
+RUBIN I think all of the above. One of the coolest and most fulfilling things for us has been hearing from people who say, “I never read Harry Potter, and I’m doing it for the first time so that I can listen to ‘Binge Mode.’” And then those people come back and say, “Boy, Harry Potter is really great.”
+Certainly most of the people listening to it have read the books, but even within that there’s huge variance. There are people who are obsessives and read the books every year, every few months. It’s everything in between, this whole swath of different experiences.ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria. The group has returned to its guerrilla warfare roots while continuing to plot attacks and directing supporters worldwide. We have won against ISIS. We’ve beaten them. And we’ve beaten them badly. We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its W.M.D. capabilities. The regime committed to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile. They’ve agreed to denuclearization and they continue to agree. They stopped everything that you’d want them to stop. We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking activities we judged necessary to produce a nuclear device. At the moment technically they’re in compliance. The Iranian regime has committed multiple violations of the agreement. In just a short period of time, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon. Russia’s approach relies on misdirection and obfuscation as it seeks to destabilize and diminish our standing in the world. We had a very successful meeting with Russia and President Putin and we’re just doing great in foreign affairs. We are doing so much better than anybody thought possible, so much better than we’ve done in years.ISIS is intent on resurging and still commands thousands of fighters in Iraq and Syria. The group has returned to its guerrilla warfare roots while continuing to plot attacks and directing supporters worldwide. We have won against ISIS. We’ve beaten them. And we’ve beaten them badly. We currently assess that North Korea will seek to retain its W.M.D. capabilities. The regime committed to developing a long-range nuclear-armed missile. They’ve agreed to denuclearization and they continue to agree. They stopped everything that you’d want them to stop. We do not believe Iran is currently undertaking activities we judged necessary to produce a nuclear device. At the moment technically they’re in compliance. The Iranian regime has committed multiple violations of the agreement. In just a short period of time, the world’s leading state sponsor of terror will be on the cusp of acquiring the world’s most dangerous weapon. Russia’s approach relies on misdirection and obfuscation as it seeks to destabilize and diminish our standing in the world. We had a very successful meeting with Russia and President Putin and we’re just doing great in foreign affairs. We are doing so much better than anybody thought possible, so much better than we’ve done in years.What Was Said
+Jake Tapper, CNN anchor: “When you were attorney general, you opposed legislation that would have required your office to investigate fatal shootings involving police officers. Why did you oppose that bill?”
+Senator Kamala Harris, Democrat of California: “So, I did not oppose the bill. I had a process when I was attorney general of not weighing in on bills and initiatives, because as attorney general, I had a responsibility for writing the title and summary. So I did not weigh in.”
+— at a CNN town hall in Iowa on Monday
+This is misleading.
+Mr. Tapper was referring to Assembly Bill 86, introduced in the California Legislature in 2015, which would have required the attorney general’s office to appoint a special prosecutor to examine fatal shootings by the police.
+Ms. Harris, who formally entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination this week, did not take a public position on the legislation in question. But she had expressed a general disagreement with its aims, and the bill’s sponsor said she declined to support it.
+A spokeswoman for her campaign acknowledged on Wednesday that Ms. Harris “expressed that she had concern about taking discretion away from local district attorneys who are held accountable by their constituents.” Ms. Harris made statements to that effect in 2014 and 2016, and could have repeated this rationale during the CNN appearance.
+In an interview with The San Francisco Chronicle before the police shooting bill was introduced, Ms. Harris said, “I don’t think it would be good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys.”The church decided that the service could be safely ended after a grand compromise between the four parties of the Netherlands’ governing coalition. The parties provisionally agreed on Tuesday that up to 700 families who had been previously listed for deportation, despite having lived in the Netherlands for more than a decade in some cases, could have their cases reassessed.
+The announcement constituted a radical policy reversal for some of the parties. One government minister had previously described the Tamrazyan family’s fate as “hopeless.”
+“For me, I hope it shows that wherever you are in the world, you can raise your voice,” said Tim Hofman, a filmmaker whose documentary about families like the Tamrazyans was instrumental in raising awareness about their fate. Mr. Hofman also started the petition against their deportation.
+Though no instructions have yet been issued to the Dutch Civil Service, and no family’s fate has been confirmed, Mr. Stegeman said he had been assured by several political leaders on Tuesday night that the status of the Tamrazyan family would be among those reassessed.
+That encouraged Mr. Stegeman and his colleagues to halt the service, which began last fall in secret and with few congregants present but ended on Wednesday afternoon with an emotional final communion in front of a packed chapel.
+“It was very emotional, very humorous. We laughed a lot, we applauded for a long time,” Mr. Stegeman said.Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.
+When a radio interviewer suggested to the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad that her verses could be characterized as “feminine,” she rejected the notion.
+“What is important is humanity, not being a man or a woman,” she said. “If a poem can get to that point, it is no longer connected with its creator but with a world of poetry.”
+Farrokhzad was one of Iran’s pre-eminent mid-20th-century writers, both reviled and revered for her poems, which often dealt with female desire. Throughout her life she struggled with how her gender affected the reception of her work in a culture where women were often confined to traditional roles, but where there are few higher callings than the life of a poet.
+In the afterword to “Captive” (1955), her first poetry collection, Farrokhzad wrote, “Perhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women’s hands and feet, and because I am the first to do so, they have made such a controversy out of me.”Young players like Patrick Mahomes, Baker Mayfield, Mitchell Trubisky and Saquon Barkley became stars in 2018, pointing the way to a post-Brady world. High-profile quarterbacks like Russell Wilson and Andrew Luck returned to form. High-octane passing offenses took over the league.
+It all came together in the conference championship games, which featured the four highest seeds and the four highest-scoring teams. Two veteran quarterbacks, Drew Brees and Brady, took on the best young quarterbacks, Jared Goff and Mahomes, in high-scoring shootouts that went to overtime.
+David Berson, the president of CBS Sports, which will televise the Super Bowl on Sunday, said fewer off-the-field stories were getting attention “because the on-field product is so compelling.” Whether Berson is correct or whether the league simply had a year with fewer controversies ultimately does not matter all that much to the league’s media partners because, as Berson put it, “The focus is on the football, and the football is really exciting.”
+There were blown calls and rules controversies, of course. The N.F.C. championship game hinged on an egregious no-call, and Brady and the Patriots also benefited from a questionable ruling and a rule that did not allow Mahomes — probably the league’s most valuable player — to get his hands on the football in overtime. But the arguments garnered more attention for the game, which was just what the league wanted.
+The question now is whether this fundamentally violent sport can be made safer. Before the season, the N.F.L. introduced a rule barring players from using their helmets as weapons when tackling. Six weeks into the season, its enforcement was essentially abandoned, underscoring how difficult it is to legislate between acceptable and unacceptable levels of violence.
+According to league statistics, concussions were down 29 percent in 2018, to 0.5 per game from 0.7. Jeff Miller, the N.F.L.’s executive vice president for health and safety, cautioned on a recent conference call that “there is no finishing line” when it comes to player safety, but touted the work being done to get players to wear better helmets and to present teams with targeted interventions to prevent concussions.
+The league’s own concussion data show that the number of concussions each year fluctuates, and that previous reductions were reversed in following seasons. The N.F.L. has also not been able to reduce the instances of A.C.L. and M.C.L. tears, ligament injuries that commonly end players’ seasons.ATLANTA — It is doubtful that the N.F.L. owners understood, when they decided early in 2016 to play the Super Bowl here, how the city of Atlanta, as the cradle of the civil rights movement, would serve as a natural forum for the many complicated social and racial issues that have roiled the league in recent years.
+Now, many players are showing that the moment is not lost on them.
+On Tuesday, Devin McCourty, a team captain on the New England Patriots, and several of his teammates boarded a bus to pay homage at the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood of Atlanta.
+“Today, when we have a little time off, guys are searching for something to do so they’re not just sitting in a hotel room,” McCourty said Tuesday. “With this game, everything is focused on playing Sunday. But when you step back and think about it, what better way to be on this stage, with this platform, but also to get a big dose of what’s really important.”
+Often, the Super Bowl city is merely a prop for the game and parties. The Patriots, who face the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday, have played for the championship in Minneapolis, Houston and Glendale in the past five years. But Atlanta, and what it has stood for, resonates on a deeper level in light of contemporary issues in the league.The Canadian government said on Wednesday that it would withdraw up to half of its diplomatic staff in Havana, as it disclosed that another employee had fallen ill with the mysterious symptoms that have affected dozens of Americans and Canadians stationed in Cuba.
+Since early 2017, American and Canadian government employees in Cuba have suffered strange symptoms such as dizziness, insomnia, hearing loss and nausea when using a computer. Canada’s government said that, in all, 14 Canadian employees, spouses and dependents have been affected.
+Global Affairs Canada, the nation’s foreign ministry, said that after the last confirmed case of unusual symptoms, in November 2018, Canadian staff members in Havana undertook additional medical testing. Those tests confirmed “an additional employee has symptoms consistent with those of previously affected employees,” the ministry’s statement said.
+Though the Canadian government had started “revised security measures,” it said, “we have decided to reduce by up to half the number of Canadian staff posted to Havana.”1. Minus 28, with a wind chill reaching minus 53.
+Those were the numbers in one city, Minneapolis, as the polar vortex blasted through the Midwest, and overnight temperatures are expected to go still lower. Much of the region has come to a standstill. At least eight deaths have been connected to the cold weather system.
+This 3-D model shows how the vortex works. Above, looking out over frigid Chicago.
+There were moments of strange beauty, like the frigid mist rising from Lake Michigan, and also oddities: “frost quakes” may have hit Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois. Here’s our roundup of the day’s weather reporting.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+After facing months of vocal resistance, Amazon executives delivered a counteroffensive during a hearing Wednesday before the City Council, the second to delve into a deal that would bring new corporate offices to Queens with 25,000 jobs in exchange for as much as $3 billion in state and city incentives.
+At the start of the hearing, Amazon’s vice president for public policy, Brian Huseman, made a glancing reference in his prepared testimony to the fact that the company still has some say in whether it expands in New York City.
+“We were invited to come to New York, and we want to invest in a community that wants us,” he told the Council. He closed by repeating that the company wanted to “be part of the growth of a community where our employees and our company are welcome.”
+Opponents of the deal and their allies on the City Council also raised the possibility of the deal unraveling, asking officials whether the city could opt out of the agreement.LONDON — For months, Britain’s embattled prime minister, Theresa May, has taken much of the blame for the handling of the withdrawal from the European Union. Now the tarnishing has spread to Parliament.
+On Tuesday, lawmakers gave Mrs. May a mandate to renegotiate a legally binding exit deal with the European Union, known as Brexit, even though the bloc says the negotiation cannot be reopened. And, while lawmakers protested the looming prospect of a potentially disastrous exit in less than two months without any agreement, they refused to take the power to stop it.
+“I think it’s a travesty that, at this point in the proceedings, with the country facing a grave political and economic crisis, members of Parliament have been voting for things that the European Union says it cannot agree,” said Simon Tilford, an expert on Europe at Chatham House, a research institute based in London.
+“What was striking was how reluctant members of Parliament were to do anything that could be interpreted as taking back control,” Mr. Tilford added. Brexit, he said, had “discredited the British Parliament and shown the whole British political class in a thoroughly unserious light.”Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman, told The Chicago Sun-Times that Smollett had been hesitant to call the police because of his status as a public figure, and that his manager was the one who made the call 40 minutes after the incident. When the police arrived at the apartment where Smollett was staying, a “thin, light rope” was still around his neck, Guglielmi said. At the urging of the police, Smollett was taken to a hospital for lacerations on his face and neck, and was treated and released.
+In a second interview with the police Tuesday, Smollett said that one of the men yelled, “This is MAGA country,” referring to President Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.”
+Initially, the police had been stymied, finding nothing useful on surveillance video despite the fact that the neighborhood, Streeterville, filled with office buildings, hotels and luxury apartments, had a “very high density” of cameras. Then, on Wednesday, the police announced they had “located a surveillance camera that shows potential persons of interest wanted for questioning.”
+“While the video footage does not depict an assault, the individuals pictured are seen in the vicinity of the alleged criminal incident during the alleged time of occurrence,” the police statement said.That same generation of brothers and sisters from my student movement days stands alongside me today, as Venezuelans from across the political spectrum are joining in an effort to re-establish democracy. It is incumbent on us to reinstate normality, in order to build the advanced and prosperous country of which we all dream.
+But first we must recover our freedom.
+The struggle for freedom has been part of our DNA ever since independence was achieved in Latin America 200 years ago. In this century we have taken to the streets repeatedly, knowing that not only is the survival of our democracy at stake, but the very fate of our nation.
+A pattern has developed under the Maduro regime. When pressure builds, the first recourse is to repress and persecute. I know this because buckshot pellets fired by members of the armed forces — at peaceful protesters in 2017 — remain lodged in my own body. A minor price to pay compared to the sacrifices made by some of my compatriots.
+Under Mr. Maduro at least 240 Venezuelans have been murdered at marches, and there are 600 political prisoners, including the founder of my party, Leopoldo López, who has been a prisoner for five years. When repressive tactics prove futile, Mr. Maduro and his henchmen disingenuously propose “dialogue.” But we have become immune to such manipulation. There are no more stunts left for them to pull. The usurpation of power was their only remaining option.
+Given that the Maduro regime cannot legitimately retain power, our response is threefold: First, to shore up the National Assembly as the last bastion of democracy; second, to consolidate the support of the international community, especially the Lima Group, the Organization of American States, the United States and the European Union; and third, to address the people, on the basis that they have a right to self-determination.
+Over 50 countries have recognized either me as interim president or the National Assembly as the legitimate authority in Venezuela. I have appealed to António Guterres, the United Nations Secretary General, as well as to several humanitarian agencies, for support in easing the humanitarian crisis. I have begun the process of appointing ambassadors and locating and recovering national assets tied up abroad.
+There is a broad consensus among Venezuelans in favor of change: 84 percent of our people reject Mr. Maduro’s rule. We have, therefore, been holding town halls across the country so people can talk openly about the moment in which we find ourselves, and about our future.Anyone paying attention to financial markets in recent months knew that the Federal Reserve’s management of the economy was perhaps the single most important question on the minds of investors.
+The Fed, of course, has been raising interest rates, including four increases last year, which unnerved many investors. These days, though, the focus has shifted to what the central bank will do with another tool it previously used to stoke economic growth.
+As part of its campaign to rescue the economy after the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed bought enormous quantities of bonds issued or guaranteed by the federal government. Now the question is how quickly, and by how much, it will shrink that pile.
+On Wednesday, the Fed left rates unchanged and signaled that it could slow its bond sales if economic and financial conditions change. Investors cheered, with the S&P 500 rising about 1.5 percent. The index is up nearly 7 percent this year.WASHINGTON — One thousand new customs officers at ports of entry, imaging technology to scan every vehicle coming into the country, increased spending on the Coast Guard, Secret Service and other agencies, and new technology at mail processing facilities to find fentanyl and other opioids — but nothing for a wall at the southwestern border.
+House Democrats laid out the general terms of their offer for toughening border security on Wednesday as House and Senate negotiators met for the first time to find a deal before Feb. 15 that can prevent another government shutdown. But the Democrats’ opening bid showed how far the parties have to go in the next two weeks, and no one seems sure of what President Trump will or will not sign.
+“Border security is more than physical barriers, and homeland security is more than border security,” said Representative Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California and the chairwoman of the Appropriations subcommittee that deals with homeland security. She later told reporters after the meeting that while Democrats have supported funding fencing in the past, they wanted to examine technological innovations that could be used in place of fences.CARACAS, Venezuela — The agents barged into the home of Yonaiker Ordóñez, 18, on Sunday morning as he slept. Dressed in helmets and carrying rifles, the men grabbed the teenager and forced him to another room without explaining why they came, his family said.
+“They took him to the area behind and killed him there,” said his sister, Yengly González.
+The operation resembled one of the many police raids against the gangs that terrorize Venezuela’s poor neighborhoods. But Mr. Ordóñez’s only crime, his family said, was that he attended a protest against the government days before.
+President Nicolás Maduro is facing the biggest challenge to his authoritarian rule yet. Protesters are in the streets, an opposition lawmaker has declared himself the rightful president, a growing number of foreign governments have backed that claim and the Trump administration has intensified the pressure, cutting off Mr. Maduro’s access to oil sales in the United States — a principal source of his government’s cash.
+In the face of the crisis, Mr. Maduro has hit back hard, sending out security forces to crush dissent in deadly operations that have alarmed even some of the president’s traditional supporters.Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, announced a settlement on Wednesday with Devumi, a company that sold hundreds of millions of fake followers on Twitter and other social media platforms before going out of business last year.
+The settlement is one of the first major efforts by regulators and law enforcement officials to investigate the shadowy market of social media fraud, where armies of fake accounts are sold to businesses, politicians and celebrities seeking the appearance of influence.
+Ms. James’s investigation was prompted last year by a New York Times report that detailed how Devumi — then based in Florida — had earned millions of dollars peddling fake accounts to customers in New York and other states. Many of the accounts, known as bots, borrowed likenesses and personal details from real people, helping them avoid detection and deletion by Twitter.(On Wednesday, TechCrunch reported that Google had a similar research app, called Screenwise Meter. In a statement, Google said it was disabling the app, which it said “should not have operated under Apple’s developer enterprise program.”)
+There’s no doubt that Apple took a firm stand here. But if Mr. Cook truly wants to protect Apple users from privacy-violating apps, he could remove all of Facebook’s products — including Instagram and WhatsApp — from the App Store until the company can prove, in a real and measurable way, that it cares about its users’ privacy.
+Shutting off Facebook’s access to Apple devices would be a radical step, tantamount to declaring war on a major competitor. But Apple has banned developers for smaller infractions in the past. And in the absence of government regulation, there may be no other option for bringing the company to heel on privacy.
+Would temporarily cutting off Facebook’s Apple apps be an effective deterrent? Absolutely. In less than a day, Apple’s move to revoke Facebook’s developer certificate has reportedly become a “critical problem” for the company’s developers. Hundreds of millions of people use Facebook through their iPhones, and without access to Apple’s App Store, Facebook would see an immediate and devastating hit to its bottom line. The ban would quickly become an existential threat, and improving privacy on its apps would become an all-hands-on-deck project for the company’s leadership.
+Would it be fair? Yes. Facebook’s privacy violations over the years have been appalling, and its executives have blatantly evaded the rules that Google and Apple, the makers of the two largest mobile operating systems, have put in place to protect their users from being exploited by data-hungry app developers. In emails released late last year, Facebook executives were shown plotting to snoop on Android users’ call and text logs without triggering a permission pop-up. And Facebook’s Onavo VPN app was pulled from Apple’s App Store last year for excessive data collection.
+Would cracking down on Facebook backfire on Apple? Possibly. Facebook’s apps are some of the most popular offerings on Apple devices, and without access to their Instagram and Facebook feeds, some iPhone users might get frustrated and switch to Android. But this abandonment would happen slowly, not all at once. (IPhone users could still access Facebook’s products through their mobile web browsers.) And more likely, given how heavily Facebook relies on Apple’s platform, Facebook would almost certainly blink first, and make the necessary changes to get back into Apple’s good graces.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Four girls at a middle school in Binghamton, N.Y., were taken aside two weeks ago after a school official thought they were acting strangely.
+What happened next is in dispute, and has led the governor to call for an investigation.
+The parents of each of the girls have said that their daughters, all African-American and 12 years old, were taken to their school’s health office, where they were questioned and strip-searched for drugs.
+School officials have refuted those claims, saying that a strip search never took place and that administrators at East Middle School only conducted a routine medical assessment out of concern for the girls’ health and safety.
+Reports about the incident spread quickly on social media, leading local community organizations to protest and rally in support of the students, which drew national attention.SANTIAGO, Chile — A judge convicted six men on Wednesday in the 1982 murder of former President Eduardo Frei Montalva of Chile, then the leader of the moderate opposition against the dictator Augusto Pinochet.
+In an 811-page ruling, Judge Alejandro Madrid found that the men — a former security agent, four doctors and Mr. Frei’s driver — conspired to slowly poison Mr. Frei after he had surgery in a private clinic in Santiago, the capital, and then worked to conceal the autopsy report.
+Mr. Frei, of the centrist Christian Democratic Party, served as president of Chile from 1964 to 1970. His government began a land reform program and took majority control of the copper industry, then in the hands of foreign corporations.
+After initially supporting the 1973 military coup against his successor, Salvador Allende, Mr. Frei and his party soon became vocal opponents of the military junta because of widespread human rights violations. At the time of his death on Jan. 22, 1982, Mr. Frei was leading efforts to unite the moderate political opposition to oust General Pinochet.Is there a more enigmatic and oddly phrased passage in the Constitution than the Second Amendment?
+“A well-regulated militia” — there’s no consensus on what this meant 200 years ago, much less now — “being necessary to the security of a free state” — were the framers talking about collective defense or self-defense? — “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” — bear arms like a soldier? — “shall not be infringed.”
+Yet, despite serious questions about the breadth of the amendment’s protections, at least four Supreme Court justices seem ready to consider what had until recently been a maximalist position: that it guarantees Americans a broadly unrestricted right to gun ownership.
+For 217 years , the opacity of the Second Amendment kept the Supreme Court from affirming that its text gave Americans as individuals, not as militia members, the right to have a gun. Former Chief Justice Warren Burger called that claim “one of the greatest pieces of fraud … on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
+The con seemed to have worked. In 2008 and then in 2010, the court ruled that, within certain limits, the government could not prohibit people from having handguns in their homes for self-protection, declaring that the amendment guaranteed that right for Americans as individuals.SEATTLE — If there are jitters in the economy, Microsoft isn’t feeling them.
+Microsoft’s quarterly earnings can give indications of whether companies and consumers around the world are cooling their spending, because the business taps into so many markets. Apple reported on Tuesday that its revenue was down in part because consumers are buying new phones less frequently, and the chipmakers NVIDIA and Intel both indicated weakening demand for the components they build for data centers.
+But on Wednesday, Microsoft showed solid performance across its commercial and consumer businesses, reporting revenue of almost $32.5 billion in the last quarter, and a profit of almost $8.6 billion, both increases of more than 10 percent over the same period a year ago.
+Microsoft had handily beat analyst expectations recently. In the last quarter, the results fell mostly in line with what investors expected, and shares fell about 2.5 percent in aftermarket trading, wiping out most of the gains made earlier in the day.
+The company continued its shift to cloud computing, which allows businesses to store and analyze their data in remote centers. Its offering is now widely seen as the strong No. 2 in the market that had once been dominated only by Amazon.Mr. de Blasio said he did not see any parallels between the way that the governors association and the mayor’s office handled the sexual harassment cases involving Mr. O’Brien.
+In both cases, Mr. O’Brien was allowed to leave his job without any public disclosure of his misdeeds, and quickly landed a new job without anyone warning his next employer.
+Mr. de Blasio has said that the city did not make the sexual harassment case against Mr. O’Brien public in order to protect the privacy of the two women who had filed the complaints. He also said that he did know until recently that Mr. O’Brien had been hired by Hilltop, which did not make a reference check with the city.
+Mr. de Blasio said that if any potential employer had asked the city for a reference, they would have been told that Mr. O’Brien resigned in lieu of termination, which the mayor said would have been a clear red flag.
+But Nicholas Baldick, the founder and managing partner of Hilltop, said in an interview this week that within two months of Mr. O’Brien’s move to Hilltop, senior City Hall employees, including Emma Wolfe, the mayor’s chief of staff, were aware of the hiring. Ms. Wolfe also knew of Mr. O’Brien’s sexual harassment case and had been involved in the decision to terminate his employment.
+But she never informed Mr. Baldick of the harassment case, or that Mr. O’Brien had resigned to keep from being fired.
+“His eventual employer asked nothing of us and I was prohibited by our lawyers and by the complainants’ wishes from sharing anything about these complaints,” Ms. Wolfe said in an emailed statement. “We did the best we could in a highly imperfect situation.”Time to vote for Donald Trump’s Worst Cabinet Member.
+No fair just yelling “Wilbur Ross!” Our secretary of commerce appeared to be trying to sweep the field last week when he expressed bafflement that federal workers were going to food banks during the government shutdown rather than taking out loans.
+Ross also volunteered that 800,000 people going without pay for a month was only “about a third of a percent on G.D.P. So it’s not like it’s a gigantic number over all.” I am convinced he heard that a Worst contest was on the way and wanted to nail down first place.
+But let’s look at some other top contestants. For instance — after all the horrific stories about children separated from their parents at the border, what about our Department of Homeland Security chief?
+“D.H.S. Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has earned the mantle of Worst Cabinet Secretary,” argued Austin Evers, executive director of the watchdog group American Oversight. “Nielsen has enthusiastically generated false evidence to justify the president’s xenophobic immigration policies, zealously executed those policies in ways that have shocked the world, and then brazenly lied about both.”The top prosecutor in St. Louis has accused the city’s Police Department of obstructing the investigation into the killing of an officer whose death last week was originally described as an accident that happened while she was playing Russian roulette with a colleague.
+Officer Katlyn Alix was shot in the chest and killed last Thursday by Officer Nathaniel R. Hendren in his home, the police said. Officer Hendren, who was on duty when he shot Officer Alix, was charged last Friday with involuntary manslaughter. Officer Alix, whose funeral was held Wednesday, was off duty at the time of the shooting.
+But the investigation into her death has not gone smoothly, according to Kimberly M. Gardner, the St. Louis circuit attorney.
+In a letter on Monday to John Hayden, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department commissioner, and Jimmie Edwards, the public safety director, Ms. Gardner raised concerns with the investigation that included the gathering of evidence and what she said was the Police Department’s rush to label the shooting an accident.An undocumented immigrant who worked at one of President Trump’s golf clubs in New Jersey for years and recently spoke out about her experience will attend his State of the Union address after being invited by her Democratic congresswoman, the woman’s lawyer and the congresswoman’s office said Wednesday.
+The undocumented immigrant, Victorina Morales, had worked as a housekeeper at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., since 2013, and spoke to The New York Times as part of an article published last month. The report revealed that the president’s company — the Trump Organization — was, for years, employing people at the golf club who are in the country illegally.
+In a brief interview on Wednesday, Ms. Morales said that on the advice of her lawyer, she stopped going to work on Dec. 4, two days before the Times article was published. Still, the lawyer, Anibal Romero, said that neither he nor his client had received notice that she had been fired. He said Ms. Morales’s employment status with the golf club was not entirely clear.
+Since leaving her job, Ms. Morales, who is from Guatemala, has campaigned for rights and fair treatment for undocumented immigrants. On Wednesday, she said she was pleased to have been invited to the State of the Union, that she has accepted the invitation and that she was “very proud because I am going to raise my voice for all of us immigrants.”WASHINGTON — President Trump lashed out at the nation’s intelligence agencies on Wednesday, accusing them of being “passive and naive” about the dangers posed by Iran, and defending his handling of Afghanistan, North Korea and the Islamic State.
+A day after the agencies issued their annual assessment of global threats — warning of malefactors like China and the Islamic State — Mr. Trump reignited a long-simmering feud with his own government, reacting as if the report was a threat to him personally.
+“Perhaps Intelligence should go back to school!” he declared on Twitter in an indignant early morning post. In another, Mr. Trump said, “The Intelligence people seem to be extremely passive and naive when it comes to the dangers of Iran. They are wrong!”
+Normally, the “Worldwide Threat Assessment” is an annual bureaucratic exercise, a dispassionate survey of the threats facing the United States — some longstanding, some new — that the White House accepts without much comment.FRONT PAGE
+An article on Sunday about experimental therapies for sickle-cell disease misidentified a patient who received treatment. He is Manny Johnson, not Manny Hernandez. The article also misstated his age. He is 21, not 20. Because of an editing error, the article also described incorrectly the trial conducted by Bluebird Bio. The researchers are attempting to restore a functional adult hemoglobin gene, not to restart a fetal hemoglobin gene.
+INTERNATIONAL
+A picture with The White House Memo article on Wednesday was published in error. The photograph, supplied by The Associated Press, showed a man The A.P. was unable to identify; it did not show Archer Blood.
+•
+An article on Tuesday about the police reaction to “Yellow Vest” protesters in France referred incorrectly to police use of rubber balls against demonstrators in Western Europe. It is authorized in France, Northern Ireland and Spain. It is not the case that only France and Northern Ireland use such tools.
+•
+An article on Wednesday about ways that Bitcoin could help Iran undermine sanctions misstated the name of the Chinese computers used to mine Bitcoin at the site visited in the Iranian desert. They are Antminer V9s, not A9Antminers.“It’s like they’re living through some kind of weather history — everyone else stayed in, and we’re here doing our thing. There’s a sense of pride.”
+DEMETRI HIOTIS, the general manager of Huck Finn, a diner on the Southwest Side of Chicago, on the cheerfulness of the patrons who ventured out Wednesday despite sub-zero temperatures.WASHINGTON — A jury in Kentucky awarded Senator Rand Paul more than $580,000 in damages on Wednesday in a lawsuit that he filed against a neighbor who assaulted him as he did yardwork.
+The neighbor, Rene A. Boucher, pleaded guilty last spring to felony assault after tackling Mr. Paul in November 2017. Mr. Boucher, who was sentenced in June to 30 days in prison, will appeal the verdict, said his lawyer, Matthew J. Baker.
+“We can hold different views, whether it’s politics, religion or day to day matters,” Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, wrote Wednesday on Twitter after the damages were announced. “It’s never ok to turn those disagreements into violent, aggressive anger. I hope that’s the message from today.”
+Mr. Boucher, 60, who had lived next door to Mr. Paul for 17 years at the time of the assault, claimed in court documents that he had festering irritation over the senator’s habit of stacking debris near the line that divides their properties. One day, when he saw Mr. Paul using a lawn mower to blow leaves onto his yard, Mr. Boucher approached him and tackled him.“Every time that I cannot get out of the train station, I have to call the fire department.” “It’s hell.” “I get to a station that isn’t — the elevators are down, I have to reroute my whole trip. Just by my neighborhood, there was a month that the — one of the elevators were out and I couldn’t use the train.” “I have a 4-year-old, and I had to go up and down stairs with a stroller, and I have a very heavy stroller. I was fortunate — most of the times, not all the time — but somebody would offer to help. And, like, unless it’s the express stop like Atlantic, there’s no elevators here.” “You have to either choose really selective spots or risk your life and her life.” “There’s a lot of people around you. Sometimes there’s water. There’s debris on the stairs. Sometimes the stairs are just uneven. And I really wish there was an accessible way to do this in every station. But, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”3D: I’ve always been a fan of HOWIE MANDEL’s, so it was very nice to see his full name debut today.
+11D: I had HOLY SPIRIT and HOLY MOLEY before I got 9A’s EKG and realized that the answer was HOLY GRAIL.
+12D: A quinceańera is a celebration of a girl’s 15th birthday, marking her passage from childhood to womanhood. I knew the three letter answer would be a Spanish word that indicated a relative, and I had a 50 percent chance of being right between TIO (uncle) and TIA (aunt). The crossing entry, 18A’s NEW YORK’S AREA CODE, made the decision, and the answer is TIO.
+57D: There is a different clue in the print version of the puzzle than in the digital one, because the visual clue could not be replicated in the digital formats. The answer to “Teaser that may include pluses and minuses” is REBUS, which I got from the crossings. The clue in print was “[picture of a cat] + A + [picture of logs], for catalogs, e.g.”
+Today’s Theme
+Our revealer at 68D — the “Palindromic number” — is 212. Surprised to be asked to write numbers in your grid? It’s happened before. That revealer happens to cross one of the theme entries, which will most likely help you figure out what’s going on here. Mr. Collins is asking us for three different things or events that 212 represents.
+For example, at that crossing with 68D, the answer to 67A’s clue, “68-Down with a degree sign after it,” is H2O’S BOILING POINT. That is, indeed, 212 degrees. And, as I indicated above, 212 is also NEW YORK’S AREA CODE (although, to be accurate, it’s New York City’s area code, and not the only one).
+Can you guess the third way 212 can be presented? I’ll give you a hint. It’s coming up soon.
+Constructor Notes
+Well, that was a surprise. The last I knew, this puzzle was going to run on February 12 of next year (a Wednesday). Anyway, here it is. The editors and I had to go through something like six iterations before we arrived at this version. There was a bit of tinkering with the fill in the lower right corner. Also, I originally had the second and third digits of 212 as rebus words inside of longer Across entries [C(ONE)STOGA and A(TWO)OD]. It was Joel’s idea to go with them in digital form [A1 SAUCE and W2S]. It made the fill a lot cleaner down there, and I like the consistency of all three digits being digits both Across and Down. I appreciate Will and Joel’s patience and advice throughout the process.
+The Tipping Point
+Almost finished solving but need a bit more help? We’ve got you covered.
+Warning: There be spoilers ahead, but subscribers can take a peek at the answer key.
+Trying to get back to the puzzle page? Right here.
+Your thoughts?In a video, Mr. Maduro warned the U.S. that military intervention in his country “would lead to a Vietnam worse than they can imagine.”
+Background: Over the last week, Juan Guaidó, the leader of the opposition, has received growing recognition around the world as interim president. The U.S., in an effort to oust Mr. Maduro, has imposed harsh oil sanctions that economists worry could unravel a Venezuelan economy already in vertiginous decline.
+On the streets: Mr. Maduro has hit back viciously, human rights groups and others say, dispatching security forces to crush dissent in poor neighborhoods that have turned on his government. The deadly operations have alarmed even some of the president’s traditional supporters. And his reliance on a special police unit — relatively new and shrouded in secrecy — may be a sign of disarray and waning loyalty in the military.
+Another angle: Russia has been supporting Mr. Maduro from the sidelines and directing opprobrium at the U.S. It is unlikely to do more than that, our Moscow bureau chief writes.
+In Opinion: Mr. Guaidó compares the movement he is leading against Mr. Maduro to the uprising that unseated the Venezuelan dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in 1958, and writes that “the military’s withdrawal of support from Mr. Maduro is crucial to enabling a change in government.”I.
+My mother, Vivian Jarrett-Irving, is the owner of two fur coats: a full-length mahogany mink and a fox that hits right below the knee. Both hang from pegs she affixed to the back wall of her bedroom closet, as if their sensual, febrile glamour were too singular to be slotted in among the racks of common clothing.
+But their storage is purely sensible. “I keep them in here because it’s cooler,” she said. Kept too warm, the pelts will shed, and excessive humidity may rot the underlying skins; too cold and the hides are prone to dry out and crack. Both must be routinely brushed and shaken out. From Easter until the first cold days of winter, the coats are kept in a vault at Saks Fifth Avenue. There, for $175 per annum, the ideal temperature ( under 55 degrees Fahrenheit, 50 percent humidity) is fastidiously maintained.
+We spoke at home in Chicago in January, on a night when the coats were newly home for the season. My mother was readying for bed. Her long hair was wrapped, her last cigarette of the night lit, and she was watching the evening news, waiting to hear whether the days ahead would bring snow and, with it, the opportunity to wear fur. “We grew up poor,” she said to me, though I’m plenty familiar. “We didn’t have a lot, but we always looked nice. I think black people, in general, no matter their incomes, like to look nice.”“I’ve chosen to stay out of it. But I had the right to, as you know, I had the right if I wanted to to end everything,” he added. “I could’ve just said, ‘That’s enough.’ Many people thought that’s what I should do.”
+Mr. Trump’s remarks came days after Mr. Whitaker told reporters that he believed the inquiry was nearing its end.
+“The investigation is, I think, close to being completed, and I hope that we can get the report from Director Mueller as soon as possible,” Mr. Whitaker said at the end of a news conference about an unrelated case.
+Since the special counsel was appointed in May 2017, it has been rare for senior Justice Department officials to comment publicly about the Russia inquiry.
+Under Justice Department rules, Mr. Mueller must explain his prosecutorial decisions in a “confidential report” to the attorney general once his investigation has ended. The attorney general must in turn send a report to Congress indicating why the work has been completed, though that can consist of only a brief summary.Good Thursday morning. Here are some of the stories making news in Washington and politics today.
+_____________________
+• President Trump lashed out at the nation’s intelligence agencies, accusing them of being “passive and naïve” about Iran’s dangers and defending his stance on North Korea. His outburst showed the rift between the bureaucracy and a president seeking to challenge foreign policy orthodoxy.
+• In a sharp deviation from statements last month, the Federal Reserve indicated Wednesday that it did not anticipate any additional interest rate increases for the first time in recent years. The statement emphasized that the Fed would be “patient” in evaluating the health of the economy.
+• Top officials from the United States and China met on Wednesday to start two days of trade talks that could prove critical to the trajectory of the world economy.An ESPN series covers the two-sport phenom Deion Sanders. And it’s the last day for Netflix subscribers to catch the Coen brothers’ classic “The Big Lebowski” on that platform.
+What’s on TV
+30 FOR 30: DEION’S DOUBLE PLAY 9 p.m. on ESPN. During the past 10 years, ESPN’s “30 for 30” series has covered stories about the world’s most intriguing athletes and sports figures, like O. J. Simpson, Andrés Escobar and Bo Jackson. Jackson appears in this latest installment, which focuses on another two-sport athlete, Deion Sanders, and the 24 hours in 1992 when he attempted to play professional baseball, for the Braves, and football, for the Falcons. The documentary, narrated by the rapper Ludacris, features interviews with former Braves and Falcons players, coaches and sportscasters.
+TRUCK NIGHT IN AMERICA 10 p.m. on History. At a time when you can find a TV show that focuses on just about any niche topic — pimple-popping, extreme couponing, making cakes poorly — it’s not surprising that there would be one completely devoted to large, customized trucks. The new season of this competition series pits five drivers against one another in monster-truck-rally-style challenges, like climbing mounds of crushed cars or trudging through swamps. The two best drivers will compete to win $10,000, taking their rigs through an obstacle course called the Green Hell.Note: Our Sixth Annual 15-Second Vocabulary Video Challenge is underway. It will run until Feb. 18.
+adverb: at or toward the rear of the stage
+verb: steal the show, draw attention to oneself away from someone else
+verb: move upstage, forcing the other actors to turn away from the audience
+verb: treat snobbishly, put in one’s place
+noun: the rear part of the stage
+adjective: of the back half of a stage
+adjective: remote in mannerSAN DIEGO — It is the early 1980s. People have poufy hair and wear pleated pants and shapeless voluminous skirts. The someday-king (he hopes) of England, Prince Charles, is a man in possession of a fortune and in want of a wife. He is consulting his mother, wise Queen Elizabeth, for advice on what to do about Lady Diana Spencer, the 19-year-old assistant kindergarten teacher he has been dating, if having a handful of chaste encounters constitutes dating.
+Because this is a musical, the queen breaks into song. What is love, she wonders, considering the complicated example of her longtime marriage to the handsome but chilly Prince Philip, who has a wandering eye. Men may “take other friends,” but “it doesn’t mean devotion ends,” she warbles, before getting to the point: “Whatever love means.”
+Charles, who unfortunately has a longtime girlfriend, Camilla Parker Bowles, who even more unfortunately has a husband, takes up the refrain, musing on his predicament: He is about to propose to someone he barely knows. He is perhaps the least qualified person in the kingdom to understand matters of the heart.
+Longtime observers of the force of nature that was Diana, the Princess of Wales — and there are many of us out here, despite the fact that she died more than 20 years ago — will notice that “whatever love means” is plucked from something Charles said after he and Diana announced their engagement, all the way back in 1981.How much have your parents, grandparents or other relatives told you about your family’s past? Are there aspects of this history that you wish you knew more about?
+Helen Zia begins “My Mother’s Secrets,” her essay about learning about her own family history, this way:
+Growing up in the 1950s as one of the few Chinese-American kids in my New Jersey town, I was so often told to “go back where you came from” that I wondered about this place called China, where I had never been. But whenever I asked my mother about her young life in China, I always received the same curt answer: “That was wartime, unhappy memory.” Over time, I stopped asking. Until one day, when she was in her 70s and we were having dinner in her small apartment, I lapsed into my childhood mantra. “Too bad you can’t tell me about my grandparents in China,” I muttered with no expectation of a reply. But this time my mother put down her chopsticks and said: “All right, you want to know? I’ll tell you.” I listened, transfixed, as my gentle mother launched into a tale with such clarity and force that I sat mute, fearing any sound from me would disrupt the narrative unfolding like a storybook that had never been opened:
+After hearing some of the harrowing history her mother had hidden from her, Ms. Zia writes:
+Learning my mother’s stories for the first time, I began to understand why so many of the refugees and migrants chose not to tell their children about their exodus from Shanghai. Why recall trauma and hardship when, after finding places of refuge, they could focus on encouraging their children to reach their full potential? They themselves had not had that opportunity. Even a cursory look at immigrants in America shows that a disproportionate number of their offspring pay forward their parents’ sacrifices. The Shanghai exodus produced Maya Lin, the architect, Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation, the Nobel laureate physicist Steven Chu and the novelist Amy Tan. Other migrations have brought the nation talents as varied as the former secretary of state Colin Powell, the writer Edwidge Danticat, the guitarist Carlos Santana, the actress Lupita Nyong’o and too many more to name. My mother did not live to see herself in my book, but her secrets enabled me to see today’s migration crises through the eyes of a frightened child. It should not take another seven decades to grasp why present-day migrants risk all to face tear gas at a border, to brave rough seas in rubber rafts, to crowd into the next boat, plane, train or bus out of fear that it may be the last one out. Or for the nation to realize that these refugees and migrants give so much more to the communities that welcome them than they will ever take away.
+Students, read the entire piece, then tell us:
+— Does anything in this piece remind you of your own family or background? How?
+— What do you know about your family history? What stories get told over and over? Are there aspects of your parents’ or grandparents’ pasts that they seem reluctant to talk about? Why do you think that is?
+— What would you like to know more about? How could you find out?
+— How do you think your family’s history continues to resonate in your generation? What aspects of this history or culture are still a part of you? How?
+— Ms. Zia reminds us that refugees and migrants often sacrifice to find places of refuge. If your family has ever immigrated from one place to another, do you know the details and the stories behind those journeys?Do you know anyone who has a pet acquired from an animal rescue organization, like the Humane Society? What is this pet like? How has having it impacted the lives of those this animal lives with?
+Tell us in the comments, then read a related Opinion essay about “The Blessing of a Rescue Dog.”Before reading the article:
+What’s the coldest weather you’ve ever experienced? What do you remember about how it felt?
+Watch the video above, then imagine you are the mayor of a city like Chicago and that you know a few days in advance that historically cold temperatures are coming. How would you prepare? What specific services, businesses, industries and groups of people might need extra attention? Why?
+Now, read the article, “A Merciless Cold Lingers in the Midwest,” and answer the following questions:
+1. How low did temperatures drop across the Midwest this week? What happens after going gloveless for minute or two in conditions like these?
+2. What were some of the services and businesses that were affected? How?
+3. Why do some experts think these low temperatures may be the result of global warming?
+4. How did schools across the region handle the cold?
+5. What is a “frost quake” and what does it sound like?‘One Day at a Time’ Season 3
+Starts streaming: February 8
+It feels like a little gift every time this critically acclaimed reimagining of Norman Lear’s long-running ’70s-and-’80s sitcom gets renewed. In season three, the blue-collar Cuban-American Alvarez family will continue to spar about hot-button political issues, while also dealing with big anxieties in their personal lives — involving career changes, romance and the persistent fear that one bad medical diagnosis or huge repair bill could upset everything they’ve been working toward.
+—
+‘Dirty John’ Season 1
+Starts streaming: February 14
+One of the many recent TV series adapted from podcasts, the eight-episode first season of “Dirty John” is about John Meehan (played by Eric Bana), a handsome and magnetic con artist known for seducing women and then slowly destroying their lives. The already-in-the-works second season will tell an entirely new true story, but it’ll be hard to top the cast for the first, which includes Connie Britton as Debra Newell — one of John’s victims — and Juno Temple and Jean Smart as her concerned family members.
+—
+‘Larry Charles’ Dangerous World of Comedy’
+Starts streaming: February 15
+The writer-director-comedian Larry Charles is known for his willingness to take chances and push buttons, whether partnering with Larry David on “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” or helping Sacha Baron Cohen prank the unsuspecting in the movie “Borat.” Charles’ latest project is more serious: a four-part documentary series about comedians in some of the world’s most troubled regions, who risk reprimands or worse when they try to make people laugh.
+—
+‘The Umbrella Academy’
+Starts streaming: February 15
+The rock band My Chemical Romance’s frontman Gerard Way turned to writing comic books about a decade ago, combining his lifelong obsessions with science fiction and teen rebellion into the cult series “The Umbrella Academy.” The TV version of the comic has Ellen Page playing a non-super-powered sibling in a family of superheroes. When the clan’s ultra-rich and ambitious patriarch dies, his adopted children are reunited and have to put aside old grudges to help save the world.
+—If you prefer to be totally surprised by your TV shows, put down this review and watch “Russian Doll” when it comes out on Netflix on Friday. It’s eight short, acerbic, wittily profound episodes with a richly satisfying ending(s).
+If you don’t mind a teensy spoiler, without which we can’t really discuss the series: The protagonist dies. This is not as big a surprise as it might seem. Nadia Vulvokov (Natasha Lyonne) is at a party for her 36th birthday, downing booze, sucking down a joint laced with a certain something and contemplating her self-destructiveness and mortality. “I smoke two packs a day,” she tells a friend. “I have the internal organs of a man twice my age.”
+Good news: Her lungs don’t kill her. Bad news: A car does, later that night.
+Disorienting news: She comes back to life, in the bathroom of the same downtown New York apartment, at the same party. Then she dies again and materializes in the bathroom again, over and over, reviving each time to the tune of Harry Nilsson’s “Gotta Get Up.”
+While this might seem to tell you everything about “Russian Doll” — another variation on “Groundhog Day,” premiering, wink wink, the day before Groundhog Day — the story is barely getting started. It’s the way the series twists and complicates the premise that makes it much more than a copycat.Frida Kahlo’s exhaustively documented crossover from artist to pop culture icon isn’t happenstance. The painter meticulously crafted her own image on a par with Cleopatra. If she were alive today, she’d probably be teaching a branding class at Harvard. Now it’s America’s turn to see how, and, more important, why she did it.
+[Read Jason Farago’s review of the Frida Kahlo exhibition.]
+Some of the contents of the home she shared with her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera — known as La Casa Azul (Blue House) in Mexico City — will be accessible for the first time in the United States in “Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving,” an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, from Feb. 8 to May 12. Their belongings were to be locked away until 15 years after Rivera’s death, according to his instructions, but the task of unsealing and inventorying them didn’t happen until much later, in 2004. This is the biggest stateside show devoted to Kahlo and a considerably expanded iteration of last year’s exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
+The sweeping survey adds greater insight into Kahlo’s collecting habits through works culled from the museum’s vault as well as the New York chapter of her timeline, and includes works lent by local institutions and galleries. The supplementary mix of Mesoamerican objects, one of the many types of art the couple favored, with her paintings and photographs divulge her yearning for Mexico’s indigenous and agrarian culture and her conflicts with capitalism, especially in the income inequality she witnessed during her travels in the United States.
+[Never miss an event again. Subscribe to The New York Times Culture Calendar.]
+Visitors will better understand Kahlo’s skill in searing her likeness into the public imagination, even if it meant dangling monkeys around her head and cultivating her most recognizable physical traits — a statement ’stache and unibrow. Neither her disabilities from polio and a bus accident, nor her frequent relapses of pain deterred Kahlo. By the time she died at the age of 47 in 1954, she left behind a public persona that is still being mined well into the 21st century; today she has more than 800,000 Instagram followers.HONG KONG — The residents of Tonga, a remote island nation 1,100 miles northeast of New Zealand, have gained unwanted perspective on how much they’ve come to depend on the internet.
+An underwater fiber-optic cable that connects Tongans to high-speed internet was severed on Jan. 20, plunging the roughly 100,000 residents into digital darkness. Internet connections were lost on the country’s more than 170 islands, international calls wouldn’t go through and credit card payments couldn’t be processed.
+Eleven days later, officials are still working to repair the damage as trickles of connectivity have returned, including phone service.
+Ezinet, a local satellite internet provider with speeds comparable to dial-up, has been able to offer some connectivity, but not enough for all. And with precious little bandwidth available, officials have blocked sites like Facebook and YouTube so that essential services can squeeze through.KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government’s control of its country declined late last year, in terms of both territory and population, according to a United States government report released Thursday.
+The report, by the agency of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, or Sigar, said that as of Oct. 31, the Afghan government controlled territory on which 63.5 percent of its population lived, a decrease of 1.7 percent from the previous quarter, while gains by the Taliban insurgency gave it control over territory that is home to 10.8 percent of the population.
+The agency’s statistics are based on data provided by the American military under a mandate to report to Congress quarterly.
+In addition, the Afghan government lost control of seven more districts during the last quarter, meaning that only 53.8 percent of districts were “controlled or influenced” by the government, while 12.3 percent of the districts were under insurgent control or influence and 33.9 percent of districts were contested. Afghanistan’s 407 districts are the basic unit of local governance.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If you’re interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.
+Let’s Talk About the Weather
+With the grueling government shutdown behind us — for now — late-night hosts have let up on their political focus, and are preoccupied instead with the frigid weather pummeling much of the country.
+Jimmy Fallon imagined Midwesterners refusing to lose their cool in response to the nasty weather — but Conan O’Brien said he wouldn’t expect Midwestern nice when temperatures are exceeding minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
+“Today the polar vortex brought the coldest temperatures in 20 years to parts of the Midwest. Midwesterners were so upset, they almost started cursing. ‘Gosh darn it! It’s flipping freezing!’” — JIMMY FALLON “To save energy, people in Minnesota have been asked not to heat their homes above 60 degrees. Yeah, people in Minnesota replied, [expletive] you.” — CONAN O’BRIENThis happened at Shea Stadium a few decades ago: My son and I were in a half-empty section, not far from two older black men.
+One of the Mets made a clodhopper move on the bases, and was tagged out.
+One of the two fans then turned to the other and said, “Jackie Robinson wouldn’t have done that.” I chortled, and we struck up a conversation, having the burning image of Jackie Robinson very much in common.
+Jackie Robinson hovered over that game, and he has hovered over every game that has been played since April 15, 1947, when he made his major-league debut.
+He upgraded the game, and he upgraded my Brooklyn Dodgers, and he upgraded life in America in his 10 years in the major leagues and in his short but active career out in the Real World, pushing for opportunities for black people in all businesses.The movie was pure Hollywood, and never destined to be an epic. Still, for this one child, the black-and-white rendering brought color and depth to the Robinson story. And playing opposite the great Ruby Dee (who portrayed Rachel Robinson in the movie) was none other than Jackie Robinson, portraying himself.
+All these years later, I can still remember how intensely I watched Robinson on the screen, giving life to his own story. There, in the sanctuary, I could see the man as well as the athlete, could hear his voice, could sense that sprinkled in among all the Tinsel Town touches were more than a few hints of truth.
+When Jackie Robinson spoke in the movie, it was as if he were speaking to me. And that mattered. It was the early 1960s and as the lone African-American child sitting in the pews that afternoon, and in my classroom every single day, I didn’t often see anyone on the big screen or on television who looked like Mom and Dad, or my relatives. In this one modest movie, Dee and Robinson came as close to mirroring us as anything I’d ever seen before.
+It would, of course, take years for me to fully realize what Hollywood dared not show at the time. It would take years of growth to realize that my worst day could never possibly compare to the things Jackie Robinson went through.
+And yet, by Jackie Robinson entering my life the way he did, by way of my mother’s tales and that memorable day watching him in a movie bearing his name, I began to understand what the battle for civil rights — one that my own parents and grandparents were fighting valiantly — was all about.
+In the decades that followed, as I pursued the career I had chosen, I was able to get to know Rachel Robinson, an outright national treasure who was and is as integral to the legend of No. 42 as Jackie himself. As well, I got to meet their daughter, Sharon, who, with her philanthropic efforts, has made her own valuable impact in keeping the Jackie Robinson story alive.
+It is, at heart, the story of the man who, at his best and bravest, showed us all how to be strong enough not to fight back but rather to fight on and on and on, even now on the 100th anniversary of his birth. And I’m proud, in my own small way, to have helped tell it.I’ve spent most of the last five years traveling across dozens of countries. The question I hear most, by far, is “how can you afford that?” No one believes it’s possible to travel cheaply and comfortably, but it is. Since I live on the road for months at a time, I want both. I’m guessing you do too. Here’s how you can have it.
+Stay at a hostel. No, really.
+Forget everything you think you know about hostels. Today’s hostels are clean, cheap, for all ages, and in many cases, gorgeous. I’ve stayed in hostels that were better than most hotels I’ve been in. Though the average age skews younger, I’m 40 and I’m never the oldest in any hostel I’ve stayed at, and often I’m not even the oldest in my room.
+If you’re curious about these low-cost, often-luxe living spaces, check out hostel booking sites like Hostelworld and Hostelz. You’ll get user reviews for each hostel, plus tons of pictures. I’ve stayed at over 100 hostels in the last few years and most were great, some were awesome, and only a handful were bad. Generally, though not always, you’ll have to share a bathroom, and the cheapest rooms are shared rooms. However, most hostels have private rooms, too. Staying in hostels, even for just part of your trip, will save you hundreds. Who knows, you might even make some new friends.
+[Hostels are a good way to travel cheaply. Here are some tips if you’ve never stayed in one.]
+Skip the restaurants
+If it’s an important meal, or a spot you really want to try, don’t feel guilty about spending money in a restaurant. If the food is great, never feel guilty. But if it’s just a quick bite while you’re exploring, don’t waste the time or money.At the Battle of Dak To, the sky was crowded overhead. In addition to the Marine A-4s, a pair of Air Force A-1 Skyraiders was dropping napalm — intending both to kill North Vietnamese troops and to create fires on the ground that the pilots in faster A-4s could use as reference points for follow-on bombing runs. B-52s were approaching with plans to carpet-bomb. An AC-47 gunship was circling. The job of coordinating all these varied options and attacks fell to Capt. James E. Wrenn of the Air Force, who was flying a small Cessna propeller plane.
+Lt. Col. Richard Taber, the pilot who the report indicated dropped the bombs, had flown 90 hours in combat since arriving in Vietnam roughly three months before. Taber flew with the call sign Hellborne 526-1 and commanded a Marine Corps A-4 squadron in Chu Lai. He was supposed to drop his bombs directly onto one of the napalm fires, but his bombs fell about 650 feet short and to the right, a miss the investigator labeled “a short round.” It landed on Charlie Company, Cook’s sister unit, which he had fallen in with amid the chaos of the fighting.
+How this mistake occurred remains unclear. The report said the A-4 may have approached the target area from a direction slightly off axis from what Wrenn directed, resulting in the bombs landing downslope from the intended target. But the investigation was ultimately inconclusive, declaring that “there is insufficient evidence to determine the exact cause of the short round” before blaming “improper release conditions.” The investigator recommended that pilots undergo remedial training and that the investigation be closed, as it had revealed “no gross personnel errors nor evidence of equipment malfunction.”
+Today, Cook, who is now 72, lives in Azusa, Calif., and spends his days tending to his grandchildren nearby. Dak To, he said, is never far from his thoughts. “Not a day goes by that I don’t” think about it, Cook said. “I’ve always thought about it, but to actually share it with others, that took 35 or 37 years.” In March 2017, Cook returned to Hill 875 to help look for the remains of the three American soldiers who had never been recovered: Sgt. Donald Iandoli, Specialist Jack L. Croxdale II and Pfc. Benjamin David De Herrera. The mission did not find the missing men, and Cook surmises that their bodies were vaporized in the blast. But Cook’s participation in the search connected him with a military investigator who was also on the trip. “I mentioned that I wondered what the pilot felt, knowing that he was responsible,” Cook said. “It must have been hard for him to carry on.” The investigator’s answer surprised him. “If you read the report,” Cook recalled being told, “you might have a different opinion.”
+Cook subsequently obtained a copy of the report in 2017, which, as far as he knew, had never been publicly released. A scholar who wrote about the fight for Hill 875 in the 1980s and an author who wrote a book about it in the 1990s both told The New York Times that they had never seen the report before, even after searching through files related to the battle in the National Archives. Upon reading it, Cook found that instead of taking responsibility, the Marine pilot’s statement to investigators criticized almost everyone but himself and his wingman. Taber blamed other pilots for being unprofessional over the radio, spoke of one pilot’s “imperious manner” and called out others for being sarcastic and impatient. He did, though, praise his own skills. “I have been dropping Snakeyes exclusively in my last 15 or 20 launches from the alert,” his statement reads. “I can recall no reported miss distance as great as 50 meters in range, and nothing approaching that in azimuth.”“Be attentive to the reasons someone might disagree with you,” says Fanele Mashwama, whose two-person team won the World Universities Debating Championship in 2016. It isn’t enough, in other words, to dwell only on the strengths of your own position. Accept that an issue like whether to increase the minimum wage, for example, can have strong reasons on both sides. “I could give very good considerations in favor of my side of the policy,” Mashwama says, “but those might not be relevant in light of the actual reasons my opponent has an opposing opinion.” This is common on social media, he adds; too often, people aren’t listening to one another. So rather than lead with your strongest arguments, start by interrogating those of your adversary.
+Establish a common set of foundational terms as quickly as possible. If you and your opponent can’t agree on some basic points — that the earth revolves around the sun, for instance — you will be less likely to come to a mutual understanding. But acknowledge the limitations of your position. “This is critical,” Mashwama says, “because sounding dogmatic detracts from your credibility,” which can make your opponent less likely to engage.
+When it’s time to make your own argument, clarity is crucial. It’s easy to talk, Mashwama says, but listening is much harder, so anticipate at least some miscommunication. “You can’t be persuasive if the other person doesn’t understand you,” he says. But avoid flooding the other side with facts: They can overwhelm decision making. Ultimately, you don’t really convince people — people convince themselves. You just give them the means to do that.
+Mirroring an opponent’s stance, keeping eye contact and lowering your voice have been shown to improve your potency. But the most important stance to take can be accepting when an argument doesn’t need to be had. Sometimes making yourself heard — explaining a grievance to a partner, say — as a matter of principle matters more than persuading an opponent to take your side. “There are tons of arguments to be had,” Mashwama says, “but not all of them are worth having, even if you think you’re correct.”In her pocket-size compilation “A Dog Runs Through It,” Linda Pastan pays loving tribute to the dogs who have accompanied her life and poetry over the years. It’s an utterly delightful book — from the nimble line illustrations to the pristine visuals of the poems themselves, doled out with equal parts rue, whimsy and wisdom. Consider the poem “I Am Learning to Abandon the World”: Although this quiet lyric is elegiac, it doesn’t mourn the inevitability of growing old so much as it accepts aging’s wearisome gradations as stages of self-reclamation. Selected by Rita DoveOn April 27, 2017, Jack Talaska, a lawyer for the poor in Lafayette, La., had 194 felony cases. 113 clients had been formally charged. The rest are not pictured. High-level felonies carry sentences of 10 years or more and should each get 70 hours of legal attention, according to a workload study. For Mr. Talaska, that’s more than two years of full-time work. Mid-level felonies require 41 hours each. A few of Mr. Talaska’s clients faced life without parole. Such cases, on average, require 201 hours apiece. In total, Mr. Talaska needed to do the work of five full-time lawyers to serve all of his clients.
+Mr. Talaska was not outside the norm. Of the public defenders in Louisiana handling felony caseloads at that time, there were two dozen with even more clients. One had 413.
+Jack Talaska William Widmer for The New York Times
+The numbers alone might seem to violate the Constitution. Poor defendants in the United States have the right to a competent lawyer, and hundreds of thousands of defendants rest their hopes on someone like Mr. Talaska.
+But there has never been any guarantee that those lawyers would have enough time to handle their cases. That’s why the study cited above, which looked at the workloads of public defenders, is significant.
+Right now, courts allow an individual to claim, after they lose, that they received an ineffective defense. But the bar is high. Some judges have ruled that taking illegal drugs, driving to court drunk or briefly falling asleep at the defense table — even during critical testimony — did not make a lawyer inadequate.
+It is even harder to make the argument that the sheer size of lawyers’ caseloads makes it impossible for them to provide what the Constitution requires: a reasonably effective defense. That is partly because there has never been a reliable standard for how much time is enough.
+Now, reformers are using data in a novel attempt to create such a standard. The studies they have produced so far, in four states, say that public defenders have two to almost five times as many cases as they should.
+The bottom line: Mr. Talaska would have needed almost 10,000 hours, or five work-years, to handle the 194 active felony cases he had as of that April day, not to mention the dozens more he would be assigned that year. (The analysis did not include one death-penalty case on his roster, the most time-consuming type of case.)
+“The workload can be overwhelming even under the best circumstances, and most offices never experience the best circumstances,” said Mr. Talaska, 30, who agreed to talk only because he was no longer working as a public defender. “Most offices don't have paralegals, law clerks, or full-time investigators.” Lawyers are expected to do it all.
+In Courtroom 4C, the Lucky Ones Get Five Minutes
+10:31 AM 10:33 AM 11:40 AM 11:46 AM 10:50 AM 11:16 AM 11:49 AM 11:56 AM 12:03 PM 12:05 PM 12:18 PM 12:34 PM Chang Lee/The New York Times
+In Providence, R.I., the scene in Courtroom 4C is the same on many mornings. The newly arrested — accused of theft, drug possession, drunken driving, battery and other crimes — are taken from local jails, chained at the wrist two-by-two, and brought before a judge or magistrate, who either sets bail or orders them either released or detained in jail until further hearings.
+Some days there are more than 50 new defendants. But in recent years most of them shared one lawyer: Bob Marro.
+Chang Lee/The New York Times
+Handed a thick roster of new defendants just minutes before court started, Mr. Marro, a public defender who recently retired after 33 years, shuffled through stacks of pastel arrest reports, prioritizing cases like a triage doctor. Assisted by social workers, he focused on those most likely to be locked up without bail.
+Counseling his new clients for the first time as they faced the magistrate or judge, Mr. Marro raised a manila folder for privacy as he whispered into their ear details of what was happening, and what they should say. The lucky ones got five minutes of his time. Others might have gotten a minute.
+Chang Lee/The New York Times
+This type of system is not the exception in this country. Roughly four out of five criminal defendants are too poor to hire a lawyer and use public defenders or court-appointed lawyers.
+The contrast between services for those who can pay and for those who cannot was on display in 4C. While Mr. Marro scrambled, a few private lawyers waited comfortably in the gallery for their cases, having had time to focus solely on their clients.
+Some days the courtroom is so full that defendants overflow into an additional courtroom, where there is no public defender. Those arrestees sometimes agree, without any legal advice, to plea deals that can have a profound impact on their lives.
+Many advocates say that paying for an adequate defense system would make the system fairer and, ultimately, less costly.
+Only Two Hours to Investigate a Felony
+Stephen Hanlon thinks he has a new solution to this problem: better data, and a lot of it.
+One of the leading voices in public interest law for decades, Mr. Hanlon was a partner at a large national law firm, and is now general counsel of the National Association for Public Defense.
+His goal is to complete studies in a dozen states to create a new standard that will help judges and policymakers determine how many cases public defenders can ethically handle before their clients’ rights are violated. The studies are conducted by the American Bar Association and major accounting firms.
+Mr. Hanlon said he was not seeking a Cadillac-level standard, only one that meets the constitutional requirement: reasonably effective counsel.
+Using a rigorous survey method developed for the military by the RAND Corporation, Mr. Hanlon and his allies asked private lawyers and public defenders how much time it should take to represent different types of criminal cases, including hours spent analyzing the relevant law, the prosecution’s evidence and the potential consequences of going to trial.
+Next, accounting and consulting firms compared those findings with how much time public defenders actually spend on cases, calculated from time diaries and other records.
+The results were eye-opening. In Colorado, Missouri and Rhode Island, they found that the typical public defender had two to three times the workload they should in order to provide an adequate defense. In Louisiana, defenders have almost five times the workload they should.
+In Texas, where Mr. Hanlon consulted on a separate, similar study, the defense spent an average of about two hours investigating the accounts of police officers and witnesses and other evidence in serious felony cases — a quarter of what the study called for.
+More studies are already underway in Indiana, New Mexico and Oregon.
+In Missouri, defenders didn’t have enough time to provide adequate counsel.
+Actual time and recommended time spent on each type of case 85 hours spent on cases 22 more hours recommended Murder/homicides 38 more hours Sex felonies Time spent by defenders was particularly lacking in the most serious cases. 39 more hours High level felonies 21 more hours Low level felonies 15 more hours Juveniles 9 more hours Misdemeanors 8 more hours Probation violations 20 hours 40 60 80 100 85 hours spent on cases 22 more hours recommended Murder/homicides 38 more hours Sex felonies 39 more hours High level felonies 21 more hours Time spent by defenders was particularly lacking in the most serious cases. Low level felonies 15 more hours Juveniles 9 more hours Misdemeanors 8 more hours Probation violations 20 hours 40 60 80 100 0 hrs 20 40 60 80 100 Murder/homicides 85 hours spent 22 more hours recommended Sex felonies 38 more hours High level felonies 39 more hours Low level felonies 21 more hours Juveniles 15 more hours Time spent was particularly lacking in the most serious cases. Misdemeanors 9 more hours Probation violations 8 more hours Sources: American Bar Association and RubinBrown LLP
+Public defenders are having to carry “outlandish, excessive workloads” that make “a mockery of the constitutional right to counsel,” the American Bar Association said after the Missouri study.
+Clients have little recourse. And an accumulation of rulings has dissuaded federal judges from interceding even when rights are trampled.
+In 2017, James J. Brady, a federal district judge in Louisiana, wrote that the state was “failing miserably at upholding its obligations under Gideon,” the Supreme Court ruling that requires the state to provide a lawyer to defendants who cannot afford one. “Budget shortages are no excuse to violate the United States Constitution.”
+But Judge Brady declined to intervene, saying that doing so would make his court “the overseer of the Orleans Parish criminal court system, a result explicitly condemned by the United States Supreme Court.”
+Mr. Hanlon and other reformers hope that their results will do at least two things: persuade judges to take a more active role and give public defenders more justification to limit their caseloads.
+The crisis has already come to a head in Missouri. Some public defenders who had tried to set limits on their caseloads were threatened with contempt of court. Another lawyer, who was carrying more than 100 cases and had been repeatedly hospitalized for serious health problems, said he simply had too many clients to handle. The State Supreme Court sanctioned him for missing a handful of deadlines.
+But then, last year, the Missouri State Public Defender office scored a victory: A state trial court judge, relying in part on the Missouri study, found that 16 public defenders in St. Louis County had provided clear reasons that their large caseloads would prevent them from providing adequate representation to all of their clients. The case is now on appeal, but defenders hope it will eventually allow them to stop taking on new clients without fear of contempt citations.
+Mr. Hanlon expects similar lawsuits to follow, armed with a weapon previous attempts have not had: rigorous data.
+The reformers say decriminalizing more offenses related to homelessness, drug addiction and mental illness would also free up public defenders to spend more time on serious cases.
+Some prosecutors have criticized the studies, saying defense lawyers have an incentive to overstate the time needed. Yet many prosecutors don’t dispute that public defenders are understaffed.
+“My guys will tell you that public defenders are overworked, but so are prosecutors,” said Pete Adams, who has spent the past 40 years as executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association.
+The time shortage also means that public defenders almost never take a case to a trial. Across the country, 94 percent of convictions in state courts are from plea bargains, according to a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that confirmed defendants’ rights to be represented by competent counsel not just at trial but also during plea negotiations.
+Many plea deals, of course, are good for defendants, ending in lesser sentences than they would have faced at trial. But at least one in 10 felony cases — and as many as two in 10, depending on the type of felony — handled by public defenders should go to trial, according to the Texas study.
+How many did? Only one in 40.
+In the most serious felony cases, defenders spent too little time on the most important tasks.
+Actual time and recommended time spent on each task 7.4 hours spent on task 2.6 more hours recommended Court time 3.9 more hours Discovery/attorney investigation 1.6 more hours Client communication Legal research 0.5 fewer hours 1.9 more hours Investigator's time 1.7 more hours Negotiations/meetings 0.5 more hours Office support 2 hours 4 6 8 10 7.4 hours spent on task 2.6 more hours recommended Court time 3.9 more hours Discovery/attorney investigation 1.6 more hours Client communication Legal research 0.5 fewer hours 1.9 more hours Investigator's time 1.7 more hours Negotiations/meetings 0.5 more hours Office support 2 hours 4 6 8 10 0 hrs 2 4 6 8 10 Court time Hours spent 2.6 more hours recommended Discovery/attorney investigation 3.9 more hours Client communication 1.6 more hours Legal research 0.5 fewer hours Investigator's time 1.9 more hours Negotiations/meetings 1.7 more hours Office support 0.5 more hours Sources: Public Policy Research Institute and Texas Indigent Defense Commission | Note: The Texas study recommended that a much larger share of cases should go to trial. The recommended time spent on each task is based on the share of cases that should be resolved by trial as recommended by the study. The study found that defenders spent the recommended amount of time, 30 minutes, on social work.In the early ’90s, while he was still in college, Farhadi began writing serialized radio plays for the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the Iranian BBC. They were so popular that he was soon fielding offers from TV producers. In person, Farhadi is humble, generous and attentive; a number of the actors he has worked with told me of the calm, supportive atmosphere he creates on set. But he also knows how to look after his own interests. After several of his scripts were turned into hit programs, he told his producer at the IRIB that he would continue to provide them with material on one condition: that he do the directing himself. A deal was struck, and at 23 Farhadi was writing, directing and producing his own TV show, “A Tale of a City.” It followed a team of fictional documentarians who, in each episode, made a program about a family or group struggling with a different social issue: poverty, immigration, drug addiction, AIDS. Although scenes were sometimes cut by the censors, the series was widely watched.
+In many ways, Farhadi’s first two feature films picked up where “A Tale of a City” left off. Diffuse and episodic, “Dancing in the Dust” (2003) and “The Beautiful City” (2004) are somewhat sentimental portraits of marginalized young people trying to escape their circumstances. His third feature, “Fireworks Wednesday” (2006), is a different matter altogether. Tightly constructed, it observes the classical unities of time, place and action. The movie gives us a day in the life of a troubled middle-class couple as seen through the eyes of a young working-class woman, herself soon to be wed, who is sent by a temp agency to clean their home. It was Farhadi’s first feature film about his own social milieu and the first to draw on his deep theatrical background — qualities that would underwrite the sequence of masterpieces that followed.
+Before Farhadi begins shooting, he leads his cast through an intensive rehearsal process, which can last for three or four months. His approach is modeled strongly on that of Konstantin Stanislavsky, the Russian director and theorist, about whom Farhadi wrote his master’s thesis. Instead of practicing the script, the actors improvise moments from earlier in their characters’ lives, producing a back story that will often inform their roles, even if none of it features in the movie itself. The goal is to get the actors to feel as if they had constructed the characters themselves. In “About Elly,” Farhadi’s subsequent film, the title character (Taraneh Alidoosti) is secretly engaged to a man (Saber Abar) who appears only in the final act, after Elly has gone missing. Although they never appear on screen together, Farhadi insisted that Alidoosti and Abar spend a lot of time with each other in rehearsals. It was important, he felt, that each have a strong image of the other in their minds throughout the shoot.
+Such a meticulous and — for film, at least — unconventional process has led to performances of astonishing sensitivity. There can be few scenes in 21st-century cinema as moving as the one from “A Separation” in which Nader (Peyman Moaadi), the man speaking to the camera in the opening shot, breaks down in tears while bathing his wheelchair-bound father — tears to which the old man remains oblivious. A moment earlier, we saw Nader, a secular-minded, relatively prosperous individual, behave poorly toward Razieh (Sareh Bayat), the religiously conservative woman he has hired to take care of his father, first accusing her of stealing (wrongly, it turns out) and then roughly pushing her out the door of his apartment. No one deserves to be treated like this, but Razieh has provoked Nader’s anger by tying his father to his bed and locking him in while she runs an errand. This, in turn, may sound almost unforgivable, except that Razieh is pregnant and desperately poor and has been having fainting spells that may be related to her work for Nader — work she has had to keep secret from her equally religious husband, who would be scandalized to know she was taking care of an old man. And Nader himself, we realize as the slightly shaky camera lingers over his heaving body in the bathroom, already seems to feel remorse for his actions. Almost every moment in the film invites, and rewards, this kind of in-the-round moral scrutiny. The power of the bathing scene arises not simply from the poignancy of the action it depicts (the son now caring for the father who once cared for him) but also from the way in which, after a relentless sequence of increasingly hostile exchanges, it provides a kind of release valve for an accumulation of complicated, contradictory emotions — Nader’s and our own.For a few days, a couple of weeks ago, a small but influential corner of the media world was transfixed by the story of Caroline Calloway and her Creativity Workshop. Calloway is a 27-year-old with a large Instagram following, built by chronicling her time as an undergraduate at the University of Cambridge (picturesque lolling on the banks of the River Cam) and her daily life as a gal-about-town in New York City. Early in January, she announced to her 830,000 followers that she would be holding a series of four-hour, $165 seminars in several American cities, a chance for fans to meet Calloway and imbibe some of her wisdom on “true creative fulfillment.” What followed was a fiasco: Early seminars failed to deliver promised amenities, and Calloway turned out to have sold tickets to some events without having located venues for them. A muckraking Twitter thread materialized, scorning Calloway as a “scammer”; she promptly canceled and then uncanceled the tour, all while zapping out flurries of alternately self-flagellating and self-justifying posts on Instagram Stories.
+As scandals go, this was minor stuff — more opéra bouffe than outrage. (“This Instagram Influencer’s Failed Tour Will Satisfy Your Fyre Fest Nostalgia,” cracked a headline on New York magazine’s Intelligencer site.) But to many commentators, the episode was a revealing parable of the internet age: a glimpse of the chaos that lurks behind the immaculately curated feeds of our self-styled lifestyle gurus and the hollowness of their advice on, as Calloway put it in the event listing for her seminars, how to “stay connected to your creative self” and “carve out and stick to a creative schedule.”
+Give Calloway credit for this: In branding herself an oracle of all things creative, she has her finger firmly on the pulse. In 2019, “creative” is a juggernaut, a ubiquitous word that touches on all kinds of contemporary aspirations and anxieties. Businesses employ creative directors to tackle problems with creative solutions. Politicians intone “creative” with the solemnity they once reserved for such terms as “freedom” and “family.” It is a bipartisan bromide: In his November 2016 victory speech, Donald Trump promised to “harness the creative talents of our people.” Two months later, in his farewell address, Barack Obama hailed “this generation coming up — unselfish, altruistic, creative.”
+“Creative” is a fixture of the self-help industry, touted as a secret to success and a key to enlightenment on podcasts and websites and in books like “Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All.” And in recent years, creative has made a grammatical migration, crossing over from adjective to noun. A creative is a kind of worker, or rather many kinds of workers — a catchall that takes in web coders, graphic designers, copywriters, actors, painters, D.J.s, cocktail mixologists, Instagram influencers and all the rest of the culture-and-information-industry professionals that the sociologist Richard Florida famously called “the creative class.” Creative is not just an attribute. It is an identity.Does perineal massage work to prevent tearing? I mean both prenatally as “prep” for birth and during the birth itself, or both?
+— @LaraLeeRasberry via Twitter
+Short take
+Perineal massage during pregnancy and during delivery can reduce tearing and the need for an episiotomy (a surgical incision to enlarge the vaginal opening during childbirth). The effect seems greatest for a first delivery.
+[Have a question about women’s health? Ask Dr. Gunter yourself.]
+Tell me more
+Perineal massage is the practice of inserting one or two lubricated fingers about two inches into the vagina and applying pressure on the pelvic muscles and tissues for 10 minutes once or twice a week starting at 34 — 35 weeks of pregnancy. The massage can be done by the pregnant person or her partner.
+For a first pregnancy, perineal massage has a modest and definitely measurable impact on reducing the need for stitches (either from tearing or an episiotomy). This translates to reducing the need for stitches by approximately 10 percent and the need for episiotomy by approximately 15 percent. In subsequent pregnancies there does not appear to be an effect of perineal massage on tearing or episiotomies, but there may be a reduction in pain after delivery.On the roof of a luxury building at the edge of Central Park, 585 feet above the concrete, a lawyer named David Goodfriend has attached a modest four-foot antenna that is a threat to the entire TV-industrial complex.
+The device is there to soak up TV signals coursing through the air — content from NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS and CBS, including megahits like “This Is Us” and this Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl LIII. Once plucked from the ether, the content is piped through the internet and assembled into an app called Locast. It’s a streaming service, and it makes all of this network programming available to subscribers in ways that are more convenient than relying on a home antenna : It’s viewable on almost any device, at any time, in pristine quality that doesn’t cut in and out . It’s also completely free.
+If this sounds familiar, you might be thinking of Aereo, the Barry Diller-backed start-up that in 2012 threatened to upend the media industry by capturing over-the-air TV signals and streaming the content to subscribers for a fee — while not paying broadcasters a dime. NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox banded together and sued, eventually convincing the Supreme Court that Aereo had violated copyright law. The clear implication for many: If you mess with the broadcasters, you’ll file for bankruptcy and cost your investors more than $100 million.
+Mr. Goodfriend took a different lesson. A former media executive with stints at the Federal Communications Commission and in the Clinton administration, he wondered if an Aereo-like offering that was structured as a noncommercial entity would remain within the law. Last January, he started Locast in New York. The service now has about 60,000 users in Houston, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Dallas and Denver as well as New York, and will soon add more in Washington, D.C.michelle goldberg
+I’m Michelle Goldberg.
+ross douthat
+I’m Ross Douthat.
+david leonhardt
+I’m David Leonhardt and this is “The Argument.” This week we take a look at the current list of Democratic presidential candidates.
+michelle goldberg
+She really speaks to, my sort of like, aspirations for this country.
+david leonhardt
+Then what does media bias look like in the Trump age?
+ross douthat
+This — this — this is an insane — this is an insane take!
+david leonhardt
+And finally a recommendation.
+michelle goldberg
+I’ve never for a moment thought that I lost out on anything.
+david leonhardt
+Over the past few weeks a handful of candidates have said that they are running for president.
+news clip (senator kamala harris) I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States. news clip (representative tulsi gabbard) I have decided to run and we’ll be making a formal announcement within the next week. news clip (julián castro) Yo soy candidato para presidente de los Estados Unidos. news clip (senator kirsten gillibrand) I’m filing exploratory committee for president of the United States tonight.
+david leonhardt
+For now there are two frontrunners among the announced candidates, Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. From the outside they seem cut from the same cloth: two liberal women from two liberal states, California and Massachusetts. But Harris and Warren are less similar than they may seem at first. We have a new colleague in the Opinion section, Jamelle Bouie, and he’s a keen observer of politics. So he’s going to join us for this discussion, and I’m going to step out. Then I’ll come back for segment two. Here are Jamelle, Michelle and Ross on the 2020 race.
+ross douthat
+So Jamelle, we’re really glad to have you. It’s going to be a trial by fire and hopefully Michelle and I will survive.
+jamelle bouie
+Thank you.
+ross douthat
+So let’s start by talking about Kamala Harris who had a pretty successful kickoff for her campaign and in the world where there is no frontrunner, suddenly a lot of people are talking about her as if she is the Democratic front runner. Michelle, why is she such a strong figure?
+michelle goldberg
+You know in some ways it’s a little bit amorphous, right? I mean, it’s not like Elizabeth Warren, who has this economic populist agenda and history that clearly speaks to this moment and to some degree maybe straddles some of the divides between the Bernie wing of the party and the Hillary wing of the party. I think, you know, she is an immensely compelling personal figure, right? She’s charismatic, beautiful, multiracial, right? I mean, she embodies the America that, that Donald Trump is trying to extripate and she’s sort of pitched herself as the candidate of the resistance, right? And yet at the same time, she’s not making the same sort of broader systemic critique as Elizabeth Warren. She’s making a sort of like patriotic argument that our America is better than this.
+ross douthat
+You know, she’s she’s a figure who, unlike some of the other Democrats, has some obvious problems with progressive activists. And so she has to arguably work harder than some of the other possible frontrunners would to reassure and win people over. Do you think that’s right?
+jamelle bouie
+Yeah, that’s exactly the thought I had about that sort of willingness to say, “Yeah my proposal would abolish private health insurance.” That because of her prior career as a prosecutor and a prosecutor in a state, right, where African-Americans are, as they are everywhere, disproportionately the targets of the criminal justice system. It’s a major obstacle, major blemish, for left wing activists in the party, for younger black voters as well. And so she needs to figure out some way to either neutralize opposition from her left or recast her career as a prosecutor into something more positive. I think she’s trying to do both. I don’t think she’s yet been terribly successful with regards to the prosecutor part. But I’ll be interested to see how much she leans in the direction of trying to present herself as onboard with sort of like the more radical policy thinking circulating within Democratic politics. Having said all of that, I do think that Harris has this like one glaring weakness and that is, I don’t actually know why she’s running to be president. Right? Like she’s very charismatic and compelling and there’s something inherently compelling and interesting and novel in the fact that she is the most high-profile, well-connected black woman to ever mount a presidential bid and that’s very important. But if you were trying to figure out what sort of like core problem in American society does Kamala Harris think needs to be attacked and overcome for the United States to better represent itself, I would be hard pressed to give you an answer. I don’t really know what the answer to that is. I know the — I knew what the answer to that was for Barack Obama. I know what the answer to that is for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, but for Kamala Harris I don’t quite know what that answer is, and I think that is kind of her rhetorical challenge over the next, you know, eleven months or so, of trying to really present to the public a critique, a vision, something that points in a larger direction than just kind of like, “I think I’d be really great at being president.” Which may very well be true.
+michelle goldberg
+But Jamelle, don’t you think she’s sort of set herself up as, like, the opponent of reactionary ethnonationalism? I mean it’s not, not direct but implicit in all of her criticisms of Trump and the Trump administration and then when she talks about what, you know, what “our America” is.
+jamelle bouie
+That’s true. Because it’s implicit, I think it loses, I don’t know, some of its value. I think it ought to be explicit and maybe, you know, I’m not the one with the pollsters so maybe the people advising Harris have good evidence to say that she can just embody that opposition and not have to say anything about it. But I don’t know. I think that candidates are well served if they can articulate kind of a clear and unambiguous vision about where they want the country to be.
+ross douthat
+I think there’s a touch of, you know, the sort of Hillary Clinton, “America is already great.” I think she literally said a variation on that in her campaign kickoff speech. This sense of sort of like Trump has been this sort of terrible accidental interregnum that has gotten in the way of the gradual upward march of progress as embodied by a African-American California female senator ascending to the highest office in the land, and let’s get back on that track. And I think I agree with you Jamelle that there is a danger in assuming that just by being the kind of candidate you feel like your party should nominate, you can win the nomination. I mean, this was, you know, the story of the Marco Rubio campaign, where the people running that campaign said, you know, “Look, Rubio embodies where a lot of Republicans want their party to be and that’s going to be enough to carry us to victory and we don’t necessarily need a clear argument for the candidacy or line of attack against another candidate.” Which he ended up not having.
+michelle goldberg
+Correct me if I’m wrong, but Rubio was not drawing huge crowds right? He certainly wasn’t getting 20,000 people out for his kickoff rally. You know and I think the reason that she is the front runner is not because pundits decided that she checked a lot of boxes but because she’s generating a lot of real enthusiasm.
+jamelle bouie
+No I agree with that. And I think, I mean I think I wrote last month or two months ago that if you were going to sort of try to figure out at an early stage who is most likely to kind of jump to the front of the race, it’s going to be Harris. Just because Democratic primary voters over the course of 2018 clearly demonstrated that they were looking for candidates like Kamala Harris. Having said that, I think the Rubio analogy is apt. I think she’s probably in a better position in part because a large chunk of the Democratic Party looks like Kamala Harris and that is like a profound advantage. I think her problem may be is that once other candidates start jumping in, and specifically Cory Booker, I think she will have to find some way to distinguish herself. Because Booker can similarly make the kind of claim that he embodies the opposition to Donald Trump, and he is much more forthright about the kind of vision for America that he has. It’s sort of a beloved community, United States is bereft of sort of fellow feeling, and that’s manifest in our politics and et cetera, et cetera. And so right now in the absence of sort of anyone with a comparable kind of following I think Harris looks very strong. But if Booker jumps in, if Bernie jumps in, right? Like those are also politicians I think — as a kind of parenthetical — similar to the ways in which it’s easy to miss the extent to which Harris has a dedicated mass following, I think Booker has one too and Bernie certainly does. And so if they jump in then I think Harris will have to find a way to keep up I don’t think she can just kind of be her.
+michelle goldberg
+Jamelle, I’m curious if you share my feeling of being sort of like reluctantly or like guiltily drawn to Harris. I mean when we were having an editorial meeting for the podcast I mentioned how I sometimes feel like, you know, the like distracted boyfriend in that meme who, you know on the one hand I’m, you know, all for Elizabeth Warren and as I’ve said on this show before, you know, my husband has been working for Elizabeth Warren. And, you know, we’re not like the Conway’s, right? Like he wouldn’t work for her if we didn’t both believe in what she was about. I totally take all the critiques of Kamala Harris to heart. And yet when I saw, you know, that rally — was it on Sunday? You know, it like brings up a lot of feelings for me. Like there’s part of me that just, you know, she really speaks to my, sort of like, aspirations for this country.
+jamelle bouie
+So I don’t think I’ve had a similar experience there. I mean I think I sort of intellectually see Harris as a very compelling candidate. But I’ve at least been persuaded that what is really missing in American politics is a, like, systemic critique of American capitalism. And for me — and I guess this is a way to get to talking about Warren, right? That Warren offers that in a way that may even be more substantively trenchant than what Bernie Sanders had to offer in 2016.
+michelle goldberg
+Oh I think that — I think it absolutely is true. I mean, but mostly because she’s kind of — it seems like she’s thought through the mechanics of things much more.
+jamelle bouie
+Right. And so that that’s what kind of like attracts me to Elizabeth Warren. That like I think she’s a perfectly capable politician. This is extremely superstitious but I think I think she’d be perfect if she weren’t from Massachusetts. But the track record for any party electing a president from Massachusetts is very bad. [LAUGHS]
+ross douthat
+Well let me push you guys a little bit though, because I think there’s no question that out of the existing field and really out of the potential field, Warren has one of the clearer arguments for why she should be the president. She has one of the clearer agendas. Everybody agrees that she’s ready to be president on day one, I think, in a way that we can’t be sure that other Democratic — potential Democratic nominees are. But I’m looking — the Washington Post just did this interesting presidential poll for 2020, where instead of giving people a list of candidates they just asked Democratic primary voters to volunteer a name, or say that they had no opinion. And one lesson of this poll is that the field is incredibly open because 43 percent had no opinion. But then if you ask people, when people gave a preference, Joe Biden had 9 percent, Harris had 8 percent which is, again, a case for her potentially catching fire early. And then everybody else is clustered at 3 and 2 percent and Elizabeth Warren’s down there at 2 percent. Why is Elizabeth Warren only at 2 percent?
+jamelle bouie
+I mean my only guess is that she’s simultaneously been around for a while but outside of D.C., like outside of people who are really in to politics, as sort of like not a major public figure, she had the moment, you know, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” She had that moment and I think that may have been something of a breakout moment for her. But I’m not sure that she has the kind of public impact that Harris has had.
+ross douthat
+To me her big moment so far, engineered by herself, has been the Native American sort of attempted rebuttal to Trump that I think it’s fair to say didn’t go well. [BOUIE LAUGHS] Do you think that that had — I mean seriously, do you think that that — I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if for the average Democratic voter right now, that’s a drag on her support? And the question is does the memory of it sort of wear off over the course of the next nine months or so?
+jamelle bouie
+I don’t think it does. I mean I’m sort of very — that was not just a blunder but I think it’s sort of, it’s one of those blunders that may end up weighing more heavily and in a general election than in a primary. I think Democratic primary voters will probably get past it, no problem. But I do think there’s this, you know, there’s the attack that Warren basically sort of gamed identity politics to get ahead, might end up being potent in the general election.
+ross douthat
+You don’t think it’s potent in a Democratic primary too?
+jamelle bouie
+I don’t know. I mean, what’s difficult about trying to game these things out is I’m not sure anymore what things catch fire by way of media, social media and thus like a broader universe of people and what things don’t. Like I have no sense of how to gauge that anymore. You can imagine a situation in which Warren gains some ground, does well in debates, is beginning to maybe move away from the larger pack in that Warren opponents begin circulating this back in social media and it becomes an object of critique from, say, Native American groups, from people who see themselves as allies of Native American groups. And by virtue of that kind of social media conflict becomes a media story, becomes a national story and then she has to deal with it. Maybe that happens.
+ross douthat
+So we’ve been talking about Harris and Warren because they’re the two most front runner-ish of the candidates who’ve jumped into the race. But let’s wrap by each choosing another candidate who is either a minor candidate who deserves more attention than they’re getting, or just someone who’s underrated in the current analysis. Jamelle, do you want to go first?
+jamelle bouie
+Sure. I think looking at the field of actual and potential candidates, I think Cory Booker is probably underrated. I say that because he, similar to Harris in fact, has kind of an actual following among Democratic voters. He’s always been a in-demand surrogate across the country. I think Booker is taking steps to try to fix his reputation with Wall Street skeptics by offering kind of ambitious policies and in signing on to like the Sanders-adjacent agenda. You know, I think he’s kind of fallen by the wayside somewhat. So I would say if I were going to, you know, say you should put money on someone, not to win but to do better than you expect, it would be Booker.
+ross douthat
+O.K. Michelle, your turn.
+michelle goldberg
+You know, I’m interested in Kirsten Gillibrand. I don’t know if her strategy is a winning one, but I think it’s interesting that in a field that has several women, she’s really pitching herself as like the feminist candidate. And she’s built up a network of women in local elected office all over the country. And so she does, I think, also have a following. And to some extent I wonder if she sort of splits the difference between Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, right? I think she’s able to speak to a lot of the members of “the resistance” who are, like her, middle-aged mothers who are morally outraged by Trump and who have been somewhat radicalized by their experience of the Trump administration.
+ross douthat
+I think that’s a good choice. Well I’m gonna say a word for one of the minor candidates which is Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. And I want to say a word for her just because she has an incredibly weird profile as a Hindu daughter of an anti-same sex marriage activist who is both the sort of would-be spokeswoman for the anti-war portion of the Bernie left, and she’s been attacked as an apologist for the Assad regime. And she’s from Hawaii, and she’s a veteran. And she’s young and telegenic and attractive, and it’s just a strange combination. So she combines this weird mix of far left positions with some cultural and foreign policy stuff that appeals both to some conservatives and to the far right. And it’s just a weird mix and obviously she’s not going to be the Democratic nominee for president. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up playing some bizarre role anyway. Jamelle, thank you again so much for joining us.
+michelle goldberg
+Yeah, thanks Jamelle. Welcome to the Times!
+ross douthat
+Welcome to the Times!
+jamelle bouie
+My pleasure.
+ross douthat
+We’re going to take a quick break now, and when we come back David will rejoin us, and we will talk about the media.
+david leonhardt
+I’m back now with Michelle and Ross, and we’re going to talk about a few of the big media controversies over the last few weeks. One was the BuzzFeed News scoop that may not actually have been a scoop about the Russia investigation.
+news clip President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
+david leonhardt
+Shortly after it came out, Robert Mueller’s office publicly denounced the scoop.
+news clip In an extremely rare move Mueller’s team released a statement denying the report.
+david leonhardt
+The other big controversy, of course, involved the students from Covington Catholic, who came from Kentucky to Washington and had an encounter on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with a Native American activist. [DRUMS AND CHANTING] Ross, you’re gonna get the first word here because I know you have a fiery take about the media controversies, and then Michelle and I are excited to take it apart when you’re done.
+ross douthat
+Okay here’s my rant. I think that there are some recurring temptations that the media faces in the age of Trump and we saw the two major ones at work in the controversies of the last couple of weeks. The first temptation is to leap on any story that seems like it’s going to finally provide the slam dunk, Russia-related evidence for the impeachment of Donald Trump. And the BuzzFeed story is the latest in a long line of scoops going back through scoops related to Michael Cohen supposedly going to Prague, and Paul Manafort supposedly meeting with Julian Assange that have been reported by a single outlet, recycled through the Twitter and cable news ecosystem, and then maybe just aren’t true. And this happens again and again and again and it’s a problem for the media’s credibility. And the other temptation is a temptation to leap on any sort of cultural or culture war story that seems to sort of have easy, privileged, white male villains who can serve as sort of the embodiment for everything that’s wrong with whiteness and white privilege in the age of Trump. And this isn’t just a Trump era phenomenon. It goes back to the famous Rolling Stone story about rape at the University of Virginia that turned out to be bogus. But I think it was an undercurrent in the Kavanaugh hearings and I think the way the media leaped on this story that seemed to be about a bunch of white teenagers mobbing a Native American activist and turned out to be way more complicated, is a good example of how there are stories out there that the media just wants to be true and it runs with them way too quickly and damages its own credibility in the process.
+michelle goldberg
+The part I want to respond to is the part about these Russia stories because, you know, you say that again and again and again these stories have been proved not to be true but that’s not really the case. I mean we don’t know exactly what in the BuzzFeed story about Trump directing Michael Cohen to lie — what part the Mueller investigation was refuting because their statement was sort of vague. I mean in some ways, nothing has come forward to disprove these stories. We’re sort of just saying, “Well these are second tier outlets and if nobody else got it then can we really believe it?” And you know, I’m just, I’m not sure that’s the case. You know, McClatchy has broken a ton of news on the Trump-Russia front. And I actually think that what we’ve seen is that a lot of the Russian reporting has turned out to be true. Once we start seeing it sort of fleshed out in indictments. Right? I mean, when Michael Cohen was charged with lying to Congress and we saw, you know, that indictment sort of walking us through the plans for Trump Tower Moscow, well all of that had been reported in BuzzFeed. I mean like really to the letter. It just — it hadn’t been confirmed but it was all there and we’re just seeing it sort of confirmed in an indictment, you know, months and months later and I think again and again we’ve seen stories that started out in the media then you see confirmed by this series of indictments.
+ross douthat
+Well, I mean, we can take our own wonderful employer as an example. I think that in the run up to the Iraq War, for instance, there was a period when some New York Times reporters were getting a lot of scoops that weren’t reported elsewhere that fit a particular narrative — in that case a pro-war pro-invade Iraq narrative. And the fact that some of those scoops weren’t corroborated elsewhere did actually turn out to be really meaningful. Like I’m not, I’m not just trying to cast aspersions on The Guardian here or McClatchy or Buzzfeed in particular. I think in general, scoops that are really big deals, that relate to an ongoing investigation where every major newspaper has lots of sources, that come out and just sort of hang there, unconfirmed for long periods of time, should be treated with a certain amount of suspicion. And I think I would say that about our own newspaper as well as some of these other outlets.
+david leonhardt
+I think you’re being a little unfair here, Ross. I mean first of all reporting this stuff is really hard, right? You’re dealing with foreign intelligence services. You’re dealing with a lot of people who’ve spent decades lying, like Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. And yet as hard as it is, we can’t name a single story that the Washington Post has gotten wrong in any major way. We can’t name a single story The New York Times has gotten wrong in any major way. We can’t name a single story that a lot of organizations have gotten wrong in any major way. Most of them—
+michelle goldberg
+Actually David, but let me interrupt because we can name a story that The New York Times got wrong in a major way, which is the story about how — written during the campaign — that the FBI saw no links between Trump and Russia. Right? That was like the sort of like big journalistic error of this, you know, recent history and I think it cuts against sort of Ross’s argument.
+david leonhardt
+That’s totally fair Michelle. And so I think yes we’re left with a few stories that are unconfirmed. I probably am closer to your skepticism, Ross about whether they’re going to be true if they haven’t yet been confirmed by others. But it’s not like other news organizations are running with these stories so—
+ross douthat
+Well that’s one area where — part of this is just my rant is against the media ecosystem rather than the outlets themselves.
+david leonhardt
+Meaning social media?
+ross douthat
+Meaning social media but also meaning, above all, cable news, right? Because yes, when the BuzzFeed story comes out our newspaper and other newspapers don’t immediately report that it’s been confirmed because our reporters can’t confirm it, right? I mean if you just — if you read BuzzFeed and then you read The New York Times and you read the Washington Post, you would have a sense that, O.K. this was an unconfirmed story that one place reported and I shouldn’t put too much stock in it.” But if you live, as maybe only political journalists do but I think other people as well, in a world of not only Twitter but the morning shows on cable and so on, where it’s like, “Well we have to talk about this scoop because it’s out there,” you know. You spend, sort of, 24 hours in a world where the default assumption is, this is it.
+david leonhardt
+I guess, Ross, what I would quibble with is that somehow the media are making the big mistakes here. I actually think much of the media was very sober in dealing with the BuzzFeed report. If you wanted to say lots of Trump’s opponents were too quick to believe the BuzzFeed story, I would agree with that. But I actually think large parts of the media were among the most cautious about whether the BuzzFeed story was true and we’re still cautious about whether it’s true.
+ross douthat
+I disagree. I don’t blame, like, my random, hyper-resistance-y friends for retweeting the BuzzFeed scoop in this sort of hopeful sense—
+michelle goldberg
+Do you have random, hyper-resistance-y friends?
+ross douthat
+Oh sure. Yeah, absolutely. Michelle, I’m friends with everybody. Everybody.
+michelle goldberg
+O.K., you’re a friend to all.
+ross douthat
+So anyway I don’t blame—[LAUGHS] I don’t blame people with that mentality for leaping on these scoops and being like, “Is this the moment? Is this the moment when our national nightmare is over?” I do blame the journalists on Twitter, real journalists, for sort of upcycling these stories with a certain intensity and the cable news producers for upcycling them and so on. And yes lots of institutions, ours included, do a good job of not just chasing these down. But there is a level of this hysteria that the press, especially on Twitter and cable news, leans into.
+david leonhardt
+Okay I think we agree that there are there aspects of the press that do it, and I also agree that’s a mistake. Let’s move on to the second case. Look, the Covington Catholic case got so much attention, I assume most of our listeners are familiar with it now. You should listen to the episode of “The Daily” podcast or go online and read any number of things about it if you’re not. To me there’s more room in that for media reflection than on the Russia stuff. Which is the case that yes, absolutely, huge numbers of people leaped to blame these students from Covington Catholic for being bad kids. And I guess what I would say is, I think if you’re wearing a Make America Great hat or T-shirt, you can’t do that in total innocence and these kids were, because that’s a symbol of the most outwardly racist presidential campaign of our lifetime. And I don’t think you can wear that and pretend otherwise. But other than the hats and shirts, I didn’t see these kids—
+michelle goldberg
+Oh and the “tomahawk chops.” I mean, come on! So I’ve watched a lot of this footage, right, and I mean I can sort of understand why, if your first exposure was like, “Oh my God these kids swarmed this man, you know, out of nowhere and it proves the sort of feral nature of the young MAGA generation,” then you would say, “No, it was more complicated.” I feel like by the time I came to this story everybody was saying, “Oh all of this, this viral Twitter thing has been debunked. In fact these kids did nothing wrong.” And I watch these videos and these kids were terrifying. You know, they looked like this like, angry white bread mob making fun of this Native American man. It’s certainly true that he approached them, instead of vice versa. But the way that they behaved was, I thought, despicable.
+ross douthat
+Despicable? That is— this is— this is an insane— this is an insane take! A couple of the kids did “tomahawk chops” and some, I’m sure, you know, it’s a gang of high schoolers roaming the Washington Mall. I’m sure that some of them did despicable things or said despicable things because they’re teenage boys. But they were a bunch of teenage boys who were getting, you know, who had a group of black nationalists who - those of us who’ve lived in Washington D.C. have gotten used to having this group, you know, yelling imprecations at you when you get off the Metro. But if you’re a bunch of kids from like a random school in Kentucky you have no idea what’s going on. You’re waiting to meet your bus. These guys start yelling homophobic slurs at you. I mean this was, this was like a colossal, like, culture war, identity politics, like, worlds-colliding kind of insanity. Which is why it was so perfect for this kind of media freakout. But describing their behavior as despicable just seems. I understand, but I don’t understand, I guess, that kind of reaction. It just feels like a reaction to, as I said at the beginning, like some idea of like feral white male privilege.
+michelle goldberg
+Again the idea that they were sort of innocent in this ridiculous confrontation of clashing signifiers just also seems like a whitewash.
+david leonhardt
+Ross this is the thing that I want to push you, on which is — and I’ll admit I’m playing with “what aboutism” here, but you had huge numbers of people on the left engage in some version of reflection after this. Right? People on the left came out in different places. Michelle you’re in one place, I’m in another. But you had large numbers of people basically say, “Hey you know what, I got this wrong initially.” And that strikes me as something we just don’t really see very much from the right. We don’t see a lot of people on the right do versions of that on, say, birtherism with Obama or with other crazy conspiracy theories that occupy vast amounts of time on Fox News. And so it seems like we end up with much more, kind of, wringing our hands about versions of the left going too far in media, and we just accept this notion that right wing media is going to be filled with non-fact based crazy stuff without any such reflection.
+ross douthat
+Well two — let me make two points O.K.? One, I think there is a division within the right in terms of the level of reflectiveness you get. I think when you have these kind of culture war controversies and, you know I mean I think an equivalent thing would be like how the media covers young black males or something, you get a big difference between how writers for National Review or the now defunct Weekly Standard would handle it, and how Fox News and talk radio would handle it. So I think there is reflection on the right, but I agree with you there’s a big segment of the right wing ecosystem that doesn’t engage in very much reflection. At the same time, a big chunk of the media that I’m critiquing here is not left media. I think a lot of the immediate mainstream news stories that were written about this story, a lot of the immediate CNN coverage and so on was ridiculous coverage. And again these are outlets that are not left outlets. They make a claim to be mainstream outlets. And I think the right’s critique of the mainstream media, that I think is often correct, is that the mainstream media has a lot of virtues, it does correct itself, it does a lot of things right. But when it makes mistakes, the right’s view is — especially on cultural war related stuff — it’s always racing in one particular direction.
+david leonhardt
+That may be right. I don’t think it’s right about straight political stories. I think on straight political stories the media airs to the right and to the left, right? Michelle mentioned the media got wrong how important Russia was. The media, I think, overplayed Hillary Clinton’s emails. You mentioned, Ross, that the media banged the drums for wars without exactly meaning to on Iraq. And so I think on straight politics stuff I don’t think the errors go only one way. But I agree with you that on cultural stuff they do, more often than not, go one way.
+michelle goldberg
+I think that the overcorrection to the Covington Catholic story was itself a distortion. Although, you know, I certainly don’t want anything that I’m saying to be construed as in any way a defensive like, doxxing these kids or even of the huge amount of significance that this strange momentary standoff took on in the broader culture, right? And to me it all kind of fundamentally comes back to the incredibly toxic nature of Twitter which is a problem in our politics and in the politics of societies all over the world, right? I mean, it’s this like machine that we’ve invented for generating and multiplying anger, you know. And it has this sort of intermittent reward structure of a slot machine, except what comes out is like indignation instead of money. And I think that, you know, we sort of have to either figure out how to deal with Twitter or, you know, I wish somebody would just figure out how to burn it to the ground. [ROSS LAUGHS]
+david leonhardt
+Well we’ve done enough self-flaggelating during this segment. We want to hear what your criticisms of the media are. So why don’t you give us a call at 347-915 4324 and give us a criticism about the mainstream media today. We may just play you on the show. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation: something meant to take your mind off of politics and the media and all that stressful stuff. Michelle, you get to go this week. So what do you have for us?
+michelle goldberg
+My recommendation is that you elope. One thing that I have never regretted, one of the best decisions I ever made was both eloping and then taking the money that my husband and I would have spent on a wedding and instead spending it on a trip around the world. And I understand that you know our ability to do that, to take that trip around the world, was a function of our extreme privilege. But it did cost less than what most people spend on their weddings. And was, you know, one of the just best decisions I’ve ever made. And also I think a good way to get a marriage off on a good foot.
+david leonhardt
+So I - the last thing I want to do is criticize your wedding ceremony, Michelle but I have one question about it, which is: Did you feel like you were missing something by not essentially saying your vows in front of your closest friends? Because that to me is the biggest argument for a wedding.
+michelle goldberg
+So some of my closest friends were there. Like basically my husband and I just sort of like called people that we knew that morning and were like, “We’re going to city hall if you want to come! You know, be there a couple hours!” You know, I’m not - I’m not someone who ever sat around fantasizing about my wedding or, you know. So no I had never thought that I lost out on anything.
+david leonhardt
+What you spun out is really romantic, right? The idea of running away, getting married, eloping. To me the one thing that I would have a hard time about it with was not having that community aspect, because you guys now know me well enough to know that I don’t use the word “sacred” very often. But I think the most sacred thing I’ve ever done is say my wedding vows with my wife in front of basically all of our collected friends and family.
+ross douthat
+And the correct and reactionary - but I repeat myself - take on all of this, of course, is that the money is being spent in order to compensate for the collapsing sense of tradition and the sacred. So people don’t have those senses in their lives to the extent that they should. And this one moment comes along that still has this residue of the sacral about it. And so people are like, “Well I have to literally make it heaven on earth, spare no expense,” and so on. So in fact the rising costs of American weddings is linked to the decline of marriage as an institution in this paradoxical but not really way. [MICHELLE LAUGHS]
+david leonhardtThere was no masked robber with a threatening note for the bank teller, no bag bulging with cash, no getaway car.
+Instead, whoever appeared to have plotted a heist at a Chase bank in Pembroke Pines, Fla., chose a rather unglamorous, subterranean approach. The plan involved a narrow, 150-foot-long tunnel dug into the dirt.
+Officials discovered the tunnel on Tuesday night after public works employees in Pembroke Pines, about 20 miles north of Miami, went to deal with a sinkhole in the road. Curiously, the workers found a power cord inside it. Realizing it was a tunnel, they eventually called the local police, who notified the F.B.I. on Wednesday morning.
+F.B.I. investigators found that the tunnel had a diameter of about three feet and opened up into a wooded area, Special Agent Michael D. Leverock said in an interview on Wednesday evening. It was so narrow that a person would have to lie on his or her stomach to navigate it, Agent Leverock said.The author, most recently, of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” admires fantasy fiction that feels “wonderfully strange and alarmingly familiar at the same time. That and a woman or man who can wield two swords.”
+What books are on your nightstand?
+Oyinkan Braithwaite’s “My Sister, the Serial Killer”; Yan Lianke’s “The Day the Sun Died”; Mervyn Peake’s “Gormenghast”; Anna Burns’s “Milkman”; Mike Mignola’s “B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs I”; and Dorothy B. Hughes’s “In a Lonely Place.”
+What’s the last great book you read?
+Paul Murray’s “Skippy Dies.” I’ve never read anything like it. Just don’t read the jacket copy: That did a pretty bang-up job of making me stay away from it for years — a shame because it’s one of the few true masterpieces of this young century. The very best stories can fool you into thinking that this is the first time you’re seeing a certain world, even as you’re being struck by the familiarity of it. I went to an all-boys high school not much different from Skippy’s. I had every one of Skippy’s friends: the boy with body odor, the fat kid, the compulsive swearer, the foreign kid, the oversexed loser, the science nerd, the art-gay, the new kid who would soon realize that he could do way better than us. I never thought my school life was particularly funny or sad, but thanks to this book I’m now realizing that I’ve survived the most sidesplitting comedy and heart-wrenching tragedy of my entire life.
+What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?
+“As Meat Loves Salt,” by Maria McCann. I’m trying to be careful in how I describe it. Have you ever had to come to grips with a loved one doing a monstrous thing and sticking by that person? Loving him but asking yourself, what does it say about your own sense of morality and decency that this person is still in your life? That’s how I felt reading the first third of this novel. Many novels are risky, but I have never read a story that goes so far out on a limb to risk alienating a protagonist because of his sudden and abominable actions. I remember saying to myself that I just can’t do this. I can’t stick with this man. And yet I fell for him. I fell in love with him falling in love. I was right there leaping up with him when he saw his lover walking down the street and saying hello to passers-by. When he described a passionate night as “delight, delight,” I even envied him a little. This was the rare book that had me waking at nights, in a sweat and fretting over a character. He was in many ways a monster. And even when he fell right back into monstrous ways, there I was in denial, because how could he be bad? I had fallen for him so hard.If she took the job, she and her husband decided, they would not uproot their lives. Instead, they would rent an apartment for Ms. Rizzo, and Mr. Pavich would visit as often as possible.
+“All our friends and family are in Vancouver, and it is a pretty hot market,” Ms. Rizzo said. “If you sell and try to come back, you can never re-enter the market.”
+Mr. Lieberman was prepared with a lineup of buildings. A few were in Dumbo, including 220 Water Street, a converted shoe factory. A lofty, sunny one-bedroom there with almost 700 square feet had plenty of character. The rent was $3,825. But the location wasn’t sufficiently Nets-friendly, with a long, drab walk to the arena that would lead her under a highway overpass.
+Image A one-bedroom unit at 220 Water Street, a converted 19th-century shoe factory, had plenty of character. But it would have made for an inconvenient commute. Credit... Robert Wright for The New York Times
+For $4,000, a charming two-bedroom in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone occupied an entire floor, with around 1,200 square feet. Such a building, run by a small-property owner, can work well for international clients, Mr. Lieberman said: “The owner is more willing to have flexibility if the tenant doesn’t have U.S. credit.”
+Inside, however, it seemed more quirky than charming, with an uninviting kitchen, and it couldn’t compete with the area’s gleaming, amenity-filled new buildings.
+The two-year-old rental tower at 300 Ashland Place, with almost 400 units, was ideal: steps from both Barclays Center and Atlantic Terminal. From there, it was one express stop or an easy bicycle ride to Industry City.Another element that Paterson said elevates Harper’s books from procedurals is an attention to character. At the center of both “The Dry” and “Force of Nature” is Aaron Falk, a Melbourne detective. In “The Dry,” he is forced to confront a dark chapter in his past as he solves a murder in his hometown; in “Force of Nature,” he searches for a missing hiker, lost in the woods outside the city. Falk, at times infuriating in his emotional inhibition, is a particularly compelling creation.
+Image Credit... Patricia Wall/The New York Times
+“I want people to think, ‘I know someone like that,’” Harper said. “I figure out what keeps people awake at night and what drives them to get out of bed in the morning, and that involves a lot of details that don’t make it into the books.” Characters’ coffee preferences, for instance: “Aaron Falk is from Melbourne so he’d probably be a flat-white man,” she said, using a term for steamed milk poured over espresso. “And Nathan” — a divorced dad who solves the death of his brother in “The Lost Man” — “he’d be instant coffee, happy to drink it black but with a splash of long-life milk on occasion.” (Harper, whose parents are British and who spent much of her childhood in England, is “more of a tea person.”)
+Nathan drinks long-life milk in part because he lives hundreds of miles from the nearest town, on a remote cattle station in the northern Australian state of Queensland. Harper leans on the Australian environment in all of her novels. “The Lost Man,” like “The Dry,” is a study in isolation and its psychological and physical effects — particularly on men, who in regional areas of Australia are vulnerable to depression and suicide. “Setting informs plot,” is how Harper put it, when asked about her skill in conjuring up a familiar type of Australian bloke, at once taciturn and tender.
+Where “The Dry” probed the dangers of prolonged drought on a close-knit farming community, “The Lost Man” is concerned with how people live — and die — in the unforgiving outback. The novel opens in the desert, with the discovery of Nathan’s brother’s body five miles from his four-wheel-drive vehicle and the food, fuel and water in its trunk. What happened to separate Nathan’s brother from his survival kit?
+“I knew I wanted somewhere hot and far-flung, but with a community of sorts,” Harper said of her choice of location. As part of her planning, she flew to Charleville, some 400 miles west of the Queensland capital of Brisbane, and then drove more than 500 miles further to the tiny town of Birdsville, on the edge of the Simpson Desert. The town’s claim to fame is hitting the highest-ever temperature in Queensland, of 49.5 degrees Celsius (121.1 degrees Fahrenheit). Now it’s the town that served as inspiration for “The Lost Man.”
+Accompanying Harper on her journey was Neale McShane, the officer in charge of Birdsville Police Station for 10 years, who is now retired. McShane, by himself, once patrolled an area of outback the size of the United Kingdom, with a population of about 250 people.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.
+Last year The New York Times introduced Past Tense, an initiative to revisit history through a present-day lens. Its projects begin in The Times’s photo archive, affectionately known as the morgue, where more than six million pictures are held.
+The first project was “California: State of Change,” a portfolio of the state and the mentality it represented during the rapid growth of the 20th century. More recently, picture essays of Fidel Castro, fitness trends and the rise of the New York pizza slice were published.
+Its latest endeavor: 100 pictures for what would have been the 100th birthday of Jackie Robinson, the first black player in Major League Baseball, who endured racial venom with stoicism and proved a genius on the basepaths in Brooklyn Dodger white. “For sociological impact,” The Times declared in Robinson’s 1972 obituary, he was “perhaps America’s most significant athlete.”A malady formerly attached to “punch drunk” boxers, C.T.E. has now been found posthumously in more than 200 former football players, including more than 100 who played in the N.F.L., plus an array of athletes in sports ranging from hockey to soccer, rodeo to BMX. Much of the research about the condition has centered on brain injuries in the military.
+Scientists are on the verge of being able to confidently diagnose C.T.E. in the living. It promises to be a game-changer, leading to all sorts of complex ethical questions in sports.
+When a football star receives a C.T.E. diagnosis, for example, who will decide whether he should stop playing? Will high schools, colleges and professional teams have an obligation to test and reveal the results? Will athletes in all sports, at all ages, have the option to be tested?
+Hairston embodied some of that coming anxiety. During news media interviews in recent years, he sometimes mentioned offhandedly that he thought he had C.T.E. The conversations always moved on quickly.
+Even those who hunted with him regularly said they did not see cause for concern. Paul Bride, an outdoors photographer who worked for KUIU, accompanied Hairston on all his expeditions.
+“I saw him on his best days, in the best place he could be — the mountains,” Bride said.
+In hindsight, though, his friends said maybe Hairston had become more forgetful, a bit less predictable. None of those close to him were alarmed enough to worry that he might end his life. He had it all.
+Privately, though, the Hairstons struggled to hold it together. Jason Hairston routinely broke down and cried, Kirstyn said, scared of where his brain was headed. When a scan revealed deterioration in the frontal lobe that had not been present a year earlier, she said, Hairston made her promise she would never make him have another test, because he did not want to know the results.Kellyanne Conway, White House adviser, recently dismissed as a “silly semantic argument” questions about President Trump’s use of the word “wall” — is it concrete, steel, see-through, a “smart wall,” slatted, piked, solar-powered, a chain-link fence or just a metaphor?
+The semantics, however, are anything but trivial. If the White House and House Democrats are to reach a deal to avert another government shutdown by the Feb. 15 deadline, they must first reach a rough détente over what they are talking about — in particular, the definition of Mr. Trump’s “wall,” and of “border security,” the Democrats’ catchall description of their own approach.
+“There’s no magic glossary telling you the difference between a fence and wall or a barrier, they are kind of interchangeable,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary from 2013 to 2017.
+“There is a distinction between governing and political rhetoric, and people should not get trapped in the binary,’” Mr. Johnson said. “The moment when we reach a compromise on the vocabulary is the moment we reach a compromise on the policy.”Friday
+1) 2 p.m. Ski in the city
+A host of the Winter Olympics in 1928 and 1948, St. Moritz is prime snow-sports territory, with a paradise of idyllic paths for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and sledding. Still, downhill skiing is the siren call of these mountains. Outside town, Corvatsch offers skiers daredevil verticality, but St. Moritz’s own Corviglia has glorious expanses of snowy slopes. (Day passes start at 50 Swiss francs, or about $50, depending on the week.) Warm up frozen toes afterward with a hot drink at Alpinahütte, where you’ll find skiers reviving with glühwein (mulled wine), skiwasser (hot water with raspberry syrup and lemon) and bull shots, a 17-Swiss-franc concoction of vodka and consommé.
+2) 6:30 p.m. Aperitivo
+Badrutt’s Palace, with its green-tipped tower marking the bull's-eye of Via Serlas, is the heart of St. Moritz society. The hotel’s remodeled King’s Social House, said to be the oldest club in Switzerland, serves dinner and cocktails to a crowd that stays late to dance in its basement lounge. But there’s even more action at the plush Renaissance Bar: Badrutt’s pocket-size, antique smoking lounge, known to regulars as Mario’s, after the now-retired barman there. Around the fireplace, scores of merrymakers pack the velvet banquettes and armchairs, lighting cigars with matches in sterling silver cases and inviting new acquaintances for rounds of Mario’s signature cocktails (like the hot negroni, with Campari, red wine, cranberry and juniper berries for 25 francs) and the popular club sandwich ( available for home delivery, via Badrutt’s slick black Rolls-Royce).Pressmark has increased its reserves of steel by half to ensure that it has enough to last 15 days. The coils lie in a corner of the factory, on a grease-stained patch of concrete.
+The company borrowed 200,000 pounds (about $263,000) to finance the additional steel. This, combined with a dip in British auto sales, prompted Mr. Nollett to delay buying newer presses.
+“Why would we want to invest in a plant if we are going to lose volume?” he asked. “You’ve got the uncertainty over Brexit.”
+At Filtermist, which employs about 90 people in Britain, Brexit has posed a distraction from the company’s surging growth. Sales increased by nearly a third from 2017 to 2018, as factories around the world sought to protect workers from the hazards of industrial air. Filtermist automated part of its production and found jobs for the workers displaced by robots.
+Mr. Stansfield, the chief executive, does not lack for other worries, among them an economic slowdown in China. But Brexit presents an especially acute danger: Manufacturers could leave Britain for industrial areas in Europe, especially in the key industries of aerospace and automotive. This was the point the Airbus chief brought home.
+“He voiced what many people were thinking,” Mr. Stansfield said. “It’s going to affect us.”
+Filtermist is owned by a Swedish conglomerate. Mr. Stansfield has grown accustomed to phone calls from incredulous Swedish board members who assume that he, by dint of being English, must be able to divine the mysteries of Brexit.
+“They call us and ask, ‘What’s happening? What’s going to happen?’” he said. “And we have to tell them, ‘We don’t know.’”Slide 1 of 100,
+Narrowly making it home, for a 10th-inning win against the Cubs. June 18, 1952.As these photos make clear, Robinson’s decade in major-league baseball was just one act in a remarkably rich and complex life — one of vision, fortitude, dignity and endurance — shaped by the currents and contours of American history even as it recast them.
+There was also Jackie the boy, grandson of slaves , hauled cross-country as a toddler from a life of sharecropping to the promise of Pasadena by a determined single mother, a Great Migration pioneer.
+And Jackie the amateur athlete, his college exploits chronicled by a booming black press . When The Pittsburgh Courier’s Randy Dixon wrote about the injustice of a segregated sport passing up a star in 1941 — “Exhibit A in So-Called Democracy, the Case of Jackie Robinson” — he didn’t even mean baseball. Robinson had just dazzled in an exhibition between college all-stars and the Chicago Bears, outshining a roster studded with N.F.L. first-round picks.Hugh Pavletich, one of the report’s authors, said housing had become more affordable in Australia over the past year as prices fell amid tightening credit. He said that Ms. Ardern’s government, which took office in October 2017, had been “messing around” by focusing too much on the hotly debated plan to build 100,000 more houses — called KiwiBuild — instead of freeing up more land for construction, which he said could have kept prices in check.
+“If they’d got out of the starting blocks with structural reforms centered around land supply and infrastructure financing soon after the election, it would have sent a far clearer signal to the market and subdued it significantly as these changes were put in place,” he said.
+But the center-left Labour Party that Ms. Ardern leads has now conceded that its flagship policy will not ease the housing crisis as rapidly as it had hoped. The prime minister told reporters Wednesday that the government would still build 100,000 housing units in a decade, but that its interim targets would be scrapped.
+The government now expects to have 300 new homes built under the plan by July, rather than the original plan for 1,000.
+Phil Twyford, the housing minister, said Wednesday that there would be a “recalibration” of the policy, noting that demand for the new homes in some areas had been weaker than expected. KiwiBuild has faced criticism from political opponents that even its cheapest houses are too expensive for first-time buyers who had been shut out of the market.BANGKOK — The global sports market is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Now, this powerful industry is coming together to promote an unlikely cause: human rights.
+Since late November, a Bahrain-born soccer player for a minor team in Australia has been held in detention in Thailand. The player, Hakeem al-Araibi, 24, is not a famous athlete. He has no lucrative sponsors.
+But he has spoken out against one of the most powerful men in international soccer, who is also a member of the ruling family of Bahrain. His testimony of torture at the hands of Bahrain’s repressive government earned him refugee status in Australia, which determined that he faced credible threats of persecution should he return to the Gulf state.
+Still, over the past week, Mr. Araibi has collected an impressive list of supporters in the world of international sports.MANILA — A 39-year-old Filipina maid was executed early this week in Saudi Arabia despite protests from the Philippines, officials said on Thursday.
+The woman, whose name was not revealed, had been found guilty of murder, the Philippine government said. But details about her case were not made public, though an official said the Supreme Judicial Council of Saudi Arabia had refused an offer of “blood money” for her alleged crime.
+“The Department of Foreign Affairs extends its deep condolences to the family of a Filipina household service worker who was executed in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday,” the department said in a brief statement.
+The country’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Adnan Alonto, said the embassy had offered the woman legal assistance during her trial and provided regular updates to her family in the Philippines, the Foreign Affairs Department said.On Wednesday, it brought temperatures as low as minus 28 in Minneapolis and upended daily life for many in the Midwest, halting planes and trains, shutting schools, and prompting officials to open emergency centers.
+The bitter weather is believed to be tied to at least eight deaths, and health officials warned residents to go outdoors only if necessary.
+For you: Exposed skin can quickly lead to frostbite. Chicagoans shared cold-weather survival tips.
+Trump pushes back against intelligence officials
+President Trump has accused the nation’s intelligence agencies of being “passive and naive” about the dangers posed by Iran, a day after the agencies gave their annual assessment of the biggest threats to the U.S.
+Lawmakers and former intelligence officials condemned Mr. Trump’s attack, calling it inappropriate and dangerous. But the president’s defenders noted the threat assessment came from the very national security establishment the president has vowed to disrupt.That’s a huge disparity I see with kids today. No kids work. At least no kids in our neighborhood in San Francisco, which is totally nuts. Working was one of the most important things for me. My daughter will work, and it will be at something like a coffee shop.
+How did you wind up at Pepperdine University?
+In my senior year of high school, I interned for Dina Ruiz, who was a local anchorwoman in Monterey. She gave me the seedling of an idea that I could become a broadcaster. I did my research and I came up with Pepperdine, but it was incredibly expensive. I got in early admission, and had no way of affording the school. So I signed up for U.C. Santa Barbara.
+But my mom said, “If you really want to go to Pepperdine, you should tell them that.” So I wrote them a letter. Then, two days before I had to put down a deposit on U.C.S.B., I got this huge packet in the mail, and it was a complete financial aid package from Pepperdine.
+How did you get started in Hollywood?
+My first internship was on the set of “Friends,” at the height of the frenzy. My job was to hold the phone, and if it rang, I had to answer it and go find the person who was wanted. That was the worst job for me because A, I hate talking on the phone, and B, I’m kind of shy. I’d be standing there, and the phone would ring, and it would be like, “Hey, it’s Brad, can you get Jen for me?” And I’m like, “This sucks.”
+I hated it. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough because of the energy. I’m an energy person. Maybe it was growing up in Santa Cruz or maybe I was just born with it, but human energy, I just feel it so much.
+How did you get into tech?
+Right after I met Kevin, I started going up to San Francisco on the weekends, and we’d go to parties where the PayPal guys were playing speed chess. Kevin was building Xoom, and he’d come down and practice his pitch deck on me a million times. I was in love, so I’d just sit there staring.
+I was working at FX at the time, during this period where product placement started to become a thing. And I would be on the phone with Anheuser-Busch, getting yelled at because we didn’t have the Miller Lite bottle the right way for long enough or whatever. And Denis Leary would be on the other line going, “I’m not getting paid for this.” It was a slow-motion train wreck, and meanwhile, Kevin’s showing me the first YouTube videos, and I’m seeing how quickly things can move.archived recording
+We begin the hour with a show-stopping report from BuzzFeed that, if true, could cost the president his job. The explosive report says the president personally instructed his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress to hide the president’s involvement in a real estate deal for a Moscow Trump Tower. BuzzFeed cites two law enforcement officials who say Mueller has evidence that the president personally instructed Cohen to lie. The story’s most explosive and consequential claim is this — that according to BuzzFeed sources, the special counsel’s office learned about Trump’s directive for Cohen to lie to Congress through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages and a cache of other documents. It’s the most direct allegation yet that President Trump may have committed a crime.
+michael barbaro
+Mike, what were you thinking when that BuzzFeed report first came out earlier this month?
+michael schmidt
+My first thought was, damn, that’s a really good story. And it particularly hurt because I have spent much of the past two years focused on the issue of obstruction of justice.
+michael barbaro
+Right.
+michael schmidt
+And this was the clearest case to date that showed the president may have obstructed justice. It was the president telling one of his associates to lie.
+archived recording
+If true, this would be bigger than Watergate. If true, this would be obstruction of justice. Well, the revelation is prompting Democrats to say impeachment is a possibility if the reports are true. If, if, if, if true — Then we are likely on our way to possible impeachment proceedings.
+michael schmidt
+Immediately there was a lot of pressure on us to match this story.
+archived recording
+So far we have not been able to confirm BuzzFeed’s report.
+michael schmidt
+And we spent much of the day trying to suss out what was going on.
+archived recording
+We should note CNN has not independently confirmed BuzzFeed’s reporting, nor for that matter has anyone else.
+michael schmidt
+And we got a fair amount of pushback and struggled to get it confirmed.
+archived recording
+MSNBC, NBC News couldn’t confirm that information. If I’m — This information is not verified at The Washington Post. We can’t verify this information independently. — not independently confirm these allegations. No other news organization, other than BuzzFeed, has this story at this point.
+michael schmidt
+And by that evening, we saw something highly unusual.
+archived recording
+Here is the breaking news, a rare and stunning move from the special counsel tonight. Robert Mueller’s team disputing an explosive BuzzFeed report alleging the president told Michael Cohen to lie to Congress.
+michael schmidt
+The special counsel’s office, which rarely speaks publicly, put out a statement knocking down the story.
+archived recording
+Quote, “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”
+michael barbaro
+Right — saying very forcefully and very clearly something in this story is wrong.
+michael schmidt
+This was a reporter’s worst nightmare.
+archived recording
+This isn’t a correction of the BuzzFeed story. This is an annihilation of it. And this is a bad one for BuzzFeed, man. They maybe should have stuck to some cat listicles. It’s not good. The press is making itself look very, very badly. And it’s going to be very difficult for this media to restore any credibility it once had before. And I think —
+michael schmidt
+Here you have the special counsel, Bob Mueller, who probably has more credibility in Washington right now than anyone else, saying your story’s not true.
+archived recording
+So the people are saying heads should roll at BuzzFeed, that you’re hurting the news business as a whole. What do you say?
+archived recording (anthony cormier)
+I’ve been a reporter for 20 years. This is going to be borne out, Brian. This story is accurate.
+michael schmidt
+It got me thinking of a time when a similar team of journalists found themselves in a very similar situation. You rolling? So I got in an Uber and went to Georgetown — [RINGING]
+speaker
+Hello?
+michael schmidt
+Hi, this is Mike Schmidt. Is Bob there?
+speaker
+Just a second.
+bob woodward
+Good to see you. How are you, pal?
+michael schmidt
+To the home of Bob Woodward.
+michael barbaro
+From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.” Today, the perils of reporting on a presidential investigation. It’s Thursday, January 31.
+michael schmidt
+1, 2, 1, 2. How’s that? [DOG BARKING]
+bob woodward
+We’ll see if we can quiet the dog and the door and the phone.
+michael schmidt
+Oh, it’s fine.
+bob woodward
+I’m sorry. It’s the real world.
+michael schmidt
+It’s the real Bob Woodward.
+bob woodward
+Well, the life of living with a dog.
+michael schmidt
+It’s fine.
+michael barbaro
+So what’s the story that Woodward told you?
+michael schmidt
+The story Woodward told me starts with the Watergate break-in in June of 1972.
+archived recording
+Democratic National Committee is trying to solve a spy mystery. It began before dawn Saturday when five intruders were captured by police inside the offices of the committee in Washington.
+bob woodward
+It was at 2:30 in the morning. And by 9 o’clock, the editors at The Post were getting on — how are we going to cover this?
+archived recording
+Five people have been arrested and charged with breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the middle of the night.
+michael schmidt
+Bob Woodward and his partner Carl Bernstein jumped on that story.
+bob woodward
+I was sent to the courthouse and saw burglars in business suits. Didn’t make sense. Lead burglar worked for the CIA. So there was an immediate curiosity.
+michael schmidt
+In the weeks and months after the break-in, Woodward and Carl Bernstein are out front on this coverage.
+archived recording
+One of the suspects, James McCord, operates his own security company in Washington. He was doing work for the Republican National Committee and the committee to re-elect President Nixon. No one has proved that the Republicans are behind the break-in, but tomorrow the Democrats are expected to file some sort of legal action against the G.O.P. anyway. Mr. Nixon, did you know about the burglary of our Democratic National Headquarters at the Watergate?
+michael schmidt
+They are doing everything possible to figure out ties between the burglars who broke into the Watergate and Nixon’s campaign.
+bob woodward
+Conventional wisdom then was, Nixon’s too smart to do this. But Carl and I didn’t do conventional wisdom, to be honest with you.
+michael barbaro
+And they kind of have the story all to themselves.
+michael schmidt
+They are out front, even when some news organizations are ignoring it.
+michael barbaro
+Including The Times.
+michael schmidt
+The Post was ahead, big time.
+bob woodward
+We started developing sources like the bookkeeper who kept their records on the money and the treasurer, Hugh Sloan. And so it was always about money, or at least that was one path of exploration.
+michael schmidt
+And they discover this slush fund, this pot of money that Nixon’s advisers controlled so they could dole money out to folks like the burglars to do the dirty political deeds that they thought needed to happen as Nixon was running for re-election.
+bob woodward
+So we found out that John Mitchell, who’d been the attorney general, who’d been Nixon’s campaign manager, controlled dispersal of the funds. So did Maurice Stans, who was the —
+michael schmidt
+As part of that coverage, Woodward and Bernstein were able to establish four people who had access to those funds, people very close to the president, including his campaign manager at the time.
+michael barbaro
+So this reporting is starting to get closer and closer to President Nixon himself?
+michael schmidt
+Correct. And that October, Woodward and Bernstein thought they had a huge scoop.
+bob woodward
+All roads led to Haldeman, the White House chief of staff —
+michael schmidt
+That’s H. R. Haldeman.
+bob woodward
+H. R. — Bob — Haldeman.
+michael schmidt
+They had learned that H. R. Haldeman, the person closest to the president, controlled the slush fund.
+bob woodward
+So we interviewed people, including Hugh Sloan, and he finally said it was Haldeman.
+michael schmidt
+And Hugh Sloan, the treasurer of Nixon’s campaign, had testified about that to the grand jury investigating the president.
+michael barbaro
+A big scoop.
+michael schmidt
+Correct.
+bob woodward
+This was the big story. If he was involved in this, if he could authorize money, that led right to Nixon’s doorstep.
+michael schmidt
+Because this would be the first person inside the White House at the time who was also controlling the funds from the slush fund.
+bob woodward
+Precisely.
+michael schmidt
+So they were reporting on this just weeks before the November election. They have three sources confirming Haldeman’s the guy. And on deadline, right before they’re about to publish, their editor asked them to get another source.
+bob woodward
+So Bernstein called a lawyer in the Justice Department and said, you know, we know it’s Haldeman. And the lawyer said, I’d like to help you, I really would, but I just can’t say anything.
+michael schmidt
+So Bernstein comes up with a workaround. And he says to the official —
+bob woodward
+He said, I’ll count to 10, and if it’s O.K., tell me it’s O.K.
+michael schmidt
+I’m going to count to 10. And if by the time I’m done counting you haven’t said anything, I’ll know the story’s true.
+michael barbaro
+Hmm.
+bob woodward
+And this was done in a very clever but direct way.
+michael schmidt
+So Bernstein starts counting. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.
+bob woodward
+And the lawyer said, you’ve got it straight now.
+michael schmidt
+You’ve got it straight now.
+bob woodward
+Bernstein thanked him again and hung up. He told me about it. We have a fourth source.
+michael schmidt
+They tell the editors, and they publish.
+michael barbaro
+So then what happens?
+michael schmidt
+As they expected, the story lands with huge impact.
+bob woodward
+The story came out, lead story. And we feel quite comfortable.
+michael schmidt
+Everyone in Washington is buzzing about it. It shows just how high the conspiracy went into the White House. And Woodward and Bernstein are in the newsroom that day, basking in the glory of the story, when —
+bob woodward
+A reporter at The Post, education reporter Eric Wentworth, said, have you seen what happened on television? And we hadn’t seen anything.
+michael schmidt
+Did you guys just see what Hugh Sloan’s lawyer said on television?
+michael barbaro
+And what had Sloan’s lawyer said?
+archived recording
+I assume you’re referring to the testimony before the grand jury, as reported in The Washington Post this morning?
+michael schmidt
+Sloan’s lawyer, with Sloan standing right next to him —
+archived recording
+Our answer to that is an unequivocal no. Mr. Sloan did not implicate Mr. Haldeman in that testimony at all.
+michael schmidt
+Had come out and knocked the story down.
+bob woodward
+And Sloan’s our source and somebody we’d developed a close relationship with, as you know, with sources. And it is agony.
+michael schmidt
+Here you had his lawyer standing there on national television saying the story’s not true.
+bob woodward
+I can’t describe the emotions, but they included — we’re finished, we’re going to have to resign.
+michael schmidt
+It’s the worst feeling as a journalist, right?
+bob woodward
+Yeah. You have a sinking feeling that — it’s so intense you don’t even know where your stomach is. You know it’s somewhere in your body, and it’s crying out really hard.
+michael barbaro
+So what had actually happened? Had they gotten anything wrong?
+michael schmidt
+They didn’t know.
+bob woodward
+We were saying, well, we need to write some sort of story. We need to back down. Or we need to explain. And then Bradlee said, look, you’re not even sure whether you got it right or wrong. What part is wrong? You don’t know where you are. You haven’t got the facts. Hold your water for a while.
+michael schmidt
+So Woodward called Sloan’s lawyer.
+bob woodward
+He said, look, you don’t have to apologize for this. And essentially, it’s true.
+michael schmidt
+The general thrust of the story is right.
+bob woodward
+But you’re wrong on the grand jury testimony. You connected the dots that were not connectable.
+michael schmidt
+You guys were just off when you said that Sloan testified about this to the grand jury.
+bob woodward
+And then I finally got to Deep Throat, Mark Felt.
+michael schmidt
+So then Woodward went to Deep Throat.
+bob woodward
+I mean, this was 3:00 a.m., I think the next day or two days later. The days rushed together.
+michael schmidt
+And Deep Throat told him —
+bob woodward
+When you move on somebody like Haldeman, you’ve got to be sure you’re on the most solid ground. What a royal screw-up, he said. And then he said, look —
+michael schmidt
+The story was right.
+bob woodward
+The whole thing — Watergate, all the espionage — is a Haldeman operation. He’s behind it.
+michael schmidt
+But you guys, by getting that one fact wrong about the grand jury, have done the improbable.
+bob woodward
+You’ve got people feeling sorry for Haldeman. I didn’t think that was possible.
+michael schmidt
+You’ve made people feel bad for Haldeman, one of the most disliked people in Washington.
+michael barbaro
+And one of the ringleaders of these dirty tricks, with access to the slush fund, a main character in this illegal plot.
+michael schmidt
+The person closest to Nixon.
+michael barbaro
+Mike, I’m curious what Woodward told you was the fatal error in this reporting that led to this error of the grand jury reference? Because four sources is a lot of sources.
+michael schmidt
+There were three things. One was that they were proceeding with confirmation bias.
+bob woodward
+Carl and I had heard what we wanted to hear.
+michael schmidt
+They thought the information was true. They were simply looking for sources to give them the O.K. to move forward with that.
+michael barbaro
+Mhmm.
+michael schmidt
+The second thing is that —
+bob woodward
+We didn’t go through that process of sitting with Sloan and saying, O.K., did they ask you at the grand jury about Haldeman’s role?
+michael schmidt
+They never went back to Sloan himself and walked him through exactly what they were going to be saying about his testimony. That really would have given them a chance to flush things out.
+michael barbaro
+Right, because he might have noticed them referring to a grand jury. And he would have said, no, what you are saying is right, but I never said it to a grand jury.
+michael schmidt
+Correct. It would have been a good way to catch it. And the third thing —
+bob woodward
+The whole Bernstein, you know, silent confirm or hang up method —
+michael schmidt
+Is that when Bernstein, on deadline, called the Justice Department official and used this confusing way of asking him about it, that failed too.
+bob woodward
+Everyone was just shaking their head, and that only made everyone more ill.
+michael schmidt
+And they missed a final opportunity to catch the mistake.
+michael barbaro
+But as Woodward went back to all these sources and learned that the heart of the story was true, was he able to report that?
+michael schmidt
+So what they did a day or so after the story was write a piece.
+bob woodward
+Let’s level as much as we can. And we were able in this case to level.
+michael schmidt
+And they said —
+bob woodward
+We were wrong on the grand jury, but it was a Haldeman operation.
+michael schmidt
+That while they had gotten the grand jury part wrong, Haldeman had indeed controlled the slush fund. And the general thrust of what they had reported was right.
+bob woodward
+I’m not sure it had any traction, because it looked like, in the beginning of 1973, Watergate might just recede, go away.
+michael schmidt
+So the story came at a critical time in the narrative because there were questions about whether this was really a story.
+bob woodward
+Yes, and whether we had it right.
+michael schmidt
+The initial splash of the wrong story overshadows the important news that is right.
+michael barbaro
+Hmm.
+michael schmidt
+The thing about big stories that are big deals is that if there is a part of it that is wrong, it allows the person who doesn’t like the story to drive a Mack truck right through it.
+michael barbaro
+Right.
+michael schmidt
+So while they were right in terms of the narrative and arc of what was going on and what had happened and how high this went into the White House, the mistake gave the White House the excuse to jump on that and say, see, look, this story’s wrong, and all their other reporting about this is just like it. It’s been wrong.
+archived recording
+I don’t respect the type of journalism, the shabby journalism that is being practiced by The Washington Post. And I used the term shoddy journalism, shabby journalism. And I’ve used the term character assassination.
+michael schmidt
+What you are saying is wrong. You have no credibility because of that.
+archived recording
+Mr. Vice President, Mrs. Agnew, all of our very distinguished guests here at the —
+michael schmidt
+Nixon was overwhelmingly re-elected that November.
+archived recording (president nixon)
+I’ve never known a national election when I would be able to go to bed earlier than tonight.
+michael schmidt
+And the roots of fake news in the American discourse begin to grow.
+bob woodward
+That’s happened to you.
+michael schmidt
+Correct.
+bob woodward
+Happened to every reporter. And this is where I think the whole discussion has been confused. My observation of reporting — we all make mistakes, but the effort is good faith. We are trying to find out what really happened in here. There’s never a moment Carl and myself — saying, well, you know, let’s stretch. Let’s take it too far. We thought we had it. It was a good-faith, stupid, dumbass mistake, but we made it. Now, how much people are willing to accept good faith — there was no intent, there was no deception — I don’t know. And that’s why we have to in this era now, what, 45 years later, 46 years later, try to not make any mistake.
+michael schmidt
+So you’re saying all these decades later, this story is still in the back of your mind as you report.
+bob woodward
+Indeed it is. I’ve been sitting here with you — thank you for reliving this chapter of my life. You can’t have that experience and it not be embedded in your head of, how could I have been so stupid and careless? And we laid it out as best we could, but it’s not a very pretty picture about being careful.
+michael schmidt
+Great. I think we got everything, right?
+bob woodward
+O.K. Good. O.K.
+michael schmidt
+That was great.
+archived recording
+Let’s take a look at what BuzzFeed did to request comment from the special counsel. This first email is from Jason Leopold, the co-author of the story, sent to the special counsel’s office. It says here, “Peter, hope all is well. Anthony and I have a story coming up stating that Cohen was directed by Trump himself to lie to Congress about his negotiations relating to the Trump Moscow project. Assume no comment from you, but just wanted to check. Best, Jason.” Ben, to me, this is a shockingly casual way to ask for comment for such a serious story. Do you think that was an appropriate and sufficient way to ask for comment?
+archived recording (ben smith)
+You know, Peter, the spokesman for the special counsel, has told The Washington Post, I believe yesterday, or people close to him on background, that if we had asked differently, he would have given us more information.
+archived recording
+But come on, one paragraph? That’s a dereliction of duty to send a three-sentence email —
+archived recording (ben smith)
+I will say — [MUSIC] And that was the choice he made, right?
+archived recording
+But when I send e-mails to BuzzFeed spokespeople, and I’m about to write about you, it’s a bullet-point, long email, everything that’s going to be included. I want to make sure everything has been checked first. Why didn’t Jason do that? Carr has now said that he would have responded in more detail if he had more detail. He could have said that two minutes later, right? He could have said — [MUSIC] O.K., process question number two, then.
+archived recording (ben smith)
+Yeah.
+archived recording
+Why publish Thursday night as opposed to waiting for a third source or a fourth source, knowing the stakes of this story?
+archived recording (ben smith)
+We published because we were very, very confident in the sourcing of this story in the way that you would — and, you know, we had been waiting, right? It was not like Anthony walked into my office on Thursday at noon and said, I have this. This is a story we’ve been developing over a long period of time, that we’ve been working on with sources.
+michael barbaro
+Mike, why did this story that Woodward told you remind you of the BuzzFeed story?
+michael schmidt
+Because in both cases, they were really reporting two things — one was the existence of the information. In the BuzzFeed story, it’s the fact that Cohen said Trump asked him to lie to Congress. The second thing they were reporting is that investigators knew about it. It was the same situation that Woodward found himself in because they had reported that Sloan knew about the slush fund and that Haldeman and controlled it, and he had told it to the grand jury. The fact that the investigators knew about it gave the fact validity. It said, this is not just something that’s floating out there that we figured out on our own. This is something that the people investigating the president have figured out. If you don’t have the validity, the backing of investigators knowing it, the reporting at times feels shakier.
+michael barbaro
+Right, which is why the moment BuzzFeed reported that Mueller knew Trump had done this is when Democrats in the House and the Senate were saying, we have to act, this is the moment to impeach the president.
+michael schmidt
+Yes. But it was the second part that they didn’t have locked down, that undercut them in their reporting in the story, that allowed the White House to attack them. So when the public finds out that the second part is not true, that the investigators do not know this, it negates the primary fact that they were reporting on.
+michael barbaro
+Right, and that’s why when the second part is challenged, the first part is so fundamentally undermined. The first part no longer feels like it can be true if the second part also isn’t true. They’re highly linked.
+michael schmidt
+Right, but what will ultimately matter is whether the fact they were bringing forward, that Trump asked Cohen to lie to Congress, is true. That will be the most important thing. When Woodward is in the middle of it and he made this mistake, he thought he was going to have to resign. The public turned on him. The White House went after him. Now, looking back on that, that seems ridiculous to imagine, because most of us don’t even remember that mistake. His reporting on Watergate is remembered as heroic and historic, but that’s because of how the investigation ended. We’re sort of back in that situation now with the BuzzFeed story. Will it be proven out that Trump asked Cohen to lie and that be a central part of the Trump story? If so, the BuzzFeed reporters will be looked at as being at the front of this and really have uncovered important information.
+michael barbaro
+Right. And their error seeming very small.
+michael schmidt
+Right. But if history doesn’t go in that direction, it will be a story that critics and defenders of Trump will point to in the years to come as examples of the media going too far as it tried to cover the investigation.
+michael barbaro
+So what you’re saying is right now, it’s too early to know if the BuzzFeed reporting is what Woodward’s mistake ultimately turned out to be — a small factual error along the way when the big picture of the reporting is accurate, or a sign that what the media thinks might be true, what the president would argue the media perhaps wants to be true, is not, in fact, what the investigators have found.
+michael schmidt
+And the problem is that the public wants an answer now. And usually that takes a lot of time. As Woodward often says, it takes a long time for history to be sussed out.
+michael barbaro
+Mike, thank you very much.
+michael schmidt
+Thanks for having me.
+michael barbaro
+Here’s what else you need to know. One day after his own intelligence chiefs contradicted him on the threats posed by Iran, North Korea, and ISIS, President Trump lashed out at them in a series of tweets questioning their intellect. The president wrote that the officials, including the heads of the CIA and the FBI, are quote, “naive and passive,” especially about the dangers of Iran and North Korea and suggested that, quote, “perhaps intelligence should go back to school.” And on Wednesday, local police said that the deep freeze that has settled over the Midwest has killed at least eight people, including some who froze to death after exposure to the cold from Milwaukee to Detroit. The record low temperatures in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago reached minus 28 degrees with a wind chill of minus 53, resulting in widespread flight cancellations, school closures, and even the suspension of mail delivery throughout the region.
+speaker 3
+Woo. And it’s evaporating.
+michael barbaroLet Ginni be Ginni.
+That was my first thought upon seeing the headline in The Times this past weekend: “Trump Meets With Hard-Right Group Led by Ginni Thomas.” Ginni Thomas — or Virginia Lamp, as I knew her years ago when she was a smart lawyer-lobbyist working for the United States Chamber of Commerce against passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act — is married to the Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas.
+These days, she is also an activist on the far-right fringe of the Republican Party. In recent months, she has denounced the student survivors of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting who are campaigning for gun control as “dangerous to the survival of our nation” (in a later deleted Facebook post). In a speech bestowing an award on Sean Hannity, the Fox News personality, she warned fellow conservatives against being “complicit as the left moves its forces across the country.” According to the Times account of last week’s White House meeting, to which she brought fellow members of a group called Groundswell, the topics discussed included why women and transgender people should not be permitted to serve in the military and how same-sex marriage is damaging the country.
+It hardly needs saying that modern families are complicated. A few administrations ago, it was tempting to conclude that presidential siblings had an unusual proclivity for getting into embarrassing scrapes. The day when wives of powerful men were expected to do little more than serve tea and look decorative has, thankfully, passed. “We have our separate professional lives,” Ms. Thomas said during the 2000 presidential election stalemate, when asked about her work for the Heritage Foundation compiling résumés for a potential Bush administration while the Supreme Court was deciding the outcome of the election. (She said her effort was bipartisan.)
+But while my feminist sensibilities make me wary of suggesting that Ginni Thomas should not be completely free to embrace her causes and live her life, there’s something troublesome about the unbounded nature of her public advocacy, at least for those of us who still care about the Supreme Court. It’s hard to think of a more delicate moment for the court, pressed at every turn by an administration that seems to regard it as a wholly owned subsidiary of the White House and that has driven the normally reticent chief justice to declare, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges.” Chief Justice John Roberts did not say “justices.” He didn’t have to. The question now is whether his colleagues on the bench — his own and all the others — will show him to be right, or sadly naïve.Artificial intelligence is beginning to meet (and sometimes exceed) assessments by doctors in various clinical situations. A.I. can now diagnose skin cancer like dermatologists, seizures like neurologists, and diabetic retinopathy like ophthalmologists. Algorithms are being developed to predict which patients will get diarrhea or end up in the ICU, and the FDA recently approved the first machine learning algorithm to measure how much blood flows through the heart — a tedious, time-consuming calculation traditionally done by cardiologists.
+It’s enough to make doctors like myself wonder why we spent a decade in medical training learning the art of diagnosis and treatment.
+There are many questions about whether A.I. actually works in medicine, and where it works: can it pick up pneumonia, detect cancer, predict death? But those questions focus on the technical, not the ethical. And in a health system riddled with inequity, we have to ask: Could the use of A.I. in medicine worsen health disparities?
+There are at least three reasons to believe it might.
+The first is a training problem. A.I. must learn to diagnose disease on large data sets, and if that data doesn’t include enough patients from a particular background, it won’t be as reliable for them. Evidence from other fields suggests this isn’t just a theoretical concern. A recent study found that some facial recognition programs incorrectly classify less than 1 percent of light-skinned men but more than one-third of dark-skinned women. What happens when we rely on such algorithms to diagnose melanoma on light versus dark skin?It is so cold that Disney on Ice has called off a performance in Chicago.
+It is so cold that General Motors has suspended production at several plants in Michigan because of an emergency appeal by the local utility, overwhelmed with heating demand.
+It is so cold that Republicans and Democrats are reaching across the aisle in Washington so they can huddle together for warmth. Just kidding.
+Tech earnings are a mixed bag
+Facebook had company from other tech firms when reporting its earnings yesterday.
+Nokia, which now focuses on telecom equipment, warned that it would have a slow start to 2019, though it expects more business from companies building 5G mobile networks later in the year. Samsung, whose operating profit plunged 29 percent amid a decline in demand for memory chips, also said earnings this year might struggle. PayPal disappointed analysts, too, even as its revenue rose.
+But Qualcomm beat Wall Street expectations and issued a forecast that assuaged some concerns about a weak smartphone market in China. Other companies also had good news.
+Microsoft, often considered an indicator of the broader market, said that its commercial and consumer businesses were doing well, with revenue and profit increasing more than 10 percent from a year earlier. Its continued shift to cloud computing has placed it within striking distance of Amazon, which leads the field.
+Alibaba, China’s largest e-commerce business, said that its earnings growth sank last quarter and that its revenue, which rose 41 percent, had increased at its slowest pace since early 2016. Executives said that, while “the slowdown of macro might cause concerns in the market,” the company had minimal exposure to the trade war with Washington and e-commerce was healthier than the overall Chinese economy.
+Tesla, the electric carmaker, reported its second straight quarterly profit, but said that its $139 million in fourth quarter earnings was less than what it brought in during the third quarter. The company expects to deliver as many as 400,000 cars this year, up from 245,000 last year. And it said it had $3.7 billion in cash to carry it through a $920 million bond payment in March.A grisly comedic thriller written and directed by Nicolas Pesce (his 2016 horror film “The Eyes of My Mother” got some positive notes), “Piercing” has an audaciousness that largely lies in splitting the difference between viewer interest and viewer exasperation. A movie that begins with a father (Christopher Abbott) standing over his newborn’s crib holding an ice pick behind his back can’t be said to be pulling any introductory punches.
+Soon, Abbott’s character Reed hears the newborn instructing him to murder a prostitute. He travels from his stylized apartment building (outside views of it look like a diorama) to a stylized hotel. There he rehearses a horrific murder and dismemberment while the Brazilian musician Zé Luis’s “Soneto of Love” plays on the soundtrack. This brand of Tarantino-brewed, Williamsburg-aged hipster irony was tired around the time that “Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead” came out (over 20 years ago), but Pesce does have some other tricks up his sleeve. Most of them borrow from the style of the lurid Italian films called giallos: Cult-picture aficionados will be tipped off by the bright yellow hotel-room phone.There’s a wonderful wildness to “Daughter of Mine,” an electricity that feels untamable. It’s in the wind that blasts across the scrubby Sardinian landscape, demanding purpose from characters who seem always in danger of being buffeted off course. And it radiates from Angelica (a magnificent Alba Rohrwacher), the village floozy who services local men in exchange for free drinks. Frequently drunk and always disheveled, Angelica lives in virtual squalor, a mangy menagerie in her yard and an eviction notice on her kitchen table.
+Watching over her is Tina (Valeria Golino), God-fearing and rigidly respectable, who cleans and provides as part of a secret bargain made years earlier. At the heart of that arrangement is Tina’s watchful daughter, Vittoria (Sara Casu), almost 10 and already suspicious of her tangled parentage. Drawn back to Angelica again and again, to her bright earrings and devil-may-care ways, Vittoria responds to a pull of nature that seems to obliterate the comforts of nurture. And if the choice between safety and danger, virtue and vice is at times made overwhelmingly literal, it’s also in keeping with the movie’s atavistic tone and unblinking focus on the act of mothering.Reveling in abundant displays of toxic masculinity and pumped-up posing, the Australian biker drama “Outlaws” is a punishing watch — more so when you can decipher the dialogue. Between the thick Aussie cadences and the tight-lipped, tough-guy delivery, I found myself paying closer attention to body language than a couple on a first date.
+Here’s what I gleaned, but don’t hold me to it. The nastiest piece of work (the designation is entirely relative) is Knuck (Matt Nable), the newly sprung president of a motorcycle gang whose stint in the slammer has left him with a taste for rape and a bloodthirsty need to reclaim his territory. His smarter deputy — again, relative — Paddo (Ryan Corr), has set up a mutually beneficial money-laundering deal with a rival gang, threatening Knuck’s supremacy. And because few things are more volatile than an emasculated thug, we guess it won’t be long before mattresses and ammunition are at the top of everyone’s shopping list.For Malory and Caleb (Lauren Lapkus and Nick Rutherford), becalmed in a four-year engagement, the thrill has gone — though, honestly, it’s hard to imagine one was ever there. Unrelentingly quippy (both actors have backgrounds in sketch comedy and improv), their interactions suggest kooky best pals much more than longtime lovers.
+Yet, as “The Unicorn” begins, their inability to pull the marriage trigger is presented as a mystery, especially to Malory’s sexually outré parents, who remain so mutually besotted they renew their vows every year. And when, at their 25th anniversary party, their secret is revealed as a fondness for threesomes, Malory and Caleb decide that, hey, maybe an extra pair of hands — a so-called unicorn — would be just the thing to invigorate their own close encounters.Having sold out at event screenings since December, “They Shall Not Grow Old,” which opens for a full run this week, is poised to become the only blockbuster this year that was filmed from 1914 to 1918, on location on the Western Front. Commissioned to make a movie for the centennial of the Armistice, using original footage, Peter Jackson has taken a mass of World War I archival clips from Britain’s Imperial War Museum and fashioned it into a brisk, absorbing and moving experience.
+How he has done this is simultaneously novel and destined to earn the justifiable quibbling of purists. Although the film is book ended by black-and-white footage of men going off to war and then returning home, the battlefield sequences have been substantially doctored, with the ostensible goal of making them more immersive and appealing to modern audiences. Given how few films from the 1910s are showing in multiplexes, the intent is at least arguably noble, although you wonder how Jackson would feel about his “Lord of the Rings” being tinkered with 100 years after its making.
+Jackson has adjusted the frame rates (the speed at which a film is projected, which wasn’t standardized until the sound era); added color in ways said to comport with the actual hues of uniforms and landscapes; given the film a 3-D conversion that can be seen in select theaters; and dubbed in voices for the soldiers, with the aid of forensic lip readers employed to figure out what they were saying.Sometimes all a movie needs to offer is the spectacle of an actor suffering for his art — or at least appearing to. Do you long to see Mads Mikkelsen, his face chapped and frostbitten, fighting to stay alive after a downed plane leaves his character marooned in the frozen north? If so, “Arctic,” the feature debut of Joe Penna (a Brazilian-born YouTube video artist), delivers what you desire, making effective use of both the star’s rugged persona and unforgiving Icelandic landscapes.
+Back story is scarce — we know it’s a cargo plane that crashed, but that’s about it. Mikkelsen is introduced chipping away at rock; an omniscient camera pulls back to reveal that he has engraved a colossal “S.O.S.” in the ground to be visible from the sky. Process is paramount. Mikkelsen catches Arctic trout, which he sometimes eats raw. (It looks tasty!) Later, he cooks one into a princely feast, mixing it with the contents of a noodle cup.It’s a hard knock life for Tilda (Sarah Hay) and Petula (Imogen Waterhouse), two of the young women of “Braid,” a jumpy thriller written and directed by Mitzi Peirone. Their only moments of repose are at the film’s opening, and even those aren’t too relaxed.
+Contemplating the spoils of a drug-deal rip-off, one of them allows that this beats waiting tables. Then the heat shows, and they’re out the window and on the run. They’re not on a train for 10 minutes before their lack of fare compels one of them to take a conductor into a restroom for some light S-and-M in lieu of payment.
+Hoo, boy. The pair eventually reach the mansion of a childhood friend, a woman of both means and mental illness who likes to play a variation of house in her adulthood. Tilda and Petula (whose name is pronounced by all the characters as if they’re going to say “petulant”) plan to play along until they can find the safe and abscond with its cash.ATLANTA — The Rams selected defensive tackle Aaron Donald with their second first-round pick in 2014, No. 13 over all, which means that 11 other teams, after assembling draft boards and consulting scouts and analyzing a trilogy’s worth of film of his demolishing offensive linemen, decided against taking a player whose dominance has since redefined his position.
+“I think,” said Mike Waufle, the Rams’ defensive line coach at the time, “people were scared of his size.”
+Donald is 6-foot-1 and, coming out of the University of Pittsburgh, was listed at 285 pounds. That is enormous in human terms, but smallish for a defensive tackle, whose function in a 3-4 defense is to blot out the sun.
+Not everyone with the Rams coveted Donald, but Waufle was undeterred. He had long prized speed over size, and from the start, he viewed Donald as an outlier, grading him as the best prospect he had seen since 1998, his first season coaching in the N.F.L. Donald generated so much power that he reminded Waufle of the Russian boxer Ivan Drago in “Rocky IV,” who punched a computerized meter with such force that Drago’s manager remarked, “Whatever he hits, he destroys.”That’s cold enough to get frostbite on exposed skin, so cover everything up. North and west of the city it is colder still: 9 below zero in Sussex, N.J., with a wind chill of -20.
+In the city, the mercury will creep up to only 16 degrees by afternoon. Overnight, more of the same, down to 10, with below-zero wind chills.
+By tomorrow afternoon, the worst should be over. Temperatures are expected to crawl up to the low 20s, then the 30s on Saturday, the balmy 40s on Sunday and into the 50s early next week.
+Brace yourselves: City officials are warning people to stay indoors as much as possible today, and use mass transit instead of driving. But city public schools and government offices will remain open.
+In the suburbs, dozens of school districts are opening late, and several are closed, including Bloomfield and Belleville, N.J.LONDON — Investment in Britain’s auto industry plummeted last year as the country’s departure from the European Union drew nearer without agreement over the terms of leaving the bloc, figures released on Thursday show.
+Investment in 2018 dropped 46.5 percent from the year before, according to data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, a British trade association.
+With the Brexit debate in London and Brussels mired in disagreement and recriminations, concerns and warnings from businesses have grown louder. Uncertainty is usually bad for trade, and companies have repeatedly urged political leaders to provide clarity about the withdrawal and its likely effects on commerce.
+But those pleas have generally gone unanswered, and many multinational companies have said they are ready to move operations outside Britain._________
+Updated: Feb. 7, 2019
+The New York Times article “How a New Kind of Pop Star Stormed 2018” pronounced that peppy pop music that attracts large audiences has been left behind as a mere “niche proposition in the wider conversation.” Now, there is Pop 2.0, powered by the internet’s streaming, both paid and free. Drake, Post Malone, Cardi B, and BTS blow the top off the Billboard charts with R&B, hip-hop, reggaeton and K-pop.
+Since CD sales and paid downloads have been declining for about 20 years, Billboard, which produces the top music lists using Nielsen data, has incorporated digital streams into its statistics. The number of streams is converted into equivalent album units (EAU). Here are the current conversion ratios: 1 album = 1,250 paid streams (such as Apple Music and Spotify) = 3,750 free streams (such as YouTube or Spotify’s free tier). The ratios reflect the relative value of the different ways music is consumed.
+The two segmented bar graphs reflect CD sales only and CD sales with EAU. Has streaming changed how we rank music genres? Has Billboard found a system that results in an accurate description of the music scene?
+Many of you gave hypotheses about why music consumption has changed. Here are some of your reasons: change in the age distribution of listeners, Bluetooth supplanting disc players, decrease in influence of radio play, some music not available in stores, and obscenity laced lyrics that cannot be on the airwaves. Olivia of AOSE described a chain of effects:
+I notice that R&B music consumption is at 54% for streaming, while only at 20% for traditional sales. Modern rappers are taking advantage of this new outlet and increasing their audience. I wonder if my music taste has assimilated to the culture, and if I am doing Carrie Underwood and Lady Gaga, for example, a disservice by no longer purchasing their music. Is streaming helping the consumer, but hurting the artist? Or is streaming also curbing personal music research?
+Here are some of the student headlines that really capture the meaning of these graphs: “Traditional Sales Heading Down Stream ” by Matthew of the Bronx, N.Y., “Dream Team Is the Stream Team” by BM from MA, and “The Rock of Ages: How Younger Audiences Listen to Music Now” by Angela of Nevada. Thank you for sharing them with us.
+You may want to think critically about these additional questions:
+• Which music genres have benefited the most from streaming? Why do you think this is so?
+• In your opinion, which method of calculating the top Billboard lists better reflects the ranking of albums’ popularity: with or without streaming included?
+• If a Gold Album is 1,000,000 albums sold, make a graph showing the combinations of paid and free streams to earn a Gold Album. (For simplicity here, assume there are no album sales.) Using the equivalent album units (EAU) described above, make a table of a few of the combinations of paid and free streaming that equal 1,000,000 albums. Then, graph them and draw in the boundary for exactly 1,000,000 EAU. Since there needs to be at least 1,000,000 EAU, but there can be more, should the combinations above or below the line be included to show the region for a Gold Album? Once you have the graph, what do you notice about the relationship between paid and free streams?
+• Explain what you think is the best indicator of a pop star’s success — CD sales, track downloads, paid streams, or free streams?This article is part of David Leonhardt’s newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it each weekday.
+“Impartiality is still a value worth defending in mainstream news coverage,” writes Margaret Sullivan, the Washington Post media critic. “But you don’t get there by walking down the center line with a blindfold on.”
+Her column is a cri de coeur against the media’s bias toward centrism. Too often, journalists confuse centrism with fairness, objectivity or common-sense truth. But centrism is none of those. It is a point of view, and it can be wrong, just as conservatism or liberalism can be.
+Centrists were wrong about the urgency of reducing the deficit over the past decade. They were wrong about the Iraq war in 2003, wrong about the economic might of Japan in the 1980s and wrong about the economic might of the Soviet Union before that.[For the latest on the weather in the Midwest, read our Friday updates here.]
+CHICAGO — Midwesterners trudged ahead Thursday into a familiar, grim reality: temperatures well below zero, schools and businesses closed, stern warnings to wear extra layers or, better yet, just stay indoors.
+The polar vortex that arrived earlier this week has for days disrupted life across an entire region. Deaths and injuries were reported. Decades-old records fell. And, for one more day, even stepping outside remained a painful, risky experience.
+But the forecast finally suggested relief ahead. By Thursday night, temperatures across much of the Midwest were expected to poke above zero. By the end of the weekend, meteorologists predicted as much as a 70- or 80-degree swing, with balmy-for-February readings in the 40s or 50s and rain instead of snow.
+Still, risks remained. A band of snow complicated travel on Thursday, and in the Northeast, officials warned of their own cold wave, with heavy snow in some places and subzero wind chills in others.“It’s a very short period of time for a deal this big. But it’s very possible,” Mr. Trump said in the interview with The Times. “I believe that a lot of the biggest points are going to be agreed to by me and him.”
+The United States wants China to commit to buying American goods and services in large quantities to reduce America’s trade deficit, and to agree to make structural changes, including ending its practice of requiring American companies to hand over trade secrets as a condition of doing business there.
+The surprise Chinese offer to buy soybeans attested to their gamesmanship and attempt to sway Mr. Trump with big numbers. It also left Mr. Lighthizer and his colleague, Larry Kudlow, the chief economic adviser, flummoxed during a briefing with reporters about whether the Chinese had pledged to buy five million tons of soybeans, or the more commonly used bushels.
+After Mr. Lighthizer dispatched an aide to seek clarification, the White House confirmed that the Chinese offer was to buy five million tons.
+An economist at the American Farm Bureau noted that in a normal year the United States exports about 35 million tons of soybeans to China, so the five million ton purchase is not as robust a gesture as Mr. Trump suggested.
+The world’s two largest economies have been locked in a monthslong standoff that has begun to slow global economic growth and rattled financial markets. Both countries are under increasing pressure to reach an accord: American companies with exposure to China have begun warning that the trade war is hurting profits, and the Chinese economy is growing at its slowest pace in years.
+On Wednesday, Mr. Liu and the Chinese delegation began two days of talks with Mr. Lighthizer and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary. Mr. Trump said on Thursday that Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Lighthizer would travel to Beijing in February, after the Chinese New Year holiday, to lay the groundwork for a meeting between the two presidents. One of the biggest issues to resolve, Mr. Lighthizer said, is how to ensure any commitment by the Chinese is enforceable.BASEL, Switzerland — In the United States, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill and Tennessee Williams form a holy trinity of master playwrights. Their works are also well known in Europe, of course, but they are less often performed than the classics of continental drama: for instance, the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, which are frequently presented in updated or deconstructed productions. Several new stagings at leading playhouses throughout the German-speaking world show what can happen when American classic drama meets European theater practice.
+This season, the British director Robert Icke, 32, has set out to conquer the Continent. Just months after his first German-language production, “Orestie” in Stuttgart, won a prestigious directing prize, Mr. Icke, who is the associate director of the Almeida Theater in London, traveled to Basel to direct a new production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible.”
+In London, Mr. Icke’s distinctive productions have drawn praise and condemnation. The Times’s critic Matt Wolf named his recent version of Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” one of the year’s best productions, while a two-star review in The Guardian called it “a parasitic rewrite.” Considering how controversial and edgy Mr. Icke’s past productions have been considered, perhaps the most surprising thing about his “Crucible” (called “Hexenjagd” in German, which means “Witch Hunt”) was how conventional it was.“Poor people can’t afford to be unemployed for too long; after a while, they’ll usually take whatever job they can get,” said Himanshu, an associate professor of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi who goes by only one name. “That’s why 6 percent is a really serious number.”
+The report is a comprehensive look at the job consequences of two disruptive economic changes Mr. Modi imposed in the past few years.
+First was his abrupt decision in November 2016 to eliminate most of the country’s cash currency in circulation. That decision, known as demonetization, was meant to crack down on illicit cash transactions, but the change was so hasty and hectic that it created acute shortages and inflicted enormous damage on large swaths of India’s economy.
+Then in July 2017, Mr. Modi implemented a sweeping new single tax code, the Goods and Services Tax, known as the G.S.T., but enforcement of the change was so disorganized that economists say it crippled many small businesses.
+The leaked unemployment report, if confirmed, undercuts a basic premise of Mr. Modi’s 2014 campaign: creating jobs for the country’s enormous and young work force. People under age 35 represent roughly two-thirds of the population of 1.35 billion, and, the thinking went, they would earn and spend, expanding and accelerating economic growth. The effects would help pull millions more out of poverty.
+Opposition politicians seized on the leaked report as evidence that Mr. Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party were responsible for the worst unemployment rate since 1972-73, when the country was roiled by war with Pakistan and by the effects of global oil market shocks.Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a potential Democratic presidential candidate known for far-left stances on issues of economic inequality, introduced legislation on Thursday that would increase the number of wealthy Americans subject to the estate tax.
+With the bill, Mr. Sanders joins a growing chorus of left-wing politicians calling for new ways to tax the rich. Last week, Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator who has announced her 2020 candidacy, introduced a plan for a so-called ultramillionaire tax on households with a net worth of $50 million or more. And Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York recently proposed a 70 percent top rate on income over $10 million a year, intensifying the conversation within the Democratic Party about tax policies aimed at addressing income inequality.
+In his plan, Mr. Sanders proposed applying an estate tax when someone leaves assets worth more than $3.5 million to his or her heirs, the same level as in 2009. The plan significantly lowers the threshold under the current tax law, passed in late 2017, which raised the amount an individual is allowed to transfer before facing any estate tax to roughly $11 million; couples can pass on twice that much.
+The tax-the-rich proposals, including the one introduced by Mr. Sanders, are designed to increase revenue to pay for expanded social programs like “Medicare for all.”Slide 1 of 13,
+Four-Bedroom in Fairfield · $960,000 · FAIRFIELD · 1060 Hillside Road
+A four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, 3,200-square-foot, updated 1940s home with four fireplaces, parquet floors, a living room with decorative moldings, a den, a new kitchen with a center island and marble counters, a second-floor office, finished third level and attached two-car garage, on two acres with a pond in the Greenfield Hill section. Deborah Cooke and Adele Higgins, Higgins Group, 203-216-1480; higginsgroup.comSlide 1 of 16,
+Lenox Hill Two-Bedroom • $2,300,000 • MANHATTAN • 188 East 70th Street, No. 7C
+A 1,340-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartment that was recently renovated, in a 31-story 1980s condo tower with a gym. Christine Miller Martin, 917-453-5152, and Deanna Lloyd, 757-572-0107, Stribling; stribling.comIn Fairfield, Conn., a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath, 3,200-square-foot, updated 1940s home with four fireplaces, parquet floors, a living room with decorative moldings, a den, a new kitchen with a center island and marble counters, a second-floor office, finished third level and attached two-car garage, on two acres with a pond in the Greenfield Hill section.Click on the slide show to see this week’s featured properties:
+In Flatbush, Brooklyn, a one-bedroom, one-bath co-op with 580 square feet, an open kitchen with granite counters and a window, and three closets in a prewar non-doorman elevator building near Brooklyn College.
+In Lenox Hill, a 1,340-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath apartment that was recently renovated, in a 31-story 1980s condo tower with a gym.Good morning.
+(Here’s the sign-up, if you don’t already get California Today by email.)
+If you’ve lived in California for a while, odds are Pacific Gas and Electric’s bankruptcy filing this week isn’t the first time you’ve heard about big problems at the state’s largest utility.
+There was the company’s last bankruptcy, filed in 2001.
+And then there was the horrific 2010 San Bruno gas explosion, which killed eight people and destroyed a neighborhood. The company was fined and convicted of criminal safety violations.
+On Wednesday, the latest turn of the screw hinged on that verdict; a federal judge found that the company was in violation of its probation because it didn’t properly report its role in a 2017 Butte County wildfire.
+“Does a judge turn a blind eye and let PG&E continue what you’re doing, let you keep killing people?” United States District Judge William Alsup said, according to The Mercury News.You would think that with more homes on the market, buyers would have more choices. But not necessarily — if the available homes aren’t affordable.
+A recent study by Redfin showed that while inventory increased between 2017 and 2018 in some of the country’s hottest housing markets, the share of homes that were affordable to those earning the local median income actually decreased.
+Of the 10 markets that saw the greatest decreases, most also saw an increase in overall inventory. Two exceptions were San Jose, Calif., where the share of affordable homes decreased by 12 percentage points, and Milwaukee, where it fell by 6 percentage points.BRUSSELS — Furious after President Trump pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and reimposed punitive banking sanctions last year, European leaders vowed to find a way to enable Tehran to keep doing business with the rest of the world.
+After months of delay, and after enduring mockery from the Trump administration, three major European allies on Thursday finally introduced a financial mechanism to do just that.
+The question now is whether anyone will actually use it.
+The new company, called Instex, for Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges, would essentially allow goods to be bartered between Iranian companies and foreign ones without direct financial transactions or using the dollar. By avoiding the American banking system and currency, the hope is that European companies and others will feel confident that they can do business with Iran without being subject to the sanctions.
+The European countries — Britain, France and Germany — were all signatories to the Iran deal in 2015, as was the United States under President Barack Obama. The Europeans, along with Russia and China, who were also signatories, have all vowed to keep to the terms of the agreement, which was intended to ensure that Iran could not build a nuclear weapon.This generation’s defining work of American mass-culture storytelling on the border might be found off screen, in Don Winslow’s trilogy of drug-war novels. “The Power of the Dog,” “The Cartel” and “The Border,” which comes out Feb. 26, indulge in plenty of sex and carnage. But they also paint a grandly scaled portrait of political corruption on both sides of the border, particularly in the States. Winslow conveys as much excitement about the Iran-contra scandal, Nafta and Senate subcommittees as he does murder and mayhem. His driving premise: The drug war destroys everything it touches in Mexico and the United States. The trilogy is propulsive pulp fiction with literary heft, a hybrid of “The Godfather” and “War and Peace.” (One of his previous drug-war novels, “Savages,” was turned into a hyperventilating Oliver Stone movie).
+There are certainly narrative features from Mexico about the border, including “Al Otro Lado” (2004) and “Desierto” (2015), with Gael García Bernal. But if you’re seeking an antidote to sensationalism, you might look to the world of documentary.
+For instance, Bernardo Ruiz’s 2015 film, “Kingdom of Shadows” takes a sober look at how drug violence affects regular people on both sides of the border. His 2012 film “Reportero” follows the staff members of a Tijuana newsweekly who execute a different kind of border crossing: Correctly determining that printing in Mexico is too dangerous, they set up shop in California and truck tens of thousands of issues back to Mexico, where they are distributed to readers. Ruiz’s documentaries have the reportage to go with the storytelling; he’s not terribly interested in cheap thrills.
+A dual Mexican-American citizen who moved to the States when he was 6, Ruiz spends a lot of time on both sides of the border, interviewing the kind of people who don’t turn up in “Miss Bala” or “Narcos.” He understands the flash-and-action appeal of such enterprises, but he also sees a need for telling other kinds of stories.To the Editor:
+In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote to his publisher, “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women .” Although he was referring specifically to sentimental novelists, his letter expressed the larger belief that women’s writing was not worth reading or publishing, that their words and ideas didn’t matter, and that their work was, to use the language of Hawthorne, “ trash .”
+As a historian, I see this playing out not only in the antebellum period, but also in the postwar era when I read letters to the editor. As I scan through various national newspapers, day after day, year after year, I find myself hoping that someday, eventually, women will be represented proportionally. I am always disappointed; they always skew male.
+Perhaps Hawthorne’s disdain for scribbling women is not such distant history.
+This problem is especially concerning because unlike an Op-Ed — where the writer presumably has some expertise in the subject matter — anybody can submit a letter to the editor. It is, I’d argue, the most democratic section of the paper because children and adults, billionaire philanthropists and minimum-wage workers, and people of all genders can contribute. Each has an equal opportunity to express her or his thoughts and participate in a robust debate in the public sphere. Therefore, I’m troubled that in 2019, The New York Times struggles to find women’s letters that are worthy of publication.
+When I first inquired as to why so few women were writing, I was told that there aren’t formal statistics on the number of women submitting letters, but that a large majority come from men. Gail Collins provided a similar explanation when she became the first woman editor of the editorial page at The Times in 2001 and started looking into this problem. She found that in letters to the editor and Op-Ed submissions, “the preponderance of men was off the charts .”Saudi Arabia said on Thursday that it had concluded a crackdown on high-level corruption that began 15 months ago with the detention of hundreds of prominent businessmen and former officials at the Ritz-Carlton in the capital.
+The purge helped confirm the unrivaled authority of Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler of the kingdom, and critics have called it a power grab. Saudi Arabia has disclosed little about the proceedings, and associates of several people caught up in the crackdown have said the detentions were arbitrary, lacking in any judicial process and frequently targeted foes of the prince.
+Associates of many of those detained have also said they were subjected to torture and physical abuse, then coerced into turning over large sums of money or other assets in exchange for their release.
+Supporters of the crown prince defend the crackdown as a necessary push to shock the Saudi elite out of longstanding habits of graft and self-dealing. The kingdom has denied any physical abuse.“My name is Catherine Hardwicke. I’m the director of “Miss Bala.” In this scene, Gloria, played by Gina Rodriguez, is captured by a cartel. And right now, she finds out that they’re going to check the phones, because they suspect that there’s a mole in the operation. And in fact, they take her phone, and she does have a chip from the DEA in her phone. So her goal is now how to get my chip out of the phone before they find it and kill me. She’s in this beautiful villa, which is out in the Valle de Guadalupe, the wine country in Baja. And it’s stunning architecture designed by a Tijuana architect. We loved that it was this luxurious, beautiful surroundings for such a terrifying situation to be trapped in. Gina, we liked to film her with close, handheld shots, where you could be close to her face in this anamorphic lens, where you could really feel what she was feeling, but you could also see the environment around her, too, by having that wide scope. So you could kind of see both. And she’s trying to decide, what do I do? How can I outsmart these guys, this crew? And we had a great composer, Alex Heffes, that was helping us increase the tension, amp up the tension, by having that rhythmic heartbeat throughout the score.” [tense music playing] “And also, you feel the spirit of her invention and her ideas and her courage to keep going, don’t be defeated, focus on the problem. And we really wanted you to feel through the music, through the cinematography, through the handheld cinematography at this moment in the movie what kind of a panic state she’s feeling and how she’s trying to stay calm enough to mechanically open up these phones, be smart about what she does, and put them back properly so that it looks exactly like no one has tampered with the phone. So I, at many times, was standing there in Gina’s ear. They’re coming up! You hear voices right outside — just keeping her amped up. And then, of course, the actors outside were doing the same thing too, with their yelling, with the tension. Because they were really very close to her. Now, at the same time, I was trying to talk to a bunch of tough guys, telling them how to put out the fire. They didn’t even know what to do. I was like, well, why don’t you swat the flames with a dish towel or something? So there was kind of a lot of comedy at the same time. But the tension was there for Gloria. She had to figure out a way to cover for where she was at the time and get away with it so that nobody suspected her.” “Where were you? What were you doing?” “I was just in the bathroom.”This is the final edition of The Week in Good News. After more than a year, we’re closing this feature as we move ahead with new projects. The surprising and inspiring journalism you have seen here can still be found across The New York Times, so we encourage you to take a deep dive into all it has to offer. You may be delighted at what you come across. Thank you for reading, and we wish you all the absolute best.
+Here are seven great things we wrote about this week:
+A single mutation in one errant gene causes this disease, which has devastating effects. But advances in gene therapy have scientists talking about the possibility of a cure.
+In a half-dozen clinical trials planned or underway, researchers are testing strategies for correcting the problem at the genetic level. Already a handful of the enrolled patients, who have endured an illness that causes excruciating bouts of pain, strokes and early death, no longer show signs of the disease. Read more »Two days after fans in the United Arab Emirates threw shoes at rival players during a 4-0 loss in the semifinals to Qatar at the Asian Cup, the country’s soccer federation has taken direct aim at the team itself.
+Organizers of the Asian Cup said on Thursday that they would respond to an official complaint lodged by Emirates soccer officials, who charged that two members of the Qatari team were ineligible to play in the region’s biggest tournament.
+The players — Almoez Ali, a Sudan-born striker, and Bassam al-Rawi, a defender born in Iraq — are fixtures in Qatar’s lineup. Ali is the tournament’s top scorer, with eight goals in six games, and al-Rawi scored the goal that sent Qatar to the quarterfinals.
+The complaint is the latest salvo in a bitter dispute between the Gulf neighbors that goes far beyond soccer. The Emirates is part of a two-year-old, Saudi-led blockade of Qatar, driven by a belief that its neighbor is financing terrorism and growing too close to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s biggest regional rival; Qatar has denied playing any role in supporting terrorist groups.With her parents deceased and no family members or friends to turn to for financial support, she has managed to keep a sense of humor as she copes with her debilitating disease.
+“People who see only a headline that says I want to marry Bernie will think I’m totally insane,” she said, laughing. “So I hope they take the time to learn more about my whole story, and the reason I want to do it.”
+In the meantime, Ms. Smartelli said, she will continue to dream of actually walking Bernie down the aisle, with Spinner as best man, and celebrating with virtual family and friends.
+But no matter how the reality of her Valentine’s Day unfolds, Ms. Smartelli will ultimately find the true meaning of the day in the company of Bernie and Spinner, just as others who do not necessarily mark Feb. 14 as a romantic holiday on their calendars might instead choose to spend the day in the company of a good book, or by watching a sunrise, or visiting loved ones at a cemetery.
+“It’s kind of ironic, but Bernie and Spinner, who are just a couple of rescue dogs, have actually rescued me from a life of loneliness,” said Ms. Smartelli, who began to cry.
+“I really love those two guys,” she said. “It wouldn’t be Valentine’s Day without them.”wesley morris
+Jenna.
+jenna wortham
+What’s up, boo?
+wesley morris
+Do you remember that text that I sent you a couple of months ago about surveillance cameras?
+jenna wortham
+Can you be more specific?
+wesley morris
+Well this particular text about surveillance cameras was basically around an epiphany that I had while I was sitting down at my table, eating my breakfast, reading the newspaper. And all it said was can you imagine how different the 1800s would have been if they had just had surveillance cameras?
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, I remember this.
+wesley morris
+And do you remember what your response to my big epiphany was?
+jenna wortham
+I was like, what the hell are you talking about? Everything would be exactly the same because either nobody would believe the footage or, worse, nobody would care. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’m Jenna Wortham.
+wesley morris
+And I’m Wesley Morris, we’re two culture writers at “The New York Times,” and we don’t know what’s real anymore. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+jenna wortham
+This is “Still Processing,” or is it?
+wesley morris
+So Jenna, that text that I sent you a couple months ago, that was right around the time of the Laquan McDonald trial?
+jenna wortham
+Yes.
+wesley morris
+Laquan McDonald, of course, being the 17-year-old who was shot by the officer Jason Van Dyke in 2014 16 times all on the streets of Chicago.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+And the police report basically said that McDonald had lunged at Van Dyke with a knife. And people just didn’t seem to believe that or they wanted proof that it had happened. But it took 13 months for the city of Chicago to—
+jenna wortham
+To cough up the footage.
+wesley morris
+Yes. During these 13 months of people begging for this footage to be released, the dash cam footage, the police cruiser dash cam footage of what actually happened that night between Jason Van Dyke and Laquan McDonald, the city settles a lawsuit for Laquan McDonald’s family for $5 million based on the footage that the city won’t release. So we know something’s in there or the people of Chicago knew that there was something in there. And so, 13 months later they actually do release it. A big outcry, Rahm Emanuel was trying to get it suppressed.
+jenna wortham
+I rememer this. Yeah, yeah.
+wesley morris
+Not suppressed, but nobody wanted to deal with what would happen if the footage came out.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+It was just too much proof.
+jenna wortham
+YEah.
+wesley morris
+And basically when they released it, what it showed was exactly why we understood Chicago paid this family $5 million and why it was suppressed for so long.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah.
+wesley morris
+It was exactly the opposite of what that police report initially said.
+jenna wortham
+Of course, yeah.
+wesley morris
+Laquan McDonald is walking away from the car and the cruiser and Van Dyke. And the minute Van Dyke arrives on the scene, he just starts firing.
+jenna wortham
+Well, he’s following him and then he starts firing.
+wesley morris
+Right, right, right. But this is all within seconds of these two men being in each other’s life.
+jenna wortham
+Right. He starts firing and doesn’t stop firing, despite what he said.
+wesley morris
+Right. And so days of protests ensue in Chicago. And then there are two trials. And one of them result in Van Dyke’s being convicted in the fall of last year of second degree murder. And I sent you that text basically saying, thank god for that dash cam footage being admissible in court and used by the prosecution to get this guy convicted.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. Thank god, right? That we had the footage. It never should have happened. But do you remember what the defense did? This is partially why I sent that response to you because the police officer’s defense team essentially uses top of the line CGI technology to make a Sims 4 video of what they say went down. And they essentially make this video to try to justify the 16 bullets, to justify what the police officer said was an aggressive lunging at him. And they basically were like, well, we know that the footage-footage shows him walking away, but the officer experienced Laquan walking towards him even though that’s not what your eyes see. What our defendant experienced felt different, so we’re going to recreate it for you. And I want to say, like, this is not “Rescue 911,” we don’t need— just need the facts. But there was a legal team, spent a fair amount of money creating their version of proof.
+wesley morris
+Yes.
+jenna wortham
+It just underlines the point that I was trying to make with you in my response which is just that people will bend the truth to make it fit whatever reality that they want to make it fit.
+wesley morris
+Yes, you’re right. I mean, it was pretty brazen that the defense just created an alternate reality based on actual reality to try to get this guy off. But it didn’t work because Jason Van Dyke fairly recently got sentenced to seven years in prison.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah, he did, he did. And that’s a small victory. Of course though that punishment does not fit the crime. A teenager is still dead, he didn’t graduate from high school. So there’s that because in the grander scheme of things that conviction is the anomaly. There’s so many more examples in this contemporary moment and throughout history where actual evidence is not enough.
+wesley morris
+Yes. I would say that whatever moment this is we’re living in probably began in 2009 or so.
+donald trump
+It’s not a birth certificate. A certificate of live birth—
+wesley morris
+When Donald Trump started this birtherism campaign against Barack Obama.
+donald trump
+It doesn’t even have a serial number, it doesn’t have a signature, and I just say very simply why doesn’t he show his birth certificate?
+jenna wortham
+Right. It wasn’t enough proof that he’d actually been sworn in as president. Donald Trump decided we need more proof, we need to see the birth certificate. If even after the certificate was produced by the way, that still wasn’t enough proof of Barack Obama’s citizenship.
+wesley morris
+I think it ushers in this moment of everything just being upside down. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+speaker 1
+This was the largest audience to ever witnessed an inauguration period, both in person and around the globe.
+speaker 2
+Answer the question of why the president asked the White House press secretary to come out and utter a falsehood?
+speaker 3
+You’re saying it’s a falsehood, and they’re giving Sean Spicer, our Press Secretary, gave alternative facts to that.
+speaker 4
+A newly released government report is revealing the dire consequences of climate change.
+speaker 5
+Even Obama’s undersecretary for science didn’t believe the radical conclusions of the report that released—
+speaker 6
+The independent report from researchers at George Washington University reveals 2,975 people lost their lives due to Maria.
+spekaer 7
+President Trump is rejecting the revised death toll from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. Earlier, he tweeted “3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit the island.”
+speaker 8
+Tonight on social media right wing conspiracy theories going viral about David Hogg, a 17-year-old Parkland shooting survivor. The unsubstantiated claims say he’s a crisis actor, a trained actor who takes advantage of tragedies for political gain. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+wesley morris
+But Jenna, this is all pretty much brilliantly summed up by none other than Sacha Baron Cohen—
+jenna wortham
+Yes, who deserved the Golden Globe for?
+wesley morris
+“Who is America,” a docu-satire basically in which he does this thing where he dresses up in costumes and tricks people into doing, what I would say is, basically being their real true selves. And in this clip from the first episode he plays this alt right host of this news program called “Truth Prairie,” which is like library except it’s called “Truth Prairie.” [LAUGHTER]
+jenna wortham
+It’s amazing.
+wesley morris
+And he wants to talk to one of America’s most preeminent journalists.
+sacha baron cohen
+So I’m sitting with Ted Koppel here in Washington. What do you think about all the fake news that’s around at the moment?
+ted koppel
+I think it’s one of the great threats to democracy.
+sacha baron cohen
+Why, I agree with you. What we’re witnessing is liberal elites who are trying to bring down the most popular president we’ve had in recent times.
+ted koppel
+When you say the most popular, he lost the popular vote by 3 million votes.
+sacha baron cohen
+That is fake news. The liberal media, which I believe you’re a part of, spread the lie that there were less people at Donald Trump’s inauguration than the word Obama’s. And that is a plain lie.
+ted koppel
+You happen to be wrong, but that’s OK.
+sacha baron cohen
+Well, let’s look at the evidence. Let’s look at real evidence.
+ted koppel
+OK.
+sacha baron cohen
+That is a photo.
+wesley morris
+I love how tolerant Ted is being.
+jenna wortham
+He’s being really respectful, but he had the threshold that’s about to be crossed.
+sacha baron cohen
+That is a photo of Donald J Trump’s inauguration.
+ted koppel
+It appears to be that, yes.
+sacha baron cohen
+Well look at the time, sir.
+11
+56 56 PM, 11 hours and 56 minutes after the inauguration started there was still— his supporters were packed in there.
+ted koppel
+It’s a daytime picture. What is 11:56 PM? Would you concede that four minutes before midnight is night time?
+jenna wortham
+This is the best part.
+sacha baron cohen
+It was an eclipse. [LAUGHTER]
+ted koppel
+An eclipse would mean it was dark.
+jenna wortham
+It’s not how it works.
+sacha baron cohen
+No, it was a solar eclipse.
+ted koppel
+Of course if there was a—
+sacha baron cohen
+No, if it was a solar eclipse, it means it would be light.
+ted koppel
+No, it means it would be dark. That’s not an issue of opinion, there are certain things that actually are factual.
+wesley morris
+Ted Koppel appears to have no idea that Sacha Baron Cohen is pranking him. So just expose what we already know to be the case, which is everything is upside down and there are one set of facts for one group of people and another set of facts for another group of people. But then there are some people who just believe that the facts are the facts, like Ted Koppel.
+jenna wortham
+But it also reveals another truth of this moment, which is that people can willfully believe whatever they choose to believe.
+wesley morris
+Anyway, I see why you’re skeptical of the verdict in the Laquan McDonald case. I do.
+jenna wortham
+But the thing, Wesley, though is that it’s so much bigger than that case. And I know you know this already, but if we turn our gaze to the culture. For weeks you’ve been pushing me to go see “Green Book.”
+wesley morris
+Oh boy.
+jenna wortham
+This new film that’s now starring my Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen. And I’ve been resisting, but I went out last weekend during zero degree temperatures, thank you very much.
+wesley morris
+So did it warm you up?
+jenna wortham
+It did raise my blood pressure, yes, but I’ll tell you about it when we come back. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+doc shirley
+It just seems so unsanitary.
+frank vallelonga
+Just relax and enjoy it. Now, my father used to say whatever you do, do it 100%. When you work, work. When you laugh, laugh. When you eat, eat like it’s your last meal. You want another piece? Here, have a breast. Delicious. Take it, eat.
+doc shirley
+What do we do about the bones?
+frank vallelonga
+We do this. This is what we do.
+wesley morris
+That was the scene from “Green Book,” the much lauded major motion picture comedy that has won the Producers Guild award, that’s the best picture of 2018 courtesy of the Producers Guild of America and is now nominated for five Academy Awards, best picture, best actor for Viggo Mortensen.
+jenna wortham
+Boo.
+wesley morris
+Wow. Best supporting actor for Mahershala Ali.
+jenna wortham
+Yay.
+wesley morris
+I don’t, I—
+jenna wortham
+Love him, love him.
+wesley morris
+Best original screenplay and best editing.
+jenna wortham
+For those who haven’t seen it, I’m going to give you a quick rundown. “Green Books” a story of an Italian guy from the Bronx who is kind of a racist on a good day?
+wesley morris
+No, don’t even. Don’t. Jenna, he—
+jenna wortham
+I’m saying from the perspective of the film, the perspective of the film.
+wesley morris
+Fair.
+jenna wortham
+He’s a racist-light, zero calories.
+wesley morris
+He’s the Splenda of racists?
+jenna wortham
+He’s Stevia of racist. And through a turn of events ends up being the driver for a musician, a classical musician named Don Shirley who happens to be black. Classic buddy comedy, sure, whatever. The guy who wrote the movie Nick Vallelonga, he’s the son of the chauffeur in the film. He claims that his dad used to tell him stories about these road trips and the friendship between his dad and this musician. And eventually, he writes a screenplay about this relationship detailing adventures of their trips together and also how, I guess, Don Shirley rehabilitates his dad and gets him to be not so racist after all. But Don Shirley’s family does not corroborate this retelling and this recasting of their relationship.
+speaker 9
+Dr. Shirley’s younger brother told NPR’S One A Moving Club the film was, quote, “Full of lies,” including the notion that Shirley was estranged from his family or the black community.
+jenna wortham
+They say they were employee, employer. They weren’t best buddies. It’s not “Air Bud 3,” you know what I mean? So you have this scenario where the family is saying this is the truth and another family says, actually this is the truth.
+wesley morris
+Right. I hate to ask, but what does this have to do with the Laquan McDonald case?
+jenna wortham
+OK. If you really think about it, this guy Nick Vallelonga, the author of the story that the movie’s based on, no way he’s not that dissimilar from Jason Van Dyke’s defense team. He’s reconstructing a version of reality.
+wesley morris
+Right, right.
+jenna wortham
+So since the movie’s come out, Don Shirley’s family has said, yeah OK, this guy did drive him around but they weren’t friends. It’s not a buddy comedy, it was a business relationship. And by the way, Wesley, you wrote an excellent piece on this and we’ll link to it in our show notes, but the family had to write a letter saying this is not an accurate portrayal of the real history between these two men.
+wesley morris
+Right, right.
+jenna wortham
+And then the thing that makes it worse is that all the black talent associate with the film now has to answer on behalf of this reconstructed history.
+mahershala ali
+I will say this that my job is always the same. And I have to look at what I’m responsible for doing. So I respect the family, I respect Dr. Shirley and his family and I wish them well, and I have a job to do and I have to continue to do my job as I move on to my next project.
+jenna wortham
+You have Mahershala Ali answering awkward questions about it. Octavia Spencer, who is an executive producer who was brought in, I think, at kind of the last minute also being asked why wasn’t the family consulted? It’s like this idea that now in order to clean up the mess—
+wesley morris
+Right. Somebody who isn’t Peter Farrelly who directed and co-wrote this movie has to pick up the mop. And in the cases of Laquan McDonald and Don Shirley, neither person can defend himself because both are dead unfortunately. And the movie depicts Don Shirley as this prissy uptight guy who doesn’t even know about black culture.
+jenna wortham
+But you know, thank goodness the driver is there to teach him about his own blackness. He teaches him about Little Richard, he even shows him how to eat fried chicken. I mean, the thing that’s wild is did that even happen?
+wesley morris
+Right. We’ll never know, we’ll never know. And that’s part of the problem. I mean, look, we could probably talk about “Green Book” all day and we will definitely come back to it and in some future conversation.
+jenna wortham
+Yes please.
+wesley morris
+But this movie does feel endemic of this moment. When we’re expected to believe that something is the truth just because somebody said so, even if there’s evidence to the contrary or even if somebody else’s account is worth being considered too. And I know it might not make sense to go from this horrible trial to this horrible movie to this horrible person named R Kelly.
+jenna wortham
+Oh my god, no. What?
+wesley morris
+But I feel like if you bare with me, we can take a break, I’ll fan you off. But then when we come back I’m going to explain this connection to these other two things.
+jenna wortham
+It better be worth it. [MUSIC PLAYING]
+speaker 10
+“I believe I can Fly” is a powerful song and a lot of people have sung it at talent shows. It’s one of those songs that inspired a lot of people.
+speaker 11
+It was everywhere. Kindergarten graduations.
+kindergartners (singing)
+I believe I can fly.
+speaker 11
+High school graduations.
+speaker 12 (singing)
+I believe I can touch the sky.
+speaker 11
+And in churches. CHURCH GROUP (SINGING) I think about it every night and day.
+speaker 10
+It was just massive. It was a huge, huge song.
+speaker 13
+It was a moment of redemption in some people’s eyes and ears.
+wesley morris
+That was a clip from “Surviving R. Kelly,” the Lifetime documentary event about the alleged sex crimes of Robert Kelly. And watching people in that first episode talk about the creepiness of having “I believe I can Fly” be this graduation song and this wedding song and this internet meme and also this global earworm also be written and performed by this particular man accused of these particular things. It occurred to me that there’s just something in this song that feels so relevant to where we are right now. And the movie devotes a few minutes to people talking about the nerve of this guy to record the sex songs while also being accused of assault and wrongful imprisonment and child pornography and sex with a minor and all of the rest of the horrible stuff. But this song, this song is the one that really stuck with me. And not as a song per se, but as the permission that he gives himself to create his own reality.
+jenna wortham
+Oh, I’m picking up what you’re putting down, my friend. Like if he can see it, then he can do it. If he just believes it, there’s nothing to it.
+wesley morris
+It wasn’t even that he was trying to tell us that he was doing it, I mean, which is the argument people make about the sex songs, right? Like he’s hiding in plain sight.
+jenna wortham
+Right, right.
+wesley morris
+But he’s also just basically building a psychological defense of himself.
+jenna wortham
+And a justification.
+wesley morris
+Right. It’s the simultaneous anthem of self empowerment, self-determination, and a metaphor for success obviously. But the song also sticks with me, not only because it’s been this inspiration to millions of people, it’s also R Kelly’s not guilty defense. He didn’t do it because he says he didn’t. That’s it. Case closed.
+jenna wortham
+But the thing that’s so bonkers here is that it hinges on a literal understanding that this man can’t fly, he cannot fly, nobody can. We all know that. But he’s telling us that there is a version of reality in which he can fly. And then you have all of these women saying, listen, he did these horrible, terrible, illegal things. But, hey, he said he could fly, so I guess we’re good. I mean, I believe he can too. He’s still flying. He hasn’t been knocked down to earth yet.
+wesley morris
+Yes. fair.
+jenna wortham
+So joke’s on us.
+wesley morris
+I guess the reason to bring it up now is it just seems so applicable to everything happening around us, right? We’ve been spending all of this time talking about what reality is, and here is a song that exists in two different realities to me. It exists in that sort of safe inspirational space that we all received certificates and diplomas to, but it also to me exists in this alternate universe space where lots of people who aren’t R Kelly are just making stuff up and saying that that’s just the way it is or that’s just the way it’s not. And so, I feel like we’re living in “I believe I can Fly” times.
+jenna wortham
+We are. From Jason Van Dyke’s defense team to the makers of the “Green Book” saying the Don Shirley we’re presenting to you is the real life version of Don Shirley, despite the claims of people that knew him and lived with him.
+wesley morris
+So lots of people are giving this movie prizes for that version of Don Shirley. But to me, one of the most “I believe I can Fly” moments we’ve had lately started with that bizarre confrontation a couple of weeks ago— [CHANTING] At the Lincoln Memorial. And what got everybody talking in the first place is this short two or three minute video in which this one young looking guy in a Make America Great Again hat is just staring down this older native looking man who’s playing a tribal drum. And the look he gives this guy is chilling to me because it’s menacing and—
+jenna wortham
+It’s empowered, it’s emboldened, there’s a type of invincibility in that smile.
+wesley morris
+And if you watch the video that got circulated, you just see them standing in this open space, or what seemed to me to be an open space. And they’re surrounded by other white kids in these Make America Great Again hats, and there’s just this one black guy there too who’s— poor guy. So the video surfaces and the internet goes nuts, and some people are mad at the kid and they’re saying things like—
+jenna wortham
+This kid is trying to intimidate this elder who, by the way, is the only person there who has a permit to be demonstrating for Indigenous People’s Day.
+wesley morris
+Oh right, yeah.
+jenna wortham
+The kids are on a field trip, they’re waiting for their bus, and this encounter goes down, this confrontation happens. But not long after the clip goes viral, other videos from different angles start to surface that purport to show the real truth or the whole truth. And what ends up happening is a really fascinating dynamic. You get this bifurcation of realities. On one hand, you have people who believe this kid was intentionally trying to disrupt and mess with this elder, and on the other hand, you have people who believe that this kid was just being a kid. He’s not doing anything wrong. And those people also say, I think this elder was to blame, which just proves the point that we’ve been making this whole episode which is that people will interpret reality to validate whatever viewpoint fits their worldview.
+wesley morris
+But I guess I’m curious to just— let’s just sort of play devil’s advocate for the longer video, right? And part of the reason that the people who sided with the kids in this video— and these kids are from Kentucky. They’re from a place called Covington Catholic High School and they’re there on a field trip. And the people who’ve come to their defense are saying there’s a longer video, you watch it, and the reason this exonerating part of the video involves these kids being name called by these black Hebrew Israelites. The short version of what they are is a group of black people who believe they’re descendants of the Israelites. And this confrontation, or this being mocked and named called and teased by the black Hebrew Israelites is supposed to be exonerating, I guess, of the behavior that happens later.
+jenna wortham
+Right.
+wesley morris
+So the people who were saying that you should watch these other longer, I guess, exculpatory uncut videos you need to understand the other side. And this is the other side, not what’s on this shorter doctored version of an altered reality. The real reality is in the longer one.
+jenna wortham
+Right, right.
+wesley morris
+So you have all these people who watched the original video who were outraged and upset by how this one kid seems to be menacing this older indigenous guy and saying, oh, I’m sorry. We really should have done our due diligence and looked at things from both sides and we’re wrong about that. We totally apologize to this child. We should really think about how this older man is also culpable for the behavior of these children as well and what role he has to play in this conflict.
+jenna wortham
+Right. Everything’s up for interpretation.
+wesley morris
+Yeah.
+jenna wortham
+No matter what.
+wesley morris
+I don’t know how— how are we supposed to live in a world where that’s possible? And I’ve heard a lot of people talk about what they see in the videos. And the hats to me are the first thing I see, and they are the indication to me that I am in some ways dealing with a threat. If I see 10 dudes standing around me, it doesn’t matter how old or young they are or even what race they are, if I see 10 dudes in a Make America Great Again hat, I’m nervous because I don’t know what this gathering is about. I feel like those hats are signifiers of a kind of intent. And to me, it’s evidence of an ultimate reality.
+jenna wortham
+Right, right. It’s also a willful denial of the moment that we’re in. It’s a willful denial that people might lie to serve their best interests in the case of the Vallelonga family in the “Green Book,” right?
+wesley morris
+Right, yeah.
+jenna wortham
+They might lie to make their father look better than he was. They might lie for the interest of selling a story. That this kid might lie in order to save face and to be able to get into college next year, you know?
+wesley morris
+Yeah. I mean, he wrote a statement that basically recasts the reality of, I would say, both videos.
+jenna wortham
+Yeah. It’s possible whatever you saw with your own eyes is not exactly what happened from my perspective. It’s not just that we’re living in a multi-verse where multiple truths are possible at the same time like in “Spider-Verse,” right? I think it speaks to the reality that we just don’t trust even what we can see with our own eyes. This moment that we’re living in is so unbelievably chaotic that anything is possible. So why not believe what makes you sleep better at night?
+wesley morris
+Why not believe that R Kelly can fly?
+jenna wortham
+Why not believe that Tony Vallelonga and Don Shirley were best friends who went to the local Juke Joint and shared a plate of fried chicken. I mean, why not?
+wesley morris
+I just— do I have to believe that?
+jenna wortham
+No, you don’t have to believe anything that you don’t want to believe, that’s the point. [MUSIC PLAYING] “Still Processing” is a product of “The New York Times.”
+wesley morris
+It’s Produced by Neena Pathak.
+jenna wortham
+Our editors are Sasha Weiss, Larissa Anderson, and Wendy Door.
+wesley morris
+And we get editorial oversight from Lisa Tobin and Samantha Henig.
+jenna wortham
+Our engineer is Jake Gorski.
+wesley morris
+Our theme music is by Kindess. It’s called “Roll to Restart” from the album “Otherness.”
+jenna wortham
+You can find all of our episodes and various things at nytimes.com/stillprocessing.
+wesley morris2. The balloon trick
+This experiment is designed to show how the volume of a gas expands as it warms, and contracts as it cools. The method: Blow up balloons in warm air, then expose them to cold air and they will deflate. They will reinflate when you return them to warm air.
+This is the same reason car tires deflate in cold weather, said Michael Kennedy, a research professor and director of Northwestern University’s Science in Society, a science education center.
+We inflated half a dozen balloons inside, then bundled up and went outside to wait for them to shrink in the minus 39 degree windchill. And we waited. Gus and Eren decided to bury their balloons in a snow bank. Hildy’s flew into the street.
+When we could no longer feel our noses, we put the remaining balloons in a bag, tied it to the door handle, and rushed inside. After about 45 minutes, the balloons had deflated only slightly and we realized we hadn’t been very scientific: It might have been wise to first measure the balloons’ original circumference, for example.
+Image Alex, the lab assistant, prepared the balloon experiment for the scientists. Credit... Danielle Scruggs for The New York Times
+Once back inside, the balloons did return to their previous shape, but by this time only the adults cared. The child scientists wanted more Sprite slushies.Metamorphosis — of the sort made famous by both Ovid and Stan Lee — is one of the novel’s central themes. There’s Tracker’s passage into manhood through a series of harrowing adventures; and his love-hate relationship with the Leopard, a charismatic being who can incarnate himself as both an animal and a man. Tracker also has a series of alarming encounters with shape-shifting creatures who may be adversaries or allies or both — including Sasabonsam, a menacing batlike creature who may have kidnapped the missing boy; and Nyka, a mercenary and former friend who once committed a terrible act of betrayal.
+[ Marlon James lists his 10 desert-island books. ]
+How did these characters reach these particular crossroads? Whom can Tracker trust, and can the reader trust Tracker — or is he as unreliable a narrator as the rivals and relatives who offer conflicting story lines, suggesting that truth is “a shifting, slithering thing”? Is his father really his grandfather, as his uncle asserts? Will he avenge himself on the men who killed his brother and father? Will his love for a group of orphaned, misfit children replace the anger in his heart and give him a sense of purpose? Why does Tracker hide his real feelings about the Leopard? And why does the Leopard tell him to “learn not to need people”? Such questions are not entirely answered in this volume — which is only the first installment of what James is calling his “Dark Star” trilogy.
+In keeping with familiar fantasy and sci-fi templates (from Harry Potter to “The Matrix” to “The Lion King”), the plot of “Black Leopard, Red Wolf” retraces many of the steps that the scholar Joseph Campbell described as stages in the archetypal hero’s journey. Like Luke Skywalker in “Star Wars” and Frodo in “The Lord of the Rings,” Tracker sets off on a journey that will take him away from home — to distant lands and kingdoms, where he faces a series of dangerous tests. And like many a comic-book superhero and antihero before him, Tracker grapples painfully with his own identity, even as he fights off a succession of opponents who threaten to thwart his mission. Along the way, as his path converges with that of others looking for the missing boy, Tracker becomes part of a motley group of mercenaries and misfits who squabble noisily and violently among themselves — and who bear more than a passing resemblance to the sorts of ragtag teams of rivals assembled in movies like “The Dirty Dozen,” “The Avengers” and “Guardians of the Galaxy.”LONDON — In the flood of news about Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union, a few seconds of black-and-white film broadcast on the BBC stood out on Wednesday.
+As an anchor ended an evening news program by saying, “Theresa May says she intends to go back to Brussels to renegotiate her Brexit deal,” the screen showed grainy images of World War II planes that appeared to be Spitfires.
+The odd pairing caught the eye of many viewers, who shared the video clip on social media.
+“For those wondering — simple human error at end of #BBCNewsSix,” Paul Royall, the program’s editor, wrote on Twitter. “If and when it happens pretty certain PM not travelling to Brussels like this.”
+Mr. Royall said the footage had been shown earlier on in the program to tease a story about a museum that opened at the former Biggin Hill airfield, the busiest during the Battle of Britain.Where the Food Sets the Mood
+At Sofra, a Turkish restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, the atmosphere is all comfort, with gentle, attentive service.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+The federal government seized more control over the New York City Housing Authority on Thursday, reaching an agreement with the city intended to correct years of mismanagement that prosecutors said had exposed hundreds of thousands of residents to lead paint and other health hazards.
+The settlement meant Mayor Bill de Blasio avoided the embarrassment of a complete management takeover of the city’s housing authority, the nation’s largest and oldest public housing system, home to more than 400,000 low-income New Yorkers.
+But as part of the deal, the mayor accepted the appointment of a powerful federal monitor and committed the city to spending $2.2 billion over the next decade to repair the authority’s dilapidated buildings.
+The agreement also will lead to the replacement of the authority’s interim chairman, Stanley Brezenoff, whom the mayor brought in last year to steer Nycha after a lead paint scandal and the departure of the authority’s chairwoman.A spoonful of kelle paca is close to pure liquid fat, a velvet sheath for the tongue, a declaration against winter. At Sofra, a Turkish restaurant that opened in November in Sunnyside, Queens, the cloudy soup starts with a sheep’s head, minus eyes and brain. It’s soaked for two days, then plunged into a pot and simmered for hours until the flesh loosens, ready to peel away.
+In Turkey, kelle paca might include sheep trotters, but here the skull yields richness enough, along with meat excavated from cheeks and crevices, obligingly tender. On its own, the broth is almost indolent, flavor and texture inseparable; you taste plushness, and it lasts and lasts. An arsenal’s worth of raw garlic, pulverized and barely tempered by red vinegar, is offered in a pitcher on the side, to anoint the soup as you will.
+Yuksel Akdas, who runs Sofra with his wife, Hadice Akdas, has been cooking since he was 9 years old, helping out at his family’s restaurant in Istanbul. Two decades ago, he moved to New York and eventually made his way to Sunnyside, where Turkish immigrants started settling in the 1980s. Locals know his cooking from his days at Mangal Kebab, where he worked for a cousin; when the restaurant was sold a couple of years ago, Mr. Akdas left to find a place of his own.I read once: Children serve as mirrors of their parents’ forgotten selves. I basically wanted to please everyone. That was my motto from a very early age. I’m a good girl. I’m a very good girl. I was born “Asya”. In Russian it sounds a little more like “Ash-a”. I was pretty much the model Soviet child — well behaved, polite, kind, obedient, check, check, check. In Riga, children were taught to be part of a group. In America, I felt very much alone, different and not accepted. I picked up the language very quickly. I picked up the culture very quickly, and I just really wanted to be a regular, American girl. They knew about blow jobs. They knew about dark lip liner and giant hoops. And I was like this little immigrant girl who hadn’t started shaving her legs yet. I was not allowed to wear makeup, but I, at some point, had stolen my mom’s, like, little tiny chunk of a lip liner that she had lying around at the bottom of a bag. We had a pretty early bedtime, but I would sneak my Walkman and I would listen to Z-100’s “Love Phones.” I was learning about a world that was larger than my own, and I kind of grasped what I had to do to fit in, to be cool. I told my parents, I’m changing my name. I’m not going to be Asya anymore. I shaved my legs. I wanted to be noticed and I wanted to be pretty. I just wanted to be wanted. In high school, I was known as the new, exotic girl. And I kept thinking to myself, if they only knew. When male attention first came my way, I ate it up and I also defined myself by it. I still didn’t know how to displease. I really didn’t know how to say no, definitely not with any kind of strength. I took these flowers, these dumb, blue flowers as I went up to his very dingy room. All I remember is crying, having my clothes taken off, and then him asking me if I wanted to order Chinese food in bed. I cried. I said, “God, that was dumb of me and so slutty. This is so embarrassing.” And then I put it away for over a decade. Eventually I stopped being a rag doll. Of course, then I gave birth to one daughter followed by a second daughter. I realized that in order to raise strong women, I had to become a strong woman myself. I need to make sure that they have a better sense of self than I had. I didn’t have friends in this country. I felt very much rejected. So one of the constant conversations we’re having is about inclusivity. How can we be kind to the people that need it the most? I think of myself as a defender of my daughters’ little spirits. And I know that even though our world is changing, it is going to chip away at this inner strength that already exists. So my job is to help preserve that strength and teach them to have faith in it. These little freedoms throughout their childhood are going to teach them to listen to their own inner voice, and they will know that they are as worthy as anyone else of making their own decisions. And if they’re not the most polite girls on the block, I don’t give a [expletive].If her assumptions are correct, the college, with a $42 million operating budget, needs to set aside at least $168 million before it can enroll the next freshman class. This isn’t likely to happen. Dr. Nelson is adamant that the only way out of this conundrum is to cancel that class and merge Hampshire with a much wealthier “strategic partner.” Otherwise, she told a group of prominent alumni, donors and former administrators this week, Hampshire will be forced to close within the next three or four years.
+As she explained it, the demographic changes threatening Hampshire’s future are a serious concern to all but the most well-endowed universities. Increasingly, America’s colleges and universities will be competing more and more fiercely for fewer and fewer applicants from a rapidly shrinking pool of high school graduates. This reality has almost every school with an endowment less than $500 million quaking in its boots right now, she said.
+Since November, Dr. Nelson has been having secret discussions with potential partners. Perhaps the best fit is the nearby University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a member of the Five College Consortium that includes Hampshire, Amherst, Smith and Mount Holyoke. Students in the consortium can already take classes and use the resources at any of those schools — an arrangement that has been particularly advantageous to students at Hampshire, with its relatively limited curriculum and small library. But whatever the perceived benefits of a merger, nobody denies it would inflict severe pain. Many of the school’s faculty and staff members would probably lose their jobs.
+Within the extended Hampshire community, there is emphatic disagreement with the course Dr. Nelson appears to have set. Kenneth Rosenthal, the college’s official historian and its first treasurer, believes it would be a grave mistake for Hampshire to jump into an asymmetrical partnership out of a panicked reaction to the financial challenges of the moment. And he thinks it would be an even bigger mistake for Hampshire to forgo enrolling new students in September, which would ensure the inevitability of a merger.
+Mr. Rosenthal points out that Hampshire owns several hundred acres of valuable land that could be commercially developed. “Half the colleges in the country would love to have this kind of problem,” he said. “Plenty of alumni have put Hampshire in their wills, but because the oldest of them are only 66 or 67 years old, they haven’t started dying yet. That’s problematic in the short term, but not in the long term.”
+Be that as it may, it seems foregone that Dr. Nelson will soon announce that no new students will be enrolled at Hampshire for the next academic year. Soon thereafter, she will likely propose some kind of lopsided merger with a securely endowed educational institution.
+Hampshire’s iconoclastic educational model is widely admired and deservedly praised. Given what lies ahead, however, it is not at all clear how much of the Hampshire philosophy — to say nothing of the Hampshire soul — will survive.
+Jon Krakauer is the author of “Into the Wild” and “Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town.”
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Juan Guaidó, the Venezuelan opposition leader, wrote in an opinion article published Wednesday evening that his opposition coalition had met with members of the powerful armed forces to galvanize support for a change in government.
+Mr. Guaidó, the head of the country’s National Assembly, last week declared himself interim president in a direct challenge to Nicolás Maduro, who has held on to power despite a widely discredited election and an economic and humanitarian disaster precipitated by his government’s mismanagement.
+In the days since, more than two dozen countries, including the United States and many Latin American nations, have thrown their support behind Mr. Guaidó. On Thursday, the European Parliament recognized him as the country’s legitimate leader. The American government has imposed sanctions intended to force out Mr. Maduro, but he has the support of some other nations, including Russia and China.
+Ultimately, though, the fate of the two leaders may be decided by Venezuela’s military, which plays an outsize role in the country’s politics as a power broker.Two weeks before Valentine’s Day, the Sweethearts candy shortage is acute.
+Many distributors have already sold out. And what candy remains is left over from last year — before its manufacturer, the New England Confectionery Company, or Necco, closed its factory doors.
+So now how are we supposed to communicate the important things — like “So Fine” and “Fax Me” — to our loved ones on Valentine’s Day? What does “Be Mine” even mean if it’s not stamped in red vegetable dye on a lump of sugar, corn syrup, dextrose and glycerin?
+Lisa A. Pake, a lawyer in St. Louis, said she regularly bought the candy hearts for Valentine’s Day. But then came 2019. “I have not seen the Necco Sweethearts in stock anywhere this year,” she said. “There is a Brach’s version on the shelves, but it just isn’t the same!”
+This year, Sweethearts fans like Ms. Pake may be forced to turn to Brach’s, the Illinois-based candy company whose conversation hearts have been a Valentine’s Day mainstay for decades. Brach’s hearts come in many flavors and are generally a little thinner and softer than Sweethearts, and they are laser-printed rather than stamped.Howard Schultz, the former chief executive of Starbucks, cannot win the presidency as an independent candidate. But is there someone who could? Is there any chance a third-party candidate could contest the presidency and win?
+The short answer is no. As long as the United States has an Electoral College and winner-take-all process for presidential elections, third-party and independent candidates will have a hard time finding any traction.
+There have been times in American history, though, when third-party candidates have upended the political landscape, winning entire regions of the country, although never the presidency. But unlike Schultz, those candidates weren’t self-proclaimed “independents” railing against “divisiveness” from the center; they were polarizers who built support by cultivating personal followings and sharpening ideological, cultural and geographic divides.
+Formed in early 1892 in an effort to make the farmer’s cooperative movement a national political crusade, the Populist Party hoped to, in the words of one leader, “march to the ballot box and take possession of the government, restore it to the principles of our fathers, and run it in the interest of the people.” That summer, delegates at a nominating convention in Omaha chose James Weaver, a former Union Army general, for president and a Confederate veteran, James Field, for vice president, a bisectional ticket meant to unify farmers in the North and South.Another string quartet — “Chambers,” by Marcos Balter — was, for me, the standout. Mr. Balter’s music tends to be both rigorous in construction and playful in overall effect. In his program note, he wrote of his interest in creating an aural illusion of forces larger than those on stage. He achieved this in the delirium of the third movement, which seemed to draw from the static opening movement and the more staggered patterns of the second — while adding something newly mystical. I wondered what he might do with the full forces of the Philharmonic at his disposal.
+The repertory at the orchestra’s main stage concert on Wednesday evening at David Geffen Hall was rather less contemporary. Which is not to say that inspiration was absent. Half the program was every bit as rousing as the “Sound On” event. The pianist Emanuel Ax’s turn in Stravinsky’s Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra had elegant energy running through it, as did Jaap van Zweden’s approach to Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”).
+In Stravinsky’s succession of instrumental color pairings, Mr. Ax had a knack for blending with the Philharmonic players while still punching his sound through. The composer’s love for then-new jazz textures was evident, and appropriately jaunty. But crucially, the performance wasn’t jokey. This was caprice with just the right amount of edge. In the “Jupiter” Symphony, Mr. van Zweden found smart ways to assert his personality without losing the overall shape of the piece — as when he allowed bass-heavy orchestral balances to bloom (ever so briefly) during the inner movements.
+Less gripping were the performances that opened the concert. Mr. Ax clearly delights in Haydn. But a sense of discovery was absent during this version of the Piano Concerto No. 11 in D. And while Mozart’s first symphony, written when he was 8, makes for an obvious complement to the “Jupiter,” his final symphony, programming the early work can also seem like a frittering away of the orchestra’s time on stage, merely for the benefit of a cute idea.Dr. Lewis told me she worries that “comparing your life now to how it was 10 years ago can leave a person feeling hopeless, helpless, depressed and anxious.” I hadn’t really thought about those people who weren’t posting: those who might have struggled with illness, divorce, or the death of a spouse or a child, or who don’t like how they’ve aged (weight gain, thinning hair, wrinkles, saggy skin).
+But Dr. Lewis also sees an upside: “For those who perceive it as an opportunity to showcase personal growth or enduring social relationships, it can foster an enhanced sense of well-being that can positively contribute to the collective wisdom that accompanies aging.”
+Still, most of the criticism of the challenge goes back to its ageism. Dr. LaBar is especially concerned about the impact of the challenge on older adults, whom he says are “particularly susceptible to the impact of negative implicit biases” of ageist attitudes. He explained that “in older adults, performance on memory tests and other cognitively-demanding tasks is impaired after participants had been given verbal reminders of negative aging stereotypes, like older adults are generally slow’ and ‘older adults tend to be forgetful.’”
+But Dr. LaBar wasn’t ready to write the challenge off. He told me that some people who have “owned” this challenge have used it to mark major life transitions” — beating cancer, surviving a trauma, graduating from college. “In these cases, the challenge is used as a means of self-actualization, self-affirmation and pride, which is extremely powerful.”
+Maybe in joining the challenge I was “celebrating” my age rather than “defying” it. Yes, my skin is dryer, my hair thinner and my cheeks succumbing to gravity. Under the hood my cholesterol is higher, as is my calcium level, an indicator of heart attack risk. My heart has also been battered by loss and sorrow, which reminds me of Elaine Stritch singing “I’m Still Here.”Michael Jackson was quite possibly the most famous entertainer of the 20th century. When he died in June 2009, it seemed like the long-boiling national conversation around the multiple allegations of child molestation against him died, too; the focus instead shifted to his planned This Is It comeback concerts, his unreleased songs and a musical legacy that includes hundred of millions of albums sold.
+But on Jan. 25, the Sundance Film Festival debuted the four-hour documentary “Leaving Neverland,” which details accusations of abuse, almost instantly reopening the discussion on one of the most notorious scandals in music history. (The film airs in two parts on HBO March 3 and 4.) If you didn’t know why Jackson is leading the news cycle nearly 10 years after his death, here’s a brief explainer.
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+What is ‘Leaving Neverland’?
+“Leaving Neverland” is a two-part mini-series focusing on the allegations of two men who say Michael Jackson abused them as children. It’s directed by the British documentarian Dan Reed, who directed the 2016 HBO doc “Three Days of Terror: The Charlie Hebdo Attacks.”
+What are the accusations in the documentary?
+Wade Robson, a choreographer who has worked with Britney Spears, and James Safechuck, a computer programmer who appeared in commercials as a child actor, said they met Jackson when they were 7 and 10, and assert that he molested them for years. Robson and Safechuck (who appeared alongside Jackson in a memorable 1987 Pepsi commercial) detail allegations like mutual masturbation, oral and anal sexual acts, alcohol, lavish gifts and pornography. Robson, who says Jackson nicknamed him “Little One,” describes what he says was the singer’s methods to keep him from speaking out. Safechuck talks about a secret “wedding” he had with Jackson, and the ring he still has in his possession, saying Jackson gave him jewelry in exchange for sexual favors. Both men supported Jackson during a 2005 trial for molestation and denied he had abused them. However Robson and Safechuck both sued Jackson’s estate after the star’s death. Robson said Jackson molested him for seven years, and Safechuck said he and Jackson engaged in sexual acts “hundreds” of times. Both cases were dismissed and are under appeal..Neighborhood restaurants occupy a very special place in my heart. These spots are not on any “hot” lists, the staff members are pleasant but generally indifferent to your presence, and the menus almost never change.
+But none of that matters, because that’s not why you go. You go because you just can’t wash another skillet. You go because they have that one salad you’re always craving and tastes the same every single time. You go because it’s nice to have a place close by where you can sit and have a glass of wine and a crispy pork schnitzel all to yourself.
+But maybe sometimes you don’t want to leave the house, and you’d like that crispy pork schnitzel to come to you. Or rather, I would like to bring that crispy pork schnitzel to you.We can start with the fact that “free” isn’t a good business model for quality journalism. Facebook and Google flatly refuse to pay for news even though they license many other types of content. Both companies have deals to pay music publishers when copyrighted songs play on their platforms. And the companies also aggressively bid to stream live sports and entertainment content to run on Facebook Watch and YouTube. These deals are varied and often secret, but none of them are based on “free.” Why are the platforms so unwilling to pay news publishers for access to the quality journalism that users need and value?
+There’s no reason those who produce the news shouldn’t enjoy the same intellectual property protections as songwriters and producers (regulators in Europe are looking at replicating some of these safeguards for journalism) .
+The tech giants are also run as “walled gardens” that minimize brands and separate publishers from their readers — even while hoarding information about those same readers. Imagine trying to build a trusted relationship with an audience when you can’t even know who they are. Publishers need new economic terms that include more revenue and more information about our readers. Any minor costs to these companies would pay huge dividends not only for our society but also for their credibility with Congress and policymakers around the world.
+Facebook and Google also need to be willing to acknowledge investments in quality journalism through their algorithms. They are constantly on the defensive about spreading false and misleading “news” that hurts people. They could start to address the problem by simply recognizing that The Miami Herald is a much better news source than Russian bots or Macedonian teenagers — and highlighting original, quality content accordingly. Recognizing and promoting publishers that have consistently delivered quality news content can’t be that difficult for sophisticated tech companies. And there are a range of qualified independent ratings organizations, such as NewsGuard, that could help them separate the wheat from the chaff.
+Whether they like to admit it or not, Facebook and Google are at real risk when it comes to the news business. Under the adage “You break it, you buy it,” the platforms now own what happens when quality journalism goes away. A study by the University of North Carolina’s School of Media and Journalism found that more than 1,300 American communities have completely lost sources of local news.How do you dress for this?
+Just regular gym gear. I wear the same stuff to Planet Fitness, and I also take dance. The less material, the better.
+What about your feet?
+I like Asics. It kind of feels like you’re walking on air.
+Do you get in the ring and fight?
+Yeah. I wanted to be able to defend myself, and my coach said the best way was to spar.This Super Bowl is a matchup of old and new: The 66-year-old Bill Belichick will be coaching against the 33-year-old Sean McVay. The 41-year-old Tom Brady will be starting his ninth Super Bowl, while the 24-year-old Jared Goff will play in his first.
+A year after being upset in a Super Bowl that set an N.F.L. record for total yards, the Patriots will be looking for a record-tying sixth Lombardi Trophy, while the Rams, having only recently moved back to Los Angeles, will be looking to earn the franchise’s second.
+New England Patriots vs. Los Angeles Rams
+Kickoff: 6:30 p.m. | Television: CBS | Streaming: Free on CBSSports.com
+When the Rams Have the Ball
+There is more uncertainty to the Rams’ approach to this game than you would expect, and that uncertainty centers on the readiness of running back Todd Gurley.BRUSSELS — Tens of thousands of children skipped school in Belgium on Thursday to join demonstrations for action against climate change, part of a broader environmental protest movement across Europe that has gathered force over the past several weeks.
+In Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland and elsewhere, activists have come together on social media to gather in large numbers and without much apparent preparation, the protests taking a different shape in each country.
+In Germany, students have protested on Fridays, communicating mainly through the messaging app WhatsApp; in Belgium, they organize on Facebook and have skipped school by the thousands on four consecutive Thursdays.
+Last Sunday, climate protests in Brussels swelled to an estimated 100,000 people of all ages. That same day, an estimated 80,000 took part in cities across France — more than turned out for the “Yellow Vest” protests the day before.His adviser approved, he recalled, and as he was leaving the building following their meeting an acquaintance reminded him that “the Jews were involved in civil rights before it became a Negro issue,” he would later write. Another friend suggested that the topic be narrowed further to Leo Frank.
+Image Professor Dinnerstein in 1998. He concluded in his scholarly work that anti-Semitism had become “an irrevocable part of the American heritage.” Credit... University of Arizona
+“My response was, ‘Who’s Leo Frank?’ ” Professor Dinnerstein recounted.
+He went on to research and write about Frank, who ran a pencil factory and was sentenced to death for the strangling in 1913 of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old employee. After the governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, a mob kidnapped Frank and hanged him.
+No one was prosecuted for the lynching. As a result, and because the state had failed to protect Frank so that he could pursue legal appeals, he was posthumously pardoned in 1986 by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, although not officially absolved of the crime itself.
+Professor Dinnerstein’s thesis was published in 1968 by Columbia University Press, titled simply “The Leo Frank Case.” It has never been out of print.
+“The book launched my professional academic career in 1968,” he wrote in the preface to a 2008 revised edition, which added an up-to-date perspective to the original exploration of what Professor Dinnerstein described as “the ambivalence that Southerners felt toward Jews” and “the poor judgments that some Jews made when trying to defend Frank.”The Ozone has since become private apartments, and I’m still looking to rediscover the magic I found in that dining room as a child. Mostly, I’ve been disappointed, but a few ambitious restaurateurs are working to reclaim these buildings and recreate the charm and quality they once held.
+There seems to be a standard playbook for these old pubs, even those that have undergone some sort of renovation or revamp. Where once you might have experienced true luxury dining , now there is a scourge of mediocre wood-fired pizzas, bland “gourmet” burgers and the requisite fish and chips.
+This is what I found at the Hotel Rottnest on Rottnest Island, in Western Australia, one of the country’s most stunning island destinations, just off the coast of Perth. Built in 1858 as an official residence for the Western Australian governor, when Rottnest Island was a prison camp for Indigenous Australian men and boys, the building was converted into holiday accommodations in 1919. The hotel is about to undergo a large expansion, adding 80 rooms, a new restaurant and a function space.SAN FRANCISCO — The chip-making giant Intel ended a seven-month search for a new chief executive on Thursday by naming the man who was running the company on an interim basis as its permanent leader.
+Robert Swan, who was installed as interim chief executive in June, had been Intel’s chief financial officer since joining the company in 2016.
+Mr. Swan, 58, inherits a role that opened up suddenly when Brian Krzanich, a longtime Intel insider who ran the company for five years, was forced out over a past affair with an employee.
+Mr. Swan, who is well regarded on Wall Street, initially said he was not interested in becoming the permanent chief executive. But he made no mention of his prior reluctance in a letter to employees on Thursday.A.I. is still artificial. They only do and “feel” what they are programmed to, they are still just machines and their emotions are not real, if at all existent, so I believe they are still property, and we should respect each others property, but the robot itself should not have rights yet.
+— Max Scholer, Hoggard Wilmington, NC
+Of course it is wrong to vandalize a company’s property and people shouldn’t do it, but there seems to be no deeper meaning to this, just people destroying stuff for fun. Occasionally, I will tell my Google Home to shut up just for the fun of it, because I know I would never do that to a real assistant. An issue I have is that we are getting too comfortable with our “robots” I have met young people who tell their Alexa and Siri “please” and “thank you.” We can even customize their voices and “Wake up word.” With that, I feel like there is a good chance that people will begin substituting robots for true human interaction.
+— Zade, Hoggard High, Wilmington, NC
+I didn’t think that robot should be treat like human because they are just machine without emotion or feelings … I think that if one day we create a robot to smart that could be dangerous. so it’s really important to differentiate oneself from robots.
+— Luna, paris
+… I think that robots can be dangerous because they do not feel like us, as result they could commit something wrong because they do not have feeling like human that can be one result that some people have fear about robot.
+— kerren 3A, YC CLIP
+Robots deserve respect
+Violence should not be accepted in any society or really in any situation. If we were to allow violence whether it was between humans or humans and robots, chaos would reign. But as far as treating robots as if they were humans or locking up humans for violence against machines, a line does need to be drawn. Robots do not have souls, feelings, or emotions outside of the programming they’ve been given. The programming comes from, in fact, a human. If we were to give robots the same privileges as people humans could use that fact to their advantage and pursue their own agendas through robots.
+— AK, Florida
+… As technology progresses, the line between human and machine will be blurred to a point where it is practically unrecognizable. Robots will become increasingly complex and human-esque, until they are virtually indistinguishable from people, and it at this point that they must be considered equal. While this future is an inevitability, it is still some time in the future, and robots that exist now are a far cry from human. However, just because they are not people, doesn’t mean that they deserve the treatment outlined in the article. The machines we create are extensions of ourselves, and they deserve the respect that any other human creations do.
+— Jake Hession, Hoggard High School, Wilmington, NC
+I find it to be highly unnecessary that people are beheading robots, or beating them with bats, punching them will all their strength, and smearing them with barbecue sauce. I find it disrespectful — well not to the robot because they do not have feelings but I do find it disrespectful to the creator of the robot. Imagine going to art museum and punching a hole in a painting just because you don’t like it. Is that disrespectful to the painting? No the painting does not have feelings. But is it disrespectful to the artist? Yes. It is disrespectful to destroy something that someone put so much time and effort into.
+— ER, Hoggard Highschool, Wilmington N.CFeel free to engage your father about his feelings — preferably one-on-one and when the moment is suitably contemplative. You can even encourage him to raise the issue with your mother. But this is not your story to tell her. The intimacies of other people’s marriages are best left to them.
+Image Credit... Christoph Niemann
+Kitchenette Conundrum
+I am the college adviser at a high school. I have the misfortune of sharing my small office with a kitchenette used by faculty and staff. One of the teachers stocked it with mismatched old dishes for communal use. My job often involves bringing students to the kitchenette during lunchtime, and I invite them to use a bowl or dish if they need to microwave their food. But upon seeing this, the aforementioned teacher collected his used kitchenware and took it home with him. Did I make a mistake? Do I owe him an apology?
+ANONYMOUS
+You did nothing wrong! While meeting in your office, you offered a small kindness to the students who are required to see you there. If the teacher was so scandalized by this that he decided to take back his mismatched plates (without a word to you), let him enjoy his petty outrage in private. Say nothing.
+But do request an office transfer. Students often share their deepest hopes and disappointments with college advisers. They deserve more privacy than the bustling hub of a faculty kitchen with a microwave (and math teachers) buzzing within earshot. Even the most overcrowded school should be able to find you a better spot.
+Baby-Proof …
+My fiancée and I are planning our wedding, and we’d prefer not to have babies or children there. We are not close to any of the kids of our invitees, and we don’t want crying or loud playing during the ceremony or reception (or the extra expense, either). How do we let guests know that children are not allowed? We’re having the wedding at my parents’ home, so we could hire a babysitter if you think we have to.CHICAGO — Just before the dangerously cold temperatures set in across the Midwest this week, Michael Belz was occupied with thoughts of his son Gerald, an 18-year-old in his first year at the University of Iowa.
+Classes at the university had been canceled. Campus was only a half-hour away from the Belz home in Cedar Rapids. But Gerald had opted to stay put and wait out the cold snap in his dorm.
+“At the time, I thought that was the smart move,” Michael Belz said, remembering that his son had trouble getting his truck started the weekend before. “I didn’t want him to get stuck somewhere driving. So he decided he would stay.”
+Early Wednesday morning, as the temperatures were plummeting, Gerald Belz was found unconscious outside a campus building, a short walk from his dorm. He died later at a hospital. Investigators believe his death was related to the subzero temperatures that plunged Iowa and all of the Midwest into a miserable and dangerous cold snap this week.The exhibition “Pierre Puvis de Chavannes: Works on Paper and Paintings” at Michael Werner Gallery in Manhattan is a major event, or at least a major rarity. It gathers together nearly 90 works — mostly on paper with some small paintings — by the 19th-century French painter (1824-98), whose mellifluous name can be more familiar than his artistic achievement.
+For me at least, Puvis de Chavannes — that is, POO-vee de sha-VAHN, or simply Puvis — has always wafted in the background in the history of modernism , sounding exotic, perfumed, and usually cited as an influence on the Post-Impressionists and beyond.
+When you see Puvis’s frieze-like oils in pale, fresco tones with idealized figures dressed in the gowns and togas of Ancient Greece, his importance is initially hard to fathom. At a time when the painting of everyday life was gaining speed, he was opting for antiquity.
+It doesn’t help that there’s never been a museum retrospective of his work in the United States; the last one in North America was at the National Gallery of Canada in 1977, organized by the art historian and curator Louise d’Argencourt, who also assembled the current display and wrote the catalog with Bertrand Puvis de Chavannes, the artist’s great-grand nephew. The last Puvis retrospective anywhere was in 1994 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.The European Commission said Thursday that it was investigating eight unnamed banks for operating as a cartel in the buying and selling of European government bonds from 2007 to 2012.
+Traders at individual banks exchanged commercially sensitive information and coordinated trading strategies mainly in online chat rooms, the commission said. Their communication could have distorted the competition for sovereign bonds, issued by the governments of eurozone countries, it said.
+“Such behavior would violate E.U. rules that prohibit anticompetitive business practices such as collusion on prices,” the commission said in a statement. Its investigation is “related to certain traders at eight banks and does not imply that the alleged anticompetitive conduct was a general practice” in the sector, it said.
+The commission’s antitrust authority did not name the eight banks, but it said all had been sent a formal statement of objections.Inside a bitsy fish store in Brooklyn, Lana Condor switched the blowtorch on. “Power!” she said brightly on a cold Friday morning, as a blade of butane flame shot from the canister. “Oh yeah.”
+Ms. Condor, 21, who wields a sword as a teenage assassin in the new Syfy action series “Deadly Class,” is an enthusiastic home cook. During a break from promotional rounds, she had signed up for a sushi class at Osakana, a tiny temple devoted to locally sourced fish in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
+She had no idea that it would include weapons training. She clearly didn’t mind. “Holy cow!” she said as the skin on slices of golden tilefish began to sear and crackle.
+Ms. Condor, who portrayed a superpowered mall rat in “X-Men: Apocalypse,” became a breakout star with the Netflix rom-com “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before,” in which she played a high schooler with a sheaf of secret crushes.The “Camelot” concert, which will be staged without costumes or sets, will take place on March 4, and will be directed by Bartlett Sher, whose productions at Lincoln Center Theater include the currently running “My Fair Lady” revival, as well as “South Pacific,” for which he won a Tony Award. The concert will feature a 30-piece orchestra.
+The rest of the cast will include Solea Pfeiffer as Guenevere, Jordan Donica as Sir Lancelot, Dakin Matthews as Merlyn, Ruthie Ann Miles as Nimue, Ethan Slater as Mordred, Julie White as Morgan Le Fey, and Jenn Colella, Jason Danieley and Bonnie Milligan as three of the Knights of the Round Table.
+“Camelot,” which features music by Frederick Loewe and book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, first opened on Broadway in 1960; the film adaptation was in 1967. (Fun fact: The “Camelot” composers also wrote “My Fair Lady,” and this “Camelot” concert will take place on the stage where “My Fair Lady” is now running.)
+Mr. Miranda won the Pulitzer Prize and two Tony Awards for writing “Hamilton,” and just finished leading the cast of a touring production of that show in San Juan, P.R. He is now co-producing, and expected occasionally to appear in, a Greenwich House Theater run by Freestyle Love Supreme, a hip-hop improv group he co-founded (and which, in 2014, had a brief run at Lincoln Center Theater).
+He has described himself as a childhood fan of “Camelot,” which he knows from the cast album and has said is his mother’s favorite score. (It even gets a shout-out in “Hamilton” when Lafayette, who refers to himself as “the Lancelot of the revolutionary set,” says, “Who’s the best? C’est moi!” — a reference to a song sung by Lancelot in “Camelot.”)A mountain on Mars that is almost as tall as Denali in Alaska appears to be surprisingly light, scientists reported on Thursday.
+For more than four years, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring Mount Sharp, located within an ancient meteor impact crater known as Gale and rising more than three miles high . Now measurements of tiny changes in gravity, recorded by the rover as it climbed in elevation, could help solve the question of how the mountain formed.
+The official name of the mountain is Aeolis Mons, but mission scientists have nicknamed it after Robert P. Sharp, a Mars expert who died in 2004. It consists of layer upon layer of sedimentary rock, which offer an easy-to-read history book of Martian geology. That was one of the attractions that led NASA to choose the site for the Curiosity mission, which landed on Mars in 2012.
+But sedimentary rocks typically form at the bottoms of lakes and oceans, not at the tops of mountains.To the Editor:
+Re “This Coal Lobbyist Should Not Run the E.P.A.,” by Dominique Browning (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, Jan. 14) regarding President Trump’s nominee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency:
+Unlike the first E.P.A. administrator in the Trump administration, Andrew Wheeler has decades of experience working on environmental issues as a career E.P.A. employee and as the Senate Environment Committee’s staff director. Senators and congressional staffers, both Republicans and Democrats, know him well from his long tenure, and while they may disagree with him, all like and respect him because of his knowledge, experience and approach.
+Since becoming acting administrator, Mr. Wheeler has been an effective leader at the agency. He is committed to protecting the environment and has the respect of the career staff, but he is also committed to correcting the regulatory overreach that occurred under the previous administration. Mr. Wheeler understands how the regulatory process works and the type of effort that is required to develop effective and legally defensible regulatory reforms.
+Opponents can certainly challenge the administration’s approach to environmental issues, but attacks on Mr. Wheeler’s character and qualifications are beyond the pale.
+Jeff Holmstead
+Washington
+The writer served as the Environmental Protection Agency’s air administrator from 2001 to 2005.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+Upon arrival at the Booze History Museum in Staten Island, visitors are treated to what Lev Mezhburd, the museum’s founder, director, curator and tour guide, calls a “disinfection.”
+“The items in the museum are very sensitive,” Mr. Mezhburd said. “To go in there, you have to get rid of the microbes that live on us.”
+This is how Mr. Mezhburd’s cleansing process works: Wielding a fire extinguisher, he instructs his visitors to open their mouths and say, “Ah.” He then sprays Russian Standard vodka into their mouths. More drinks follow from a series of other visual gags, including an IV drip bag, a radio and a pair of binoculars, all of which conceal vodka.An impressive reception to greet President Vladimir Putin. He came to Serbia this week to shore up one of his allies, President Aleksandar Vucic, who critics accuse of dismantling democracy at home. The ceremony played out at this historic church. We watched the lavish festivities which felt more like a coronation than a state visit. People attended from all corners of the country. But most of them were bussed in. It’s a carefully orchestrated show loaded with symbolism. And at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise, a visit like this suggests that Serbia is moving in a similar direction. Vucic was elected in 2017. Over the last two years, he’s amassed more power, silenced the press and undermined opposition. In November, Borko Stefanovic, a prominent opposition leader, was assaulted on his way to meet some of his supporters. “Just describe the attack itself. What happened?” “They knocked me unconscious from the back, so I was hit. They actually tried to murder me because when I was unconscious, they continued to hit me in the head. There was a lot of blood on my shirt and at the press conference the day after, I showed the bloody shirt to the public, and actually actually that the image of that shirt was the spark for these protests.” “And that’s why the protesters carry signs saying ‘No more blood’.” “Yes, exactly that’s the reason why.” The attack sent thousands of protesters into the streets. And they’ve returned for six weeks straight, accusing the president of creating a climate of fear and paranoia. We sat down with President Vucic and asked him to respond to his critics. “I guess there’s some concern that in your relationship with Putin that maybe that model is being adopted here as well.” “Which model?” “The model the more authoritarian-style of government.” “If you think so, what can I say to you?” “You can tell me if you think that’s an incorrect analysis, or if you think that’s accurate.” “I think it is an incorrect analysis. I think that we belong to a very democratic society.” We met Jelena Anasonovic, one of the original organizers of the antigovernment protests. “So what is this what we’re getting on here?” “Yeah” “Number 41?” “Yeah, 41.” “41.” “O.K.” “Serbian public transportation.” “So these protests, they started over the beating of one politician, but it’s sort of taken on a lot more. So it’s kind of everyone who is upset about what exactly?” “The main reason is the like raising violence in our institutions. They’re creating the atmosphere of fear.” She sat down with a group of friends in a downtown cafe to plan the next demonstration. “Have all of you thought about leaving at some point?” “Yeah, definitely at some points of despair we thought about leaving the country. But it was like more, we want to have decent jobs. We want to have a decent society without lies, manipulation discrimination.” “I mean, to me, you guys, you guys are out here with your faces, your names. Are you not afraid? I mean, are you worried that there might be consequences for either you or your family?” “Yes, we are.” “You are?” “But you’re still out here?” “Yes, because we need to be here because I want to change something and I want to live in a decent, normal country.” The students’ frustrations have echoed throughout the city, and people have joined the movement from all walks of life. Like here, at one of the oldest theaters in Belgrade. The night we attended, a dark comedy about the breakdown of society was showing. Bane Trifunovic is a well-known actor here. And he is now a public face for the movement. “Bravo!” Two of Bane’s shows have been banned. A reminder, he said, of the 1990s when former President Slobodan Milosevic ruled through intimidation. In 2000, a popular movement swept him out of power. “This building has a lot of history because you when you see all these photos here, it’s all about history.” “They’re amazing.” “One of the things that I’m so curious about, how heavily history hangs over everywhere here.” “It’s everywhere. It’s in this whiskey, you know. It’s everywhere.” “So I don’t want to date you, but, you would’ve been in your 20s in 2000 right? You know, now 18 years after that moment, here you are in, I don’t know how you would describe it, but do you feel disappointed?” “Yes.” “Why?” “Because actually nothing happens. Now, we were living in worse play ever written.” “You’re living in the worst play ever written?” “Yeah.” We met up with Jelena again. She was one of the thousands attending a vigil for a politician who was murdered one year ago. But even as more people have risen up, week after week, few of them expect to take down the government. Vucic remains powerful and many who oppose him don’t see a real alternative in the opposition. But they hope that their continuing resistance will at least break down the barrier of fear.Soccer and human rights: An increasing number of powerful sports executives have called for the release of a Bahrain-born soccer player, Hakeem al-Araibi, who has refugee status in Australia but has been detained in Thailand since late November. The case represents the first time that sporting bodies have come together to “address the fate of a single person,” one of Mr. Araibi’s supporters said.
+New Zealand: Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern scrapped her initial targets in an ambitious plan to build 100,000 new homes over the next decade, signaling that a solution to the country’s shortage of affordable housing remains out of reach.
+Iran: Britain, France and Germany, in an attempt to bolster Iran’s economy while skirting U.S. sanctions, have set up a company that would essentially allow goods to be bartered between companies. Whether anyone will actually use it remains to be seen.
+11 days offline: Tonga, a remote island northeast of New Zealand, was forced into digital darkness after an underwater fiber-optic cable was severed on Jan. 20, cutting off internet connections, international calls and even credit card payments. Repairs are underway, and some connectivity has trickled back.
+Sri Lanka: Our Frugal Traveler hopped on a train from Colombo to Kandy, then from Kandy to Ella, to take in the lush, hilly terrain with rows of perfectly manicured tea plants. The country “is a place best seen slowly,” he writes.
+Overlooked no more: Forough Farrokhzad, who was perhaps the first female Iranian poet to write about the emotions and desires of women, elevating her among the great voices of Persian literature. Her death, from a car crash in 1967, was regarded as a national tragedy in Iran, but she didn’t receive a Times obituary. Until now.To the Editor:
+Re “Perils of Two-Step Authentication” (Op-Ed, Jan. 28):
+Josephine Wolff raises legitimate questions about the effectiveness of two-factor authentication and its use as a best practice. But she engages in the timeless tradition of using FUD — fear, uncertainty and doubt — to make her argument.
+Certainly, multifactor authentication is not the holy grail in identity authentication, but it has had a positive effect in securing data compared with the password-only approach, which has failed miserably.
+Until we are able to move security completely away from the end user, the end user has a responsibility to do whatever he or she can to manage risk.
+There will always be vulnerabilities in cybersecurity. Our objective should be to create resilient solutions that manage risk effectively. Best practices are used because they are informed approaches and solutions to common challenges.Since BuzzFeed’s chief executive, Jonah Peretti, and its managers started delivering the bad news, the company has faced criticism for dragging out the firing process, and employees who were let go have publicly criticized their severance packages. In addition, the suddenly jobless journalists have suffered the attacks of online trolls from corners of the internet darker and colder than BuzzFeed’s typically sunny climate.
+Complaints about severance pay started bubbling up in an internal Slack messaging channel last Friday called AJA, for “Ask Jonah Anything.” BuzzFeed workers — those still employed and the newly laid off — questioned why the company was not going to include pay for unused vacation and comp days as part of the exit packages (except for employees based in California, where such payment is required by law).
+A group of current and former employees who called themselves the BuzzFeed News Council published a letter on Medium concerning the issue of paid time off, known as P.T.O. It was signed by 600 current and former employees and addressed to Mr. Peretti; the company’s chief people officer, Lenke Taylor; and the BuzzFeed News editor in chief, Ben Smith.
+“For many people, paying out P.T.O. will be the difference between whether or not bills and student loans will be paid on time and how their families are supported,” the letter read. “It is unconscionable that BuzzFeed could justify doing so for some employees and not others in order to serve the company’s bottom line.”
+The hosts of BuzzFeed’s morning show “AM to DM,” which is produced in association with Twitter, addressed the issue on Monday. “I think it is embarrassing and absurd to work for a company that puts such an emphasis on this idea of all of us in it together, all of us as a family, and then refusing to pay out P.T.O. — paid time off — except where it’s law,” Isaac Fitzgerald, a co-host, said.WASHINGTON — President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday that will push for federal dollars spent on infrastructure projects to be put toward American companies and bolster workers his top trade adviser described as “blue-collar Trump people” the administration has focused on helping.
+That description, given to reporters by Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser, was a small but telling glimpse at how the administration has sought to carry out the president’s “America First” policy. The executive order is meant to be an economic shot in the arm for workers held up as symbols of the president’s tough-on-trade stance, even as some have faced shaky economic prospects over the administration’s decisions to impose high tariffs on imported goods and to start several global disputes, including a damaging trade war with China.
+Flanked by officials including Mr. Navarro and Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta in his first public appearance since the government reopened on Friday, Mr. Trump said during a 40-minute session with reporters that the reasoning behind the order was that “we don’t get treated great by many countries in terms of our trade deals.” The president added that he wanted infrastructure projects to be built with “American steel,” “American iron” and “American hands.”
+The executive order, “Strengthening Buy-American Preferences for Infrastructure Projects,” will recommend but not outright require that what the administration said was $700 billion in federal financial assistance doled out by some 30 agencies each year go toward American-manufactured products, including aluminum, steel, concrete and iron. The order will also seek to tamp down on waivers that agencies have used to bypass American products in favor of foreign-made ones.To the Editor:
+Re “Lessons From a Rescue Dog,” by Margaret Renkl (Op-Ed, Jan. 28):
+Over the past 20 years, I have provided a home for five rescue dogs, including a basset hound dumped beside a busy street and a chocolate Lab abandoned when college students went home for the summer. All five showed the psychic wounds that anyone would expect of animals that bond so strongly with humans.
+But to borrow Raymond Carver’s line, surely that is part of what we talk about when we talk about love. Dog rescue isn’t for everyone; the cost of veterinary care for aging dogs can be substantial. But I can’t express how much those dogs have enriched my life — and, as Ms. Renki articulated so well, how much dogs can teach their humans about coming to terms with loss.
+David Scott
+Columbus, OhioPam Tanowitz, whose 2018 piece “Four Quartets” at the Bard Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., received critical raves, will return as its first choreographer in residence, the center announced on Thursday.
+For the position, a three-year residency to begin in February, Ms. Tanowitz will create three commissioned dances, including a collaboration with the New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns; she will also develop a digital archive of her work.
+Ms. Tanowitz’s time at the Fisher Center is being supported by a $1.2 million gift from the philanthropists Jay Franke and David Herro.
+“It’s an incredible opportunity for me,” Ms. Tanowitz said in an interview. “As a midcareer artist sometimes it’s hard to keep going as far as support, and this is allowing me to have some stability for the creative process and performance.”At the same show, Marcia Belsky, who has written a musical version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” set in 2028 Brooklyn, sang about how annoying it is when rich people get really into nature. “Don’t stress because deep down we’re all animals,” she sang, describing a dialogue with a wealthy man. “Yes, but you’re an animal who owns a yacht.”
+Take away the music, and these songs could be turned into stand-up bits, though not as funny. When the joke leans on an exaggerated reaction to the ordinary, it helps to have some dramatic notes to belt out.
+Musical comedy may be even more popular among artists who work online since comic songs tend to go viral faster than jokes told at a microphone, which may be why musical segments Leslie Jones’s tribute to the Upper East Side last week are as integral to the mix of sketches on “Saturday Night Live” as ever. It’s also why so many musical comedians work online. Demi Adejuyigbe, an inventive writer for “The Late Late Show With James Corden,” posts pop-culture spoofs, including a spot-on Childish Gambino and an annual and increasingly elaborate re-edit of the Earth, Wind & Fire song “September.”
+But the artist who captures the low-rent spirit of early Bo Burnham videos best is Matt Buechele, who has a gift for spotting and lampooning musical clichés in only a few seconds at his keyboard. His impressions reflect a perceptive ear, whether for that moment in a musical right before the romantic couple break out into song or how movies remix their hit song for the end credits.
+Improv comedy has not been immune to this trend. Baby Wants Candy, a musical juggernaut that started in the late 1990s, now has permanent shows in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Its alumni have also started their own companies, including North Coast, a hip-hop improv troupe that mounts a “Hamilton”-inspired show called “Anybody” at Caveat that tells the story of a historical figure. But the most impressive improvised musical I have seen is “Your Love, Our Musical,” also at Caveat, a double act in which Rebecca Vigil and Evan Kaufman interview a couple from the audience and turn their romantic origin story into a fluidly structured, tuneful show.Arnold Schoenberg’s 1899 “Verklärte Nacht” (“Transfigured Night”) is a tempest of emotion. Inspired by a poem about a woman walking with the man she loves in a cold, moonlit forest, guiltily confessing that she is pregnant with another man’s child, the composition surges and crests, pushing late-Romantic musical language toward a breaking point. To many dance fans, it is the sound of Antony Tudor’s 1942 ballet “Pillar of Fire,” a Freudian drama of sex and repression. People don’t often make dances like that anymore.
+But at Baryshnikov Arts Center in Manhattan on Wednesday, the Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s company, Rosas, presented the New York debut of her “Verklärte Nacht.” A 2014 revision for three dancers of a 1995 ensemble work, it is intensely faithful to the score, its emotional dynamics and the situation of the poem. It’s not a ballet, though. It’s barefoot modern dance, so loaded with contraction and release that it could almost be from the 1930s.
+It begins in silence, with a prologue. In the chilly illumination of a single moonlike light, a woman (Cynthia Loemij) and a man (Igor Shyshko) enact a quick scene of passion and then exit the stage in reverse. After a while, the woman returns and repeats the scene with another man (Bostjan Antoncic) as the first man hovers like a shadow. They all leave, and the second couple returns, remaining on stage for the rest of the 40-minute work. (Mr. Shyshko has traveled from Belgium just to establish the dramatic problem.)Representative Ted Deutch, a Florida Democrat, shared a video of Mr. McConnell’s remarks and said, “An Election Day holiday WOULD be a power grab,” adding: “It would be the American people grabbing power back from the wealthy special interests that dominate Washington because @senatemajldr & others prefer that it be hard to vote.”
+The target of Mr. McConnell’s comments, a House of Representatives bill titled For the People Act of 2019, is the first major legislation by the new Democratic-controlled House and puts forward seven major changes to elections nationwide. The proposals are wide ranging, including changes to how people register to vote and new requirements for states to secure voting systems.
+Among the proposals: Voters could register in person on the day of an election, an option that is currently offered in only 18 states and the District of Columbia, and could cast ballots in federal elections during an early-voting period, which all but 11 states already allow. Permitting same-day registration could increase voter turnout by three percentage points, the equivalent of about 3.8 million additional voters in the 2016 presidential election, according to studies. The bill would also allow automatic registration for eligible people.
+The bill also seeks to remove a major hurdle that prevents people from voting: work. A census survey of roughly 19 million registered voters who did not participate in the 2016 election found that 14.3 percent, or about 2.7 million people, said they were too busy to vote. The legislation proposes making Election Day, the first Tuesday in November, a public holiday just like Washington’s Birthday, Independence Day and Christmas.
+It would grant the federal government’s two million full-time employees a paid day off, and would make companies, many of which shut down on federal holidays, more likely to grant their workers a day off. Mr. McConnell derided that idea as “generous new benefits for federal bureaucrats and government employees.”To the Editor:
+Re “Citing #MeToo, Davos Elites Express Fears About Mentoring Women” (news article, Jan. 28):
+I was aghast, but sadly not surprised, to read this article. Powerful men are now afraid of women they might be able to help, so women lose out again.
+It really isn’t that hard. You keep your hands to yourself; you keep your pants zipped; and you think about what would help your mentee, not what would help you.
+Mentoring requires the altruism of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. It is amazingly satisfying and rewarding in and of itself because you take a chance at making the world better.
+Sex really doesn’t have anything to do with it.
+M. Susan Ubbelohde
+Berkeley, Calif.
+The writer is a professor and associate dean for faculty affairs in the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley.To the Editor:
+Re “Trump Rejects Threat Advice With ‘Wrong!’” (Washington Memo, front page, Jan. 31):
+I’m impressed. President Trump has explained to us that he is a genius, that he is the greatest president this nation has ever known (with the possible exception of Abraham Lincoln), that no one can build a wall better than he, or knows more about drones. He has said he’s the world’s best negotiator and that he knows more than any general.
+But that’s not all. After his national security team testified to Congress about threats to our nation’s security, he felt comfortable refuting their studied assessments. If he is to be believed, and after all he is the president, then we are in good hands. Otherwise I will not sleep well tonight.
+Robert Wagner
+New YorkBut Mr. Farrell unknowingly ran afoul of one of the complex rules that govern the transition to Medicare — and now he is paying the price.
+Medicare requires enrollees to sign up during a limited window before and after their 65th birthday. Failing to do so leads to stiff late-enrollment penalties that continue for life, and potentially expensive, long waits for coverage to begin. There is one major exception: People who are still employed when they turn 65 can stay with employer-provided group coverage.
+What Mr. Farrell missed is that Cobra coverage did not qualify him for that exemption, since he was no longer actively employed. He didn’t realize his error for more than a year, when the end of his Cobra coverage approached and he began looking into Medicare. The mistake means that he will pay a late-enrollment penalty equal to 20 percent of the Part B base premium for the rest of his life. This year, the penalty increases his monthly standard premium of $135.50 to $162.60.
+The transition to Medicare from other types of insurance is plagued by problems like Mr. Farrell’s — and, so far, there isn’t much of an early warning system to alert people close to retirement age of the pitfalls. These complex rules also affect people moving from Affordable Care Act exchange plans and retiree health coverage. And workers who use Health Savings Accounts in conjunction with high-deductible employer insurance need to watch out for tax issues related to timing.
+The basics on signing up
+Medicare enrollment in Part A (hospitalization) and Part B (outpatient services) is automatic if you have claimed Social Security benefits before your 65th birthday — your Medicare card will arrive in the mail and coverage begins the first day of the month in which you turn 65. There is no premium charged for Part A in most cases, and you may be able to turn down Part B at that point without incurring late-enrollment penalties if you are still working and receive your primary insurance through work.Arctic cold continued to cripple the Midwest and Northeast on Thursday. Photographers captured the effects of extreme winter weather this week.
+[Read: Polar Vortex Updates: Bitter Cold Weather Spreads East]
+In Minneapolis, where the wind chill was minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit, Bonnie Star went on her daily walk and had encountered another person.In 2016, a picture book titled “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” was withdrawn from stores after critics complained that it glossed over the horrors of slavery. A similar scandal engulfed the 2015 picture book “A Fine Dessert,” which depicted an enslaved mother and daughter hiding in a cupboard and cheerfully licking a bowl of batter clean; the author, Emily Jenkins, apologized and donated her earnings to We Need Diverse Books, a nonprofit that promotes diversity in children’s publishing. In 2017, Laura Moriarty’s dystopian novel, “American Heart,” was savaged, months before its release, by readers who said Ms. Moriarty had peddled a “white savior narrative” in her depiction of a future America where Muslims are placed in internment camps. Harlequin Teen delayed publication of Keira Drake’s fantasy novel, “The Continent,” after readers blasted it as “racist trash,” “retrograde” and “offensive.” Ms. Drake and her publisher, Harlequin Teen, apologized, and Ms. Drake rewrote the book, removing and revising some passages and character descriptions that readers had flagged as racially offensive.
+Children’s book publishers have grown increasingly cautious when acquiring books that deal with charged subjects such as race, gender, sexuality and disability. Many publishers and authors now hire “sensitivity readers” who vet books and identify harmful stereotypes.
+“When any author is writing outside their own experience, we want to make sure they’ve done their homework,” David Levithan, vice president and publisher of Scholastic Press, which regularly seeks advice from sensitivity readers, told The Times in 2017.
+[Read about the growing trend of sensitivity readers.]
+Edith Campbell, a reference librarian at Indiana State University who blogs about young adult literature, said readers’ ability to instantly weigh in on social media has forced publishers to confront the lack of diversity in the industry, and made it impossible for publishers and authors to ignore complaints when a book promulgates racial or other stereotypes.
+“This is one of the few ways that publishing has evolved into the 21st century, by having to listen to people’s immediate reaction to what they’re publishing,” she said.
+Shelley Diaz, a former reviews manager and young adult editor at School Library Journal, said “Blood Heir” and other young adult fantasy novels that deal with slavery often deserve extra scrutiny from readers because the stories are crafted for an impressionable young audience, and praised Ms. Zhao for responding to critics.
+“Some people in the community have found things that were worthy of critique and weren’t handled in a culturally competent way,” she said. “A lot of authors have been confronted with critiques like these and decided to stand their ground and not change anything, but this was a woman of color who was brave enough to say, ‘I hear you, I hear this critique, and I want to bring a better book out to my readers.’”[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+For decades, the sign atop the Marcal Paper Mills plant had been a landmark for New Jersey drivers, its red neon light a beacon to weary travelers that told them how close they were to home.
+But on Wednesday night, roads near the iconic sign in Elmwood Park were illuminated by something else: a raging blaze that felled the sign and consumed the 1940s building that supported it.
+The conflagration was one of three major fires that area firefighters battled amid frigid temperatures and harsh, blustering winds brought on by a polar vortex.
+At Newark Liberty International Airport, about 30 minutes south of Elmwood Park, more than a dozen cars caught fire Thursday morning on the rooftop of a parking garage, sending a huge plume of smoke into the air.Meanwhile, the mold in her apartment made her and her daughter sick, and the cleaning made her body hurt: a “constant burn,” “shooting pain,” “tingling sensations” down her limbs. Nerve damage prevented her from gripping with her dominant right hand, so she was forced to use her left. She got in a car accident and lost her car. She had no time to cultivate new friends, and those she already had weren’t always kind about her plight. She was ashamed to be on public assistance. With nobody around to give her the comfort or reassurance she needed, she tried giving it to herself. “I love you,” she whispered piteously when she was overcome with pain or panic. “I’m here for you.” She fantasized about moving to Missoula, Mont., for college; about owning a house like the ones she cleaned; about finding a lasting partner. All her hopes seemed implausible. If she were ever in a position to hire a cleaner herself, she vowed, she’d tip them, offer them food, leave them small gifts. She’d treat them “like a guest, not a ghost.” Sometimes, she cried while she cleaned.
+Image
+The strain of caring for a child in insecure circumstances shadowed the pleasures of motherhood. Land followed a strict bedtime routine with her daughter, hoping that rigid structures would increase the girl’s sense of stability, knowing any foundation was being eroded by her shared custody agreement and frequent changes to their living arrangements. After her relationship with the farmer ended, Land regretted the loss on her daughter’s behalf more than her own. She encountered no personal obstacle that wasn’t magnified in some way by being a single parent, no problem of parenthood that wasn’t intensified by her financial predicament.
+For a while, as Land recounts in “Maid,” her memoir of her time as a cleaner, she was on seven kinds of government assistance, and still hardly surviving. The paperwork she was forced to complete in order to qualify for help was interminable: applications with questions about her plans for the years to come, detailed proof of income that included documentation of her schedule and letters from clients verifying that she did indeed work for them, and continual updates to account for any change in status. When, at one point, she submitted a handwritten pay stub, an official from the Department of Health and Human Services threatened to rescind her child care grant. To be eligible for a program that subsidized her rent, Land was required to attend a class about how to approach landlords, because they tend to resist renting to those on public assistance.
+[ Read an excerpt from “Maid.” ]
+Rent plus groceries plus utilities plus laundry plus insurance plus gas plus clothing minus an hourly paycheck of barely more than minimum wage and the scant assistance parceled out by the government with spectacular reluctance — the brute poetry of home economics recurs throughout Land’s book. When Land is faced with any kind of irregular expense, she must check the budget pinned to her wall, next to her notes about when each bill will be withdrawn and for how much. Math like this isn’t complicated, it’s merely endless. Calculated and recalculated as if the sums will improve with repetition, the figures overwhelm the mind.
+As Lizzie Feidelson wrote in a 2016 essay for n+1 about her work as a housecleaner, an ambivalent pleasure of the job is that it gives you singularly novelistic insight into the people who dirty the spaces you clean. Details emerge “unbidden, without warning, like smells.” Documents spread on a table, receipts pinned to the fridge, a sound clip emanating from a laptop — the plot points of her clients’ lives, Feidelson observes, “connected in an instant.”But if Mr. Maduro is eager to wear the mantle of the aggrieved leftist menaced by American imperialism, it fits him poorly. Millions of Venezuelans have left the country in recent years, creating a regional refugee crisis. People are suffering from hunger and a lack of access to medicine and basic goods. The economy has shrunk by half in five years, and inflation in 2018 reached 1,000,000 percent. Opposition to the Maduro government extends to all classes of Venezuelans.
+In a reversal of the region’s most typical Cold War pattern, it is Mr. Maduro’s supposedly socialist government that relies on paramilitary violence to maintain power. China and Russia, which still support the Maduro government, are no less interested in profiting from Venezuela’s oil than the United States.
+It is as yet unclear how directly the United States shaped Mr. Guaidó’s decision to challenge Mr. Maduro’s authority. In December, he met secretly with officials in the United States, Colombia and Brazil, all governed by right-wing governments. But what is clear is that support for Mr. Guaidó — or at least for an alternative to Mr. Maduro — extends beyond the right. Mr. Guaidó was recognized as interim president by most members of the Lima Group — including Peru, Canada, Ecuador and Argentina — a body formed in 2017 to seek a peaceful resolution to the Venezuelan crisis.
+Even if Mr. Guaidó did coordinate his declaration with the United States, the popular discontent that he channels is real. Many Venezuelans are eager to find help wherever they can, even if that means a Trump administration that is hardly known for its hostility to dictatorship or its commitment to human rights.
+This is a vulnerability for the opposition. Washington is all too ready to lend a hand, but in doing so it could — as it has so many times in Latin America’s history — cause more harm than good.
+Mr. Maduro will use United States intervention to rally his remaining domestic and internal support under an anti-imperialist banner, drawing parallels with Washington’s long history in the region. United States intervention would also undermine the prospect for the thing that Venezuela needs most to achieve a peaceful transition to democracy: national reconciliation. A government that owes a debt to Mr. Bolton and Mr. Abrams will not only be viewed with suspicion by many on the left in Venezuela; it could be forced to abide by constraints imposed by the neoconservatives in Washington about which political actors are considered acceptable partners in a reconciliation process.
+The situation in Venezuela is, undoubtedly, difficult. But when it comes to Latin America, Washington has a long history of making difficult situations worse. It is precisely because Venezuela deserves a better government than it currently has that the United States should not play a role in choosing it.
+Patrick Iber is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of “Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America.”
+The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Can you even remember a time before Google Image Search and Street View, before we all had instant access to far-flung sites like the Parthenon, the Dome of the Rock, a stretch of empty highway in the Australian outback? The whole inhabited world has now been pictured and cataloged, and we have so fully embraced the archive that it feels like an extension of our collective mind. In the infinite scroll of the search results page you can forget that once not every place was visible. Someone, in every place, had to take the first photograph .
+In dozens of cases, that first photographer was Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey (1804-1892), a Frenchman of astonishing artistic ambition and considerable tech savvy. In 1842, three years after his countryman Louis Daguerre unveiled the world’s first practical camera, Girault set out on an epic adventure across Europe and into the Middle East, lugging custom photographic equipment that weighed more than a hundred pounds. He returned with over a thousand photographic plates , including the first surviving daguerreotypes made in Greece, Egypt, Anatolia, Palestine and Syria.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+As commuters shuffled through the Lexington Avenue-53rd Street subway station on Thursday morning, Tyrone Cooper serenaded the bundled-up passengers with his usual renditions of popular tunes.
+But Mr. Cooper’s performance also came with a warning: “It’s too cold to be outside right now. You can get sick and die out there.”
+As a cold spell cloaked New York, with temperatures reaching only into the teens, city officials urged residents to limit their time outside. But for the homeless, options were limited.
+Mr. Cooper, like countless others without shelter, sought protection in transit stations and on trains. He spent Wednesday night on the subway’s E line, a popular refuge in the winter because the train stays underground during its 50-minute trip between Queens and Lower Manhattan.Also, every time my kids complain about being bored, I make them put a toy in the Goodwill box. “If you’re bored, that means you’re tired of the toys we have, and it’s time to get rid of them,” I tell them. That stops the complaining and gets rid of stuff; it’s a win-win.
+Invent new games
+Joe Riley lives in Davenport, Iowa, where the low temperature Thursday was minus 5 with a wind chill of minus 21.
+Image Joe Riley's dog, Zoey, the subject of a family bet during the polar vortex. Credit... Morgan Riley
+Invent new games. We have one called “Will She Poop on the Stoop?” We bet if our dog, Zoey, will make it past the stoop to do her business. Five dollars says she’ll poop on the stoop.
+The result: Zoey just sort of stood there in terror, while we watched from a window to see if she would venture past the stoop. I’m out five dollars so far.
+Spend more time on each pose
+Charity Eleson lives in Oregon, Wis., where the low temperature Thursday was minus 5 with a wind chill of minus 21.
+While I know I should not rush through my yoga practice, I frequently do so I can move on to the next thing on my to-do list. Wednesday while marooned inside, I spent more time on each pose, conscious of breath and body throughout. The polar vortex turns out to be a teacher.
+Take a walk ( in lots of layers )
+Ellie Barta-Moran lives in Spring Green, Wis., where the low temperature Thursday was minus 12 with a wind chill of minus 24.
+I just walked four blocks to get lunch at our bar, mostly to say I did it. I was wearing a wool union suit, long underwear, two shirts, a wool sweater, wool legwarmers, two pairs of wool socks, a long down coat, gloves, leather hunting mittens, a balaclava, a neck gaiter, a wool hat, a scarf and sunglasses to trap my breath and keep my eyeballs from freezing. It’s sunny and beautiful out, so it was a cozy walk!
+Use the phone to — wait for it — talk
+Lisa O’Keefe lives in Chicago, where the low temperature Thursday was minus 2 with a wind chill of minus 41.
+The weather is so bad that I am using the phone to actually have a conversation with friends. I’m using a phone to talk. It’s like junior high all over again, except instead of talking about junior high things, my friend and I had to confirm we had the same brand of Brazil nuts from Whole Foods, and whether or not the nuts smell funny. Adulthood.The Federal Reserve indicated on Wednesday that it was done raising interest rates for the foreseeable future, after a run of incremental increases that began to affect the typical consumer’s wallet.
+The decision will hold the central bank’s benchmark for short-term rates to a target between 2.25 and 2.5 percent, the level it reached in December after steadily climbing since the end of 2015.
+That is the target for the federal funds rate, the interest rate that banks and depository institutions charge one another for overnight loans. It influences how banks and other lenders price certain loans and savings vehicles.
+Whether you will cheer or chafe at the halt depends, broadly, on whether you’re a saver or a spender. For savers and retirees, who were only just starting to find accounts that paid more than 2 percent, the end of rate increases means that’s as good as it will get. But people trying to whittle down a pile of credit card debt, thinking about tapping their home equity line of credit or buying a car should welcome the fact that the cost of those loans won’t keep rising.“Good afternoon. On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.” That was the start of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. “We need the freedom to operate on the ground and in the air.” It’s now America’s longest war. About 18 years. Yet few battles or notable events from Afghanistan have taken root in America’s collective memory. And that means fewer signposts to mark the long passage of time. But if we look at how long it took to reach seminal moments in other wars, it might bring America’s 17-year presence in Afghanistan into clear view. We’ll start with the Battle of Gettysburg. This bar represents the number of days the U.S. has been fighting in Afghanistan. The fighting at Gettysburg began 811 days into the Civil War. Many consider this the most important battle of the conflict. And it took place after half the war was fought. Now apply it to Afghanistan time. It would bring us to just Dec. 27, 2003. There were about 13,000 American troops in Afghanistan back then. That number would eventually peak at 100,000. “In England, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his deputy commanders chart the liberation of a lost continent.” Then there’s the Allied D-Day invasion at Normandy. One of the most iconic moments of World War II. The culmination of extensive planning in years of fighting in Northern Africa, Italy and elsewhere. That invasion began 913 days after America entered the war. In Afghanistan time, that brings us to just April 4, 2004. Hamid Karzai hadn’t even been elected as president of Afghanistan yet. And when World War II neared its end with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, that came after 1,339 days of battle. In Afghanistan time, that would reach to June 2005. Not even a quarter of the way through. Vietnam was America’s second-longest war. And the final pivotal moment was the fall of Saigon in April 1975. That occurred 3,706 days after U.S. Marines landed in Da Nang in 1965. And in a final comparison to Afghanistan time, that would bring us to Nov. 30, 2011. Osama bin Laden was killed about six months earlier. And President Obama had already announced plans to completely withdraw U.S. troops. He would later reverse that decision. The Obama and Trump administrations would unveil new strategies – continuing the fight, which goes on to this day.The phenomenon of so-called anchor babies has fueled criticism from advocates of tougher immigration laws who are concerned that foreign adults are using their children to secure permanent residency in the United States and from there, access to public benefits.
+The indictments include an array of charges, including visa fraud, wire fraud and identity theft, against owners of the birth-tourism agencies that are accused of enabling thousands of Chinese women to come explicitly to give birth to American children.
+“Statements by the operators of these birthing houses show contempt for the United States, while they were luring clients with the power and prestige of U.S. citizenship for their children,” Nick Hanna, United States attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “Some of the wealthy clients of these businesses also showed blatant contempt for the U.S. by ignoring court orders directing them to stay in the country to assist with the investigation, and by skipping out on their unpaid hospital bills.”
+There are no official figures for how many babies are delivered to tourists on American soil. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, puts the number at about 36,000 annually in a 2015 report.
+“The fact that we have no idea of the scale of birth tourism is a problem in and of itself,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the center in Washington. “We should not tolerate an entire industry that encourages people to come here for the sole purpose of having a child who leaves with a U.S. passport.”
+In recent years, the practice has prompted some lawmakers, who have opposed children of undocumented immigrants automatically becoming citizens, to propose repealing birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
+President Trump last year claimed erroneously that the United States is the “only country in the world” that automatically confers citizenship to anyone born in the country. In fact, it is one of at least 30 countries that do so.HOUSTON — For those of you keeping track of the “As Texas goes, so goes the nation” notion, I have either very good or very bad news.
+The state that gave you two recent mediocre-to-crummy Republican presidents (who are starting to look downright Lincolnesque compared to you-know-who), gerrymandering in the guise of redistricting (thanks a lot, Tom DeLay) and a profound if misguided antipathy to government in general is now surging ahead in a new field: voter suppression. As someone who loves Texas with a triple shot of ambivalence, I take no pleasure in spreading this news. But if it is your goal to keep people of color from the polls — some Republican leaders come to mind — it’s time once again to look to Texas for guidance.
+Our state officials in their infinite wisdom last week announced that they hoped to excise 95,000 people from voter rolls because they didn’t seem to be citizens. Our secretary of state, David Whitley, insisted that, with the help of the Department of Public Safety, he had been able to compile a list of those supposedly illegally registered. It was even suggested that 58,000 of those folks had actually already voted, a felony in these parts. This finding was heralded in a tweet by our attorney general, Ken Paxton, as an all-caps “Voter Fraud Alert.” Paxton, you may or may not know, is himself under indictment for securities fraud.
+The state, which as yet cannot take anyone off the voter rolls, turned to county officials, who can. They are supposed to hunt those miscreants down by sending notices demanding they appear at voter registrars’ offices with proof of citizenship (birth certificate, passport, etc.) within 30 days. Otherwise, they would be stricken from the rolls and, presumably, ICE would be pounding on their doors soon after.The 418 new accounts linked to Russia mimicked the behavior of the 3,843 accounts that were run by the I.R.A. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, said in the blog post that the company could not prove that the new accounts it discovered were run by the I.R.A.
+Though Twitter and Facebook announced their findings separately, the companies — both under pressure to crack down on disinformation on their services — collaborated on the investigation.
+The most successful and ambitious of the disinformation efforts detailed on Thursday was believed to be an Iranian-led campaign that used Facebook and Twitter to reach millions of people across dozens of countries.
+The Iranian campaign had sought to sway public discourse in countries across the Middle East, Europe and Asia, Twitter and Facebook said. Some of the social media accounts involved in the campaign had been active for over a decade. Facebook said it had removed 783 pages, groups and accounts with ties to Iran, while Twitter removed 2,617 Iranian-linked accounts.
+Facebook’s investigation focused on pages tied to Iran that in some cases were nearly nine years old. The page administrators and account owners claimed they were local and posted items on topics like Israeli-Palestinian relations and the conflicts in Syria and Yemen.
+The Iranian effort had a number of goals, according to the Atlantic Council’s DFR Lab, which studies disinformation. The Facebook pages “promoted or amplified views in line with Iranian government’s international stances,” wrote the DFR lab in its initial analysis. Researchers noticed that the content shared included a strong pro-Iranian government bias, as well as an effort to advance Iranian interests.
+In several examples viewed by the DFR lab, the campaign shared content as varied as pro-Palestinian images and conspiracy theory videos that argued the Sept. 11 attacks were an “inside job” executed by the government of the United States.If “Polar” were a teenager, it might be content to chug Mountain Dew while playing first-person shooter games and trolling innocents online. Unfortunately, “Polar” is a movie, and if it has any redeeming qualities, it chooses to keep them a secret.
+A particularly toxic brew of glibness and graphic violence, this Netflix throwaway, directed by the music video maestro Jonas Akerlund, stars the usually trustworthy Mads Mikkelsen as a notorious hit man, the Black Kaiser, who decides he is ready to retire and ruminate on his sins. His boss (a preening Matt Lucas) has other ideas. He sends a team of hot, hip young assassins to take down the Kaiser in his wintry Montana hide-out (and to torture as many people as they can along the way).Now the Supreme Court justices must block the law while we ask the court to review our case. The Supreme Court is not a legislature. The justices vowed, as nominees, to follow precedent, not upend it because one justice has retired and another taken his or her place. Even the dissenters in Whole Woman’s Health, who include Chief Justice John Roberts, are obliged now to follow and apply it.
+It’s also alarming that all that’s required for Roe v. Wade to be eroded and Whole Woman’s Health to be a dead letter is for the court to do nothing, creating an outcome that is unfaithful to existing law.
+This is likely not the last time the Supreme Court will be in this position. Lower courts around the country will consider , in the coming months, perhaps a record number of unconstitutional abortion restrictions, and if other courts go rogue, as the Fifth Circuit did here, the Supreme Court must intervene to preserve the rule of law.
+If the Supreme Court fails to do so in the Louisiana case, the consequences will be dire for women there. The state has just three clinics, down from 11 in 2000. If the law goes into effect, more will be forced to close because it's so difficult to secure admitting privileges . Close to 10,000 women seek abortions in Louisiana each year, and one or two doctors cannot care for all of them.
+Women who still have access to abortion services would face delays, be forced to travel long distances and have to endure other obstacles that could harm their health. Undoubtedly, some women will seek out unlicensed or unsafe abortions, or be compelled to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term. The hardships will be greatest for women in poverty, who already face the greatest barriers to access.
+So far this year, state legislators around the country have proposed more than 100 bills that would further restrict abortion. Anti-abortion politicians are hoping that the Supreme Court will stand by and let them legislate abortion out of reach — without the court ever having to reverse Roe v. Wade and related cases assuring access to abortion. That would be death to Roe by a thousand cuts.
+The rule of law is on the line, and so is the ability of women in Louisiana and beyond to make their own health decisions and control their own fate.
+This article has been updated to reflect news developments.NASHVILLE — Harold Bradley, who played on thousands of country, pop and rock ’n’ roll recordings, including landmark hits like Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry,” Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” died on Thursday in Nashville. He was 93.
+His death, at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, was confirmed by his daughter Beverly Bradley.
+Beginning in the 1940s, Mr. Bradley’s work on six-string bass and guitar was also featured on records by, among many others, Red Foley, Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, the Everly Brothers and Loretta Lynn.
+Mr. Bradley, known for his spare, soulful playing, also played banjo and other instruments. But according to Guitar Player magazine and other sources, he is among the most recorded guitarists in history.
+The younger brother of the pioneering record producer Owen Bradley, Mr. Bradley also served for decades as the de facto leader of Nashville’s A-Team, the elite circle of first-call session musicians immortalized in the Lovin’ Spoonful’s 1966 Top 10 hit “Nashville Cats.”And now, the Brazilian investors who backed the project are engulfed in a growing bribery scandal, and an international arrest warrant is expected to be issued for Mr. Figueiredo.
+The federal police in Brazil this week arrested 13 entrepreneurs and bank executives charged with diverting public pension funds into two commercial projects, including the former Trump hotel, in exchange for bribes and illegal commissions. The other project was a sprawling office building in Brasília.
+Investigators did not implicate the Trump Organization in the scheme.
+Authorities in Brazil said they are going to ask Interpol to issue an alert seeking the arrest of Mr. Figueiredo, who is now living in the United States.
+Trump Hotels withdrew from the project in December 2016, just weeks after federal prosecutors launched a criminal investigation into the funding scheme. Prosecutors in the capital, Brasília, began the probe in October 2016, after identifying large investments in the hotel made by two small public pension funds.
+At the time, the Trump Organization said it had pulled out because of delays in completing the 13-story, 171-room luxury property. The hotel opened in August 2016, in time for the Olympic Games, but before several floors and facilities had been finished, including a 4,000-square-foot nightclub.BARONE Her charisma certainly goes far, even if the banter pushed the evening to just over two and a half hours. And it made her all the more endearing that she wore reading glasses to read music from a stand, because, as she said, “Mother’s memory isn’t what it used to be.” But did you notice a disconnect between her ease speaking to the crowd and the palpable tension in the opening numbers, six Italian songs she assembled for a rough narrative about the arc of a relationship?
+WOOLFE I don’t like speculating about what artists are feeling, but I can imagine that, after so many years away, she was a little nervous, to say the least. So no, I didn’t think that opening set really bloomed vocally. Throughout the evening, actually, her breath wasn’t ample enough to fill out long phrases; her tone in the middle was a little grainy, the low register cloudy. But there was some big, velvety sound in what I’d call the upper-middle range, and wistful eloquence when she went soft. The traditional Irish songs were lovely; I think everyone got the poignancy of “The Kerry Dance,” “gone, like our youth, too soon.”
+BARONE Those four Irish tunes, delicately accompanied by the pianist Inseon Lee and the harpist Merynda Adams, were the highlight of the night, or at least when her allure as a recitalist was at its peak. Like a cabaret singer, she blended Irish-American family history and song — “The Kerry Dance” was even more moving because Ms. Millo said her mother used to sing it to her at night. In “Danny Boy,” her voice was raspy and not completely at ease in the lower range of the opening verse. But it blossomed, gloriously, into a moment out of Ms. Millo’s salad days, rising from a fine quiet into a lushly phrased climax: “I’ll be here in sunshine or in shadow.”The Knicks shook the N.B.A. on Thursday by abruptly cutting ties with Kristaps Porzingis, sending the player long billed as their 7-foot 3-inch savior to the Dallas Mavericks in a blockbuster trade that could make New York a major player in free agency this July.
+The deal, which was first disclosed by The New York Times, came one week before the N.B.A.’s trading deadline and changes the course of the Knicks’ franchise. Porzingis, Tim Hardaway Jr., Courtney Lee and Trey Burke have all been shipped to Dallas in exchange for the promising guard Dennis Smith Jr., who was a first-round draft pick in 2017, two future first-round picks and the expiring contracts of the veterans DeAndre Jordan and Wesley Matthews.
+Porzingis, who was increasingly unhappy about the Knicks’ constant losing and is scheduled to become a restricted free agent July 1, asked to be traded on Thursday, according to both a team statement and subsequent comments that Knicks President Steve Mills and General Manager Scott Perry made on a conference call Thursday evening.
+But the Knicks and the Mavericks were already far along in trade talks before Porzingis lodged that request, according to two people with knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.During the later part of his career, Michael Jackson faced several allegations that he molested young boys.
+The police investigated him in 1993. Another accusation led to a trial in 2005 that became a pop culture spectacle, complete with crowds of supporters waiting outside the courthouse. Jackson was acquitted and died four years later while preparing for a string of concert dates he hoped would revive his career.
+A new documentary, “Leaving Neverland,” has rekindled interest in the accusations. The film had its debut at the Sundance Film Festival and airs on HBO March 3 and 4.
+[Never miss a pop music story: Get our weekly newsletter, Louder.]
+The first accusation
+In August 1993, when Jackson was still a major star on the pop charts and touring to support his album “Dangerous,” the Los Angeles Police Department began investigating claims that Jackson had molested a 13-year-old boy. Executing search warrants for a condominium in Los Angeles and Jackson’s Neverland Ranch in Santa Barbara County, Calif., the police seized videotapes but found no incriminating evidence.To the Editor:
+Re “The Black History of the ‘Green Book,’” by Brent Staples (Editorial Observer, Jan. 28), about a Jim Crow-era guide to hotels and restaurants that welcomed African-Americans:
+Early one evening in April 1964, a traveling salesman checked in at the Downtowner Motor Inn in Greenville, S.C., where I worked part time while in college. Finding no local “approved” lodging for his driver listed in the Green Book, he asked where his driver could spend the night .
+In my naïveté, I said we had plenty of rooms to fill and that the driver could stay at the Downtowner, adding that it would be convenient for the driver and salesman to stay at the same hotel.
+A week later I was told that the salesman informed the hotel manager he would no longer stay there because he didn’t want to sleep where a driver would be welcome. Soon after, the manager’s handwritten note to desk clerks clearly indicated that drivers should be referred to other hotels.
+David Roberts
+Athens, Ga.
+To the Editor:
+In the early 1960s, before the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, I drove from my home in Houston to El Paso to attend an Army Reserve Officers two-week summer training camp at Fort Bliss. While there I met an African-American officer from Houston and we became friendly.Few first novelists have the kind of success Angie Thomas saw with “The Hate U Give,” which has spent 100 weeks on the Times Best-Seller list and been made into an equally acclaimed movie. Perhaps even fewer write a second novel that gets as many advance raves as Thomas’s “On the Come Up,” which will be published this month. It’s set in the same fictional community, Garden Heights, as “The Hate U Give,” but Thomas turns her attention away from Starr (the protagonist in her first novel) to the world of hip-hop, and Brianna, a talented teenager who lives and breathes it. I asked her to talk about how the book came into being. These are excerpts from our conversation.
+When did you start writing “On the Come Up”?
+Even before I wrote “The Hate U Give,” I knew I wanted to write a novel that paid homage to hip-hop. For me, as a teenager, hip-hop was how I saw myself when I didn’t see myself in books. And I could never seem to find books that gave hip-hop its due. A lot of times in Young Adult books, hip-hop is only used when the characters are at parties — otherwise they’re more into indie rock. But for so many kids, hip-hop is their music, hip-hop is their culture, it speaks to them when other things don’t. I mean, white suburban kids are the biggest consumers of hip-hop.
+[Read our review of “On the Come Up.”]
+I had this character, Bri, and I knew she had to be a rapper, but that’s all. I got the idea for the plot after “The Hate U Give,” when I began to deal with challenges to the novel, people trying to censor it. A police union in South Carolina spoke out against the book being on a summer reading list. The union was concerned that it created anti-police sentiments. And it was challenged by some school districts, because of the language. Of course, if they paid attention to what their students were saying in the hallways they would hear many more f-bombs than I could ever write. I knew it wasn’t really about the language, it was the subject matter.
+So when I was dealing with my own censorship, I thought of the rappers who had meant so much to me, like Tupac, Biggie, Lauryn Hill and Nas, and how they went through it. I was raised knowing that when hip-hop spoke up, it was always challenged. So often when rappers speak, they’re criticized for how they do it, as opposed to what they actually say.H. Lawrence Culp Jr., General Electric’s new chief executive, faces two major tasks.
+Mr. Culp must fix G.E.’s big yet ailing power-generation business, a turnaround project that will take a few years. More immediately, he needs to sell assets and trim costs to generate enough cash to stabilize the company as a whole.
+The fourth-quarter results that G.E. reported on Thursday pointed to the depth of those challenges, despite a strong performance by the company’s jet engine business.
+Mr. Culp, who became chief executive in October, made a guardedly optimistic case for how G.E. can whittle down its $121 billion debt while improving the profitability of its industrial operations.
+Still, G.E. made no forecast for what its profits and revenue would look like this year, saying those would come later. In a conference call, Mr. Culp acknowledged that 2019 was “still very much a work in progress.”The Green Bay Packers created a McVay coaching tree, of sorts, by hiring his former offensive coordinator, Matt LaFleur, who is 39, to be their head coach. The Cleveland Browns hired Freddie Kitchens, a 44-year-old offensive guru, to lead their staff. And in an extreme example of McVay mania, the Arizona Cardinals’ website, in its official announcement about the hiring of the 39-year-old Kliff Kingsbury as the team’s new head coach, noted that Kingsbury was friends with McVay.
+That the two had never coached together seemed not to matter, though after some blowback, the team amended the announcement to remove the part about their friendship while still noting that McVay is a young “offensive genius who has become the blueprint of many of the new coaching hires around the N.F.L.” and had recently offered Kingsbury a chance to join the Rams as an offensive consultant.
+“It’s certainly humbling and flattering,” McVay said of the hiring trend, “but I think more than anything it’s a reflection of the success the Rams have had.”
+In the end, teams may discover that replicating McVay will be difficult.
+Young, offensive-minded coaches are “the vogue thing right now,” said Brian Billick, the former Baltimore Ravens coach. “Some will be successful, and some won’t. Eighty percent will probably fail.”
+Very few coaches have engineered the kind of turnaround that the Rams have made in two seasons under McVay, who, despite having coached in the N.F.L. since 2008, is younger than one of his players, and two of the Patriots.Who is Bombalurina?
+The “MEET THE CATS” section of the musical’s website lists her skill(s) as “Flirting.” Descriptions from casting calls collected on the musical’s Fandom page repeatedly describe Bombalurina as a “strong” singer and dancer, “sexy,” “fun,” and “tall,” which Ms. Swift absolutely is (she is 5’10”). Bombalurina is named, but not described, in the book of poems by T.S. Eliot on which the musical is based.
+Would you like to read an essentially random list of personalities and names a man ascribed to imaginary cats nearly 100 years ago and are you Canadian? If yes to both, the text of “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” is part of the public domain in Canada.
+The verses were originally composed to entertain Mr. Eliot’s godchildren. (Despite having no particular plot and containing many nonsensical lines, they still convey a marked distaste for Chinese people — “heathen” being among the kinder descriptors deployed. In one poem, a pirate cat is described as having vowed “his hatred” to “cats of foreign race.” He is eventually killed by a “horde” of cats referred to in the original text by a baldfaced Asian slur, replaced in the musical by “Siamese.”)
+Mr. Eliot’s widow, Valerie, gave Mr. Lloyd Webber permission to adapt the work on the condition that the meandering poems serve as lyrics, rather than a mere jumping-off point for a conventionally plotted musical script. In 2012, The New York Post estimated that “Cats” had earned the Eliot estate “nearly $100 million.” (Worldwide, the musical has earned billions.)
+Valerie Eliot married her husband in 1956, when he was 65 and she was 30. Previously, she was his secretary. She had, in fact, become a secretary so that she could be his secretary. Her obituary in The Guardian recounted a story that, as a schoolgirl, she “told her head teacher that she knew precisely what she wanted to become: secretary to T.S. Eliot.” Before becoming Mr. Eliot’s secretary, she did occasional secretarial work for Dylan Thomas who, according to a volume of Mr. Eliot’s letters Valerie edited, once, before visiting Mr. Eliot, asked her “What is it worth to you if I push his secretary down the stairs?” As the executor of her husband’s estate, Valerie claimed copyright on the private diaries of his first wife, Vivienne, who died in a private asylum, in 1947. Accounts differ on whether her husband or Vivienne’s brother had her committed.
+The role of Rum Tum Tugger will be played by Jason Derulo.BEIRUT, Lebanon — As families have made the long, frozen, sometimes barefoot trek out of the last shards of Islamic State territory to a refugee camp in northeastern Syria over the past two months, at least 29 children and infants among them have died before reaching help, mainly from hypothermia, the World Health Organization said on Thursday.
+At least 18 of them died over the past week, it said, a toll that added to the hundreds of thousands killed over the course of Syria’s civil war, now approaching its eighth year. Millions of people have been displaced, and thousands continue to flee the violence, across distances full of their own dangers.
+About 23,000 people have arrived at a refugee camp in the Hasakah region of Syria over the last eight weeks, mostly women and children fleeing the battle to oust the Islamic State from nearby Deir al-Zour province, the W.H.O. said.One of our recommended titles this week — “Aristotle’s Way,” by Edith Hall — posits that the path to happiness lies through moderation in all things. We like to think that Aristotle would have made an exception for reading. Here, then, are 10 books for our fellow obsessives, from an expansive Native American history to a slim novel about a son’s suicide to a memoir of obesity and weight loss, and more. Live moderately, read excessively.
+Gregory Cowles
+Senior Editor, Books
+THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America, by Tommy Tomlinson. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) A few years ago, Tomlinson topped out at 460 pounds. He was the biggest person, he writes, that most people who knew him had ever met. “The Elephant in the Room” runs on two tracks. In the first, Tomlinson tells us, in something like real time, about the year he tried to lose weight. The second track is an affecting memoir. “I loved this book,” our critic Dwight Garner writes. “His clean and witty and punchy sentences, his smarts and his middle-class sensibility made me yearn for the kind of down-to-earth columnist I often read in the 1980s and 1990s but barely seems to exist any longer.”
+THE WORLD ACCORDING TO FANNIE DAVIS: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers, by Bridgett M. Davis. (Little, Brown, $28.) Davis’s memoir honors her remarkable mother, who made a good life for her family in the ’60s and ’70s by running an underground numbers gambling operation out of her Detroit home. Fannie wanted her family to make full use of the opportunities that her profits made possible, but the source of those profits had to stay hidden. This book is “a daughter’s gesture of loving defiance, an act of reclamation, an absorbing portrait of her mother in full,” our critic Jennifer Szalai writes.
+WHERE REASONS END, by Yiyun Li. (Random House, $25.) In the months after her 16-year-old son killed himself in 2017, Li began writing this new novel. It imagines a dialogue between a mother and her teenage son after he has been lost to suicide. “At first glance, this book seems constructed of very cerebral debates between mother and son,” our critic Parul Sehgal writes. “But the arguments in the novel never build. They eddy. As the title alerts us, this book takes place in a territory beyond reason, in all its connotations — beyond explanation or understanding.”Below, we’ve chosen the best prompts — those that ask the most relevant questions and link to the richest Times materials — from our Student Opinion collection that address every stage of life, from coming-of-age and wrestling with one’s identity to understanding one’s role in a family; making friends; getting an education; falling in love; working; and experiencing old age. We hope they can provide jumping-off points for discussion and writing, and inspiration for further reading.
+Most teachers know that our Student Opinion questions are free and outside The Times’s digital subscription service, but what you may not realize is that if you access the Times articles we link to from those questions via our site, the articles are also free. So in this list we hope we’re not just suggesting 100-plus interesting questions, we hope we’ve also helped you find 100-plus great works of nonfiction that can speak to the literature your students are reading.
+So whether you’re taking on classic works like “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Romeo and Juliet” or “1984,” or whether you’re teaching more contemporary literature like “The Poet X,” “Speak,” “Refugee” or “There There,” we hope there are more than a few items on this list that will resonate.
+Please note: All our recent questions, from late 2016 on, are still open to comment on our site. While questions published on an older version of The Learning Network are no longer open to comment, both the questions and the related Times materials are still available via the link.“My name is Catherine Hardwicke. I’m the director of “Miss Bala.” In this scene, Gloria, played by Gina Rodriguez, is captured by a cartel. And right now, she finds out that they’re going to check the phones, because they suspect that there’s a mole in the operation. And in fact, they take her phone, and she does have a chip from the DEA in her phone. So her goal is now how to get my chip out of the phone before they find it and kill me. She’s in this beautiful villa, which is out in the Valle de Guadalupe, the wine country in Baja. And it’s stunning architecture designed by a Tijuana architect. We loved that it was this luxurious, beautiful surroundings for such a terrifying situation to be trapped in. Gina, we liked to film her with close, handheld shots, where you could be close to her face in this anamorphic lens, where you could really feel what she was feeling, but you could also see the environment around her, too, by having that wide scope. So you could kind of see both. And she’s trying to decide, what do I do? How can I outsmart these guys, this crew? And we had a great composer, Alex Heffes, that was helping us increase the tension, amp up the tension, by having that rhythmic heartbeat throughout the score.” [tense music playing] “And also, you feel the spirit of her invention and her ideas and her courage to keep going, don’t be defeated, focus on the problem. And we really wanted you to feel through the music, through the cinematography, through the handheld cinematography at this moment in the movie what kind of a panic state she’s feeling and how she’s trying to stay calm enough to mechanically open up these phones, be smart about what she does, and put them back properly so that it looks exactly like no one has tampered with the phone. So I, at many times, was standing there in Gina’s ear. They’re coming up! You hear voices right outside — just keeping her amped up. And then, of course, the actors outside were doing the same thing too, with their yelling, with the tension. Because they were really very close to her. Now, at the same time, I was trying to talk to a bunch of tough guys, telling them how to put out the fire. They didn’t even know what to do. I was like, well, why don’t you swat the flames with a dish towel or something? So there was kind of a lot of comedy at the same time. But the tension was there for Gloria. She had to figure out a way to cover for where she was at the time and get away with it so that nobody suspected her.” “Where were you? What were you doing?” “I was just in the bathroom.”“My name is Catherine Hardwicke. I’m the director of “Miss Bala.” In this scene, Gloria, played by Gina Rodriguez, is captured by a cartel. And right now, she finds out that they’re going to check the phones, because they suspect that there’s a mole in the operation. And in fact, they take her phone, and she does have a chip from the DEA in her phone. So her goal is now how to get my chip out of the phone before they find it and kill me. She’s in this beautiful villa, which is out in the Valle de Guadalupe, the wine country in Baja. And it’s stunning architecture designed by a Tijuana architect. We loved that it was this luxurious, beautiful surroundings for such a terrifying situation to be trapped in. Gina, we liked to film her with close, handheld shots, where you could be close to her face in this anamorphic lens, where you could really feel what she was feeling, but you could also see the environment around her, too, by having that wide scope. So you could kind of see both. And she’s trying to decide, what do I do? How can I outsmart these guys, this crew? And we had a great composer, Alex Heffes, that was helping us increase the tension, amp up the tension, by having that rhythmic heartbeat throughout the score.” [tense music playing] “And also, you feel the spirit of her invention and her ideas and her courage to keep going, don’t be defeated, focus on the problem. And we really wanted you to feel through the music, through the cinematography, through the handheld cinematography at this moment in the movie what kind of a panic state she’s feeling and how she’s trying to stay calm enough to mechanically open up these phones, be smart about what she does, and put them back properly so that it looks exactly like no one has tampered with the phone. So I, at many times, was standing there in Gina’s ear. They’re coming up! You hear voices right outside — just keeping her amped up. And then, of course, the actors outside were doing the same thing too, with their yelling, with the tension. Because they were really very close to her. Now, at the same time, I was trying to talk to a bunch of tough guys, telling them how to put out the fire. They didn’t even know what to do. I was like, well, why don’t you swat the flames with a dish towel or something? So there was kind of a lot of comedy at the same time. But the tension was there for Gloria. She had to figure out a way to cover for where she was at the time and get away with it so that nobody suspected her.” “Where were you? What were you doing?” “I was just in the bathroom.”[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
+HIBERNATORS WEEKEND at Wave Hill (Feb. 2-3, 10 a.m.-3 p.m.). While some will celebrate the awakening of groundhogs this weekend, this public garden in the Riverdale section of the Bronx will also salute the many animal species that are snoozing steadily until spring. This annual event particularly encourages little Homo sapiens to come dressed in their pajamas, ready to frolic as well as relax. The children can take part in a family art project to make animal masks — of bears, toads, groundhogs or a creature of their choosing — and curl up in a hibernators den offering books, puzzles, puppets and hot chocolate. On Saturday only, Volunteers for Wildlife will host “To Sleep or Not to Sleep,” a nature presentation for those 8 and older that will discuss how local amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds survive the winter. (Attendees will meet some live creatures.) And on Sunday only, young visitors will have two opportunities to don their masks and learn to waltz at a Hibernators Ball, where Jody Kruskal and Friends will provide the music. (A full schedule is on the website.)
+718-549-3200, wavehill.org
+JUST KIDDING: ‘THE GUSTAFER YELLOWGOLD SHOW’ at Symphony Space (Feb. 2, 11 a.m.). Gustafer Yellowgold is one hot dude. A creature born on the sun and now living in Minnesota, he may be the most child-friendly alien since E.T. The invention of Morgan Taylor, an artist, musician and singer-songwriter, Gustafer has been entertaining young audiences since 2005 in multimedia shows that combine Taylor’s original songs, stories and hand-drawn color animations. This performance, which will also feature a live band, will present an abridged version of Taylor’s recent audiobook, “I’m From the Sun: The Gustafer Yellowgold Story,” as well as older folk-flavored tunes starring his space-traveling hero.
+212-864-5400, symphonyspace.org
+‘GIOACHINO ROSSINI! STORIES THAT SING’ at the Kaye Playhouse (Feb. 2, 10 and 11:30 a.m.; Feb. 3, 10 and 11:30 a.m. and 1 p.m.). “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!” Children may have heard that musical bit in cartoons, but they will learn about its true operatic origins in this program, part of the LOS Kids series from the Little Orchestra Society. Geared toward ages 3 to 10, the concert will introduce both Figaro, the clever wingman and titular character of “The Barber of Seville,” and Rossini himself, the composer of that work and many others, who will appear in the form of a costumed actor. Written by Craig Shemin, an alumnus of the Jim Henson Company, with music conducted by James Judd, the interactive presentation will also include excerpts from “William Tell” and “The Thieving Magpie.”
+212-971-9500, littleorchestra.org
+‘THE STINKY CHEESE MAN AND OTHER FAIRLY STUPID TALES’ at the Borough of Manhattan Community College Tribeca Performing Arts Center (Feb. 3, 11 a.m.). Based on the popular fairy tale satire written by Jon Scieszka and illustrated by Lane Smith, this family theater production portrays the hero of “Jack and the Beanstalk” as a kind of latter-day Scheherazade. When Jack can’t escape the pursuing giant by chopping down the beanstalk fast enough, the boy tries to keep himself from being eaten by diverting the ogre with ever-more-fantastical stories. Jack’s jumbled versions of well-known narratives include “Little Red Running Shorts” and an encounter between Goldilocks and three elephants. And don’t forget that smelly cheese guy.
+212-220-1460, tribecapac.org[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
+IN-PERSON REENACTMENT at Anthology Film Archives (Feb. 1-13). Last year the Quad held a retrospective of films in which real-life figures, from the Beatles to John Malkovich, played themselves. This unrelated series explores similar terrain, highlighting films that blur the line between candid realism and self-dramatization. Two of them star Muhammad Ali: the documentary “Muhammad Ali, The Greatest” and the biopic “The Greatest,” both showing on Saturday and Feb. 13. In “Man of Aran” (on Sunday and Feb. 10, with “Four Men on a Raft,” a reconstructed segment from Orson Welles’s uncompleted “It’s All True”), Robert Flaherty, one of cinema’s original “nonfiction” fabulists, assembled a fake family on the Aran Islands in Ireland and filmed them hunting basking sharks, as if it were part of their daily lives. (In reality, the custom had been obsolete for generations.) Somehow, it’s still some of the most stunning footage ever filmed.
+212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org
+YORGOS LANTHIMOS at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (Feb. 1-5). Now that Lanthimos’s topsy-turvy palace-intrigue comedy “The Favourite” (on Monday) has tied “Roma” for the most Oscar nominations for 2018, the time is ripe to revisit the Greek auteur’s earlier work — to get a sense of just how weird the idea of “Academy Award nominee Yorgos Lanthimos” really is. All six of his features will screen, including his breakthrough, “Dogtooth” (on Saturday and Tuesday), which brought him international attention after winning a prize at Cannes, and “Kinetta” (on Friday and Sunday), the seldom-shown film that preceded it.
+212-875-5601, filmlinc.orgOur guide to pop and rock shows and the best of live jazz happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+Pop & Rock
+AMEN DUNES at Warsaw (Feb. 1, 9 p.m.). To rehash bluesy rock in a way that’s genuinely compelling is a serious challenge, but Damon McMahon, frontman of Amen Dunes, has found his own way down that oft-trodden path. Especially on the band’s latest album, “Freedom,” there’s a refreshing restraint to their work, stripping away most of rock’s maximalism in favor of gentle, reverb-laden riffs that spotlight McMahon’s distinctive, ever-so-slightly wavering voice. The result is pleasant, mild chaos with enough familiar sounds to be an easy listen. The electronic artist Arthur opens.
+212-777-6800, mercuryeastpresents.com/warsawconcerts
+TONI BRAXTON at Kings Theater (Feb. 7, 8 p.m.). This R&B titan takes over the cavernous theater in Flatbush, Brooklyn, for a show that has long been sold out (though tickets are available via resellers). Braxton specializes in dramatic, emotional epics, songs that are practically operatic in scope; her most enduring hit is “Un-Break My Heart,” a sweeping power ballad. Most remarkable, though, is that Braxton’s style has remained constant in spite of shifting R&B trends. Her 2018 album “Sex & Cigarettes,” a collection of cathartic, unrelenting songs about infidelity, earned three Grammy nominations. The trio SWV, responsible for chart toppers such as “Weak” and “Right Here,” will also perform.
+718-856-5464, kingstheatre.com
+ESTELLE at Baby’s All Right (Feb. 6, 8 p.m.). This British singer’s 2008 major-label debut is best known for its smash hit “American Boy,” which features Kanye West as her raffish suitor. The release had another minor hit, though: “Come Over,” a pop-reggae song featuring Sean Paul. Estelle, whose father is from Grenada, revisited reggae and dancehall on her most recent record, 2018’s “Lover’s Rock” — a tribute to the buoyant, romantic British reggae subgenre that goes by the same name. The album, released on the legendary reggae label VP Records, features heavy hitters including Chronixx, Tarrus Riley and Konshens.
+718-599-5800, babysallright.comOur guide to stand-up, improv and variety shows happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+BUTTERSCOTCH at Greene Grape Annex (Feb. 7, 7:30 p.m.). Courtney Fearrington and Maria Heinegg host a stand-up showcase every first and third Thursday in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. This week, they not only present comedy from Shalewa Sharpe, Rosebud Baker, Aminah Imani, Raj Sivaraman, Mike Recine and Emmy Blotnick; they also ask you to bring donations of coats, gloves, hats and boots for the ICL coat drive.
+718-858-4791, greenegrape.com/events
+HER-ICANE: ALL FEMALE-IDENTIFYING STAND-UP COMEDY FOR DISASTER RELIEF at Union Hall (Feb. 2, 10 p.m.). Hosted by Kate Villa and Jenny Gorelick, this monthly showcase raises money for relief efforts while also celebrating women in comedy. The proceeds from this show will go to the California Community Foundation’s Wildfire Relief Fund. Carmen Lynch and Marcia Belsky will perform.
+718-638-4400, unionhallny.comOur guide to the city’s best classical music and opera happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+BEHZOD ABDURAIMOV at the 92nd Street Y (Feb. 2, 8 p.m.). This young, unshowy, but mightily effective pianist performs Liszt’s Piano Sonata; the same composer’s gloss on the end of Wagner’s “Tristan,” “Isoldes Liebestod”; and Prokofiev’s transcriptions of numbers from his ballet “Romeo and Juliet.”
+212-415-5500, 92y.org
+JEREMY DENK at Carnegie Hall (Feb. 1, 8 p.m.). Denk is as good a writer as he is a pianist, and his recitals often have an elegant, literary quality to them, teasing out connections, taking them in new directions, arriving somewhere one never quite expected. So it is here, with a program full of sets of variations, of homages, of reflections. One is found in John Adams’s “I Still Play,” a miniature tribute to the record producer Bob Hurwitz, and itself a nod to Hurwitz’s love of Bach. But Beethoven dominates, represented by the “Five Variations on ‘Rule Britannia’” and the “Eroica Variations,” as well as by his influence over Mendelssohn’s “Variations Sérieuses” and Schumann’s Fantasy in C.
+212-247-7800, carnegiehall.orgOur guide to dance performances happening this weekend and in the week ahead.
+ASASE YAA AFRICAN AMERICAN DANCE THEATER at Symphony Space (Feb. 2, 7:30 p.m.). Since 2001, this Brooklyn-based company — named after the earth goddess of the Ashanti in West Africa — has been sharing the traditions of African dance and drumming. For one night only, Asase Yaa presents “Drum Love,” choreographed by its founder and artistic director, Yao Ababio. The work relays the story of a young girl who ventures into the city where she winds up alone and pregnant. Ultimately, she finds love and support from her friends and family. However serious that story may seem, expect exuberant song and dance to have the final word.
+212-864-5400, symphonyspace.org
+CAMILLE A. BROWN & DANCERS at the Joyce Theater (Feb. 5-6, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 7-9, 8 p.m.; through Feb. 10). In 2012’s “Mr. Tol E. Rance,” Brown dissected historical and modern-day minstrelsy; in 2015’s “Black Girl: Linguistic Play,” she used childhood games to celebrate the camaraderie of black women. Her latest work, “Ink,” which had its premiere in 2017 at the Kennedy Center and now comes to the Joyce, completes her trilogy on black identity. Using a mix of blues, hip-hop, jazz and swing music, a broad spectrum of movement from African to tap to modern dance, and her talent for shaping compelling characters in rich theatrical worlds, Brown links past to present with a powerful meditation on communal strength.
+212-242-0800, joyce.org
+FRIDAYS AT NOON at the 92nd Street Y (Feb. 1, noon). More than 60 years ago, a 27-year-old Alvin Ailey and his new dance company made its debut at the 92Y, where they performed a sensual work called “Blues Suite.” In honor of the company’s anniversary and the beginning of Black History Month, Ailey II, the troupe’s junior wing, performs an excerpt from that work, along with sections from the Ailey classics “The Lark Ascending” (1972), “Hidden Rites” (1973), “Isba” (1983) and the enduring, ever-popular “Revelations” (1960). Sylvia Waters, who led Ailey II from its founding in 1974 until 2012, will have a conversation with Troy Powell, its current director.
+212-415-5500, 92y.org‘CONSTANTIN BRANCUSI SCULPTURE: THE FILMS’ at the Museum of Modern Art (through Feb. 18). This show is built around works by the Romanian modernist (1876-1957) that have been longtime highlights of the museum’s own collection. But these days, can Brancusi still release our inner poet? The answer may lie in paying less attention to the sculptures themselves and more to Brancusi’s little-known and quite amazing films, projected at the entrance to the gallery throughout the duration of the exhibition. MoMA borrowed the series of video clips from the Pompidou Center in Paris. They give the feeling that Brancusi was less interested in making fancy museum objects than in putting new kinds of almost-living things into the world, and they convey the vital energy his sculptures were meant to capture. (Blake Gopnik)
+212-708-9400, moma.org
+‘ROCHELLE FEINSTEIN: IMAGE OF AN IMAGE’ at the Bronx Museum of the Arts (through March 3). In her career survey, this wisecracking Bronx native proves that she can do just about anything with painting. She can chronicle history or tell a joke. She can alchemize linen, photographs, newspapers, cardboard and photocopies into art. She can teach you something about looking and life. A whiz with color, she sprays and squeezes paint, and stains with it. Several works feel like odes to color charts or to the color theory art students learn in school. A morbid strain runs through other works as Feinstein grapples with and battles the forces trying to shut down painting in favor of other media. (Martha Schwendener)
+718-681-6000, bronxmuseum.org
+‘LUCIO FONTANA: ON THE THRESHOLD’ at the Met Breuer (through April 14). The art of this Argentine-Italian modernist looks a bit like it comes from another planet, and it might as well, given how seldom we see it in New York. The Met Breuer show, with single environments at the Met Fifth Avenue and El Museo del Barrio, is the artist’s first museum survey here in over 40 years. This wouldn’t be especially notable — plenty of his Latin American peers never get seen at all — were Fontana, who died in 1968, not so influential a figure. The “threshold” in the title refers not only to the early phase of his career, which the Met Breuer show highlights, but also to his position as a forebear of contemporary art as we know it. Things we take for granted — installation, new media and the poly-disciplinary impulse that defines so many 21st-century careers — Fontana pioneered in the 1950s. (Holland Cotter)
+212-535-7710, metmuseum.org
+‘THE JIM HENSON EXHIBITION’ at the Museum of the Moving Image. The rainbow connection has been established in Astoria, Queens, where this museum has opened a new permanent wing devoted to the career of America’s great puppeteer, who was born in Mississippi in 1936 and died, too young, in 1990. Henson began presenting the short TV program “Sam and Friends” before he was out of his teens; one of its characters, the soft-faced Kermit, was fashioned from his mother’s old coat and would not mature into a frog for more than a decade. The influence of early variety television, with its succession of skits and songs, runs through “Sesame Street” and “The Muppet Show,” though Henson also spent the late 1960s crafting peace-and-love documentaries and prototyping a psychedelic nightclub. Young visitors will delight in seeing Big Bird, Elmo, Miss Piggy and the Swedish Chef; adults can dig deep into sketches and storyboards and rediscover some old friends. (Farago)
+718-784-0077, movingimage.usOur guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.
+Previews and Openings
+‘BOESMAN AND LENA’ at the Pershing Square Signature Center (previews start on Feb. 5; opens on Feb. 25). A man and a woman, tramping from shantytown to shantytown, have arrived back in New York. As part of the Athol Fugard residency, the Signature revives this 1969 play, and though it’s set specifically during the apartheid era, it also speaks to a more universal sense of displacement. Yaël Farber directs a cast that includes Zainab Jah and Sahr Ngaujah.
+212-244-7529, signaturetheatre.org
+‘CALL ME MADAM’ at New York City Center (performances start on Feb. 6). This 1950 Irving Berlin musical imagines a gentler world in which the worst the State Department has to contend with are finicky matters of protocol and a few inconvenient love affairs. Encores! revives this ambassadorial gem, starring Carmen Cusack, Ben Davis, Jason Gotay and Lauren Worsham.
+212-581-1212, nycitycenter.orgFive days after Christmas, the Danish designer Cecilie Bahnsen stood in her serenely decorated basement studio in Osterbro, a leafy residential neighborhood in eastern Copenhagen, with one of her team members. They considered all of the work that still needed to be done for her fall 2019 runway collection, her fifth to date, which was showing in a month. She had an idea, but it had not yet translated into a single garment. “Something interesting often arises from situations where you feel cornered or under pressure. It adds a dynamic that you can’t create on your own,” she reflected recently, as she walked through her narrow studio on a misty January afternoon. Her pace seemed surprisingly calm for a designer who was 72 hours out from her show. “It actually hasn’t been that hectic this time around, compared to the first couple of shows that we did,” she added.
+When Bahnsen, 34, presented her first runway collection of gauzy ruffled pieces, in the Copenhagen Opera House in February 2017, the interest from buyers was immediate and widespread, and not long after she was shortlisted for the LVMH Prize. Her brand has introduced a new ethos to Scandinavian women’s wear, offering pieces that are both unabashedly romantic and exquisitely finished but also relatively straightforward in their shapes. Last year, facilitated by a growing demand for her pieces, she grew her team from one to five full-time employees, allowing her to focus on what she does best — design — while expanding the operations side of the company. Now, her collections can be found at over 60 retailers worldwide, including Selfridges in London and Dover Street Market, whose New York location will host an installation by Bahnsen next week.The Italian economy shrank 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 compared with the third quarter, Istat, the Italian statistics agency, said. It was the second quarter in a row of declining output and that, by one common definition, means a recession. It is Italy’s third since 2008.
+Growth in the eurozone itself was just 0.2 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the third quarter, the European Union statistics agency said. That rate matched the previous quarter’s, and anemic as it is, it might have been worse but for Spain and France. Spain’s economy grew at an unexpectedly strong clip, rising 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the third. And in France, where the government has been struggling with mass public protests over economic duress, growth hit 0.3 percent.
+Economists agree with Mr. Conte on one point — that China’s woes are weighing on Europe.
+During the last decade, Europe profited from China’s push to modernize its infrastructure. China equals the United States as a customer for heavy-duty German machinery, like cranes, textile machines or equipment for steel mills, and companies like Volkswagen have made the country a priority.
+“It’s our biggest market,” said Ralph Wiechers, chief economist at the Mechanical Engineering Industry Association, which represents German machine manufacturers. “We still have growth, but we are noticing a lack of momentum.”
+Critics of the Italian government blame its economic policies at home for its performance. Economists say the populist alliance has sowed uncertainty, prompting many Italians to spend less. A decline in consumer spending was a major culprit in the economy’s setback.
+Carlo Cottarelli, a former director of the International Monetary Fund who led a spending review of the previous Italian government, reviewed the statistics on Thursday and said the alliance, in power since June, was responsible for Italy’s slide. “This recession here, it can’t be the fault of the previous government,” he told a radio station in Padua.Jean Guillou, a French organ master whose modern-sounding compositions, unusual transcriptions and idiosyncratic performances challenged centuries of tradition and were preserved on more than 100 recordings, died on Jan. 26 in Paris. He was 88.
+His death was announced by his music publisher, Schott Music.
+Mr. Guillou (pronounced ghee-YOU) never lost the capacity to shock in a career of nearly eight decades, from his beginnings as a church organist while still a child through the half-century he spent in one of the most important organ posts in France, at the church of St. Eustache in Paris.
+He bucked performance traditions; transcribed music by composers who could seem an odd fit for the organ (including Stravinsky, who had dismissed the organ by saying that “the monster never breathes”); wrote ambitious organ works in his own idiom; and helped design new organs that challenged conceptions of how the instrument should look and sound.“My father said, during all the years I lived with him, that I was the ugliest boy he had ever seen, and I had absolutely no reason to doubt him.” So wrote James Baldwin in 1976, and he repeated his father’s words often. He did have reason to doubt them though. They didn’t jibe with my impression of the writer’s appearance as taken from a photograph on the cover of the 1955 paperback edition of “Notes of a Native Son,” which I owned and treasured when I was a teenager, and a copy of which you’ll find on display toward the start of the exhibition “God Made My Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin” at David Zwirner.
+I would have first seen that photo at some point in the early 1960s. Baldwin was African-American; I was a white kid in the process of working my way through the sociopolitical dynamics of all that through reading him. What I mainly saw in the photo, though, was a young man, slope-shouldered in a floppy sweater, looking warily self-contained, and emphatically un-butch. I could relate.
+As a young person, I was a constant, precocious reader, as he had been — binging on Dickens at 11, Shakespeare at 12; that kind of thing. My wonkishness led me to make older friends; as a high school freshman I hung out with juniors and seniors, who would pass on literary contraband. And in, I think, 1962, one good friend, Nina Angelo, gave me a copy of Baldwin’s novel “Giovanni’s Room,” which had openly homosexual characters.A federal court has held Syria’s government liable for the targeting and killing of an American journalist as she reported on the shelling of a rebellious area of Homs in 2012. The decision could help ease the way for war-crimes prosecutions arising from the Syria conflict.
+Issued by the United States District Court in Washington, the decision awarded $302.5 million to relatives of the journalist, Marie Colvin. Of that sum, $300 million is punitive damages for what Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her ruling, called “Syria’s longstanding policy of violence” that aimed “to intimidate journalists” and “suppress dissent.”
+“Our hope is that this case in some ways will provide a blueprint for future cases against the regime” led by President Bashar al-Assad, said Scott Gilmore, a lawyer for the Colvins, after Judge Jackson’s ruling was issued on Tuesday.
+Collecting the money will be an arduous effort that, at best, will take years, Mr. Gilmore said. But more significant, he said, the ruling was the first time a court had held the Syrian government responsible for an atrocity from a war convulsing the country for nearly eight years.Margo Rodriguez, half of the husband-and-wife team Augie and Margo, who danced the mambo on television and before presidents and helped it evolve from a nightclub craze into popular entertainment, died on Tuesday in West Palm Beach, Fla. She was 89.
+Her son, Richard, said the cause was pneumonia.
+Augie and Margo’s dance career took shape at the Palladium Ballroom, a haven for Latin music in Midtown Manhattan, where they often danced to the music of Tito Puente and his orchestra.
+In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s Augie and Margo were among mambo’s best-known ambassadors, dancing on concert stages, on television and in nightclubs around the world. They appeared repeatedly on “The Steve Allen Show,” “The Arthur Murray Party” and “The Ed Sullivan Show” and opened for entertainers like Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in Las Vegas.
+At the height of their fame, they danced in London for Queen Elizabeth II and at the White House for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon.WASHINGTON — Sexual assaults at three American military academies rose sharply over the last two years, according to a Pentagon study released on Thursday, an increase that defied efforts to address a problem that has long plagued the military.
+An anonymous Defense Department survey found that the number of unreported sexual assaults surged by nearly 50 percent — to 747 during the 2017-18 academic year, compared with 507 in 2015-16. The Pentagon is required by Congress to conduct the survey every two years at the United States Military Academy at West Point, the United States Naval Academy and the United States Air Force Academy.
+Among reported cases of unwanted sexual contact, which runs the gamut from groping to rape, the number rose only slightly. The study reported 117 episodes during the 2017-18 academic year, up from 112 the year before.
+“We are disheartened that the strategies we have employed have not achieved the results we had intended,” said Elizabeth Van Winkle, executive director of one of the Pentagon offices that looks into sexual assault.1. In an exclusive wide-ranging interview, President Trump said he will proceed on a border wall without lawmakers and dismissed any suggestions of wrongdoing in investigations that have consumed his presidency.
+Mr. Trump called the current negotiations over the wall “a waste of time” and indicated he will likely take action on his own when they end in two weeks: “I’ve set the table. I’ve set the stage for doing what I’m going to do.”
+On the topic of China, he expressed optimism at reaching a trade deal. And he denied being at odds with his intelligence chiefs, just a day after calling them “naive” on Twitter.The Labor Department did revise downward its estimate of December hiring by 90,000 jobs, an unusually large adjustment. But the strong growth in January, combined with upward revisions to earlier months, meant that the pace of hiring, averaged over six months, actually rose.
+That combination of strong hiring and modest wage gains has put the economy on a strong, sustainable footing. More jobs means more income for consumers, which leads to more spending, and in turn more hiring.
+“The virtuous cycle continues,” said Michael Gapen , chief United States economist for Barclays. “What’s kept this recovery going, what’s kept the U.S. economy so resilient to all the things that have clouded the outlook, is a virtuous cycle of a continuously growing U.S. labor market.”
+None of the threats to the economy over the past several years have disrupted that central pattern. The shutdown, for example, caused ripple effects throughout the private sector, but companies and businesses also found ways to cope. Ben Herzon , an economist for Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm, said that as a result, the shutdown’s economic impact might be more muted than simple economic models might suggest.
+“The economy is resilient,” Mr. Herzon said. “People and businesses find a way to work around these disruptions. People want to buy stuff, and businesses want to find a way to make that happen.”
+James Diana and his wife started JD’s Canine Cruiser, a dog-walking and pet-sitting business in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, in 2012. The area’s strong economy has allowed them to expand the business and bring on more contract employees, many of whom are at-home parents and others who might not find work in a less robust economy.
+Many of Mr. Diana’s customers are federal employees or contractors, and the shutdown hit his business hard. He said cancellations in January were roughly double their normal level, costing him thousands of dollars in lost business. Government workers, he noted, will get back pay, but that won’t help him.The University of Farmington in Farmington Hills, Mich., billed itself as a “nationally accredited business and STEM institution,” with an innovative curriculum, flexible class schedules and a diverse student body.
+But it had no curriculum, no classes and no real students, the authorities said this week.
+The university in the suburbs of Detroit was part of an undercover operation by the Department of Homeland Security designed to expose immigration fraud, according to federal prosecutors who announced charges in the case.
+In what the authorities called a “pay to stay” scheme, foreign students knowingly enrolled in the fake school to falsely maintain their student visa status and remain in the United States, according to prosecutors.
+The authorities charged eight “recruiters” in the case. They are accused of enlisting at least 600 people to enroll in the school. Prosecutors said the recruiters collected money from the fake university for bringing in students and made more than $250,000 in profit.ISIS and Al Qaeda have yet to be defeated, and American national security interests require continued commitment to our missions there. We need to build on this momentum and continue strengthening NATO, dispelling all doubt, all doubt, about America’s commitment to this alliance, which has reshaped history for the better.[What you need to know to start the day: Get New York Today in your inbox.]
+It is not enough that a subway fare increase could soon make traveling underground in New York City more expensive. The cost of getting around above ground is going up, too.
+An extra $2.50 fee will be tacked onto any yellow taxi rides in Manhattan that begin, end or pass through south of 96th street, and an extra $2.75 fee will be added for other for-hire vehicles, including Ubers and Lyfts — all before the car even starts.
+The new ride fees were supposed to start Jan. 1, and are intended to raise more than $1 million a day to help fix the city’s broken subway system. New York is following a growing number of states and cities, including Chicago and Seattle, that have adopted similar per-ride fees in recent years to pay for public transportation and other services.
+In New York, the new ride fees had been temporarily blocked at the last minute by a lawsuit filed by a coalition of taxi owners and drivers who called it a “suicide surcharge” that would drive away customers and devastate an industry already crumbling under financial pressures.No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions on what to watch.
+This Weekend I Have … a Few Minutes, and I Don’t Care About Football
+‘The Puppy Bowl’
+When to watch: Sunday at 3 p.m., on Animal Planet.
+This is Puppy Bowl XV, and this year’s festivities include a sloth referee, kangaroo joey cheerleaders, porcupines, a capybara and of course the kitten halftime show — and that’s just during the regular Puppy Bowl. There’s also a “training camp” special, a separate Dog Bowl for adult dogs and a pregame show. None of this is particularly high-impact viewing, but dropping in for 10 or 20 minutes of fluff time never hurt anyone.
+… an Hour, and I Deserve BetterThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
+Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.We want to hear from our readers. Have a question? We’ll try to answer it. Have a comment? We’re all ears. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
+____________________
+Whatever happened to …
+One of our biggest pet peeves at On Politics is the way stories often seem to fade away, without any follow-up. With that in mind, we wanted to update you on some of the stories we covered this month.
+• We brought you the story of Júlia Quintanilla, a contract employee cleaning federal government buildings, who worried about how she would pay her bills — or even afford groceries — during the government shutdown. The government has reopened, but Ms. Quintanilla’s fight isn’t over. Democratic lawmakers in the Senate are pushing a bill that would ensure low-wage workers get back pay. So far, the legislation has failed to attract any Republican co-sponsors.
+• Since we wrote about the former Starbucks C.E.O. Howard Schultz’s difficult path to the presidency, his troubles have gone from tall to venti. Over the past three days, it has come out that Mr. Schultz has voted in just 11 of the past 38 elections. He doesn’t know the price of a box of Cheerios, the country’s No. 1-selling breakfast cereal. And he was heckled at a book event in New York City, with another protest planned tonight in his hometown, Seattle.
+• Before President Trump agreed to end the government shutdown last Friday, we wrote about how damaging the situation had become for his political standing. On Tuesday, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll found that a whopping 56 percent of Americans said they would definitely not vote for him in 2020. (Don’t count him out yet, though. We are still two years away from any ballots being cast.)
+• For our first newsletter of 2019, we wrote about the “likability” question that plagues female politicians — most recently Senator Elizabeth Warren. Since then, two other female senators have entered the 2020 race. The first question Kirsten Gillibrand received at her first news conference: Is she too nice? Sigh.
+[Sign up here to get On Politics in your inbox.]
+____________________
+The SoapboxWASHINGTON — President Trump proclaimed on Thursday that without funding for his wall at the southwestern border, the panel of lawmakers negotiating a broad compromise on border security would be “wasting their time,” issuing what appeared to be an ultimatum even as lawmakers pleaded for a chance to reach a deal that would head off another shutdown.
+“Without a wall, it doesn’t work,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “I’m not saying this as a Republican, I’m not saying it as anything other than a fact stater.”
+“If you don’t have a wall,” he added, “they’re all just wasting their time.”
+And in an interview with The New York Times on Thursday, the president indicated that he was prepared to move forward without lawmakers, saying that he had “set the stage for doing what I’m going to do.” He declined to directly say whether he planned to declare a national emergency to build a wall.
+[Read the New York Times interview with President Trump.]
+The comments came as 17 House and Senate lawmakers from both parties struggled to reach a bipartisan border deal before Feb. 15, when much of the government again runs out of money. Republican leaders, especially in the Senate, have made it clear that they do not want to suffer through another debilitating shutdown, and senators asked the president to give them room to work.WASHINGTON — A top American diplomat signaled on Thursday that the United States might no longer demand that North Korea turn over a complete inventory of its nuclear assets as a first step in the denuclearization process that President Trump is pursuing.
+The diplomat, Stephen E. Biegun, said in his first public speech that “before the process of denuclearization can be final, we must have a complete understanding of the full extent of the North Korean W.M.D. and missile programs through a comprehensive declaration.”
+Mr. Biegun, appointed in August to be special representative for North Korea, was speaking to a room of North Korea experts at Stanford University. His reference to the timing of North Korea’s releasing a full list of its weapons of mass destruction indicates that the United States could be more flexible than it previously indicated about at what point in the negotiations the list is handed over.
+If American negotiators drop their demand that the list is an essential first step in denuclearization, that would remove one obstacle that has hampered diplomacy since a summit meeting last June between Mr. Trump and Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader.Dusan Makavejev, a Serbian director whose movies, full of politics, sex and metaphor, were hailed on the film festival circuit in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s but also sometimes reviled, died on Jan. 25 in Belgrade, Serbia. He was 86.
+Marija Nikolic Radonjic, head of the rector’s office at the University of Arts in Belgrade, where Mr. Makavejev studied directing, confirmed the death.
+Mr. Makavejev was, as The Nation once put it, “the brightest star in the avant-garde firmament” in the early 1970s, thanks to movies like “Man Is Not a Bird” (1965), “Innocence Unprotected” (1968) and especially “WR: Mysteries of the Organism,” a brash hodgepodge that was a darling of the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
+That movie, incorporating Mr. Makavejev’s signature mashing together of documentary footage and fictional elements, invoked the ideas of the psychologist Wilhelm Reich (the “WR” of the title) to examine fascism, capitalism, sexual liberation and more. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, captured Mr. Makavejev’s sense of politics and the absurd when he described a central scene in which a Belgrade beautician and Reich admirer thaws an uptight Stalinist by giving him the perfect orgasm.I’m inspired by people like the singer Sissieretta Jones and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, who challenged racial stereotypes and fought for their opportunities to take center stage.
+And every morning in my kitchen when I’m making a cup of joe, I’m grateful that Melitta Bentz invented the paper coffee filter so I don’t get grounds in my teeth.
+There is no shortage of fascinating people to write about, only limited time and space.
+Fortunately, Overlooked is continuing in 2019, and in the year ahead, I plan to widen its lens, starting with a special issue online now and in print this Sunday. In it you’ll find obits for a dozen prominent black men and women whose deaths were not noted by The Times.
+You’ll read about Scott Joplin, the pianist and ragtime master who wrote “The Entertainer”; Gladys Bentley, the gender-bending blues singer who became 1920s Harlem royalty; Elizabeth Jennings, who stood up for civil rights when she sat down on a whites-only streetcar; and Major Taylor, the first black man to win a world championship in cycling.
+Many of them were a generation removed from slavery. To carve a name for themselves, they sometimes had to make myth out of a painful history, misrepresenting their past to gain a better footing in their future. They were ambitious and creative, becoming painters and composers, filmmakers and actors. Others used their imaginations to invent and innovate. Often they felt an unspoken greater mission to break the constraints society placed on their race.
+Some managed to achieve success in their lifetimes, only to die penniless, buried in paupers’ graves. Almost all of them reached deep within themselves to push back against harsh circumstances, the likes of which are unimaginable for many of us today.
+This special issue was created in partnership with Past Tense, a new team at The Times that is delving into our archives to bring to life compelling stories from our past.SYDNEY, Australia — Since this country’s founding in the early 20th century, the packs of untamed horses that roam freely through our beautiful and hostile alpine landscape have captured the public’s imagination. The savage grace and freedom of the horses — known here as brumbies — have made them into a popular symbol of the national spirit.
+Today, environmentalists want the brumbies shot.
+Not since cattle roamed the mountain parks (before a ban in the 1950s) have animals done such damage to the alpine regions that Australians proudly call the “high country.”
+A 2014 survey estimated there were more than 9,500 wild horses in the Australian Alps. Some of the horses descend from animals that belonged to settlers in the early 1800s.
+The brumbies eat fragile alpine moss. Their hooves trample the banks of creeks, killing vegetation that stops silt from building up. They destroy peat that takes thousands of years to develop. Campers report the fear of being trampled by herds in the middle of the night.
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